Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

She pulled on her pack even harder. She didn’t care if he had a knife. Let him have a knife. Let him kill her with his knife. That would be fine, but he wasn’t taking her stuff.

She was up on her feet, towering. She was taller than he was and a lot angrier. She’d given nearly everything she had to the people in this park, but she’d done it on her own terms. She wouldn’t do it on his.

With more strength than she knew she possessed she wrenched the pack out of his hands. He came at her, trying to tackle her, but she was balanced and strong. She clutched her pack in one arm and with the other punched him as hard as she could in the jaw. It hurt her hand, but it hurt his jaw too, she knew. In surprise he put his hand to his face and she punched him again in the ear.

If he had a knife, she never saw it. He turned and walked away. He seemed to know she was crazier than he was. She was tempted to follow him and hit him again. He might have been a felon or a junkie, but he had more to live for than she did.

“Fuck off,” she spat at him.

Her hand hurt. She hugged her pack. She didn’t want to give anything away anymore.

Lena and Kostos sat on the couch that night. First they were sitting up on opposite ends, then they turned to each other, she cross-legged. His nice shoes came off, and eventually, as it got late, they each leaned back, symmetrically resting on pillows propped against the arms of the couch, their knees bent and feet not quite touching. The conversation flowed and stopped and started as it would, a third thing in the room, not quite controlled by either of them, but mostly benevolent.

She began to doze off, and when she woke she realized she’d stretched out her legs and he’d taken her large feet on his lap. They were not her best part.

“Do you have any idea how much that letter meant?” she found herself asking him. It must have tied in with a dream she’d been having. She wondered why she said it, unguarded as it was, and not connected to anything. But why not say it? What was there to hold on to anymore? This was her hallucination and she could say what she wanted in it.

He held her feet. He was puzzled. “What letter?”

What letter. Was there any other letter? God, how small her life had become. It was probably one of five he had written that week. She took a breath. “The letter you wrote to me after Valia died.”

He nodded. “I loved her like she was my own grandmother. I walk up this street and I miss her every time.”

“She loved you too. You know that. She was so proud of you. She felt like everybody abandoned this place. We all made homes in other places, and you, the hero of Oia, always came back.”

He shrugged and shook his head. There was almost no blaming with him. “Everybody leaves here. Except the tourists. The Germans. They stay.”

She smiled. It was probably a smile. “I couldn’t understand my own feelings about Valia until I read your letter, and then I could.”

“That makes me glad to know,” he said. He considered, his eyes down. “I disappointed her, though.”

“Valia?”

“Yes.”

“Impossible.”

“I did.”

“In what way?”

His face had turned inward and complicated, and she found herself unsure about wanting to follow him in. He rarely paused to search for words as he was doing now. He glanced down and then looked up at her. He smiled, but not easily. “I didn’t marry her granddaughter.”

Lena’s caution seemed to slow her thoughts—she could almost watch them going by like words on a very slow ticker tape. Kostos didn’t marry Valia’s granddaughter. Lena was Valia’s granddaughter—one of her granddaughters, most likely the one he meant. Kostos didn’t marry her, was what he meant. Kostos was supposed to marry her, Lena, and he hadn’t.

Lena looked up at him in alarm. She hadn’t thought he would ever say that out loud. She was too far gone to process the impact of these words and also too far gone to make any attempt to hide from them.

No, he hadn’t married her, had he? He had married somebody else. He had divorced somebody else. He had gone on with his life, clearly not held back by any of it. You couldn’t let a grumpy grandmother—somebody else’s grumpy grandmother—tell you whom to marry.

Kostos’s eyes were cast slightly down, but not focused on anything. She sensed he was looking at Valia in his mind’s eye. “Before she died she asked me why. And I couldn’t explain it to her satisfaction, but I told her I loved you, and she said, ‘What good does that do me?’ ”

Kostos looked up, refocusing his eyes on Lena.

He smiled, trying to lighten the mood, but her face was stricken, she knew. She didn’t have the wherewithal to compose it in another way.

He looked regretful, sorry for her. “It was all a long time ago.”

She didn’t know what to say. She gaped at him like a gutted fish.

“So much has changed since then,” he added quickly. He didn’t want her dangling on the hook.

She nodded. She couldn’t seem to speak. She sat up and withdrew her feet.

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” he said.

Lena wanted to say so many things. She wanted to close this abyss, to cover it graciously, to make him feel okay, cross over it carefully, to get to the other side and keep on walking.

She also wanted to dive into it and ask him whether his love was only in the past tense anymore. A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hair-ball of feelings and she couldn’t pull forth any one strand.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “You don’t have to say anything.”

He got up off the couch and went into the kitchen. Lena hugged her knees. She wondered if she was having a stroke, if the entire speaking apparatus of her brain had flooded and shut down.

He came back with a loaf of bread and cheese, two apples, and a bottle of red wine. He carefully sliced the bread, cut into an apple. He poured the wine, letting the strange air in the room begin to settle back toward normal.

She held the glass and balanced a plate on her knees. “Thank you,” she choked out.

He lifted his glass. “To friendship,” he said.

She nodded and lifted her glass in return. She worked on a smile. Even that would help.

They chewed and sipped in silenc

e for a few minutes.

“You know what I’d like to do?” he said.

She shook her head.

“I’d like to write you a letter about Tibby. I’d like to write something that could help, I really would.” He looked almost tearful. “But I don’t know what it would say.”

She was moved by the sympathy in his face. It took her a while to pick her words. “I don’t know what it would say either.”

He nodded. His face expressed something like defeat, and she hated for him to feel that way. He’d spoken to three local bureaucrats on her behalf. He’d fixed her eggs and tea, bread and wine. He’d repaired the kitchen faucet and the back door, and had even cleaned out the cabinets when she wasn’t looking. He’d lain with her for hours on the couch. He’d held her feet.

Who knew why? Who knew what—other than guilt and a sense of responsibility toward Valia—made him do it? But strange as it was, Kostos, her customary causer of sadness, had given her enormous comfort.

She swallowed the bread she was chewing and cleared her throat. “Your being here is kind of like the letter,” she said.

Lena could hear the wind outside late that night. It sounded like the beginnings of a storm. She could almost feel the anticipation of it on her skin.

It was well after midnight, and she had expected that at some point Kostos would go back to his alleged vacation house, which she knew had to offer accommodations more comfortable than her grandparents’ old couch. But he didn’t. He lay with her, or mostly with her feet, sipping wine, occasionally talking, and eventually dozing.

Tonight we make strange bedfellows, she thought. Her loss, his guilt. Her insecurity, his good manners. Usually these things kept them apart, but tonight they brought them together.

Was there an attraction anymore? There had been, fiercely, before. But she was too distant from herself, too sad and empty and confused to know anymore. What, besides sympathy, did he feel for her now? He was large and dashing and glamorous, moving through time with ease, where she felt stunted and small and stuck, a stick figure of pity with large feet.

She could imagine how it seemed to him. If you couldn’t bring yourself to marry the sad granddaughter, you could at least take pity on her.