Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [59]
Tibby emailed pretty regularly for those first couple of months. Cellphone service was tricky, but she wasn’t out of touch. She sent comically sappy ecards for each of them at Christmas. But then three months had gone by. And then four and six and eight. They kept waiting for her to come home, but she didn’t. They pestered her endlessly about it. When are you coming home? That was the subject line of every email Bridget sent her. When? When? When?
Tibby’s communication fell off about four months after she’d gone, just at the time they thought she’d be coming back. There were very few emails from her after that, and the tone of them changed. Suddenly she was noncommittal about when she’d return.
It took them a couple of months to pick up on this change, to register that it wasn’t just one but all of them who’d experienced it. In June, they finally convened at a diner in New York to discuss it. They talked themselves down from crisis mode.
“She’s probably working on something big,” Carmen hypothesized. “You know how she gets when she’s in the middle of a script.”
“Maybe since she and Brian are already over there, they decided to spend the summer in the bush or diving along the Great Barrier Reef,” Bridget had suggested. “That’s what I would do. And there’s no calling or emailing from there.”
Tibby’s birthday emails in September didn’t really say anything; they were without information or intimacy. In retrospect, they were hauntingly vacant.
That was where the real troubles must have started, as best Bridget could tell. They weren’t prepared for Tibby’s departure. They didn’t know how to handle it. They couldn’t even acknowledge to themselves that it was real, that Tibby was far away. It wasn’t the physical distance; they’d managed that before. It was the fact that for the first time in their lives one of them was really, purposely, extensively out of touch. They couldn’t bring themselves to imagine it was true.
As she looked back, Bridget had the distinct sense of them all being stuck in time from that point forward. They never said it out loud, but it seemed implicitly disloyal to have fun together in Tibby’s absence, to make any big changes, to allow anything significant to happen without Tibby being part of it. They waited for Tibby to come back, spiritually if not physically, so they could resume their lives. They’d never accepted her absence. They didn’t know how to live if it wasn’t together.
That was why Bridget, why all of them, had been so thrilled and relieved about the Greece trip, why they’d thought this bewildering, isolating era of their lives was finally coming to an end. Thank God we’ll be together again. It had never been Bridget’s idea to fall apart, but they certainly had. She understood that now.
Why had Tibby done it? Why had she left like that? That was the part Bridget couldn’t understand.
Some days she worked backward, starting with the time just before the tickets for Greece came. She tried to connect those days to the days before and the days before that, to try to find some thread back to the time when she’d felt like she understood Tibby and lived a mostly rational life.
In her mind she looked for an explanation, a missing piece. Maybe Brian left Tibby and broke her heart. Maybe that was the cause of her falling out of touch. But wouldn’t she have confided her sorrows to them?
The two people Bridget would have wanted to ask were Brian himself and Alice, Tibby’s mother. What did they know? But her desire to find out was overwhelmed by her apprehension that neither of them knew what had really happened. Bridget had managed to call Alice a few nights before, but the conversation went nowhere. As far as she could tell, Alice believed Tibby had simply drowned. It was a senseless tragedy, an accident, and that was all. Maybe Tibby didn’t want anyone else to know the truth, and