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Her father opened his mouth to respond too, and Ari shut him up with a look.
“I know,” Lena said quickly. “I was considering that also.”
Ari put her hand on Lena’s. “Sweetheart, it’s a generous offer. It really is. But why don’t you take a little time to think it over and make sure it feels right.” She cast another stern glance at her husband, who looked like he was going to explode.
Lena nodded.
“Because selling the house could take a while, you know,” her mom added.
“Not so long,” her dad spat out.
“It’s a big job.”
“Not necessarily so big.”
“And expensive to get there, of course.”
“I’ll pay for the plane ticket,” said her father.
Lena was tempted to laugh. “I’ve actually been thinking about it for a while. This isn’t the first time it’s occurred to me.” She sat back in her chair, oddly relaxed. “It’s a place with a lot of painful memories, no question about that. But I feel like I need to do something different than what I’ve been doing. It’s not good for me to be in Providence right now.” She was surprised at her own openness and hoped she could leave it where she wanted to.
Her parents looked surprised too. Instead of jumping in with queries they waited for her to say more, so she did. “I can’t keep avoiding it. I need to do something, and the idea of this feels all right.”
Ari nodded. She looked as though she had fifty questions and a hundred comments, but she didn’t say any of them, and Lena was grateful that she held back.
Lena thought of herself as Alice, turning the kitchen inside out so as not to have to engage, and her mother just wishing she would relax and sit down.
Her father clapped his hands together. “I think it sounds like a great idea,” he said.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different.
—T. S. Eliot
There was a list 119 items long of the things Carmen was doing. There was a list one item long of the things she wasn’t doing. And it was the second list she thought of more.
She’d put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn’t see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything.
Sometimes she held the envelope, felt its weight, shook it, tried to guess its contents. Sometimes she studied Tibby’s writing and wondered if she’d been in a hurry when she’d addressed it. Sometimes she carried it with her from place to place. The one thing she didn’t do with it was open it.
Until the night she came home from drinks with her publicist, having had a gin and tonic and two glasses of wine on an empty stomach.
She’d eaten so little for three days in a row, she felt fierce and impermeable. She hadn’t said or thought anything substantial in over a week, so she felt shallow. And Jones wasn’t home, so she felt sort of like an adult. She felt like nothing could hurt her. Or she felt like nothing could hurt her for a few more drunken minutes, at least.
She got the envelope out of her underwear drawer and pulled it open. Hit me with your best shot, she thought, so shallow she could only think in Pat Benatar lyrics. She dumped the contents out on the bed.
To her amazement an iPhone dropped out. She looked it over quickly. It was the newest kind, with the biggest memory, the fastest processing, the better camera with video. It was exactly the one she’d been yearning to get but hadn’t, because she wasn’t eligible for an upgrade yet and it cost six hundred bucks. Here she’d been girding to have her heart broken more and instead she got an iPhone.
There was a brief note with it.
Carma,
Brian got this for me and I have no use for it, but I thought you might.
Love,
Tibby
That was it? That was too easy. There was another note folded up in the envelope. She opened it.
Carmen,
I’m keeping this short, my dearest Carma Carmeena, because I can’t make the feelings I have for you fit on this page, I can’t even try, so I’m just going to ask you one thing. Will you come to the address written below on or soon after April 2? Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I know you’re really busy. But it’s less than an hour and a half from NYC. Come if you can, because there’s someone I want you to meet.
Love,
Tibby
Carmen looked in the envelope for something else, but there was nothing. There was nothing to wallow in, nothing to cry over. She was so hyped up and drunk and hungry and prepared to cry she put her head down on the bed and cried anyway.
Bridget had used one of the kiosks at SFO airport to buy the cheapest plane ticket to Sydney, Australia.
She got a flight out early the next morning. She looked down at the last bit of coast as it disappeared into seven thousand miles of water. Checking out her window every few hours of daylight made her wonder whether the earth was really made of anything besides water. She didn’t know what she’d find where she was going. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. It was a long way to go for nothing. But it felt good to be moving hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet up in the air.
She remembered again that juncture of uncertainty starting around age twenty-five, after they’d had to give up the apartment on Avenue C, where she’d been happy. That was one place she could remember that she hadn’t wanted to leave.
Tibby had moved in with Brian. Carmen had gotten her fancy agent and started getting real parts. Lena had gotten promoted to a teaching gig that kept her in Providence five days a week. Eric had graduated from NYU law school and gotten a job that kept him busy twelve hours a day. And what had Bridget been doing? Moving from one temporary living situation to another, walking dogs for money, working for a city landscape company in good weather, learning how to dance on Rollerblades from a dazzlingly crazy man in Central Park—nothing that was remunerative or ambitious, anything that kept her outside.
Leaving that apartment had clearly been a moment to grow up, but had she looked at her options and thought them all through? Had she searched for a job or a living situation that would suit her needs? Nope. She’d managed to amble from couch to floor, from apartment to apartment, from one impulse to the next for a year and a half, before she hopped on a plane and moved across the country. When in doubt, keep moving.
She looked down at the ocean. She’d thought going across a continent was something. But going across the planet—now you were talking.
She got a train from the airport to the central station in Sydney and took CityRail two hours south to the town of Bowral, New South Wales. It was a pretty town with cafés, shops, a couple of art galleries. It was less alien than she’d expected it to be, having come across the planet for it. Maybe because she’d studied it so long on the screen of the computer in Sheila’s office at the Sea Star Inn.
The address matched a bungalow not unlike Perry and Violet’s, but the in
verse, other-side-of-the-world version. Where Perry’s was purply gray, this one was butter yellow. Where Perry’s was held close by a matching house on either side, this one was surrounded by its own little meadow. Perry’s tiny backyard was bordered by a line of old dark-leaved eucalyptus trees. Spreading behind this one were young woods, topped by a cloud of green so green it seemed to pulse. The pink late-day light slanted differently here, the shadows spread differently under her feet.
Had Tibby lived here? Vacationed here? For a short time? A long time? Was this the place she’d lived most recently or had she left it long before?
It was opposite world, turned upside down. The toilets flushed the other way, the guy on the train had told her, and you just had to see Bowral’s famous spring tulips—in September. Fall was spring, winter was summer, gray was yellow, night was morning. Maybe death was life. Maybe Tibby was here.
Bridget floated along the concrete walk. She was tired and disoriented. There was nothing that could surprise her, nothing she wouldn’t let happen.
She noticed a car parked in the driveway behind the house. She walked up a few steps to the shaded porch. The screen was closed, but the door was open. She knocked on the wooden trim. She heard a voice talking from the back of the house. She opened the screen door a couple of feet.
“Hello?” she called. She felt yet another old version of the world ending, a new one opening up.
She saw him walking toward her down the hallway. The sun was setting behind the house, making a silhouette of him against the back windows, so she could make out his shape but not his features at first. The gait was both familiar and strange. It took until his face was within a couple of yards for her to know it was him.
“Bee,” he said.
He came out onto the porch, barefoot and also disoriented. She put her arms around him, and he felt thinner and more brittle than she’d expected him to.
“Tibby said you would find us,” Brian said as they came apart. “But I didn’t think you’d come all the way down here.”
Before Bridget could formulate a question, another shape emerged from the back of the house, a very small one. Bridget was mesmerized by it as it came into focus.
