Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [34]
He put his feet up on the coffee table and glanced at her. She closed her eyes, but they didn’t want to stay shut. Her lids felt not heavy but rubbery and light, and perhaps too short to even cover her eyeballs. Strange.
She turned over to face the couch instead. Maybe her eyelids had become short because she wanted to look at him. She gazed at the pattern of the couch for a while—green, blue, yellow, ochre, garnet-red hydrangea puffs that didn’t really look at all like hydrangea puffs but like a fantastically druggy impression of them. This was a couch that wouldn’t go with any painting.
And then she started to wonder what would happen to this couch. This would be one of the things her father wouldn’t know what to do with. She pictured it sitting out on the winding street, waiting for someone to claim it, the harsh island sun picking out every sign of wear.
She pictured her grandparents buying it. She imagined the boxy furniture store in Fira in about 1972, her grandmother effusive over the colors and her grandfather with his sweet face and nothing to say. She pictured how the couch would look in her studio apartment in Providence. It wouldn’t fit. She’d have to get rid of her bed. It was a thought.
When she flipped back over she discovered that Kostos’s newspaper had drifted to his lap, his head had drifted backward, and his eyelids had closed. With wide-open eyes she watched him sleep. I guess I can watch over you, she thought. The sight of his sleeping self seemed almost like a feast offered to her eyes, both inviting and overwhelming. She had hungry eyes, even now. The thing that always held her back was that she hated being caught looking. And now she could look all she wanted. For a time, his face belonged not to the important world, but to her.
She did a strange thing, which was she got a sketchbook and charcoal from her bag. Those two items lived permanently in her bag, but she hadn’t gotten them out and used them in a long time. Kostos slept quietly and she drew his face, full as it was of dramas she could barely remember right now. Even if your brain didn’t understand anything, your eyes could still see. Even if you were high above, looking down on the thunderhead and not yet getting pummeled by it, you could still draw. That felt like a saving grace.
When he opened his eyes it took him a few seconds to come back to her. A look of apology materialized on his face. He had wanted to watch over her. He really had meant to, but the sadness and the worry were like unruly children, very difficult to babysit.
Kostos talked on the phone in her grandparents’ kitchen and Lena sat by the window and looked out at a small segment of the street and the house a few yards across it. She could have gone upstairs and given herself the whole magnificent expanse of the Caldera, but sometimes a close view was all a person could handle.
She listened to his voice. It had been electrifying in the past, but it lulled her now. For some reason her mind strayed to an image of her hyperactive cousin who needed a stimulant to calm down.
Kostos was, as she’d known he would be, the perfect person for this burden. He was already the trusted friend of the guy at the consulate, the go-to man for the last loose ends at the precinct. At some point she realized he’d switched from English to Greek, but she hadn’t noticed right away because she hadn’t stopped understanding.
Lena thought for a moment of Eudoxia. I did call him after all, she thought sadly.
Kostos was quiet for a while, and when she went to check on him, he’d taken apart the kitchen faucet to fix the drip. She watched him for a few minutes from the doorway, forgetting to be self-conscious and that he might be.
“Nobody’s taken care of this house for a long time,” she said.
“What’s going to happen to it?”
“My father says he’s going to sell it. But that will require him coming here and putting it in order and sorting through all the old things.”
He nodded. “I hate to think of this house belonging to anyone else.” When he’d finished reassembling