The Second Summer of the Sisterhood Part 34

Christina piled pillows onto her lap. "Maybe it's not that easy."

Carmen pointed to the bathroom. "Maybe it is."

Christina hesitated. Carmen could close her eyes and plug her ears, and still she would know how much her mom wanted to go. But Christina was trying to be rational and responsible, and Carmen appreciated that.

"I'm not telling you to lose your head, Mama. I'm not even telling you to take up where you left off with him. I'm just saying, go out to dinner with the guy who loves you."

Her mother swung her feet over the edge. This was working.

"You never have to go out with him again if you don't want." Carmen knew the chances of that-were zero, but hey.

Her mother started toward the shower.

"Wait." Carmen rushed back to her room. She took the Traveling Pants from the top of her bureau and shook them out gently. She rushed back to her mother.

"Here."

Christina's eyes got swimmy. She pressed her lips together. "What?" Christina said in a whisper, even though she knew what it meant.

"These are for you to wear."

"Oh, mi nena." Christina grabbed Carmen and pressed her close. Carmen realized she could lift her chin and rest it on the top of her mother's head. That was sad, a little.

When her mom pulled away, Carmen felt tears on her neck.

"I can't take them. If I'm going to try again, I have to be a grown-up this time."

"Okay." Carmen understood that.

"But Carmen?"

"Yeah?"

Her mother's mouth wobbled and tipped. "It means the world to me that you offered."

Carmen nodded. She picked up her mother's hand and pressed a kiss onto her knuckles. "Go, Mama. Shower. Get dressed. Hurry!"

Carmen strode back to her own room. "I'll get the camera all ready for when David gets here!" she called over her shoulder.

Carmabelle: Tib. I'll bring the Pants when I come to the screening. Can't wait to see you.

Tibby knew she was a true-blue believer in the Pants, because otherwise she could not have put them on today, considering what had happened the last time she had worn them. For her, the Pants were about putting in bad, lame-o st.i.tches and pulling them out again, judging people and being able to change her mind. She could surprise herself, that was what Bailey had said.

She touched the embroidered heart as she walked into the auditorium. Her own heart felt as if it were beating just beneath her skin. Her bones no longer felt hard and protective.

For some reason, when she saw the cl.u.s.ter of people waiting for her in a row of seats at the back of the auditorium, she had the strangest sensation that she had died. The world was over, and all the people she had hurt and disappointed had come back to give her a second chance.

Her mother and father were there. Brian was there. Lena and Carmen, Mr. and Mrs. Graffman. Even Vanessa. I want to deserve all of you, she thought.

Her movie came first. It started with Bailey in the window and sunlight pouring all around and Beethoven. The picture switched to Wallman's and Duncan Howe and to Margaret at the Pavillion movie theater and to Brian at the 7-Eleven. She'd interspersed these segments with bits from the home movies she'd gotten from the Graffmans. Bailey taking her first steps as a baby, Bailey running after a b.u.t.terfly in her backyard, and-this was a hard part-Bailey as a feisty six-year-old with a baseball cap and no hair underneath. The last segment was the interview. Bailey talking and looking, seeming to take as much from the camera as she gave to it.

The end was the still picture from the 7-Eleven. The one with her looking over her shoulder at Tibby and laughing. The image dissolved slightly as it hung there, and it turned to black and white. It stayed on the screen as the music played on.

Brian, sitting next to her, reached out and took her hand. She squeezed his in return. She realized he was whistling along with the music, but so quietly she was probably the only one who could hear it.

At last the music finished and Bailey's face flickered off. The darkness felt empty without it.

Mrs. Graffman leaned her head against her husband's chest. Tibby's mom reached for Tibby's hand on one side and Carmen's on the other. Lena held her head. All of them cried freely.

Outside in the bright sunlight, Tibby's parents hugged her. Her mother told her she was proud. Carmen and Lena squeezed her and praised her again and again. Brian had tears in his eyes. Tibby was surprised when Alex came over. She steeled herself for his comment, though she was well beyond taking it to heart.

"Well done," he said. His eyes were uncertain; it came out almost like a question. He studied her as though she were a stranger. Which, in a way, she was. He was flattened against the wall, and she could see all around.

If you are Greek, you know that it is traditionally considered an insult to the ancient G.o.ds to think you know when things can't get any worse. If you make this mistake, then the G.o.ds will prove you wrong.

One week to the day after Lena received the apocalyptic letter from Kostos, Grandma called from Oia and told Lena's father that Bapi had had a stroke. He was in the hospital in Fira, and he wasn't doing well.

Lena's father, being a lawyer and an American now, demanded to talk to Bapi's doctors and shouted a lot and wanted to have Bapi airlifted to the research hospital in Athens. The reply came that Bapi was too fragile to be moved.

Lena only had time to leave messages for Tibby and Carmen about what had happened and to call Basia's and quit a week early. She was packing her suitcase in a daze along with the rest of her family when she remembered the Traveling Pants. She was supposed to get them that day! It was midafternoon and they still hadn't arrived. Who had had them last? They'd been moving around so fast lately, Lena couldn't remember. The flight to New York was leaving in two hours! In spite of the crises around her, this became the most urgent source of her worry. How could she go to Greece without them?

As the rest of her family scurried around the house, she waited by the front door, hoping for a glimpse of a delivery truck. She dragged her feet in the last minutes before her departure.

"Lena, come on!" her mother was screaming at her from the car as she paused on the sidewalk, still hoping the Pants would somehow magically appear in time.

They didn't, and she took it as a bad omen.

Lena and her family stood by on the flight to New York, and the following morning on a direct flight to Athens. On the 747 rumbling eastward over the Atlantic Ocean, Lena spent most of the time looking at the seatback in front of her. But a lot of scenes played out on the blue polyester. Bapi and his wrinkly elbows poking out the window on the night of the festival of the a.s.sumption last August. Bapi eating Cheerios in his white ta.s.seled shoes. Bapi looking long and hard at her paintings, taking them as seriously as anyone ever had. It seemed funny, maybe, to find your soul mate in an eighty-two-year-old Greek man, but that was what had happened to Lena last summer.

Lena's father wrote in a notebook. Effie slept against his left shoulder. Lena's mother sat grimly beside her.

At one point, between the first movie and the second, they caught each other in a grim look and then proceeded to stare at each other grimly.

I wish we could help each other, Lena thought. I wish that you trusted me enough to tell me important things and that I trusted you. Then she found herself wis.h.i.+ng that her mother could be her soul mate and not Bapi, who was probably dying. Then Lena started to cry. She curled up in her seat with her back to her mother and let her shoulders shake and her breath forget all the usual patterns. She blew her nose loudly into a c.o.c.ktail napkin. She was crying for herself and Bapi and Kostos and her grandma and her father and the Traveling Pants that hadn't come in time, and then for herself some more.

And yet, when the captain ordered the flight attendants to prepare for arrival, and Lena saw the ancient and beautiful terrain of her grandmotherland below, she felt a thrill in the bottom of her stomach. Somewhere inside, her irrepressible, naive heart was leaping with eagerness to see Kostos again, even under these wretched circ.u.mstances.

Bee,

I wish there was a better way to find you, 'cause I want to talk to you right away. So badly. I just found out Lena's bapi had a stroke. They all left for Greece yesterday. After everything she's been through, I feel so horrible. I want to make sure you know.

Love,

Tibby

Lena had reasonably begun to believe that what you least wanted to happen was certainly the thing that would happen.

When they pulled up in the rental car after a long climb up the cliffs of Santorini to the village of Oia and saw Grandma standing outside her egg-yolk front door, her belief was confirmed.

Grandma wore black from head to toe, and the lines on her face all seemed to point straight down. Lena heard a small cry leave her chest. Her father leaped out of the car and hugged his mother. Lena saw Grandma nodding and crying. They all knew what it meant.

Effie put her arm around Lena's shoulders. Lena's tears were on call, ready for duty. She had cried so much in recent days, she actually felt thirsty. Lena's hair mixed with Effie's hair as they held each other and cried. Then they all took turns hugging Grandma. When Grandma saw Lena she let out a moan and seemed to collapse on her shoulders. "Beautiful Lena," she said, sobbing into her neck. "Vat has happened to us?"

The funeral was to take place the following morning. Lena woke up and watched the Caldera at dawn, dark gray and pink. The window of her bedroom, now shared with Effie, brought the memories of last summer so close around her she felt as if she could hold them. She remembered sketching Kostos in charcoal from this very spot.

With a thrum of antic.i.p.ation and anxiety at seeing Kostos, Lena took extra pains with her appearance. She wore a beautiful sheer black blouse over a camisole borrowed from Effie. She wore pearls in her earlobes. She blow-dried her hair and wore it down around her shoulders, a rare occurrence. She put on the slightest bit of eyeliner and mascara. She knew that even a little makeup set off her celery-colored eyes dramatically, which was why she almost never wore it.

Lena always downplayed her looks. She wore simple, uninteresting clothes. She hardly ever wore makeup or jewelry and wore her black hair back in a knot or a sloppy ponytail. From when she was a little girl, her mother had always told Lena her beauty was a gift, but as gifts went, Lena compared it to the Trojan horse.

Her beauty made her feel self-conscious and exposed. It brought her the kind of attention she hated. The very obviousness of it made her feel cheated. Effie, with her big nose, was allowed to be pa.s.sionate, quirky, wholehearted, and free. Lena, with her small nose, got to be pretty. Lena spent too much of her life making sure none of the people she trusted cared about how she looked, and avoiding the people who did.

And yet, today, she was polis.h.i.+ng up the gift. Today, her hollowness over Bapi, her aching eagerness for Kostos made her desperate, willing to try any power available to her.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Effie said upon seeing her descend the stairs. "What have you done with Lena?"

"Duct tape in the closet," Lena answered.

Effie admired Lena in seeming awe for a few minutes. "Kostos is going to eat his poor heart out," she declared.

And thus, feeling guilty and small, Lena had her private soul read like a poster by her little sister, Effie.

Tibby looked down at the linoleum floor and remembered how plain and depressing her dorm room had seemed the day she'd moved into it two months ago. Now the floor was covered with dirty clothes she was tossing haphazardly into a large Hefty bag. On her bed she laid out all the videoca.s.settes she had gathered and used in making her movie. On her desk was her iBook, which had worked so hard with her this summer. The computer had been a bribe, but she'd come to love it anyway. On her bureau was her eleven-year-old drawing of her bedroom, which had kept her company in a funny way. There was also the certificate announcing that her movie had won highest honors from the film department, and the note of congratulations from Bagley, her screenwriting teacher. On her nightstand was the purple poison dart frog Vanessa had made expressly for Nicky. Each of these things gave her pleasure as she tucked them, one by one, into her suitcase.

The last thing she packed was a picture she'd taped to the door. It was a picture of Bailey in the hospital not too long before she died. Mrs. Graffman had given it to Tibby when she'd come for the movie screening.

It was hard for Tibby to look at. Even as she cherished it, she wanted to press it safely between two books on a high shelf and leave it there forever. But she promised herself she wouldn't do that. She promised herself she would hang it on the wall of her room, no matter where she was. Because Bailey had understood what was real, and when Tibby saw Bailey's face, she couldn't hide from it.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

-Matt Groening

The ma.s.s for Bapi was held in the plain and lovely whitewashed church Lena had visited many times last summer. The service was all in Greek, naturally, including her father's eulogy, which left Lena to her own memories and meditations of Bapi.

She held Grandma's hand tightly and yearned for a glimpse of Kostos. He would be terribly sad, she knew that much. While she had only had the chance to love Bapi for one summer, Kostos had known him almost all his life. Lena had observed the subtle ways Kostos looked out for Bapi as he grew older and more feeble-hauling the garbage, replacing the roof tiles-while still making Bapi feel manly and respected.

Lena wanted to share this with Kostos. He was one of the very few people who knew what Bapi meant to her. No matter what it was that had come between them, they could be close today, couldn't they?

Toward the end of the service, Lena caught sight of him at last. He was across the aisle from her family, on the far side, wearing a dark suit, and mostly obscured by his grandfather. Was Kostos looking for her, too? Here they were, in a small church on this tiny island on such a day. How could he not?