Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [27]
After that, as far as Bridget was concerned, Lena had disappeared. Even as she stood in the middle of the room, holding the phone to call the cab to take them from the bottom of the hill to the airport, she was gone. She had become a black hole of a person, but not the kind that pulled you in.
In a completely unfair way, Bridget wanted Lena to drop all that and help her. She’d gotten used to Lena’s coming to her when she was in distress. Fate had been kind to them before this, doling out traumas not all at once but one at a time, so that whenever something awful was happening to one, the others were there to help. The explosions came at them from the outside while they huddled together for protection.
This explosion came from the middle of the huddle. This was an inside job.
After the letter, Bridget saw Carmen as a stranger. Her voice a little too loud, her teeth a little too white, her collarbones jutting out too far. Was this what she really looked like now? How powerfully memories could soften a face. How beautiful love could make a friend’s face. You could recognize its power when it was gone.
For some reason Bridget thought numbly of the old apartment on Avenue C. For two and a half years they had paid rent below the market rate. It had crept up only slowly, by tiny increments, thanks to three decades of rent stabilization enjoyed by dozens of impoverished hipster tenants before them.
And one day the landlord sent in two Nicaraguans in weight-lifting belts to tear out their perfectly shabby little kitchen. For three weeks they were left with a dank cavity and a bunch of chopped-off pipes and wires stumped like snakes looking for their heads. Eventually the grumpy superintendent sealed up the hole with cheap new appliances and cupboards, all plastic and composite board. For that honor, they got their rent doubled all at once, a so-called fair market rent.
The next month they’d moved out. It was the end of an era. Tibby had moved in with Brian in Long Island City. Bridget spent an itinerant year on couches or floors or house-sitting or sub-subletting before she began her slow trek to San Francisco. Carmen roomed with the bulimic paralegal uptown. Lena got a better teaching job and mostly stayed in Providence. The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.
Bridget paced the living room of Lena’s grandparents’ house, waiting for it to be time to pace somewhere else. She couldn’t stand the hurt and disappointment she would see on Carmen’s face if she looked at her. She’d rather jump into the cauldron after Tibby than have to look at the things Carmen needed from her. Please let’s all love one another. Please let us act like it’s the same. Please let’s act like we still believe in us.
There was one time at the end of that terrible last day when Bridget’s eyes did drag across Carmen’s, but she didn’t see what she was expecting to see. It was a different blow. Carmen’s eyes were as dead as Bridget’s; they weren’t asking for anything at all. And maybe not seeing Carmen’s neediness was even worse than seeing it and disappointing it. Maybe Carmen didn’t believe in them anymore either.
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn’t change the past. The past was set and sealed.
But that wasn’t true. Now every time Bridget glanced behind her, the past, whether near or distant, opened and morphed and reset into images and uncertainties she’d never even thought of. If this could happen to Tibby, then nothing about their friendship, about their past, could be trusted. It seemed ironic to disagree with Tibby at such a time, but she didn’t believe their past anymore and was extra sorry that Tibby herself had been the one to prove its frailty.