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“Is Kostos home?” she asked politely.
There was nothing friendly about Harriet. “Did you come here before?”
No fear. “Yes. A couple months ago.”
The shape of Harriet’s eyes was changing and she seemed to be growing larger in stature. “What is your name?”
Lena cleared her throat. “Lena Kaligaris.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To find Kostos.”
“He’s not here.” Harriet took a step forward, but Lena didn’t step back.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
Harriet looked like she was debating between shutting the door in Lena’s face and replying to the question. There was something in Harriet’s expression Lena recognized as curiosity. The sick kind of curiosity you hated yourself for having. “I have no idea when he’ll be back here. Possibly never.”
“This isn’t his house?”
“It’s his house, but he doesn’t live in it any longer. He moved out. I thought you of all people would know that.”
Lena wouldn’t shrink. She would stay right here. “I didn’t know that.”
“Aren’t you the girl he wrote all the letters to, Lena Kaligaris? I’m fairly certain you are. You’re the one who made the drawings he had all over his fucking desk and stuck to his mirror. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”
“That would likely be me,” Lena said, unintimidated, without sarcasm. Who really knew? Maybe Kostos had other pen pals. She’d had worse disappointments.
Harriet gave a mirthless laugh. “He said they were ‘friendly’ letters. Funny. You don’t stay up until two or three every morning writing ‘friendly’ letters. I thought he’d run off to you a month ago.”
Lena looked down and shook her head. “He didn’t.”
“Well, good luck finding him. Give him my regards. He’s a strange man, you know. He’s never really with you. My grandmother warned me about shagging a man who doesn’t want to marry you at all, and I should have listened. But I landed quite a good house, didn’t I?”
“You have been my friend,”
replied Charlotte.
“That in itself
is a tremendous thing.”
—E. B. White
It wasn’t her farm in rural Pennsylvania.
Except for being an old acquaintance, bystander, and unofficial babysitter, Bridget had no claim on it. But after thirty-two hours of cross-planetary travel with a sweaty toddler sticking to her body, after nearly five months—arguably two-plus years—in complete limbo, she stepped across the willow-shaded front yard and felt as if she were walking home.
She hadn’t known she liked old farmhouses on twenty-seven acres of lawns and fields and forests, with converted barns, guest cottages, root cellars, and icehouses. She had never longed for any of those things. But as she swooped around the place with Bailey on her hip, she discovered that perhaps, in some way, she did.
Maybe because the whole thing was blooming before her eyes on the most perfect early spring day that had ever been. Maybe because it was the place that Tibby had found and planned to call home. Maybe because of the little soul making headway in her uterus, who was becoming an oddly joyful source of companionship to her.
“We could have animals here,” Bridget told Bailey, peering into the dark stalls on the lower story of the barn. “It’s like Charlotte’s Web. We could get pigs and sheep and donkeys. And horses.” She was a little suspicious of herself as far as what she meant by “we.”
“And get …” Bailey paused to put her words in order. “A ’pider.”
“I bet we’ve already got spiders here,” Bridget said, pointing out the spangly webs at the corners of the stalls as though they’d won the lottery twice. She carried Bailey across the shady central yard, around which the clapboard buildings were clustered.
“We could put a vegetable garden right there. We could grow tomatoes and strawberries and pumpkins.”
“Bannas?”
“Not necessarily bananas, but we could buy those.”
Brian was in the mostly empty kitchen, trying to scrape together a snack for Bailey. Bridget put Bailey down on the counter.
“Did you buy this?” she asked Brian.
“This house? This farm, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“This whole thing?”
“Tibby fell in love with it in the pictures.”
“Wow.” It wasn’t that it was so fancy. Bridget knew it hadn’t cost millions of dollars or anything, but still.
“And since I got the programming finished, we won’t have to sell it.” His face looked a little bit lighter than it had.
“Good news,” she said. She had the sense that Brian was trying to thank her, and she felt thanked.
She’d always known he was exceedingly smart with computers. She’d heard a couple of rumors that his company was getting off the ground, but she hadn’t paid attention to them. “What kind of program is it?” She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought to ask before.
“A game. A simulation game.” Brian dug in his pocket and handed her some keys. “I haven’t been inside the icehouse yet. I’ve only seen pictures. You want to tell me what you think?”
She left Bailey and ventured across the grass. The icehouse was the last of the structures, sitting at the edge of the woods about twenty yards from the main house. As she got close, she discovered there was a little stream running along the far side of it.
It was a miniature house, white clapboard like the farmhouse, and sort of vertical. She got ready with the keys, but she found the door unlocked, so she pushed it open.
She stood in the doorway, astonished and slightly puzzled. She felt like she’d seen it before, or maybe dre
amed it. The ground floor was two simple square rooms, one big and one small. The big one had an open kitchen on one side of it, and the small room glowed with the light of a clerestory. The upstairs was a loft reached by a ladder. Standing below, she could see it was high and white and open, with sloping walls and a skylight. You could see through it to green branches and pieces of sky overhead.
She climbed up the ladder and then back down. She wandered into the smaller room on the first floor and discovered another door. She opened it and gazed through. There was a tiny rustic screen porch sticking into the woods and cantilevered over the stream. She stepped onto it in a state of near-disbelief. She’d never imagined that any enclosed space could be so appealing. There was an old iron daybed against one wall. If you went to the edge and looked down, the water was rushing right under your feet. She couldn’t quite get over it, the smell of the woods, the sound of the stream, the quality of the light. It was almost painfully perfect.
Feeling slightly dazed, she walked back to the kitchen of the farmhouse and handed Brian the keys. He didn’t take them.
“How is it?” he asked.
“It is perfect,” she said, a little breathlessly.
“That’s what Tibby thought you would say.”
When the train stopped in Toccoa, just past the Georgia state line, they lost Coach Attendant Kevin and got Coach Attendant Lee. Coach Attendant Lee had a paramilitary flavor about him, Carmen decided; he immediately started asking everybody for their IDs.
Carmen produced her driver’s license, which was in fact still valid. Lee stared at it and her ticket for a long time. He turned his eyes on her as though she had something to hide. I’ll let you go this time, his eyes seemed to be saying as he moved across the aisle.
Carmen listened only vaguely at first as the father of the family across the aisle tried to follow the words of the fast-talking Lee. He went into his wallet and found his driver’s license. He went into his suitcase to retrieve his passport. Carmen could see that it wasn’t a U.S. passport, but she wasn’t sure what it was.
