For some reason I took a slightly different path up. I stopped to take a piss and suddenly was hit with a wretched smell. Something organic, rotting.
I looked up ahead and in the thicket I saw a dead goat, as if it had slipped and fallen. There were many wild goats on the island, so many that sometimes they stopped traffic. Other times they managed to hike down to the steep cliffs over the water, near the monastery, and couldn’t find their way back up. You might see them from a boat and wonder how they ever made it there in the first place. Often they died there. But after the fires earlier this year, on this end of the island, nothing would grow back with the goats roaming around, so people were encouraged to shoot them. The logical solution of a crazy person. I didn’t love the idea of armed men roaming the island in cars and pickup trucks, looking for animals to kill.
But the goat did not seem to have been shot. Maybe a broken leg. It unsettled me.
When I got to the car I leaned up against the hatchback a moment. From the small cooler in the back of the car I retrieved a lemon Fanta, still cold, and sucked it down. Then I drove back to the village, left my car in the lot, and began the walk back to my father’s. I bought two cheese pies at the bakery at the village’s entrance, and this is where I ran into a distressed Mira. She was sitting on a bench, drinking a juice. Her hair was damp and combed straight, close to her head. She wore cutoff shorts and a tank top. She was not flirtatious. She didn’t bother with pleasantries but asked if I’d seen Nefeli. I hadn’t. She’d just checked my father’s house and Aris’s father’s too. “I need to find her. Will you take me?” She held up a small bakery bag, saying she’d bought Nefeli her favorite cookies. She looked dazed as she offered me one, and for more than a brief moment I convinced myself I had imagined the previous night. Or worse: that it had been a mistake.
At my car, Mira crawled into the passenger seat as if crawling into a bed. After a while, she sat up straight and braided her damp hair, which was already beginning to dry in waves. I tried to make conversation, if only to ease the tension I felt coming from her, but she was distracted, staring out the window. We drove the rest of that winding road in silence.
19
Mira
When we neared the cabin, which I never would have found on my own, up several unmarked winding roads, the Captain parked next to a large shrub and we walked the rest of the way quietly, side by side. Even had I known how to find it, the Fiat would never have made it. Then I followed him up the steps leading to the cottage, which was smaller than I remembered, an old stone shepherd’s dwelling, endless terraced hills in the background, a large patio off the side. Nefeli had painted the doors and wooden shutters bright blue, and on the three white steps leading to the house were those stenciled blue scorpions. “Hello?” we said. The Captain pushed open the door, and I felt a powerful sense of déjà vu.
But she was not there. The clouds had cleared and the bright haze hurt my eyes, which met the Captain’s briefly. The dreamlike night had offered a thin barrier, one that didn’t exist in sunlight, and it seemed inconceivable that only hours ago I had wrapped my legs around his body. I looked away, and we walked in, taking in the space.
Bees swarmed everywhere, in and out of the open window of the cottage, around the door, in her kitchen where she’d left a sticky jar of honey on the table. I covered my hand with the striped dish towel that hung on the wall and placed it outside, away from the house. On the patio there was an easel but nothing on it. Behind the cottage was a small herb garden, plots of flowers. I mentioned my surprise that Nefeli was interested in gardening, and the Captain told me his father often tended to them.
Back inside, I surveyed the place. The stone walls were painted white, and built into them were little cove-like shelves, which housed a small camp stove, a duffel bag, a few notebooks. There were two green wooden chairs covered with embroidered pillows, several bottles of water, a cold cup of coffee, an oily film on the top. In another little cove were two double beds, flowered sheets. I flopped down on one and looked out the window at a spectacular view of the terraced hills, the sea visible in the far distance. I didn’t realize she had this view.
The Captain watched me carefully. “You okay?” he asked. I shrugged and told him yes. He studied my face a moment. “I swear,” I added.
“Maybe she’s gone back to Athens,” he said, but I think we both knew she hadn’t.
He said he was walking down to his father’s hives and disappeared around the back of the cottage. I felt a twist in my chest. All this time, I had thought Nefeli had been performing health for me, but I knew now that she had been performing death. And her anger with me stemmed from my inability to tell the difference; my inability, or my refusal, to see the gesture for what it truly was.
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.