Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [47]
The nurse stroked Bridget’s head patiently and let her cry. After a while she moved to stroking her back. She held Bridget’s hand and passed her Kleenexes. Bridget didn’t deserve this kindness either, but she took it.
“I don’t think I can tell him,” she finally said.
“If you love him, then you have to try,” the nurse said soothingly. “Whether or not you’ll ever want to have a baby together, I can almost promise you the relationship won’t survive if you don’t tell him.”
I don’t think it survived, Bridget thought, but she respected this nurse too much not to walk out of here promising to make a somber choice. And if she needed to do it thoughtlessly, at least she’d go somewhere else.
The nurse walked her to the front entrance. Bridget realized she was still holding her hand. The nurse took a card out of her pocket. She wrote her cellphone number on the back. “You call me anytime, all right? I mean anytime.”
“Thanks,” Bridget said. She looked down at the name on the card and up at the little name tag affixed to her breast pocket. For the first time she saw that the nurse’s name was Tabitha.
The couch where Carmen did her crying was midcentury chrome covered in shiny orange material with a fancy name that was basically plastic. Unlike the one in the apartment where she’d lived with her mother, the old chenille chesterfield that kept a permanent record of every spill and every tear, nothing here stuck.
When Carmen finally got up and trudged to the bathroom to blow her nose and pee, she looked in the mirror and she was hideous. A hideous hideosity. For the first week after Greece, she had looked in the mirror and felt sorry for herself. Now she despised herself.
What was she going to do? Was she really going to end this thing with Jones because she was too sad and too crazy and too chicken to get married? Would she say goodbye to him that night? Move out, stay in a hotel for a couple of weeks, find a new place?
What did she have without him? Without this place? Nothing. She’d be alone. Who did she have to cry to? No one. Not Lena. Not Bee. She didn’t even know how to talk to them now.
She felt the tears starting again. Not Paul. Not her dad. The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people too broken to lean on.
There was her mom. Her mom didn’t know what to offer and Carmen didn’t know what to ask for. Her mom had returned to busy mode, redecorating her house and trying to get Ryan into a new school. She was grateful for quick problems like flowers and hors d’oeuvres. She liked Jones. She was scared of Carmen’s despair.
What about other friends? Her New York friends?
Her New York friends consisted of her stylist and her makeup artist and her manager and her publicist and the PA who got her lattes. They were people who expected something of her. They were audience members. They were not people you fell apart in front of.
And actor friends? They were impossible. They had a drink with you, maybe, but you stayed in bullshit cheek-kissing-acquaintance purgatory forever. Like her, they all had their real friends from “before.” Nobody needed any new ones.
At seven o’clock in the evening, Carmen was wearing her Catherine Malandrino; she put on Billie Holiday and made Jones a martini for when he walked in the door. It was pretty corny, but effective.
Jones waltzed her around the room. “Are we on for September?” he asked happily.
“I was thinking more like April.”
He stopped midwaltz. “This April?”
“This April.”
His smile got big. He put up his hand to give her a high five. “Now we’re talkin’, baby.”
After the high five, he carried her into the bedroom and made love to her without even folding down the fancy bedcover or taking off her dress. His phone bleeped and buzzed and spasmed and for once he ignored it.
Afterward, they lay for a long time and talked about the venue and the guest list and where was the most beautiful place to go in April on your honeymoon. Carmen was a pretty darned good actress if she did say