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She laid her sleeping bag out on the sand and crawled into it, trying to stop her body from shaking. She lay on her back, staring at the quiet stars, wondering when the fog would roll over her.
Her body was a prison, her mind was a prison. Her memories were a prison. The people she loved. She couldn’t get away from the hurt of them. She could leave Eric, walk out of her apartment, walk forever if she liked, but she couldn’t escape what really hurt. Tonight even the sky felt like a prison.
Kostos walked out the door of her grandparents’ house, explaining about needing to pick up a few things. Lena closed the door behind him and promptly presumed she had hallucinated the entire episode.
But a short time later he returned, carrying a leather satchel and two bags of groceries. Within minutes he was fielding phone calls, one from somebody connected to the U.S. consulate and one from the local police precinct. He seemed to know everything and everyone without her having to say a word. She wondered if she was still hallucinating.
He hung up the phone, unpacked his groceries, and made her a plate of scrambled eggs and toast with sweet tea. She sat across the little kitchen table from him and ate. It had been so long since she’d put food in her mouth it felt strange, as though her tongue had forgotten how to taste and her teeth how to chew. She took a break in the middle and rested her chin on her hand. It was oddly exhausting, eating.
She considered his face, more in pieces than as a whole. She couldn’t take it all together. There were those emotions down there, and though she couldn’t quite feel them, they were strong and she feared them. It was like watching a thunderhead from high up in a plane, and though you weren’t under it, you knew how it would feel if you were. You knew you’d have to land eventually.
His cheekbones, his nose, and his jaw were more prominent than she remembered. His principal expressions had become etched into his face—the eye crinkles from laughter, concern, and maybe near-sightedness, the subtle lines around his mouth. She watched the lines shift and move when he talked.
He had yesterday’s whiskers, lightened by sparkles of silver. You are older, she thought. But this was her Kostos, the man she remembered, not the man from the magazines. Could there be two of him? She had the remote idea of looking at his hand for a ring. He didn’t have one on the marriage finger, but he did have a silver one on the middle finger. She didn’t know what signified what in Greece or in London, and she couldn’t follow her own thoughts.
“How strange this is,” she said quietly, to him, her eggs, herself.
I figure I basically am a
ghost.
I think we all are.
—John Astin
Dear Dad,
I appreciate you calling all those times and I’m sorry I haven’t called back. That was a really nice note you sent. I know you want to be there for the burial, but Alice says please wait and come to the memorial service in the spring. I know you want to help, and I really appreciate it. I’ll call you when I get back to New York, or maybe I can come down to Charleston for a visit sometime. So, anyway, thanks a lot, Dad, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Love,
Carmen
Carmen stared at the email for a long time without pressing send. She lay in her old bed, her old bed in her mother’s big new house, and in a strange way she felt like she and her dad were slowly switching places.
She remembered how frustrated she used to be with him for avoiding her sadness, blandly saying things like suffering made you stronger and hard knocks were for the best. In the old days she’d wanted most of all to share something important with him, to be brought closer to him by it. Now he was ready to acknowledge her grief, to show her the way, and she didn’t want any of it. Who was the avoider now? She couldn’t take his grief and she couldn’t take her own.
She glanced down at the email icon on her phone. It showed there were five new messages, and she saw in them a couple of minutes of salvation. She recognized in herself the familiar old maneuvers: the dodge, the stall, the float-above-it-all. She recognized them from having watched him. And in his plaintive offerings she recognized an old self of hers who tried harder to be brave.
“Do you want to sleep?” Kostos asked Lena as she yawned over her tea.
“If I could, I would,” she said.
He had an open and sympathetic face. He always had—even when he was crushing her hopes most brutally. “You lie down on the couch and I’ll answer the phone or the door. I’ll watch over everything.”
I’ll watch over the sadness for you, he seemed to be saying. I’ll watch over the worry and the big, dark questions so you can get a little rest.
“Thank you. I’ll try,” she said. She lay down, her hands under her head, and he gave her a wool blanket. He spread it over her as though it were his house, not hers. And it was his more than hers. He’d been spending time in this house his whole life, and she had only come four times, always to lose things—her heart, her grandfather, her pants, Tibby, and along with Tibby her sense of comfort that she understood anything about the world or ever had. He touched her anklebone by mistake.
He sat in the green upholstered chair across from her. She watched him carefully, openly, as he got up and retrieved his bag from the other side of the room and took out his newspaper. She forgot that she was supposed to be sleeping and that it was a weird thing to do.
He put his feet up on the coffee table and glanced at her. She closed her eyes, but they didn’t want to stay shut. Her lids felt not heavy but rubbery and light, and perhaps too short to even cover her eyeballs. Strange.
She turned over to face the couch instead. Maybe her eyelids had become short because she wanted to look at him. She gazed at the pattern of the couch for a while—green, blue, yellow, ochre, garnet-red hydrangea puffs that didn’t really look at all like hydrangea puffs but like a fantastically druggy impression of them. This was a couch that wouldn’t go with any painting.
And then she started to wonder what would happen to this couch. This would be one of the things her father wouldn’t know what to do with. She pictured it sitting out on the winding street, waiting for someone to claim it, the harsh island sun picking out every sign of wear.
She pictured her grandparents buying it. She imagined the boxy furniture store in Fira in about 1972, her grandmother effusive over the colors and her grandfather with his sweet face and nothing to say. She pictured how the couch would look in her studio apartment in Providence. It wouldn’t fit. She’d have to get rid of her bed. It was a thought.
When she flipped back over she discovered that Kostos’s newspaper had drifted to his lap, his head had drifted backward, and his eyelids had closed. With wide-open eyes she watched him sleep. I guess I can watch over you, she thought. The sight of his sleeping self seemed almost like a feast offered to her eyes, both inviting and overwhelming. She had hungry eyes, even now. The thing that always held her back was that she hated being caught looking. And now she could look all she wanted. For a time, his face belonged not to the important world, but to her.
She did a strange thing, which was she got a sketchbook and charcoal from her bag. Those two
items lived permanently in her bag, but she hadn’t gotten them out and used them in a long time. Kostos slept quietly and she drew his face, full as it was of dramas she could barely remember right now. Even if your brain didn’t understand anything, your eyes could still see. Even if you were high above, looking down on the thunderhead and not yet getting pummeled by it, you could still draw. That felt like a saving grace.
When he opened his eyes it took him a few seconds to come back to her. A look of apology materialized on his face. He had wanted to watch over her. He really had meant to, but the sadness and the worry were like unruly children, very difficult to babysit.
Kostos talked on the phone in her grandparents’ kitchen and Lena sat by the window and looked out at a small segment of the street and the house a few yards across it. She could have gone upstairs and given herself the whole magnificent expanse of the Caldera, but sometimes a close view was all a person could handle.
She listened to his voice. It had been electrifying in the past, but it lulled her now. For some reason her mind strayed to an image of her hyperactive cousin who needed a stimulant to calm down.
Kostos was, as she’d known he would be, the perfect person for this burden. He was already the trusted friend of the guy at the consulate, the go-to man for the last loose ends at the precinct. At some point she realized he’d switched from English to Greek, but she hadn’t noticed right away because she hadn’t stopped understanding.
Lena thought for a moment of Eudoxia. I did call him after all, she thought sadly.
Kostos was quiet for a while, and when she went to check on him, he’d taken apart the kitchen faucet to fix the drip. She watched him for a few minutes from the doorway, forgetting to be self-conscious and that he might be.
“Nobody’s taken care of this house for a long time,” she said.
