Lena looked desperately at the door, wishing for the place to fill up. Where was everybody? What was wrong with this place? You couldn’t count on Providence for anything ever.
Effie looked like she was going to cry. She reached out her hand to Lena’s. “First Valia and then Tibby,” she said. “It’s really hard to believe.”
Lena was frozen. She felt an upheaval taking place somewhere down deep, and she hoped that if she stayed very, very still it could be contained. She thought of the time she’d gotten food poisoning from kung pao shrimp, how she lay completely still in her bed, suffering the nausea, hoping if she didn’t move it wouldn’t all have to come up.
Valia had been ninety-two. Tibby had been twenty-nine. Valia had had children and grandchildren, a restaurant to run, and a long happy marriage. Tibby, with her talent, her wit, her love, had been denied everything. Valia had lived a full life, while Tibby had suffered a secret hole in hers so devastating she couldn’t go on. Don’t move. Don’t move. It was going to come up.
“I’m really sorry about Tibby. I really am.” It was the martini and all the wine talking. Lena hoped her wine wouldn’t answer.
“I know how much you miss her, Len. I miss her too.”
“What. Are you. Talking about.” Lena’s words came through her clenched jaw. It couldn’t be contained. It was coming up.
“I am. I do. Tibby and I might have had a few conflicts, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her.”
Oh, God. Here it came. Lena was effectively leaning over the toilet at this point. Her mouth was filled with saliva. Her stomach was heaving. You just had to get it out and pray you would feel better when it was over.
“You didn’t love her,” Lena erupted, all bile and nastiness. “How can you even say that? You know you didn’t.”
Effie looked injured. It was a look she was good at. Lena didn’t let herself consider the idea that it was real.
“You were angry about the stupid thing with Brian.” Another wave. Lena couldn’t hold it back. “He loved Tibby and he didn’t love you, and you never let go of it. You still blamed her for that. I know you did.” It was nasty, finally, when it came up.
Effie’s eyes were shiny. “How small do you think I am?”
“You stole our pants because of that! And you lost them!” As this bilious memory came up and out, Lena recognized the strange, childlike belief that was nesting right inside it. If they’d still had the Traveling Pants, this couldn’t have happened. The pants wouldn’t have let this happen to Tibby or to any of them. The pants would have protected them.
“You still haven’t forgiven me for that! You said you did, but you never did and you obviously never will.”
Lena pressed her mouth together. She wiped the tears off her cheeks with her fingers. She and Effie were shouting and both of them were crying, Lena realized, and it was probably a good thing the place was mostly empty. Ella Fitzgerald sang on about Frosty the Snowman and Lena trembled in her chair.
“That’s not true,” Lena said, more quietly.
“Anyway, I wasn’t mad at Tibby,” Effie spat out. “I wasn’t mad at Brian. I was mad at you.”
Lena felt her chin wobbling, her shoulders shaking.
“I was mad at you for choosing her over me. I was mad at you for choosing your friends over me every time. I am your sister! That never meant anything to you, did it?”
Lena watched helplessly as Effie stood. “Yes, it did,” Lena said.
“No, it didn’t!”
“Effie.”
“I came here because I wanted to help you, Lena, but I can’t. I don’t matter enough to you to be able to help.”
Lena was crying hard. She put her face in her hands. “That’s not true,” she tried to say.
Effie rooted around her bag and pressed five twenties onto the table. Her eyes were still streaming as she hitched her bag over her shoulder and walked out.
Lena watched her sister’s back, and after Effie was gone she stared at the door of the restaurant with the diminishing hope that Effie might come back through it.
Bridget walked slowly back to Bolinas and into the Sea Star Inn. She was starving, and it was the first place she came to. She ordered eggs and sausages and buttered toast and more toast.
She didn’t realize until she saw the tinsel strewn around the place and heard the well-wishers on the radio that it was Christmas.
“Do you know if there are any rooms available tonight?” she asked the waitress, who also appeared to be the innkeeper. The place was ramshackle enough that Bee hoped it was in her price range.
She got a tiny room and use of a bathroom in the hall for forty dollars a night. That evening she got into the creaky bed as the sun was setting. When she woke up in the middle of the night she could hear rain beating against the window.
By the second day of sleeping in a bed and eating cooked food, she’d run out of money. The waitress/innkeeper, Sheila, saw Bridget in the lobby with her pack on her shoulders.
“You going already? I’m sorry to see it.”
“I’d like to stay,” Bridget said. “But I ran out of money.”
She saw the look on the woman’s face. “I mean,” Bridget said quickly, “I can pay my bill.” She took out her wallet. “I’ve got enough here. I just don’t have any more to spend.”
Sheila nodded. She wore a bandana tied over her hair just the way Bridget’s grandmother Greta sometimes did. “I’ve got some odd jobs around here,” she said. “I could spot you a few days’ room and board if you’re prepared to work.”
For some reason, the way it came out of Sheila’s mouth, the word “work” sparkled like a new pair of cleats, a banana milk shake.
“I’d love to work,” Bridget said.
“All right, then.” Sheila nodded. “Go put your stuff in your room and we’ll get started in the kitchen.”
That night Bridget used the ancient pay phone in the lobby to call Eric. She called him at work, knowing he wouldn’t be there. She left him a message wishing him a merry Christmas and telling him she loved him. She thought she might say something else, but she couldn’t. Her heart was pounding as she hung up the phone.
The next morning she used it again to call Nurse Tabitha.
“Did you talk to your boyfriend?” Tabitha asked.
“Not yet. No.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t know.” Bridget poked her finger in the swinging hatch of the change slot. “How long do I have?”
“How long do you have?”
“To make the decision. To, you know, end it.”
“Bridget, you are probably about nine weeks pregnant. That’s early. According to California law, you can terminate the pregnancy at up to twenty-four weeks. But once you’ve thought it through and made up your mind, I do not recommend waiting. Based on my experience, if you go past fourteen weeks, it’s a whole lot worse for you.”
“Worse for your body?” Bridget asked.
“Worse for your heart.”
Back in the quiet crypt of her room, Lena carefully packed Effie’s things in a cardboard box. Although they were spread around the place, each of Effie’s possessions stood out. The bottles of magenta and turquoise nail polish, the chartreuse tights, two Christmas stockings, the high-heeled gold boots, the lacy pink tho
ng still in its package, the three different kinds of hair product in neon green plastic, a tub of makeup. It was as though Lena’s drab apartment was incapable of digesting objects so colorful, fragrant, and festive.
Lena gazed wretchedly at the cheerful array in the box. Effie had come armed to celebrate Christmas with manicures, pedicures, facials, and makeovers. She was going to remake Lena’s underwear drawer. She was going to give Lena a new hairstyle. She’d threatened to download new songs onto Lena’s iPod. She had come because she wanted to make Lena feel better. These were the things Effie knew how to do.
“You just have to let people love you in the way they can,” Tibby had said to Lena once.
Lena carefully taped the seams of the box and left it by the door to take to the post office. Effie had come bearing intimacy and joy and Lena could tolerate none of it. Effie was far above anything Lena deserved.
It’s not that you don’t matter; it’s that you do, Lena told her sister silently.
Now Lena’s drab silence was fully regained, her misery preserved. She perched on the edge of her bed, sitting on her hands. This was just what she had wished for, wasn’t it? Effie was gone, without even spending a night. Lena’s fingers and toes were unpainted. A holiday was uncelebrated. Her hair was as plain as before. Lena was all alone, dismal and withdrawn once again. She’d done what it had taken to scare Effie away, maybe for good.
Lena tipped over and lay with her cheek pressed into the itchy top blanket. She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.
Lena woke with a jolt in the middle of the night. She stared at the ceiling for a time, her eyes as wide and clear as if it were the middle of the day. She got up and walked the four steps to her desk and sat down in the chair.
Her apartment featured one large window, which faced the air shaft. For about an hour during the day and an hour at night, the sun and then the moon, respectively, found their way into her room. Now the moonlight brushed in through the dirty chicken-wire panes and illuminated the letter that stood there unopened day after day, night after night.