“What’s going to happen to it?”
“My father says he’s going to sell it. But that will require him coming here and putting it in order and sorting through all the old things.”
He nodded. “I hate to think of this house belonging to anyone else.” When he’d finished reassembling the faucet he looked up. “You could do it.”
“Do what?”
“Get the house fixed up.”
“I could?”
He nodded. “I could help you.”
The storm cloud crackled below her. She blinked away tears. “But I have to go back.”
“Why?”
It wasn’t even that she was scared. Maybe she would have stayed. She looked at him in the eyes. “The burial.”
His face was pained. “Oh.” He nodded slowly. “Of course. When?”
“Tomorrow. I go back tomorrow. The burial is the next day. Thursday.” She was still of no mind to keep track of the days, but she remembered how Alice Rollins kept saying Thursday. In her mind Thursday had nothing to do with Tibby, but it was one of the few fixed points on her horizon.
He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He wrung out the sponge in the sink and began wiping down the counters.
She went to the bathroom to wash her face and blow her nose, and when she came back, Kostos, star financier, was taking apart the hinges of the back door that would no longer open.
Bridget’s body was in pure revolt and her mind had nothing further to say about it. It had nothing to say about anything. She thought nothing, had nothing, belonged to nothing, owned nothing. Except her bike.
She went back the second day to retrieve it, when she was sure Eric would be at work. She wondered for the miles she walked back to the apartment how she would get it without the key to unlock the door to the garage. That was where she’d stored her bike the day she’d left for Greece.
She felt a pang. She’d been so happy at that moment right before Greece, imagining that her life would be coming together, not falling apart. She pushed the memory away.
Eric kept the garage key on his key chain. Bridget barely ever used it. She never used the car and preferred to lock her bike on the front porch for quick access. Could she jimmy the lock? Could she climb through a window? She was remarkably good at both of those things.
But when she got there, she found the garage door swung open, almost as if Eric had left it that way for her. There was her bike in the corner.
Her mind stayed mostly quiet, and it was better that way. She wheeled her bike out and all the way to Sixteenth Street before she got on. She wasn’t as glad to see it as she’d thought she would be. It didn’t feel so much like it was hers. The silk flowers looked stupid. She didn’t know why she had ever liked them.
She rode up through Pacific Heights, punishing her restless muscles on the most precipitous hills, and then down to the Presidio. She turned north and stopped at Fort Point long enough to unwind the flowers from her bars and basket. She stood on a wall and threw the silk flowers into the greedy water. It could have those too.
Kostos thought maybe a walk would help, and Lena thought maybe he was right. Maybe she would be better at moving than staying still.
When she stepped out the front door the sunshine was so strong her shoulders stooped under the force of it. She squinted and blinked, trying to adjust her eyes and her pores to the onslaught.
She glanced down the road to Kostos’s grandparents’ house. She was still slightly afraid of them from the time she’d made a spectacle of herself the first summer. It was many years ago, granted, but she had an acute memory for her mistakes. She’d imagined she would at least stop by and say hello. She’d imagined she would talk with Rena a little about her grandmother. She’d even packed a little gift for them, and a note from her mother. But then, early that first morning, all previous notions had been scattered or obliterated.
“Are you staying with them?” she asked, gesturing to the house. It was so close, she remembered thinking that first summer, that if she’d tripped and rolled, and the Dounases’ door happened to be open, she would have rolled right into the living room of Kostos’s house.
“No. I always see them when I come, but I have my own place.”
She tried to picture it. “You still have the apartment in Fira?” she asked. She remembered that when he’d been married to Mariana, that was where they had lived.
He looked puzzled at first, and then seemed to realize what place she meant. “No, no.” His expression told her it would have been impossible for her to be more wrong. “A few years ago I bought a place opposite Oia, overlooking the Caldera.”
“Your own house?”
He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “A weekend house. A vacation house.”
“Can you go on vacation at home?”
That didn’t assuage his discomfort. She backed off. She hadn’t meant to ask him any of those stupid questions.
They walked up the hill instead of down. It didn’t matter; either way was fraught.
As they climbed she talked to herself rather than to him. She chastised herself for her dim-witted confusion—thinking he still lived with his grandparents, forgetting who he actually was now. It was because she couldn’t contemplate having the will or the means to buy a house for yourself—especially not in a place you weren’t even living. Lena barely had the courage or cash to buy a toaster oven. What small amount of money she had she spent on rent and food. Even when she managed to stash away some savings, she tended not to acquire or accumulate anything besides photos, keepsakes, and sketchbooks. That was normal for college students, especially art students, and for people who refused to let time move forward.
But Kostos was long past that. He was over thirty years old. He had a hugely powerful job. He’d been on the cover of a magazine, for God’s sake. Lena had trapped herself in time, but only in her delicate delusions was he trapped there too.
Going uphill was fraught because at the top of the hill, on the plateau, was the little grove they’d shared in a variety of moods, including shame, lust, betrayal, and forgiveness. If he led her there, she was worried she might find herself down in the heart of the storm.
But he didn’t. Instead he led her to a parched stretch of rock, and they sat on a precipice overlooking the water.
This was the view she’d been avoiding, and as her eyes blurred into the blue horizon she understood why. Something moved in her brain, maybe something opened or something shut. The horizon wobbled and spread and the tears rolled over her cheeks. Her breath caught and her shoulders shook.
She found her head tipping against his shoulder and vaguely she felt his arm come around her. The water seemed to dissolve her. Maybe it was the salt in her tears melting her, turning her inside out like a slug. She didn’t fight it. She couldn’t have anyway.
She remembered crying like this in Bee’s arms, and it had been over Kostos. She remembered crying like this in her mother’s arms a different time, and it was also over Kostos. And now here were Kostos’s arms around her as she cried over Tibby and their whole lost life.
Who would have imagined that he, the source of all fret, would turn out to be a source of comfort? She’d built him up so far and high, it was hard to imagine he was right here with her at such a time. It seemed like a hallucination, but not one to be poked at or questioned, so she let it be.
She cried for a long time. Or so she guessed by the changing of the light. Kostos was a patient man. It was his nature, as true to him as his polite manners, his guilt, his oversized accountability. The guilt was for her.
She’d cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn’t feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just … empty. It felt like she was an outline, empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing. Tibby was too deeply incorporated within her for Lena to go on without her.
“I lose
everything here,” she said.
He couldn’t really know what she meant, but he thought it over carefully nonetheless.
“Maybe you gain things too,” he said.
“Maybe I do,” she said. She considered that and shook her head. “Nothing I get to keep.”
Bridget indulged one of her old desires. Sometime around midnight—she wasn’t sure what time it was anymore—she locked her bike to a lamppost and unrolled her sleeping bag on a bench in Dolores Park. She stretched out on her back, her head resting on her pack, and looked up through the branches of a familiar tree to the disjointed pieces of the sky.
She tried to lie low, not to alert her friends, because they might tell Eric—the Tall Mexican in the Suit, as they referred to him—and he would worry about her descending immediately into homelessness. But she discovered as it got later and colder that though this group talked up sleeping outside, most of them seemed to get absorbed into nearby churches and shelters long before dawn. In the darkest hours it got very quiet.
She was nearly asleep when she felt something nearby. She opened her eyes and saw nothing, so she closed them again. A few more minutes passed and her breathing evened out. And then suddenly there was a shadow over her face and she felt her pack pulled from under her head.
There was one benefit to having a body so charged with agony and adrenaline. She got her hands on her pack almost instantaneously and yanked it back.
Her eyes took a little longer to adjust. It was a man with a knit hat and a beard.
“Get off my pack,” she growled at him.
“I’ve got a knife,” he said menacingly.