I ran much longer than usual.
I knew I could not keep up this duality much longer, and when I returned to the house I’d tell Katerina I would go to the island but stay at my father’s during the time she was there. When she went back to Brussels, I’d stay there with the kids so they wouldn’t have to leave.
When I came home, the twins asked me how many turtles I’d seen in the park, and I lied and told them three. I hadn’t paid attention. I decided against my earlier idea. They all looked so happy. Katerina, still in her white pajamas, made pancakes. I walked to the massive refrigerator and filled my glass with ice, making a clownish show of it, acting surprised as all the ice tumbled to the floor.
Katerina looked up absentmindedly, and Ifigenia asked, “What is wrong with you?” before they realized I was trying to make them laugh.
•
The night before we left for the island, I overhead a bit of Katerina’s phone conversation with her sister Effie. They were talking about the EU, which Katerina was adamant about Greece staying in.
“Who knows what will happen without the EU,” Katerina said. “Without the euro. We go back to the drachma?”
It was clear from Katerina’s responses that Effie disagreed. So many Greeks wanted to try something new. End the suffering already.
You see? I don’t blame anyone. But in a way, I do.
I was watching television alone in the den when Katerina reappeared and said they were all going to the movies. Normally she’d have invited me to join, but we had settled quietly into a new normal: separate lives underneath one roof. She asked if I wanted her to bring me something to eat, but I said I’d be fine.
I was not used to being alone in this space; I even missed their noise. A few buildings over, someone held a party, the balcony adorned with white Moroccan lights. I thought of Morocco, leaving it, passing the Canary Islands, so bright and colorful they felt like a storybook.
On another balcony a couple kissed; nearby some small children played with trucks while an older man, their grandfather, smoked a cigarette and scrolled through his phone. A cat stared at me, wanting something. I felt uneasy, exposed, yet deeply embedded in my loneliness, its haunting presence. I missed the sea. I went back inside and turned on the television, but every channel I turned to featured people shouting at one another, or miserable. Others just showed what seemed an endless string of loud car-chase scenes. I felt anxious and turned it off.
It was only about twenty minutes after everyone had left for the movies that I grabbed my keys and was out the door, driving to the center of the city. When I pulled into my apartment building’s underground parking, I felt my insides swerve. I bought a beer from Sophia, who grinned at me as though betraying involvement in some sort of secret plot. I let myself in, walked across the old floors still wearing my shoes. I opened up the windows to the early evening.
I drank my beer on the balcony, waiting.
And waiting. I went to Sophia and bought another bottle. She was talking to the man who owned the karate place down the way, so I was able to come in and out without interrogation. I returned to my balcony. There was no telling how long I could wait, or what, really, I was waiting for. For all I knew Mira was out of town, or sleeping at a new boyfriend’s; maybe she’d decided to go to the island, too. Athens was becoming unbearably hot.
If she did show up, now, I’d have to leave anyway. Saturday-night traffic: it would take me a while to get back to Kifissia. I’d already pushed my luck. If Katerina was home with the kids before I was, I’d just tell them I went to the local taverna for dinner.
On my way out of the building I ran right into Nefeli. Though I’d attended her exhibit, I hadn’t seen her in years. I still thought of her the way she’d been when I’d been a teenager, she in her late twenties. I’d met her often in Athens with my father. There’s one time in particular that still stands out, the marks of forced exile all over her face. It was winter. Back then, her black hair was longer than any woman’s I’d ever seen, and she wore a thick white turtleneck sweater, a thick headband. All those big layers made her look tiny, fragile, but she had smiled at me, grabbed my cheek. “Does your mother know you’re out?” she asked. She’d called me “little captain” before I was even a captain, but my grandfather had also been a captain and had felt betrayed, I think, by my father’s move to politics. Perhaps I chose it, unconsciously, as a sort of atonement for the sins of my father. My father, of course, took it—took everything—as a slight.
“Have you seen our Myrto today,” she asked.
I had never heard anyone use her Greek name. “Not today,” I said. Unfortunately.
“I need something from her place,” she said. “But I have a key,” she added. She’d lived here for years, after all.
“How’s my father,” I asked. Despite having spent nearly a week on the island, I hadn’t managed to see him. Minas had assured me he was fine, staying at Nefeli’s cabin on the mountain. I had assumed he was with her, but
