Forever in Blue (28 page)

She suspected that what he really needed were antidepressants, but until she could rally herself for that effort, a baby bunny rabbit was the next best thing.

He named it Barnacle. She had no idea why.

“She’s got to come out eventually, right?” Lena said to her mother the next morning in the kitchen.

“Effie?” her mom said.

“Yeah. Have you seen her?”

“She left early this morning. Daddy drove her to the airport.”

“What? You are kidding me! Where did she go?”

“She went to Greece.”

Lena was stunned. “She went already?”

“She called Grandma last night and asked if she could stay in Oia for the week. Grandma was delighted. She wants Effie to help her paint her house. Your father changed the ticket on the computer.”

How had she missed all of this? “She left this morning?”

“Yes.”

Lena scratched violently at a bug bite on her wrist. She needed to think for a minute. “Did she seem okay?”

Her mother gave the first sign of knowledge. “Depends on what you mean by okay.”

“Will she talk to me if I call her?”

“Maybe you should give her a few days.”

Lena felt stricken. “That bad, huh?” She kept her eyes down.

“Lena, honey, she feels betrayed,” her mother said, perching on a tall kitchen stool. Ari rarely gave in to a true sit.

Lena put her arms on the counter. “Brian didn’t love her, Mom. She was going to have to notice that eventually.”

“I think you’re right. And I think Brian basically told her that as gently as he could,” Ari said.

“You do?”

“I do. But I don’t think it’s Brian’s love she’s missing.”

Lena had thought she’d be needed here at home. Now she wasn’t. She couldn’t reach Effie on the phone to make anything right, and she was too guilty and fitful to hang around sidestepping conversations with her father about her plans for the future.

So she came up with an even crazier idea.

She fooled with the phone in her father’s office until she managed to get Tibby and Bee on at the same time. Within two minutes she’d presented her crazy idea and they’d both agreed to it.

Once she secured the borrowing of her mother’s car, she went upstairs to pack her bag.

“Hey, Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you seen the Traveling Pants?” Lena went down to the kitchen to ask the question rather than just shout it.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“I thought they were in my room.” She began to feel a touch of nervousness. “Was anybody in here cleaning or doing laundry yesterday?” She trusted her mother and the regular housekeeper, Joan, not to do anything insane, but once in a while there was a substitute.

“No. Joan was here on Friday. That’s it. Are you sure you had them? That you brought them from school?”

“Yeah. I’ll go back and look more,” Lena said, darting back up the steps to her room. She checked everywhere, even hopeless places like her bottom drawers and a trunk she hadn’t opened in months.

She knew she had brought them home for Tibby to wear to the party. Tibby had worn them and then given them back. She had given them back, right?

Lena thought she had, but there was enough doubt to provide modest comfort for the moment.

Opening night arrived, and Carmen’s stomach somehow climbed into her neck. She might have thrown it up, but luckily, it stayed attached.

There were photographers, critics, hundreds of people. Andrew was trying to protect her. She could feel that. He held her hand and walked her around backstage.

Jonathan kissed her and pulled her hair.

“Lovely.” Ian nodded at her decked out in her flowers. He kissed her head and she thought she might cry.

Could she do this? Did she know how? She tried to swallow her stomach back down to her stomach again.

From where she sat backstage, she listened to the first act and let the trance begin. She heard the words more clearly than she ever had before. She heard more in each word, more in each combination of words, and exponentially more in each line of words.

These were real performers. Her heart swelled to know them. They had given so much in five weeks of rehearsals, she would have thought they’d given everything. But now she knew that they had saved something for this.

During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row.

They were so big, so bright, so beautiful, so magnificent to Carmen’s eyes that she thought she was imagining them. They were like goddesses, like Titans. She was so proud of them! They were benevolent and they were righteous. Now, these were friends.

Lena, Tibby, and Bee were here, in this theater, and they had come for her. Her big night was their big night. Her joy was their joy; her pain their pain. It was so simple.

They were absolutely lovely, and in their presence, so was she.

In the presence of her friends, Carmen rediscovered the simplicity she had lost. They enabled her to find the voice of Perdita as she had first understood it. It felt good to be able to go back.

But the greater miracle was her understanding of the last scenes in the play: the reunion, the end of estrangement, the end of winter. She had understood from the beginning the feeling of the girl who was lost, and now she also understood the girl who was found.

In front of six hundred and twenty souls, three of them most precious to her, Carmen’s winter ended and she felt the return of her own extravagance.

Lena was singing along to an old Van Morrison tune on the radio, driving along the New Jersey Turnpike. She’d dropped Bee off in Providence and Tibby in New York, and now she was heading back to D.C. to return her mother’s car. It was four o’clock in the morning and she needed to do something to keep herself awake.

Her cell phone began buzzing in the front pocket of her skirt. That worked too.

“Hello?”

There was no connection at first, and then she heard an urgent though distant voice. “Lena?”

“Effie! Is that you?”

“Lena, are you there?”

“Yes, it’s me. Are you okay? Are you in Greece?” She jabbed the radio button off. She was relieved and grateful to get to talk to Effie so much sooner than expected.

“Yes, I’m at Grandma’s,” Effie said, muffled, but crying openly.

“Ef? Effie?” For several seconds Lena heard sobs but no voice, and she agonized. “I am so sorry, Effie. Please talk to me. Are you okay?”

“Lena, I did something really terrible.”

Even over a cell phone connection, Lena suddenly sensed that these were a different kind of tears than the ones Effie had left with. “What? What is it?” Lena tried not to drive off the road.

“I can’t even tell you.”

“Please tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Effie, what could it be? How could it be that bad?”

“It is. It’s worse.”

“You’re making me nervous, you know. Just tell me or I’ll drive into a ditch.”

“Oh, Lena.” More sobs.

“Effie!”

“I—I…your pants.”

“What? I can’t hear you!”

“I took your pants.”

“The Traveling Pants?”

“Yes.” Crying. “I took them.”

“To Greece?”

“Yes.”

“Effie.” Now she knew where they were, at least.

“I was mad and I just—I was mad at Tibby and you and everybody and—”

“Okay, I get it,” Lena said, disoriented by the rapid reallocation of guilt between them.

“It’s worse than that, though.”

Lena felt the bang bang bang of her portending heart. “What?”

“I wore them on the ferry and they got wet.”

“Yes.”

“I hung them on the line on Grandma’s terrace to dry. I never thought—”

Bang bang bang. “You never thought what?”

“It was windy. I wasn’t thinking that it could”—several words were lost in tears—“or that I would lose them.”

“What do you mean, Effie?”

“I went to get them and they were gone. I’ve looked everywhere. For the last three hours I’ve looked.” Another crash of sobs. “Lena, I did not mean to lose them.”

Effie had taken the Pants. Now Effie couldn’t find them. But she had not lost them. They were not lost. “Effie, listen to me. You cannot lose them! Do you hear me? You have to find them. They have to be there somewhere.” Lena’s voice was as hard as she’d ever heard it.

“I’ve tried. I really have.”

“You keep trying!” There was static on the line. “Can you hear me? Effie? Effie?”

She was gone. Lena threw the phone down on the passenger seat and clutched the wheel. She felt like she could crush it in her hands.

The Pants could not be lost. They had magic to protect them. They were not the kind of thing that could be lost. They were there, and Effie would find them. Anything else was not a thing she could think.

It had been hard for Carmen to see it end. The honors, the admirers, the catered parties, the champagne, the little egg rolls. Her singular pride in introducing her friends to the cast. But the evening had eventually come to an end.

It had been hard to say good-bye to her friends as they piled into Lena’s mother’s car to drive through the night and be back by morning in time for their obligations.

Walking back from the parking lot, Carmen had passed the theater again to savor the taste of the night.

Judy and Andrew had still been there, sleeves up and hair down, going over the points of the evening one more time. It had been hard not to cry when they hugged her.

“You did me proud, sweetie,” Judy said in her ear.

“I’m not going to jinx it,” Andrew said. But when Carmen let out a few tears, she saw that he had some too.

Hardest of all had been ending up back in her dorm room.

Thankfully, Julia was asleep when Carmen crept into her bed. Carmen slept a long and virtuous sleep. But as does tend to happen in the morning, Julia woke up.

“How did it go?” Julia asked pointedly.

“Weren’t you there?” Carmen asked.

“No, I had other plans.”

This was strange, because during one of the many curtain calls, Carmen had actually seen Julia in the audience. She knew she had, because she had been struck at that moment by the contrast between the three beacons of friendship burning like suns in her eyes and Julia, the cheapest, scrawniest, chintziest ten-watt bulb of a counterfeit friend.

“That’s weird, because I saw you there.”

Julia was again looking couched and furtive. “No, you didn’t.”

Carmen could have summoned her towering anger at this moment. She thought of it. Her power was restored enough that she could have taken on Julia as the rock-hurling Carmen of old, and Julia would have suffered for it.

Carmen could have, but she didn’t. Julia had once seemed too valuable to cross. Now she didn’t seem valuable enough.

She began getting dressed as Julia looked on sourly.

“I don’t know what your problem is,” Julia snapped before Carmen could get out of the room. “I thought we were friends.”

Carmen turned. She towered a little in spite of herself. “We weren’t.”

“We weren’t?” Julia echoed, surprise and sarcasm mixing.

“No. You know how I know?”

Julia looked heavenward, the same kind of petulant expression Carmen herself used to make. “How do you know?”

“Because you wanted me to fail. But I didn’t. Too bad for you. That means we were not friends.”

Before Carmen left, she thought of one more thing.

“You know what the sad thing is?”

Julia’s jaw was locked now. She wasn’t saying anything back.

“The way you are going, you will never have one.”

As Carmen walked away, she felt sorry that she’d been taken in by a snake like Julia. But in some strange way she felt appreciative that it had happened. In friendship terms, she’d lived her life in the Garden of Eden. Her bond with her friends was so powerful, so supportive, so uncompetitive, she’d thought that was how friendship worked. She’d been spoiled and she’d been innocent. She hadn’t recognized how good she had it, or how bad other alleged friendships could be.

Now she knew.

If she could go back, would she do anything differently? She thought about that.

No, she probably wouldn’t. It was that old idea—better to put your heart out there and have it abused once in a while than to keep it hidden away.

But jeez, a little judgment wouldn’t hurt.

From the moment Bee learned the state of the Pants, time had ceased flowing in its normal way and instead proceeded in nervous jolts.

“Should I call Lena again?”

“You talked to her ten minutes ago,” Eric said from the back of Bee’s neck, where he’d been kissing her.

“I know, but what if she heard something? What if she talked to Carmen?”

She and Tibby and Lena had done almost nothing but call each other since Lena had set off the alarms.

Bee’s phone rang before she could decide. It was Carmen.

“Oh, my God.”

“Lena told you.” Bridget’s agitation was big and her dorm room felt tiny.

“Yeah.” They had deliberated waiting until after Carmen’s last performance on Wednesday.

“What are we gonna do?”

“What can we do? Hope Effie isn’t blinded by anger and jealousy.”

Bridget paused. “I kind of wish we had someone else looking.”

“Yeah. But who else have we got?”

“Grandma.”

“Ugh.”

Lena called Effie every hour for twenty straight. Grandma was getting annoyed, but what could she do? She let Effie take the blame.

“I’m trying. I’m trying everything.” That was all Effie would say.

Lena even wished she could call Kostos to see if he was there and could help. But unfortunately, that was a bridge she had burned.

“I think I know what the problem is,” Tibby said to Lena on the phone from her room in New York.

They called each other so often, they hardly bothered hanging up anymore. “What?”

“The Pants don’t want Effie to find them.”

“Oh, my gosh. You could be right.”

“They’re scared of her.” Tibby suspected that she was possibly overidentifying with the Pants, but still.