Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [99]
Carmen trudged back to her seat. She had never in her adult life gone this long without checking her email, Facebook, or Twitter or making a call.
What had people done before they had phones? It was a serious question. She needed to know. What had she herself done, before she had a phone? She remembered the long car rides to Bethany Beach or the really long car rides to Fort Myers, Florida, to see her great-aunt and great-uncle. What had she done? She hadn’t read—not even magazines. It made her carsick.
Carmen knew what she’d done. It seemed hard to fathom right now, but she did know. The younger, phone-free Carmen had looked out the window and thought about things.
Carmen wondered about that. She was too tired to be huffy and indignant any longer, so she wondered about it honestly. Did she even have thoughts anymore?
She looked out the window. She tried to think of where in the world she was. She thought she’d heard the conductor announce a stop in North Carolina not too long ago. She observed how the trees were getting fuzzier and greener as they went. In New York, the trees were still mostly gaunt and bare, but here, they were budding and blossoming like mad. As the train rumbled south they plunged into spring, passing through whole weeks in a matter of hours.
It made her feel a little homesick, because of the blossoms, the cherries and dogwoods and magnolias and those pink ones, whatever they were called. These were the flowers that burst out all over her old neighborhood growing up, that would drop into her hair like spring snow. They probably had them in New York too, maybe in the park, but she never saw any.
If the train was in North Carolina now, then South Carolina would be next. That gave her a pang of nostalgia too. If she’d been in a plane and flown over these places, she wouldn’t have thought a single thing of it, but now she was going to be passing through the state where her dad had lived since she was six. It was the place she’d visited, fantasized about, been disappointed in, and grown up some in. It was the place where she’d met her stepbrother, Paul. And his sister, Krista, too, but Paul loomed larger here. He gave the whole state the stalwart suffering feeling that he had, even though she knew he didn’t mean to. It was the place where Lydia and her dad had gotten married and where Lydia had been sick and died. It seemed sad to go through the state and not reach out to any of them.
When she heard the baby shout she looked up. She felt an ache in her throat, and wondered if she felt sadder about Lydia than she’d realized, or if the phone carried a contagion of sadness sent over from Tibby.
The baby wasn’t crying, for once, but smiling and trying to say something. They were wordlike utterances that weren’t actually words. The baby was a girl, Carmen observed. She had olive skin and very large dark eyes. Her hair made shiny delicate dark curls. But you wait, Carmen thought. My hair looked like that too when I was your age.
Carmen observed that the mother of the family had not, in fact, been in the bathroom for the last ten hours as she had thought, but was apparently not on the train at all. Carmen looked at the rumpled father and took pity on him. It was awfully bold of him to take two small children on this ride by himself. Had you no other options? she couldn’t help wondering.
And Carmen couldn’t stop herself from staring at them a little. Rumpled though he was, the father had a certain dignity you rarely saw in parents of young children. He wore dark twill pants and a faded jean jacket over a gray T-shirt. Carmen had noticed as she’d padded around the aisles that everybody’s shoes had come off by this point, but his hadn’t. He wore pointed brown leather shoes. They were well worn but elegant. The kind that well-dressed businessmen wore.
She could