The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (31 page)

Though his grandparents were among the first to hug and kiss Valia, Kostos waited until almost the very end. The sky had clouded over darkly and the churchyard had emptied by the time he approached, with the blond woman still at his side.

Awkwardly Kostos hugged Grandma, but they said nothing to each other. The blond woman timidly pecked Grandma on the cheek. Lena stared at this unfamiliar woman, and she stared back at Lena. Lena waited for some sort of greeting or introduction, but it didn’t come. Grandma’s mouth made a straight line across her face. Lena felt confused, and slightly panicked at the strangeness on all sides.

The priest, who had hovered kindly throughout the proceedings, seemed to sense the social breakdown. He knew enough English to want to facilitate.

“Kostos, you must know Valia’s son and daughter-in-law from America.” He gestured toward Lena’s parents standing a few feet away. “And Valia’s granddaughter?” He gestured from Kostos to Lena and back again. “Lena, do you know Kostos and his new bride?”

Bride.

The word flew around Lena’s ears like a mosquito, diving and threatening before it bit her. And then it bit her.

She looked at Kostos, and finally, he looked at her. His face was all different. As his eyes met hers, knowing and seeing her at last, her vision began to fuzz at the edges.

Lena sank down to the ground. She put her forehead to her knees. She was vaguely aware of her mother’s worried hands on her back. Dimly she felt Kostos’s alarm as he broke his stiff posture to reach for her. Lena’s basic human instinct made her hang on to consciousness, even though it would have been a blessed relief to let it go.

The bedroom was not big enough to contain her anguish. The house was not big enough. Lena wondered, as she stepped quietly out of the house and started up the darkening road, whether the sky would be able to hold it.

She walked barefoot up the dusty road, not sure of her destination until she got up to the top, to the wide, flat expanse that spread from cliff to cliff. Numbly she set herself in the direction of the little olive grove. It was a place she and Kostos had shared, but she felt sure he had since abandoned it, as he had abandoned everything that was theirs, including her. There were many pointy, spiny things sticking into the bottoms of her tender, suburban feet, but that was okay with her.

When she got to the grove, she hovered by the little olives as though they were her long-lost children. She stepped over the rocks and sat by the side of the pond, much diminished since last summer. The whole island was drier and yellower than it had been then.

This was the place where it had all started. It seemed ceremonial to wash her sore feet and make her good-byes here too.

She thought she’d be finishing it alone, but she heard the crackle of footsteps behind her. Her heart leaped, but not because she thought it was a criminal or a wild boar. She knew who it would be.

He sat next to her, rolled up his funeral pants, and put his feet in the water next to hers.

“You’re married,” she said, flat and numb.

She clamped her jaw before she allowed herself to look at him. He was obviously pained and embarrassed and sorry and blah blah blah. So what.

“She’s pregnant,” he said.

Lena had been prepared to be remote and unmoved, but he had managed to ruin that for her too.

She gaped at him with giant eyes.

He nodded. “Her name is Mariana, and I went out with her three times after you broke up with me. The second time I had sex with her.”

Lena winced.

“I am a stupid bastard.”

She had never heard him sound bitter like this before. She stared at him quietly. She didn’t have very much to add to that.

“She is pregnant and I am at fault. So I am taking responsibility.”

“Do you know it is . . .” She had trouble finishing the sentence. “. . . yours?”

He looked at her levelly. “This is not America. This is an old-fashioned place. This is what a gentleman does.”

She remembered when he’d used that word with her. She couldn’t help feeling, somewhat discordantly, that his efforts at being a gentleman were not adding to the overall happiness in his life.

Slowly, looking at the water, Lena tried to reassemble the last few weeks, knowing all this.

“Will you go back to London with her?”

He shook his head. “Not for now. We’ll stay here.”

Lena knew what a blow that was to him. He wanted to get off the island and make a life for himself in a bigger place connected to the bigger world. She knew he had always dreamed of that.

“Do you live together?” she asked.

“Not yet. She is looking for a place in Fira.”

“Do you love her?” Lena asked.

Kostos looked at her. He closed his eyes for a minute or two. “I could never imagine feeling about anyone the way I feel about you.” He opened his eyes to see her. “But I’ll do what I can.”

Lena was going to cry soon. She knew she couldn’t keep this up for long. The reality was catching up fast, hard on her heels, gripping her wrists. She wanted to get away from him before it happened.

She got up to leave, but he took hold of her hands and pulled her to him. With a stifled cry he crowded her to his chest with both arms around her, his mouth on her hair, his breathing rough.

“Lena, if I’ve broken your heart, I’ve broken my own a thousand times worse.” She could hear that he was crying, but she didn’t want to look. “I would do anything I could to change this, but I can’t see a way out.”

She let out an orphan sob, a small release as she struggled to hold the rest of it back.

“I’ll let myself say this now, and not again. It goes against the commitment I made, but Lena, I have to tell you this. Everything I ever said to you was true and is true. I didn’t lie. It’s truer and bigger and more powerful than you’ll ever know. Remember what I said.”

His voice was desperate. He clutched her, almost too roughly. “You will go along, I know you will. And I will spend my whole life not having you.”

She needed to get away. She pulled herself away from him and hid her face.

“I love you. I’ll never stop,” he promised, just as he had done a few weeks before on the sidewalk outside her house.

That time it had been a treasure. This time it was a curse.

She turned and she ran.

Tibby agreed to get a pedicure. She had never pegged herself as a pedicure kind of girl, but her mother had wanted her to come, and it was hard to hate a free foot massage. Plus, as they sat side by side with their feet swirling in miniature Jacuzzis, Tibby realized this was the longest time she’d spent with her mom all summer long. Maybe that was the idea here. Maybe you had to tag along sometimes to get what you needed.

Her mother chose dark red for her toenails. Tibby chose clear. But then she changed her mind and chose dark red too.

“Sweetie, I wanted to show you something,” her mom said, pulling an envelope out of her purse.

She unfolded the letter, handwritten on thick, fancy paper. “It’s from Ari.”

Tibby winced. She thought of Lena, of course, and she also thought of the whole stupid blowup.

“It made me cry,” Alice said, seeming to summon up a bit of wetness in the eyes to demonstrate. Tibby could tell it wasn’t a sad kind of crying.

“Before they left for Greece, she wrote the dearest apology for the whole mess. She’s a sweet person. She always has been.” Alice’s face seemed to grow sentimental, and Tibby suddenly felt sentimental too.

“I remember when you and Ari used to play tennis on Wednesdays against Marly and Christina, and you always took turns winning.”

Alice laughed. “We did not take turns,” she said.

“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” Tibby said, knowing it wasn’t.

She remembered the four Septembers as little girls, playing for hours every Wednesday afternoon at the crummy playground on Broadbranch Road next to the public court while their mothers whacked the ball around. It had about two pieces of climbing equipment, as Tibby recalled. The Good Humor man had always stopped his truck there, and their mothers had almost always let them get ice cream bars.

“I wonder if she still plays?” Alice said more to the air than to Tibby. “Anyway.” She took the envelope out of her purse. “Here’s what I wanted to show you.” She passed Tibby a three-by-five color photograph.

“Ohhhh.”
Tibby held it and studied it, letting the pleasure warm her all the way down to her dark red toenails. “I love this,” she said. “Can I please, please have it?”

There was a serious, actually fatal, infection called endocarditis, which was an inflammation of the heart. Lena’s great-grandmother had died of it as a young woman, and Lena was pretty sure she had it.

Lena lay in bed deep into the morning, monitoring the ache and the swell.

Sometime around lunch, her mother tiptoed into the room, took off her heels, and crawled into bed with Lena. She was still wearing her navy silk suit. Lena’s resistance evaporated. She felt herself slip back to being a three-year-old as her mother put her arms around her and pulled her protectively to her chest. Lena smelled her unique, powerful, mother smell, and she melted away. She cried and she shook and her nose ran disgustingly as her mother stroked her hair and wiped her face. Lena might have even fallen asleep for a while, strangely enough. She left off being a conscious creature altogether.

Her mother was as patient as the earth. She didn’t say one thing until the light had changed in the room and the pink of late day crept in the window. When her mother sat up a little more in the bed, Lena noticed she’d gotten snot on her mother’s best outfit.

“Would it be okay with you if I told you a little bit about Eugene?” her mother asked very softly.

Lena sat up a little too, and nodded. She’d cared so much about Eugene early in the summer, and now she could hardly remember why.

Ari fiddled with her rings for a while before she started talking—her wedding ring, her diamond engagement ring, her fifteen-year-anniversary emerald. “I met him in church in Athens when I was seventeen, and I fell madly in love.”

Lena nodded again.

“He went to America to go to college—to American University. Right near home.”

Lena nodded.

“I stayed in Athens. For four years I ached every day and every night we were apart. I felt like I only lived those few weeks of the year when we were together.”

Lena nodded again. She understood this.

“When I was twenty-one, after university in Athens, I moved to America to be with him. My mother forbade me, and she was furious when I went. I waited tables and I waited for Eugene. He was busy with his life and finishing up school. I was willing to take any part of him that he would give me.”

Her mother looked upward and thought about that for a while.

“He asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes. He gave me a ring with a tiny pearl, and I cherished it like it was a religious icon. We lived together like we were already married. If my mother had known that, she would have died. Three months later, Eugene left suddenly and went back to Greece.”

“Mmmm,” Lena hummed in sympathy.

“His father had cut off the money and told Eugene he’d better come home and put his expensive education to some kind of use. I didn’t actually know that at the time.”

Lena nodded.

“For a year I longed for him miserably. He kept saying he would come back next month and next month and next. I lived in an ugly one-room apartment over a pet store on Wisconsin Avenue. I was as poor and lonely as could be. And, God, the place really stank. So many times I wanted to go home. But I thought Eugene would come back to me, that we would be married like he’d promised. And of course I didn’t want to prove my mother right.”

Lena nodded yet again. She could understand how that might be.

“I enrolled in graduate school at Catholic University that autumn. The first day of classes, I got a call from my sister. She told me the thing that everybody else knew and had known for weeks. Eugene had met another girl. He had no plans to come back to me.”

Lena’s chin quivered in overwhelming empathy. “Poor you,” she murmured.

“I dropped out of school the very first day. I took to my bed.”

Lena nodded solemnly. That sounded very practical to her. “Then what?”

“I had a truly good-hearted advisor at graduate school. She called me at home. She made me come back.”

“And then?” Lena had a feeling they were about to get to the part of the story she knew.

“On Thanksgiving I met your father. We were the two confused, countryless Greeks eating alone at Howard Johnson’s.”

Lena smiled. She knew this part. The often-told story of her parents’ first meeting, as it arose in this context, felt as dear to her as an old sweater. “And you got married four months later.”

“We did.”

And yet, Lena’s parents’ famous whirlwind meeting and marriage had a different, darker shading now that Lena knew all the facts.

“But unfortunately it wasn’t the end of Eugene.”

“Oh.” Lena sensed that this was where it got tricky.

Her mother seemed to consider her strategy for a minute or two. Finally she said, “Lena, I will explain this to you as a nearly seventeen-year-old young woman and not as a daughter. That is, if you want me to.”

Lena wanted that infinitely, but she also didn’t. The wanting prevailed. She nodded.

Ari let out a breath. “I thought about Eugene often in the early years of my marriage. I loved your father, but I distrusted that love.” She rubbed her finger over the top of her lip, gazing into hazy middle distance. “I felt ashamed of the hasty rebound, I guess. I believed our union was connected to Eugene and tainted by him. I was afraid I had transferred my feelings from Eugene to your father out of emotional necessity.”

Lena’s head felt heavy as she nodded. Her mother was trained in psychology, and sometimes it showed.

“When you were almost one, Eugene called me from New York. It was the first time I had heard his voice in four years. It sent me into a tailspin.”

Lena was starting to get nervous about where this was going.