Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [67]
“Twenty months.” His face showed strain and exhaustion. She could see the web of blue-purple veins under his eyes and at his temples.
“You’re her father. I can’t believe you’re a father.”
“I can’t remember not being one.”
“Tibby is her mother.” Bridget looked quickly at Brian and he looked away. “Was her mother.”
Brian’s face stayed turned away. She could see the wariness in his posture.
“She looks so much like Tibby it scares me.”
Brian nodded, but still didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to talk about that, she understood. She could see by the way his head tipped how much he didn’t.
For the first time since Greece, Bridget couldn’t force away the presence of Carmen and Lena in her mind. They didn’t know about this. They needed to know.
“Would you mind if—Could I tell Carmen and Lena about her?”
“About Bailey?” He looked uncomfortable. “Tibby didn’t say anything?”
“No, she—”
“Then I’d rather wait till we get back to the States next month. Tibby wanted to make the introductions in person.”
“She did?” Bridget swallowed painfully. How could you make any sense of what Tibby wanted?
“That’s why we’re moving back,” he said.
“Oh.” There was an opening here and she was too unsettled to know what to do with it.
“Next month. The truck comes on the twenty-first of March.”
“Where will you go?”
“We bought a place in Pennsylvania. A farm. Tibby picked it.”
She waited for him to say more, but he was quiet.
“How did you find us here?” he asked after a while.
“I found the address on the Internet.” She was somewhat ashamed to admit it. But she hadn’t known what she’d be finding. She’d imagined the address would only be the first step of a long, roundabout search for Tibby’s lost years. She hadn’t expected to hit it right off.
“I was figuring you would wait and find us at the new place,” Brian said.
“Why?”
“Because Tibby said she was sending you an invitation to come there.”
The word “invitation” rang in her ears. “She probably did. I didn’t open the letter yet.” As Bridget said it, she realized how typically impulsive it sounded and how badly she had misfired yet again. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this,” she said.
Brian shook his head. “It’s okay that you’re here. I was just surprised.”
He pulled apart a fraying bit of his shoelace, and she watched the side of his face. She wondered what dark thing had happened to him and Tibby. Had their relationship become a source of misery? Had the baby been an unwelcome trial?
Brian was the only source of information she had, and with his stiff body and his face turned away, she didn’t know if he even realized the worst of it, or how to ask him. “I just want to know what happened,” she began gracelessly. “Can you tell me about her life here? Because I just wish I knew—”
Brian got to his feet. He looked at her and then looked away again. “Bridget, I don’t think I can handle this right now.”
“But can you just …” Bridget stood too. “Did the two of you fight? Was she sorry about moving all the way out here?” Even as she said these things she knew they were the wrong questions.
Helplessly she watched Brian step into the house and let the screen door bang behind him. She felt injured and oversized and she couldn’t follow him. What could she do?
Maybe he blamed her. Maybe he thought she was blaming him. Maybe he didn’t want to compare notes on their failures.
Maybe he didn’t know what had really happened. Maybe, like Alice, he thought it was simply a terrible accident. Or maybe he knew the truth and was as blindsided, confused, and miserable as Bridget was. Maybe Tibby’s death had shattered his idea of the world as it had hers.
She waited until the house was quiet before she walked silently to the guest room and collected her things. She was halfway down the front walk when he caught up with her.
“Bridget, don’t leave,” he said.
She could see that he’d been crying and she felt sorry. She’d come here expecting him to be a role player in her tragedy, to give her that missing piece that would make her life bearable. But he had his own tragedy