Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball.
Kostos stopped near the bottom of the stairs as it slowly dawned on him who was there. He was surprised, undoubtedly. She didn’t know what else he was, because she couldn’t look any longer. She looked away.
She held out Tibby’s letter with a shaking hand, and the woman took it. “I am so sorry for disturbing you,” she said earnestly. She turned and walked down the three stairs and away from that house as fast as her numb legs would take her.
As soon as Brian had shut the door to his study at the rear of the house, Bridget embarked on her journey back through time.
It began with Bridget and Bailey staring at each other over cereal.
“Bee,” Bailey said to her. “Beebee. Beeeee. Bee.”
“Right,” Bridget said with a note of pride. “That’s me.” She hadn’t realized she had a name that fit perfectly into the mouth of a toddler.
Bailey tipped her bowl over and sent milk and Rice Krispies all over the table. She laughed.
Bridget thought of Brian’s advice. But here was another way Bailey was different from her—Bridget wouldn’t have done that.
Bridget cleaned up the mess and felt the day stretching out for a thousand years in front of her. She tried to think back. What had she liked to do?
“Let’s go outside,” she said. She lifted Bailey from her high chair and put her on the ground. She took her hand and led her out to the backyard.
The grass seemed to glow. The little forest buzzed. The world felt early and young out here, a place where none of the serious things could have happened yet.
“Oh, my gosh. You have a creek!” Bridget exclaimed.
“Creek,” Bailey repeated.
Bridget led her under the canopy of leaves to the edge of the water. It was a perfect creek, just like the one that ran through the little woods at the end of Tibby’s old street. Time passed so slowly at that place Bee couldn’t begin to calculate the number of hours they’d spent there.
“Look, you can step over it. You can walk on the stones.” She swung Bailey from one rock to another, as Bailey slipped and slid.
Bridget liked how Bailey was careful, but her balance wasn’t very good. Bridget hoped she would not pull Bailey’s small arm right out of its socket. Bailey’s eyes were large and uncertain as she looked down at the water going past her feet. Bridget wondered if she was scared.
“Again,” Bailey said as soon as they got to the other side.
“Okay,” Bridget said. They went across again, slipping and sliding. Bridget couldn’t tell from Bailey’s face whether she liked it or hated it.
“Again,” Bailey said again, and so they did.
They went back and forth and back and forth with complete solemnity until a foot went wrong and landed in the shallow flow. Bailey looked up at Bridget to see how they felt about it. Bridget smiled. “Ha! Cold!” she said.
Bailey’s serious face transformed into an expression of pure glee. “Ha!” she said. “Ha ha!”
Bridget felt her face mirroring Bailey’s. “Ha ha!”
Once they made friends with the water, they started looking for things to catch. At first it was just a stringy bug that Bridget picked up from the surface. She held it out on her palm as it wriggled. Bailey touched it in fascination. Bridget couldn’t think of a specific name for it. “Bug,” she said.
“Bug,” Bailey repeated, digging into the “g” sound, looking at Bridget as though she were a genius. It was nice to be around someone so easily impressed.
Bridget put the bug back gently. As much as she felt like a child, she realized that as a child she would have just as easily crushed it in her hand or smashed it against a rock. She never thought of the bug fitting into a larger perspective back then.
They perched on neighboring rocks, Bridget holding Bailey’s hand, and dangled their free hands in the water to sieve for crayfish. Bridget caught one and triumphantly held it up, all its little legs going.
“Big bug,” Bailey intoned carefully. There was so much motion she was timid about touching it.
“It doesn’t bite.” Bridget put Bailey’s finger on it so she could enjoy its sliminess.
“Bite,” Bailey said. She got a slightly vicious look on her face and snapped her jaws together.
“No, it doesn’t bite us. And we don’t bite it.”
Bailey thought this was funny. Or seemed to think it should be funny. She opened her mouth in a wide and somewhat fake laugh. Bridget saw she only had about eight teeth, all crowded to the front, and big spaces where the molars would go.
“Here. You can throw it back,” Bridget said. She carefully put it in Bailey’s palm. “Gentle,” Bridget said as Bailey’s fingers closed around it with a crunching sound.
“Okay, say goodbye.”
Bailey flung the disfigured, mostly dead crayfish. “Bye! Bye-bye!” she shouted gaily.
Why did you want this for me, Tib? Why did you make me do it?
Lena walked for blocks and blocks. So much for her carefully labeled map of London. She didn’t have any direction in mind and she barely looked up.
Maybe it was so Lena could finally see what was obviously true to everyone else: Kostos had moved on. He was far out of her league.
Tibby wouldn’t think of it that way, exactly, because she had always overvalued Lena. But she would want Lena to understand that it was time for her to move on too.
Lena passed unthinkingly through one neighborhood and then another.
At last she was too cold and tired to go on. She didn’t want to sit at a restaurant or drink at a bar by herself. She ducked into a supermarket that was open late.
Sightlessly she walked up and down the aisles, and eventually stood by the front window. It was dark on the street and brightly lit in the store, so she couldn’t see the outside; she saw only her forlorn reflection. She wanted to distract herself with the life on the sidewalk, but instead she saw her red dress and felt embarrassed.
There had been a fantasy. She hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, but there absolutely had been. She would wear her red dress, and Kostos would see her anew. He would see her here in London and realize he loved her again, maybe had loved her all along. He would grasp not just the letter but her. He would take her in his arms and overwhelm all of her fears and misgivings. In some way she longed to turn herself over to him, to let him take over the running of her, because she didn’t know how to do it anymore.
She’d been trying to look glamorous and magnetic, but in the context of Kostos’s home and his wife (or girlfriend or maybe fiancée), her efforts seemed pathetic. Red dress or brown, she looked like what she was: a timid cipher. She was usually good at keeping her hopes down, but even that small gift had failed her this time.
It was the time they’d spent together in Santorini that had done it to her. She’d felt so close to him; closer than she’d even known. She’d told herself she wanted nothing more from him, but it wasn’t true.
As angry as she was at herself, she realized she had some anger left over for Kostos too.
“Can I help you?” a young woman behind a register asked her.
Lena turned her head to stare at her and remembered where she was.
“No. Thank you. Sorry,” she said with her head down. She went back outside to the cold and resumed her walking.
She thought maybe if she walked long enough she might eventually pass into Brixton, but now she had the sad feeling that there was no way to get there from here.
She remembered back almost ten years ago to her moonlit walk up the hill in Oia to meet him in their special olive grove.
“Someday,” he’d said to her in Greek. She hadn’t been able to speak Greek at all then, and it had taken her great effort to figure out what the word meant.
The word had seemed like a precious gift at the t
ime, a keepsake or an inheritance. She’d tucked it away and treasured it accordingly, waiting for the right time to cash it in.
Waiting and waiting. That was her thing. The word gave her an excuse to wait and do little else. The word wasn’t so much a gift as a terminal virus with a long period of latency.
In her heart she thought he had meant it, but of course he hadn’t. She remembered other parts of that long-ago conversation word for word. He’d asked her if she loved somebody else and she’d said, “I don’t know if I can.” And in return he’d said, “I know I can’t.”
She had been pretending she’d more or less forgotten the whole episode, but she hadn’t. She had still been a teenager at the time, he not much older, and that gave everybody an automatic out, didn’t it?
No, it didn’t. Not in her lockbox of a heart. I know I can’t. She’d held on to that declaration as if it were a signed affidavit.
And yet it was total crap. She thought of the beautiful, scornful woman in the black dress. Oh, yes, you can, Lena thought.
People said things they didn’t mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn’t? Why did she imagine that the world didn’t change, when it did?
Maybe because she didn’t change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same.
I was ador’d once too.
—William Shakespeare