Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [41]
Kostos made Lena coffee in the morning and hustled her to the ferry dock. She was relieved to be taking a boat before the plane. She felt tremulous at the thought of leaving the surface of the earth just yet. She didn’t trust anything to stay where she wanted it.
He carried her heavy bag and Tibby’s duffel. He pulled her by the hand when it looked like she was in danger of missing her boat. He promised to close up the house, to make sure everything was left in order. He said it with such a sense of purpose she half expected he’d spackle the walls and refinish the floors before he considered himself done.
It was a rushed goodbye that would have to last for a long while, she guessed. Maybe forever. She hugged him zealously, her body able to express more than her brain. She pressed her face into his chest. He must have had the same feeling. He hugged her in return like she was someone he might not see again.
He kissed her hard, not on the face but above her ear. She wondered about the nature of this kiss.
They let go of each other. How to leave it? I’ll call you? Don’t forget to write? See you next time! None of that seemed to fit.
Because why say these words? When was next time going to be? Bapi was gone. Valia was gone. The house would soon be gone. They were two people who had never come together of their own volition. They’d come their weary way always by circumstances, usually bad ones. These few days had been like a cozy foxhole dug out of time—a big, prosperous life in his case, a tragedy in hers. It was time to go back to those things.
“Thank you,” she said tearfully. Those were the parting words that fit.
She lugged the two bags the last few yards onto the boat. She weaved through the other passengers and parked at the first empty stretch of rail. Quickly she turned again to catch his face. She felt a sense of desperation as the engines began to churn and pull her away from the dock. She wanted to keep him in her mind as he was now. She didn’t want to lose him.
What if this was her life? What if his was the face she was coming home to rather than leaving? What if she had arrived here on Independence Day all those summers ago? She pictured Kostos standing just where he was now, but the engines churning in the opposite direction, bringing her to him maybe forever. Was that the brave life through which she would have earned the right to keep Tibby?
He didn’t move from his spot on the dock. The crowd drifted and dissipated and he stood there as the distance between them grew. And yet the wind was so oddly calm and the water so glassy she could imagine it was he who was drawing away and she who was staying still.
She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one. She hadn’t gotten to keep Tibby.
Finally she stopped waving, dropped her hands to her sides, and just looked at him as he got small. It gave her the feeling that her memory was already closing in on him. The distance between them stretched and finally broke. She never got to keep anything.
She turned to face the horizon, the blurring line of water and sky, the great vacuum, the place where things went when they left her.
But this morning it wasn’t empty. This time she could barely open her eyes enough to see it because there was something large and fierce right in the middle of it and it was the sun.
She was not one
who expected to get away
with much in life.
—Larry McMurtry
Carmen lay on her mother’s bed after the burial and let her mother rub her back, the way she’d done through all the many tragedies of Carmen’s childhood. Carmen found herself longing for those tragedies, when a back rub and a long cry on her mother’s pillow would do the trick, instead of this one, when nothing seemed to help.
At least the burial was over and she didn’t have to dread it anymore. It had been small and grim, just a handful of shattered people standing in the gray November air: Tibby’s family, Carmen and her mother, Lena and her parents. Vaguely Carmen wondered about Brian,