White Vespa

Sixty-seven



28 Sept.





Since Jim’s visit, I find that I am waiting. I seem to have been turned forward, but nothing has begun. Outwardly, my days are little changed. I walk. I eat, read, go to town and come home again. But it’s not the same. The clouds are different. They were there before but blew across the island; now they just hang, suspended, between worlds. Some days I walk goat trails out along the lip of the volcano to sit under a tree, just looking. The caldera feels full to me. I study its fullness. I am visited by the occasional hawk, riding the thermals welling up from the floor of the crater. Down there, dust devils swirl, touching down on the sulfurous earth, reaching up a yellow cone to blue heaven. I blow the spores off a dandelion and they float away, wishes, in no hurry to get anywhere.

Or I trail the Vespa down to a lonely bit of shore, on a spur out beyond Páli, to Líes, a protected cove at the end of the track. The water is warm but in a different way. It has remembered winter. These days hang between seasons. I wade in, the sand rippled like corduroy under my toes. Deeper. And I feel my body lightening up. Then I’m weightless, and I breathe the salt air deep into my glowing lungs. I am floating now, between mediums, the air pressing down, the water pressing up, and the sun shot all through it. My ears fill with sea water and my breath, my blood, are all I hear. I am waiting for something to begin.

I dream of fish, weightless, the beautiful silver domes of jellyfish, the rhythm of their pulsing, the skimming blue of flying fish, of dolphins, a seahorse, hanging in consciousness like an unanswered question.





Sixty-eight



2 Oct.





The day started with bread, or the thought of it. Even in bed, I began to hunger. I’d pulled a sheet up over my eyes, wanting to sleep again, to float away on the light breeze that trailed from window to window. But it was already late, and before I could find my way back to sleep I smelled bread, or imagined the smell of fresh bread, and the goodness of that smell got me out of bed. There would be fresh bread in the bakeries of Mandhráki, on the square or in that bakery run by brothers, off the paraléia, overlooking the restless sea. I wanted something fresh and heavy, dense and chewy. I wanted it deep in butter and honey. So I pulled on my loose slacks and cinched my heavy belt tight to hold them up. I pulled on a rumpled white T-shirt and consulted the mirror. The news was not good, but I wanted bread, the smell of bread, so I slicked my hair back with tap water, stepped into my sandals, and went out the door.

The Vespa, I noticed, was no longer very white, but khaki, the color of dust, and I swiped at the seat and got on, picking my way down the alley to the pavement. You can see bits of several switchbacks from Emborió, and I braked to a stop when I saw someone walking up way down below, someone in a loose, green skirt and a black T-shirt, carrying a day pack. The hair was wrong, but I knew that stride. My hands felt weak on the grips and my arms suddenly very cool inside. I hesitated. I eased off the brakes and started down, braking often, going slow. I wanted to be ready or ready to be wrong. But I couldn’t get myself to think or to feel. Should I have felt elated, furious? It was as if my head, my heart, had been swept out, clean and empty. I dropped through the terraces, in and out of shadow and sun, air, a bird flying in it, two choughs in a tree, one cawing, his body heaving the sound up. Every hairpin turn brought up a new prospect, dizzying, and it should all have been familiar but was not. Another turn and there she was, standing still, head cocked, listening to the familiar rattle of the Vespa’s muffler, eyes wide, and, I think, a little afraid. Her fear disarmed me. I pulled right up next to her, stopping, face to face.

“Take a picture of a girl, mister?” She said, a forced smile fading on her lips.

“So,” I tried to say something but all I could do was lean into her. I could feel her shuddering against me.

“I,” she began, and I could feel her pulse pounding in her chest. She twitched, and I ran my hands over her back and shoulders, gently, trying to steady her and wanting to touch her. But her breath came ragged when she spoke.

“I couldn’t stay dead. I thought I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

I just held on, could not speak. I wanted to say, maybe what needed to die did die, what wanted to live, lives. But all I could do was hold her a little tighter, and finally, say her name. “Anne.” Just Anne.

“I’m back,” she said, her voice throaty and broken.

“Then get on.”

And she did.





Things went in motion again. Clouds streamed over the island. Birds rattled by, going with the wind. The Vespa made the landscape rush, olive trees bent and blurred, the sere grasses yellow and blown back. A herd of goats scrambled away from the road, one pied goat leaping like an ibex from terrace to terrace. Anne pressed her cheek against my back and her arms roped around my waist, with me again in a flowing world.

The Vespa reared a little in the steep, cobbled alley, and the sound of the engine bounded back and forth between the close walls. At my gate I shut it down. Anne didn’t move.

“Well?”

“So this is it?” Her voice came low, muted, from behind my back.

I nodded, but she made no move to get off, held on.

“What are you doing?”

“Smelling you.”





“I didn’t know this was here.” We were looking into the crater, sitting high up, on a rock wall a little beyond the last house of Emborió. “Or not here,” she added quietly.

“Must have been a little mountain there before,” I gestured where I imagined it had been. “But it was always a volcano.”

“I remember when Mt. St. Helens surprised us out in Washington state. One day it looked like Fuji, the next day it didn’t. Something like this. So much of what was there just gone.” Then she fell silent.

I didn’t know what to say. I gazed at the terraces, at Emborió and Nikiá, where people had built again, right on the lip of the caldera. They must have looked straight into the throat of the volcano and said, Nevertheless.





“After the farce at Paul’s place I just couldn’t stay. I . . .

I told her to let it go, but she’d come to speak.

“I wanted to put an end to it, to me, at least the idiot who thought, what? Getting even was possible? But I was still trying, thinking somehow my phony death would drive a stake in his heart. Fat chance.” She shook her head, then stuttered, “So I got help, Lisa, from upstairs at Two Stories. She walked by on the track above the beach. In a big wig. She was carrying a sack with a wad of money in it and a pair of tennis shoes, a dress and a big straw hat, and a ferry ticket for Rhodes. Her walking by was the sign that the play should begin. You got up to swim, and, of course, I got up, too. By the time we were wading out Lisa was coming back from the next little beach where she’d left the bag. She saw you put your glasses down and—I don’t know why—she just walked over and picked them up. That was her part.”

“Then, I went back in about an hour before the ferry was scheduled to depart. I can swim a long way underwater. When I came up for air I was almost around the point. When I got out, I found Lisa’s bag, dressed, took the inland trail back to Yialós, boarded the Sými I, and that was it. I was gone. As long as I was acting I was all right. I didn’t think about anything. Not about you, not about us, not about what might come after. I just went through with it.”

I threw a rock out over the crater, watched it fall. It hit with a sharp crack and I saw motion in the shade of a tree, two terraces down, goats, swinging their heads to check it out.

“Then I wasn’t all right,” she said. “I saw it all differently. I remembered my hands white on Paul’s belt as he pulled on the rope, Pie going up. And I looked at my hands on the rail in front of me, and I saw that I was still clutching at Paul’s belt, that I was still that girl who hadn’t known how to save her horse or to save herself.

“On Rhodes, I couldn’t keep that thought away,” Anne whispered. “I kept asking myself. What have I sacrificed for?” Anne wept. “I couldn’t even begin to think what I’d sacrificed, Myles. What of mine, what of yours.

“In the end, I had to find out. I got back to Sými the day before yesterday. I told them it was all one big mistake, how sorry I was to have caused them so much trouble. They were too relieved to ask many questions. So happy to see me alive! They treated me like the resurrected.

“Paniyótis told me you were here.”





Now, as I write this, she’s sleeping on the roof, under a ceiling of stars. Short, red hair, cut like a boy’s, but it’s Anne. It doesn’t feel like a miracle, or, now, even surprising. The tide was out, it came back in again. Here, the birds fly off to Africa, but they come back. It feels like that, as if, even grieving, I’d been expecting her all along. Maybe all our losses are sown with hope. We wander in the wreckage, not quite believing it, something in us faithful to what we had before. Still yearning. It shouldn’t have taken Anne’s coming back for me to know that that yearning is for something real, not just an absence, but a presence as real as can be. Max is lost but palpably here, and Bryn, while I live, still here with me.





Her pack was full of bread and cheese and olives. Eel-slender cucumbers and heavy, red tomatoes. Onions. Garlic. Glittering green oil in a small, fat bottle. Spices folded in newspaper cones. A bottle of Kourtáke retsina. A bottle of black wine. A sack of sweet figs, ripe and splitting their seams. A small, yellow melon, dressed in green stripes.

“Offerings,” she said, “please.”

“Does that mean we won’t be eating them?”

“You don’t want to eat them?” Anne’s face suddenly flooded with light, something young and happy played across it, her lips alive with quivering life. “Don’t you?”

I must have been lost in looking, her face fringed in flaming hair.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“I hunger,” I stammered out at last, “I thirst.”