Forever in Blue (20 page)

“Hey.” She kept her eyes on the little marshmallows. She wanted to be friendly, but she didn’t want to lead him on.

“Brian takes us on Friday sometimes instead of Mom,” Katherine explained happily. She had completely abandoned her own cereal in favor of Brian.

Tibby heard her mother upstairs yelling at Nicky to stop playing on the computer and get dressed. “Well, that’s really nice,” Tibby said stiffly. “You should eat your breakfast, Katherine,” she added. She couldn’t imagine volunteering to take her brother and sister to camp, and she was the one who supposedly shared their DNA.

But then, Brian didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Desire came from deficit, and Tibby had a surplus.

“How come you’re not hugging anymore?” Katherine asked, looking from Brian to Tibby and back.

Moments passed. Brian let Katherine stomp around on his shoes but did not answer the question. Tibby kept her pink face turned to her cereal bowl.

“Are you in a fight?” Katherine persisted. Now she appeared at Tibby’s leg, both hands on one of Tibby’s knees, leaning into her.

Tibby clutched her teaspoon and stirred. The combination of the pink hearts, yellow moons, blue diamonds, and so on turned the milk a sickly gray hue. “Not in a fight,” she said. “Just…doing different things this summer.”

Katherine did not immediately accept this answer.

“Do you want to come?” Brian asked Tibby politely.

“To…?”

“To take us to camp!” Katherine got right on board. “Yes. Can you come?”

“Well. I guess I could—”

Minutes later, Tibby found herself in the passenger seat of her mother’s car with her ex-boyfriend, who was driving her brother and sister to camp. But the true awkwardness began once the two noisy passengers had gotten out of the car.

“How’s it going?” Brian asked into the silence.

He seemed more comfortable than she felt. But he wasn’t the guilty one, was he?

“Pretty good. How about you?”

“Doing a little better, I guess. I’m trying to.” He was willing to be honest and she wasn’t. That was why she didn’t want to have a conversation with him.

She couldn’t think of anything to say. They were stopped at the longest red light on record. She had always hated this light on Arlington Boulevard. Why had Brian gone this way?

“How’s it going with school and everything?” she asked finally.

“What do you mean?” he asked. At last they were moving again.

“With financial aid and that stuff.”

“I probably won’t need it.”

“Really? But I thought—” She was inside the conversation now.

“At Maryland, it’s—”

“No, at NYU, I mean,” she said.

He didn’t say anything for a while.

She wished she could take back her words, remove herself once again from the interaction at hand.

“I’m not planning to go to NYU anymore,” he said slowly, just as they were turning onto her block. “I withdrew my acceptance a couple weeks ago.”

She was opening the car door before it had fully stopped. “Right. Sure.” She forgot for a moment it was her mom’s car and Brian would be parking it in her driveway. “That makes total sense. Of course,” she said. She was flustered, spasmodically waving to him from the sidewalk on her way into her house.

He was looking at her, but she wasn’t sure of his expression, because she wasn’t really looking at him.

“I hafta run. So I’ll see you later!” she declared as she disappeared into her house.

She walked up to her room and sat stiffly on her bed. She looked out the window but saw nothing.

Of course Brian wasn’t going to NYU! He was only going because of her, and she’d broken up with him!

Brian, it seemed, had accepted the reality of their breakup. That much was suddenly clear.

But had she?

When Carmen got home after rehearsal ended that night, she was struck to see that Julia had left a stack of books for her on her bed.

“That one is about the Elizabethan stage in general,” Julia said eagerly, pointing to the first one Carmen picked up. “The big one under it, that’s about language and pronunciation. That will be really helpful. Then there’s that one, which is just an analysis of Winter’s Tale.”

Carmen nodded, studying them. “Wow, thank you. These are great.”

“I think they might be useful,” Julia said.

“Right. Definitely,” Carmen said. The books struck a certain chord in Carmen. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of going to the library. She, a girl who trusted herself to beg, borrow, study, and steal more than she trusted herself to be naturally good at something.

She was exhausted, but instead of going straight to sleep, she left the light on for a while and confused herself about the different kinds of verse.

The following night Julia coached her about looking through the text and beyond the text. And then Carmen read the passage Julia recommended about Leontes as self and antiself while Julia feverishly wrote something at her desk. Around midnight, when Carmen was getting ready to turn off the light, Julia presented it to her.

“Here, I marked this up for you.”

It was a half inch of photocopied pages from the script, marked up with a dizzying number of symbols and annotations.

“I wrote the meter out for you,” Julia explained. “I tried to put the beats in the way you’re supposed to.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. It seemed like you could use some help with that.”

“Okay. Yeah.”

Julia pointed to the first line and started reading it, exaggerating the rhythm.

“I get it.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.”

“Do you want to try it?”

Carmen didn’t want to try it. She didn’t really get it at all and she felt stupid and she wanted to go to sleep.

“Just try a line or two,” Julia prodded.

Carmen tried.

“No, it’s like this,” Julia said, demonstrating.

And so it went until Carmen was doubly exhausted and also had a headache.

On Sunday of that weekend, Tibby went to see Mrs. Graffman, mother of her old friend Bailey. Tibby was going back to New York by train that night, and she wanted to make some effort to see her before she left.

“Do you want to meet for coffee or something?” Tibby asked when she called.

“That’s fine. Let’s meet at the place around the corner on Highland.”

“Perfect,” Tibby said, relieved. She preferred not to go to the Graffmans’ house if she could avoid it.

Tibby had tried to visit Mrs. Graffman, or at least call, the few times she’d been home in the last year. Usually she wanted to, but today it felt more like an obligation.

Tibby gave Mrs. Graffman a brief hug at the entrance where she was waiting. They got their coffee at the counter and sat down at a tiny table by the front window.

“How’re things?” Mrs. Graffman asked. She looked relaxed in her yoga pants and slightly muddy gardening sneakers. She was more robust-looking than she’d been six months and a year ago.

Tibby considered neither the question nor her answer. “Pretty good, I guess. How about you?”

“Well, you know.”

Tibby nodded. The “you know” meant that she missed Bailey and that life was only good or remarkable in a very limited context when you’d lost your only child.

“But work is fine. I switched firms, did I tell you that?”

“I think you had just switched last time,” Tibby said.

“I redid the downstairs bathroom. Mr. Graffman is training for the Marine Corps Marathon.”

“Wow, that’s great,” Tibby said.

“We try to keep our sense of purpose, you know?”

“Yes,” said Tibby. Mrs. Graffman looked sad, but to Tibby’s relief, she didn’t look urgently sad in a way that needed tending.

“What about you, my dear?”

“Well, I’m taking this intensive screenwriting course. We’re supposed to have a full-length script done by mid-August.”

“That’s exciting.”

Suddenly Tibby realized that Mrs. Graffman was going to want to know what it was about.

“What’s it about?” she asked cheerfully, right on schedule.

Tibby sipped her coffee too fast and burned her tongue. “I’m kind of working with a bunch of different themes, still. I’m kind of gathering images, you know?” She had heard someone say that once, and she thought it sounded cool. But in the air between her and Mrs. Graffman it sounded like the fakest thing ever.

“Interesting.”

Which is another way of saying I haven’t started, Tibby should have said, but didn’t.

“And how about our friend Brian?” Mrs. Graffman asked with a smile. She was another one of Brian’s many ardent parent-aged fans.

“He’s…well. He’s good, I guess. I haven’t been seeing him as much.”

Mrs. Graffman had a question in her eyes, so Tibby kept talking so she wouldn’t get to ask it. “It’s just been so crazy, because I have a job and school and he has two jobs and we’re in different cities, and so…you know.”

“I can imagine,” Mrs. Graffman said. “But next year you’ll be together?”

“Well.” Tibby wished she could leave it at that. She wanted to go back to her tiny dorm room, hours from home, and watch TV. “I don’t know. It’s kind of tricky.”

You see, I broke up with him. And now, oddly enough, it seems that as a consequence, we are not together anymore and our future is no longer shared. How mysterious. Who would have thought?

Mrs. Graffman was too sensitive to push into places Tibby didn’t want to go. Which left them almost nothing to talk about.

“You’re coming to my parents’ party in August, right?” Tibby asked, gathering her things.

“Yes. We just got the invitation in the mail. Twenty years. Wow.”

Tibby nodded blandly. She never wanted to do the math as far as her parents’ wedding was concerned. Here was yet another blocked conversation.

Tibby realized why she found comfort in simpler, more one-sided interactions, like with, say, the TV.

Lena had forgotten about forgetting about Kostos. That was how she knew. When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

The thing that reminded Lena about Kostos came not from any movement in her brain (which would have constituted a failure to forget) but from a knock on her door on a hot Thursday afternoon at the very end of July.

It was simple. When she saw Kostos, she remembered him.

It was after class that it happened. Lena had kicked off her flip-flops and fallen asleep on her bed in her shorts and T-shirt, her hair falling out of its ponytail. The knock came in the first deep part of sleep. She was groggy and disoriented and sweaty before she even opened the door.

When she saw the dark-haired man standing there, she only half believed that he could be Kostos. Even though he had Kostos’s face and Kostos’s feet and Kostos’s voice, she persisted in thinking that maybe he was somebody else.

Why was this man, who looked so strangely like Kostos, standing in the doorway of her dorm room? Disjointedly she thought of calling Carmen and telling her that there happened to be a guy in Rhode Island who was almost identical to Kostos.

Then she remembered what Carmen had said about when Kostos would come, and she remembered about the forgetting.

She felt suddenly jolted and afraid. Like she’d woken up in the middle of her SATs. Did that mean it could be him?

But it was impossible, because Kostos lived on a Greek island thousands of miles away. He lived in the past. He lived unreachably inside the walls of a marriage. He lived in her memory and her imagination. That was where he spent literally all of his time. He existed there, not here.

He could not be here. Here was the leftover turkey sandwich from a hurried lunch in the studio and the ratty drawstring sweatpants she’d cut into shorts, and the mosquito bite on her ankle she’d ruthlessly picked, and the charcoal drawing she’d Scotch-taped to her wall two Mondays ago. Kostos did not live here or now. She’d question her eyes and ears faster than she’d question that.

She almost told him so.

“It’s me,” he said, sensing her confusion, faltering in his certainty that she would recognize him.

Well, she did recognize him. That wasn’t the point, was it? She was hardly convinced. So what if he was me? Everyone was me. She was me. Who else was he going to be?

Just because he was Kostos and appeared at her door and said “It’s me” didn’t mean he was occupying space and time in her actual life. She thought of telling him so.

She had that frustrating dreamlike confusion of racking her brain for the answer and then forgetting what the question was. There was a question, wasn’t there? She thought of asking him.

“I should have called first,” he murmured.

She recognized that her heart was beating either many more times or many fewer times than it was meant to. She considered. Maybe it would stop altogether. Then what was she supposed to do?

For some reason she pictured her chest opening like a cupboard door and her heart sproinging out at the end of a coil.

Was she awake? She could have asked him, but he was the last person who would know, having no place in reality himself.

“I think I might sit down,” she said faintly. She was like a corseted girl in an old movie, taking the big things sitting down.

He stood in her doorway with the question on his face of whether he should come in. He looked worn out and rumpled. Maybe he really had come all the way here.

“Maybe you could come back later,” she said.

He wore the look of being tortured. He didn’t know what to make of her. “Can I come back this evening? Maybe around eight?”

She found herself wondering, did he mean eight her time or his time? She only confused herself. “That would be fine,” she said politely. Could they really be in the same time?

If he came back at eight, she decided, listening to the door close, tipping over onto her pillow, that would strengthen the case for his being here.

On that same scorching Thursday at the end of July, the security guard called up to Tibby’s room and told her she had a visitor.

Immediately she thought of Brian, even though she hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since she’d returned from Bethesda. She felt her heart quicken. “Who is it?” she asked.