Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [93]
“What does that mean?”
Eudoxia cocked her head to one side. “Let me put it this way: do you want to be without him?”
Lena remembered the feeling of saying goodbye to Kostos at the ferry the last time. “But that doesn’t mean I want to be with him.” Why was everyone always trying to turn the world into binary choices, black or white, A or B, this or that?
Eudoxia looked unimpressed.
“We’ve caused each other more misery than anything else,” Lena said hotly. “It’s true. It’s all suffering with the two of us. If you were to ask Kostos: Has Lena caused you more pleasure or pain? If he was honest, he’d answer the same way I would about him.”
Eudoxia sat there shaking her head. “That’s just silly.”
Lena felt like Eudoxia had slapped her. “That’s silly? Thanks a lot.”
Eudoxia looked unrepentant. “You’ve been unhappy because you haven’t been together. If you were together, you’d be happy.”
Lena’s mind raced over their long, tragic history, all wrenching goodbyes and longing letters. Kostos being with people besides her.
It couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? There was no possible way. Their torments were real and important, fateful and psychologically complex.
Weren’t they?
Then the strangest thing happened. It was as though Lena’s consciousness shifted from her body into Eudoxia’s. Suddenly Lena’s mind existed at the top of Eudoxia’s big, generous body and looked out of her canny eyes.
From that perch Lena saw the whole thing differently, and it did seem silly. And dumb. It was another dumb thing Lena had been holding on to. Another part of her dreadful mythology that made her think even simple things were overwhelmingly complicated and worthy of dread.
Feeling dumb, Lena crept back wretchedly to her own body. If she’d been aiming to keep her personal mess off the table, this might have been a good time to pay the bill and go home, but she realized she couldn’t anymore. She was all in.
Lena stared at Eudoxia’s knowing face, and though she did feel silly, she did not feel appeased. There were other problems too. “In all the fourteen or something years we’ve known each other, we haven’t done much more than kiss a few times. How can we make some big blind commitment when we don’t even know how we are together?”
Eudoxia cast that off with a flick of her wrist. “Anatole and I had barely kissed. Most couples in the history of the world had barely kissed. It’s when the world changed and people started doing everything else, that’s when everybody got divorced.”
“You think.” Lena half intended to sound sassy and sarcastic, but it didn’t come out like that.
“Of course. It’s better this way. You have more to look forward to.”
Lena was floundering in messy doubt and Eudoxia was sitting there like the queen of certainty.
“Oh, and another thing. I think he’s getting married.” Lena laid down the heavy card.
Eudoxia shrugged philosophically. “Then he probably won’t come.”
Lena shot up in her seat in protest. “He probably won’t come! And that seems okay to you? You think I should go and yet you think he won’t show up?”
“I don’t think he won’t show up.”
“But you think it’s possible.”
“Of course it’s possible.”
“How can I go if he doesn’t go? How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?”
Eudoxia’s expression grew more serious. “That’s what you’re doing anyway, my dear.”
Probably because she had no pride left, Lena called Eudoxia three hours after they’d said goodbye at the coffee shop.
“Do you think he’ll come?”
“I don’t know, dear one.”
“You act so confident, like you know what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t. I know what I want to happen.”
“But what do you think will happen?” Lena recognized that she sounded like she was five.
“I think you need to make this decision on your own. I think you need to know what you want and try to get it. That’s the only thing you can do. The other part is not in your control.”
“Okay, okay, I know that.”
“You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it