Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [92]
at 4 o’clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
If you choose to come, bring yourself, all of yourself, and no one else.
Consider it a journey that could last the rest of your life.
If you choose not to come, that’s a different ending, but it’s a beginning too.
Bridget waited until three nights before the move, while she was helping Brian pack up the books in the living room, to ask another question.
“Did Tibby want to have a baby?” As payment went, this was a more expensive question, and she knew it.
He didn’t answer at first. His book-boxing movements became robotic. “Yes. Of course.”
“Did you?”
“Of course.”
She stopped and looked at him with some impatience. Tibby was gone. It didn’t seem so “of course” to her.
He walked out of the room, up the stairs, and into his bedroom, and she thought they were back to her first day in this house.
She waited for a door to bang shut, but a few seconds later she heard him walking down the stairs again. He was carrying something and he thrust it at her from several feet away. His face had changed to a completely different shape.
She took it from him and looked at it. She drew in a breath and felt her whole body shifting in response to it.
It was a photograph in a glass frame. It was black-and-white and must have been taken within a few days of Bailey’s birth, because her tiny face was puffy and crumpled.
In the picture Tibby’s hand cupped the baby’s head and her cheek lay against her baby’s cheek. Tibby’s eyes were closed, her freckles were like dark snowflakes on her white skin, and her lovely pixie face showed something too ancient to name. It was her familiar Tibby, but also it was Tibby gone to a serious place where Bridget couldn’t follow.
From the picture Bridget understood. She felt an uprising of tears, neither tranquil nor philosophical. The picture answered her question expensively.
She handed it back to Brian and saw he was crying too. He sat down in a chair, his jaw in his hands and his shoulders shaking. She went to the other chair and curled up like a fetus.
They stayed like that for a long time in their separate chairs. They didn’t exchange a word, but unlike the first time she’d pushed too hard, she realized that the air felt strangely companionable.
She decided not to ask him any more questions for a while.
Lena thought of canceling her weekly coffee with Eudoxia, but for what? So she could sit on her bed and stare at the wall and ruminate. Was that really something she needed more of?
“My dear, what is it?” That was the first thing Eudoxia said. “Something is very wrong.”
Lena looked at her coffee and looked at Eudoxia and looked back at her coffee. It seemed insane, on the face of it, to tell Eudoxia what was going on.
But why?
Because it wasn’t the kind of thing she did.
But why?
Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself.
Lena realized she was kneading her hands in the manner of Valia if Valia had taken amphetamines. As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product. She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life.… Well, she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in, a real friend could do a world of good.
“Tibby left a letter for me and one for Kostos. She gave a date and a time and meeting place, some place in Pennsylvania I’ve never heard of, and invited us both to show up.”
Eudoxia looked purely puzzled. “To show up for what?”
It was so outlandish, Lena found it hard to answer. “I guess it’s the chance to be together. To get together and stay together.”
A dawning look was coming into Eudoxia’s eyes. “And if you don’t?”
“Then just give up and move on.”
“Tibby wants you to make a choice, not just wait around for him to come.”
“I’m not waiting around for him to come.”
“Lena.”
“That supposes that I want to be with him. Maybe I don’t.”
“I see