Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [36]
He looked puzzled at first, and then seemed to realize what place she meant. “No, no.” His expression told her it would have been impossible for her to be more wrong. “A few years ago I bought a place opposite Oia, overlooking the Caldera.”
“Your own house?”
He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “A weekend house. A vacation house.”
“Can you go on vacation at home?”
That didn’t assuage his discomfort. She backed off. She hadn’t meant to ask him any of those stupid questions.
They walked up the hill instead of down. It didn’t matter; either way was fraught.
As they climbed she talked to herself rather than to him. She chastised herself for her dim-witted confusion—thinking he still lived with his grandparents, forgetting who he actually was now. It was because she couldn’t contemplate having the will or the means to buy a house for yourself—especially not in a place you weren’t even living. Lena barely had the courage or cash to buy a toaster oven. What small amount of money she had she spent on rent and food. Even when she managed to stash away some savings, she tended not to acquire or accumulate anything besides photos, keepsakes, and sketchbooks. That was normal for college students, especially art students, and for people who refused to let time move forward.
But Kostos was long past that. He was over thirty years old. He had a hugely powerful job. He’d been on the cover of a magazine, for God’s sake. Lena had trapped herself in time, but only in her delicate delusions was he trapped there too.
Going uphill was fraught because at the top of the hill, on the plateau, was the little grove they’d shared in a variety of moods, including shame, lust, betrayal, and forgiveness. If he led her there, she was worried she might find herself down in the heart of the storm.
But he didn’t. Instead he led her to a parched stretch of rock, and they sat on a precipice overlooking the water.
This was the view she’d been avoiding, and as her eyes blurred into the blue horizon she understood why. Something moved in her brain, maybe something opened or something shut. The horizon wobbled and spread and the tears rolled over her cheeks. Her breath caught and her shoulders shook.
She found her head tipping against his shoulder and vaguely she felt his arm come around her. The water seemed to dissolve her. Maybe it was the salt in her tears melting her, turning her inside out like a slug. She didn’t fight it. She couldn’t have anyway.
She remembered crying like this in Bee’s arms, and it had been over Kostos. She remembered crying like this in her mother’s arms a different time, and it was also over Kostos. And now here were Kostos’s arms around her as she cried over Tibby and their whole lost life.
Who would have imagined that he, the source of all fret, would turn out to be a source of comfort? She’d built him up so far and high, it was hard to imagine he was right here with her at such a time. It seemed like a hallucination, but not one to be poked at or questioned, so she let it be.
She cried for a long time. Or so she guessed by the changing of the light. Kostos was a patient man. It was his nature, as true to him as his polite manners, his guilt, his oversized accountability. The guilt was for her.
She’d cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn’t feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just … empty. It felt like she was an outline, empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing. Tibby was too deeply incorporated within her for Lena to go on without her.
“I lose everything here,” she said.
He couldn’t really know what she meant, but he thought it over carefully nonetheless.
“Maybe you gain things too,” he said.
“Maybe I do,” she said. She considered that and shook her head. “Nothing I get to keep.”
Bridget indulged one of her old desires. Sometime around midnight—she wasn’t sure what time it was anymore—she locked her bike to a lamppost and unrolled her sleeping bag on a bench in Dolores Park.