What if this was her life? What if his was the face she was coming home to rather than leaving? What if she had arrived here on Independence Day all those summers ago? She pictured Kostos standing just where he was now, but the engines churning in the opposite direction, bringing her to him maybe forever. Was that the brave life through which she would have earned the right to keep Tibby?
He didn’t move from his spot on the dock. The crowd drifted and dissipated and he stood there as the distance between them grew. And yet the wind was so oddly calm and the water so glassy she could imagine it was he who was drawing away and she who was staying still.
She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one. She hadn’t gotten to keep Tibby.
Finally she stopped waving, dropped her hands to her sides, and just looked at him as he got small. It gave her the feeling that her memory was already closing in on him. The distance between them stretched and finally broke. She never got to keep anything.
She turned to face the horizon, the blurring line of water and sky, the great vacuum, the place where things went when they left her.
But this morning it wasn’t empty. This time she could barely open her eyes enough to see it because there was something large and fierce right in the middle of it and it was the sun.
She was not one
who expected to get away
with much in life.
—Larry McMurtry
Carmen lay on her mother’s bed after the burial and let her mother rub her back, the way she’d done through all the many tragedies of Carmen’s childhood. Carmen found herself longing for those tragedies, when a back rub and a long cry on her mother’s pillow would do the trick, instead of this one, when nothing seemed to help.
At least the burial was over and she didn’t have to dread it anymore. It had been small and grim, just a handful of shattered people standing in the gray November air: Tibby’s family, Carmen and her mother, Lena and her parents. Vaguely Carmen wondered about Brian, what he knew and where he was. She wondered many things, but she didn’t pursue the information. She was terrified by what little she knew; she didn’t want to find out any more. That was wrong of her, maybe, but she didn’t have the energy to make it right.
They muttered prayers standing on hard grass, but nobody tried to do any real eulogizing. Only the minister spoke of Tibby, and he kept calling her Tabitha. They’d plan a proper memorial service for the spring, Alice said. It was too shocking, too soon, too rushed, too confusing to attempt more than burying the body that was supposedly Tibby that came off an airplane. In the spring, Alice said, they’d know what to do. Alice had given them relentless permission not to come, but only Bridget had taken it. “I’ll come in the spring,” Bridget had said woodenly, and Carmen had known it would hurt Bee worse not to be there, but she hadn’t been able to bridge the gap to tell her so.
Carmen had thought that when the burial was over there would be some relief, but there wasn’t. Before, she had been able to aim the terrible feelings at the burial, so where was she supposed to aim them now? What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t haul this misery around through her normal life. She couldn’t fit it through the door of her loft. But what other life did she have?
She could stay here, curled up in the dark on her mother’s bed.
But she couldn’t. The skin of her back had begun to feel irritated under her mother’s hand. Her whole body felt uncomfortable. The pressure in Carmen’s chest forced her to sit up.
Christina withdrew her hand and she looked at Carmen sorrowfully. She knew she wasn’t helping. Her face was full of compassion, but Carmen could see that her mother was spooked and uncertain too.
Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.
Perry and Violet were too quiet. They talked quietly. They ate quietly. When they played music it was quiet.
Bridget was loud. She stomped around loudly, wanting to drown out her loud thoughts, but it didn’t work. By the second week she couldn’t take it anymore. She left them a note and set off on her bike in the dark toward Sacramento.
She saw the neon lights of a pool bar on the outskirts of the city and pulled her bike into the parking lot. She locked her bike, heaved her pack onto her shoulder, and walked in. Now, this was loud.
She pulled her hair from its elastic and shook it out before she went up to the bar. She smiled at the fifty-some-year-old bartender and lifted her pack. “Do you think you could keep this back there for me?” she asked him sweetly. She smiled, and whatever reservation he had seemed to dissipate.
“Just this once,” he said, and swung it under the bar. “What can I get you, sweetheart?”
“I’ll take a Bud,” she said. She didn’t drink very often, and when she did, she wasn’t prissy about it. She thought of Carmen and her white wine spritzers.
It was far from her last drink of the evening, but it was the last one she paid for. The guy who sent over the next two beers looked like he was barely out of high school. When he came over to ask her to dance he had an insistent look on his face and she didn’t like it. “No thanks,” she said with no coyness whatsoever.
He looked more irritated than hurt. “Come on, girl. I bought you two beers.”
“And I thanked you for the beers. You didn’t buy me.”
She left him at the bar and went over to the area with the pool tables. It was crowded and the music was loud.
A waitress materialized with a tray and a bottle of beer on it. “This is from the gentleman over by the jukebox,” she said, giving Bridget a little wink.
Bridget looked in the direction she pointed. The guy tipped his hat to her. He had tanned skin, straight dark hair down to his shoulders, and a worn cowboy hat. He wore a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves, revealing tattoos on both forearms. She walked over to him. “Hey, thanks.”
“With pleasure.” He studied her with obvious interest. “Can I talk you into a game of pool, beautiful?”
He was entirely relaxed and confident in the asking. He wasn’t old, probably in his midthirties, but his skin was weathered in a way that made her think he probably worked at a local farm or ranch. Where the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned, she could see another tattoo winding up from his chest. She wondered what it was a picture of.
“Sure thing.”
By the speed with which a table cleared when he made his intentions known, Bridget guessed he was a regular here and a serious player.
He saw Bridget pausing over the array of cues. “Is this a game or a lesson?”
Bridget feigned innocence. “Do you need me to show you how to play?”
He laughed, and it was a great big laugh. It was the first thing Bridget had enjoyed in many days.
She stuck out her hand. “My name is Bridget,” she said.
He shook it, mildly surprised by her sudden formality. “Travis,” he said.
“Travis,” she repeated. “I like to know the name of my opponent before I beat him.”
Travis bought Bridget two more beers while she beat him three games in a row. She was getting giddy. Giddy from drinking, giddy from winning, giddy from the crowd that had gathered around the table, giddy at the
way Travis looked at her.
She was so giddy she lost the fourth game. She laughed as he got the whole bar involved in his victory lap.
He was obviously a local guy and well loved. He was as good a player as she was, if not better. But she’d taken advantage of his initial surprise and disorientation to win the first games. She was naturally gifted, and she’d played a shameful number of hours while getting Cs at Brown and in the first aimless years after she’d graduated.
“What do you say we team up?” he suggested. “We’ll hold this table all night.”
Their first opponents were two serious older Mexicans, and they gave them a long fight. When Bridget nailed the final shot, the entire population of the bar erupted. Travis picked her up off her feet and kissed her on the lips.
He might have expected her to pull away first, but she didn’t. The kiss lengthened and deepened as the cheering of the spectators faded. Bridget felt the blood pounding in her head, rushing down into her abdomen. She felt the beer sloshing around behind her eyes and she could barely remember what had broken her heart two and a half weeks ago. She could almost forget that the burial had taken place and she hadn’t been there.
They didn’t hold the table all night. They were far more interested in each other than pool after that. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She clutched another beer as Travis led her outside. If she kept drinking and he kept kissing her, she could keep the sadness away longer.
He took her around to the side of the bar, where it was dark and quiet. He took off his hat and dropped it on the grass. He took her in his arms and pushed her against the wall. He kissed her like she hadn’t been kissed in a long time and she was breathless. The feeling was so strong she could lose herself in it.
She felt his hands on her back, then under her shirt. His hands came around the front. He pulled open her bra and then her shirt and she startled. It had been a long time since she’d had unfamiliar hands on her skin.