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“Are you sure? You don’t have somewhere else you need to be?”
Bridget shook her head. She had never been big on posturing or pretending she had anything she didn’t.
She knew Brian probably wondered what had happened to her life, what had happened with Eric, why she didn’t call anybody. But he didn’t ask. The air was packed with the things they didn’t ask each other.
“I wish I could repay you.”
“You don’t need to repay me.” If she could have found a way to say it, she would have been honest and told him she wasn’t doing it for him or Bailey or even Tibby as much as she seemed to be doing it for herself.
But by the time she’d finished cleaning up from the muffins, she’d thought of a payment she would exact. She would venture a question.
“Hey, Brian?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She wouldn’t risk opening the sky on him as she had at first. What happened to you two? Why were you hiding from everyone who loved you? Why didn’t you tell us about your daughter? She’d ask him something specific and relatively easy.
“Were you and Tibby married?”
He looked up at her in some surprise. It was an easy one, but a breach of their tacit agreement nonetheless. His eyes were wary. Was she a fellow fugitive, as he’d come to hope, or really a spy after all? “No,” he said.
He must have sensed her disappointment as she picked up her water glass and started for the door.
“We were planning to get married as soon as we got back to the States,” he said. “Tibby wanted to wait to do it with her folks and the three of you.”
Bridget floated back toward the table.
“But that didn’t happen, of course.” He seemed to be trying to fend off a lot of things with his “of course.” A gulf was opening, and neither seemed to know how to close it.
“That’s delayed me taking Bailey back,” he added, more businesslike. “She was born here. Because we weren’t married yet, there were some legal issues about guardianship to nail down before I could take her out of the country.”
Bridget nodded.
“She hasn’t met her grandparents yet, you know?” There was an almost undetectable crack in his voice.
Bridget had wondered about that. She nodded again.
“Or Nicky or Katherine. Or Carmen and Lena.”
Bridget thought it was brave of him to say all the names of the missing in a row. “Right,” she said.
“But now it’s all settled. So that’s the next thing, I guess.” It was a wearying prospect. She could see it in his face.
“Right,” she said again.
They were silent after that. She took the muffins out of the oven and left one on a plate for him. She’d wait until a couple of days to ask any more questions by way of payment.
After more than three weeks of obsessive letter-writing and at least twenty letters on each side, Lena got one from Kostos that ended in an absolutely breathtaking and unexpected way.
The second-best part of my day is writing a letter to you. The first-best part is receiving one from you. And all day long I think, “But wouldn’t it be lovely just to wake up together in the same bed?”
For the first time Lena didn’t know what to write. Her head sizzled with a shock that killed every idea. She couldn’t do so much as take out a piece of paper and lay it on her desk. She walked around with a roaring lawn mower in her chest.
The feelings were too noisy, moving too fast to be understood. So much for Markos the tennis partner. There was excitement and fear and a hundred other strands that she couldn’t untangle.
She attempted to search the Internet for information about Harriet, knowing only her address and first name, and found nothing. She felt stupid.
Two days later another letter came from him and it was short. Lena tore it open before she lost courage. Her heart raced with hope. What was the hope?
It was one page, five words.
My mistake. Won’t happen again.
That wasn’t the hope.
The lawn mower stopped. All the noise and energy drained out of her. She felt tired, all of a sudden, and nothing else. She slept through the late afternoon and night and didn’t wake up until the next morning.
Still wearing Valia’s robe, she took out a piece of paper and wrote a question.
Do you love Harriet?
She stared at it for a long time, and then she threw it in the garbage.
All morons hate it
when you call them a moron.
—J. D. Salinger
Bridget and Bailey played in the creek and weeded the flower bed alongside the house. They went to the neighbors’ house to visit their cat, Springs. Bailey adored Springs but Springs did not adore Bailey, who was always trying to pick her up by the back legs.
After lunch Bridget and Bailey lay on the couch together and Bridget read Good Dog, Carl four times in a row, in four different accents.
Bailey fell asleep on Bridget’s chest, and Bridget closed her eyes in contentment, feeling Bailey’s body rising and falling on her breath.
Bridget heard a song floating in from Brian’s study. It was a Beatles song she used to love, “I’ll Follow the Sun,” and with Bailey safely asleep, she let herself cry. They were tranquil tears, even philosophical ones, but deeply sad as they slid down from the corners of her eyes into her hair and ears.
How could you have left her, Tibby?
It was the question that poked and nicked and needled her a hundred times a day, but only now had she put it into words.
How could you choose to spend even one day away from her?
Bridget had thought maybe when faced with the daily tribulations of an actual child she would understand it better, what Tibby and Marly had done. But she didn’t. She understood it less. Every day she spent with Bailey the mystery grew darker.
How could you have done it?
And because she was not completely without shame or self-awareness, Bridget thought of the thing in her uterus, not a thing but a person, a soul, and she felt chastened. Just look what she was willing to do. Had been willing to do.
The tears rolled on and Bailey rose and fell on her chest. Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who’d missed everything.
Lena half expected that the day known as Wednesday, March 15, would not occur. It would somehow get swallowed by the calendar. The earth would give a little heave in its orbit, and Tuesday would turn into Thursday. People across the globe would miss dentist appointments and soccer matches, but they would reschedule them and life would go on.
The time to open Tibby’s portentious letter would be gone without ever having arrived, and life in the post-disappointment era would go on unchallenged.
Lena’s life had come down to a very few things, and on the evening of March 14, even those
were beyond her. She couldn’t take in the words on the pages of her book. She couldn’t hear the words of the songs she played. She couldn’t taste her dinner. She couldn’t fall asleep. She didn’t want to cede what slight hold she had on the world in case the appointed day might just tiptoe past without her notice. But wouldn’t that be easier, in a way?
At midnight she crept out of bed and woke her computer. Her computer wouldn’t lie to her. If it skipped the day, it would at least let her know.
At 12:00 a.m. it recorded Wednesday, March 15. Was it being honest with her or just conventional?
She thought of Julius Caesar on this day. So it has come, she thought. It has come, but it has not gone.
Should she open it now? She thought of Kostos. What time was it where he was? Later. He hadn’t already read it, had he? No, not that much later. He was probably asleep in his bed. She didn’t want to picture his bed in the likely event he wasn’t alone in it.
She picked up the letter. She could open it—it was the proper day. But somehow her desperate-in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-her-bare-feet status would seem to follow the letter of Tibby’s law rather than the spirit. The spirit was what she was going for here.
She brought the letter into her bed and clutched it until morning.
At six o’clock in the morning she tried to be casual. She ate a bagel casually. She went out to the newspaper stand two blocks away and bought The New York Times. Wednesday, March 15, it said along the top. It was probably midday in London.
As soon as she got back to her apartment, she walked directly to the letter still lying in her bed and opened it. In the envelope were two things. First was a one-page letter, folded, and second was yet another small sealed envelope with her name on the front. On the back the envelope said Please open on March 30.
How long would this go on? She put the sealed envelope beside her on the bed, and unfolded the page to which she was now entitled. It was printed sort of like an invitation.
