Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [84]
Bailey nodded. The look on her face rent Bridget’s heart and she began questioning everything she had done. She tried to identify the moment when she’d done the worst wrong. It often happened without clear warning. Was it the moment of abandon when she’d begun grabbing living things from the sky? Was the worst wrong opening the jar and letting them go? Had she sided with bugs against a child? Was the worst wrong returning the empty jar to Bailey’s arms?
“We don’t know how they escaped, but they did,” Brian said. “They flew away.” Bridget couldn’t tell if there was a note of accusation in his voice.
Bailey nodded.
“I told her they’re happy in the sky,” Brian continued, “but she’s still feeling sad.”
Bailey was listening carefully. The sobs had stopped, but her face was still stricken, wet with tears and her runny nose.
“I’m sorry they went away,” Bridget said. She understood Bailey wasn’t looking for an explanation. Bailey didn’t need Bridget to tell her they hadn’t gotten out by themselves, and that if she’d left them in there they would have died. She put her hands out and lifted Bailey from her chair.
She wordlessly took the jar from Bailey’s hands and put it on the counter. She folded Bailey into her side, held her firmly with one arm and stroked her head with the other as she walked back and forth across the kitchen. After two or three laps, Bailey gave the weight of her head to Bridget’s shoulder.
Brian sent her a grateful look and tiptoed back to his office. Bridget didn’t stop walking. She moved from stroking Bailey’s head to stroking her back. She made the laps bigger.
Bailey wiped off her nose on Bridget’s shirt, and Bridget felt strangely grateful for it. Bridget felt the violent hitch in Bailey’s breathing begin to smooth out. After some time Bailey put her thumb in her mouth and got heavier.
When the loop grew to include the entire ground floor of the house and the front porch, Bridget began to understand the deeper thing Bailey was crying for. She wondered about the words Brian might have used. They probably involved going away and maybe even being in the sky, and Bridget was sure they were bewildering to Bailey and signaled nothing more than pure loss.
Bridget went out to the porch and lowered onto a wicker chair in the soft shade. She continued to rub Bailey’s back as she felt Bailey’s body settle deeply into hers.
She’d thought Bailey had fallen asleep until Bailey sat up on her lap. She took her thumb out of her mouth and formulated a question.
“Catch a-a-a-again?”
Bridget sighed. She was greatly tempted to tell Bailey they would catch more tonight. They could easily catch a dozen in their jar. They could catch them every night if they wanted to.
But Bridget thought again about the moment of worst wrong, such an unassuming juncture that she often swanned right past it. There was no way she was putting them through that again.
“They are always in the sky. In the summertime you can see them,” Bridget said quietly. “Everywhere you go.”
Bailey lay back down on her again, and Bridget resumed stroking her back.
Bridget had imagined it was better if the thing you loved just disappeared. But maybe Bailey would have been better off if she could have seen and known what happened. Either way, she and Bailey were the same. They were both broken in the same place.
I know how you feel, Bridget thought. And it wasn’t just Tibby. She had lost her mother too.
The day Lena returned from Greece to nothing and no one, there was a letter waiting for her. She knew instantly who it was from by the way her name looked in the particular way he wrote it. It had been forwarded from her parents’ address.
Dear Lena, it began in his beloved handwriting. You said not to call, so I decided to write.
The momentary ecstasy at seeing her name in his writing again was quickly replaced by a pang of dread.
With a girded heart she scanned the letter for the explanations and mollification regarding Harriet. On the phone he’d said they weren’t married, but that was kind of a cop-out. He and Harriet