Free Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares Page A

once. Once Lena met Tibby’s parents at the morgue, where she attempted to translate their desire to waive the full autopsy. The cause of death had been determined to be accidental drowning, and they wanted to get the body home to the United States as soon as possible. During the same three days, Carmen dragged Lena and Bridget to see Tibby’s hollowed-out parents at their hotel in Fira exactly once. The Rollinses had managed to find the only grim, gray-office-building hotel in a spangled holiday town that mocked them day and night with blasting cruise boats and endless vacationers getting drunk on open terraces.
    In the dreary lobby five of them drooped over cups of bitter tea.Alice’s skin looked as thin and colorless as skim milk. Tibby’s father bit at his lips savagely.
    Of the many topics they did not discuss, one was Brian. A detective at the precinct mentioned at some point after they’d claimed her body that he’d received a call from a distraught man responding to the message the detective had left at Tibby’s home phone number in Australia. He didn’t recall the man’s name—he’d written it in the file. “Not her husband. Her boyfriend,” he’d said dismissively in Greek. “But did you tell him?” Lena had asked. “Yes, I told him,” he’d responded. Between the detective’s tone and his lack of English, Lena doubted the conversation had gone easily. She felt incipient compassion for this boyfriend, who she felt sure was Brian, but she didn’t have the stamina to think it through, let alone make contact with Brian herself. She was too scared of her own feelings to take any part in his. She didn’t know whether Tibby’s parents had spoken to him. She doubted they had.
    As she watched them all, Lena felt heartless and detached—detached from herself as well as from them. They’d all fallen down the same hole and were staring at one another in a mixture of unassigned blame and disbelief that the tragedy that had sent them down here could never be undone. They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.
    Lena felt cold on the surface. Cold and eerily electrified in a way that made the hair on her arms stand on end. She felt a dry snap in the air that touched the outside of her skin, and a roiling, stewing punishment waiting underneath.
    None of them really knew how to comfort one another. She guessed that every one of them felt privately like the most bereaved.
    The one time Alice came to Lena’s house was to collect Tibby’s belongings. It had to be done. Bridget had offered to bring the bags to the hotel, even to go through them with her, but Alice said no.
    Alice spent a long time in the back bedroom with the door closedwhile the three of them sat in a row on the couch. Now and then they heard a choke or a sob come from Alice that wasn’t much different from sounds they had made and heard among themselves.
    At last Alice came down and dumped a suitcase on the floor in the middle of the living room. “I think this is all stuff for you girls,” Alice said. Her face was splotchy. “Okay.”
    The four of them looked at it. None of them moved.
    “Okay,” Alice said again, staring at them as though they were supposed to do something. Nobody knew what it was.
    Bridget wondered at how little of Alice seemed to touch the ground by this point. She was all gaze and no traction.
    I’m sorry we’re still alive , Bridget thought. She didn’t begrudge Alice the feeling she was almost certainly having as she looked at her daughter’s friends. Plenty of times Bridget had wished every other mother dead if she could have kept hers. You love us, I know, but when it comes down to it, we are other people’s daughters .
    That was the tone of Bridget’s brain now. A diseased, philosophical