The Years That Followed

by Catherine Dunne

  Calista nodded. “I can do that,” she said. “He’s so keen to get this promotion; work is all he talks about.”

  Yiannis looked away from her. “Are you OK?”

  “Yes,” she said. She kept her voice bright, optimistic. “A little tired, but that’s to be expected.”

  He looked at her quickly.

  She smiled. “I’m pregnant. Imogen will have a baby brother or sister in about six months.”

  “That’s wonderful! Congratulations,” Yiannis said. He touched her hand lightly. “I’m very happy for you both.”

  “Thank you.” Calista glanced towards the house, but there was still no sign of Maroulla. She often joined them when her son visited, her broad face lighting up at the sight of Yiannis. Now, in her absence, Calista decided to seize her opportunity. “Yiannis, I need to say something to you.” The words sounded more urgent than she had intended.

  He looked at her, surprised.

  “I really want to have my own home. Alexandros and I need a place for ourselves and the children. I’m struggling here.”

  Yiannis nodded, still looking at her. His eyes were kind. “I understand.”

  “I’m not criticizing your parents. Please, I just . . .”

  “I didn’t think that you were,” he said quietly. “I will do all in my power to help you. Don’t worry; we’ll make it happen.”

  Each week, Yiannis updated her, quietly, sometimes in just a few snatched sentences. Calista knew that Alexandros was steadily becoming more confident, more authoritative.

  And now, with their new home finally a reality, Calista is sure she and Alexandros are on the threshold of a new life, that they can finally put the last few difficult years behind them.

  * * *

  When Calista meets Mirofora, she thinks immediately of Maggie. She hires her as her housekeeper, and they have an animated conversation on that first day. Calista’s Greek is fluent at last: she’s been taking lessons for the past four years from Alexia, a young woman, a university student. Learning to speak Greek was a challenge; Calista had no landmarks, no known territories. Greek did not behave in the same ways as Spanish or schoolgirl French. Calista had felt adrift, unanchored among the oceans of its words. At times it had felt like drowning.

  But now Calista is afloat, and she moves about her new kitchen, putting away everything she’s bought at the market. Imogen is playing in the garden under Mirofora’s watchful eye. Omiros is asleep upstairs. Calista has noticed how her son’s eyes follow his father as soon as Alexandros enters the room. She points this out to Alexandros, over and over again. It pleases him the way the baby’s face creases into a delighted, gummy smile every time his father approaches.

  * * *

  María-Luisa and Timothy had traveled to Cyprus to meet their new grandson.

  “Felipe will be here on Friday,” María-Luisa said at the end of their first week. “Your brother is really looking forward to seeing you, and to meeting Omiros. He has good news.”

  Calista looked at her mother quickly. “What sort of good news?”

  María-Luisa smiled. “I will let him tell you himself. I just wanted to prepare you.”

  “Just tell me this—is there a woman?”

  Her mother’s smile faded. “No,” she said, “not that sort of good news. Just be ready.”

  “Of course. I can’t wait to see him.” Calista wished she hadn’t asked. Her mother’s disappointed face had been eloquent.

  She looked over at Imogen, forever making sand castles. Omiros was nestled contentedly in her arms. Calista bent and kissed his forehead, glad all over again that she had produced a son.

  And then she felt ashamed for having allowed herself to place the value of one of her children above that of the other. She remembered, guiltily, María-Luisa’s casual certainties about Philip’s greater value—in the family, in school, in the world. Boys’ education was what mattered, boys’ friendships, even boys’ hobbies; but above all, boys’ futures. She’d looked surprised on the few occasions Calista had challenged her. “But, my dear girl,” María-Luisa would say, her expression more puzzled than irritated, “you will one day marry, have children of your own, be there as a support for your husband; that is your job in life. It is the natural order of things.”

  She glanced over at her mother now. She saw María-Luisa’s hesitation, could read it in the way she placed her hands in her lap.

  “What is it, Mamá?” Calista asked gently.

  “Is all well with you? I worry, you know.”

  Calista smiled. “There is no need, Mamá, really. Alexandros and I are fine. The first few years were difficult, and you already know that. But with his promotion, this house, Omiros’s arrival—we’ve come through. Don’t worry. Things have never been better.”

  María-Luisa nodded. “I am glad,” she said. “I am so very glad.”

  pilar

  Madrid, 1973

  * * *

  Pilar takes the Metro, as usual, to her meeting with Señor Gómez. She arrives at precisely seven thirty; she expects that he will be there waiting for her. For sixteen years, this has been their ritual. These meetings quickly became one of the fixed points on Pilar’s personal compass. They were the safe place from which it was possible to make out the direction of her life and feel the certainty of her place in the world. The only exceptions to this monthly event were August and December, when Señor Gómez allowed his family to insist on the holidays that Pilar was sure he would rather not have taken.

  As she approaches his office, Pilar gets ready for all the usual politenesses of this September conversation. Did you have a nice holiday? How is your wife? Did your son and grandchildren visit as usual this August? Señor Gómez will, in turn, ask Pilar about her two weeks in Asturias, or Galicia, or wherever she chooses to tell him she has been. And then they will get down to business.

  This morning, however, Señor Gómez buzzes Pilar in from the intercom by his desk. He is not standing waiting in his outer office to greet her. Instead, he calls out to her from his “inner sanctum,” as he calls it, and Pilar pushes open the door.

  What she sees shocks her. The man behind the desk is Señor Gómez, certainly, but it is a man who has changed almost beyond recognition. Pilar gasps; she cannot help herself. Quickly, she calculates that it is seven, possibly eight weeks since they last met in July, and the man has withered to a gaunt, yellowish shadow. Pilar knows Señor Gómez is not yet sixty. The man who now speaks to her looks two decades older.

  “Good morning, Pilar,” he says, and his smile is weak, tremulous. His teeth suddenly look too large for his mouth. “You are very punctual, as usual.”

  Pilar tries to gather a response from the scattering of words already racing around in her head. “Good morning . . . It is good to see . . . Are you quite well?”

  He gestures to Pilar’s familiar chair. “Please, sit,” he says. “We don’t have too much time. My son Ignacio will be joining us shortly. There are some things I need to say to you.”

  Pilar nods. She can sense the man’s urgency, and she waits quietly for him to speak.

  “I am dying, Pilar. There is no easy way to say it—so that’s it. As blunt and as forthright as we have always been with each other.”

  All the things she would like to say well at the base of Pilar’s throat. She cannot speak, cannot peel her eyes away from the shape of Señor Gómez’s skull, now clearly visible underneath the tight sheen of his skin.

  “Well, perhaps not always forthright,” he says. “But that has been my fault.”

  The room fills with an intensity that shreds the air. Pilar wants to raise one hand to stop him, but she finds she’s not able. She does not want this man to speak the words that will allude to Petros or the baby—not now, not when everything is already too late. Pilar’s body has been shocked into immobility; her face, her voice, her limbs have all fr
ozen.

  “Today, you must listen and not interrupt.” Señor Gómez looks at her with that familiar, affectionate, mildly interrogative gaze.

  Pilar nods again.

  “I have the deeds to our first property here. The mortgage has been discharged in full. The building in Calle de las Huertas is yours. Completely.”

  Pilar begins to move now, a slow, tentative reaching out, but Señor Gómez stops her.

  “No. No words.” He pauses, and his ravaged face fills with emotion. “I loved your mother once, many years ago, Pilar. Perhaps you didn’t know that.” He does not look up. “She would not come with me to Madrid, but the truth is, I did not try to persuade her. I listened to my family more than I should have, and I left.” He drops his head farther. Pilar can barely make out the words. “I have regretted that every day of my life. My own lack of courage. My abandonment of her and of our son. I regret that bitterly.”

  Pilar feels her anger blaze: at him, at Petros, at the world. She can hardly begin to unravel the knots of emotion that tighten the air around her. So he did know. For all these years, he’s known. Pilar wills him to meet her gaze. They look each other, finally, in the eye.

  “I cannot undo it, nor can I even make proper recompense. I have tried, over the years, to look after you. But it is not enough. Never enough.”

  Pilar’s words are clamoring now. Words that careen from anger to pity to grief and back again. She cannot articulate any of them.

  “Look after Francisco-José for me,” he says. “I know your brother grew into a fine young man.”

  The outer door opens then, and Ignacio enters. “Right, Papá,” he says. “That is enough. Time to take you home. Half an hour: you agreed.” He turns to Pilar. “Good morning, Señorita Domínguez. My father has been most anxious to keep his appointment with you. I trust your business is completed?”

  Pilar nods, speechless, the deeds to her building hastily stuffed into her handbag.

  “Then we will say good-bye.” Ignacio’s hand under Pilar’s elbow is firm as he begins to guide her out of the room.

  “Wait a moment, please,” she says. She may never see Señor Gómez again. Pilar is flooded with the sudden, pitying certainty that she cannot leave him burdened like this. Her mother would never forgive her. She remembers Mamá’s face, filled with love as she spoke of this man. She would not wish him to suffer needlessly. Pilar crosses the room, stands in front of Señor Gómez’s desk, and places her hand on his. “I will do as you ask,” she says. She keeps her voice low. “I will look after your son for you now. Some things are never too late.”

  He gazes up at Pilar, his eyes filled with tears. “Thank you for that kindness,” he says. “Thank you. You are just like your mother: a fine woman. Ignacio will take care of your affairs when I’m gone.”

  Ignacio escorts Pilar to the outer door. She knows she is being hurried away. His eagerness to have her gone makes Pilar wonder.

  She removes her arm from his and glances back over her shoulder at Señor Gómez. “May I come and see him another day?” she asks, although she feels that she already knows the answer. “I would really like to see him again.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Ignacio says. Pilar can discern no regret in his voice. “This is now family time. My father has very little left.” He doesn’t look at Pilar. His gaze is directed back towards his father, now slumped over his desk.

  Pilar nods. There is nothing to be said to that. “Will you please be sure to contact me when . . . ?”

  “Of course.”

  Pilar steps out onto the busy Madrid street. There is the screech of traffic, the rumble of the Metro, the heaving crowds of constant, rushing people.

  For a moment, she cannot move. Mamá’s life, Pilar’s own life, countless other lives pulse around her. She sees mothers hurrying their small children to school; mothers pushing babies in their prams; pregnant women negotiating their careful way across the street.

  Pilar stands there, allowing the crowds to part around her. She is the only fixed point in a sea of moving bodies.

  calista

  Limassol, 1973

  * * *

  Calista and Alexandros are having a dinner party to celebrate their new life in their new home.

  Nothing too large; Alexandros does not like more than six people at a time around his table. Calista has left the guest list up to him, of course; but she has already chosen a weekend when she knows Petros and Maroulla will be away. Alexandros has invited two friends from his university days: men who have recently moved back to Cyprus from the United States with their brash Californian wives. That is Alexandros’s word: “brash.” It has taken Calista by surprise. She wonders what he means by it, but decides not to ask.

  “Charalambos is a lawyer, and Evagoras is a tax consultant,” Alexandros tells her. “They could be useful to me in the future.”

  Calista says nothing. It seems that friendship is something Alexandros does not understand: your friends, your allies, your supporters are your brothers and your sisters and your cousins. Outside of that army of family, you have no need of others. Others will take every opportunity to betray you; others will show themselves eventually, and when you least expect it, to be the enemy.

  Calista hears Omiros crying. She calls out to Mirofora. “I’m going upstairs to feed the baby. We’ll get started on tonight’s meal as soon as I come down.”

  Imogen looks up at the sound of her mother’s voice and waves at her from the terrace, from her moat surrounded by sand castles with tiny Cypriot flags pushed into their crenellations. An entire fortified city lies at her feet. Calista watches as her six-year-old daughter sails her fleet away, her small hands making the toy boats rise and fall, rise and fall on the sea’s invisible swell.

  * * *

  At first, the evening is a success.

  Calista looks beautiful and she knows it. She wears a long, sky-blue dress with a daring neckline, a dress that emphasizes the new curves baby Omiros has brought along with him. She wears her dark hair up, a gold rope around her neck, matching earrings, and gold-colored sandals. Alexandros smiles his approval when he sees her.

  “You are beautiful,” he says. “You will be the most beautiful woman in the room.”

  It is over the main course that things begin to go wrong. The Californian women, Cindy and Zoe, are by now loud with wine. They are criticizing Cypriot men, talking over each other, arguing with their husbands about something called “women’s lib.” Calista has no idea what they’re talking about; even the language they speak is not familiar to her. She knows each discrete word, of course, but she cannot follow the conversation. The context is missing. Cindy and Zoe are throwing around words like “oppression,” “patriarchy,” “equality,” “liberation.” Calista is worried. One half glance at Alexandros shows her that her husband is not pleased.

  She can feel the turn the evening is taking. She can sense it in the atoms of air around her. The top of her head begins to thrum, faintly but persistently; always a bad sign, her own internal thunder. She tries to shift the evening’s focus, but it feels hopeless, like trying to stop the tide coming in.

  “God,” says the one called Cindy, except that it sounds to Calista like “Gaad.” “I think it’s just disgusting the way Cypriot women serve their men. I mean, it’s 1973, and this is still such a traditional ­society—I keep telling Charlie I don’t know if I’ll ever adjust!” She blows a thin stream of smoke upwards and keeps pulling at her blond hair with one hand.

  Calista glances in Charalambos’s direction and sees him grimace. Charlie. Her eyes meet Alexandros’s fleetingly, and she can tell that his anger is growing. Please, she prays silently; please let him be mad at her, at them, and not at me. Please.

  Zoe’s husband, Evagoras, jumps into the conversation, protesting, and Calista feels immediately grateful. He is funny, Evagoras, and he manages to make the two women
laugh. “We’ve had plenty of feisty women over the years in these parts,” he says. “Look at Helen of Troy, at Clytemnestra and Cassandra for starters, and what about Lysistrata? You can’t say that women here are under the thumbs of men—far from it!”

  Calista is not so sure about that. She recalls a story she once read about Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who seduced Clytemnestra, killed her children, abandoned her in order to fight a war that lasted ten years, and then carried home another woman as a prize. It seems to Calista that the women in that tale did not get much opportunity to be feisty. Not until they became hell-bent on revenge. Then it was a different story.

  Calista cannot hear any longer what Cindy and Zoe are shouting in reply, because her heart has begun to speed up. All she can hear is the bluntness of the blood pounding in her ears. The evening has begun to take a particular turn, and Calista is frightened.

  “Don’t you agree, Calista?” Evagoras is saying, looking kindly in her direction.

  “I’m sure you’ll settle in, just as I did,” Calista says, smiling at her guests. She hopes that her contribution is bland enough, flexible enough, so that it can mold itself around whatever it is the Californian women have just said. Instead, there is a short, strained silence before Charalambos and Evagoras begin speaking again, this time about business opportunities in Cyprus. It is clear that they have changed the conversation because of her. Calista catches Cindy’s surprised glance; she sees Zoe make a face; and she feels Alexandros’s eyes burn into hers.

  Mirofora enters the dining room and begins to clear plates. Calista chooses her moment to escape. She excuses herself and murmurs about seeing to dessert and Irish coffees. When she closes the door behind her, Calista leans against it for a moment, just to catch her breath. Then she hurries to the sink, turns on the cold water, and allows it to flow over her wrists, willing the force of the water to calm the heady racing of her pulse.