Everything Beautiful Began After (16 page)

“I’ve been loving you from a distance,” Henry said.

Her mouth broke into a smile, but her eyes didn’t change—as though attached to thoughts beyond the moment. “I was thinking,” she said.

Henry touched her cheek. “About what?”

Then George appeared. “I’ll tell you soon,” she said.

“I thought we could swim around there,” George said.

They found they had swum into a cave that widened into a larger space. The sand was dark and compact. Without carrying the sun on their backs, the cave felt almost cold. Their voices were louder and more distinct. The ceiling of the cave was ridged like the inside of a mouth.

The cave echoed with the breath of each wave, and through spaces in the rock sunlight fell in columns of yellow.

They talked for an hour and then swam into the darker, deeper hollows of the cave, which were teeming with so much life that things brushed up against their legs. For a while they lay on their backs on the cool wet sand. Then the tide swept in and washed over them. They swam against the current and out toward the beach—to their jumble of possessions in the glow of early evening. They packed up without saying much.

When they reached the top of the cliff, George and Henry found the scooters and wheeled them quietly toward the road. Just as they were about to mount them, Rebecca stopped.

“I want one more look at the place where I was so happy,” she said.

They turned around and walked back to the edge of the cliff.

Rebecca found George’s hand. “I’m so glad we’re working it out,” she said.

The sun was beginning to fall behind distant rocks. It was very quiet and they stood for some time before anyone spoke.

“My whole life,” Henry said, “I’ve felt as though I were missing something, that the happiness assigned to me existed always at a distance, somewhere, in some place that was somehow beyond me—and when I moved, it too moved, always away but never so far as not to haunt me with the feeling of what it might be like to be happy.”

“But with you,” he said, turning to George and Rebecca, “I feel as though I am leading the charge toward death. Happiness and I have swapped places, and now it’s pursuing me for its very existence.”

“No matter what happens from this moment on,” Henry announced. “Here, in this place, I will always have my defining moment of victory against sadness.”

“I wonder if we’ll ever come back here,” Rebecca said.

“I think we will,” George said.

Waves broke against the cliffs.

Rebecca fell into a deep, dreamless sleep on the boat back to Athens.

George and Henry chatted about the coming day, hypnotized by the lights that grew nearer and brighter as their boat skimmed home in the quiet dusk.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Henry’s apartment was warm and dark. It was not late, but they were all very tired and had nothing to say. Rebecca fell asleep again on the metro from Piraeus. George agreed to stay over if he could borrow some clothes. The professor was expected early the next morning.

Henry brewed some tea, but Rebecca and George were already asleep by the time it was ready. The smell of peppermint filled the kitchen. Henry drank a cup and thought about their day together. He checked on George and then went into his bedroom, where he shed his clothes silently and slipped into bed with Rebecca.

A scooter went past.

Light from the hall fell upon their bed like a spine.

Henry turned to kiss Rebecca and saw that she was awake.

She looked at him and stroked his face with her hand.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

Then he asked what she had been thinking about when he swam out to meet her.

She hesitated for a moment. “Can I tell you tomorrow?”

Henry smiled. “Is it something about George?”

“No, it’s about you and me.”

Henry blinked quickly.

“But not tonight, Henry, maybe tomorrow when we’re alone.”

“I think we should talk tonight,” Henry said. “Otherwise I’ll worry about it tomorrow.”

Rebecca touched his arm. “Can we please wait?”

“George is dead asleep—I checked.”

Rebecca closed her eyes. Henry turned abruptly to face the shutters.

“Are you mad at me?” she said.

“A little,” Henry said. “If there’s something you need to say—say it.”

“I’m afraid to.”

Henry turned to face her. “I’ve spent my whole childhood with people too afraid to speak—so if there’s something you need to say, say it, Rebecca.”

Rebecca sat up.

“So?” Henry said.

“George is really asleep?”

“He’s dead asleep.”

Rebecca covered her face with her hands. “It’s serious.”

“Whatever it is—I’m yours,” he said. “I love you now.”

“I’m afraid that if I tell you, you’ll leave me and I’ll turn out just like my mother and sister.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m pregnant.”

Henry’s face dropped.

“At least, I think I am.”

“How?”

“I missed my period and then took a test,” she said. “And the test was positive.”

“Jesus. Jesus,” Henry said.

Rebecca reached for him, but he pulled away into some private world.

“Henry,” she said softly, but he seemed not to hear her. “Henry,” she said again.

“It’s awful,” he said, “so awful, you’ll hate me.”

Rebecca threw back the covers and went over to the window, where she stood, a shadowy outline against the starlight.

“There’s something I have to tell you that’s awful,” he said.

“Tell me then,” she replied coldly.

His instinct at that moment was to hold her, but Henry found himself suddenly pinned by the sight of his baby brother, not asleep but dead. His parents screaming. They pulled at his body with scissors.

The only baby Henry had ever held was no longer living.

Rebecca watched him cry. When she finally came near, he escaped into the bathroom and vomited. Then he sat quietly on the tiles.

By the time he went back into the bedroom, determined to admit everything, Rebecca was asleep and it was nearing dawn.

Henry got into bed and held her so tightly that she opened her eyes and smiled.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The professor kept his word and pulled up to the apartment at six o’clock sharp. The car was very loud. Henry heard it coming down the street while it was still far away and quickly dressed. He had spent most of the morning awake, staring at the window, watching the ghostly arc of passing headlights lessen against the glow of dawn.

George was fully dressed when Henry emerged from his bedroom.

Henry combed his hair in the mirror then went to find his briefcase of notes.

Rebecca was still sleeping. Only half her body was covered by the sheet.

Henry imagined a life growing inside her.

He knew things like this could be taken care of in a few hours—like a tiny candle blown out with a puff. He wondered if it was what she wanted.

A moment before leaving the apartment, he hoped Rebecca would wake up so he could reassure her they would work it out together. But she was motionless and Henry let her sleep. George held the door. His face was slightly burned.

“Is Rebecca not coming?”

“She’s still sleeping.”

Nobody talked on the drive up, so Professor Peterson turned on the radio. The sky was very bright. George rolled down his window.

If they had the child, where would they live? Would she give birth in France? And what if the child were born dead? What if the child came out in a tangle?

It would all take place within a single year.

Unsolvable questions swirled in Henry’s mind.

A mile or so from the dig, the professor started whistling. Then he skidded to a stop in the dust.

“Which one of you boys is going to find the bricks?”

George volunteered. Once the bricks were under the wheels. Henry got out and walked over to his Vespa. There was condensation on the inside of the dials. He tapped the glass.

A dog had barked once, and his brother’s eyes opened for the last time.

For most of the morning, Henry worked quietly in his excavation pit, scratching the ground with little enthusiasm.

He knew that he would see her later. That a decision had to be made somehow, and that they would both stick to it.

And then, not long before lunch, another side of Henry began to emerge—a part of him that was just a little further ahead in his life than where he was now. And in his mind, he saw himself in a tweed jacket in Regent’s Park, pushing a stroller along some beautiful Sunday path, the child giggling with joy. He imagined packing up the car for summers in Wales. Skipping through meadows of tall grass, and the light, bubbling laughter of a child trying to keep up. Learning to swim in the cool water of Bala Lake. The wobble of first steps. He sensed closeness too. Rebecca in some heavy pocketless coat, with snow falling. A weekend in Paris. The happiness of afternoons.

He would give up his search for the dead and live for the living.

Love is like life but longer.

END OF BOOK ONE

In my end is my beginning.

—T. S. Eliot

The final moments of her life Rebecca lay crushed under tons of rubble.

The fruit she had been eating was still in her mouth.

Her eyes would not open.

She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her.

She could not feel her arms.

Then her life, like a cloud, split open, and she lay motionless in a rain of moments.

The green telephone at her grandfather’s house next to the plant.

She could feel the cool plastic of the handle and the sensation of cupping it under her ear. She could hear a voice at the other end of the line that she recognized as her own.

The weight of her mother’s shoes as she carried them around the house, wondering when she would come home.

The idea that she’d grow up and have to wear such things.

Running through the forest of owls with her sister.

Their white faces.

A twin.

The strangeness of a living mirror.

And then the rain of her life stopped, and she was in darkness, her heart pushing against her ribs.

Muted noise as though she were underwater.

Then the rain of moments began again until she was drenched by single esoteric details:

Morning light behind the curtain.

The smell of classrooms.

A glass of milk.

The hope for her mother and the imagined pressure of her arms against her.

Passengers’ faces.

Quietly beating hearts.

Wings held steady by moonlight.

Market stalls.

Orange trees.

Sandals.

Laying her head upon Henry’s cool back in the morning.

It was as important as being born.

George and the street children.

Clogs.

Sweets.

Her grandfather again, but a character in his own dream—walking barefoot by the lake calling out to someone far away.

A bungalow in France.

A daughter.

Granddaughters.

His elbows as he drove them in the rain to the shops.

And then two very small hands growing inside her belly.

A small head.

Thumb body, surging.

Life knitting something in her womb.

Then Rebecca realized she could not feel her body and was unable to shout.

There was no sound. Nothing stirred but the silent movies projected on the inside of her skull.

She was not so much aware that she was dying as she was that she was still alive.

Had she more time, she might have nurtured a hope of being rescued by George and Henry. Instead, memory leaked out around her.

Mother.

This memory was not painful to her now. Her life was an open window and she a butterfly.

If not for her intermittent returns to darkness—the body’s insistence on life—she could have been on vacation, swimming in the sea, each stroke of her arms a complete philosophy.

Henry.

The morning he came back from Cambridge.

And then she smelled her grandfather’s coat, hanging behind the kitchen door with a bag of bags and a broom.

On the back of Henry’s Vespa.

She wondered if she had lived her entire life from under the collapsed building. That life is imagined by a self we can never fully know.

The softness of hands. A child’s hands. A small house somewhere. Gloves on a cold day.

And then with the expediency of the dying, she fell in love with the darkness and the eight seconds she had left in it—each second like a mouthful of food to someone starving.

At that moment, a French girl living in Paris called Natalie fainted in the supermarket.

People rushed over.

In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.

—T. S. Eliot

BOOK TWO
NIGHT CAME WITH
MANY STARS

Chapter Thirty-Four

You couldn’t wait for the day to end. She would be delighted with your change of heart. There would be practical things to sort out, like hospitals and names, a house to live in with a garden.

But just before lunchtime it came. George was at the entrance to the tent, holding up a pitcher of water. George fell over. The water spilled.

And then it came and just battered everything.

You tried to cover your ears, but you were soon on the ground too. No one could see because of the dust. You had no conscious thoughts. If you had died, your last feeling would have been pure terror.

It seemed like hours; thought lay in a mess at your feet. Below the mountain, buildings were crumbling. People’s lives were ending within a few seconds.

And when it stopped, the silence on the mountainside was deafening. You remember sprinting to the top—toward the tent—through the dust. George was standing again, but very still. His face seemed grotesque, as though it were hung upon his skull the wrong way. Then you felt each other as if to physically confirm what your eyes saw. You remember being at the edge, looking for Athens in the distance.