Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [33]
She considered his face, more in pieces than as a whole. She couldn’t take it all together. There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn’t quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren’t under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you’d have to land eventually.
His cheekbones, his nose, and his jaw were more prominent than she remembered. His principal expressions had become etched into his face—the eye crinkles from laughter, concern, and maybe near-sightedness, the subtle lines around his mouth. She watched the lines shift and move when he talked.
He had yesterday’s whiskers, lightened by sparkles of silver. You are older, she thought. But this was her Kostos, the man she remembered, not the man from the magazines. Could there be two of him? She had the remote idea of looking at his hand for a ring. He didn’t have one on the marriage finger, but he did have a silver one on the middle finger. She didn’t know what signified what in Greece or in London, and she couldn’t follow her own thoughts.
“How strange this is,” she said quietly, to him, her eggs, herself.
I figure I basically am a
ghost.
I think we all are.
—John Astin
Dear Dad,
I appreciate you calling all those times and I’m sorry I haven’t called back. That was a really nice note you sent. I know you want to be there for the burial, but Alice says please wait and come to the memorial service in the spring. I know you want to help, and I really appreciate it. I’ll call you when I get back to New York, or maybe I can come down to Charleston for a visit sometime. So, anyway, thanks a lot, Dad, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Love,
Carmen
Carmen stared at the email for a long time without pressing send. She lay in her old bed, her old bed in her mother’s big new house, and in a strange way she felt like she and her dad were slowly switching places.
She remembered how frustrated she used to be with him for avoiding her sadness, blandly saying things like suffering made you stronger and hard knocks were for the best. In the old days she’d wanted most of all to share something important with him, to be brought closer to him by it. Now he was ready to acknowledge her grief, to show her the way, and she didn’t want any of it. Who was the avoider now? She couldn’t take his grief and she couldn’t take her own.
She glanced down at the email icon on her phone. It showed there were five new messages, and she saw in them a couple of minutes of salvation. She recognized in herself the familiar old maneuvers: the dodge, the stall, the float-above-it-all. She recognized them from having watched him. And in his plaintive offerings she recognized an old self of hers who tried harder to be brave.
“Do you want to sleep?” Kostos asked Lena as she yawned over her tea.
“If I could, I would,” she said.
He had an open and sympathetic face. He always had—even when he was crushing her hopes most brutally. “You lie down on the couch and I’ll answer the phone or the door. I’ll watch over everything.”
I’ll watch over the sadness for you, he seemed to be saying. I’ll watch over the worry and the big, dark questions so you can get a little rest.
“Thank you. I’ll try,” she said. She lay down, her hands under her head, and he gave her a wool blanket. He spread it over her as though it were his house, not hers. And it was his more than hers. He’d been spending time in this house his whole life, and she had only come four times, always to lose things—her heart, her grandfather, her pants, Tibby, and along with Tibby her sense of comfort that she understood anything about the world or ever had. He touched her anklebone by mistake.
He sat in the green upholstered chair across from her. She watched him carefully, openly, as he got up and retrieved his bag from the other side of the room and took out his newspaper. She forgot that she was supposed to be sleeping