Forever in Blue (25 page)

“Thanks,” Carmen said tearfully.

She would have stayed in bed all day, but opening night was now four days away, and Carmen knew if she missed the afternoon part, Andrew would maim, mangle, dismember, and also kill her.

She dragged herself miserably to the theater. She was slowly turning invisible again. Jonathan wasn’t even bothering to flirt with her anymore.

She was unfortunately still visible to Judy, who was waiting stage left to pounce on her.

“Carmen, c’mere,” she said, walking briskly out back.

Carmen felt herself suffocating, even apart from the ninety-five-degree heat and one-hundred-percent humidity.

“I don’t like to think I have made a mistake.”

“Me either,” Carmen said dolefully.

“I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.”

“Where to start,” Carmen said.

Judy looked at her sharply. “You’re wallowing.”

“I know.”

“It’s too late to get someone else to do this.”

Carmen felt the thud of her pulse in her head.

“And yes, I have thought about it.”

Carmen was done with being smart. She had nothing to say.

“You know, Carmen, the great majority of people achieve real quality in acting by work and study. There are a few people who have very strong natural instincts, and for them it sometimes makes sense to just get out of the way and let it happen. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Carmen nodded, though she didn’t fully know what Judy was saying.

“So you go home and figure out what the trouble is and come back tomorrow for dress rehearsal and do your job.”

Carmen gazed at Judy without confidence.

“One last thing.”

“Yes.”

“Trust yourself. Don’t listen to anybody else.”

Carmen tried not to roll her eyes, but it seemed to her a laughable command at this point.

Judy shrugged. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

“So look what I bought,” Bee said to her father when he got home from work.

He was surprised to see her, first off, let alone the array of vegetables, fresh fruit, and pasta she’d bought at the new Whole Foods and left on the counter. “I’m only home for a couple of nights, so I thought we could make dinner together.”

Once upon a time her father had enjoyed cooking. He used to listen to Beatles songs in the kitchen, and he played them loud, so the words made their way onto Bridget’s sheets of homework.

She pushed him gently and amicably on the shoulder. “What do you think? You know how to make pesto, don’t you?”

He nodded. He looked strained, shell-shocked, slightly frightened.

“Good. I’ll get Perry. He can make the fruit salad.”

This was an absurd notion, but Bee was ambitious tonight.

She dragged Perry downstairs, blinking like a mole pulled from the dirt. “You can go back to your game after dinner,” she told him. She set him up at the counter next to her with a paring knife, a pile of fruit, and a blue bowl. “Cut off the peels and cut everything more or less into squares,” she explained.

He was so startled he just did what she said.

She started chopping garlic for the pesto. “Like this?” she asked her dad. He looked up from washing basil.

“A little smaller,” he said.

She plugged in the long-unused kitchen radio, an artifact of sorts, and tuned it to an oldies station. She bounced around a little as she grated the cheese.

“Penne or linguine?” she asked Perry, making the boxes dance in front of him. “You get to choose.”

“Uh.” Perry looked from one to the other. He seemed to take his job seriously. “Penne?”

“Perfect,” she declared.

They worked in silence but for a dumb Carpenters song on the radio.

“Did you get pine nuts?” her father asked her.

She was so pleased that she had. “Here,” she said, plucking them from behind a loaf of bread.

“Some people use walnuts,” her father told them, “but I prefer pine nuts.”

“Me too,” said Bridget earnestly.

Perry nodded.

After she’d set the little kitchen table and lit a candle and helped Perry transfer his burgeoning salad to a bigger bowl, she heard “Hey Jude” come on the radio. She felt a sad and strange sort of exultation. She turned her face away from them for a moment and closed her eyes, caught in the grip of remembering how it used to be in this house, in this kitchen.

To her right, over the sound of water running in the sink, she heard her father sing along to two words of the song. Just the two, and yet it brought her a joy she could hardly contain.

Tibby’s parents’ twentieth-anniversary party was for her, in a way, like a traffic accident taking place in slow motion over a long period of time. Sometimes she was in the accident and sometimes she was watching it.

It also had the feature, for Tibby, of having been foretold. And as with an accident, Tibby didn’t dare look, but she couldn’t not look either. Her better angels told her to look away. And she told those better angels to take a hike.

Lena brought her the Traveling Pants to wear. Lena and Bee hovered so close to her she felt like she’d grown two more heads. She finally told them they had to go away.

Tibby talked to various family friends. She acted like she was writing a real script, being a real film student, and not just playing one while watching TV.

The first time she saw Brian he was eating hummus. The next time he was eating shrimp dumplings. The third time he was eating stuffed grape leaves. How could he eat so much?

The fourth time, he was with Effie. It had to happen eventually. Tibby watched while Effie, in a fit of lurid effrontery, touched Brian on the back. In front of everybody. Tibby felt sick. Both Lena and Bee magically reappeared, each at one of Tibby’s elbows.

Effie looked beautiful. She really did. Her cheeks were pink and her legs were tan and her breasts looked like they were ready to take over the room. To be fair, Effie wasn’t overdressed. She wasn’t overly made up. Effie was happy. That was the thing.

And by that standard of beauty, Tibby was a pure fright. A Boo Radley spooking around her parents’ happy party.

Tibby spent some of the time in her room. At one point she went into the backyard and found Bee teaching soccer moves to Nicky and Katherine. Tibby tried to be zany and get up a game of spitting watermelon seeds, but who was she kidding?

“Can this just be over?” she asked Bee before the cake was even presented.

At last, in a blur of warm tidings and well wishes and drunken neighbors, it really was over. She ended up saying good-bye to Effie and Brian in order. She could tell it wasn’t what they’d intended. Everyone looked embarrassed at the way it had fallen out.

Tibby kept her face on. And yes, there was Effie, close enough to smell. Tibby moved her mouth and formed words in the generally appropriate category. “Thanks. Great. Yeah. Blah, blah blah.” Effie moved on.

Now it was Brian’s turn. Tibby said the same robotic and stupid things, but Brian didn’t say anything stupid or robotic back. He just looked at her. Tibby’s spirits were fried, but even so, her brain carried on. It continued to perceive things and have thoughts.

Yes, Effie was glowing. Effie was a goddess. But when Tibby looked with honest eyes she could see that Brian, all handsomeness notwithstanding, didn’t look so happy. He was a second Boo Radley, but with a fuller stomach.

Tibby stopped whatever stupid thing she was saying in the middle of a sentence. Enough already. Brian held her hand. He held it and he looked at her straight on, eye to eye. She didn’t look away. It was the first brave thing she’d done in three months.

There was the natural rhythm of things you knew without knowing. The natural rhythm dictated that Brian let her hand go now, but he didn’t. He kept on and so did she. Before he got shoved along by a paralegal in her father’s firm, Brian squeezed her hand. But so quickly and subtly she wasn’t completely sure it was on purpose or actually that it had even happened.

She watched him go with a sad, slow feeling, as though she saw close things from miles away. She went up to her room without saying good-bye to anyone else.

She climbed into her bed and looked at the place by the window where Mimi’s cage used to sit, where Mimi had lived her soft, simple guinea-pig days among her wood shavings and her pellets. Tibby wished she could go back to when Mimi was still alive. To when Bailey was still alive.

She thought about the first time she met Brian. It was Bailey, of course, who thought of it, who put them together. Bailey was uncanny in that way. Before Bailey died, she basically set Tibby up with everything and everyone she would need for a happy life. And Tibby mostly lost or forgot them.

It was so hard to live the right kind of life, even if you knew what it was.

Tibby wished she could at least go back to the night in June when she’d lost the idea of love. She didn’t wish she could take back the sex. She used to wish that, but not anymore. She and Brian loved each other. They were old enough to know what they were doing. She wanted to be with him in every way, and that was one of them.

As she thought about it, she realized she wouldn’t even change the condom breaking or her fears about pregnancy. If she really got a wish, she wouldn’t want to be greedy or impractical. You couldn’t turn back time or bring the dead to life. If she got a wish, she would hope to be more modest with it.

She remembered when she was around four or five asking Carmen if she believed the wish Tibby had made over her birthday candles would come true. “Yeah, if you wish for something that could actually happen,” Carmen had said philosophically.

Tibby’s wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

That night, Carmen tried to figure out what the trouble was. She walked around the campus. She sat on the hillside where she’d first met Judy. She called Tibby, and then she remembered about the Rollinses’ anniversary party and she cried because she wasn’t there with them.

Why are we always apart? she wondered. A voice on the phone wasn’t enough sometimes. Why have I kept away all this time?

Because we have the Pants, she thought quickly. The Pants make it okay to do that.

She went back to her dorm room, and without bothering to take off her clothes or brush her teeth or turn out the lights, she crawled into bed.

She was lying there, eyes open, a while later when Julia came in.

“Look what I have for you,” Julia announced gaily. She was in her Florence Nightingale persona.

“What?” said Carmen weakly.

“Those buttermilk scones you love. They make them at night. Did you know that? I have three in the bag and they are ho-o-ot!” She drew out the O, trilling it in song.

Carmen sat up. Scones were, in fact, the most comforting food in the solar system.

But as she looked up at Julia’s face, something occurred to her. Julia looked happy. Not just cheering-up-a-friend happy, but genuinely happy. Carmen, on the other hand, felt—and undoubtedly looked—genuinely sad.

In the next moment another thing occurred to Carmen. She remembered the time, just a few weeks ago, when Julia was the one who looked unhappy. And it happened to be at the same time that Carmen was feeling, and undoubtedly looking, happy.

Was this a coincidence? She thought not.

Julia was happy when Carmen was unhappy. In fact, Carmen’s unhappiness was the very thing that seemed to make Julia happy. And, alternately, Carmen’s happiness caused Julia displeasure.

There was a notable misalignment there. A serious one. What kind of friend thrived on your unhappiness?

She knew the answer. No kind of friend.

She lay back down, her mind whirring.

She thought of her pathetic resolution to be a more worthy friend to Julia, deciding that if she lost weight and pulled herself together, Julia would like her better. How wrong she had been! Julia liked her precisely for her unworthiness. All the ways Carmen failed made Julia feel better about herself. What few ways Carmen succeeded made Julia despise her. Even sabotage her.

Julia seemed to sense the change in mood, but she didn’t want to let go. “Butter or jam? Butter and jam!”

Even now, even amid deepest doubt, confusion and misery, Carmen didn’t want to let Julia down. Too ingrained was her idea of how friendship was. “No. Thanks,” she said. “I’m just really tired.”

“Are you sure? They are hot. They won’t be hot in the morning.”

Julia made it hard not to take what she offered. “No, thanks,” Carmen said again.

Julia’s face got a pinched look. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll just leave them on your desk.”

“Thanks,” said Carmen, dully. She picked herself out of bed, brushed her teeth, put on a sleeping shirt, and crawled back into bed. “Do you mind if I turn off the light?”

Julia grabbed a book from the floor. “I’m going to read for a while,” she said.

Carmen tried to sleep, but she couldn’t. Her despair was so big that she couldn’t think of a way to feel better.

And then she remembered a way.

Under Julia’s suspicious frown, Carmen took her script from the end of her bed and crept out into the hallway. She sat under the good light and tried to reacquaint herself with the lost girl.

When Tibby woke up, she lay in her old bed for a while and let the waking world come back to her slowly. And she realized her breath had an echo. That was kind of funny, to be breathing in twos.

Then she realized that the second breathing was not hers. She opened her eyes and saw Lena’s face where she lay across the end of Tibby’s bed. Lena’s small, patient face, made with more precision, more fineness than ordinary faces. Most people would tap you and wake you up, but Lena was happy to just wait while Tibby slept.

“Hey,” said Tibby. She wondered at how she could love one Kaligaris sister so much and really hate the other one.

Lena smiled. She seemed pretty satisfied with lying there in the sunshine.

“When do you go back?” Tibby asked, crooking her elbow and propping her head on her hand.

“I’m going to stay here for a few days. What about you?”