Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [87]
Afraid of breaking this spell, Bridget barely breathed. She put her arm around Bailey, wanting to hold her, but afraid to burden her with any weight.
The rain pounded on the roof and trickled down the window. Bailey snorted and twitched and drooled and finally passed into such a deep stage of sleep, Bridget supposed she could dangle her by the ankles without waking her.
It wasn’t a spell, Bridget realized, gathering Bailey closer. She needed a mother. Like all of us, Bridget thought. And like most of us, Bailey wanted to sleep in proximity to another warm body.
Bridget lay awake, but she wasn’t restless. There weren’t as many places to go as there were thoughts to think.
Sometime in the early-morning hours, Bridget felt Tibby’s presence again. Not in the form of this look-alike old playmate, but separate from her. In Bridget’s half-dream, Tibby seemed to lie in a symmetrical curve on the other side of Bailey, so that their knees practically touched under Bailey’s feet. This time she took the form of a mother.
Honey,
you cannot wrestle a dove.
—The Shins
Nearly every aspect of the wedding planning had been a cheerful and much-needed distraction for Carmen until now. Now she sat at the kitchen table in her loft, bouncing her leg, staring at the pile of invitations, unable to pick up her pen.
Until now she’d been pleased with the invitations. They were expensively engraved, just the right shade of ecru, and one hundred percent tasteful. With the help of these invitations, she’d managed to waste at least four evenings, addressing them during the time when she otherwise might have had to spare a thought for how her life was going to feel the day after her meticulously planned honeymoon came to an end.
But when it came to the last two invitations, her pen dried up and her energy left her. She’d invited Lena’s parents. She’d even invited Effie. Now she had to invite Lena. She’d invited Bee’s dad and her brother and Violet, even though she felt pretty sure they wouldn’t come. Now she had to invite Bee.
She knocked her pen against the metal table. The plan had been to call them first, resume contact before the invitations arrived, but she hadn’t done that. The plan then became to write a little note in each of their invitations acknowledging, at least, how strange and difficult this was, but she hadn’t managed that either.
What was she so scared of? She couldn’t even frame it. She didn’t want to have to talk about what happened. She didn’t want to have to acknowledge the impenetrably dark thing that they three—maybe only they three—knew and could not say. It isn’t just that she drowned.
Carmen didn’t want to have to digest it any further. She couldn’t.
The third plan was just to write out their addresses and stick the damned things in the mail, but even that proved too hard. She pictured their reactions when they got them. You are seriously going ahead with this? What would they think of her? They would think she’d had a lobotomy. That would be their kindest reaction.
What if she didn’t invite them? That would be insane.
She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle, seeing their faces in the crowd as she and Jones took their vows, just two more random spectators. If only she could think of them that way. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine them and not imagine their honesty along with them. They knew her better than anyone.
She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle without seeing their faces at all, and she simply couldn’t do it.
Without them, her life was a farce. With them her life was a farce. Carmen sighed and put her head down on the cold table. Her life was a farce.
Kostos’s return letter came in an extraordinarily brisk three days. It had many parts, all of them funny or sad, none of them having anything to do with his girlfriend/fiancée named Harriet.
I dreamed of your lost city last night. Isn’t that strange. You gave me a dream. Thanks for it. It was