There was a list 119 items long of the things Carmen was doing. There was a list one item long of the things she wasn’t doing. And it was the second list she thought of more.

She’d put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn’t see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything.

Sometimes she held the envelope, felt its weight, shook it, tried to guess its contents. Sometimes she studied Tibby’s writing and wondered if she’d been in a hurry when she’d addressed it. Sometimes she carried it with her from place to place. The one thing she didn’t do with it was open it.

Until the night she came home from drinks with her publicist, having had a gin and tonic and two glasses of wine on an empty stomach.

She’d eaten so little for three days in a row, she felt fierce and impermeable. She hadn’t said or thought anything substantial in over a week, so she felt shallow. And Jones wasn’t home, so she felt sort of like an adult. She felt like nothing could hurt her. Or she felt like nothing could hurt her for a few more drunken minutes, at least.

She got the envelope out of her underwear drawer and pulled it open. Hit me with your best shot, she thought, so shallow she could only think in Pat Benatar lyrics. She dumped the contents out on the bed.

To her amazement an iPhone dropped out. She looked it over quickly. It was the newest kind, with the biggest memory, the fastest processing, the better camera with video. It was exactly the one she’d been yearning to get but hadn’t, because she wasn’t eligible for an upgrade yet and it cost six hundred bucks. Here she’d been girding to have her heart broken more and instead she got an iPhone.

There was a brief note with it.

Carma,

Brian got this for me and I have no use for it, but I thought you might.

Love,

Tibby

That was it? That was too easy. There was another note folded up in the envelope. She opened it.

Carmen,

I’m keeping this short, my dearest Carma Carmeena, because I can’t make the feelings I have for you fit on this page, I can’t even try, so I’m just going to ask you one thing. Will you come to the address written below on or soon after April 2? Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I know you’re really busy. But it’s less than an hour and a half from NYC. Come if you can, because there’s someone I want you to meet.

Love,

Tibby

Carmen looked in the envelope for something else, but there was nothing. There was nothing to wallow in, nothing to cry over. She was so hyped up and drunk and hungry and prepared to cry she put her head down on the bed and cried anyway.

Bridget had used one of the kiosks at SFO airport to buy the cheapest plane ticket to Sydney, Australia.

She got a flight out early the next morning. She looked down at the last bit of coast as it disappeared into seven thousand miles of water. Checking out her window every few hours of daylight made her wonder whether the earth was really made of anything besides water. She didn’t know what she’d find where she was going. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. It was a long way to go for nothing. But it felt good to be moving hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet up in the air.

She remembered again that juncture of uncertainty starting around age twenty-five, after they’d had to give up the apartment on Avenue C, where she’d been happy. That was one place she could remember that she hadn’t wanted to leave.

Tibby had moved in with Brian. Carmen had gotten her fancy agent and started getting real parts. Lena had gotten promoted to a teaching gig that kept her in Providence five days a week. Eric had graduated from NYU law school and gotten a job that kept him busy twelve hours a day. And what had Bridget been doing? Moving from one temporary living situation to another, walking dogs for money, working for a city landscape company in good weather, learning how to dance on Rollerblades from a dazzlingly crazy man in Central Park—nothing that was remunerative or ambitious, anything that kept her outside.

Leaving that apartment had clearly been a moment to grow up, but had she looked at her options and thought them all through? Had she searched for a job or a living situation that would suit her needs? Nope. She’d managed to amble from couch to floor, from apartment to apartment, from one impulse to the next for a year and a half, before she hopped on a plane and moved across the country. When in doubt, keep moving.

She looked down at the ocean. She’d thought going across a continent was something. But going across the planet—now you were talking.

She got a train from the airport to the central station in Sydney and took CityRail two hours south to the town of Bowral, New South Wales. It was a pretty town with cafés, shops, a couple of art galleries. It was less alien than she’d expected it to be, having come across the planet for it. Maybe because she’d studied it so long on the screen of the computer in Sheila’s office at the Sea Star Inn.

The address matched a bungalow not unlike Perry and Violet’s, but the inverse, other-side-of-the-world version. Where Perry’s was purply gray, this one was butter yellow. Where Perry’s was held close by a matching house on either side, this one was surrounded by its own little meadow. Perry’s tiny backyard was bordered by a line of old dark-leaved eucalyptus trees. Spreading behind this one were young woods, topped by a cloud of green so green it seemed to pulse. The pink late-day light slanted differently here, the shadows spread differently under her feet.

Had Tibby lived here? Vacationed here? For a short time? A long time? Was this the place she’d lived most recently or had she left it long before?

It was opposite world, turned upside down. The toilets flushed the other way, the guy on the train had told her, and you just had to see Bowral’s famous spring tulips—in September. Fall was spring, winter was summer, gray was yellow, night was morning. Maybe death was life. Maybe Tibby was here.

Bridget floated along the concrete walk. She was tired and disoriented. There was nothing that could surprise her, nothing she wouldn’t let happen.

She noticed a car parked in the driveway behind the house. She walked up a few steps to the shaded porch. The screen was closed, but the door was open. She knocked on the wooden trim. She heard a voice talking from the back of the house. She opened the screen door a couple of feet.

“Hello?” she called. She felt yet another old version of the world ending, a new one opening up.

She saw him walking toward her down the hallway. The sun was setting behind the house, making a silhouette of him against the back windows, so she could make out his shape but not his features at first. The gait was both familiar and strange. It took until his face was within a couple of yards for her to know it was him.

“Bee,” he said.

He came out onto the porch, barefoot and also disoriented. She put her arms around him, and he felt thinner and more brittle than she’d expected him to.

“Tibby said you would find us,” Brian said as they came apart. “But I didn’t think you’d come all the way down here.”

Before Bridget could formulate a question, another shape emerged from the back of the house, a very small one. Bridget was mesmerized by it as it came into focus.

The tiny shape reached to pull open the screen door and let it slap behind her. The shape turned into a tiny girl, who came up beside Brian and wrapped her arm around Brian’s knee.

Bridget stared at the girl in astonishment—the large hazel eyes, the pointy face, the serious mouth. This was a person she knew. Death was life and the present was the past. She’d gone back to her earliest childhood to find her friend again.

Brian took the little girl’s hand and led her forward. “Bee, this is Bailey. This is Tibby’s and my daughter.”

Lena was back in Providence, back in her tiny, dark studio apartment, back to long, quiet, mostly empty days, but one important thing was different: she had a project.

When you had a project it was much easier to pretend to be someone else. You could pretend to be Nancy Drew, for instance, or Maria from The Sound of Music, or the sensible wisecracking housekeeper on The Brady Bunch.

In her Nancy Drew persona, Lena looked up the phone number of Kostos’s so-called vacation house in Santorini and called it. She couldn’t hold on to the persona long enough to leave a message on voice mail, but she called three times over the course of the week, and the third time the phone was answered by a live person, a woman who greeted her in Greek. Lena asked in timid Greek if Kostos was home.

“No, he’s not here. He doesn’t come back until the middle of February.” The voice was rough and deep, that of an older woman, probably large in stature.

“I’m Lena Kaligaris, an old friend.”

“You have an American accent.”

“Yes. I’m American. My family is Greek.”

“I am Aleta. I take care of the house. You should call him in London.”

“Okay.” Would Nancy Drew ask for the number?

“Lena, right? If I talk to him should I tell him you called?”

“No, no, that’s okay,” she answered quickly and fearfully, one hundred percent Lena and zero percent Nancy Drew.

When she hung up, her heart was pounding. Her heart wasn’t buying the persona yet.

Now what? She couldn’t wait that long to leave for Greece. She couldn’t go all the way across the Atlantic and not deliver Tibby’s letter. She woke up her computer and checked the cheap travel sites. There were about as many flights to Santorini stopping in London as any other way. It was less expensive than trying to fly nonstop to Athens, and it broke the trip up a little.

From the back of her underwear drawer she retrieved the letter of condolence Kostos had sent about Valia. The return address was London. She confirmed it on the Internet, but the phone number wasn’t listed.

It would be better to call first, before she went ahead and bought the ticket through London. When she pictured herself picking up the phone and calling him, though, she was frankly relieved that neither she nor any of her new personas had his number.

She had his address. She’d get his number in some way or other, even if she had to call Aleta again. Being a plucky risk-taker in her Maria–from–The Sound of Music persona, she bought her ticket on the strength of that.



Bridget watched in pure wonder as Brian fed Bailey the last of her dinner. She watched as he cleaned her up.

Bailey sat on the edge of the kitchen sink, her feet in the basin and her hands stuck under the flowing faucet. She shouted when the water felt hot and laughed when it felt too cold. When the water was right, Brian plugged the drain.

Bailey stood on the counter and Brian pulled her dress over her head and took off her diaper. She was tiny enough to fit in the sink. Brian turned off the water and pushed the faucet aside so she wouldn’t hit her head.

Occasionally Bailey turned her curious, somewhat suspicious eyes on Bridget. Bridget stared back without a gesture or a word.

Brian told Bridget she should go ahead and put her pack in the guest room. He showed her the closet where the extra sheets and towels were. When he invited Bridget to join them for Bailey’s pajamas and bedtime story, she followed them up the stairs mutely. She lay on the floor of Bailey’s room, her mind a whirl of incoherence, listening to Goodnight Moon twice.

Bridget didn’t try to talk to Bailey or touch her. When Brian kissed Bailey goodnight, Bridget stood shyly in the doorway. She could hardly say anything. It wasn’t Bailey’s baby diffidence that was the problem; it was her own.

Bridget went to the kitchen and mindlessly tidied up from Bailey’s dinner. She couldn’t find her voice. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d passed through a time portal and found Tibby in the midst of their joint childhood. She couldn’t help feeling that this tiny former Tibby was her peer.

She was on the underside of the world and she couldn’t remember where she was in the time line of her own life. She felt like she could close her eyes and open them and be in any part of it.

She drifted out to the front porch and sat on the steps. She watched the dark. They had lightning bugs here too. No matter where you went in time or space you could find them.

Brian came out and joined her. She thought of when he had entered the story, an oddball character in Tibby’s “suckumentary” the summer they turned sixteen. You don’t come into the story just yet, she felt like telling him. We are still small.

They sat in silence as Bridget tried to remember how the story went, how to put all the parts back in the right order.

“How old is she?” she finally asked.

“Twenty months.” His face showed strain and exhaustion. She could see the web of blue-purple veins under his eyes and at his temples.

“You’re her father. I can’t believe you’re a father.”

“I can’t remember not being one.”

“Tibby is her mother.” Bridget looked quickly at Brian and he looked away. “Was her mother.”

Brian’s face stayed turned away. She could see the wariness in his posture.

“She looks so much like Tibby it scares me.”

Brian nodded, but still didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to talk about that, she understood. She could see by the way his head tipped how much he didn’t.

For the first time since Greece, Bridget couldn’t force away the presence of Carmen and Lena in her mind. They didn’t know about this. They needed to know.

“Would you mind if—Could I tell Carmen and Lena about her?”

“About Bailey?” He looked uncomfortable. “Tibby didn’t say anything?”

“No, she—”

“Then I’d rather wait till we get back to the States next month. Tibby wanted to make the introductions in person.”

“She did?” Bridget swallowed painfully. How could you make any sense of what Tibby wanted?

“That’s why we’re moving back,” he said.

“Oh.” There was an opening here and she was too unsettled to know what to do with it.

“Next month. The truck comes on the twenty-first of March.”

“Where will you go?”

“We bought a place in Pennsylvania. A farm. Tibby picked it.”

She waited for him to say more, but he was quiet.

“How did you find us here?” he asked after a while.

“I found the address on the Internet.” She was somewhat ashamed to admit it. But she hadn’t known what she’d be finding. She’d imagined the address would only be the first step of a long, roundabout search for Tibby’s lost years. She hadn’t expected to hit it right off.

“I was figuring you would wait and find us at the new place,” Brian said.

“Why?”

“Because Tibby said she was sending you an invitation to come there.”

The word “invitation” rang in her ears. “She probably did. I didn’t open the letter yet.” As Bridget said it, she realized how typically impulsive it sounded and how badly she had misfired yet again. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this,” she said.

Brian shook his head. “It’s okay that you’re here. I was just surprised.”

He pulled apart a fraying bit of his shoelace, and she watched the side of his face. She wondered what dark thing had happened to him and Tibby. Had their relationship become a source of misery? Had the baby been an unwelcome trial?

Brian was the only source of information she had, and with his stiff body and his face turned away, she didn’t know if he even realized the worst of it, or how to ask him. “I just want to know what happened,” she began gracelessly. “Can you tell me about her life here? Because I just wish I knew—”

Brian got to his feet. He looked at her and then looked away again. “Bridget, I don’t think I can handle this right now.”

“But can you just …” Bridget stood too. “Did the two of you fight? Was she sorry about moving all the way out here?” Even as she said these things she knew they were the wrong questions.

Helplessly she watched Brian step into the house and let the screen door bang behind him. She felt injured and oversized and she couldn’t follow him. What could she do?

Maybe he blamed her. Maybe he thought she was blaming him. Maybe he didn’t want to compare notes on their failures.

Maybe he didn’t know what had really happened. Maybe, like Alice, he thought it was simply a terrible accident. Or maybe he knew the truth and was as blindsided, confused, and miserable as Bridget was. Maybe Tibby’s death had shattered his idea of the world as it had hers.

She waited until the house was quiet before she walked silently to the guest room and collected her things. She was halfway down the front walk when he caught up with her.

“Bridget, don’t leave,” he said.

She could see that he’d been crying and she felt sorry. She’d come here expecting him to be a role player in her tragedy, to give her that missing piece that would make her life bearable. But he had his own tragedy to get through, and a kid besides. Was he supposed to relive his torment for her benefit?

“I should go,” she said.

“No, you shouldn’t. Tibby would never forgive me if I sent you away.” Some small part of his face had opened toward her.

“I know you want to be left alone.” She felt genuinely terrible for him. Over the last three months she’d taken the opportunity to fall apart, but he hadn’t been able to do that, had he? He looked like he wasn’t far from it, like a skeleton with slippery joints. She couldn’t push him for answers. It was wrong of her to think she could find what she needed here.

“Listen.” He was at least talking to her now, and not to the side of the porch. “I have a project for work hanging over my head. It was due a couple of months ago, but I—well—Anyway, it’s a big software job I have to do and I need to hold myself together and finish it before we move. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about Tibby, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I can’t do it now.”

There was something about Brian. The sincerity of his eyebrows and the way his eyes hardly blinked. She couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him and shame at her selfishness. And strangely she felt a little bit afraid of him, for the unhappiness he had allowed to grow under his roof.

She looked up at the sky. If she was going to reconstruct the steps that had led Tibby to the bottom of the world, she was going to do it without his help.



Bridget forgot until she got into bed in Brian’s guest room that night the thing that was going on in her uterus. She didn’t remember it in a panicky way. She remembered it as an abstraction. And even as an abstraction, it didn’t suit her at all.

She pictured the sure way Brian bathed Bailey and read to her and knew when to put on a new diaper and what she was supposed to eat and wear to bed. She couldn’t imagine knowing or doing any of that. If felt as foreign to her as standing up in front of a college classroom and lecturing on chemistry. She had nothing to say about it.

She wondered if her own mother had felt that way. She could remember how her mother’s face looked when confronted with lacing Bridget’s skates or getting gum out of her hair. It was just too taxing, too foreign, too much. She wondered if that was the way Tibby had felt.