Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [19]
In disarray they packed all their stuff and themselves into a taxi. Lena said a few words in Greek. Carmen felt misgivings about leaving. This was where they were supposed to meet. She remembered the direction always given to them as children: “Just stay in one place; we’ll find you.”
Bridget seemed to understand Carmen’s mind. “Don’t worry. She’s probably at your grandparents’ house wondering where the hell we are. She couldn’t get to the airport for whatever reason. She’d figure we’d come to the house. She’ll be there. Where else would she be?”
Lena nodded and then Carmen joined in the nodding, but for the long, expensive taxi ride they remained mostly silent.
They walked and dragged the last uphill stretch to the house. The road was too narrow and too steep for a full-size vehicle. By the time they were halfway up the hill, Bridget was carrying all three bags.
“Who needs a mule,” Carmen said.
Lena tried the handle on the weathered egg-yolk-colored door, in case Tibby was inside, but it was locked.
“Hello?” Lena called, unlocking and pushing open the door. The three of them stood sun-drunk and huffing in the dark of the shuttered house. “Hello?”
“Tibby?” Carmen shouted in such a loud voice it made Lena wince.
Lena opened a shutter and Bridget put down the bags. Slowly Carmen’s eyes took in the familiar contours. “Anybody home?” she called.
“I don’t think she’s here.”
“We should’ve stayed in the airport,” Carmen bleated wearily. “What if she’s there?” The more tired she felt, the worse she was at keeping her moods to herself.
“She may be stuck somewhere in between,” Lena pointed out in a reasonable voice, “but she’ll find her way back here eventually.” She waded deeper into the house. “And look, she was definitely here earlier. Look at these flowers!” She opened another couple of shutters. The girls had all been trained by her voluble grandmother not to open them willy-nilly, that a house here was essentially a fortress against the sun.
There were pink roses on the dining room table and white ones on the coffee table and in the small kitchen. A large bowl on the counter was piled with fruits and vegetables.
“She went shopping,” Carmen said. There were two loaves of bread atop the short fridge, and milk, cheese, butter, eggs, and bottles of water inside of it. She peered into a white bakery box and found a fancy cake.
Carmen felt her tired eyes welling at all the little offerings. The hand of Tibby so close and yet not here.
“I bet she’ll be back any minute,” she heard Lena saying as she headed up the stairs.
In the bedrooms Carmen found more pink and white roses in teacups and jam jars. They’d already decided it would be Bridget and Tibby in one room and Lena and Carmen in the other and no one in Valia and Bapi’s old room, because that would be creepy. Tibby knew Lena loved the front room with the views of the Caldera, and so she had left her two bags in the back bedroom. Also out of deference to Lena, Tibby had left her stuff pretty tidy, though she was a known slob.
Carmen heard Lena calling Tibby’s cellphone from the house line downstairs. “She’s not picking up. I’m just getting her message,” Lena called out in a general way. “I wonder if her phone works here.”
Carmen wandered in a circle around the little room. Seeing Tibby’s familiar things made her presence so acute, she half expected her to jump out from under the bed. The angle of Tibby’s discarded shoes instantly bridged two lost years. You could build a whole Tibby from that alone. Nothing had changed, really.
The rest of them had big feet, from Lena’s nine and a halfs to Carmen’s eight and a halfs to Bridget’s somewhere in between. Three of them could always share shoes in a pinch. But Tibby’s sixes looked like child shoes in comparison. They could never share shoes with Tibby. She wore these chunky, grommety, attitudinal shoes all the time, but they were too small to really make the point.
The particular scent of Tibby brought more tears to her eyes. Neither a sweet, perfumy smell nor a bad foot odor–ish smell, just