Honestly, We Meant Well Page 15

  She told him none of this. Instead, she repeated herself. She said, again, “Because.”

  Collapsing back onto the grass, she stared up at the windmill. There was still no breeze, but she told herself that if she focused hard enough she could will the wings to move. They didn’t, though, and it wasn’t until Christos leaned over to brush some hair from her face that she realized that she had started to cry.

  “Agape mou,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you.” He was still leaning over her, and she could smell the gum—stale peppermint—on his breath. When he kissed her, she let him, if only for a second—she wanted to see if she remembered how he felt—and then she turned her head away.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “No,” she said, “you shouldn’t have.”

  He looked up at the windmill and pulled his knees up to his chest.

  “Well,” he said. “You can’t win them all, I guess.”

  The next morning, she woke early and drove to his hotel, the Roadside Inn in Oakland. In four hours, her parents would be arriving from Washington; in twenty-four hours, she would be married. She didn’t know what she wanted to happen in the meantime—to be convinced, maybe. To hear Christos make his case, then make it again. To be reminded that, in spite of her recent decisions, there were choices she could still make. It was a rash, stupid decision, and as she merged onto the exit from the highway, she turned up the radio and cursed herself. She didn’t know what she was thinking: a day wasn’t long enough to change a life.

  She rang the bell on the front desk, and ten seconds later, when no one had appeared, she rang it again. A half-empty rack of tourism brochures stood in the lobby’s corner, along with a percolating Mr. Coffee machine. From where she stood she could smell it—weak grinds, mixed with whatever industrial bleach the cleaning staff used the night before. Next to it was a fake plant—a silk Kentia palm, its leaves a startling and perfect shade of green. She was hungry and a little hungover. Yesterday, after leaving Christos in the park, she had gone to have an early dinner alone and ended up drinking a bottle of wine. When Dean called in the evening to check in, she told him that she was expecting a call from her mother, and she needed to keep the line free. She was worried about talking to him for too long. She didn’t want him to know she was drunk.

  Turning, she prepared to ring the bell again. This time, though, a woman stopped her.

  “Twice is enough,” she said. “In fact, I heard you the first time.”

  “I’m sorry”—Sue Ellen read the woman’s name tag—“Barbara. I’m just … I’m sort of in a rush.”

  “Check-in isn’t until two.”

  “I’m not checking in. I’m looking for someone.”

  “We don’t give out room numbers without guests’ permission.”

  Barbara wore a denim shirt and a pair of burgundy corduroys. She smelled like cigarette smoke and rose perfume, and in her left hand she held a half-eaten bran muffin.

  “Maybe you can phone him for me, then.”

  “Maybe you can tell me his name.” Barbara picked up the phone and sneered. Sue Ellen saw a gash of red lipstick on her front tooth. She considered telling her, and then didn’t.

  “Christos,” she said. “Christos Papadakis.”

  Barbara set the phone down and took a bite from the muffin.

  “Mexican guy?”

  “He’s Greek.”

  Barbara wiped something from the corner of her lip—a crumb—and flicked it to the floor.

  She said, “Whatever he is, he’s not here. He left last night.”

  Eleni

  July 24 and 26

  Aegina

  At first, Sue Ellen’s stories come unpredictably and in trickles. Her past, it seems to Eleni, is like a fistful of sand: occasionally a few grains escape, slipping through cracks between her knuckles. There’s little rhyme or reason to it. A chair reminds her of a hike, while a hike calls to mind a day at the beach. Eleni does her best to indulge her, listening with an uneasy charity. She watches as Sue Ellen disappears into herself, her eyes glazing over and her lips curling into a smile. Stopping her there, at the edge of nostalgia, would be worse than impolite, she figures. It would be cruel.

  Two days after their lunch in Perdika, they stand shoulder to shoulder in the Alectrona’s kitchen preparing dinner. Eleni’s never considered herself much of a cook—tonight will be the seventh time in eighteen days that she’s made the Wrights moussaka—and so she was relieved when, earlier today, Sue Ellen asked if she might help. Now, she watches as she finishes slicing half an onion, which she stirs into a saucepan, along with cinnamon, ginger, and ground lamb. Her eyes water at the scent, and so it’s through a film of tears that she watches Sue Ellen wipe her hands on a dishtowel and reach up to unclasp her necklace.

  “It’s too long,” she says, setting it on the counter. “It gets in the way when I cook.”

  Eleni picks it up. From its chain hangs a pendant the size of a small thimble.

  “It’s pretty,” she says.

  Sue Ellen throws a pinch of allspice into the saucepan.

  “Your dad bought it for me,” she says.

  Lifting the necklace to the light, Eleni inspects the pendant more closely. There’s something on its surface, she sees—the cryptic remains of a half-erased face.

  She says, “You’re joking.”

  Sue Ellen reaches past her for a wooden spoon.

  “That surprises you?”

  “The only time my dad bought me jewelry, it was a mood ring. He let me wear it for one day before he told me to take it off because he was worried that when it turned green it was too suggestive.”

  Sue Ellen shrugs and stirs the lamb. “The gods used mortals to act out their follies,” she says. “I suspect that parents do the same with their children.”

  Eleni sets the necklace back on the counter, pooling its chain in a loose circle. Then she reaches for an eggplant, which she begins to cut into thick, meaty slices.

  “When did he give it to you?” she asks.

  Sue Ellen smiles. “The day before I left,” she says. “I was in my room packing when I heard this terrible honking coming from outside the inn. The two other guests who’d been staying there had left that morning. They were this British couple who were always complaining about not having enough ice in their drinks. God, I can still remember their faces. Anyway, I thought they might have forgotten something—they came with enough luggage to last them the whole summer, even though they were only there a week. Your grandparents weren’t there, which means it must have been Sunday; the only time they both left the inn together was when they went to church. So, the honking continues, and I start to get worried that something might actually be wrong, so I go downstairs to see what it’s all about.

  “It was your father. He was sitting on the back of this beat-up red scooter, yelling at me to get on. He hadn’t even turned off the engine. I asked him where he got it, and he told me not to worry about it. I pressed him again, and he said he borrowed it, and he’d return it before whoever owned it knew it was gone.” Here, she shakes her head. “God, we went everywhere. Souvala, Cape Tourlos, Portes. Honestly, I think we probably drove down every road on the island. When we were done we drank negronis down near the harbor, and he bought me that.”

  She sets the spoon down and picks up the necklace, wrapping the chain around her finger.

  “It’s cheap, obviously. He bought it at one of those souvenir shops that has racks and racks of worry beads. The pendant used to have a little engraving of Hermes. It’s been rubbed away, mostly, but if you look closely and sort of squint, you can still see one of his winged sandals. Either that, or it’s just a scratch.” She hands the necklace to Eleni. “Hermes was the patron and protector of travelers. Thieves and orators, too, but for your father, travelers were most important. He said he wanted me to have a safe trip.”

  “A safe trip where?”r />
  “Home, I suppose. Or wherever I was going.”

  The lamb sizzles, and Sue Ellen uses the spoon to scrape it away from the pan’s edge.

  “You can have it, if you want,” she says.

  “The necklace?”

  “Sure. Would you like to keep it?”

  Eleni looks down at it, the chain running along the lines of her palm.

  “Yes,” she says. “I actually think I would.”

  There are more memories. Sweeping pine needles from the Alectrona’s front stoop, she hears of how, on those rare afternoons when she and Christos were the only two people in the inn, they used to clear the tables from the dining room, put on records, and dance.

  Setting down the dustpan, she says, “He loved Joe Dassin.”

  Eleni angles a pile of pine needles with her broom.

  “I don’t think I know him,” she says.

  “French guy. Big in the seventies.” Sue Ellen stands and empties the pan. “Great hair, but he sang some really god-awful stuff.”

  Later, when Eleni’s heating the briki to make her afternoon coffee, Sue Ellen tells her how, on a weekend in June, she and Christos had taken a trip north, to the island of Skopelos.

  “Your grandparents shut the inn for the last two days of the Apostles’ Fast, so they let us skip town. To get there we had to take two buses and what had to have been the slowest ferry in Greece, but it was worth it. I dragged him to Agios Ioannis, this little chapel on top of a huge rock along the coast. The only way to get up or down from it is this terrifying set of steep stone stairs. On one side you’ve got the cliff’s face, and on the other side, nothing, at least back then. No rope, no guardrail—just a hundred-meter drop to the rocks. Going up, Christos was fine, but on the way back, he froze. Only way he could do it was to sit on his ass and scoot himself down, one step at a time.” Sue Ellen laughs. “He was so pissed. I don’t think he spoke to me again until dinner.”

  Eleni smiles.

  “That’s hilarious.”

  She fills two demitasses, handing one of them to Sue Ellen, then taking a scalding sip from her own. She doesn’t say what she’s really thinking: that she never knew her father was afraid of heights.

  That night, she sits at the desk in her bedroom, passing the necklace back and forth between her hands as she waits for her laptop to power up. In a week she’s scheduled to be in Athens to sign the closing documents with Lugn’s attorneys, and she needs to reserve a spot on an early ferry. Earlier today, she had invited Sue Ellen to come with her. When she mentioned that she needed to be in the city the following evening for a reception at the Hilton, Eleni promptly suggested they ride over together. Ultimately, though, Sue Ellen declined the invitation; there was some writing she intended to do that morning, so whatever ferry she took would need to be in the afternoon. Eleni smiled and, surprised by her disappointment, said she understood.

  “It’s probably for the best.” She laughed. “I always end up passing out and drooling on ferries, anyway.”

  Now she books a spot on a ten o’clock hydrofoil, which will put her in Piraeus around eleven. Once she’s finished, she brushes her teeth and crawls into bed. For the next hour, she stares at the ceiling, unable to sleep; she keeps replaying the stories she’s heard of her father. They play on loop—a supercut of Christos scooting downstairs, stealing a moped, and doing the twist in the dining room. They haunt her until they start to disappear, at which point she goes searching for them again.

  Still awake around midnight, she hauls herself back to her desk and her laptop. Tapping her fingers on each side of the screen, she thinks for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the blue light. Then she searches for images of Agios Ioannis, the church Sue Ellen and her father visited on Skopelos. The Wi-Fi is weak; it takes awhile for the results to load, though when they finally do she clicks on the most detailed photograph she can find, a panoramic shot of the site, the Aegean pressed up against the sky. She’s never been to Skopelos. Work has certainly never called her there, and when she was at the university, she preferred to take her holidays on the mainland—what’s the point of going to an island, she figured, when you’ve spent most of your life trying to get off one? Now, zooming in, she stares at the little chapel, perched atop its giant rock. She wonders if you can hear the surf when you’re that high—if the sound of the waves travels, or if it vanishes halfway up the cliff. It’s one of those questions Christos could have answered for her, she realizes, if she’d ever thought hard enough to ask. Looking closer, she’s surprised to see that there are people in the photo. She can’t tell much about them, other than that they’re there—tiny, faceless smudges on the stairs and at the chapel’s door. She picks one of them—a red dot near the cliff’s edge—and decides that it’s her father. Smoking a cigarette as he surveys a new patch of sea.

  After saving the image to her desktop, she returns to Google, this time typing in Joe Dassin, the singer Sue Ellen had mentioned. For a few minutes, she reads snippets of his biography: born in America; grew up in Europe; married twice; died during a vacation in Tahiti. Then she scrolls down further. There, toward the middle of the page, she finds a link to a video of him singing. The footage is black-and-white, and grainy; lines cut across his face as he leans into the microphone. She can’t tell what he’s saying, but even still, she’s inclined to agree with Sue Ellen: it’s soupy, maudlin music. The sort of stuff that she imagines makes French grandmothers weak in the knees. When it’s over, she says, aloud, “Jesus, Dad, this is really bad,” before reaching down and playing it again.

  * * *

  And then, two days later, she learns the rest. Sue Ellen’s fist springs open, and the memories that are left within it come pouring out.

  Early in the afternoon they ride bikes down to Aegina Marina, on the east side of the island. Sue Ellen swears there’s a market there that sells Aegina’s best sour cherries, and she wants to pick up a few jars for her son before they fly home. “They’re too sweet for me, but he’s addicted to them,” she says once they’ve left the store. “Then again, I guess cherries are better than heroin.” Afterward, they get lunch and drink two beers along the quay before beginning the ride back to the Alectrona. Ten minutes in, though, there’s a pop, followed by a fierce hiss. Sue Ellen has run over a broken bottle, and now her back tire sags, flat.

  “I’ll call Stavros,” Eleni offers, digging in her pocket for her mobile.

  Sue Ellen leans down and plucks a shard of glass from the rubber.

  “Actually,” she says, “how about we walk.”

  It’s then, in the hour that follows, that she unspools the rest of her history with Christos: a kiss and missed ferries; a wedding invitation and a botched, last-minute trip to California. Eleni is silent as she speaks, focused only on the sound of Sue Ellen’s voice and the uneven slap of the tire as it rolls over rocks and dirt. Every so often a car will pass, its driver beeping the horn and waving, and in those moments Sue Ellen stops and waves back. Then she waits, keeping quiet until the car has disappeared behind a bend or a cloud of red dust—nervous, it seems, that someone else might hear what she has to say.

  Now, as she finishes, Eleni stops walking and turns around, her left hand steadying her bike.

  “So, you were in love with him,” she says.

  Sue Ellen adjusts her backpack.

  “We were very young,” she says. “It was before he met Agatha.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. You can say you were in love with him.”

  Overhead, a warbler alights on a branch, beating its wings a few times before settling. Sue Ellen watches it, then turns to Eleni.

  “Okay,” she says. “Yes. I was in love with him. Very much so, as it turns out.”

  “And do you regret not staying with him? Or not going back with him, when he asked you to in San Francisco?”

  “That’s a very personal question.”

  “I’m sorry.” Eleni rests the bike against her hip. “We can talk about something else.”
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  Sue Ellen lifts her sunglasses and sets them on top of her head.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s just something that I’ve thought a lot about.”

  “And?”

  “And no. I don’t regret it.”

  Cicadas buzz in the brush on each side of the road. The sun, well into its descent, ducks behind a pine tree.

  “Why not?”

  Sue Ellen scratches a mosquito bite on her right ankle with her left foot. Her shoes, once white, are now caked in red soil.

  She says, “Because I couldn’t keep running away to what was behind me.”

  “But if you loved him…”

  Sue Ellen looks at her.

  “Have you ever been in love?” she asks.

  “Of course,” Eleni says, though this is a lie. She suspects she’s gotten close, one time with a classmate she used to tutor in calculus, another with a bartender who worked at an Irish pub near the university. Both affairs ended quickly—her classmate left school to work for his uncle up north; the bartender met a rich girl from Ekali and stopped calling back. A flame snuffed out as soon as the match was lit.

  “So, you know what I’m talking about, then,” Sue Ellen says. “You fall in love, but you make other plans. Life, unfortunately, is longer than a summer.”

  It’s dusk by the time they finally arrive at the Alectrona. Above them, the night’s first stars pierce a scrim of purple and blue. Sue Ellen offers to help change the bike’s flat tire, but Eleni tells her not to worry, they can take care of it tomorrow. They’re both exhausted, anyway, and she wouldn’t mind cleaning up a bit before dinner. Alone in the bathroom, she wets a washcloth and scrubs her face, watching in the mirror as her cheeks grow red and clean. Letting the faucet run, she finds herself thinking of what would have happened if Sue Ellen had stayed. It is, admittedly, a curious thing to picture—a version of the past where Christos never met Agatha and Eleni was never born. But it’s also one that’s vital and unburdened by regret. Where Christos danced, and bought cheap jewelry; where he was willing to fly halfway around the world because he had fallen madly and improbably in love.