Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [110]
She paused and looked out the window. She wondered what time it was. She doubted this was the kind of night when you ever went to bed.
She told him about Lydia getting sick and then seeming to get better and getting sick again. And then she came to the part where Tibby disappeared. The part where Tibby moved again, just like always, but this time somewhere much farther away. It wasn’t Australia that was the problem, it was that she fell out of touch in a different way and it just went on and on. There was some confusion among them. Who had talked to Tibby last? Somebody must be talking to her. There were three emails in a year and they didn’t even sound like Tibby.
“We told ourselves it was okay. I don’t know why, but we thought she would get home and be our regular Tibby again. I don’t think we could process the truth of it, that she had really pulled away from us. We just waited for her to come back.” Carmen put a hand to her cheek.
And then came the tickets to Greece. The elation. Getting to the airport on the island. The three of them together, jumping out of their skins to see Tibby again. So much excitement, so much joy. A new life was starting. She could just feel it. And then. And then.
Carmen put her arms around her knees. She rested her cheek on top of her knee.
And then the call. And then the police. And then the denial, and the confusion, and finally the calls to Tibby’s parents. Nobody knew how to reach Brian anymore. And then the silence. And the discovery of the things she’d left for them. The terrible knowledge, the incomplete but also inescapable knowledge that it wasn’t all an accident. And then. And then. And then. It was a new life indeed.
She finally lifted her head to look at him. She saw that her sadness had gotten all over his face. She saw it more clearly than if she’d looked in a mirror. He put his large hands on either side of her head and pulled her into his chest. He held her tightly and it all came loose.
She passed through Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and over the Louisiana state line with her face in his chest and his arms around her. It was a mysterious thing. She clung to him as though she hadn’t first seen him two nights before, but had known him and needed him and depended on him the whole time, from the very beginning.
It was the great peculiarity of her life. The people she loved, really loved, had been with her from the start. She hadn’t added a person, not one single person, to that group since the day she was born. There was in fact the legendary picture taken a few hours after her birth, she a tiny hunched-over grub held by her mother and father and surrounded by newborn Bridget with Marly, newborn Tibby with Alice, newborn Lena with Ari. Compared to Carmen, a strapping Lena at three weeks old had looked as if she were ready to go to law school. “We had all just been hanging around, waiting for you to be born!” her mother told her the first time she remembered looking at that picture.
And you could have turned off the camera and called it a day right then and there. Carmen’s whole life. No need for further documentation.
There was a certain skill some people used when they needed to hunt and gather people to love and to love them. Well, that was not a skill Carmen had developed. Not to say she hadn’t worshipped Paul or felt real tenderness for David and Lydia. She’d had a true spark of something with a guy named Win once. But her heart was the most exclusive club in history: you had to know Carmen Lowell on the first day of her life in order to join.
It wasn’t that her heart was small. She knew that. It was big. If anything, it loved too violently, too much. But she couldn’t expand