Some people said the first month was the worst. Others said it was really the first three months. Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

As Lena walked along the river in Providence, shivering in a wool coat long overdue for retirement, she felt like she was going in the wrong direction. She grieved about as well as she did everything else, backward and badly.

The first month hadn’t been the worst. She’d been horrified, blinking and confused, like she’d been whacked in the back of the head by a shovel, but she hadn’t really believed Tibby was gone. This December morning fell somewhere after the middle of the second month, and by now she believed it. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and in that empty space, the nothing in the middle of her, had come to settle a black, drab something.

Each day that passed took her further from the time when Tibby was alive and made her incrementally more dead. Each day that passed buried deeper Lena’s old ideas about the world.

That morning she’d woken up feeling sorry for Carmen. It was a feeling she kept out, but her early-morning mind was half dreaming and vulnerable, and somehow the sympathy had gotten in. It was a flickering image of Carmen’s damned iPhone that had gotten to Lena. Every time Carmen looked at her phone there was that old picture coming to life of the four of them as toddlers peeking over the back of a sofa, looking like a miniature girl band. Carmen looked at it five hundred times a day. How could she take it?

As Lena cried for Carmen and the picture on her phone, she knew why she tried so hard all the time not to feel sorry for Carmen and Bee. Because it was the same as feeling sorry for herself, and if she allowed that, the surge of it would carry her away.

At this rate she couldn’t imagine what she would be like at six months. She would be a black shriveled ball. Blacker and more shriveled, with hopes buried too deep ever to come out. Her life wouldn’t have shifted to make room for her grief, it would simply have shriveled and surrendered.

These days she walked a lot. Often along the river without really seeing the river. Somewhere she possessed the idea that if she was moving, the saddest images couldn’t settle on her as heavily. It didn’t really work. But being still was intolerable.

Her fingers ached with red cold as she put her key in the lock. They hurt all the time, but she lost track of them and failed to replace her lost mittens. The lesser pains like the ones in her fingers and toes vied for attention, but like fifth- and sixth-born children in a very large family, they didn’t get much of it. It was the firstborn pain and the most recently born pain you tended to think of.

There were messages on her phone. She was down to two regular check-ins, by her mother and Effie, not Carmen anymore, and their messages had grown more pitying and patronizing, if that was possible. She didn’t want to listen to the messages. She let them pile up.

In her tiny apartment she sat down at her desk, still in her coat. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t like to look at anything. On the walls were the photographs, the ones she hadn’t taken down or hidden away. There were the drawings, all from a different time, reminding her of ways she used to feel but couldn’t anymore. There was nothing she wanted to feel or taste or see or even imagine.

She jiggled the mouse of her big, lumbering desktop computer, watched it wake, and subjected herself to her own version of Carmen’s phone, her daily punishment. Bright on the big screen was one of the few pictures she hadn’t flipped over or put away: the four of them on the day they graduated from high school. There they were with those thick, oily rented gowns, holding or tossing those weird hats. Surrounding them were all their family members, their nearest and dearest. The picture represented her whole life at a moment when it had seemed biggest, most complete, most hopeful. Her arm was around Tibby, clutching her ardently and without reserve, her face so animated and free in its joy she couldn’t even recognize it as her own.

There had been a break, a rupture in the seam of her identity, and it happened sometime after that. She wasn’t the same person she used to be. She looked at the faces in the picture, from Tibby to Bee to Carmen and back to Tibby.

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She’d held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she’d been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

But what was that great feast? It was the idea of their friendship, their shared strength, their unconditional love for one another, their support, their security, their honesty and the freedom it seemed to promise. It was an idea big enough to sustain her through years of poverty.

Now it was unquestionably gone. And deeper questions gnawed at her. Had it really been such a feast? Had it ever been real? How could this have happened if it had been? How could Tibby have kept so much from them? If the strength and support had been real, how could Tibby have given up? How could they have let her? How could they have let her get so far away from them?

There was a clear and dreaded answer to all these questions: If it had been real, they couldn’t have. She couldn’t have. It hadn’t been real.

Lena hadn’t been eating leftovers from a feast; she hadn’t been eating at all. She’d been starving, and so devoted to her delusions she’d become incapable of feeding herself in the most basic way.

She eyed the letter Tibby had left for her. It stood perched on her desk, day after day. She studied Tibby’s writing, just Lena’s name on the front, and a note to open it after December 15 on the back, but it had no more secrets to tell her. She’d looked at it too often, too long, too fearfully for it to say any more. I could open it now, she told herself, and instantly recoiled at the thought, as she always did. Later was the time she would open it, never now. Tibby wanted her to open it after December 15. She didn’t specify how long after.

The phone rang and jolted her from her thoughts. She stared at it without even considering the idea of sticking out her hand and picking it up. After a few seconds, she poked the button and the message began playing. She hadn’t realized it was Christmas Eve until her robot-voiced message machine told her the date.

“Len, it’s me. I’m on the train right now, because you are not allowed to spend Christmas alone. I’m passing through … I don’t know, New Haven? I think that was the last stop. I said in the last message I’d be at your place by one, but it looks more like one thirty. Call me back and let me know you got this.”

Lena felt as if she were choking on her tongue. Effie was on her way. She was coming here to keep her company for Christmas, and that was about the last thing Lena wanted.

She should have known she couldn’t get away without acknowledging Christmas. Her parents had finally let the matter drop after badgering her endlessly about coming home to Bethesda, but she should have known she hadn’t heard the last of it.

Why hadn’t she listened to her messages? If she had she could have caught Effie while she was still safely in New York, not racing past New Haven. She could have somehow talked her into staying there or doing something else. Now Effie was coming here, and what was Lena supposed to do?

She knew Effie all too well. Effie was going to pester her with questions and confidences and take her out to dinner and make a big fuss about exchanging presents and sleep in her bed with her. Effie wouldn’t leave her alone. She would crawl into Lena’s precious quiet like a tapeworm.

Lena put her face in her hands. Should she call Effie right away? Before she entered the state of Rhode Island? Lena racked her brain for excuses to make Effie turn around and go back home. Leprosy? Bedbugs? No heat or hot water?

No, Effie was on the move. She couldn’t be turned away. Lena suspected that her parents were a big part of the impetus for this visit and probably the ones financing it. If Lena wasn’t careful, Effie would book them a hotel room with massages and manicures all around.

There was only one thing Lena could do. She could be so arduously, painfully boring that Effie would leave the next day. And that, at least, came naturally.

Jones decided, somewhat impulsively, that they should spend Christmas in Fresno, California. Christmas needed to be celebrated, and his parents needed to meet his fiancée before the wedding, so that was what they did.

Which was how Carmen found herself sitting at a dining room table in a modest ranch house in suburban Fresno on Christmas Eve, between the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Jones.

There was an artificial tree in the living room, a fruitcake on the kitchen counter, but as they sat down to dinner, Carmen was surprised by how little ceremony there was. There were no prayers or toasts, they just started eating. They didn’t even remember to turn the TV off.

“I can’t hear what he’s saying,” Mr. Jones said with some irritation after he’d eaten most of his ham.

Carmen wasn’t sure Jones was saying much of anything, but she jumped out of her chair to turn the volume down on the television so they could all hear it in case he did.

“No. The other way,” Mr. Jones directed her, and she realized the person Mr. Jones couldn’t hear was the man on the TV.

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” Carmen remembered how, as a child, she’d longed to be able to watch TV during dinner and her mother had never let her do it one time, not even when she was sick.

“Delicious,” Carmen said to Mrs. Jones, pointing at the ham.

“Thank you. I use a maple glaze.”

“Right. It’s very good.”

“I can give you the recipe if you’d like.”

“Okay. Yes. I don’t cook much these days, but I’d like to learn.” She wondered if she should have said that. She glanced over at Jones, but he was staring at the TV.

“Do you enjoy cooking?” Carmen asked, and then she felt doubly stupid at the blank look Mrs. Jones gave her. She knew how alien and spoiled she probably sounded, as if cooking were a hobby you chose or didn’t.

“Is that a lemon tree?” Carmen asked, pointing out the window.

“Yes.”

“That’s the great thing about living in California, isn’t it?” Carmen knew she was talking too fast. She suffered the length of the pause and felt herself grow a pair of antennae in the meantime.

“I suppose it is.”

After a while Carmen shut up and let the TV take over. No wonder Jones had gone into the business.

As Carmen spread the noodle casserole around on her plate she let her mind turn to Bridget. She’d calculated the distance from Fresno to San Francisco on a map online. She imagined she might call, she’d thought about it a lot, but now that she was here she knew she wouldn’t. If she could have thought of the first sentence to say, she might have, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t ask Bee how she was. She couldn’t mention what she was up to. Every casual opening seemed intolerably phony, and the deeper conversation was impossible.

“We can spend tomorrow at the movie theater,” Jones mentioned to her later, after they’d said goodnight to his parents.

On their way upstairs to the bedrooms Carmen noticed there was a picture in the stairwell that must have been of Jones with his older brother. It was the only picture of the deceased brother she had seen so far in the house. The two boys were sitting at a picnic table, with big slices of watermelon on their plates. Jones looked about seven. Carmen paused to look at it, but Jones didn’t wait for her. He kept going up the stairs. She stared at his back and wondered if he or his parents ever talked about his brother anymore. She tried to picture such a conversation at the dinner table, with the TV going.

Carmen had often wondered how it turned out, the Jones style of mourning. Maybe now she knew.



Bridget woke on Stinson Beach sometime after the sun rose. She sat up and looked at the waves. She imagined each one coming at her, like the bar of a swinging trapeze, toward her and away, toward her and away, inviting her to come in and take hold. She could do that. She could walk right in and keep going, swinging from one wave to the next. Tibby had done it. Why not her?

She thought of Tabitha the nurse. Now, this was a somber choice. It was the mother of somber choices, by which you could take care of all the smaller somber choices at once.

Tabitha would be disappointed in her, and strangely, it was Nurse Tabitha’s disapprobation that got to her more than her father’s or Carmen’s or Lena’s or Eric’s.

I wouldn’t do that to you, she thought, as she had thought before.

The morning sun was burning a hole in the top of her head. So much for sun; why didn’t it ever rain here? For the first time in her life she wished for a crashing, brawling East Coast–style thunderstorm.

She opened her pack and took out the envelope Tibby had left for her. She wasn’t supposed to open it for another two weeks, but that was bullshit. Tibby didn’t get to decide anything anymore. If she’d wanted the rights of friendship, she should have stuck around for them. Bridget considered tossing it in the water unread, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

She tore it open. Inside was a letter and another sealed envelope marked with another later date. She unfolded the letter.

Dearest Honey Bee,

I’m trying to picture you reading this. Somewhere in the sunshine, at least a week or two before the date I wrote on the envelope.

I know you feel abandoned by me, and I understand. You’ve probably gotten to the point of feeling mad at me, and if you haven’t, you will. Or you ought to. You trusted me to be around and I’m not. And God, I would give anything if I could be. Please believe that. The thought of missing out on the later life of my magnificent friend Bee is almost more than I can take. Everything feels like more than I can take right now.

Of all of us, I suspect this is hardest on you, and I wish I could cushion it. I wish I could make you feel as strong and as loved as you are. You’ll find your way, because of that, and because you have the thing that so often wavered in me. You have faith. Not in God necessarily, but in the thing with feathers. You are brightness, Bee. You are hope. No matter how far down you get, you’ll always have it. That’s what makes you different from your mother and, I fear, different from me.

I picture your spirit as a yellow, fluttering, buzzing, flying thing, and no matter how down you feel, it is in there. It is who you are.

Bridget’s anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.

It felt like a torrent so strong it could sweep her into the ocean, and not because she chose to go, but because she was powerless to resist it. Maybe that was what had happened to Tibby. Maybe she couldn’t help it.

“Why do you keep making that face?” Effie asked, sitting cross-legged on Lena’s bed. It was not yet four o’clock and Lena was running out of deflecting conversation topics.

“Why do you talk so loud?” Lena wondered if the close walls of her apartment felt as jarred and uncomfortable as she did being disrupted after so many weeks of solitary quiet.

“I’m not talking loud. I’m just talking.”

Lena didn’t argue. Effie thrived on arguments. Better to be flat boring than argue.

Effie’s phone buzzed every few minutes, but she seemed to have made a commitment not to answer it. She glanced at it constantly, though. “How’s that guy?”

Lena took a few extra seconds to answer. Words were like oxygen to Effie, and if Lena cut them off maybe she’d go home a little sooner. “What guy?”

“The guy who looks like the pot-smoking Scooby-Doo character.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The guy with the scraggly beard. The guy who makes sandwiches.”

Lena preferred to keep pretending she didn’t know, but the suspense could come to seem interesting if she wasn’t careful. “You mean Drew,” she said flatly.

“Yes. Exactly. Drew. What happened to him?”

“Nothing happened. He still works at the sandwich place. He’s still putting together work for a show.”

Effie shook her head impatiently. “Do you still go out with him?”

Lena sighed boringly. She pulled the laundry basket over and started folding. “I see him now and then.”

The truth was she’d seen him once since she’d gotten back, and that was to tell him she needed to take a break for a while, as though the relationship were strenuous in some way. It was the classic it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversation, and he had acceded without a fight.

“Do you hook up?”

No fireworks. No arguing. Lena shrugged.

Effie punched a couple of buttons on her phone and put it down again. “Honestly, I’m not sure which answer I’m hoping for. I hate for you to waste your time on such a loser, but it would be comforting to think you were actually having contact with another human being. Mom and Dad would be comforted by that, I know. Even Dad. I’m not kidding.”

No fireworks. Lena clamped her teeth together. Effie was the human equivalent of gasoline sprayed all over the kitchen. It was hard to avoid not only fireworks but complete conflagration.

“You don’t need to worry, Ef. I’m fine. I have human contact. You all should calm down,” she said calmly, boringly. “I teach two afternoons, one morning, and one evening a week. I spend time in the studio. I see other instructors and professors all the time.” Effie looked bored, so she went on. “I go to a demo or a lecture pretty much every week. I helped Susan, um, Murphy do this PowerPoint slide show.…” Lena was running out of material and she wished she had more. Effie’s eyes had drifted to her phone but she hadn’t picked it up yet. “I have lots of human contact.”

“Do you have any friends?”

It was so like Effie to cut her to the quick, to push aside her feeble maneuverings, to destroy her complacency, however lame. Lena swallowed and hoped her eyes didn’t show anything. “Sure.”

“I don’t mean old friends, but friends here. That you see.”

This was why Lena wished she had checked her messages and somehow derailed this visit. She wished her sister would go home. She wished she had never come.

“Sure,” Lena said again, bending down to pick up the laundry basket. She carried it over to her bureau and set it down again. Slowly, laboriously, sock by sock, she went about putting her clothes away.

When she’d organized her face again, she turned to Effie. She cleared her throat. It took a lot for her to voluntarily bring up the subject of Effie’s job at OK! magazine, because Effie’s tales of low-ranking celebrity and the absurdly vain girls she worked with made Lena want to pull her own hair out. And furthermore, Effie would find it stimulating.

But here, under two and a half hours into Effie’s visit, Lena had come to that. She sighed again and sat down on the floor. “So how’s work?”