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About a year later, shortly after their twenty-seventh birthdays, was when Tibby disappeared. With almost no warning she moved to Australia. Bridget remembered going to surprise her at her and Brian’s ground-floor apartment in Bed-Stuy on Halloween. Bridget was in her full Indiana Jones costume, including the hat and the whip, carrying a box of caramel apples, ringing their buzzer and banging on the door, but no one was home. Finally Bridget climbed up to peer in the front window and saw that the apartment was empty.
Tibby emailed her and Carmen and Lena a short while later explaining the move. It was a project for Brian’s work. It paid really well. It would probably be only three or four months. Radical, huh? she’d written. Australia!
Tibby emailed pretty regularly for those first couple of months. Cellphone service was tricky, but she wasn’t out of touch. She sent comically sappy ecards for each of them at Christmas. But then three months had gone by. And then four and six and eight. They kept waiting for her to come home, but she didn’t. They pestered her endlessly about it. When are you coming home? That was the subject line of every email Bridget sent her. When? When? When?
Tibby’s communication fell off about four months after she’d gone, just at the time they thought she’d be coming back. There were very few emails from her after that, and the tone of them changed. Suddenly she was noncommittal about when she’d return.
It took them a couple of months to pick up on this change, to register that it wasn’t just one but all of them who’d experienced it. In June, they finally convened at a diner in New York to discuss it. They talked themselves down from crisis mode.
“She’s probably working on something big,” Carmen hypothesized. “You know how she gets when she’s in the middle of a script.”
“Maybe since she and Brian are already over there, they decided to spend the summer in the bush or diving along the Great Barrier Reef,” Bridget had suggested. “That’s what I would do. And there’s no calling or emailing from there.”
Tibby’s birthday emails in September didn’t really say anything; they were without information or intimacy. In retrospect, they were hauntingly vacant.
That was where the real troubles must have started, as best Bridget could tell. They weren’t prepared for Tibby’s departure. They didn’t know how to handle it. They couldn’t even acknowledge to themselves that it was real, that Tibby was far away. It wasn’t the physical distance; they’d managed that before. It was the fact that for the first time in their lives one of them was really, purposely, extensively out of touch. They couldn’t bring themselves to imagine it was true.
As she looked back, Bridget had the distinct sense of them all being stuck in time from that point forward. They never said it out loud, but it seemed implicitly disloyal to have fun together in Tibby’s absence, to make any big changes, to allow anything significant to happen without Tibby being part of it. They waited for Tibby to come back, spiritually if not physically, so they could resume their lives. They’d never accepted her absence. They didn’t know how to live if it wasn’t together.
That was why Bridget, why all of them, had been so thrilled and relieved about the Greece trip, why they’d thought this bewildering, isolating era of their lives was finally coming to an end. Thank God we’ll be together again. It had never been Bridget’s idea to fall apart, but they certainly had. She understood that now.
Why had Tibby done it? Why had she left like that? That was the part Bridget couldn’t understand.
Some days she worked backward, starting with the time just before the tickets for Greece came. She tried to connect those days to the days before and the days before that, to try to find some thread back to the time when she’d felt like she understood Tibby and lived a mostly rational life.
In her mind she looked for an explanation, a missing piece. Maybe Brian left Tibby and broke her heart. Maybe that was the cause of her falling out of touch. But wouldn’t she have confided her sorrows to them?
The two people Bridget would have wanted to ask were Brian himself and Alice, Tibby’s mother. What did they know? But her desire to find out was overwhelmed by her apprehension that neither of them knew what had really happened. Bridget had managed to call Alice a few nights before, but the conversation went nowhere. As far as she could tell, Alice believed Tibby had simply drowned. It was a senseless tragedy, an accident, and that was all. Maybe Tibby didn’t want anyone else to know the truth, and Bridget didn’t want to be the person to tell it.
One night Bridget borrowed Sheila’s computer and searched for Tibby’s name in Australia. It took a few rounds and refinements, but eventually her name came up, along with an address. Bridget’s hands shook as she located the address on the map. She zeroed in closer and closer, and when she got right into the middle of town, she turned the map to the satellite setting. It was a small town. A village, really. Bridget could navigate over each of the buildings and study every street. She saw the figures in the satellite images and wondered how long ago the pictures had been taken, whether one of them could be Tibby.
That was when the idea came to her. She knew what she would do. It was something she wished, with excruciating remorse, that she’d done when Tibby was alive.
It would seem cowardly to make sure Effie wasn’t going to be home the weekend Lena picked to go back to Bethesda, but Lena was pretty cowardly. She called both her mom and her dad separately to tell them she was coming and to fish around a little. Her mom might be tricky enough to push her and Effie together without their knowledge, but her dad wasn’t. He always blurted out the thing he wasn’t supposed to say and forgot to tell you the thing he was supposed to say. He wasn’t trying to make trouble, she knew. He was just bad at keeping track, and the forbidden things stayed closer to the front of his mind.
“Sweetheart, I’m so happy you came,” her mother said for the third time as Lena sat in their big, shiny kitchen and drank the tea her mother had made. The tea had more milk and honey than Lena would have put in, but it tasted good.
“I’m happy too,” Lena said. She wanted to express herself honestly without indicating that she was open to a full examination.
Anticipating this trip, Lena had expected her mother to jump down her throat at the first possible opportunity, to ask a million jarring questions, to shine her maternal klieg light on all the tender, hidden spots. But she hadn’t. She was companionably quiet. She put some groceries away.
“Did you set a time with Alice?” Ari asked after the last bag was balled up in the recycling bin.
Lena shook her head. This was the part of her weekend where the real dread kicked in. “No, I just told her I’d stop by in the afternoon.”
Her mother nodded. “Do you want me to go with you?”
Lena looked up, surprised by the offer. She had forgotten, at her age, that her mother could do something like that for her, that there was anything truly helpful her mother could do to solve her problems. She could see the strain in her mother’s face, but also the willingness, and she admired her for it.
Lena considered. “Thank you for offering. I really appreciate it. But I think I should go on my own.”
“Okay,” Ari said.
“You’ve been over?”
“A couple of times.”
Lena nodded. “I bet you brought food.”
“Loads of it.”
Lena pictured it and it made her hungry. “Spanakopita, I bet. Nicky loves that.”
“And other things.”
Her mother sat down, something she rarely did. Her expression was thoughtful. “It’s hard to know what to do.”
Lena wondered if it was too late to turn out like her mother. “At least you try,” she said. “At least you do something.”
First they sat in the kitchen while Alice attempted to make them coffee. Lena sat at the table and watched Alice search for
one thing and then another. The coffee filters. No coffee filters. She looked in a harried way in hopeless places, like in the refrigerator and under the sink. A piece of the grinder was broken. The instructions were around there somewhere. And the milk? They were just out of milk. It was a strange reversal for Lena.
“It’s okay. I didn’t really want any coffee anyway,” Lena said.
Alice was squatting on the floor, unloading the contents of the lower pantry by then. “I think we have instant.”
Lena wished she could say something to Alice to get her to relax and sit down at the table with her, but by that time Alice was on the phone to Loretta, the housekeeper they’d had for over a million years, asking where the instant coffee was, and Lena understood that Alice didn’t want to sit down at the table with her. Lena understood because she knew very well what ants-in-your-pants evasion looked like. It was what she herself did all the time.
Alice didn’t want to meet her eyes or hazard a bit of quiet creeping between them. She didn’t want a space to open where they might have to talk about Tibby and what had happened and how it had happened and how much they missed her. In fact, Alice clearly dreaded it.
Lena looked at Alice finding the yellowed instructions for the grinder on the high shelf, and in Alice she saw herself. Lena always thought she masked it so cleverly, but seeing it across the room, it struck her as tragically transparent.
Lena didn’t want to make Alice talk about anything she didn’t want to talk about—Lena of all people wouldn’t do that to her. Lena didn’t want to introduce anything hard or sad. She just wanted Alice to sit down. She just wanted Alice to know that she cared about her. Was this how it was for the people who cared about Lena? Like her mom? Like Carmen, Effie, and Bee? Like Tibby?
“How’s Nicky liking the new school?” Lena asked casually. She knew he’d switched to Maret for his junior year, leaving the public high school where they’d all gone.
