Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [24]
And what if the second part blotted out the first? What if the second part was all she was left with? The thousand precious images of their lives together she suddenly imagined curling up and melting in the basement furnace at the end of Citizen Kane. She knew that movie because Tibby had made her watch it the whole way through, fearing Bridget would spend her life as a film imbecile, knowing nothing but Napoleon Dynamite and The Princess Bride.
I’m sorry, Tib. I think I did end up a film imbecile, and there’s no help for me now.
Carmen lay in the quiet dark imagining where Tibby was, wondering how it felt to be there. It was the worst thing to think of, but she wanted to try to be brave, as it seemed horrifically brave of Tibby to be dead.
She couldn’t fathom how Tibby could have gone to this place where they couldn’t follow her. She tried to imagine the moment it had happened and whether Tibby was scared. It was the worst thought, but she tried to follow it, no matter how much it hurt, because she didn’t want Tibby to have to be all alone. It was the only way Carmen could think of to be with her.
Later in the night it struck Carmen as all out of order. She felt that Tibby’s leaving this life ought to have more parallels with how she had come into it. The four of them did these things together. They were born together. They grew up together. They should get married at the same time, at least roughly. They should have children together. They should complain about menopause together and judge people who got face-lifts together and be grandmothers together and all die within seventeen days together. That was how it ought to happen. Carmen felt that a mistake had been made, that an oversight had been so specifically mishandled that if it were brought to the attention of the right person, maybe it could be recalled, like a batch of bad ground beef. It was a mistake.
But if it couldn’t be rectified, then what? They weren’t on the map anymore; they were living some other kind of life, unfamiliar and deeply inferior, for which they were unfit.
But Carmen didn’t really believe it. She didn’t really believe Tibby belonged to death, to that big idea, to the careless world.
She belongs to us.
Sitting on the top stair, alone in the night, Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.
The most perfect bedrock of happiness was the four of them at nineteen, gathered on the ledge and staring at the place where the ocean blended into the sky on their last day in Santorini. Or the summer night when they were twenty-four and the power went out in New York City and they lay on blankets on the floor, surrounded by candles, talking all night, eating everything perishable in the fridge and freezer, including two and a half pints of ice cream. Even that last night, at Teller’s Bar on East Fifth Street, the goodbye she hadn’t known was goodbye, Lena had looked around the table with a sense of security and a feeling of joy about the future she hadn’t felt since.
That happiness eroded when they were apart, out of sync and out of touch. It quaked the night Lena discovered Tibby had moved to Australia without even explaining it to her and she couldn’t get either Bee or Carmen on the phone to ask them what they knew.
And now what? If happiness depended on their being together, then what could you possibly say about this day?
And for all our inventions
In matters of love loss,
we’ve no recourse at all.
—The Shins
Lena had tried to make Tibby’s parents feel welcome when they arrived in Santorini. They did what they could. She, Bridget, and Carmen, the three of them, silent and dark, like shadows without bodies to cast them, managed to rent a car and get to the airport and wait for the plane to come down. It was an airport they