The kitchen clock had literally stopped. It was broken. That must be it. It hadn’t budged since 12:42. Or . . . oh, 12:43.

It was way too late to call anybody. Carmen didn’t want to e-mail Paul. She didn’t want to read the bile that would slip from her fingers. If she put it in words and actually typed them out, Paul could take all the time he liked to judge her in that silent way of his. He would probably save it to his hard drive. Maybe he would forward it to his whole address book by mistake.

She had an idea. She would pack up the Pants for Tibby. That was a perfectly wholesome thing to do. She’d been meaning to all day. She would put in the letter and address the package and everything.

She walked, as if in a trance, to her bedroom. She moved piles around aimlessly. She forgot what she was looking for until she remembered. She looked harder. With a certain effort she pulled her mind into the task. The Travelling Pants. The Pants. Sacred. Not okay to lose.

Robotically she dug through her drawers. They were not in her drawers. Nor were they in the very large pile of clothes at the foot of her bed.

 

Suddenly she pictured them in the kitchen. Yes, she’d carried them into the kitchen earlier that evening. She lumbered back into the kitchen and scanned the small room.

 

They were not on the counter.

Worry about her mother began to vie with worry about the Pants. She checked the laundry, in case some terrible accident had brought the Pants into forbidden contact with the washing machine. Her bones and muscles seemed to rev up. She checked the bathroom hamper. Pantsworry was officially beginning to edge out mother-worry.

Carmen was dashing hopelessly toward the linen closet when the front door swung open and both worries appeared in its frame.

 

At the sight of her mother, Carmen stopped with a skid like a cartoon character’s. Her mouth wagged open.

 

“Hi, sweetheart. What are you doing still up?” Her mother looked shy, not quite up to meeting Carmen just now.

 

Carmen gasped and sucked air, fishlike. Her lungs were very shallow. She pointed.

 

“What?” Christina wore her perma-flush. It served both giddiness and shame. At this moment it was shifting from the former to the latter.

 

Carmen poked her finger in the air, unable to summon words that could possibly convey her indignation. “Y-you . . . ! Those . . . !”

 

Christina looked deeply uncertain. She still trailed wisps of happiness. Some of her was still in the car with David. She hadn’t yet fully entered the domestic nightmare that was Carmen.

 

“My pants !” Carmen howled like a beast. “You I stole them!”

 

Christina looked down at the Pants in confusion. “I didn't steal them. You left them out on the kitchen counter. . . . I thought—”

 

“You thought what?” Carmen thundered.

 

Her mom seemed to shrink. She looked timid now. She gestured at the Pants. She gave Carmen a beseeching look. “I thought maybe you meant them as a . . .”

 

Carmen glared at her stonily.

 

“As a . . .” Christina looked pained. “As a peace offering, I guess.” She finished quietly.

 

If Carmen had been kind at all, she would have backed off. This was a tender sort of mistake, potentially sore all around.

“You thought I wanted you to wear the Travelling Pants? You seriously thought that?” Carmen’s temper was growing so big, she herself was afraid of it. “Are you kidding? I put them out to send to Tibby . I would never, never, never—”
“Carmen, enough.” Christina held up her hands. “I understand that. I made a mistake.”

“Take them off now! Now. Now now now!”

 

Christina turned away. Her cheeks were deep red and her eyes were shiny.

 

Carmen’s shame deepened.

The sick thing was, Christina looked beautiful in the Pants, slender and young. They fit Christina. They loved her and believed in her just as they’d loved Carmen last summer, when Carmen had been worthy of them. This summer they eluded Carmen. Instead, they chose her mother.

Christina had appeared in the doorway moments before, looking free and happy and optimistic as Carmen had never seen her before. She seemed to glide on a kind of magic that Carmen couldn’t find. And at that moment, Carmen hated her for it.

Christina reached out her hand, but Carmen refused to take it. Christina held her own hand instead. “Darling, I know you’re upset. But . . . but . . .” Tears were jiggling in her eyes as she clasped her hands together. “This . . . relationship with David. It won’t change anything.”

Carmen clenched her jaw. She’d been through the drill. When your parents were about to ruin your life, they used that line.

 

Her mother might mean what she said. She might even believe it was true. But it wasn’t. It would change everything. It already had.

 

Tib,
You are not worse than me. I am worse than you. Trust me. We can fight about it more later when you’re home.

Here are the Pants. They are technically supposed to go to Lena, but we both had the idea that they would make a great date to your movie premiere. Just give them to Lena after you knock ’em dead, Tibba-dee.

With love from your friend who no longer deserves happiness or nice things,

 

Carmen

Before walking over to Greta’s, Bridget studied herself in the mirror above the bureau. It was kind of a relief not to have to see more than her face, really. She leaned in and inspected the top of her head. There was a solid inch of roots grown in, and they didn’t match. Even the dyed parts were fading in patches, giving her hair a weird, skunky look.

She wasn’t so crazy about the brown anymore, but she didn’t want to risk blowing her cover, either, so she dug a baseball cap out from a pile of dirty clothes and put it on her head. Voilà . As a fashion statement, it wasn’t much. Forgive me, Carmen, she thought, heading out the door.

The attic was starting to take shape now. Bridget had waded through and organized vast loads of books, coats, and magazines and moved everything but the last two of Marly’s boxes down to the basement. Now that most of the clutter was gone, she could get a sense of the room itself. It was a classic old-fashioned garret, cramped and sloping, but romantic, too. The ceiling was high in the middle and slanted down to around four feet at the windows. But there were many windows, three on each of the four sides, and they seemed to catch the loveliest light.

It badly needed a paint job, Bridget decided, looking around.

For now, she decided to confront another of Marly’s boxes. This, as she had suspected, was where her father came into the picture. There were two papers Marly had written for his class (an A- and a B+. “Fantastic ideas—need to follow through,” he’d written on the second). There were many pictures of her with her friends being an adorable and jolly coed. There were no pictures of her in her bed. There were no pictures of her at Shepherd’s Hill.

Then there were the wedding pictures, most of them taken on the steps of the Baptist church in town. Bridget studied them carefully, wondering about the furtive quality they had. Her father looked dazed with love, but he tended to hover at the edges of the pictures, his posture stiff. His family wasn’t there. He had no colleagues or friends, from what Bridget could determine. It was a wedding, all right, but it wasn’t the wedding she would have expected from famous Marly Randolph, a girl who could have been Miss Alabama if she’d wanted to.

Bridget was fairly certain her mother hadn’t been pregnant at the time, and yet she’d brought shame upon her groom nonetheless. She’d brought him down in the world. Her father had sacrificed everything to marry her, and Bridget wondered if Marly had disrespected him for it. Maybe Professor Vreeland had been a prize for only as long as she couldn’t have him.

At the bottom of this box was the wedding dress. Bridget pulled it out, feeling extra gallons of blood pulsing though her head and her heart. It was so crumpled and faded it was hard to believe it had ever been beautiful. Bridget held it up to her face. Was there any smell of her mother left in it?

She was ready to go downstairs now. She pulled the baseball cap on, even though it was too hot for a hat. She had the image of Greta setting out lunch, and it seemed deeply comforting to her.

“Nice to see you down here a little early,” Greta said happily.

 

Bridget flopped into a kitchen chair. “I’m going to start painting tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

 

“You’re going to paint it? Yourself? Have you painted before?”

 

Bridget shook her head. “But I’ll figure it out. Don’t worry. How hard could it be?”

 

Greta smiled at her. “You’re a good girl and a very hard worker.”

 

It jumped into Bridget’s head to say “Thanks, Grandma,” and she was surprised at herself.

With a sense of peace, she watched Greta set out their lunch. It had evolved over the summer. Now there were carrots every day, and sometimes sharp cheddar cheese or turkey instead of bologna. Bridget knew Greta watched her very carefully, mentally recording her moods and her preferences. But even as the menu changed, lunch was always at the same time, on the same plates, with the same yellow paper napkins. That was how Greta had been before, too, Bridget realized. That was how it had been in this house long ago.

“My Marly had two children, did you know that?” Greta said as she watched Bridget finishing her sandwich.

 

Bridget swallowed hard. “You mentioned before that you had a granddaughter.”

 

“Yes, Marly’s daughter. Marly had twins. A girl and a boy.”

 

Bridget pulled a thread at the hem of her shorts rather than pretend to look surprised by this information.

 

“I guess the babies came around two and a half years after they were married.”

 

Bridget nodded, still looking down.

“Pregnancy agreed with Marly. It was a happy time for her. But oh, my, when they arrived.” Greta shook her head at the memory. “Twins. Can you imagine? When one needed to eat, the other needed to sleep. When one needed inside, the other needed outside. I moved in with them for the first six months.”

Bridget glanced up. “Did you really?”

 

“Sure,” Greta said. Her face was thoughtful. “Only, looking back, I wished I’d done less and taught more. Marly struggled after I left.”

 

No matter how it had gone after that, Bridget felt her first six months on earth must have been comfortable if Greta had been there.

 

“I adored those children,” Greta said, shaking her head. She had tears in her eyes, and Bridget feared for her own eyes. “That little girl. She came into the world with a point of view, I’ll tell you.”

 

Bridget considered the deep fraudulence of sitting there listening to her grandmother talk about her. But she suddenly wanted to know this. It felt good.

“She had a little face you could die for,” Greta said, and then she seemed to regret her way of putting it. “She had a real feisty personality, too. She was stubborn and independent, and she could do anything she wanted the first time she tried it. My Lord, her grandfather thought the sun rose and set on that child.”

Bridget just listened, hoping it was okay if she didn’t nod or even look up. This was what she had wanted, what she had come here for: knowledge at a distance. Only it didn’t feel distant anymore.

“I think it was hard on the little boy sometimes. He was quieter and more cautious. He got a little lost, what with the mighty Bee marching around.”

 

Bridget flinched at the mention of her name. She felt sad for Perry. She knew that was how it had been his whole life.

 

Greta’s eyes wandered to the clock on the kitchen wall. “Oh my. Listen to me, talking and talking. You probably want to get back to work, don’t you.”

 

Bridget didn’t want to at all. She wanted to stay there and listen to Greta. But she made herself stand up. “Yeah, gosh, it’s late, huh?”

 

Bridget paused in the doorway. She didn’t want to go back up just now. “I better get some paint,” she said.

 

Greta’s eyes lit up. “Yes! How ’bout I run you over to Wal-Mart in the car?”

 

Bridget liked that idea. “Perfect,” she said.

Tibby saw a yellow note in her mail slot in the dorm lobby. It told her she had received two packages, and that the RA had them. Tibby didn’t relish a visit to Vanessa, with her toys and her moles. Vanessa’s room was a favorite target of scorn for Maura. On the other hand, Tibby had a filmmaker’s curiosity prodding her to at least get a look at the place.

“Come in,” Vanessa called when Tibby knocked.

 

Tibby swung the door open slowly. Vanessa got up from her desk chair and came to the door.

 

“Hi. Um . . . Tibby, right? Did you come for your packages?”

 

“Yeah,” Tibby said, trying to get a look around Vanessa.

 

Vanessa seemed to sense this. “Would you like to come in?” she asked politely.

Vanessa was wearing a Williamston T-shirt and a pair of high-waisted old-lady jeans. She seemed nervous as Tibby followed her into the room. Tibby couldn’t help wondering why such a socially awkward person had put herself up for the job of RA.

Vanessa looked for the packages, while Tibby looked at the room. The light wasn’t very bright, so objects presented themselves slowly. There were indeed a lot of stuffed animals. All over the shelves and the bed. But as Tibby studied them more closely, she realized they weren’t the usual sappy Gund bears and Beanie Babies. They weren’t like any stuffed animals she had seen before. In spite of herself, Tibby moved closer to an armadillo hunched in the bookcase.

“Could I look at this?” Tibby asked.

 

“Sure,” Vanessa said.

 

“God. It’s . . . got so many parts,” Tibby said, amazed, as she pulled back the layers of thick, pebbly fabric that made the shell.

 

“I know. It took me forever.”

 

Tibby turned to stare at her in disbelief. “You made this?” Vanessa nodded. Her face turned pink. She held out Tibby’s packages.

 

Absently Tibby took her packages and put them on the bed. “You sewed this?”

 

Vanessa nodded.

Tibby felt her eyes opening as she looked at all the other creatures around the room—brilliantly colored toucans, koala bears, a two-toed sloth hanging from the closet door. “You didn’t make all these,” she breathed.

Vanessa nodded.

 

“Really?”

 

Vanessa shrugged. She was trying to figure out if Tibby was impressed or if Tibby thought she was psychotic.

 

“They are . . . unbelievable,” Tibby said sincerely. “I mean, they’re great. They’re so beautiful.”

 

Vanessa smiled, although her arms remained protectively around her middle.

 

Tibby picked up a vibrant yellow frog with black spots. She wasn’t thinking when she heard herself say, “God, my little brother would love this. He would go nuts.”

 

Vanessa loosened her arms. She laughed a little. “Really? How old is he?”

 

“He’s almost three and a half,” Tibby said, beginning to remember where she was and why she was there. She returned the armadillo and the frog to their places and picked up her packages.

 

“Thanks a lot,” she said, moving toward the door. Her stomach was churning in an uncomfortable way.

 

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Vanessa said. Tibby’s praise had changed Vanessa’s posture.

 

“Uh, Tibby,” Vanessa said to her back.

 

Tibby turned her head. “Yeah?”

 

“Sorry I haven’t been by your room or anything. I’m . . . not exactly the greatest RA.”

Tibby turned her body too. Looking at Vanessa’s earnest face and her loyal T-shirt, Tibby suddenly felt like crying. She couldn’t stand Vanessa thinking she was a bad RA, even though she was. “No, you’re not. Seriously. You’re great,” Tibby lied. “If I have any questions, I know where to come,” she added lamely.

From her face, Vanessa knew Tibby didn’t mean it, although she appreciated the effort. “It covers part of tuition,” Vanessa explained.

 

“I love your animals, I really do,” Tibby said as she went out the door.

On her way down the hall, Tibby felt a hollowness under her ribs as she rewound all the snide comments and jokes Maura had made about Vanessa’s toys. Maura, the creative artist, who couldn’t even finish her script, while Vanessa, the dud, had created a world out of bits of fabric. And Maura was the one Tibby had striven to have as a friend?

Back in her room, Tibby remembered her packages. One contained the Travelling Pants. Tibby felt too much shame to look at them right then. The other was from home. She opened it to find a batch of foil-covered brownies and three pictures on construction paper. One was a scribble signed with Katherine’s name. The second was a scribble signed with Nicky’s. The third was a childish self-portrait her mother had drawn with crayons. It showed a frown and a blue tear on her cheek. We miss you! it said.

Me too, Tibby thought. Her mouth trembled as she produced a tear to match the one in the picture.

 

Paul had told Carmen once that you could distinguish a drunk from a drinker, because a drinker could choose to stop and a drunk couldn’t.

 

Carmen was a drunk. She could take or leave alcohol; anger was her mode of self-destruction. She couldn’t stop when normal people could.

Her anger the night before had been so big she’d nearly drowned in it. This morning she woke up hungover, in a sweat of remorse. From her bed she listened to her mother making coffee as she always did on Sunday mornings. She heard her mother let herself out of the apartment quietly. Christina would go around the corner to get The New York Times. She always did.

Moments after the door clicked shut, the phone rang. Carmen staggered toward the kitchen in a T-shirt and underwear. The machine picked up after the second ring. Carmen’s fingers were poised to grab the receiver when she heard the voice recording onto the tape.

“Tina . . . pick up if you’re there. . . .”

 

Carmen shrank back from the phone.

“Tina . . . ? Okay, you’re not there. Listen, I was hoping I could pick you up at one and take you over to Mike and Kim’s. Then maybe we could go to Great Falls after, if you’re in the mood for a hike. Call me if you’re free today, okay? Call me as soon as you get home.”

David paused. He made a funny humming noise and dropped his voice.

 

“I love you. I loved you last night. I think about you every minute, Tina.” He sort of laughed at himself. “Hadn’t mentioned that in a few hours.” He cleared his throat. “Call me. Bye.”

Carmen felt a strange vacuuming sensation under her ribs, sucking away all that was left of her goodwill, pulling in hostility and fear behind it. There were so many alarming, threatening parts to the message her demons hardly knew where to turn.

Mike and Kim? Couple friends. Couple friends for the happy couple. Her mother had never had couple friends before. She’d had her sister and her cousin and her mother and one or two single-mother friends. Mostly she’d had Carmen.

Carmen had never seen her mother’s old life as a consolation prize before. But suddenly, that was how it looked. Now that she had a boyfriend and couple friends. Now that she had the brass ring.

All this time, Carmen had thought her mother had chosen her life. That she’d wanted it. Had she been wishing for something else all along? Had she never had what she wanted? Was Carmen a next-best thing?

I thought we were happy together.

Maybe if she had brothers or sisters and a father around, it wouldn’t matter as much. But she and her mother depended on one another in a deep and unspoken way. It was motivated by love and loyalty, but underneath there was fear and loneliness, too, wasn’t there? Carmen always came home for dinner. She acted as if it were a natural convenience, but she didn’t like her mother to eat alone. What did Christina really feel for Carmen? Was it love? Was it obligation? Was it not having anything better?

Carmen had her friends, and she counted on them, but she never forgot that they had real sisters and brothers. A deeply insecure part of Carmen reminded herself that if there were a fire, they’d have to save their brothers and sisters first. The person who would save Carmen in a fire was Christina, and vice versa. Carmen and her mother could pretend the world was large and varied, but they both knew it came down to the two of them.

Carmen thought back to the night in late June, just about a month ago, when all this trouble had started. The night of her first date with Porter. Carmen was a bluffer, caught in her bluff. She’d made a feint toward breaking an agreement she hadn’t realized existed and had never meant to break.

Carmen didn’t like change, and she certainly didn’t like endings. She kept flowers till they were wilted and sticky and algae grew in the vase water.

 

I don’t want boyfriends, she felt like saying. I want it back how it was.

Standing over the machine, which was now blinking crazily, Carmen pressed her thumb on the Play button. She felt herself loathing David as the spontaneity of his emotion dried up in the replay. Had he forgotten that Christina lived with her daughter? That it was embarrassing and inappropriate to leave intimate, practically X-rated messages blaring through the apartment? Did Carmen matter so little that David had forgotten about her completely? Had Christina forgotten her too?

She stumbled to her room and threw herself facedown onto the messy bed. She heard the phone ring again. She didn’t move. Click went the machine. “Uh . . . Christina? Bruce Brattle here. I’m in the office today and had a brief question. Give me a call, if you could.” Long pause followed by a beep.

A few minutes later she heard her mother let herself in. Christina went right for the message machine and hit the Play button. Bruce Brattle’s message played. Only that one. Carmen felt her heart pounding a little. She could have corrected the mistake by telling her mom. Instead, she fell asleep.

A little while later, in a dismally unmysterious nap dream, their apartment sizzled and flamed. David valiantly saved Christina as Carmen burned to a crisp.