Heavy sleep. Shadow dreams of Greek school. Morning rehearsals of a performance, cider and donuts, the only reason I liked to go. All the children were asked to come up to the stage, but I kept eating my French cruller, quite happily, and looking over at my mother, smiling at all the kids swarming to the front. Somehow I did not think I was one of them, and my mother waved me to go too, and I was alarmed. I climbed onto the stage, now my older self, walked past the children, and slipped through the heavy velvet curtain, which led me to my balcony, where the Captain waited for me.
15
Mira
When I came to Athens for my parents’ burial I didn’t make it to the island. Despite the shock of winter green, the bleak wind and stillness would have been too much. Now, my first trip back, the ferry moved through the mist like a phantom voyage. But within an hour the weather had cleared and I sat on the top deck, my face to the sun. For a short while I forgot myself and felt content.
Then, as the first island began to appear on the horizon, I felt a returning creep of dread. Six months earlier my parents were still alive. Five months earlier I’d still been with Aris, wandering through his Plaka apartment in a daze, comforted by his presence, his tenderness then. Eva would have already been pregnant. What had he told her? An old friend had come to stay? His girlfriend, in fact, but no, the timing was wrong for telling her?
From the island port, it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the house. On the way was a small parking lot, and only then did I notice my parents’ old flat-nosed Fiat. My mother drove that car all around the island, my father in the passenger seat, chatting. Most of the time, I realize only now, she was probably drunk, or well on her way.
To return to a place again and again is to confront the sneaky passing of time. Here I am at fifteen, at twenty-five, at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine. What of those earlier selves is left in me?
Our narrow street was deserted. I pulled my suitcase up the steep incline and climbed the stairs to our red front door. I don’t know why, but I knocked. When I was a child I used to come to our own door and ask, in Greek, if the American girl could come out to play, and I think there was a part of me that hoped I would appear from the inside of the house, my own double. Now I hesitated under the stone archway, fumbled for the key, and let myself in.
What always hit me the hardest was the smell: the wool of the rugs that hung on the walls, the white flokati on the tile floor. When the place hadn’t been aired out it smelled slightly of mold, which held a comforting familiarity, though Kyria Voula, who cared for me when I was a child, must have recently been by because the windows were open.
I opened drawers and cupboards. Whereas the flat in Athens had been mostly stripped of my parents, save for those few reminders, a few things in the storage closet, the memory of the rooftop, they were everywhere here. In the top-left cabinet I found the briki—my father only drank Greek coffee, and luckily there were plenty of places near our home in Chicago to indulge his particularly endearing snobbery—and the water glasses, the small blue tumblers for juice. On the other side stood the whiskey glasses, and behind them the plastic cups I used as a child. The other cupboard held my father’s various bottles of tsipouro and behind them my mother’s arsenal: vodka, bourbon, gin.
As I waited for coffee to boil, I opened the linen closet and put my face to a soft white pillowcase dotted with small blue flowers. Behind the clean towels I noticed some glass and retrieved an almost-empty whiskey bottle, as if my mother had told herself that if she didn’t polish it off, she had barely had any at all.
I don’t know why I thought I’d be alone in this house. I texted Nefeli, wondering if she were here, but got no response. Part of the reason I’d come to the island was to look for her. And partly because my apartment had felt so empty without my nightly conversations with the Captain.
Soon I collapsed onto my small double bed and didn’t move for an hour, exhausted from all the grief that seemed to exponentially compound with each new event, each new addition. I wanted to empty myself of it.
I took a fresh towel from the closet and unwrapped an olive oil soap. In the mirror I saw the pattern from the woven blanket imprinted in my cheek. I forgot to first turn on the hot-water heater, so I froze in the shower. Still, after, I felt a bit better, though the weight of all those physical reminders of loss had exhausted me.
Everything leaves its mark.
Fortunately, by then, it was night.
•
The next day I drove to have lunch with Aris’s father, the novelist, who lived in the mountain village at the top of the island. I had been first introduced to him as “the novelist” and it’s how I, and many others, still referred to him. We’d had a friendship prior to the one I’d had with Aris, from back when I was writing my dissertation. So it didn’t strike me as particularly strange that he’d
