Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [98]
The second thing was the phone. Once Carmen was awake on account of the crying and there seemed no hope of going to sleep, on account of the crying, she grabbed her phone. But when she tried to wake it up it stayed black. It’s all right, don’t panic, she counseled herself. It was a slightly temperamental phone, was all. She held down the home button for a while. Still black. Okay, it was the charge. She unwound the charger and thankfully found an outlet. She plugged it in and waited. Sometimes this could take a minute or two. She knew the stubborn biorhythms of these phones better than the ones of her own body.
At last it lived. The little waiting circle spun and then the screen lit up. And when she saw the icon on the screen, the fear began, like the beat of a slow drum against the horror-movie sound track of the screaming baby.
There glowed the dreaded icon that instructed you to plug your phone into your iTunes mother ship or you were screwed. Well, she had no iTunes to plug into. The mother ship was sitting in the living room of her loft, giant-screened and cutting-edge and of no help to anyone. This daughter-phone was not so independent as she liked to pretend.
Carmen turned it off and turned it on again with no feeling of hope whatsoever. Same icon.
“Shit,” Carmen muttered. She would have felt guilty about cursing near children, but they were the ones who should have felt guilty. “Shit,” she said again. Her mind raced for possible solutions. Whom could she whine to? Whom could she bribe? Whom could she charm?
No one. She was down to zeroes and ones, and they really didn’t care about her. She loved her phone, but her phone did not love her back.
She thought of Tibby with a feeling of pique. Some gift this was. And then she felt horrified. How could she be irritated at Tibby, who was dead?
She realized she was sweating. Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t call anyone! She couldn’t text anyone! She couldn’t read the script! She needed desperately to call Jones and tell him she couldn’t call him.
She looked up at the ceiling. She looked out at the darkness, at the billows of dark steamy pollution, at the grim lights of industrial New Jersey or Delaware or wherever she was. She couldn’t spend thirty-two more hours on this train with no one to talk to and nothing to do. She couldn’t.
You can’t kill yourself over a phone, a sane voice in her head pointed out. Oh, yes, you can, a less sane voice answered.
She laid her head back on her pillow and tried to breathe deeply. She tried to steady her heart. Every little trick she had for self-comfort hit a wall. Call her mother? No. Check the weather? No. Update her Facebook status? No. Google her rivals? No. Find her horoscope? No.
Like a drug addict, she felt the itches and the tremors that made her want to claw her own skin. Like a drug addict, she found herself grasping at any fix no matter how self-destructive: she could get off in Baltimore and buy a new phone—who cared if she missed her meeting! She could offer a thousand dollars to anyone on the train who would sell her theirs! Better, she could steal one! Who cared that it wouldn’t have her mail or her contacts? Who cared that the only numbers she knew by heart were Lena’s, Bee’s, and Tibby’s?
Like a drug addict, Carmen felt waves of nausea and despair throughout the night. She might have seen hallucinations of spiders, she wasn’t sure.
At some point in her misery, she realized that the baby had gone quiet and the mother still hadn’t come back.
Not knowing
when the dawn will come
I open every door.
—Emily Dickinson
Throughout the early morning Carmen got several cups of coffee from the dinette. She flipped through the awful train magazine.
She spent a little time talking to Coach Attendant Kevin, who was from a town called Goose Creek, just west of Charleston, but had not heard of the street where her father lived.
Carmen went back to the dinette and got some walnuts in a bag. She begged the lady behind the counter,