Finally, she saw the splashes of a struggle and something massive and hairy erupt from the surface. She strained to make it all out, as the blob of the boy wrestled with the creature. At last, joyful shouts resounded. Eventually, the boy emerged with a huge, black, shabby dog in his arms, whom he deposited at the little girl’s feet. She threw herself atop the mass of wet fur, burying her face into his. Her parents must be rich, Sarah knew, to keep a dog as a pet.
Sarah watched the boy shrug off accolades, pat himself dry with a rag, button his shirt, and return to his fellow fishermen. And that was when she fell in love with him.
No, she didn’t love him because he made her laugh or because he had striking eyes and soft hands. Those things were true, but she learned them later. She didn’t have a choice. God didn’t ask her if she wanted to love a non-Jewish boy from Lefkada who came to Corfu to try his luck for the season. To see if their fish were any better.
If Sarah had known then what she and this fisherman had in store, would she have run far? Would she have run home?
Seventy-some years later, Milos, and still, the answers to those questions elude me.
That was our beginning, but there is so much more to tell. Can you write me back in English? Maybe you can have someone translate. Please, I can’t read more Greek. It makes me feel, well, unbearable. If you can’t find a way to write in English, send me one of those little yellow faces the kids use these days. My granddaughter Joey, she’s a girl, not a boy, it’s short for Josephine—she helped me set up my computer so I could talk with you. She told me there is one face that means laughing and crying at the same time. Have you ever heard of anything so stupid, Milos? Back then we laughed and we cried, but only separate, didn’t we? We laughed so hard and then I only cried.
I am tired now, Milos. I think I will go watch my rosebushes.
I hope you are well. I hope you have been loved.
Chapter Six
Joey
Florida
2019
Joey looped her sandals on her thumb and crossed the sand already scorching in the morning sun. She’d asked Leo to meet her at the pier at Lighthouse Point because it was private and far from Delray, minimizing the risk of encountering anyone she knew. The beach was vacant aside from an old man sculpting a sandcastle by the shore. Ahead, a lighthouse presided over a row of white-shuttered beach rentals. A silhouette hovered in the shadow of the lighthouse, near the end of the pier. Joey’s body lurched like there was something it remembered.
“Leo,” she whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. “Holy shit.”
Joey walked slowly toward the pier, adjusting the half-tuck of her flowy white blouse into her burnt-orange high-waisted shorts. The man at the end of the pier turned. He tossed up a tennis ball, and Joey watched its trajectory, higher and higher until clapping back into his open palm.
“Hey, Jonesey.” A smile unfurled on lips she once could map in her sleep.
Jonesey. The nickname traveled through her exquisitely slowly, dragging with it the bittersweet memory of its origin.
Joey stepped closer, farther down the pier, until she dead-ended into a chest, into arms, and something more than gravity swept her inside them.
* * *
“You look good, Jones.” It sounded deeper, this Leo voice, and Joey tipped her face up in curiosity. His lazy, teasing smile was so utterly the same that it took her breath away.
Leo slipped from her arms and started back down the pier toward the beach. Joey followed, dazed, beside him, the hairs of her arm sweeping the hairs of his. As they walked, Joey was struck by flashes of before—floating in the sea on their backs, staring up at an azure sky, the wind dancing in the awning at their one-year anniversary dinner. Their last Corfu night.
But then here was Leo in the flesh, now more Daniel Craig to his early-aughts Joshua Jackson. He wore a green T-shirt and gray jeans slung low, skinny and rumpled. A couple of black rope bracelets clung to his left wrist. His face bore pale scruff, sprinkled by a few silver strands, and one cavernous wrinkle bisected his forehead. Somehow, though, the wrinkle lent him wisdom, worldliness, an invitation to unearth the adventures that had shaped it.
“You got edgy, huh, Jones?”
“What?” Their arm hairs were still hugging each other.
“This.” Leo touched her left earlobe, where she had three delicate gold earrings in a row, plus two in her cartilage that had hurt like hell in the piercing.
She had fewer piercings in her right ear, only two in the lobe, for an asymmetrical vibe, not too precious or perfect. Her dad liked to call her piercings jazzy. Joey still couldn’t work out if that meant he liked them or not.
“When did you get them?”
Joey’s heartbeat thrashed in her ears. She could tell Leo about quitting her big law job, about craving a drastic change after all those years shellacked and suit-straitjacketed. About how the ear piercer had tried to talk her out of getting all five additional piercings at once, but she’d insisted. About going to Bali and meeting Grant and one of the piercings getting infected so Grant had taken her on the back of his motorbike through twisty rice paddies to get antibiotics from a clinic.
But no, Joey couldn’t tell Leo all that. That story required a thousand others to preface it. And Leo had chosen to bow out before those thousand other stories.
“I’ve always been edgy,” she said. “I’m an artist. It’s basically in the definition.” Her left hand twitched. She extended it. “One thing that did change, though, is I’m engaged. Well, you already know that, I guess. His name is Grant.”
Leo took Joey’s hand to check out her ring. Their fingertips brushed, and Joey saw things at work in his head, as if his brain were on the outside and the gears were all interchanging, as if he were about to come out with something meaningful. But then she sensed his resolve weaken, and a weary certitude overwhelmed her, that she shouldn’t have come to see him. Leo released her hand. It flopped to her side.
“My parents send their love and regrets they can’t make it to the wedding. They’re so happy for you. I’m happy for you too, Jonesey.”
“Thanks.”
“A dermatologist, huh?” Leo raised an eyebrow. “Nice.”
“How did you know?” They’d invited Maisy and Rand to the wedding for old times’ sake, although not Leo, for obvious reasons. But Joey didn’t think their two sets of parents had kept in touch much in the decade and a half since their Corfu days, at least not sufficiently for Leo’s parents to know the particulars of Grant’s job.
“You didn’t think I was going to come all the way to Florida without Googling you, did you, Jones?”
“Oh.” She tried to picture him scouring her digital footprint like she’d done to his but couldn’t conjure it. It was a thing she’d always resented him for: Leo was better at letting go.
“You’ve Googled me too.”
“No…” she said, but smiled and knew it was unconvincing.
“Sure, Jonesey. Sure.” Leo laughed with all his teeth displayed, his front two teeth the same length as the two that hugged them. He’d been self-conscious about that. Some mishap by a dentist who’d gotten overzealous shaving off a chip. Leo tugged off his high-tops and socks before wading into a soft wave, past the line demarcating wet sand from dry. “Come sit with me, Jonesey.”
“In the water?”
“It’s a special occasion. My first time in the Atlantic in a long time. Just put your feet in.”
“What the hell.” She eased herself down beside him. They sat in silence until a wave came that looked simple and nice and instead thrust a sheet of sea into her face.
“Oh God.” Joey scooted back and blinked salt from her eyes. “How am I going to explain my wet-rat look to Grant?”
“You didn’t tell him I was coming?” Leo tossed up his tennis ball. It landed with a thump in his palms, and he sent it up again.
“I’m going to.” A lump lodged in her throat. “You didn’t give me much notice.”
<
br /> Leo shook his legs in the water. “I know, Jonesey. I’m sorry.”
Joey’s eyes fixed on his jeans, clinging like spandex to the twists of his muscles. She waited for Leo to say more, but he didn’t so she thumbed through her fifteen years’ worth of questions. Had he fulfilled his dream of becoming a captain of his own ship? Was he happy? But what came out of her was, “Did you ever wonder about me, Leo?” She immediately wished she could take it back. Just that little bit had induced a whiplash of vulnerability. “I mean, how I was doing and stuff.”
His face looked pained but almost dumbfounded too. “I wondered about you, Jonesey. Of course I did. That you’d think I didn’t…” He shook his head. “That’s the whole reason I’m here. I…I didn’t break up with you because I didn’t love you. I loved you so much. I guess, well…the truth is that I still do.”
Joey had imagined Leo saying just that for so many years, but somehow hearing it now only twisted the knife. “You still love me? That’s what you came to tell me? Just when I’m happy, you swoop in to ruin it?”
“Jones, wait. I’ve thought about seeing you for so long. A million times I wanted to tell you the truth—”
“No!” The ferocity with which it emerged almost scared her, that something could live so dormant inside with such rage. “No. No. You can’t do this now. You don’t have the right. You know what? I need to leave.” Joey stood and brushed sand from her butt.
Leo stumbled up to a stand after her. “Wait! I know it wasn’t fair of me. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. I just found out you were getting married, and I don’t know, something in me snapped.”
“Right,” she said, unable to couch her bitterness. “Fifteen years later and something in you snapped.”
He stared down at the tennis ball now stationary in his palm. “I realized it was now or never, I guess.”
“It’s never, Leo.” She was surprised, still, at the sharp edges of her anger. “Let’s get one thing straight. You and I will never happen again.”
“Okay. I get it. Loud and clear, I do. But Jones, I’ve come to Florida for more than just seeing you.”
A wave slapped her calves. “I don’t know what that means, Leo.”
“I know. It’s just…I need to do the right thing, Jonesey. I need to finally do the right thing.”
“You’re speaking in riddles, and frankly it’s annoying.”
“Will you stay and listen? I promise, if you stay and listen, you’ll understand why I had to come.”
Joey looked into his green eyes, still boyish and hazy, inviting her to fall back inside them. But falling by its nature entailed that inevitable crash back to earth. Falling was once the only way Joey knew how to love. With Grant she’d finally learned how to love on solid ground.
She had to trust in that solid ground now because she couldn’t rewind herself away from the beach. It was inevitable. She was always going to stay for the next part.
Joey sat back down on the sand. “Okay, sit, Leo. Talk.”
Chapter Seven
Joey
Corfu
2003
How Joey came to be Jonesey was a story that told almost everything. The beginning and, if you looked close enough, the ending too.
It was late morning on Corfu the summer they were eighteen. Joey wandered bleary-eyed onto the terrace abutting the Abrams and Winn families’ neighboring apartments, with their postcard vista of town, harbor, and mountains.
She surveyed the array of mostly empty plates and glasses and only Leo at the table, his shin propped against the glass table pane. His legs were tan, bulkier in appearance when he contorted them so, the little hairs adorning them bleached by the sun. He put a hand to his brow and gave her his trademark languid smile. “Half the day has passed, Joey. Fancy seeing you awake so early.”
“Ha. Some of us need our beauty sleep.” She scraped back a chair and sat. “Been out on the boat?” She could smell his intoxicating Abercrombie cologne. During the school year, on trips to the mall with her friends, she often lingered by the entrance to the store with its strong scent she associated with Leo, eagerly anticipating the summer.
“Yep. Let’s do something fun this afternoon, J. Got plans?”
“Not yet,” she said, her insides their usual tangle of hopes and fears.
“Great. Wanna go to Sidari? I rented a motorbike.”
Sidari. Wasn’t that the place with the stunning beaches and the Tunnel of Love? Had Leo finally figured out she’d had a crush on him since they were ten? If he didn’t kiss her at last, she’d combust. Die. Dead.
Okay, stop the crazy, Joey ordered herself.
As casually as she could muster, Joey said, “Cool.” She stared out at the view as familiar as her face in the mirror. They lived right in the heart of Old Town. The tallest building with the grandest terrace. They were the luckiest people in the world.
Before Joey was her favorite marigold building with intricate, wrought-iron white balconies that resembled Chantilly lace. And then beyond it, in the sweep of town that led down to the sea, endless sherbet and copper stucco blazed into view, bookended by the two Venetian fortresses that for centuries had guarded the island against foreign invaders. Olive trees sprouted in roadside squares and bougainvillea wove around trellises. Steeples and clock towers thrust through the skyline; only the Church of Agios Spyridon was visible in its grand entirety. It had been narrowly spared destruction by Allied bombs in the forties, and according to Joey’s art teacher, legend had it that Saint Spyridon walked the cobblestone kantounia at night, protecting the island and her people.
In the distance, sailboats bobbed in Garitsa Bay. And not far beyond hovered the misty outlines of mainland Greece and Albania across the strait, with villages baked into lush green hilltops. At a certain line, the villages petered out and the mountains stood proud watch over the Ionian Sea.
Joey peeled off flaky pieces of a leftover croissant now hot from the sun, her eyes in their typical bounce between the vista and Leo. After breakfast, while Joey went to her bedroom to slip into her favorite coral bikini, the danger occurred to her of allowing optimism to overtake things. She and Leo were just friends, and had been for years. But oh God, the hope of something more swept her away.
Joey went to the kitchen to assemble snacks into a basket. Her mother padded in.
Joey’s father was in the States still, presenting at a conference on the latest techniques for minimizing estate taxes, or something equally boring. He usually spent all of June with them in Greece and came out for a week one other time.
Bea’s long dark waves were piled on top of her hair in a messy bun, and she wore just a peach lace bra and matching high-waisted panties with a silky robe atop, splayed open. Even compared with high school girls, her mother was objectively hot.
“Your abs look amazing,” Joey said.
“Thanks, JoJo! You think?” Bea clasped her ribs with her forefingers and thumbs and appraised herself in the stainless-steel gleam of the countertop mixer that had been used over its lifetime far more frequently as a mirror than as a baking tool. “When your dad is away, I have time to do sit-ups.”
Even though Joey thought that was a bit of an exaggeration about the tightness of Bea’s schedule—she had a nanny come most days to care for two-year-old Lily—Bea did generally allocate a lot of time toward her art. Sometimes she was in a research phase, or the actual creation, and sometimes she was just sitting around staring at a canvas or a wall, seemingly not doing anything. But actually, that was Bea’s prime time for inspiration, she said, when ideas had space to attach. As an aspiring artist herself, Joey admired her mother’s passion and devotion. Bea wasn’t a wallflower stay-at-home mom like many of Joey’s friends’ mothers, and no one would ever say Bea Abrams didn’t have a point of view.
Bea held up two dresses—a long red one with a plunging back and a black mini that Joey had once borrowed to go clubbing with Leo at the resort town Benitses in the south. “Which one?”
�
��The red is nice.”
“It’s for the presentation I’m giving at the gallery on Sexuality in the Era of Impressionism. Thirteen people signed up.”
“Oh. Cool, Mom.” Joey waited for Bea to launch into some diatribe about how that paltry sign-up meant Corfu needed to get with the times. That even in the nineteenth century, Manet created some scandalous stuff. Then Bea would backtrack and say, but we should be careful about using the word scandalous because it carries negative connotations, and nudity is natural.
Instead, Bea said, “Where are you going?”
“With Leo, to Sidari.”
“Oh, it’s gorgeous there. You know, Joey, if you’re sleeping with Leo—”
“I’m not sleeping with Leo!”
But I want to be sleeping with Leo. I desperately want to be sleeping with Leo.
She’d had sex before, a grand total of once, throwaway sex in a friend’s basement with a guy who was sweet and sort of chubby. The next morning, she’d nearly gagged as the heat of his stale beer breath had tunneled against her neck. In the dark, lulled by angry hip-hop and floating in the pool at one A.M. in some random girl’s spare bikini, staring up at a starless sky, it had seemed the natural segue when arms wrapped around her waist, when she swiveled her head to see that guy on the football team who always seemed oafy. Or maybe she’d just slept with him to get it over with, to not look a fool when she returned for the summer and presented herself to Leo. Joey knew Leo was not a virgin.
Bea said, “Well, if you do sleep with Leo, it’s your prerogative.”
“Mom. For the last time, Leo and I aren’t together.” It worried Joey, how transparent her desire was and also how fragile—she was china teetering on a table’s edge.
When We Were Young Page 4