16
Mira
That evening, after my afternoon at the sea, I was anxious, buzzing, unable to sit still. I tidied up, went through a few things, found a few books I’d wanted to read. Kyria Voula, whom I had not yet seen but who seemed to appear when I wasn’t around, had left a bowl of strawberries on the table, and a small ceramic pot of homemade yogurt in the fridge, which I ate. She’d taken down my laundry and folded it on my bed. I would remember to leave her some money. I texted Dimitra to call me, then went out for a walk.
The port was crowded. At the far end, passengers boarded the ferry. I ate a souvlaki on a bench, looking out at the small sailboats, the fishing vessels, the larger, more elegant crafts whose owners either stood in front, proud and admiring, or were nowhere to be found. I was gripped by loneliness.
Of course Nefeli was ill. How had I not known, or, more accurately, how could I not have admitted it to myself? I’d attributed it all to depression alone, as if the mind were not part of the body. The stealing, the small rages, the gray pallor and the darkness below her eyes. From that very first outing to the beach when I’d arrived: it was all there, in plain sight.
From the distance I could hear music. Singing, a coo of voices, minor keys: humming? Low registers and high ones, harmonies that intensified and retreated, growing quiet for a moment. At first I thought it was coming from one of the docked sailboats, some beautiful and eerie nautical choir. I looked around to see if anyone else heard it; it was so subtle I thought I was going mad. One second it would sound like praise and the other like lament, from keening to joy, taunting me like impish angels.
I glanced around, wished I could share the moment with someone, if for no other reason than to confirm it. People walked by in twos and threes, couples holding hands, families, groups of loud teenagers. Nobody seemed to hear it.
That’s when I noticed him, the Captain. His face was brown with sun, his shirt was pressed, his hair seemed longer, messy, and he hadn’t shaved in probably a few days. I almost didn’t recognize him, but the entire effect was quite lovely. I so rarely looked at his face. Only a glimpse here and there: over the balcony, a sun-drenched moment on the roof, a walk from the market on the street behind our building.
“Mira,” he said. “Mira away from Athens.” He took a seat on the far end of the bench.
“Please tell me you hear that,” I said. I could feel his glance. I raised my hand over my eyes to turn toward him in the flush of sunset. The sound, like a rush of urgent human voices. For the longest time he was quiet, and I wondered if I had spoken or just thought I had spoken.
“It’s the wind moving through the sails.” He said a few other boat terms I didn’t understand, which he repeated in English, as though that might help: the rigging and the halyards. For some reason sea sickness hadn’t come to me until I was a teenager, despite the fact that children are more susceptible to it, but without question, for me to get on a sailboat is to spend it sick and leaning over the edge, just like my mother, forever wondering why I’d thought that particular time might be different.
“The sails?” I asked.
“Yes. Call them the sails.”
I couldn’t explain the knot in my throat. I was afraid if I didn’t concentrate on the sound hard enough it would fade. “I could listen to this all night,” I said. I felt embarrassed and hoped all the emotion didn’t show in my face. But who was I kidding. I was transparent. All that from wind—like sirens, like sea nymphs.
We listened. He glanced over his shoulder. Maybe he was waiting for his family. A few times I could see he went to speak but something stopped him, like a wall drawing down, blocking the words. It was the strangest feeling. I was going to ask him if he was okay, something I might do on the balcony, but here it felt too intimate. For a brief moment our hands touched, but neither of us pulled away. He folded his hand over mine.
After a few minutes, he removed his hand, stood, and turned away as casually as he would have stepped back through the door of his apartment, and continued walking down the promenade. I walked in the other direction along the port, past the ferries and up the hill. I stopped at the small, scraggly beach at the end of town, where a young woman kicked a soccer ball around with her dog. There was a small fishing boat, moored in the sand, half in sea, half on land, its bottom flat and sinking as if it might belong there, might be best suited to that position.
I don’t know why I felt so moved. I wished he’d sat with me longer, or that we’d taken a walk, but at the time I couldn’t find any words. As odd as it sounds, it was the first time we’d conversed in public. Perhaps I was afraid to disrupt that speculative space we had created for ourselves, my contingent freedom from my body. We had been constructing a fiction that had nothing to do with our individual realities. Yet something was happening there. An emergence.
17
Mira
When the novelist called three days later to tell me that Nefeli had shown up at his house and was now staying in the guest room, the implication of his call was clear. I wanted to see her but because I knew something I was not supposed to know, I hesitated. That Nefeli wanted me to pretend I knew nothing made the deception trickier and obligatory and multilayered and exhausting. Her behavior was intense self-preservation: perform it, believe it, make it so.
When I arrived in the village, Nefeli was in the small daybed, reading. I didn’t ask why she wasn’t staying in her cottage on the hill, though had I not known she was sick I would have. Or why she wasn’t staying in the private guest studio, where I usually stayed, but in the large back room of the main house that the novelist usually used as a study. The entire room was sparsely furnished in a way that made it feel even larger than it was. Now the space had been taken over by paintings, lining the entire perimeter of the room, backs facing out to hide their subjects. I could smell the reek of acrylic and thinner.
She looked up, irritated, as if she’d been expecting me and I was late. I asked her how she was, and she said she was fine. She got out of bed and shuffled to the straight-backed chair next to the window. Beside it was a desk draped in a white sheet, covered with brushes and tubes of paint, small glass jars of what I assumed was solvent, sketch pads and pencils and drawing paper.
I was in a loose sundress and sweating from the walk up into the village, but she was in flannel pajamas. I was supposed to pretend all this was normal for her at three in the afternoon, to be crippled by pain, to have her face permanently cringed. To not have responded to any of our messages. When I’d seen her last, after all, listening to the cicadas, it had felt like a goodbye.
Now she was here in front of me but something felt off, as if this woman were only a shadow of Nefeli, a projection, an image beamed in from somewhere else. I touched her shoulder gently, and she eyed me strangely.
“I ran out of space up there,” she said, waving first in the direction of her cottage and then to the paintings. She walked to the nightstand, poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher and drank it in one motion. “Do you want something to drink?” she asked, gasping.
I felt as though I were choking. “Everyone’s been worried.”
“Let them dye their hair pink, orange, green,” Nefeli said, “if they want to express themselves. Let them stand outside the metro with a megaphone and take a selfie. Look at them all, with their tattoos and piercings and strange clothing. Who cares.”