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Now she knew what the work had been for. She would give this, her best painting, to Kostos.
She despaired of ever having the courage to tell him how she felt. She hoped this painting would say to him in Lena-language that she recognized that it was his special place, and that she was sorry.
Tibby called in sick to Wallman's. She had a cramp in her foot. She had a twitch in her eye. Her nose ring was getting infected. She just wanted to go to sleep.
She didn't want to be at work and have Bailey be in the hospital. She didn't want to forget even for a moment and have to remember again when Bailey didn't come at four. The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.
She looked longingly into Mimi's glass box. Mimi was sleepier than ever. She hadn't even touched her food. Mimi lived so slowly, and yet her life cycle was progressing much faster than Tibby's. Why was that? Tibby expected her to keep pace.
Tibby went over and tapped the glass wall. She felt an unexpected surge of frustration that Mimi could just snooze through all this distress. She reached into her box and nudged Mimi's soft stomach with her index finger.
Something was wrong. Mimi wasn't right. She wasn't warm. She was room temperature. With a jolt of panic, Tibby grabbed her too roughly. Mimi flopped between Tibby's hands. She didn't stir. “Mimi, come on,” Tibby urged her tearfully, like Mimi was playing a stupid guinea pig joke. “Wake up.”
Tibby held her up high, in one hand. Mimi hated that. She usually scrambled her sharp little nails against Tibby's wrist.
Dawning on her both slowly and panic-fast was the knowledge that this wasn't Mimi anymore. This was leftover Mimi.
Somewhere in her brain a wall formed, a wall that kept out further consideration about what was happening here. Tibby's thoughts were confined to the small area of her brain that was left. They felt more like commands from a control tower than actual thoughts.
Put Mimi back in her cage. No, don't. She might start to smell. Take her to the backyard.
No way. Tibby bristled at the control tower. She was not doing that.
Should she call her mom at work? Should she call the vet? No, she knew what they would say.
She had a different idea. She marched downstairs. For once in her life her house was quiet. Without thinking any more than was strictly necessary, she put Mimi in a brown lunch bag, crumpled down the top so she was snug, and stuck her in the freezer.
Suddenly Tibby flashed on the horrible image of Loretta defrosting Mimi and dumping her into a roasting pan. Tibby threw open the freezer door again and hid Mimi behind the frozen remains of Katherine's baptismal cake, which no one would ever eat or throw away.
There. Fine. Mimi wasn't . . . whatever. She was just on ice. There was technology for this kind of thing. There was a whole science, Tibby was pretty sure. It might take a decade to perfect the science, but Tibby wasn't going to be impatient about it. There was time.
Upstairs she collapsed on her bed. She took a pen and notepad from her nightstand to write a letter to Carmen or Bee or Lena, but then she realized she had nothing to say.
Carmen,
Every day I've been in Greece I've eaten breakfast with my grandfather, and we've never had a single conversation. Is that weird? Does he think I'm a freak? Tomorrow, I swear, I'm going to memorize at least three sentences in Greek and say them. I'll feel like a failure if the summer ends and we still haven't said a word to each other.
When we get back, do you think you could give me a few pointers on how to be a normal person? I don't seem to get it.
Love,
Lena
Raw and open, Carmen collapsed on her mother's bed and let her mother rub her back.
“My baby,” Christina murmured.
“I am mad at Dad,” Carmen announced, half into the quilt.
“Of course you are.”
Carmen flipped over onto her back. “Why is that so hard for me to say? I have no trouble being mad at you.”
“I've noticed that.”
Carmen's mom was silent for a while, but Carmen could tell she had something to say.
“Do you think it's easier to be mad at people you trust?” her mom asked very softly.
I trust Dad, Carmen was about to say without thinking. Then she tried thinking. “Why is that?”
“Because you trust that they'll love you anyway.”
“Dad loves me,” she said quickly.
“He does,” her mother agreed. She waited some more, but with a look of purpose in her eyes. She lay down beside Carmen on her bed. She took a long breath before she started in again.
“It was very hard on you when he moved away.”
“It was, wasn't it?” Carmen remembered her seven-year-old self, aping the words her father told her when anyone asked. “He has to go for his job. But we're going to see each other as much as ever. It's the best thing for all of us.” Did she really believe those words? Why did she say them?
“You once woke up in the middle of the night and asked me if Daddy knew you were sad.”
Carmen rolled onto her side and propped her cheek on her palm. “Do you think he knew?”
Christina paused. “I think he told himself you were okay.” She was quiet again. “Sometimes you tell yourself the things you need to hear.”
“Tibby, dinner!” It was her dad's voice. He was home.
It was freezing. Tibby shivered in her flannel shirt and pajama bottoms. Her dad must have turned the a/c up again. Ever since her parents had central air-conditioning installed in the house, they had kept the place hermetically sealed four to five months of the year.
“Tibby?”
Dully she realized that she would have to answer him eventually.
“Tibby!”
She opened her door a crack. “I ate already,” she yelled through it.
“Why don't you join us anyway,” he called. He phrased it like a suggestion, so she figured she could ignore it. She closed her door. She knew that in a few seconds, Nicky would start flinging peas and Katherine would emit one of her arcing vomits—she had baby reflux—and her parents would forget about Tibby, the sullen teenager.
She touched her hair. It wasn't just greasy at the scalp. It was greasy all the way to the ends. She would be leaving a slick on the pillowcase.
“Tibby, honey?” It was her dad still. He wasn't giving up so easily.
“I'll come down for dessert!” she bellowed. Her chances were good he would forget by then.
It was seven. She could watch game shows until the WB shows started. Then those could take her right through ten o'clock. Unlike those emergency room shows, she knew, the WB shows would have no relationship to your actual life. Then there were hours of pompous rockumentaries on VH1 of bands that had died of drug overdoses before she was born. Those were good for putting her to sleep.
The phone rang. The first time Tibby's mom got pregnant, Tibby got her own phone line. The second time, Tibby got her own TV. When the phone rang in here, she knew it was for her. She crawled deeper under her covers.
The times you were in the kitchen and wanted Carmen to call you back, the answering machine picked up after three seconds. When you were screening calls less than two feet from the phone, it rang for hours unanswered. At last the machine clicked on.
“Hi, Tibby? This is Bailey.”
Tibby froze. She shrank from the phone.
“My number here is 555-4648. Call me, okay?”
Tibby shivered under the covers. She focused on the commercial about erectile dysfunction. She wanted to go to sleep.
She thought of Mimi downstairs freezing in her little box and her up here freezing in her big one.
Bridget took a long time getting dressed for the big game. Other girls had decorated their shirts with pictures of taco fixings. It was the kind of thing Bridget would have loved if she hadn't run out of steam.
Both teams had strung paper streamers along their goals. There was a table piled with watermelons at the side of the field.
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Her cleats felt too loose. Bridget knew she'd lost some weight. Her metabolism required constant feeding. But could you lose weight in your feet?
“Bridget, where've you been?” Molly asked. Bridget knew there'd been some kind of unofficial kick-around this morning.
“Resting up for the big game,” Bridget said.
Molly wasn't sensitive enough to detect anything else, and Bridget didn't want her to.
“All right, Tacos,” Molly said. “We've got a tough game here. Los Cocos are on a roll. As you all saw yesterday, they are clicking. We are going to have to max it out to win this.”
Bridget made a mental note never to say “max it out.”
Molly turned to her, her face full of giving. “You ready, Bee? You do your thing. You go all out today.”
The rest of the team cheered at that. Bridget just stood there. She'd been stuck on defense. Stuck in the goal. Screamed at when she dribbled the ball more than two yards. “I don't know if I remember how,” she said.
