The Pants would have been her first choice, of course, but she’d had to send them back to Lena. And besides, she didn’t want to be greedy. She’d already gotten what she needed from them.
“Okay,” she said, reappearing beside him in the darkness. Her feet were still bare and her hair was loose.
He blinked and took a step back to get a better look at her. “God, Bee,” he murmured. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she wasn’t going to press him on it.
They walked side by side down toward the lake. She tried not to bounce on her feet, but she couldn’t really help it. She was happy. Her hand collided with his briefly and it set her nerves singing. After all they had been through together, all the things they’d felt and now spoken, they didn’t even know how to touch each other.
They took their usual spots at the dock. Bridget could practically see the warmth they’d left on the weathered planks from last time. She swung her legs over the water, loving the empty air under her bare toes. Their bodies made no shadows tonight; they were fully contained.
Eric pulled a little closer. His expression was wistful. “You know what?”
“What?”
“When I saw your name on that list of coaches before the summer started, I had a premonition. I knew you were going to turn my life inside out again.” He didn’t sound so sorry about it.
“If I had seen that list, I wonder if I would have come,” Bridget mused.
He let out a breath. “Did you dislike me so much?”
“Uhhhh. Dislike?” She smiled a little. “No. That’s not the word. I was afraid of you. I didn’t want to feel like that again.”
“It was hard, wasn’t it?” He was sorry, she knew.
“I was a little out of control.”
“You’ve grown up since then.”
“Some. I like to think so.”
“You have. You are different. And also not.”
She shrugged. That sounded about right.
“I’m sorry I disappeared,” he said sorrowfully. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know if you felt what I felt. I was worried it was just me.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Now I know.”
They considered these things.
“I’m glad I didn’t read the coach list. I’m glad I did come,” she said after a while.
“Me too. We had to find each other eventually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We were meant to be.”
She loved that idea. “You think?”
“I do.”
“Is that what your thoughts told you? When they went straight?” she asked. Her heart was swelling inside her ribs.
He smiled, but he looked serious too. “Yeah. It is. Maybe that doesn’t sound so straight. Maybe that’s not what I was expecting them to tell me. But they did. So there you go.”
“How did they know?”
“Because when I lay with you in my bed, there was a moment when I could feel everything you had been through, and I had this idea that if I could make you happy, then I would be happy, too.”
Bridget was too full to talk. She leaned her head against him. He put his arms around her, and she put hers around him. He’d said them simply, but these were words enough for a lifetime. He could make her happy. He had.
Last time they had started at the end. This time they started at the beginning. You couldn’t erase the past. You couldn’t even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.
Maybe tomorrow they would kiss. Maybe in the next weeks and months they would figure out how to touch each other, to translate their feelings into gestures of every kind. Someday, she hoped, they would make love.
But for now, all she wanted was this.
Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.
—Christopher Columbus
The Morgans’ beach house had sandy carpets. The fridge was empty but for one half-loaf of moldy Wonder bread. The pots and pans looked as though they had been washed most recently by Joe, their almost-two-year-old.
It was also staggeringly beautiful, pitched on the sea grass in a low field of dunes set just eighty yards or so back from the Atlantic Ocean.
The first thing they did when they got there was to tear off their clothes (by previous agreement they’d all worn bathing suits under them) and run yelling and screaming straight into the ocean.
The surf was big and rough. It clubbed, tackled, and upended them. It might have seemed scary, Tibby thought, except that they were all holding hands in a chain so the undertow couldn’t drag them down the beach. And that, in addition to all the hollering and taunting and shrieking, made it fun.
The second thing they did was collapse on the warm sand. The afternoon sun dried their backs as they lay there, shoulder to shoulder. Tibby’s heart still pounded from the thrill of the water. She had pebbles in her bathing suit. She loved the feeling of the sand under her cheek. She felt happy.
She wanted to let this happiness be her guide. She wouldn’t look forward with trepidation. She wouldn’t rev her brain like that.
There would be the inescapable good-byes. The nitty-gritty ones. Like when she would watch Lena and Bee drive away to Providence in the U-Haul on Thursday. She could picture Bee laying on the horn for the first five miles away from home. Then there would be the moment on Friday when she’d kiss Carmen and watch her roll off to Massachusetts with her dad and all fifty million of her suitcases. There would be the good-byes at the train station on Saturday morning when she and her mom would board the Metroliner for New York City. Her father would clap her on the back and Katherine’s chin would tremble and Nicky would shuffle and not kiss her back. Tibby could picture it if she tried. And the good-bye to Brian. She knew that one wouldn’t stick for long. Brian was supposed to go to Maryland, because it was almost free, and yet she suspected he hadn’t gotten an 800 on his math SAT for nothing. He would find his way to her. She knew he would. It was a good thing she had scored a single room.
But this moment was for the Septembers and for them alone. This was their weekend out of time. She would live in the happiness of each one of these moments, no matter how finite. Together, the Septembers could just be.
They all showered (the hot water ran out after Carmen’s and before Lena’s) and made a late lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and brownies, feeling sun-tired and extra hungry, the way the ocean makes you feel.
The first cell phone rang just after lunch.
“Really? How great!” Carmen was laughing into the phone. She moved it a few inches from her mouth. “Win saw Katherine in the kids’ lounge at the hospital today,” she explained to Tibby. “The hockey helmet is off!”
“I know. She misses it.” Tibby smiled appreciatively. She liked Win. She gave Win the big thumbs-up. But she found herself wishing that he weren’t joining them just now.
The second call came from Valia. Valia apparently couldn’t find the photocopy of the drawing Lena had made of her, and wanted urgently to bring it back to Greece. Valia had new life in her—and she was putting it all into packing. Valia then insisted on getting Carmen on the phone so she could tell her something about the new soap opera she had adopted, the same dumb show Carmen was always watching.
The third call was for Bee. Tibby watched Bee melt into the phone and she knew it was Eric. She could never begrudge Bee—or anyone she loved, for that matter—a voice that could give her so pure a look of happiness.
Tibby sat on the kitchen counter and considered the sheer number of voices that had joined their lives.
Then Brian called on Tibby’s cell phone. He wanted to talk to her, and she wanted to talk to him—just for a few minutes, at least.
As soon as Tibby hung up, two other phones started ringing simultaneously. Lena caught Tibby’s glance. “What’s going on here?” she said. “It’s like a joke.”
Tibby nodded. “Only I can’t figure out if it’s funny or not.”
Dinner was a c
haotic affair, what with the phones ringing and Carmen almost burning down the house when she forgot about the rice. There wasn’t much peace. It was sort of wonderful in the sense that it reassured Tibby how rich and funny and interconnected her world was. It was sort of sad in the sense that she’d imagined that world would stop for this one weekend, so that they could just exist together in solitude. But the world hadn’t stopped for them. If anything, it had sped up.
Hours later, midnight had come and gone and Tibby couldn’t sleep. She sat on the floor of the small, sandy bedroom and couldn’t help feeling a little bleak. It wasn’t that their night hadn’t been fun; it had been. After the kitchen fire was brought under control, they decided to abandon the stove altogether and had milkshakes and peanut butter fudge for dinner instead. They ate so much of it they had all lain groaning and exhausted on the living room floor.
There were so many things to talk about, so many new people to process, so much future bearing down on them, they had barely gotten started. They had listened to music and fallen into sugar-induced slumber and crawled off to their various bedrooms.
Tonight, for the first time, the world had felt too big to contain and digest within their small circle of friendship. Was this the way the future was going to go?
They were growing up. It was inevitable, and Tibby had learned enough this summer not to stand in its way. There were boyfriends and families and big plans burning just ahead of them.
But please, God, she couldn’t do it if it was a trade-in. She couldn’t strike the bargain if growing up meant drowning out the friendship that stood at the very center of her life, the thing that gave her strength and balance.
Darkness closed her in the house and the black waves beat against the shore for all to hear. All of a sudden Tibby felt claustrophobic. Perhaps for the first time in memory, she felt more afraid of a small, confining space than the big, infinite one. Without thinking, she tiptoed out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out into the air.
Tibby felt like she was walking into a dream, a happy dream, when she saw the three distant silhouettes sitting on the sand. She laughed at the sight of those three familiar heads. It was like a dream too, in that she knew more than she really could know. She knew what they were feeling; she knew it was the same thing she was feeling, and in that knowledge she felt the strength of their connection.
It seemed as though they were waiting for her, even though they had no practical reason to know she would come. When Tibby got close enough, Bee reached up for her hand and pulled her down into their little cluster.
“Hi.” Tibby’s voice was quiet, but almost giddy.
“This is where the cool kids go,” Bee said, laughing.
Lena shrugged. “I guess nobody could sleep.”
“We have too much stuff to talk about,” Carmen mused.
A wave washed close to their feet. This didn’t give anybody the idea to move.
They tightened their circle, and Carmen set the Pants in the middle, making a circle of their summer as well.
Tibby breathed out, finding inexpressible comfort in her friends’ faces. Before her eyes, this night had transformed into a gift of reassurance. This was the future. Life would get busier and more varied, populated both by beautiful things and unfortunate circumstances. If their friendship demanded exclusivity or solitude, it couldn’t work. If it required that everything go as planned, it would turn brittle, and ultimately it would break. On the other hand, she knew that if they could be flexible and big, if they could encompass change, then they would make it.
Tibby remembered her dream about taxidermy and understood in a new way the beauty of the Pants. The Pants could move along with them.
“Whatever happens,” Bridget said, “we will find each other. We always will.”
I’m going back to the start.
—Coldplay
EPILOGUE
For our last hour at the beach, we exchanged gifts instead of saying good-bye. We didn’t plan it that way, exactly. It just kind of fell into place, like us all finding each other on the beach in the middle of the night. We each wanted a few things we could hold on to.
The sun streamed pink and orange behind our heads, and the ocean churned dark. The sand felt softer in the sweet light. The air was warm and comforting.
I can’t tell you all that was said and what was felt. I just can’t. But I’ll tell you what happened and you can imagine it. You’ll do better with your imagination than I could with my words.
Carmen got to go first, because she is the least patient. Not about getting, about giving. “For the walls of our dorm rooms,” she announced, handing them out.
Carmen had found four long, vertical frames and pasted three photographs into each of them. The first photo, on the top, was the one of our mothers, as young, happening, late-eighties moms sitting on a wall, arms around each other’s shoulders, wearing jeans. The photo was familiar to us now. A little speckled. A little old. A little heartbreaking to remember Marly, as it always was. The next photo, in the middle, was also old, one I barely remembered ever seeing. It was the four of us as toddlers, our faces peeking over a couch. We looked like a miniature girl band. Carmen looked like the singer. I, small and confused, looked like the one who plugged the instruments into the amplifiers. It made me laugh. The bottom photo was from graduation, the four of us in the same order, the same faces, the same expressions.
The crying started for each of us around then. It was inevitable. It was like that feeling of being outside in a rainfall without a raincoat or umbrella. You fight getting wet for a while and then you just surrender to it and you realize it feels pretty nice. You wonder, why do we fight the things we fight when giving in to them isn’t so bad at all?
Bee went next. She passed out tiny jewelry boxes. We pulled the tops off all at once.
On four delicate silver chains dangled four tiny, identical charms. Of pants. They were tiny silver charms in the shape of pants, just like our Pants. Now they were our Pants, in a new and different way.
Bee explained how Greta first spotted one in a jewelry kiosk in the middle of the mall in Huntsville, Alabama. And how she and Greta made a joint project of hounding the jeweler, Mr. Bosely, until he came up with three more.
We all put them on each other, fiddling with clasps, holding up hair. I pressed the tiny charm flat against my sternum, knowing it would live there now. We couldn’t look at each other except in little bits. It was hard to feel so much.
Lena handed hers out next. She had even wrapped them. We tore the paper off with different degrees of care: I folded the wrapping paper for future use, Bee tore at hers savagely and sat on the crumpled paper so it wouldn’t blow down the beach.
Lena had made four nearly identical drawings and framed them, one for each. She’d drawn the Traveling Pants twice, front and back. But she’d drawn them upside down and side by side so that together they formed a big W. Next to it Lena added the letter e. The picture said We.
I went last. I handed out videocassettes with specially decorated labels. “We have to go inside for this,” I said.
I had already made sure the Morgans’ VCR was in working order. So once we’d scrambled up the beach and into the house, it didn’t take me long to get the movie fired up.
It was short. Just ten minutes. Most of it was stuff from my own parents’ collection, but I’d managed to get stuff from Tina and Ari too. I’d even given the two of them and my mom a little preview a few nights before in our den, though I made them keep it a secret. The three of them wept while I crowded up all close to the TV and pretended not to. The three moms hugged afterward. That made me feel happy.
The first part was on old-fashioned Super 8 film, atmospheric and a little jerky, showing us crawling around in Lena’s backyard. Well, Lena was timid about crawling, so we mostly nudged and rolled her. I was a stringy baby, bald and purposeless. Bee’s hair looked like white feathers adorning her head. She was a fast crawler. Her mother had to pull her away from the si
de of the pool. Bee’s brother, Perry, made a brief appearance. He didn’t move much, but he did find a bug in the grass. Carmen had perfect brown ringlets, giant eyes, and a very loud voice with which to coax inert baby Lena.
By the time we were two, some parent or other had sprung for a real video camera. The next part showed the four of us girls lined up on four plastic potties. Lena sat patiently, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her palm. I was tiny and seemed to be falling into mine. Carmen was trying to yank a Mary Jane off her foot. Bee finished first. “I’m done!” She stood up and shouted at someone off camera.
The next bits were fast takes, a catalog of joint birthday parties, bad haircuts, and complex orthodontia. Siblings, parents, grandparents, and other relatives filtered through in various fashion mishaps.
The last one was a long shot, taken when we were about seven. I didn’t even understand the significance of it when I’d picked it out and smoothed it into the end of the movie.
It was taken at Rehoboth Beach, probably within a mile of this very place. The camera showed the four of us holding hands in the rough surf, jumping waves, shouting and screaming.
It was just like now. Exactly as we had done the afternoon before and early that morning. As I looked at the screen I could feel the cold, salty water covering my hands, linked with Bee’s on one side and Lena’s on the other. I could hear Carmen’s shrieks of joy in my ear. Different times we lined up in a different order. It didn’t matter the order.
The image stayed on the screen and we all watched it, even when it went still.
Back then was exactly the same as now. To brave the undertow, we had learned to hold hands.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The novel opens with a first-person narrative by Tibby. Why do you think the author selected this character to frame the story? Would you have selected another character, and if so, what would he or she say?