Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [49]
She was furious at her uterus. She was in no position to be dealing with anything, not even herself. Didn’t it know that? This captain was letting her ship go down, she didn’t care who was on board.
She was furious at her bike for getting stolen. She was furious at the lock for failing. She was furious at her dad for getting rid of her old bike without even asking her. She was furious at him for getting rid of all their stuff, even her mom’s shoes, when he sold their house and moved into an apartment.
She thought of her mom’s shoes and how they’d been keeping them for so many years. They were a size and a half too small for Bridget, and she probably wouldn’t have worn them anyway, but you couldn’t just throw them away.
The churn of anger got rougher. How could her mom have just left them with all those shoes, not knowing what they were supposed to do with them? Or her clothes? Or her gardenias, every one of which slowly died in a dark room? All the stuff Marly left behind—what did she think was supposed to happen to it? Did she even care? Did she think the world ended when she decided to leave it?
And Bridget was mad at Tibby. She was furious at Tibby. She kicked the sand into a shower that got into her eyes and mouth and hair. “How could you do that?” she screamed at the ocean. “I wouldn’t do that to you!”
She fell onto the sand and lay there without moving. Hours passed and she didn’t bother getting her sleeping bag. She lay on her back looking at the sky.
Hadn’t Tibby loved her at all?
If one synchronized swimmer drowns,
do all the rest
have to drown too?
—Steven Wright
Some people said the first month was the worst. Others said it was really the first three months. Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
As Lena walked along the river in Providence, shivering in a wool coat long overdue for retirement, she felt like she was going in the wrong direction. She grieved about as well as she did everything else, backward and badly.
The first month hadn’t been the worst. She’d been horrified, blinking and confused, like she’d been whacked in the back of the head by a shovel, but she hadn’t really believed Tibby was gone. This December morning fell somewhere after the middle of the second month, and by now she believed it. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and in that empty space, the nothing in the middle of her, had come to settle a black, drab something.
Each day that passed took her further from the time when Tibby was alive and made her incrementally more dead. Each day that passed buried deeper Lena’s old ideas about the world.
That morning she’d woken up feeling sorry for Carmen. It was a feeling she kept out, but her early-morning mind was half dreaming and vulnerable, and somehow the sympathy had gotten in. It was a flickering image of Carmen’s damned iPhone that had gotten to Lena. Every time Carmen looked at her phone there was that old picture coming to life of the four of them as toddlers peeking over the back of a sofa, looking like a miniature girl band. Carmen looked at it five hundred times a day. How could she take it?
As Lena cried for Carmen and the picture on her phone, she knew why she tried so hard all the time not to feel sorry for Carmen and Bee. Because it was the same as feeling sorry for herself, and if she allowed that, the surge of it would carry her away.
At this rate she couldn’t imagine what she would be like at six months. She would be a black shriveled ball. Blacker and more shriveled, with hopes buried too deep ever to come out. Her life wouldn’t have shifted to make room for her grief, it would simply have shriveled and surrendered.
These days she walked a lot. Often along the river without really seeing the river. Somewhere she possessed