There are no secrets. Everybody knows everything.
Everything is a lie, Kazantzidis sang.
The waiter cleared our plates, returned with a small platter of nectarines and berries.
“Myrto,” the novelist said, hesitating over his first bite. “Have you seen Nefeli?”
I told him that since her show had opened, even before the vandalism, our visits had felt fragmented—Nefeli’s moods had been more erratic than usual, and she often announced suddenly that she had to go or had another appointment, some changes to make at the museum or work to do at her studio. She was working on new paintings but forbade us to see them.
“I invited her for lunch last week,” I said, “but she didn’t respond.”
“She’s on the island,” he said. So she had been here. Nefeli was a hard person to pin down, as if she moved quickly through portals.
“Listen,” he said, after a pause. “I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise to pretend you do not know.” I gestured for him to go on. He reached over and took my hands in his. “Nefeli is not well.”
“Not well how?” I asked. He must have known about the stealing, the rapid changes in mood. I told him that without her pre-show adrenaline her mood had dimmed considerably.
“Around you she wants to pretend she’s fine,” he said.
I could feel that sharp twist in my guts again. It was true that Nefeli had grown distant, but I was used to the way we’d sometimes talk three times per day and other times she’d disappear for weeks into the labyrinthine space of her work, her mind. I knew she once had stayed with the novelist in the village, but in the past few years she’d converted an old shepherd’s cottage into a small studio and now stayed there. Though I wouldn’t be able to find it again, she’d brought me there once: it was charming and spartan and isolated, with a solar panel and rain barrel, a garden sprawling out back. “I want to die here,” she’d said then, a disconcerting line that now felt alarming.
“She wants to imagine herself as a woman who is not sick. And that by doing so, she might become well.” I recalled something the Captain had said: From the moment I imagine something, it’s a reality. It may only be in my mind, but a reality all the same.
The novelist told me the details, though I sensed he knew even more than he was letting on. She’d been fighting a long time, trying all sorts of alternative treatments, including scorpion venom. I felt sick, thinking of the way a woman like Nefeli—independent, unconventional, rejecting tradition and societal norms—seemed forever due, at least here, in this country, to be punished.
Despite all the wine, I left the village soberer than I’d been in days.
•
The next morning I drove to my favorite beach, one you could reach only on foot from the road or by walking over the rocks and through the water from the adjacent cove. It was on the north end of the island, about fifteen kilometers from the mountain village. The road was so bumpy I thought the Fiat would just snap undone, all sides clattering to the ground.
I hiked down the familiar goat path and noticed something new at the end of the beach: a four-post bed in the small area of shade. The absurdity soothed me. Otherwise I was alone and was filled by the rush of this, no one knowing where I was.
I stripped down to my bikini bottoms, took a few steps into the water, and could feel myself opening up. What was the source of this near-spiritual ecstasy? The sense of being on the border of earth and sea? Or something primordial, the way fish crawled out of the ocean to live on land, the way we might wish for gills or almost feel the sprouting of wings from our shoulder blades?
The water was freezing, and I wasn’t quite ready for it, so I lay down atop the blanket. The sun was warm on my back. I fell into a heavy nap and dreamt of Nefeli, waking unsettled. I sent her a text but I had no service and it didn’t go through.
After noon, the day grew warm. From my bag I retrieved the apricots and cherries I’d purchased from the vendor at the side of the road, the cheese pie. I drank half the bottle of water and flipped to my front. I drifted in and out of sleep, and when I stood up I noticed an older woman on the bed, dressed in a black housedress, also asleep, her body curled up beneath a blanket, her back to me. I hadn’t heard or seen her arrive. When I walked closer I could hear her snoring.
I swam and swam, back and forth, back and forth, a quick, measured freestyle going nowhere, between the two capes that enclosed the cove. Then I decided to swim farther, to see how far I could go, to see if I could reach the rock out in the distance. In high school I had been a swimmer, and it felt good to channel all the power of my body into measured, strong strokes: one two three four five breathe, one two three four five breathe.
I grew tired soon enough, wondering what had gotten into me. Finally, I flipped onto my back and whipped my goggles off my face, letting them dangle in my hand. I floated, trying not to move, and let the salty sea gently prop me up. No one knows where I am. I looked up and could still, though barely, see the bed on the shore, smaller now in the distance, rising and falling with the gentle undulations of the waves. I had the strange feeling of seeing my strokes from above, as
