Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [65]
She got a train from the airport to the central station in Sydney and took CityRail two hours south to the town of Bowral, New South Wales. It was a pretty town with cafés, shops, a couple of art galleries. It was less alien than she’d expected it to be, having come across the planet for it. Maybe because she’d studied it so long on the screen of the computer in Sheila’s office at the Sea Star Inn.
The address matched a bungalow not unlike Perry and Violet’s, but the inverse, other-side-of-the-world version. Where Perry’s was purply gray, this one was butter yellow. Where Perry’s was held close by a matching house on either side, this one was surrounded by its own little meadow. Perry’s tiny backyard was bordered by a line of old dark-leaved eucalyptus trees. Spreading behind this one were young woods, topped by a cloud of green so green it seemed to pulse. The pink late-day light slanted differently here, the shadows spread differently under her feet.
Had Tibby lived here? Vacationed here? For a short time? A long time? Was this the place she’d lived most recently or had she left it long before?
It was opposite world, turned upside down. The toilets flushed the other way, the guy on the train had told her, and you just had to see Bowral’s famous spring tulips—in September. Fall was spring, winter was summer, gray was yellow, night was morning. Maybe death was life. Maybe Tibby was here.
Bridget floated along the concrete walk. She was tired and disoriented. There was nothing that could surprise her, nothing she wouldn’t let happen.
She noticed a car parked in the driveway behind the house. She walked up a few steps to the shaded porch. The screen was closed, but the door was open. She knocked on the wooden trim. She heard a voice talking from the back of the house. She opened the screen door a couple of feet.
“Hello?” she called. She felt yet another old version of the world ending, a new one opening up.
She saw him walking toward her down the hallway. The sun was setting behind the house, making a silhouette of him against the back windows, so she could make out his shape but not his features at first. The gait was both familiar and strange. It took until his face was within a couple of yards for her to know it was him.
“Bee,” he said.
He came out onto the porch, barefoot and also disoriented. She put her arms around him, and he felt thinner and more brittle than she’d expected him to.
“Tibby said you would find us,” Brian said as they came apart. “But I didn’t think you’d come all the way down here.”
Before Bridget could formulate a question, another shape emerged from the back of the house, a very small one. Bridget was mesmerized by it as it came into focus.
The tiny shape reached to pull open the screen door and let it slap behind her. The shape turned into a tiny girl, who came up beside Brian and wrapped her arm around Brian’s knee.
Bridget stared at the girl in astonishment—the large hazel eyes, the pointy face, the serious mouth. This was a person she knew. Death was life and the present was the past. She’d gone back to her earliest childhood to find her friend again.
Brian took the little girl’s hand and led her forward. “Bee, this is Bailey. This is Tibby’s and my daughter.”
Lena was back in Providence, back in her tiny, dark studio apartment, back to long, quiet, mostly empty days, but one important thing was different: she had a project.
When you had a project it was much easier to pretend to be someone else. You could pretend to be Nancy Drew, for instance, or Maria from The Sound of Music, or the sensible wisecracking housekeeper on The Brady Bunch.
In her Nancy Drew persona, Lena looked up the phone number of Kostos’s so-called vacation house in Santorini and called it. She couldn’t hold on to the persona long enough to leave a message on voice mail, but she called three times over the course of the week, and the third time the phone was answered by a live person, a woman who greeted