Authors: Kevin Oderman

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White Vespa (25 page)

BOOK: White Vespa

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“Must have been a little mountain there before,” I gestured where I imagined it had been. “But it was always a volcano.”

“I remember when Mt. St. Helens surprised us out in Washington state. One day it looked like Fuji, the next day it didn't. Something like this. So much of what was there just gone.” Then she fell silent.

I didn't know what to say. I gazed at the terraces, at EmboriÃ³ and NikiÃ¡, where people had built again, right on the lip of the caldera. They must have looked straight into the throat of the volcano and said,
Nevertheless
.

“After the farce at Paul's place I just couldn't stay. I . . .

I told her to let it go, but she'd come to speak.

“I wanted to put an end to it, to me, at least the idiot who thought, what? Getting even was possible? But I was still trying, thinking somehow my phony death would drive a stake in his heart. Fat chance.” She shook her head, then stuttered, “So I got help, Lisa, from upstairs at Two Stories. She walked by on the track above the beach. In a big wig. She was carrying a sack with a wad of money in it and a pair of tennis shoes, a dress and a big straw hat, and a ferry ticket for Rhodes. Her walking by was the sign that the play should begin. You got up to swim, and, of course, I got up, too. By the time we were wading out Lisa was coming back from the next little beach where she'd left the bag. She saw you put your glasses down and
â
I don't know why
â
she just walked over and picked them up. That was her part.”

“Then, I went back in about an hour before the ferry was scheduled to depart. I can swim a long way underwater. When I came up for air I was almost around the point. When I got out, I found Lisa's bag, dressed, took the inland trail back to YialÃ³s, boarded the
SÃ½mi I
, and that was it. I was gone. As long as I was acting I was all right. I didn't think about anything. Not about you, not about us, not about what might come after. I just went through with it.”

I threw a rock out over the crater, watched it fall. It hit with a sharp crack and I saw motion in the shade of a tree, two terraces down, goats, swinging their heads to check it out.

“Then I wasn't all right,” she said. “I saw it all differently. I remembered my hands white on Paul's belt as he pulled on the rope, Pie going up. And I looked at my hands on the rail in front of me, and I saw that I was still clutching at Paul's belt, that I was still that girl who hadn't known how to save her horse or to save herself.

“On Rhodes, I couldn't keep that thought away,” Anne whispered. “I kept asking myself.
What have I sacrificed for?
” Anne wept. “I couldn't even begin to think what I'd sacrificed, Myles. What of mine, what of yours.

“In the end, I had to find out. I got back to SÃ½mi the day before yesterday. I told them it was all one big mistake, how sorry I was to have caused them so much
trouble. They were too relieved to ask many questions. So happy to see me alive! They treated me like the resurrected.

“PaniyÃ³tis told me you were here.”

Now, as I write this, she's sleeping on the roof, under a ceiling of stars. Short, red hair, cut like a boy's, but it's Anne. It doesn't feel like a miracle, or, now, even surprising. The tide was out, it came back in again. Here, the birds fly off to Africa, but they come back. It feels like that, as if, even grieving, I'd been expecting her all along. Maybe all our losses are sown with hope. We wander in the wreckage, not quite believing it, something in us faithful to what we had before. Still yearning. It shouldn't have taken Anne's coming back for me to know that that yearning is for something real, not just an absence, but a presence as real as can be. Max is lost but palpably here, and Bryn, while I live, still here with me.

Her pack was full of bread and cheese and olives. Eel-slender cucumbers and heavy, red tomatoes. Onions. Garlic. Glittering green oil in a small, fat bottle. Spices folded in newspaper cones. A bottle of KourtÃ¡ke retsina. A bottle of black wine. A sack of sweet figs, ripe and splitting their seams. A small, yellow melon, dressed in green stripes.

“Offerings,” she said, “please.”

“Does that mean we won't be eating them?”

“You don't want to eat them?” Anne's face suddenly flooded with light, something young and happy played across it, her lips alive with quivering life. “Don't you?”

I must have been lost in looking, her face fringed in flaming hair.

“Aren't you hungry?”

“I hunger,” I stammered out at last, “I thirst.”

A Note on Kevin Oderman

Kevin Oderman is the author of a book of literary criticism,
Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium
; a book of essays,
How Things Fit Together
; and the novel,
Going
, set in Granada, Spain. Twice he has lived abroad as a Fulbright Fellow, teaching modern American poetry at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and American literature at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a professor of English at West Virginia University.

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The Ruth H. Beecher Foundation

The Bates-Manzano Fund

The New Mexico Community Foundation

Gratia Murphy Fund

Founded in 2001 with a generous grant from the Oristaglio Foundation, Etruscan Press is a nonprofit cooperative of poets and writers working to produce and promote books that nurture the dialogue among genres, achieve a distinctive voice, and reshape the literary and cultural histories of which we are a part.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Oderman, Kevin, 1950-

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-983-29449-8

1. Americans--Greece--Fiction. 2. Self-realization--Fiction. 3. Photographers--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3615.D47W48 2012
813'.6--dc23

Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.

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