The Lovers

by Vendela Vida

  Yvonne had the ten movies and was walking out the door to look for Peter when she heard the high pitch of the bell as she stepped over the threshold. Then the moan of a horn. In the intersection she saw a large white car heading toward the driver’s door of Peter’s blue Honda. It was too close, too fast. She heard the screech of skidding tires, and then a hollow, tidy smack.

  Yvonne ran to the passenger door of the Honda, opened it, and saw Peter’s body contorted like a tangled puppet. She touched his forehead, warm with blood, and his wrist, broken and cold. She thought she saw his mouth move, but it was blood falling slowly from his chin. She wiped it off with the back of her hand.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” she said. “Peter. Say something.”

  She repeated his name, shaking his shoulder softly. The only logical thing was for him to sit back in his seat and say, “Whoa, what a mess!” But he wasn’t sitting back. He wasn’t talking. She needed only to get him to talk. She touched his cheek, as if to begin the process, to lead his muscles to speak. Blood coursed from his mouth and over her fingers. “Peter!” A dozen people were watching now. She sensed someone trying to pull her away. “Peter!” She wanted him to begin talking so it would be she and him again. Not these people. If only he would speak, the two of them could talk about how terrifying the accident had been, how scared he was, and how Yvonne had seen it from the video store. “I saw the car coming toward you!” she would say. “You did?” Peter would say, his eyes open in his certain way, his way of expressing utter amazement at the things that could happen in life. “Oh my god, what a nightmare,” he would say. But his mouth did not move.

  Someone was dragging her away. She pulled herself free.

  “Are you okay?” said a man.

  “We’ve called an ambulance,” said a woman.

  The passenger-side window was gone.

  “Is he okay?” said another voice.

  “I wasn’t in the car,” Yvonne said. It was the only answer she thought to give. She turned again to Peter. “Speak!” She found herself tugging on his ear. She had done it occasionally when he wouldn’t wake up after one of his afternoon naps. “Get up, get up!” She was screaming now.

  Now a woman, the woman, the driver of the other car, was coming toward them. Yellow complexion, gray jeans. She stood in front of their car, her arms extended, as though Peter was about to run her over. Broken glasses clutched in one hand, blood on her forehead. Not even enough to warrant stitches.

  Yvonne stepped away from the car, but kept her hand on the handle of the passenger door. If she loosened her grip, it seemed, the car might disappear with Peter’s body still inside. “What were you doing?” she screamed.

  “I didn’t see the light. I didn’t see the light.”

  Yvonne stared at her, heaving. She recognized something in the woman’s eyes, in her voice. She was high. Of course, Yvonne thought. She had spent so many hours thankful that at least Aurelia had never gotten a DUI or injured someone with her car. And now.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I have to go.”

  Yvonne heard something come from within her own voice—it was midway between a laugh and a growl. If the ambulance siren hadn’t come then, drowning out the drum of her heart in her ears, she might have lunged at the woman with her yellow skin and tight jeans. Her car was a white monster, a shark. On the street lay its mangled license plate.

  Yvonne walked toward the license plate instead of the woman. She picked it up and placed it under her arm. It was warm from the crash.

  “You can’t take that,” the woman said.

  “Sure I can,” Yvonne hissed. She was convinced that if she worked hard enough, stared at this license plate intensely enough, its letters and numbers would produce a word, an answer, a meaning.

  The paramedics tried to revive Peter before placing him on a gurney. As Yvonne rode in the ambulance, she held the license plate with one hand and Peter’s hand in the other. His fingers felt broken, and this made her hold them harder, as though the warmth of her palm could meld them back together.

  From inside, the cries of the ambulance were deafening. When they arrived at the emergency room, no one had to tell her anything. The doctor led her into a small room with an itchy couch and two boxes of tissues on the table and she knew.

  After telling the story, Yvonne felt breathless, her lungs deflated. She had been amazed at what had come out of her mouth.

  “Wow,” Jimson said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “That is some story,” Carol said, shaking her head, her lips open in disbelief. “You poor thing.”

  “What happened to the woman who hit him?” Jimson asked.

  “She disappeared,” Yvonne said. “She ran away from the scene of the accident. It was a rental car. She had lied and said she had insurance. She just left the car in the road and was gone.”

  “Just took off?” Carol said.

  They were focusing on the wrong part of the story. Her husband had been killed and they were wondering what had happened to the drug-addled woman who had hit him.

  “Happens all the time,” Jimson said. “These hit-and-runs.”

  “That’s why I think there should be cameras at every intersection,” Carol said. “Then you catch the lady.”

  “But that’s not feasible,” said Jimson. “Think of the cost!”

  “Well, at least she had the license plate,” Carol said, as though Yvonne wasn’t there. “That was smart.”

  Yvonne wasn’t sure what kind of response she had wanted from them, but this wasn’t it. There was a long pause.

  “What do you think?” Carol said. “Do you want to go check with Deniz and see if it’s alright for us to go up?”

  “Yup, we should do that,” Jimson said.

  Yvonne felt petulant toward these people she had liked only minutes before. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and sat on the closed seat of the toilet. The room was tiny, her knees and elbows touching the walls. She knew she wouldn’t tell the story of Peter’s death again. No response was adequate. The funeral should have taught her that.

  It was late when they returned to Knidos. The rain had stopped and the night sky was brown. Deniz embraced each of them, nesting her hands to her heart after she had released them; she treated them all equally in her farewells. Captain Galip took Carol, Jimson, and Yvonne to shore on the motorboat. Everything was wet—the seats of the boat, the wind, Yvonne’s hands and face.

  “It was so great to meet you,” said Jimson. Carol nodded enthusiastically.

  Now they pity me, Yvonne thought. They would go back to the chateau and tell each other how lucky they were to have found each other, to still have one another, to have raised well-adjusted children whose lives rarely interrupted or questioned their own. Yvonne knew this because, in the beginning, she and Peter had done the same thing on many occasions. This, she thought, was what the expression “love is blind” really meant: no couple wanted to believe there were millions just like them.

  “We should get your contact information,” Carol said. The wind was blowing hard and for a moment Yvonne pretended she hadn’t heard. They would exchange a few e-mails, and she would receive a holiday card from Jimson and Carol, their faces cheek-to-cheek. She already knew that in a year or two she would be removed from their mailing list. By then, they would have met other people on other trips, and their time on Cleopatra’s Island, and her story of Peter’s death, would blur into other stories they heard and movies they saw—if they remembered any detail at all.

  Yvonne pretended to look for a pen. She knew she didn’t have one. “Here,” said Carol. “It’s my card. For my clothing company, but you can find me this way.”

  On shore, Captain Galip turned to Carol and Jimson for payment, and Jimson produced an envelope, already prepared. Captain Galip peered inside and, without removing the money, shuffled through the bills with his thick fingers. When he was finished counting he nodded.

  Then he turned to Yvonne.

  It was a
financial arrangement. When Deniz had asked her to come to the island, it had not been an invitation of friendship, but a business offer. Yvonne had not thought it through; she had not thought anything through. Fortunately, she still had money left over from her exchange in Istanbul, and it was all in her purse. She paid Captain Galip and gave him the coins she had intended to give Ahmet. “For the boys, the crewmen,” she said, embarrassed. She knew it wasn’t much.

  Yvonne hugged Carol and Jimson and Captain Galip good-bye, wanting badly to be alone. She could see in their distracted eyes that they too were finished with the day, with the company they had kept. Yvonne looked briefly for Ahmet. He would not have dismissed her story of Peter’s death, even if he couldn’t understand it. He would have remained quiet, respectful, awed, devastated. She should have saved the story for him.

  But there was no one at all at Knidos; the only two cars in the parking lot were the rentals belonging to her and to Carol and Jimson. She drove back to Datça in the dark and in the rain, which had started up again. At the house, there was a note from Özlem under the front door that said: “I stopped by to apologize.”

  Yvonne walked down to the basement to see if the owl had moved. It was sleeping on the top of a bookshelf, between a stack of CD cases and an old printer. She walked back upstairs and turned on the television, and quickly grew bored of an American show. She sorted through a deck of playing cards; she had never learned how to play solitaire. Hunger led her to the kitchen, where she saw the pomegranates she had bought a few days before. She sliced one in half and removed and transferred the seeds into a bowl. She ate a handful of seeds, and then another. She searched the kitchen for more food. The tomatoes she had bought only a few days before appeared to have shrunk away from their skin, each the face of an old and toothless woman. She threw them away and went to bed.

  In the morning it was raining lightly, the sky the color of driftwood. Yvonne felt she had to go to Knidos. She had to see the boy. The look he had given her the day before, as he watched her leave for Cleopatra’s Island, haunted her. She knew if she did not show up this would mean something to him. He would feel abandoned or, worse, that he had never been important to her.

  As she walked out the door, she saw the maid coming up the steps—hadn’t she just come? Twice a week was too much. She was wearing a different head scarf today, with bright yellow roses, and her husband and son were trailing behind her. They each nodded hello to Yvonne, and she nodded back. A moment later Yvonne heard a sound coming from within the house. It was the owl. She covered her hair with her hands as it flew over her head and out the door. A small flurry of black, like paper set to fire. The maid screamed. She pointed to the owl in the distance and said something to Yvonne. Then she held up her long skirt, turned, and ran down the stairs, back to the car she had come in. She was followed by her husband and her son. Yvonne ran after them.

  “Come back,” Yvonne said. “It’s gone.”

  The husband was in the driver’s seat already. Inside the car, the maid was crying or praying—Yvonne couldn’t tell which. Maybe she was doing both. Did she think it was an omen? Yvonne watched the car drive off, and knew they would not return.

  Yvonne locked up the house and drove. Knidos was as empty as it had been the night before. The restaurant was closed, the umbrellas pushed down as though in retreat from the sky. Yvonne held the shell she had taken from Cleopatra’s Island.

  She walked through the quiet harbor and toward the beach looking for Ahmet. She found no one but a lone fisherman. She walked to the other harbor, where only two boats remained, rocking visibly. The Deniz II had left.

  On the beach she saw the boy, sitting alone, looking out at the boats. Relief passed through her, and she called to him. He turned in her direction and then turned back to the water. Yvonne approached him and seated herself beside him on a narrow log. The weight of her body rolled the log forward and the boy leaped up.

  “Sorry,” Yvonne said.

  Ahmet’s face was impenetrable.

  “I brought you something,” she said, and held out the shell.

  The boy examined it.

  “For you,” she said.

  He held it in his fingers, between the small half moons of his nails, and smiled.

  “It’s a terrible day,” said Yvonne.

  They both looked out at the water, at its gray and white foam. He nodded and smiled.

  She realized she had nothing to offer him except companionship, and now she felt that was not enough. What interest could she hold for a boy of nine or ten? Her guilt—for leaving him the day before, for not knowing Turkish—prompted her to speak. “I’d like to commission you,” she said. She knew he wouldn’t understand, but she was still fashioning what it was she was offering.

  “I pay you,” she said, using accompanying hand gestures, “to bring me shells. Pretty shells from the ocean. I will pay you for your time. For every shell you bring me, I will give you money.”

  She explained her idea again, more slowly, and this time Ahmet appeared to understand. He smiled and extended his hand. She took it in her own—how cold his small fingers were—and lifted it up and down in an exaggerated handshake.

  “Deal,” she said.

  “Deal,” he repeated.

  When Ahmet started walking to the water, she realized today was the first day she hadn’t worn her swimsuit to Knidos. She had come to see the boy, not to swim.

  “Are you sure you want to swim today?” she said, and looked up at the sky. “We can start tomorrow.”

  The boy stared at her, puzzled. Yvonne reminded herself that he wasn’t a tourist in pursuit of a warm-weather dip and a tan. It was shells he sought, and the commission she had offered him for these shells. Cloudy skies meant nothing. She followed him to the edge of the water. She didn’t want to be far from him.

  Ahmet was intrepid. He walked only a few feet out into the ocean before hoisting the front of his body onto his bright white kickboard. The kickboard looked new, and because there were no stores in Knidos, and none Yvonne had seen in Yakaköy, she wondered if he had bought it in Datça. It was hard to picture him there, on the other side of the peninsula, in that other world.

  She lifted her dress above her knees. The water was chilly but not as cold as she would have imagined. Ahmet would be warm enough, she thought, as she watched him kick his way out into the ocean.

  He scooted himself forward on the kickboard so his head was over the front edge, and peered down into the water. Every few minutes he would leave the board and dive below. He spent twenty seconds or so underwater before emerging for breath. If his dive had been successful, he would place a shell into a small net tied to the front of the board.

  The water today was rougher than usual. As Ahmet moved farther out into the ocean, Yvonne instinctually stepped forward into the water, as though there existed a string between them of finite length, and she could not let more distance expand between the two of them. A nervous feeling grew inside her stomach and her mind. Relax, she told herself.

  An hour later, Ahmet returned to her, the kickboard in front of him, his legs scissoring behind. When he arrived on shore, he reached into the net and extracted three shells. One was smooth and fan-shaped, violet-colored. The second was pale blue, with a row of protruding quills. The third reminded her of a belly button.

  “Beautiful,” she said. She rummaged through her purse and found she had nothing to give him. Whatever money she had had, she’d handed to Captain Galip the evening before.

  “Tomorrow I’ll pay you your commission,” she said. Guilt was balling up inside her again. “I promise.”

  He gave her a blank look of either trust or disbelief.

  Yvonne saw the sand starting to darken and, a moment later, she felt drops of rain on her head. She offered Ahmet a ride home.

  He placed the kickboard, his net, and his sandy towel in the trunk, so as not to dirty the car’s interior—a polite gesture not everyone would have made, given the car’s appearance. H
e buckled himself into the passenger seat, his legs not long enough to reach the floor. Yvonne tried to remember when Matthew had been that young, that small, and could not. When she tried to picture Matthew, she saw Ahmet instead.

  She drove more carefully with Ahmet in the car. Alone, Yvonne felt invincible, but with the boy in the car, she gripped the wheel tightly and kept her eyes fixed on the road.

  When they approached the chateau, the boy pointed. Yvonne pulled into the driveway and stopped the car to let him out. Ahmet signaled to her to open the trunk, which she did, and then he came around to the driver’s side and pointed to her and then to the hotel. “You look,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said. She felt oddly flattered that he wanted her to see his grandmother’s hotel.

  She followed the boy up the cement steps that led to more steps. By the entrance to each guest room sat an array of small rocks, painted with a room number and a flower or a moon. The rain was heavy and she saw no one. Carol and Jimson had said they were checking out early.

  By the time they reached an open door, Yvonne was out of breath from the stairs. Inside, the smell of cooking greeted them from a warm kitchen. In the adjacent dining area, a man and a woman in their late thirties were listening to the radio and folding paper napkins into triangles.

  Ahmet greeted them and they returned the greeting without looking at him. Yvonne stood next to Ahmet for a moment in silence, watching the man and the woman fold the napkins, until the boy spoke again. She heard him say her name, the way he pronounced it. Eve-on. The man and the woman looked up from their work.

  “Merhaba,” said the man.

  “Hello,” the woman said, and stood. “You are staying here?”

  “Merhaba,” said Yvonne. “No, I’m just here with Ahmet.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, and turned away, finished with Yvonne. In a glass case massage products were on display next to a price list. Yvonne guessed the woman served many roles at the hotel—cook, maid, masseuse. And she guessed the man, her boyfriend, most likely did maintenance.