Burning the Map (10 page)

“This place is perfect,” Kat says, pasting on an obscenely skimpy white bikini. “Cheap and close to the beach.”

“Amazing,” Sin says, tucking her hair under a blue baseball cap and stepping into a two-piece bathing suit, much more tasteful than Kat's.

“Coming with us, Case?” Kat asks, but she's collecting her towel, her beach bag, not really looking at me.

Sin stays quiet, throwing her book and a bottle of SPF 15 in a straw bag.

“Nah, I'm just going to unpack,” I say. The need to be alone overwhelms me, and I get the distinct feeling that neither Kat nor Sin will be crushed if I don't join them.

As they head to the door, Lindsey turns and looks over her shoulder. “We're meeting the Irish guys at the bottom of the hill,” she says. “Come find us if you want.”

Not exactly the warmest invitation, but at least she made it.

“Thanks,” I say, giving her a polite smile. I feel like she's
someone I just met on the ferry, not the person who's been a sister to me for most of the last decade. Between Kat's revelation about the Hatter attack and the still cool relations with my friends, I'm left a little bewildered. It's not an emotion I'd expected on this trip, and I'm not sure where to file it in my head.

I move most of my clothes from my backpack into the small, unfinished wood bureau. I usually don't unpack, since living out of a suitcase doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I need to kill some time. A whole sunny day stretches out before me, and I can't think of a thing to do besides join the throngs at the beach.

It's been so long since I've had any time to relax that I find it difficult to remember how. I struggle to recall how I've unwound over the last few years. I know that I've pored over old legal texts and memorized thousands of notes. I've logged countless hours on John's couch, my head in his lap, watching random TV. But was any of that relaxing? Did I actually like all that? I used to play tennis, yet that has fallen by the wayside. Why? I stand there, in the middle of our little hut, trying to remember. There seems to be no good explanation except that over the last few years my physical activity had been limited to raising Doritos to my mouth.

I get my PalmPilot out of the front pocket of my backpack. It's the first time I've pulled it out since we got on the plane, and for a second, the sight of its shape—its little black squareness—makes me think of school and work, and I nearly break out in hives. I make myself ignore the feeling, and after powering it up, I scroll through my calendar until I reach the Saturday morning after my first week of work.

“Play tennis,” I write in the slot for ten o'clock. I try not to think about the fact that Gordon Baker Brickton, Jr., my new boss, may want me in the office slaving over a five-hundred-page deposition abstract. I'd been warned that first year
associates at my firm are often ordered into the office on the weekends, especially at the beginning, the thought being, apparently, that we can be broken in like house pets.

I've already seen a change in the way the firm treats me and the other soon-to-be attorneys. When we were summer associates, we were the star rookie recruits of the firm, stars that needed lots of attention if they were going to join the team full-time. There were lavish dinners on yachts, skyboxes for the Cubs games and nightly martinis at one hot spot or another. But when we signed up for good and started
really
working, it all changed. Partners who'd bent over backward to get to know you during the summer suddenly couldn't remember your name. The projects we were given were no longer interesting, but rather, grunt work that could have been assigned to a paralegal. It wasn't that I minded grunt work, or any kind of hard work, for that matter, but when all the hoopla died away and I took a look at what the work was really like, what the cases were really about, I found I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm. The thought of never being excited by my work scared the hell out of me.

I start playing with my PalmPilot now, not letting myself go any further down that road. Instead, I try to remember what else used to make me happy. I used to love seeing bands, I think. It was how I met John, even, but when John started working hard and said he couldn't stay up late, I didn't, either.

I lift the Pilot again, and under the Saturday night slot, I write, “See live music!”

The rest of my unpacking takes all of ten minutes. I get in the shower, but the plumbing at the Sunset makes the trickle in our Rome hotel seem like a gushing geyser, so bathing takes only a few minutes, too. I change into a fresh pair of shorts, delighted that they seem slightly baggier than before. I put on a light shirt and then consider rearranging the room, which is something that I
do
like, something that relaxes me.
I survey the room, figuring that at the minimum, I could move the bureau, the tallest piece of furniture, away from the door and put it against the far wall. I'm sure it would really open up the place, but I'm not so sure Spiros and CeCe would appreciate my efforts.

Instead, I head to the terrace for something cool to drink. CeCe is hard at work behind the counter of the bar, chopping vegetables and yelling playfully at one of the kids, a girl of about ten.

She looks surprised to see me. “You go to beach now,” she says, pointing to a set of rock stairs that lead along the side of the terrace and down the cliff to the sand.

“No, not yet,” I say. “Something to drink?” I pantomime a drinking motion.

CeCe places an icy bottle of Amstel in front of me. I'd been thinking more along the lines of a Diet Coke, but what the hell. I pull a rumpled traveler's check from my pocket and smooth it on the counter.

CeCe shoos it away. “You go. You go.” She gestures toward the tables on the terrace.

“Efcharisto,”
I say hesitantly, trying out the Greek word of thanks.

CeCe nods and turns back to her vegetables.

I have the terrace to myself. I choose the table at the very edge, liking that the sight of the sheer drop makes me woozy. I must be a few hundred feet above the beach, high enough that I can't make out Kat or Sin or the Irish guys, but I'm glad for the solitude. I need a little space in my head, a little silence. I follow the white swatch of beach with my eyes, noticing how it ends when it runs into a tall hill of brown brush and a few weatherbeaten houses whose white paint is starting to flake. I stare out at the sea, trying to forget myself in the aquamarine blue, trying to think clean, wholesome thoughts about John, but thickets of images keep growing in my mind—Francesco leaning over me on the blanket, the feel
of his lips on my collarbone, the way he kissed me that last time on the step of the pensione. I chug my beer ambitiously, willing myself to enjoy the scenery and forget Francesco, but I can't seem to get any peace.

The first Amstel leads to another, and another. Pathetic really, drinking by myself, but each one makes me feel lighter and strangely carefree. Maybe this is why people become alcoholics. CeCe finally has to start charging me for the beers, and when I order my sixth, she looks at me with concerned eyes.

“You sure you want?” she asks.

The lack of food and quantity of beer has rendered me slightly stupid, and all I can do is give her an emphatic nod. She shrugs and places another dripping bottle before me. I traipse back to my seat on the edge of the cliff, taking another swig of the cold beer, and as I rerun the Francesco movie in my head again, I start to believe my own press. I
am
beautiful like Francesco said. I'm probably the sexiest woman on the planet. I try out Kat's hair flip to solidify the image, and I'm rewarded by a grin and a once-over from a blond kid hoofing it up the stairs and onto the terrace. He can't be more than twenty, but the body is all man—tanned, honey-brown chest, no shirt covering the six-pack of his stomach.

He raises his chin toward me in a cocky kind of greeting. “Hey,” he says, and I can tell he's American. Los Angeles, I'd guess, from the witty banter and soap opera good looks.

“Hey,” I say back, dredging my old flirty smile out of the attic and throwing it his way. He keeps giving me appraising glances as he makes his way to the bar and orders a beer.

It dawns on me that he's probably going to come over and sit with me, a thought that gives me an eruption of excitement and makes me grab for my bottle again. I'd forgotten how nerve-wrackingly fabulous flirting can be.

The soap opera blonde gets his beer from CeCe, and just as I thought, he starts sauntering among the tables toward me, one hand holding the bottle, the other rubbing itself over his chest and stomach, a motion that nearly mesmerizes me. I lean back in my chair so that I'm balancing on the two rear legs, an action that I imagine is sexy and confident. I perform the hair flip again in order to drag my eyes off his abs, but I overaccentuate the toss of my head and suddenly, my whole body is wobbling. I look into the blonde's eyes and see them go wide. He rushes at me, taking his hand away from his chest and holding it out toward me. I get a flash of blue sky, followed by a glimpse of the red-and-white awning.
I'm falling,
I comprehend, entirely too late. I hear the crash of my beer bottle, and then everything goes dark.

S
omething is jabbing into my back, something hard, about the size of a fist. I slip one hand under myself and grab the thing, raising it to my face, my eyes squinting in the sun, which seems to be shining its rays right into my brain. I blink over and over until the object comes into focus. A green-handled screwdriver. What in the hell?

I hear the yelp of a child, and I look over to see Spiros's daughter, the one who'd been helping her mother today.

“You awake!” she says, crawling over to me, her hair flapping around her face, and it's then I realize that I'm lying in the back of the pickup, being driven to God-knows-where.

“What are we doing?” I ask, trying to sit up, but the girl pushes me back down and scoots to the front of the cab, pounding on the window that looks onto the driver's seat. Almost immediately, the truck screeches to a halt on the side of the road, and Spiros's concerned face appears over the edge of the truck.

“Okay?” he says. “You feel okay? You can see me? You can hear me?”

I almost laugh, but the instinct brings on a raging pain in my temples, and I grab my forehead. “I'm fine.” The fall comes back to me, or at least the beginning of it, and I wonder if maybe I really am hurt and I just can't appreciate it yet. “Did I fall down the cliff?”

Spiros cocks his head. “You fall off chair onto floor.”

“Oh.” Not as interesting an incident as I thought. I get a wave of embarrassment then, thinking of the soap opera blonde watching me wobble and sprawl across the terrace. “I'm sure I'll be fine,” I say, trying to sit again, but the pain elevates, and I lie back.

“Hospital,” Spiros says. “I take you to hospital.”

I start to protest, but the girl puts her hands on my shoulder, and I close my eyes again, letting the rocking of the truck lull me.

 

Three hours later, after being prodded by a bored physician who looked like he'd seen more than his share of drunks, Spiros drives me back to the Sunset. This time I sit in the front with him and his daughter, whose name is Samantha. The truck jostles along the road, jolting every few seconds, since Spiros doesn't even attempt to avoid potholes.

“I'm so sorry,” I tell him for the tenth time. The bored doc had determined that I'd passed out from the alcohol and heat, not from a head injury as I'd hoped. I'd actually have preferred some kind of real wound that would elicit sympathy, rather than snickers about my poor balance and inability to hold my alcohol.

“No problem,” Spiros says. “I glad you okay.” And in all honesty, he seems pleasant, not at all put out, as if this three-hour detour in his day was just what he'd been looking forward to.

Samantha, sitting between us in yellow shorts and a pink top, starts giggling, lifting her hand to her mouth. She says a
few sentences in Greek to Spiros, who chuckles along with her.

“What?” I ask, smiling, too. “What is it?”

“She says you funny when you fall,” Spiros says. “Your legs in the air.” He flails his arms, mimicking my legs, and they both laugh harder.

When we get back to the Sunset, I stumble to our hut. It's only six o'clock and still sunny. Sin and Kat aren't even back from the beach yet. I get a wave of fatigue, and I crash like a cut tree on top of my bed.

When I awake, it's nine o'clock at night. Kat and Lindsey are showering, whispering about something.

“What's up?” I mumble through the sweaters someone has knitted on my teeth.

Kat hands me a bottle of water. “CeCe told us you got plastered this afternoon and took a tumble. How're you feeling?”

“Like shit.” I gulp half the bottle and fall back on my cot, clutching my head.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Sin says, sitting next to me.

“I'm fine. The diagnosis at the hospital was too much beer.”

She leans forward and starts patting my head. I close my eyes, loving her mothering touch. “No bumps,” she says, pulling her hands away. “You think you'll live?”

“Oh, I'm sure,” I say. “What are you guys doing?”

“There's a group going to town,” Kat says, “but we'll stay with you.”

“No. Go out. I feel stupid enough already. You guys don't need to baby-sit me.”

“You sure you don't want to come?” Kat asks as she goes about trying and retrying two different shirts, both of which look adorable. “You could just drink water, and we can make it an early night.”

“Can't do it,” I say. Just the thought of being around alcohol triggers my gag reflex.

Kat and Lindsey don't seem particularly heartbroken that I won't be joining them, and neither tries to talk me into it as they normally would. But then I suppose that taking a drunken header will do that.

 

I managed to outrun my hangover while Kat and Sin were out chasing theirs. They both rolled in at 5:00 a.m., and now they're moving a little slowly.

“How was it?” I ask them, as we all climb out of bed at the crack of noon. “What are the bars like?”

“Fucking nuts,” Kat says, yawning and stretching as she gets off her cot.

“Well, tell me,” I say.

“You really have to see it to get it,” Sin says, effectively cutting off a laundry list of questions I had about the bar scene.

Kat nods in agreement. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Fine,” I say, and surprisingly, besides being famished, this is true. I just hope I don't run into the soap opera blonde again.

“So,” I say, shifting topics, “did anybody hook up?” This is a fairly common question between the three of us, usually intended to elicit Kat's crazy stories. This time, though, I'm angling it toward Sin, wanting to know if anything happened with Billy.

They both shake their heads.

“I had this little Austrian man for a while,” Kat says, “but I lost him somewhere.”

“Were you with the Irish boys all night?” I ask.

“Most of the time,” Kat says. “They're sweeties.”

Sin stays quiet, pulling a new bathing suit out of her bag, and I wonder why she wasn't able to make a love connection with Billy.

A few minutes later, Sin sees me trying on different bathing suits in a one-piece versus two-piece kind of battle. She's already packed and ready to go to the beach, of course.

“Coming with us this time?” she says. I pick up a faintly sardonic tone.

“I'll meet you there.”

But Sin stays and watches me. As I yank up the top of my black one-piece, I feel her eyes on me like glue. It's not a mothering kind of stare, though, not a relative to the head patting she gave me last night. Instead, it's more like she's studying me. It makes me nervous, but I won't give her the satisfaction of snapping at her.

Luckily, Kat is ready in record-setting time. Once they're gone, I rush to the mirror on the back of the door and model the bathing suits, turning myself this way and that, sucking in my stomach, sticking my chest out. I decide to go with the bikini, since wearing a one-piece to this beach seems a little like wearing a snowsuit to play golf, yet I keep trying to adjust the bikini in an effort at transformation. I pull the bottoms up high on my hips, making my legs look thinner but pinching my waist. I slide them a little lower. Next, I put my hands in the cups, scooping up my breasts, hoping to make them appear fuller. None of these things does anything to change the Casper's-ass-whiteness of my skin or the extra flesh, and sadly, I can't think of anything else that might.

I pull my hair up in a ponytail, noticing that it looks rather brassy blond from the sun I got in Rome and on the ferry. For a minute, I wonder if it makes me look like a tart. Then I remind myself that this would be fitting, since I acted rather tartlike with Francesco. I stick a floppy hat over my head, pulling it low, and I head outside.

I forget my self-consciousness for a moment when I see the beach. Pure heaven. Hundreds of yards of fine white sand that stretches from the base of the Sunset's jagged steps to where the blue water laps and rolls.

I spot Noel, Johnny Red and Billy spread out on a blanket, their bare chests glistening. Johnny is covered in freckles, but the other two are pretty brown for Irish boys. Must have spent some time in the tanning beds back home.

“Morning,” I say when I reach them.

They wave and ask whether I'm feeling okay, Billy kidding me about getting too “pissed” for my own good.

Finally I manage to reassure them that I'm fine and get them off the subject of my bender. “Have you seen Kat and Lindsey?” I say.

Billy smiles a slow smile. “They're getting something to drink. Have a seat.” Damn that boy is cute.

I drop my shorts quickly and glance at them. No one flinches at the sight of my flesh, and I take this as a good sign. I walk to the water, moving around the sunbathers, holding my body as firm as possible with the hope that nothing is jiggling out of control.

The water is cool despite the heat of the day, sending tingles through me. It's so clear that even when I wade to chest level, I can still see the “Not in Kansas Anymore Red” polish I've painted on my toes for the first time in over a year. I wiggle them as I look down, and just seeing my scarlet toes through the watery blue makes me feel glamorous.

 

Our days in Ios stretch into a pattern of sorts. An idyllic pattern, if it weren't for the weird tension that still hovers between Lindsey and me. Aside from her concern about my fall, she's been aloof with me, and Kat, while perfectly nice, seems to be joined at Sin's hip.

It's not that I don't spend time with them. Most days we sleep until at least eleven o'clock, then make our way to the terrace, where CeCe and the kids serve made-to-order eggs and toast. I always ask for egg whites only, as I've been trying, with some success, to knock off a bit more of my girth. After the food fills our bellies and clears some of the cobwebs from our heads, we stake out a spot at the beach, usually next to the Irish boys. Inevitably, Lindsey hurries to place her towel near Billy.

“Hello, boys,” she'll say (as she had that first day I was on the beach with her) and as she speaks, she'll reach behind,
unceremoniously unclasping her top, her breasts bouncing loose.

Kat does the same, asking Noel something benign like, “What time did you guys get in last night?”

The first time I saw this, I'd glanced at the faces of the Irish guys. Their eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but none of them appeared particularly flustered. Either they had fabulous poker faces, or they were simply used to topless women. I chalked it up to a European thing, since well over fifty percent of the beach's female population is sans tops. There's even a core contingent of naked people, both men and women, who have nearly every inch of exposed skin tanned to perfection.

One guy we meet, a Frenchman named Richard, wears nothing at all except a thick coat of white zinc oxide on his nose and penis.

“So that was Richard, huh?” Kat says as he walks away, his white pecker bobbing against his leg. “I guess we can officially call him Dick.”

We all laugh, the Irish guys hooting. Still, it amazes me that without batting an eye or clapping a hand over their browning breasts, Sin and Kat will engage in the most casual conversations as if they weren't half-nude. Sin, especially, shocks me. I'd expect her to go bungee jumping over Niagara Falls before I'd expect toplessness.

“Come on!” Kat cajoled me that first day on the beach. “Just take it off, Casey. It's no big deal.”

“I have a fair complexion. I don't want to get third-degree burns,” I said, using my light hair and peachy skin as an excuse. Actually, I can tan pretty well if I go about it slowly. I was just hoping that the lack of time I'd spent with Kat and Sin lately would play into my hands and neither would remember this. I'm disappointed when that wish actually comes true.

In reality, I'm simply mortified at the thought of going
topless. Not for any moral reasons, just physical ones. Flashing my overly white orbs wouldn't have thrown me for a loop a few years ago, but now, the thought of being available for public viewing by the hundreds of people on the beach makes me cringe. Francesco had made me remember how my body used to feel, but it seems I've forgotten again.

 

One day, I corner Kat while Sin is in the sea with the Irish guys, splashing water and generally trying to look as if she's frolicking, when the fact is she doesn't do frolic well.

“Hey,” I say, plopping myself down on a towel next to Kat.

“Hey, sweetie,” she says back in a lazy voice. She's on her stomach, her head on her arm, her hair splayed over most of her face like a hood. She opens one eye and gives me an equally lazy smile.

“How's it going?” I ask, feeling odd to be exchanging pleasantries with one of my best friends as if she were someone I'd run into at the dry cleaners.

“Too much ouzo last night, but I'm good. You?”

“Great.” Well there you have it. Another illuminating heart-to-heart between friends.