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But one surprising thing, Lena found as she looked at her face in the mirror, was that it wasn’t as familiar to her as some. Yes, she had looked at herself plenty over the years. But her face wasn’t as rutted in her brain as her mother’s or her father’s.
Lena had a funny relationship with her face. She wanted it to be beautiful, and she also didn’t. She looked at it with the desire to find some overriding flaw that would kick her from one category (beautiful) into another (not). And she also looked at it with the fear that she’d succeed. Either way, she usually didn’t find it.
It was like what Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina about all happy families being alike. Lena felt that all pretty faces were all alike—straight, even, regular. It was the ugliness, the sadness that set them apart. Lena couldn’t find that much objective ugliness in hers. But the sadness was apparent.
As she began to draw the outer edge of her cheek, she realized she had the look of a person who was waiting. Not impatient, not tortured, not frustrated. Just waiting. What was she waiting for?
The eight-thousand-pound elephant in the middle of her room snorted in irritation. Kostos, of course. The one who was always there while she studiously avoided him.
She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn’t going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn’t going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.
Release me, she begged, silently, of her elephant.
She needed to be free of him. She needed to get on with her life. Maybe even to fall in love again. She had a candidate in mind.
It was easy to wish to let go of the torture and the heartbreak and the missing Kostos. It seemed easy, at least. But there was a catch. To let go of the pain, she had to give up the other parts too: the feeling of being loved. The feeling of being wanted and even needed. The way Kostos looked at her and touched her. The way her name sounded when he said it. The number of times he’d written I love you at the end of his third to last letter. (Seventeen—once for each year of her life.) And yes, she did still read those letters. Time for a full confession: She did.
It wasn’t the suffering she willfully clung to. It was the precious stuff. But the precious stuff attached her, irrevocably, to the pain.
She waited for Kostos to come for her. She waited for him to release her. She lived quietly, passively, at the margins of other people’s bigger lives: her father’s, Kostos’s. She took up the space they left for her.
She couldn’t wait for Kostos anymore. That was the thing she learned from the face she saw in the mirror and on her paper. There was one person who could release Lena, and Lena was looking right at her.
Beezy,
Call me, would you? These are for you, and they are full strength, so wear them well. (And carefully! I had to say that, Bee. I’m worried about you.) I am here. I can be there in a flash. Call me.
Love,
Len
I just need your star for a day.
—Nick Drake
Bridget didn’t see Eric until late Monday morning. She felt like the universe could have exploded and cooled and spat out a few new galaxies in the time that had passed.
He didn’t look at her and she didn’t look at him. Or she didn’t let him see her looking at him, anyway. He was an avoider, wasn’t he? She hated avoiders. She hated being one. How could a person transform from her hero to her destroyer in so short a time?
The intercamp tournament began Monday. Because it was tournament week, she and Eric got off lake duty. This was the time of the summer when everybody lived and breathed only soccer. Eric and Bridget stopped needing to see each other.
By Tuesday afternoon, Bridget’s team had already taken their first two games. Usually she drove her players hard, but she was fun. Now she drove them harder and she wasn’t fun. She was vicious.
Eric’s team had also won two of two games. As angry as she was, Bridget had to grant that Eric was probably the best of the coaches. He was patient and he was intuitive, and he already had three years of Division I soccer under his belt. Bridget was considered by the other staff to be talented but unpredictable and inexperienced. And she had a few real cases on her hands. Everybody agreed Eric’s was the team to beat. So Bridget determined to beat them.
Maybe it wasn’t the most mature way to deal with her anger. But she had a lot of dangerous energy, and it was better used in soccer than in, say, operating heavy machinery.
So she knew her team and Eric’s would meet in the final on Friday. She spent every moment until then working on her lineup and her strategy. She had a few really fine players: Karl Lundgren, Aiden Cross, Russell Chen. She knew exactly what to do with them. It was a player like Naughton who required some thought. She scouted Eric’s team. She scheduled surreptitious meetings of her own team by flashlight in the woods after dinner. She took them on early-morning runs. She had to hold herself back from setting a crushing pace.
Three or four times in those days that passed, Eric looked up at her and waved or tried to catch her eye. She kept her head down. She wasn’t going to hope anymore.
Thursday night, she found the Traveling Pants bundled up inside a Jiffy bag in her mail cubby with a note from Lena. She was in business.
Friday morning she got up at five. She was too preoccupied to sleep. She put on her team’s blue jersey. She brushed her hair and wore it down. As an afterthought she applied mascara and a little blue eye shadow. The color matched her eyes, her Pants, her mood, and her jersey. Team spirit and all.
She went outside to consult her notebook in the streams of first sunlight that crept across the ground. She was still stuck on Naughton. Everybody deserved a chance. Everybody had something to give.
In a fit of inspiration, she went to his cabin and woke him up. “Get dressed and meet me at the south field,” she told him. He had a hopeful look about him, which she suspected related to something other than soccer. “Naughty. Nothing like that. I need to figure out what to do with you.” He knew he was an unconventional player. If he didn’t, he should have.
When he got out on the field she ordered him into the goal. In one way, Eric had been right. Naughty’s deficits made him a terrible choice for goalie. But on the other hand, there was something about him….
“Ready?” she called lining up with the ball fifteen or so yards out from the goal. She kicked one straight at him, hard but not very hard. He moved away from it and fumbled the ball with his hands, allowing it into the box. His big feet weren’t good and his hands were worse. She wondered why he’d stuck with soccer since first grade, as he’d proudly told her that he had.
“Let’s try another one.” He threw her the ball and she stopped it neatly with her foot. She tried several more straight shots on goal. He couldn’t just stand there and catch a ball coming right at him. He felt the need to move. He screwed it up almost every time.
She decided to try out her theory. She stood farther back and gave herself a little room to run. She kicked the ball hard, sent it sailing right into the top left corner of the goal. She watched in amazement and also satisfaction as his body took off in the direction of the ball. He leaped high, and with arms outstretched, he caught it. “Wow. Nice,” she called out.
Inside she was screaming, but she didn’t want to make a big deal.
She sent him several more hard, angled shots and he pulled each of them down. He couldn’t tend goal when it meant just standing there. He couldn’t be given any time to think, or his mind sabotaged him completely. But he could move. He had a remarkable, almost spooky sense for where the ball was going to be, and the faster it came, the farther away it was, the more impressive his ability.
On her final shots, she actually challenged herself to get one past him. Only her last and finest shot made it into the goal.
She went over to him and shook his hand. She smacked him hard on the back. “Naughty, you have something. I don’t know what it is, but it is something.”
; “You look amazing,” Tibby said, sitting across from Christina at the small table in their kitchen. Christina bowed her head modestly. She peeked proudly at her baby. It would appear that she felt amazing too.
“I am lucky, is what it is,” Christina said, hiking the baby up a little in her arms. “But Tibby, listen.” Christina cast her eyes at the closed door. “I wanted it to be just the two of us”—she paused and glanced at the baby—“well, the three of us—for a few minutes, because I wanted to ask you something. It’s kind of serious, and you don’t need to say yes and you don’t even need to answer right away.”
“Okay.” Tibby couldn’t help feeling a little nervous. “You aren’t going to ask me to be your labor coach again, are you?”
Christina snorted so loud in her laughter that the baby startled. “No. I promise.”
Tibby laughed too.
“Not that you weren’t everything I needed,” Christina said more seriously. “You were.” Her eyes looked perilously shiny, and Tibby felt her own eyes getting like that too.
“I wanted to ask if you would be the baby’s godmother.”
Tibby’s eyes widened.
“I know it sounds heavy, but it doesn’t need to be. You played a special role in his life already. I want to acknowledge that. I’d love to think you would continue to share your life with him a little.”
Tibby didn’t need to think. “I’d love to.”
