Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [23]
There was the small gear spinning the minute-by-minute things—Tibby is uncomfortable, why are they making her lie on that hard table? Her head hurts. Tibby, get off there. Her orange toenail polish, the familiar freckles along her shinbones, the glint of a tiny gold stud in her nose, the wrong color of her skin. Why was she stuck in a bag? How could she stand it? Tibby was the one who’d scream when you covered her with the blanket in hide-and-seek. Do not zip that up. No, please don’t. It is so cold in here. She could get sick. Regular colds went right to pneumonia with Tibby.
The second gear spun with the big, abstract, unfathomable things. Tibby is not really here anymore. Tibby is gone. She won’t be coming back. That is forever.
All the places where the two gears might have fit together and pushed her understanding forward, they didn’t. They just spun apart, getting her nowhere.
You are my friend. You are here and I need you. That was living and true. You are gone. You are not coming back. That was also true.
Between alive and dead there was no common ground.
Even long after, Lena wasn’t sure her mind was working that day. She did things and said things and saw things, but they bounced off her head like so many Ping-Pong balls. She knew they were terrible things, destroying her happiness by the minute, but she forgot each thing as soon as it happened. How she got to the police station, the hospital, where she sat, who drove them, what the basement of the hospital looked like, what the detective told them, and later, what Lena said to Tibby’s mother, Alice Rollins, on the phone from the precinct. And what Alice said to her.
She forgot everything instantly, as though she had no memory apparatus at all. But in a sick-feeling way, she also knew her eyes and her ears were taking these things in and keeping them. These images and words would be there waiting for her, settling into some deeper layer that would someday resurface—maybe that night, maybe tomorrow, maybe months or years from now—and make her feel crazy and scared. They would sneak into her dreams and fracture in weird ways that would make her dislike a certain kind of car she couldn’t remember having ridden in, or the particular perfume on a person she didn’t remember speaking to, or the taste of a certain cup of tea she didn’t remember drinking.
Oh, you’ll remember them.
She knew that memory divided into terms short and long. In the short term Lena was only aware that she was standing. Long term, she was scared that she was full of cracks and soon to fold.
Late that night, without food or discussion, they returned to Valia’s house and trod upstairs one by one. Bridget went into the bedroom she was sharing with Tibby and tipped onto the bed like a tree cut at the base. She waited to hear the others using the bathroom, but she didn’t. There was no talking. There was no noise at all. She understood it. In midst of all the big traumas there were the small ones to avoid too. Like having to look at yourself in the mirror over the sink while you brushed your teeth, knowing what you knew.
After a while, Bridget changed beds. She got into the one on which rested Tibby’s soft duffel bag. She got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn’t smell Tibby’s smell in the way you couldn’t smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here, and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.
Each time her mind flashed on that image for a second, a fraction of a second, it blinded her like a flashbulb, burning out the center of her mind’s eye to blackness. Already she could feel the image dividing her life into two halves. Her life leading up to today was innocence and unrealized joy for not yet