Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood Page 6

  “Okay,” Lena said. She didn’t really want to leave anyway. She would stay and water the plants if that were her only excuse.

  Annik left supplies out on a free easel. It was like leaving drugs out for an addict. It had been Lena’s easel; that’s why it was free. At first Lena just stood in the back of class and watched people draw. Then her fingers started itching for a piece of charcoal. She ambled over to the easel, just drawing with her eyes at first. She hesitated. Then she picked up the charcoal and she was lost until the bell rang.

  Annik came over. “That’s lovely,” she said, studying the three poses of Andrew laid out on the sheet. “Do you want to go outside and talk for a minute?”

  “Okay.” Lena expected they’d talk in the hallway, but Annik led her down the hall, up a ramp, and out into the courtyard. Annik rolled up to a bench, and Lena sat down on it. The dogwood trees rustled and a small fountain gushed appealingly in the middle. Various sculptures and found-object works, one involving a stack of car tires, decorated the perimeter.

  “Are you comfortable drawing Andrew?” she asked. Annik’s hair was a beautiful red, made only more so by the sunlight. There was orange and gold and chestnut and even pink in it. Annik was fairly young, Lena realized, probably in her late twenties, and her face was delicate and pretty. Lena wondered, absently, if there was a man who loved her.

  “Yes,” Lena said. “I felt a little awkward the first day, but then it went away. I don’t think about it anymore.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Annik said. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen at the end of the summer.”

  Annik nodded. “Can I tell you what I think?”

  Lena nodded.

  “I think you should take the class.”

  “I think I should too. I wish my dad felt that way.”

  Annik put her hands on her wheels like she was getting ready to roll away.

  Lena wondered, as she had many times before, what had happened to Annik that made her need a wheelchair. Had she always been in a chair or had she grown up on her legs like a regular kid? Had she had an accident or a disease? Lena wondered what of Annik’s worked and what didn’t. Could she have a baby if she wanted to?

  Though Lena wanted to know, she didn’t dare ask. She shied away from the intensity that might come from asking such a question. Intimacy came faster when a person wore their pain and poor luck for all to see. And yet, not asking felt like an act of neglect or cowardice. It kept a distance between them that Lena regretted.

  Annik rolled back and forth a little, but she didn’t go anywhere just yet. “You do what you need to do,” she said.

  Lena wasn’t sure whether this meant take the class or listen to your father, but she had a pretty strong suspicion it was the former.

  “I’m not sure how I’d pay for it, for one thing,” Lena mused.

  “I’m allowed a second monitor,” Annik said. “You’d need to help set up and clean up every day, including mopping. But you’d get free tuition.”

  “I’ll do it,” Lena said instantly, not aware of making the decision.

  Annik smiled openly. “I’m so glad.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to tell my dad,” Lena murmured, half to herself.

  “Tell him the truth,” Annik said.

  Lena shrugged, knowing that this was the piece of Annik’s advice she was not going to take.

  There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Tibby sat frozen on a chair in the den watching Nicky watch cartoons. Her thoughts came together and broke apart, occasionally punctured by the sadism of Tom and Jerry. Her whole body hurt; every bone ached when her mind flashed on Katherine. She let herself think of Katherine for only a second at a time and then she pulled away, because it hurt too much.

  Nicky didn’t know anything yet. They didn’t want to scare him. Whereas Tibby was good and scared, wanting desperately for the phone to ring, but only if it was good news.

  Tibby was not raised religious. For the early part of her childhood, her parents were devout atheists, spewing Marx’s “opiate of the masses” rhetoric. Nowadays Tibby wasn’t sure what they believed. They didn’t talk about it anymore.

  But Tibby was not them. As far as Tibby was concerned, you couldn’t have someone you loved, really loved, die and not believe in some kind of god. It was the only way to look at it. And besides, Bailey herself—as she had lived, not as she had died—had been proof that somebody or something existed beyond the realm of rational things.

  And when Tibby thought of Bailey, it made sense, because a god who was smart enough to want Bailey back as soon as possible was also smart enough to see the beauty of Katherine. Katherine was too good for the world Tibby lived in. Tibby belonged there just fine, but not Katherine. Katherine was brave and generous and passionate. If she weren’t on God’s dance card, then who would be? Tibby would stand in the corner of heaven, if she ever made it there, but Katherine, like Bailey, would be doing the polka or the bunny hop or maybe the bus stop with God.

  Please don’t take her yet, Tibby implored. She’s only three and we love her too much to survive without her.

  Tibby was asking selfishly. Because she knew it was her fault. She had opened a window that was always shut. Why had she done that? She knew Katherine wanted to climb the apple tree. She knew that was how Katherine fell out the window. It wasn’t on purpose. Please, God, believe that.

  It was an accident. It was horrible, but not nearly as horrible as the ways in which Tibby had failed her little sister on purpose. Tibby was jealous and resentful. She hurt Katherine’s feelings on the pretense that small kids didn’t have actual feelings. And yet Tibby knew in her heart they did—possibly the deepest feelings of all.

  If Tibby had loved Katherine as she deserved, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen out the window. If Tibby had paid attention to her and given her a boost to the branch of the apple tree, then Katherine wouldn’t have been climbing out anybody’s window. If Tibby hadn’t been so preoccupied with Brian, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

  Love was the best padding anybody could have. And though irrepressible Katherine deserved it a million times over, Tibby hadn’t given it.

  I do love her, God. I love her so much. Tibby just wanted a chance to do better.

  The phone rang and Tibby threw herself on top of it.

  “Tibby?”

  It was her dad. She ran the phone into the kitchen so Nicky wouldn’t hear. “Dad?” Her body was shaking.

  “Honey, she’s doing better. The doctors say she’s going to be okay.”

  Tibby gave herself full permission to cry now. She wept and sobbed and heaved and shook. Her dad was doing similar things on his end.

  “Can I come?” she asked.

  “She’s still getting X-rays. Her skull is fractured, which is the most serious thing. She also broke her wrist and her collarbone. We’re hoping that’s the extent of it. She’s talking and alert now, but I’d rather you stay home with Nicky for a couple more hours. Bring him over around six when things settle down here, okay?”

  “Okay. But I want—I want to see her so bad, Daddy….” Tibby’s voice got swallowed up in tears.

  “I know, honey. You will.”

  “Tib, it’s me, Carma. We’ve been terrified all day. Lenny made me stop calling your house, and then she called five more times. I’m so glad K’s gonna be okay. I’m thinking about you. Please call when you get a second. I love you.” Beeep.

  “Tibby! It’s Bee! God, Lena called me here to tell me about Katherine. I’m still shaking. She’s going to get better so fast, though. I know it. Call me? Love you.” Beeeep.

  “Tib, sorry I kept calling before. It’s Lenny. I just couldn’t stand waiting. I’m so glad the news is good. I’ll come visit tomorrow, okay? Hang in there. We love you.” Beeeep.

  “And I saw it really close, so I wanted to get
it.” Katherine was propped up on pillows in her hospital bed, slightly woozy from medication but still eager to recount her adventure to Tibby and Nicky, who were both sitting cross-legged on the foot of her bed.

  Tibby nodded eagerly, trying not to show her agony at each word of the retelling. Her heart ached at the sight of Katherine’s bruised, bandaged head, her cast, her sling and multiple cuts and scrapes. It was made almost more heartrending by the fact that Katherine didn’t seem to notice.

  “I couldn’t reach it, so I climbed.” Here she looked remorseful. “I’m not supposed to climb. But I almost got it, so I climbed more. And then”—she looked to Nicky for this bit—“I falled.”

  Nicky was entranced. Rarely had his sister done anything so interesting. “On the ground?” he asked breathlessly.

  “First I grabbed on the bottom of the window,” she explained. “I tried to climb back in because my fingers hurt because I was hanging.”

  Nicky nodded, eyes wide and unblinking.

  “I couldn’t climb back in, so I saw the soft bushes and I falled.”

  “Oh,” Nicky murmured.

  “They aren’t very soft because I crushed my skull,” Katherine added conversationally.

  “Katherine!” Tibby could not take this. The images were too awful to bear. She turned her head to get hold of herself. When she turned back, she lay across the bed on her stomach and grabbed Katherine’s two bare feet. She tried to smile. “You are so strong and brave, you know?” She turned to Nicky. “Isn’t she?” She knew his was the compliment Katherine would treasure.

  “Yes,” Nicky said solemnly.

  “But you have to promise you will never do something like that again, right?”

  “I promised. I already promised Mommy and Daddy that.”

  Tibby held the pair of small feet up to her face, pressing one to each cheek, and closed her eyes. She was overcome by tenderness and relief mixed with guilt and regret. She breathed deeply and willed back the tears. She didn’t want Katherine to see any more crying.

  “Brian!” Katherine shouted, with remarkable glee for a girl who had in fact crushed her skull less than eight hours earlier.

  Tibby looked up. She had already felt so many things today, she couldn’t imagine feeling any more.

  Brian’s face was wrenched, but he kept his expression bright as he came over to hug the noninjured parts of Katherine. “You are all in one piece, Kitty Cat,” he said. “Good job.”

  Katherine beamed. “I falled out Tibby’s window.”

  Brian cast the briefest of glances at Tibby, but she could read in it his protectiveness of her. “That’s what I heard.”

  Tibby wondered how he’d heard. It was so like him just to come over to the hospital.

  Tibby let Katherine’s feet go as Brian looked at her in his particular way—projecting all the things he was thinking from his eyes to hers. He was worried about Katherine, but he was worried about Tibby, too. He wanted her to feel better, not to feel bad or responsible. He also wanted—or did she imagine this?—to convey to her that what had happened between them had really happened, that he meant what he had said to her.

  She wanted something too. Just one little thing: for them to go back to how they were before.

  Carmen lay on her bed thinking about Katherine, worrying about Tibby, and generally wondering things. Her mother was sleeping even though they’d finished dinner only an hour before. Once again, David had not made it home in time for dinner.

  David was working on a big case. Seeing his schedule up close convinced Carmen that she did not ever want to become a lawyer. At least, not the kind David was. For a few weeks he’d come home by seven most nights for dinner, but in the last month he never came home before eleven, and even at that hour he was fielding calls on his cell phone. A few times he’d left home for the office one morning and hadn’t come home until the next morning. Then he’d taken a shower and gone back again. Carmen had always suspected that people who worked that hard secretly didn’t want to come home, but she knew that wasn’t true of David. He was desperate to be home with Christina. He adored her. Carmen could see that he felt genuinely guilty and sad for every dinner he missed. And that was pretty much all of them.

  According to Christina, he was working on a “big deal.” One gigantic company gobbling up a different gigantic company, as Carmen understood it. And all David wanted to do was finish this “big deal” before the baby came. Which was why he worked twenty hours a day.

  Carmen studied her ceiling, dotted with the glowing constellation stickers she’d excitedly arranged there when she was eight. There should be a law disallowing eight-year-olds from decorating their rooms, especially where stickers were involved. Why had her eight-year-old self saddled her seventeen-year-old self with so many dumb decals and see-through unicorn window appliqués? They were impossible to get off.

  The truth was, she continued to have a soft spot for the glowing stars, but tonight they made the ceiling seem closer rather than farther away.

  Thinking about her eight-year-old self reminded her of her four-year-old self, who was responsible for packing her closet with so many beautified (er, mangled) dolls. And that reminded her of her baby self, who had also inhabited this very room. And that, of course, reminded her of babies again.

  She wanted to leave a hole when she left for college. That was selfish, maybe, but she did. She wanted to step out of the picture of her old life and leave a big, generous cutout waiting for her return. Giving her the chance, at least, to come back.

  But now it felt like the minute she stepped out of her life, it was going to close up around her as if she’d never been there at all. The picture would re-form almost instantly with a new family in the place of her old one, and she could never come back again. That was how it felt to her. She was scared to disappear. She was scared to lose her place.

  The ceiling was pushing down on her. The pressure beneath her eyes was pushing up. She felt like her eyeballs were in a vise. She got out of bed and turned on the light. She wiggled her mouse to wake her sleeping computer. She went online, and without really planning to, she brought up the Web site for the University of Maryland. Slowly she clicked around inside the site. It was the usual higher-education propaganda. She found herself clicking on the admissions link, and from there to the online application. The university offered rolling admissions. She wondered if they were still rolling. Her hand caused her to click on the Print icon.

  Her eyes lighted ever so briefly on the stack of booklets and papers from Williams College. Health forms, dorm info, a course guide, a map showing the leafy spot in western Massachusetts where the campus lay, more than seven hours north of home.

  She listened to the buzz and spit of her printer and wondered. What if she didn’t go away after all? What if she didn’t disappear?

  Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.

  —Mary Kay Ash

  “I took on an extra shift at work,” Lena told her father at dinner when he asked about her day. “I’m going to do the first dinner shift, from four to seven.” She looked down at her pasta as she said it.

  “Excellent,” her father said.

  “How is little Katherine doing?” her mother wanted to know. “Did you get to stop by there today?”

  “Yeah.” Lena smiled at the thought of Katherine’s excited retelling. The tragedy had become the single most thrilling incident in Katherine’s short life. “She’s great. Only she has to wear a hockey helmet till the end of the summer.”

  “I wore a hockey helmet,” Effie recalled, scraping her salad fork annoyingly across her plate. “Didn’t I, Mom?”

  “For a week,” Ari answered. “You had a concussion, not a fracture, thank God.”

  Lena chewed a piece of bread. What was it about little sisters smashing their heads? Lena had never had so much as one stitch.

  “Vhat kind of sauce do you call this?” Valia asked
in an overloud voice.

  “Pesto,” Lena’s mother said with finality.

  “It does not taste good.” Valia inspected it with her fork.

  They were all quiet and waited for the moment to pass. Even Effie had been ground down into acquiescence.

  A while later, Lena stood at the sink doing the dishes. She stiffened when she heard her grandmother pad into the kitchen behind her.

  “I did IMs vith Rena today.”

  “Oh?” Lena did not turn around. She did not like these conversations.

  “She tells me Kostos and that voman are not living together now.”

  Lena closed her eyes and stood with her hands in the warm suds. She was glad Valia could not see her face.

  Valia had many things to be bitter about, and Kostos was one of them. Her greatest dream was to have her handsome, beloved surrogate grandson, Kostos, marry her beautiful granddaughter Lena. She didn’t seem to realize that her own hurt and disappointment were magnified a thousand times in Lena herself. If she had, maybe she wouldn’t have brought up the news from Oia as often as she did.

  The baby expected by Kostos and Mariana, the reason for their hasty marriage and Lena’s heartbreak at the end of the previous summer, did not materialize. That was the first thunderclap to arrive, sometime in December. Valia kept Lena roiling on this news for weeks. No one knew exactly why or what happened, but there was endless speculation. Valia was so biased, Lena doubted that any of her information was reliable. For all she knew, there was a bouncing baby Kostos, beloved by all.

  Then, as now, Lena both wanted these rumors to be true and she didn’t. The better part of her didn’t. It was all she could do to get over Kostos and keep moving on with her life. She couldn’t open her mind to any what ifs or she would be hobbled by them. She didn’t want to know about Kostos. Whatever had happened, it was over. But still, she did want to know.

  Valia’s very presence and her connection to Oia was a thorn in Lena’s heart, aggravating the wound whenever it seemed to be healing.