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The Pants would have been her first choice, of course, but she’d had to send them back to Lena. And besides, she didn’t want to be greedy. She’d already gotten what she needed from them.
“Okay,” she said, reappearing beside him in the darkness. Her feet were still bare and her hair was loose.
He blinked and took a step back to get a better look at her. “God, Bee,” he murmured. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she wasn’t going to press him on it.
They walked side by side down toward the lake. She tried not to bounce on her feet, but she couldn’t really help it. She was happy. Her hand collided with his briefly and it set her nerves singing. After all they had been through together, all the things they’d felt and now spoken, they didn’t even know how to touch each other.
They took their usual spots at the dock. Bridget could practically see the warmth they’d left on the weathered planks from last time. She swung her legs over the water, loving the empty air under her bare toes. Their bodies made no shadows tonight; they were fully contained.
Eric pulled a little closer. His expression was wistful. “You know what?”
“What?”
“When I saw your name on that list of coaches before the summer started, I had a premonition. I knew you were going to turn my life inside out again.” He didn’t sound so sorry about it.
“If I had seen that list, I wonder if I would have come,” Bridget mused.
He let out a breath. “Did you dislike me so much?”
“Uhhhh. Dislike?” She smiled a little. “No. That’s not the word. I was afraid of you. I didn’t want to feel like that again.”
“It was hard, wasn’t it?” He was sorry, she knew.
“I was a little out of control.”
“You’ve grown up since then.”
“Some. I like to think so.”
“You have. You are different. And also not.”
She shrugged. That sounded about right.
“I’m sorry I disappeared,” he said sorrowfully. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know if you felt what I felt. I was worried it was just me.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Now I know.”
They considered these things.
“I’m glad I didn’t read the coach list. I’m glad I did come,” she said after a while.
“Me too. We had to find each other eventually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We were meant to be.”
She loved that idea. “You think?”
“I do.”
“Is that what your thoughts told you? When they went straight?” she asked. Her heart was swelling inside her ribs.
He smiled, but he looked serious too. “Yeah. It is. Maybe that doesn’t sound so straight. Maybe that’s not what I was expecting them to tell me. But they did. So there you go.”
“How did they know?”
“Because when I lay with you in my bed, there was a moment when I could feel everything you had been through, and I had this idea that if I could make you happy, then I would be happy, too.”
Bridget was too full to talk. She leaned her head against him. He put his arms around her, and she put hers around him. He’d said them simply, but these were words enough for a lifetime. He could make her happy. He had.
Last time they had started at the end. This time they started at the beginning. You couldn’t erase the past. You couldn’t even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.
Maybe tomorrow they would kiss. Maybe in the next weeks and months they would figure out how to touch each other, to translate their feelings into gestures of every kind. Someday, she hoped, they would make love.
But for now, all she wanted was this.
Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.
—Christopher Columbus
The Morgans’ beach house had sandy carpets. The fridge was empty but for one half-loaf of moldy Wonder bread. The pots and pans looked as though they had been washed most recently by Joe, their almost-two-year-old.
It was also staggeringly beautiful, pitched on the sea grass in a low field of dunes set just eighty yards or so back from the Atlantic Ocean.
The first thing they did when they got there was to tear off their clothes (by previous agreement they’d all worn bathing suits under them) and run yelling and screaming straight into the ocean.
The surf was big and rough. It clubbed, tackled, and upended them. It might have seemed scary, Tibby thought, except that they were all holding hands in a chain so the undertow couldn’t drag them down the beach. And that, in addition to all the hollering and taunting and shrieking, made it fun.
The second thing they did was collapse on the warm sand. The afternoon sun dried their backs as they lay there, shoulder to shoulder. Tibby’s heart still pounded from the thrill of the water. She had pebbles in her bathing suit. She loved the feeling of the sand under her cheek. She felt happy.
She wanted to let this happiness be her guide. She wouldn’t look forward with trepidation. She wouldn’t rev her brain like that.
There would be the inescapable good-byes. The nitty-gritty ones. Like when she would watch Lena and Bee drive away to Providence in the U-Haul on Thursday. She could picture Bee laying on the horn for the first five miles away from home. Then there would be the moment on Friday when she’d kiss Carmen and watch her roll off to Massachusetts with her dad and all fifty million of her suitcases. There would be the good-byes at the train station on Saturday morning when she and her mom would board the Metroliner for New York City. Her father would clap her on the back and Katherine’s chin would tremble and Nicky would shuffle and not kiss her back. Tibby could picture it if she tried. And the good-bye to Brian. She knew that one wouldn’t stick for long. Brian was supposed to go to Maryland, because it was almost free, and yet she suspected he hadn’t gotten an 800 on his math SAT for nothing. He would find his way to her. She knew he would. It was a good thing she had scored a single room.
But this moment was for the Septembers and for them alone. This was their weekend out of time. She would live in the happiness of each one of these moments, no matter how finite. Together, the Septembers could just be.
They all showered (the hot water ran out after Carmen’s and before Lena’s) and made a late lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and brownies, feeling sun-tired and extra hungry, the way the ocean makes you feel.
The first cell phone rang just after lunch.
“Really? How great!” Carmen was laughing into the phone. She moved it a few inches from her mouth. “Win saw Katherine in the kids’ lounge at the hospital today,” she explained to Tibby. “The hockey helmet is off!”
“I know. She misses it.” Tibby smiled appreciatively. She liked Win. She gave Win the big thumbs-up. But she found herself wishing that he weren’t joining them just now.
The second call came from Valia. Valia apparently couldn’t find the photocopy of the drawing Lena had made of her, and wanted urgently to bring it back to Greece. Valia had new life in her—and she was putting it all into packing. Valia then insisted on getting Carmen on the phone so she could tell her something about the new soap opera she had adopted, the same dumb show Carmen was always watching.
The third call was for Bee. Tibby watched Bee melt into the phone and she knew it was Eric. She could never begrudge Bee—or anyone she loved, for that matter—a voice that could give her so pure a look of happiness.
Tibby sat on the kitchen counter and considered the sheer number of voices that had joined their lives.
Then Brian called on Tibby’s cell phone. He wanted to talk to her, and she wanted to talk to him—just for a few minutes, at least.
As soon as Tibby hung up, two other phones started ringing simultaneously. Lena caught Tibby’s glance. “What’s going on here?” she said. “It’s like a joke.”
Tibby nodded. “Only I can’t figure out if it’s funny or not.”
