They say when you’ve experienced intolerable pain, an intense injury, your body becomes oversensitized. Even taking a shower can feel painful on your skin. I imagine it’s the same with emotional pain, with rejection, with grief, both the way it can reemerge and the things we do to shield ourselves from it. I placed the small bag of cookies on the little table, sat down on the bed, my head in my hands.
Soon, from outside the cottage, I heard the Captain calling to me, but when I tried to answer, my voice cracked. No sound would emerge. I heard him come inside.
“Mira?”
“Yeah,” I said, finally. I was still on the bed, head propped in my hands, looking out the window.
“One of the hives has been knocked over,” he said.
“I think we should go,” I said.
The drive back to the village I barely registered, so immersed was I in replaying moments from the night before, from hours before, from Nefeli’s cottage and the world framed from her bedroom window, all blazing white like the marble quarry, like the bright, low moon. When we returned to the village, the Captain looked first to the sky, which had cleared, though the dark clouds still hung over the other end of the island, near the port. Then he looked back to me. I walked to my car, across the lot, thanking him for his help. He urged me to stay the night. “Please don’t drive back to the port. Rest awhile.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “She’s gone.”
We did not hug or kiss goodbye, but he placed one hand on my shoulder and the other along my waist and told me to be careful, to get some rest. I was confused but also relieved to not have to talk about what had happened between us, to just have let it happen, to let it be. Things did not feel much different, as if we’d always had this world between us, a large, airy house overlooking the sea, a space we had entered through different doors to find each other sitting underneath a large bay window reading the paper, or at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, our bodies drawing naturally together. I was not sure how I felt about it myself. Somehow it seemed inevitable. Yet perhaps my feelings were colored by my worry about Nefeli, because I felt the sense of an ending, though an ending of what, I wasn’t sure.
I was distraught by impermanence, by lack of solidity. I am fugitive, I am nothing. I couldn’t get it out of my head, as if someone else were telling it to me. You are nothing. Whose are you? You belong to no one. I drove back to the port quickly, the old Fiat shaking from the speed, held together only by salt.
It never rained after all, the dark clouds raging across the sky but emptying elsewhere. It would not rain again for a long time.
•
I went back to Athens again. I boarded the ferry, and after the ship had pulled away I stood on the top deck until I could no longer see the island, not even a trace. Despite my mood, the sea was soothing in its vastness, the idea that water was connecting me to places around the world: ships and beaches and shores. The history of this island was a history of glaciers and the history of glaciers is a history of life.
I was not nothing.
At the ship’s concession stand I bought a beer and some potato chips. I sat back on the top deck, in the setting sun. I remember the fading light. Nearby, a man in wire-rimmed glasses and a thick sweater sat reading a contemporary Greek writer, a book about two lovers in an e-mail exchange. He caught me looking at him and smiled, inviting me to sit, but I declined. I thought of course of the Captain, those long routes in the Pacific, when he was younger, that he had told me about. His resistance to staying in one place.
While my parents were alive I felt a subconscious but powerful force that would not allow me to relocate to Greece, that somehow moving to the land they had left to give themselves, and me, what they saw as a better life, would be a betrayal. I could see my mother standing on the roof, her hands on her hips: We sacrifice so much so you can end up back here? Each time I returned I left pieces of my history around the city. A suitcase of things at Aris’s. What I’ve left in taxicabs alone could fill the shelves of my apartment: a bottle of wine and a mobile phone and several books and bags of gifts; books everywhere, really—on the metro, in a café, in a rented flat; scarves in tavernas and T-shirts and bathing suits in island hotel rooms. A bag of clothes in a rented apartment, a bottle of shampoo, a stack of postcards. A journal, almost filled, the worst and most embarrassing loss of all.
Yet I think they knew my work and my heart would take me back here for good. My father was already retired and my mother nearly so. They had saved the way only a certain generation of immigrants can save, they had stashed cash not only in banks and in this apartment, but all over the house. After their deaths I had found it everywhere. And that spacious brick home in Chicago was worth an exorbitant amount, more than they had ever dreamed, but I had been reluctant to sell it. Now it seemed to belong to another world.
•
Back in Athens, I looked carefully at Nefeli’s paintings, the ones I hadn’t yet displayed. One depicted the back of a woman, long black hair, sitting in a chair
