Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [122]
Carmen had looked at him in puzzlement and disbelief.
“I mean, you don’t have to add anything,” he’d added quickly. “It’s up to you. You can do whatever you like with it. It’s a place that will be here for you whenever you want it.”
It was hard to fathom that this was her little place, mind-blowing to think of all that Tibby must have considered. Tibby had tried her best to make it easier on them.
Carmen felt the tears slide onto the pillow as she lay in this bed with the window open and the chirping coming from both grass and trees, with Bridget and Eric in the little house across the yard, and Lena and Kostos in the barn, and Brian and Bailey in the house next door. What a joyful context. How different from the Vietnamese restaurant, newspaper stand, and lighting store she was used to.
She remembered so well Tibby’s distress the summer they left for college, troubling over the notion of home. What would hold them together? Where would it ever be again?
Carmen did feel strangely, for the first time in her adult life, like she was home.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight
’twould win me
That with music loud
and long
I would build that dome
in air.
—Samuel Coleridge
Epilogue
You’ll be happy to know, we did conduct the last pants ritual that Tibby had assembled for us in Greece but that we never got to have. I, Carmen, the last to arrive, was the one to suggest it. It seemed like the right thing to do, and I have always been a sucker for a ceremony.
On a much bleaker day in early November, Lena had carried the suitcase from Santorini to her parents’ house in Bethesda. Just a couple of days earlier, she’d asked her mom to ship it up to the farm.
We snuck away from the group, which had now grown to include Tibby’s parents and Nicky and Katherine staying in the farmhouse with Brian and Bailey. We decided to hold our ceremony in the loft of the barn, because with its shiny wooden floors and tall open space, it reminded us the most of Gilda’s, the aerobics studio where our mothers met and where the old ritual had always taken place. The absence of the pants, the incorporeal presence of Tibby, didn’t make it any less effective.
We stinted on no part of it. Not the candles nor the Pop-Tarts nor the Cheetos nor the tears. Bridget sang her lungs out along with Gloria Estefan. Tibby would have laughed over that. We held hands. Teenage Tibby tended to balk at that, but I knew she would want it now.
Looking around at the hopefulness in my friends’ faces, I couldn’t help staring behind me into the cave where we’d dwelt for the last five months, really the last two years. In my mind’s eye, I tried to see these faces as they had been the first time we opened this suitcase. But then, why do that to yourself?
How did Tibby achieve these transformations? I don’t know. There have always been mysteries in our friendship.
Where will we go from here? I don’t know that either. Tibby’s parents and sister and brother are supposed to leave on Sunday, but I’m not sure about the rest of us. I’ve got a little house to furnish. I’ve got a small girl to love. New York is close enough to drop in for an audition once or twice a week if I need to. I’ve got a heart that appears to have broken open. I feel hopeful where I am.
Eric is talking about switching to a New York firm, commuting three days a week so Bee can raise animals, make a vegetable garden, and grow her baby alongside Bailey in a place where she’s happy.
Bridget looks older and obviously a bit rounder, but I’ve never seen her lovelier. Lena bought a pair of scissors and expertly cut off the matted ends of Bee’s hair. Bee let me wash her hair in the sink with my most outrageously expensive shampoo and sat cross-legged and talking on my bed for hours while I combed it out.
Kostos is on leave from work. Though they won’t stay here forever, I don’t see him and Lena