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“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.
