Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [111]
Beyond that, by agreeing to marry him she had been ready to blithely forgo a future of having children. She’d blown it off as though it were nothing. And why? Because maybe she didn’t believe she could love them either. Her heart was complete, thank you very much; signed, sealed, and closed to all new business. Why would it be any different with a baby?
And then Carmen thought of Tibby. She thought of that sick physical ache caused by the loss of her, of her heart being torn open—just lying there wrecked and open, so that no amount of talking on her phone, texting Jones, planning her wedding, or buying expensive dresses was going to close it. And maybe closing it wasn’t the idea.
Through one eye she saw the first shades of the sun peering up. Here was this strange man all around her, sifting into her very pores, and she wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.
Behold
I do not give lectures
or a little charity,
When I give
I give myself.
—Walt Whitman
Because the moving truck wasn’t coming until the following day, and the only new furniture that had been delivered so far was a few mattresses, Bridget, Bailey, and Brian went to a pizza place in town for dinner.
Bailey ate three bites of pizza and a slice of pepperoni and fell asleep on Bridget’s lap. This left her and Brian with a lot of pizza and a lot of silence between them.
Bridget felt stirred up. Maybe about the farm, about the icehouse, where Brian had told her she should put her stuff. About Tibby’s mysterious plans. About the things over time that had made less and less sense. It was cruel, perhaps, to ambush Brian over pizza and his sleeping daughter’s head, but she couldn’t keep the questions back anymore.
She was a little surprised by the one that came out first. “Why didn’t Tibby tell us she was pregnant? Why didn’t she tell us when Bailey was born?”
Brian gave her a look that was hard to decipher. Almost as if she were playing him, demanding he tell her things she should already know. “Because that was when she found out she was sick.”
“Sick.” The word seemed to spin like a coin on the table before it settled. She felt like she could see it sitting there heavily, motionless. She didn’t know what to make of it. She felt a strong intuition to go carefully. She cleared her throat. “What do you mean, sick?”
There was his grief-stricken impatience again. “I mean sick. Sick with Huntington’s. That’s when we found out.”
Bridget took a breath. She looked down at Bailey’s peaceful face and looked up again. She felt as if she were walking into a very cold, very rough ocean. She put her hair behind her ears. “What is Huntington’s?”
Brian sort of squinted at her. He must have known she wasn’t asking anything rhetorically. They stared at each other in a strange kind of standoff. Neither of them touched anything or chewed or moved.
“It’s a degenerative disease,” he finally said, as though it were obvious and she should know. “It’s what she died of.”
It would have been impossible to follow all the different thoughts to all the places they went. Her breath started feeling shallow. She could only hope to take one thought to one place at a time.
“Is that why you moved to Australia?”
Brian pushed his plate away. “We went to Australia for my job in October. We thought we’d be there for three months and come back home. In November we found out she was pregnant and started doing the tests.” His hand was shaking when he picked up his beer. “The diagnosis was confirmed before Christmas. The only positive news was that the baby didn’t carry the gene for it. I couldn’t think of having a baby then, but Tibby wouldn’t think of not having it, no matter what it did to her. But she was scared to come back to the States after that. None of it seemed real over there, but you