Forever in Blue (8 page)

And so they are the world, Lena remembered thinking then, and many times since.

You couldn’t paint a thigh based on how you knew it was, in darkness or in light. You had to paint a thigh based exactly on how the light particles entered your eyes and how you perceived it from that angle, in that room, at that moment.

Why did she spend so much of her life unlearning? It was so much harder than learning, she mused as she timidly made her way around Leo’s canvas.

She was almost scared to look—scared of its being worse than it was supposed to be but more scared of its being better.

She waited until she was fully in front of his painting to take it on.

After three days in the studio, his painting was really only begun. More suggestion than execution. And yet it was so far beyond hers she felt like crying. Not just because hers looked so amateurish in comparison, but also because his had a gesture and a quality, even at this young stage, that was unaccountably sad and lovely.

She was devoting her life to art school, and she knew she could learn a lot of things here, but in a flash of recognition, she also knew that this couldn’t be taught. She couldn’t say why this painting struck her so, what was the particular insight into the pathos of Nora, but she felt it. And she felt her own set of standards and ambitions swirling down the toilet. She could practically hear the flush.

She put her fingers to her eyes, unnerved to feel actual wetness. She had hoped these would be conceptual tears, not wet ones.

She thought of Leo. His hair and his hand. She tried to reconcile the look of him with this painting.

And in a rush she felt ashamed of her fatuous games as she realized she was going to be thinking about him whether or when or how he ever looked at her.

LennyK162: Hellooooo, Tibby. Are you in there? You are not answering calls and your friends are concerned. Bee is writing up the missing person report and I am designated to call Alice. Please advise.

Tibberon: I am here, O hilarious one.

“Please call me back before five if you can, Tib,” Brian said.

Tibby lay on her bed as she listened to the end of his message. She didn’t want to call him back. If she actually spoke to him, rather than leaving him messages when she knew he was at work, she probably wouldn’t be able to be angry at him.

“It’ll be okay, Tib,” he said in closing.

Why was he always saying that? What power did he have to make it so? Maybe it wouldn’t be okay. Maybe she really was pregnant.

Anyway, okay for whom? Maybe it was her body and not his.

And what if she was pregnant? What would he say then? What if he wanted her to keep the baby? He had talked about babies before. What if he secretly wanted something like this to happen?

Meta-Tibby had something to say about this, but regular Tibby shut her up fast.

Brian probably romanticized the notion of having a baby. He probably thought it would be this beautiful thing between them. Well, Tibby had seen the whole process up close and personal, and it wasn’t pretty. She had seen her mother’s gigantic belly, pregnant with Nicky, with all the scary red stretch marks across it. She knew how little you slept and how much babies cried. And in one of the most surreal experiences of her life, she had weathered the whole bloody, bloody thing as Christina’s unwilling labor partner. She knew the power of birth, both for beauty and terror. She was the last girl in the world who could write it off as cute and sexy.

She couldn’t be. What if she was?

If her last period had ended on the fifth, say…or maybe it was the sixth? And then you counted twenty-eight days. No, it was twenty-one days, right? From the last day? From the first day?

Tibby had puzzled over this question at least one hundred times, and still she got confused in all the same places.

Brian worked as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant in Rockville on Wednesday evenings. She waited until she knew his shift had started to call him back.

“I don’t think you should come this weekend. I think I’m going up to Providence to hang out with Lena. Okay? Sorry about that.”

She hung up quickly. She felt her face twisted in an unpleasant shape. She was too preoccupied to feel her own shame at lying or even to do it convincingly.

If it had been the fifth, then her period—if it was going to come—was going to come by the twenty-sixth. But what if it hadn’t been the fifth? It could easily have been the sixth or seventh. Then she would have to wait until Sunday. How could she wait that long?

And what if it didn’t come on Sunday? What if it didn’t come at all?

No. She couldn’t think that thought. She couldn’t bring herself to think it, and yet she couldn’t fully think any other.

She wasn’t really going to Providence. She didn’t want to see her friends now. Not until she got her period. If she went, she would have to tell them what was going on. They knew her too well to accept her evasions or her lies. She didn’t want to say the feared word out loud to her friends, because that would make it feel true.

She hated not telling them that she had finally done it. She needed to tell them such an important piece of information. But the aftermath of having done it was too painful to share, and the two things were inextricable.

She couldn’t see Brian right now. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened. What if he wanted to have sex again? He would, wouldn’t he? What would she do?

Brian shouldn’t have been so insistent on it, she found herself thinking. We should have just stayed how we were.

She didn’t feel like eating, she didn’t feel like sleeping. There was nothing to look forward to, nothing to feel happy about, and nothing she could bring herself to do.

And yet she had very specific plans for the weekend. She would wait and hope for the one thing she really wanted. She would wait and hope that it would come.

“Oh, my God. It’s a piece of a skull. Somebody get Bridget.”

Bridget laughed and turned around.

Darius, the good-looking Middle Easterner, turned out not to be Turkish, but Iranian by way of San Diego. He was also in mortuary, and at this moment he was pointing to a wall of dirt.

She moved in. She put down her usual pointy trowel in favor of finer instruments. In a little over a week she had already earned a reputation for fearlessness. In the face of moldering bones, snakes, worms, rodents, spiders, and bugs, no matter how big, she was unperturbed. Not even the stench of the latrines got to her. Though in truth she almost never peed inside.

At five-thirty in the evening, her dirty, sweaty colleagues were wandering toward camp, but she was still working on the piece of bone. It was actually quite a large piece. It was painstaking work. You couldn’t just dig it out. Every bit of soil had to be cleared and screened with care. Every bit of bone, every fragment of clay or stone had to be sent to the lab. Everything had to be recorded in context by means of a large three-dimensional grid. She had to photograph each thing with a digital camera and number it by basket and lot.

“The difference between looting and archaeology is preserving context,” Peter had told her. “The object itself, whatever its worth, represents a small fraction of its value to us.”

By six-thirty, only Peter was still there with her. “You can go,” she said. “I’m almost done.”

“I don’t feel right, leaving you alone in a grave,” he said.

She liked him there, with the sun behind him. She’d let him stay.

“I’ve named him Hector,” she said, coaxing the skull from the dirt.

“Who?”

“Him.” She pointed to the hole that would have been his nose.

“That’s a heroic name. Why do you think it’s a he?”

She wasn’t sure if he was asking her or quizzing her. “By the size. We found a part of a female skull yesterday.”

He nodded. “And what did you name her?”

“Clytemnestra.”

“I like it.”

“Thanks. I’m keeping an eye out for the last few bits of her. Her skeleton is almost complete.”

“Oh, so that’s Clytemnestra. I heard about her in the lab.”

Bridget nodded. “The biology guys are excited about her.”

Once almost all the dirt was processed, she gingerly lifted Hector’s skull. She began to brush out the grooves as she’d been taught.

“It doesn’t get to you, does it?”

She shrugged. “Not really.”

“Something will eventually. It seems so far back, I know, but something always gets through.”

“But there isn’t much tragedy in a death that took place three thousand years ago, is there?” Bridget mused aloud. “Old Hector would be long dead no matter what great or awful things happened in his lifetime.”

Peter smiled at her. “It puts mortality in perspective, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Why do we worry so much about everything when we’re just going to end up here?” she asked. She felt quite cheery considering she was standing in a burial site holding a large section of a human skull.

He laughed at her, but he seemed appreciative. He sat down at the edge of the trench to consider. She had the odd perception that he had fine ears. He seemed to hear the full extent of what she said and meant, no matter how loudly or quietly she spoke. When you shared a context, it made hearing easier.

“No question a recent death feels more tragic,” he reasoned. “I guess because we’re still experiencing the world that the dead person is missing. We are still around to miss them.”

Did he have such a tragedy in his life? she wondered. Could he tell that she did?

She pushed her hair back. She realized she’d drawn a streak of dirt across her forehead. “Our moral connection to people expires after a certain amount of time. Don’t you think? Otherwise how could we dig up their graves?”

“You are exactly right, Bridget. I couldn’t agree more. But how long a time? Two hundred years? Two thousand? How do you calculate the moment when a person’s death becomes scientific rather than emotional?”

She knew he was asking the question rhetorically, but she actually wanted to answer it. “I’d say you calculate it by the death of the last person whose life overlapped with theirs. The point when they lose the power to help or hurt a living soul.”

He smiled at her certainty. “That’s your hypothesis?”

“That’s my hypothesis.”

“But don’t you think the power to help or hurt can extend far beyond a person’s natural life?” he asked.

“I don’t,” she proclaimed, almost reflexively. Sometimes she felt the magnet of certainty more than truth.

“Then you, my friend, have a thing or two to learn from the Greeks.”

Lenny,

I enclose the Pants with a little bit of ancient dirt and a picture of me with my new boyfriend, Hector. He’s not so lively, you may say. But he’s got the wisdom of the ages.

A whole lot of love from yer pal Bee (and a toothy kiss from yer pal-in-law, Hector)

Carmen did run lines with Julia. She ran them for hours on end for two straight days. Julia wanted to try a range of parts before she settled on her audition strategy.

Carmen was relieved when Julia went to the office to photocopy more pages so Carmen could at least have a break and check her e-mail. She had a list of unread messages from Bee and Lena and her mom and her step-brother, Paul.

When Julia got back, she immediately noticed a picture Carmen had printed out and left on her desk.

“Hey, who’s this?” Julia asked. She picked up the paper and studied it.

It was a picture of Bee in Turkey holding a human skull and pretending to kiss it. Bee had sent it over the Internet, and it had made Carmen laugh so much she’d printed it out.

“That’s my friend Bridget,” Carmen said.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Carmen knew it was strange of her that she didn’t talk about her friends more to Julia. She mentioned them in passing once in a while, but she never expressed what they really meant to her. She wasn’t sure why. It was as though she had put them and Julia into two different compartments. They didn’t mix. She didn’t want them to mix.

“She’s your friend?” Julia looked vaguely doubtful, like perhaps Carmen had clipped the picture from a magazine and was just pretending.

Maybe that was why, Carmen thought.

“She’s amazing-looking. Check out those legs,” Julia said.

“She’s a jock.”

“She’s pretty. Where does she go to school?”

It was funny. Carmen didn’t think of Bee as pretty, exactly. Bee didn’t have the patience for it. “Brown,” she said.

“I thought about going there. Williams is a lot more intellectual, though.”

This from a girl who read not only Us Weekly each week, but Star and OK! as well. Carmen shrugged.

“Her hair looks kind of fake. She should use a darker shade.”

“What?”

“Does she color it herself?”

“Bridget? She doesn’t color her hair at all. That’s her hair.”

“That’s her real hair?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what she tells you, anyway,” Julia said, half jokingly, but Carmen didn’t find it funny.

She looked at Julia, wondering what was up. Was she honestly competing with a girl she’d never met?

“Hey, let’s go pick up something quick for dinner and bring it back here,” Julia suggested later, after another hour of lines. “I want to keep studying.”

“You can stay here,” Carmen offered. “I’ll go get it.” She was frankly glad to get away from lines, glad to be outside. The grounds of the place were beautiful, especially in the evening light. There were miniature weeping trees along the paths and huge annual gardens around the main buildings.

In her appreciation of the flowers, she lost track of the cafeteria, known by the apprentices as the canteen. She walked until she got to a pretty hillside overlooking the valley. It was lush and so sweet in this light.

Carmen stood there looking at it for a long time. She was already lost—she couldn’t really get more lost, could she? When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere, she mused.

She wondered how long it had been since she’d used her senses to perceive beauty. It was like she had been frozen for all these months and was only now beginning to thaw.