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She thought back to something Effie had told her once long ago when it came to taking a risk on Kostos. You have to have some faith, Effie had said.
But Effie hadn’t meant faith in Kostos, Lena realized. Not faith that Kostos would be there to meet her and throw his arms around her and want her more than anyone else. Effie meant faith in herself. Faith that even if he didn’t come, she would be all right. She had to have faith not just in trying, but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail? Was she strong enough not to?
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you can make this phone work in the next ten minutes,” Carmen thundered at the pimply young man in the phone store two blocks from Penn Station.
“We close in five minutes, ma’am,” the pimply young man answered.
Carmen glared at him. Where was the ambition? Where was the greed? This country was going down the tubes if this kid was any indication. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you can make it work in the next five minutes,” she said slowly.
He looked scared of her. He was no Daisy. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I could try.”
“Please try.” Was she going to have to tell him about being on TV? She didn’t want to, but that sometimes worked on guys like him.
He turned her phone on. He pushed a couple of buttons and then the home key. “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” he said.
“Are you serious?”
He pointed it at her. She snatched it from him.
“You don’t have to pay me the hundred bucks,” he said magnanimously.
“Thanks,” she snapped, walking out the door.
She managed to buy her train ticket on her credit card without incident. There were no roomettes available, she discovered, but there was a car called the dinette where she could eat.
She passed by the newsstand and looked at the fashion magazines. She didn’t need them. Her phone was working, she’d be fine. She could read the script, she could make calls. She could write emails and plan her wedding. She could play that game where you landed the airplanes. With a functioning phone in her hand she felt her confidence slowly returning.
She got on the train with time to spare. She put her head back and closed her eyes. It was hard to believe she’d had all these reversals without telling Jones about any of them. He was always the one she complained to first. He understood her bumbling and faltering. He seemed to expect it.
Carmen felt happy to have two seats to herself on the dark train. She was happy that there was no one in the seats directly across from her or behind her. If she could keep her phone charged then maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.
She dozed a little until Newark, when the train stopped and more people got on. She put her big purse on the seat next to her. She watched a trickle of people come down the aisle, most of them, thankfully, passing her by. Finally a small group straggled up next to her. It was a man with a small boy and a baby. He was eyeing the seats directly across the aisle from her. Please don’t sit there, she thought. She overheard the man talking in Spanish to his son.
Her heart sank as they settled in. She listened to the boy chirp excitedly to his father. Oh, God. How long before the baby woke up and started screaming? She wondered if she could get her seat reassigned. This was really the last thing she needed.
Eight days remained before the fateful meeting was meant to take place, five days before Lena was meant to open Tibby’s last letter, and there was something Lena was doing, hour after hour, day after day, and it didn’t feel right. She’d done it in her studio apartment and she’d done it alone and with far too much ease. It was the grueling habit she meant to overturn, and yet she had no choice but to do more of it: it was waiting.
But what else could she do? She felt unusually fitful, jumpy, and impulsive, yet she was stuck in a holding pattern and didn’t know what to do other than fret and fret and fret and wait.
Many times she thought of reading back over the twenty precious letters Kostos had written, but something stopped her. I don’t want to turn those into memories, like everything else with him. She didn’t want them enshrined as further exhibits in the Lena and Kostos memorial museum. Maybe they would end up there, but she wanted them to stay real for at least a while longer.
She stared at Tibby’s sealed envelope and had the strangest idea. What if she opened it right now? What if she didn’t wait?
Could I just do that?
She felt a weird gonging in her head. She ripped the envelope open so fast she almost shredded the letter inside.
My dearest Lena,
I know I’ve made a blunt and probably unwelcome maneuver to wrest control of your life from you. And I know that you’ll know that, misguided as it may be, it’s out of love.
You don’t have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want.
I know you’ve always hated an either-or decision. You always want to choose Option C, as you call it, the third way, which too often, my sweet Lenny, means no way at all. And here I am demanding A or B.
I’ll be honest and tell you I want you to choose A. I feel like I understand Kostos. I don’t think he’s forgotten you. I think he’s waiting too. He’s holding back, because he knows if he comes to you he’ll scare you off. And if he comes to you, there will always be doubt. You have to come half the way. I didn’t think anybody could comprehend you and love you as well as we Septembers do, Lenny, but Kostos impresses me.
If you choose B, I promise to leave you alone, not to haunt you with further letters or demands. I promise I’ll leave Kostos alone too. (And really, what choice do I have?) There will be no doubt or disappointment from me wherever I am. You can free yourself of that notion. Because you will have chosen your path and not put it off any longer, and that’s all I really want.
Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it. Sorry to pontificate, my friend, but my body is giving out and that’s where my head is today.
(I admit to a secret wish that you’ll open this letter before the date on the back.)
Live for me, my friend Lenny, because I can’t anymore, and God, how I wish I could.
Two things happened over the next hour that made Carmen want to wrench open her window and jump off the train to her doom.
First was the crying. Just when Carmen had reclined her chair as far as it would go, gotten herself a pillow and a blanket from Coach Attendant Kevin, as his name tag said, and closed her eyes to rest, it started. First it was little barks a few seconds apart. They got closer and closer together until they turned into full-on crying.
You’ve got to be kidding, she thought. She cast a narrow-eyed look at the man, presumably the baby’s father. Now that she thought of it, where was the mother of this group? Had she come on with them? Maybe she was in the bathroom and when she got back she could make the baby be quiet.
The second thing was the phone. Once Carmen was awake on account of the crying and there seemed no hope of going to sleep, on account of the crying, she grabbed her phone. But when she tried to wake it up it stayed black. It’s all right, don’t panic, she counseled herself. It was a slightly temperamental phone, was all. She held down the home button for a while. Still black. Okay, it was the charge. She unwound the charger and thankfully found an outlet. She plugged it in and waited. Sometimes this could take a minute or two. She knew the stubborn biorhythms of these phones better than the ones of her own body.
At last it lived. The little waiting circle spun and then the screen lit up. And when she saw the icon on the screen, the fear began, like the beat of a slow drum against the horror-movie sound track of the screa
ming baby.
There glowed the dreaded icon that instructed you to plug your phone into your iTunes mother ship or you were screwed. Well, she had no iTunes to plug into. The mother ship was sitting in the living room of her loft, giant-screened and cutting-edge and of no help to anyone. This daughter-phone was not so independent as she liked to pretend.
Carmen turned it off and turned it on again with no feeling of hope whatsoever. Same icon.
