Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [122]
“Yes,” I said. My fork cut through the flesh and pulled it apart in smooth, long pieces. I looked up at him and thought how I could have kissed him, right then.
“I’ve traveled so long,” he said, “to be here.”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
He took a long swig of wine, then leaned in. “Like I can finally stop searching. Like this is where I was supposed to be all along.”
Afterward we strolled through the streets, taking it all in. The trees, the mud, the rain that made everything seem hazy. I felt like the child who’d seen Mary walking toward her in front of the courthouse and the adult who’d lost her, at the same time.
“What do you know about your mother, anyway?” I asked, as we headed back down to the river, following a trail of people. “Do you know how she and your father met, anything like that?”
“I just know what my father told me,” he said. “But I never knew if what my father told me was true.”
“What?”
“He said that when he was young, he met a girl named Katerina and thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. They were both working on the boats on the Aegean, I guess, in Turkey.”
“What did she look like?” I immediately imagined Mary with Costas’s eyes, his mischievous look.
“She had long brown hair she’d tie up with silver strings, lashes like Greta Garbo’s, lips that looked like wet fruit. He always got teary describing her. When he met her, he said, she was only nineteen, living with this family who’d found her on the docks and taken her in. She’d steal past the mosquito netting and out the window every night to my father’s little boat he kept docked at the harbor.”
“How romantic,” I said.
When we arrived at the water, there were a few small groups gathered around fires. The people glanced up as Costas and I stretched out along the bank.
“Yes, I guess they spent their nights drifting on my father’s boat out into the sea,” he said. “I know my father tried to impress Katerina with his bravado, diving into the water and coming up with a small octopus wrapped around his hand. The next night he’d serve it up to her, tentacles and all.”
“What happened?”
“They finally ran away together, to Greece. The town was an hour from Greece by boat, so they just kept going one night, to an island called Kos, and they moved into a small house with a white tile floor. They spent their days planting flowers and hanging curtains and swimming in the ocean and eating vats of yogurt piled high with fruit. That’s how he used to describe it to me.”
“It must have been hard for him to talk about it to you after everything that happened,” I said. I thought of the riverboat, imagined Katerina going halfway across the world just to fall in love with a man on the water.
“It was the best time of his life. He always talked about it. It’s one of the reasons I realized I had to make this journey, so I wouldn’t be filled with regret the way my father was. I felt like I would never be myself until I came here.”
“When did things go bad with Katerina?”
“Well,” he said, “the way my father tells it, she used to talk about this place, dream about it, mumble about it in her sleep. Always talked about coming back, and one day she just snapped and walked into the water.”
I couldn’t help but feel shivery, imagining it. “That’s terrible,” I said. I wondered if Mary had wanted to return here, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “I get the feeling there is a lot of sadness here, because of the place. I don’t know why I feel that way; right now I’m so at peace. Are you?”
I looked at him, not sure how to answer. “Yes,” I said, finally. I was at peace, but I was everything else, too. Happy. Filled with remorse. Detached from everything, as if I were reading it all in a book.
We stared out into the water, the tangle of trees and foliage hanging over it, the people scattered across the bank. I could not get over the feeling that we were at the edge of the world, and that we could do anything. My heart reached for Mauro, but it almost didn’t feel real, as if he were a character I was remembering from a story. It was a dangerous