Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [50]
Her fingers ached with red cold as she put her key in the lock. They hurt all the time, but she lost track of them and failed to replace her lost mittens. The lesser pains like the ones in her fingers and toes vied for attention, but like fifth- and sixth-born children in a very large family, they didn’t get much of it. It was the firstborn pain and the most recently born pain you tended to think of.
There were messages on her phone. She was down to two regular check-ins, by her mother and Effie, not Carmen anymore, and their messages had grown more pitying and patronizing, if that was possible. She didn’t want to listen to the messages. She let them pile up.
In her tiny apartment she sat down at her desk, still in her coat. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t like to look at anything. On the walls were the photographs, the ones she hadn’t taken down or hidden away. There were the drawings, all from a different time, reminding her of ways she used to feel but couldn’t anymore. There was nothing she wanted to feel or taste or see or even imagine.
She jiggled the mouse of her big, lumbering desktop computer, watched it wake, and subjected herself to her own version of Carmen’s phone, her daily punishment. Bright on the big screen was one of the few pictures she hadn’t flipped over or put away: the four of them on the day they graduated from high school. There they were with those thick, oily rented gowns, holding or tossing those weird hats. Surrounding them were all their family members, their nearest and dearest. The picture represented her whole life at a moment when it had seemed biggest, most complete, most hopeful. Her arm was around Tibby, clutching her ardently and without reserve, her face so animated and free in its joy she couldn’t even recognize it as her own.
There had been a break, a rupture in the seam of her identity, and it happened sometime after that. She wasn’t the same person she used to be. She looked at the faces in the picture, from Tibby to Bee to Carmen and back to Tibby.
Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She’d held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she’d been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.
But what was that great feast? It was the idea of their friendship, their shared strength, their unconditional love for one another, their support, their security, their honesty and the freedom it seemed to promise. It was an idea big enough to sustain her through years of poverty.
Now it was unquestionably gone. And deeper questions gnawed at her. Had it really been such a feast? Had it ever been real? How could this have happened if it had been? How could Tibby have kept so much from them? If the strength and support had been real, how could Tibby have given up? How could they have let her? How could they have let her get so far away from them?
There was a clear and dreaded answer to all these questions: If it had been real, they couldn’t have. She couldn’t have. It hadn’t been real.
Lena hadn’t been eating leftovers from a feast; she hadn’t been eating at all. She’d been starving, and so devoted to her delusions she’d become incapable of feeding herself in the most basic way.
She eyed the letter Tibby had left for her. It stood perched on her desk, day after day. She studied Tibby’s writing, just Lena’s name on the front, and a note to open it after December 15 on the back, but it had no more secrets to tell her. She’d looked at it too often, too long, too fearfully for it to say any more. I could open it now, she told herself, and instantly recoiled at the thought, as she always did. Later was the time she would open it, never now. Tibby wanted her to open it after December