Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [90]
“Hey, Brian?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She wouldn’t risk opening the sky on him as she had at first. What happened to you two? Why were you hiding from everyone who loved you? Why didn’t you tell us about your daughter? She’d ask him something specific and relatively easy.
“Were you and Tibby married?”
He looked up at her in some surprise. It was an easy one, but a breach of their tacit agreement nonetheless. His eyes were wary. Was she a fellow fugitive, as he’d come to hope, or really a spy after all? “No,” he said.
He must have sensed her disappointment as she picked up her water glass and started for the door.
“We were planning to get married as soon as we got back to the States,” he said. “Tibby wanted to wait to do it with her folks and the three of you.”
Bridget floated back toward the table.
“But that didn’t happen, of course.” He seemed to be trying to fend off a lot of things with his “of course.” A gulf was opening, and neither seemed to know how to close it.
“That’s delayed me taking Bailey back,” he added, more businesslike. “She was born here. Because we weren’t married yet, there were some legal issues about guardianship to nail down before I could take her out of the country.”
Bridget nodded.
“She hasn’t met her grandparents yet, you know?” There was an almost undetectable crack in his voice.
Bridget had wondered about that. She nodded again.
“Or Nicky or Katherine. Or Carmen and Lena.”
Bridget thought it was brave of him to say all the names of the missing in a row. “Right,” she said.
“But now it’s all settled. So that’s the next thing, I guess.” It was a wearying prospect. She could see it in his face.
“Right,” she said again.
They were silent after that. She took the muffins out of the oven and left one on a plate for him. She’d wait until a couple of days to ask any more questions by way of payment.
After more than three weeks of obsessive letter-writing and at least twenty letters on each side, Lena got one from Kostos that ended in an absolutely breathtaking and unexpected way.
The second-best part of my day is writing a letter to you. The first-best part is receiving one from you. And all day long I think, “But wouldn’t it be lovely just to wake up together in the same bed?”
For the first time Lena didn’t know what to write. Her head sizzled with a shock that killed every idea. She couldn’t do so much as take out a piece of paper and lay it on her desk. She walked around with a roaring lawn mower in her chest.
The feelings were too noisy, moving too fast to be understood. So much for Markos the tennis partner. There was excitement and fear and a hundred other strands that she couldn’t untangle.
She attempted to search the Internet for information about Harriet, knowing only her address and first name, and found nothing. She felt stupid.
Two days later another letter came from him and it was short. Lena tore it open before she lost courage. Her heart raced with hope. What was the hope?
It was one page, five words.
My mistake. Won’t happen again.
That wasn’t the hope.
The lawn mower stopped. All the noise and energy drained out of her. She felt tired, all of a sudden, and nothing else. She slept through the late afternoon and night and didn’t wake up until the next morning.
Still wearing Valia’s robe, she took out a piece of paper and wrote a question.
Do you love Harriet?
She stared at it for a long time, and then she threw it in the garbage.
All morons hate it
when you call them a moron.
—J. D. Salinger
Bridget and Bailey played in the creek and weeded the flower bed alongside the house. They went to the neighbors’ house to visit their cat, Springs. Bailey adored Springs but Springs did not adore Bailey, who was always trying to pick her up by the back legs.
After lunch Bridget and Bailey lay on the couch together and Bridget read Good Dog, Carl four times in a row, in four different accents.
Bailey fell asleep on Bridget’s chest, and Bridget closed her eyes in contentment, feeling Bailey’s body rising and falling