Carmen had always wanted to be important. But she didn"t want to be this important.
Lena was clean. Her hair was washed. She smelled fine.
When Kostos walked in the door she tried to keep her head from falling off.
She watched him, as though in a dream, as he greeted her father. She watched him kiss her mother on both cheeks. She watched him hug Effie. She watched him not hug her but shake her hand instead. As he was shaking it, she felt that her hand was several hundred degrees below zero.
She watched him speak Greek to her parents, maybe even tell a joke, because her parents both laughed and beamed at him like he was a superhero and a comedian all rolled into one.
Lena wished she could speak Greek. She suddenly felt like a dolphin that couldn"t swim.
They sat in the living room. Her dad offered him wine. Kostos was a man, practically. He was dazzling. He was a parent"s dream.
Lena"s dad offered her apple juice. She felt like a scrawny fifth grader in comparison. As if she hadn"t even hit p.u.b.erty. It was a good thing she"d broken up with Kostos, because she"d saved herself the misery of discovering that she wasn"t nearly good enough for him. Well, actually, she hadn"t saved herself that misery, had she?
Lena tried to remember things to like about herself. She tried to remember reasons why Kostos might have liked her. She couldn"t think of one. Maybe she should just go upstairs.
At dinner, Lena sat next to him.
He told a funny story about Bapi Kaligaris, when Grandma had tried to get him to wear new eelskin shoes in favor of his preferred white ones. "This are good, honest shoes!" Kostos bellowed in a perfect imitation of Bapi. "Are you trying to turn me into a dandy?" Lena"s father looked so joyful and homesick Lena half expected him to burst into tears.
Kostos was everything she remembered him to be. Why had she had so little faith in him? So little faith in her memory? Why had she been so impatient?
When Lena was eating her lamb chop, she felt a shoe brush against the sole of her bare foot. She nearly choked on her food. A tingle ran right up her leg and out the top of her scalp. Her entire body was on alert. Every nerve ending was reporting to her brain in one tangled traffic jam.
Had he meant to do that? Her heart roared along. Could he be trying to tell her something? To send a tiny message?
She didn"t dare turn her head to look at him. She couldn"t even make herself finish chewing the bite in her mouth. Did he know she was feeling hopeless? Did he want to give her one small pinp.r.i.c.k of hope?
You broke up with him, the Carmen-Effie-Bee combo pointed out once again.
But I didn"t stop loving him!
Okay.
It was out. At last it had been acknowledged. She"d finally chosen, and she"d chosen B. She resumed chewing. She did love him. She loved him, and he didn"t love her anymore. That was the hard, cold truth. She would have relocated to Alaska to avoid admitting that, but now it was out. It was done. It was horrible, but it felt better to be honest.
The nerves in the sole of her foot reached out to him. The slightest touch would mean the earth to her. It came. The gentlest graze. She looked down.
It wasn"t Kostos"s foot. It was Effie"s.
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart"s desire. The other is to get it.
-George Bernard Shaw
It took Lena hours to fall asleep, and once she did, she had a dream that made her wake up again.
The dream had the ratty, two-bit quality of an old-fashioned science filmstrip. She heard the whir of the film flying through the projector and the fan that kept the light cool. The film showed two greatly magnified cells moving through a roughly drawn diagram of the human body. One cell was traveling from the brain, and the other from the heart. The cells met at about the clavicle. They bounce bounce bounced together until both membranes gave way at once and they joined.
In the dream, Lena raised her hand and heard herself saying to Mr. Briggs, her ninth-grade biology teacher, "That can"t happen, can it?"
Then she woke up.
When she woke up she went to the bathroom, because she really had to pee. And while she was peeing, she got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted. She was tired, yes, but she couldn"t sleep.
She sat on her windowsill for a long time and looked at the three-quarter moon. It was the same moon shining on Bee and Carmen and Tibby and Kostos and Bapi and all the people she loved, near and far.
No, she wasn"t going to be sleeping anymore tonight. She put on the Traveling Pants under her nightgown and put her denim jacket on over that. Before she could think better of it she went downstairs and out the door. She closed it very carefully behind her.
It was about a mile to the Sirtises", and Lena walked it with a reckless feeling in her heart. She had already come to terms with the worst possible thing. It couldn"t get any worse.
But she owed it to herself to see if it could possibly get better.
She had been to the Sirtises" house enough times to know where the guest bedroom was. But as she sneaked around the side of the house, she was suddenly afraid that they had a burglar alarm and that she was going to set it off. She imagined sirens wailing and dogs barking and Kostos watching the cops drag Lena off wearing handcuffs over the sleeves of her nightgown. Maybe she hadn"t come to terms with the worst possible thing.
It was lucky the guest bedroom was on the first floor, because she was bad at climbing and had terrible aim.
The lights were off in the room. Naturally. It was nearly three in the morning. She climbed through the bushes that lined the side of the house. She felt very stupid. She knocked softly on the window. She knocked again. What if she woke the whole house? How would she explain herself? The whole Greek community would be whispering about Lena the s.e.xual predator.
She felt him stirring before she actually saw him at the window. Now her heart felt like an unmanned AK-47, wheeling around in her rib cage and blasting everything in range. Kostos saw her and opened the sash.
If the sight of Lena in her nightgown and jeans knocking on his window at three in the morning gave him the feeling of a waking nightmare, he didn"t let on. He did look surprised, though.
"Can you come out?" These were the first words she"d spoken to him since he"d arrived. She was proud that she"d had enough breath to send them to his ears.
He nodded. "Wait. I"ll be there," he said.
She pulled herself out of the bushes, losing a little of her nightgown in the process.
His white T-shirt looked blue in the moonlight as he came toward her. He had pulled a pair of jeans over his boxer shorts. "Come with me," he said.
She followed him into the backyard, to a corner shielded by tall, old trees. He sat down and she sat down too. Her jean jacket was hot from all the walking. She took it off. She perched on her knees first, then sank down on the damp gra.s.s to sit cross-legged.
The summer sky was magical to her as she looked up at it. She felt heedless and not so afraid.
He was watching her face very carefully. He was waiting for her to say something. She was the one who"d pulled him out of his bed in the middle of the night.
"I just wanted to talk to you," she said in a voice a little louder than a whisper.
"Okay," he said.
It took a while to get the words up and out. "I missed you," she said. She looked in his eyes. She just wanted to be honest with him.
He looked in her eyes right back. He didn"t look away.
"I wish I hadn"t broken off our letters," she said. "I did it because I was afraid of missing you and wanting you all the time. I felt so stretched out. I wanted to feel like my life belonged just to me again."
He nodded. "I can understand that," he said.
"I know you don"t feel the same way about me anymore," Lena said bravely. "I know you have a girlfriend now and everything." She picked a blade of gra.s.s and rubbed it between her fingers. "I don"t expect anything from you. I just wanted to be honest, because I wasn"t before."
"Oh, Lena." Kostos"s expression was strained. He sat back in the gra.s.s and put his hands over his face.
Lena found herself staring at his hands instead of his eyes. She cast her own eyes down at the gra.s.s. Maybe he didn"t want to talk to her anymore.
At last he pulled his hands away. "Don"t you know anything?" he said. He said it like a groan.
Lena"s cheeks turned warm. There was a sob in her throat. She had expected him to be sympathetic to her, no matter what. Now she felt her courage slipping. "I don"t," she said humbly, her head bowed. She could hear the tears in her voice.
He pulled himself up and turned to her. His body was facing hers straight on, no more than a foot away. To her amazement, he took one of her hands in both of his. He looked pained by the tragedy in her face. "Lena, please don"t be sad. Don"t ever be sad because you think I don"t love you." His gaze was steady on her.
Her tears were perched on her lids, and she wasn"t sure which way they were going to go.
"I never stopped," he said. "Don"t you know that?"
"You didn"t write me anymore. You got a new girlfriend."
He released her hand. She wished he would keep it. "I didn"t get a new girlfriend! What are you talking about? I went out with a girl a few times when I was feeling miserable about you."
"You came here all the way from Greece without even telling me."
He semi-laughed-more at himself than at her. "Why do you think I came here?"
She was afraid to answer. The tears slopped over her lids and ran in big rivulets down her face. "I don"t know."
He reached out to her. He put a finger on her wrist. He let it float up to touch a tear. "Not because I want a career in advertising," he said.
On one level her mind was spinning madly, and on another it was focused and calm. The smile she put forth threatened to warp at any second. "Not because of the Smithsonian?"
He laughed. She found herself wishing he would touch her again. Anywhere. On her hair. On her ear. On her toenail.
"Not because of that," he said.
"Why didn"t you say anything?" she asked.
"What could I have said?"
"You could have been happy to see me or told me you still cared about me," she suggested.
He laughed his rueful laugh again. "Lena, I know how you are."
Lena wished she knew. "How am I?"
"If I come close, you run away. If I stay still then maybe, slowly, you might come."
Was she like that?
"And Lena?"
"Yes?"
"I am happy to see you and I still care about you," he said.
He was kidding, but still she took it to heart. "And I had lost all hope," she said.
He put his hands over hers and held them against his chest. "Don"t ever lose hope," he said.
She reached for him slowly, rising to her knees and finding his mouth with hers. She kissed him gently. He groaned a very quiet groan. He put his arms around her and kissed her deeply. He fell backward and pulled her onto the gra.s.s on top of him.
She laughed and then they kissed some more. They rolled in the gra.s.s and kissed and kissed and kissed until a boy on a bike threw the newspaper up the walk and scared them apart.
The sun was lighting the sky from the bottom as Kostos pulled her to standing from the gra.s.s. "I"ll walk you home," he said.
He was barefoot and had bits of gra.s.s stuck all over his shirt. His hair was sticking up on one side. She could only imagine how she must look. She giggled most of the way. He held her hand.
Just before they reached her house, he stopped and kissed her more. He let her go. She didn"t want to go.
"Beautiful Lena," he said, touching her collarbone. "I"ll come for you tomorrow."
"I love you," she told him bravely.
"I love you," he said. "I never stopped."
He pushed her a little toward her door.
She didn"t want to go. She didn"t want to be anyplace without him. It was hard to make herself walk away.
She turned around for a last look.
"I never will," he promised her.