As soon as she’d gotten home they’d wanted to know everything that had happened with Kostos, and she’d told them. But she hadn’t yet figured out how to tell them how she felt about what had happened.
She crawled into bed early. She half listened to the laughter downstairs coming from Bee and Carmen and Valia. She heard Tibby talking to a series of international operators, trying to reach Brian on her cell phone.
Lena’s head was so full she expected she would toss and turn for hours, but instead, she fell asleep almost immediately. And then she woke up with a jolt. She felt there had been a dream, but it receded too quickly for her to grab even a string of it.
She heard Carmen’s slow breathing beside her. The particular look of Carmen’s sleeping face reminded her of a hundred other nights, a hundred sleepovers through the years. Here, in Greece, it made her feel happy. So often the world was made of jumps and starts, but tonight it was round and continuous.
She looked out the window and saw the proud full moon hanging over the Caldera, seeming to enjoy its own perfect reflection below. She knew what Kostos had meant.
She spent another minute looking at the moon, and suddenly she really knew what Kostos had meant.
She crept out of bed gingerly so as not to wake Carmen. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a faded green T-shirt. She brushed her hair and padded on soft toes out of the house.
Who knew what time it was? Who knew if he’d be there or when he’d be there? But her big feet had faith as they pulled her up the hill.
He was there. Maybe he’d been there for hours; she couldn’t know. He stood up to greet her, happy, not surprised. He needed to look at her face for only a second to know it was okay to hold her.
She cried in his arms. They weren’t sad tears at all, just ones that needed to get out. She cried in his shirt. She cried for her Pants. He held her as tight as he could without crushing her.
She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.
The neat leaves wrinkled under the moon. The pond made slapping, watery noises. It felt so good to be right here. These were arms that felt unlike other arms.
“Do you think you can ever forgive me?” he asked her. There was no demand in his voice. She felt like she could answer yes or no and he wouldn’t hug her less.
“Maybe,” she said faintly. “I think maybe so.”
“Do you love someone else?” he asked. It was important to him, clearly, but he let it float.
“I tried,” she said. “I don’t know if I can.” She talked to his chest.
She could feel him nod on her head. She could feel his relief in the way his body found more surfaces to connect to hers.
“I know I can’t,” he said.
She nodded at his chest. They stayed like that for a while. She realized the sun was already pushing up light at the farthest edge of the sea. It was later than she thought. Or earlier.
He unbound himself from her slowly, regretfully.
She felt cold air replace all the parts he’d been touching. Before he broke away he put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her, strong and sturdy and full of lust. It was a new kind of kiss. It was grown up and decisive. She knew without thinking how to kiss him back the same way.
The last thing he said to her was something in Greek. He said it with emphasis, as though she would know what he meant, but of course she didn’t.
And all the way down the hill as the sun rose, carelessly extending itself into the privacy of her night, she tried to remember the word.
Was it one word? Two words? A phrase? It was five syllables, she thought. It was, wasn’t it? She tried to remember each of them, chanting them over and over as a mantra all the way down the hill.
First thing inside the house she wrote it down with a pencil on a piece of lined paper in her grandmother’s kitchen.
She wrote it out phonetically. What else could she do? She didn’t know the Greek alphabet well enough to try the right way. She was unsure of how to represent the vowel sounds.
Why did he say it like that? Like he knew exactly what he was talking about and like she would understand?
Arg. He always left her with a problem.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked her grandmother when she came down the stairs, sticking the piece of paper two inches from Valia’s nose. Lena wasn’t quite as private as she used to be.
Valia scrunched up her already wrinkly eyes. “Vhat is this supposed to be?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m hoping you can tell me. It’s Greek.”
Grandma was nonplussed. “You call this Greek?”
Lena breathed impatiently. “Grandma, can you try?”
Valia made a martyrish fuss over finding her glasses. She squinted at the paper some more. “Lena, love, how do I know vhat this means?” she said finally.
While her friends got out of bed and dressed and took over the kitchen, making omelets out of everything edible in the room, Lena sat at the table in the middle of the action with her nose in the Greek-English dictionary.
“What are you doing?” Tibby finally asked.
“I’ll tell you when I know,” she said.
They put on bikinis and sundresses and packed straw bags and Lena followed them down to the beach with her face still in the dictionary. She tripped over a cobblestone and skinned her knee like a baby. Like a baby, she felt she might cry.
“What is with you?” Carmen asked.
“She’ll tell us when she knows,” Tibby said with a note of protection in her voice.
Lena was so preoccupied she got a sunburn on her back. She kept diligently at her dictionary when her friends went to get ice cream. She tried every spelling. Every grouping of letters until at last, with the sun at the top of the sky, she figured it out. Or at least, she believed she did.
“” was what Kostos had said. It meant “Someday.”
And so she did understand.
On the sixth day in Santorini, Lena tracked Effie down by phone at their aunt and uncle’s house in Athens.
“Effie, it’s me,” she said. She made her voice gentle. She knew Effie was afraid to talk to her.
“Did you find them?” Effie practically exploded.
“No.”
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Oh, no.” She heard Effie turn instantly snuffling and teary. As mad as she’d been, Lena realized she didn’t want Effie to feel this way. “Oh, no,” Effie said again.
“I know.”
“Since you called, I thought maybe you found them,” Effie said, sniffling. She probably believed Lena would be too angry to call otherwise.
“I called because I wanted to tell you…it’s okay.” Lena wasn’t sure what she was going to say until it was out.
Effie blew her nose loudly.
“It’s going to be okay,” Lena said again. “Okay? I know you didn’t mean for it to happen. I know you tried your hardest to find them.”
Effie shuddered a sob.
“It’s okay, Ef. I love you.”
For the longest time Effie was crying too hard to say anything back, so Lena waited patiently until she was done.
On the seventh day in Santorini, they swam for hours in the Caldera, floating with their bellies pointing to the sky. It seemed to Carmen they were putting off having to touch their feet to the earth again. The earth turned and time passed and then they would have to think about what it meant. But the hour did come, as all hours do.
“I don’t think we can stay here much longer,” Lena said, sitting on the sand and watching the sun go. She was the one who had to say it.
Carmen looked at her shriveled fingertips. She pressed them to her mouth.
They had been so busy with their Pants-finding attempts the first few days, but after that, bit by bit, they’d talked about the Pants less, expected less, done a little less. They’d relaxed into their long aimless stretches of talking and eating and thinking and
walking and wondering about things together.
Although the overarching fact of the matter was sad, there had not been a moment since Carmen had arrived here that she’d suffered. It felt too good to be together. There was too much joy in it, so long needed and so long overdue.
Rather, Carmen had felt an ever-growing awe at the wisdom of the Pants for knowing how to bring them together. For knowing that absence is sometimes more powerful than presence.
“I wish we could stay here forever,” Carmen said.
“I do too,” Bee said.
They didn’t want to leave without the Pants, Carmen knew. The Pants were here, in a way. Even if they were lost, they were all around them.
“I think we might have lost the Pants a while ago,” Tibby said, pressing her hands into the sand, her face abstracted. “I mean, I think we lost the idea of them. They came to us to keep us together, and I think we were using them to help us stay apart.”
Carmen thought about this. “Right. It was like we had the Pants, so it was okay if we didn’t see each other.”
“I think that’s true,” Lena said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“We counted on them too much,” Bee said. “Or maybe we counted on them in the wrong way.”
Without thinking, they moved around to form a loose circle, like they did at Gilda’s. Today there were no Pants, just them.
“They taught us how to be separate people, but we learned a little too well,” Carmen said.
“We should have put them away during the school year,” Tibby suggested.