Mary’s hand shoots up, irrespective of her will, desperately pushing the helmet off her head. Coughing, she gasps for breath. The helmet soars behind her, crashes onto the highway, rolling.
Geoff screams, “What the fuck!”
Mary is hacking hard now, clutching his waist. There are tears. Shit. Maybe if he just keeps driving, he will not see them. But no. Of course he will stop the scooter—he is stopping the scooter. Of course he has to get the fucking stupid-ass helmet, just as he had to right that bicycle. Yeah, Mr. Nice Guy—he was never a match for Zorg and Titus, never a match for what happened that day. Mary lets go of his waist, almost loses her balance, clutches the back of the scooter until it comes to a halt, then pushes Geoff’s body away from hers futilely. She has started to shake.
Geoff runs after the helmet. It takes him a while—it has rolled pretty far. A bus whizzes by, almost knocking Mary over with its gust. She stands close to the guardrail, sobbing.
“Okay,” Geoff says. “Okay, I get it. You don’t like the scooter. I will drive very slowly, I promise—I’m sorry, Mar, I’m not trying to scare you. Come on, let’s just get back to the other side of the island and return this thing, and then we’ll be done with it.”
“You think they raped her,” Mary accuses, not looking at him.
Geoff steps closer to her, though he holds the helmet like a shield between them. “Yeah. I do.”
“You don’t understand.” She shakes her head. “It’s my fault. They were already planning it—that’s why they sent me to bed. And I just went. I slept for something like two hours, maybe three. I just abandoned her to them.”
Geoff sets the helmet very carefully on the scooter’s seat, like something breakable and precious. He goes to Mary, his large hands on the sides of her arms, but his touch feels wrong and she jerks away.
“Listen,” he says. “Be realistic. What could you have done? You were two girls in an isolated house with men who were older and stronger than you were. You didn’t speak the language—you didn’t even know where you were. Do you really think you could have stopped those sons of bitches from doing whatever they had a mind to do?”
“I didn’t even try! I could have stayed with her, and maybe they would have reconsidered—maybe . . .”
“Do you really believe that? Isn’t it more likely that they would just have raped you, too?”
She starts to walk, mindlessly, uphill. Geoff stays rooted on the highway’s curb, not following, waiting for her, but she can’t bring her body to turn around and reapproach him. Her hands are still trembling, her tears still falling, but something about all this feels wrong, as if she is acting something out, reciting lines that don’t belong to her. How is it possible that Geoff would know all this time what happened to Nix and she would not? Nothing makes sense. He wasn’t there. How could she have slept through the kind of gang-rape scenario he obviously imagines? He didn’t even hear Titus and Zorg laugh. Mary’s legs move numbly, her knees buckling, so that she has to hold on to the guardrail. They were all a little shit-faced—okay, really, really fucking sloshed, from the wine at the restaurant, the barrage of cocktails at the villa. The moment her head hit the blindingly white pillow, Mary was out cold. But was she really so drunk, so deep in slumber, that she wouldn’t have heard her best friend scream?
Nix never screamed. On this, Mary would bet her life. But how does this fit into the rest of the scattered truths of that day? How does this reconcile with what Geoff thinks he understands?
He pulls up alongside her, on the scooter, helmet hanging from its handlebars. “Mary,” he begs, “please get on.”
Nature is in collusion with all manner of trouble. Just as she feared back at the beach when the chilly air teased her arms, a drizzle of rain begins to fall from the sky.
“We have no choice,” Geoff begs. “Look at the sky—it’s going to storm.”
Nix’s face on the villa’s balcony, set with some kind of blind resolve. I will get us out of this, she promised. Don’t do anything, she warned. Nix, the reckless one, always too brave for her own damn good. But how far could any girl be willing to go? Afterward, Nix was a shell of herself, nothing resembling victorious. What was the line between rape and a premeditated scheme? What was the possibility that anyone could so calmly orchestrate and carry out her own annihilation?
And what sense would such a sacrifice make, if both of them were only going to die anyway? What difference all the feelings Mary has had for Geoff, when after everything, love is just nowhere near enough?
“I don’t care!” Mary screams at the idling scooter. “Go ahead, leave me here—it doesn’t matter!”
Like everything else, Geoff’s stare contradicts itself. There is anger, unmistakably, but also confusion, also fear, and she understands in a brief flash of clarity that he, too, has reached the end of some kind of rope. That he is summoning all the calm and generosity he can muster from a place very far away, a place he cannot feel. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” he mutters, low. “I’m not going to leave you. If you make me push this scooter all the way down this damn mountain in the middle of a rainstorm and it takes all night, then that’s what I’m going to do. But I will not be happy about it, Mary. You can’t ask me to be happy about it anymore.”
“You think you understand so much,” she accuses. “You didn’t see Nix in that car, when Zorg was speeding on the cliffs. We really believed we were going to die. She was . . . so afraid.”
“But babe,” Geoff says, killing the motor, “Nix didn’t die in that car. Whatever happened at that villa isn’t what killed her. She died on an airplane, but you’re not afraid to fly. Your best friend died because some militant extremists bombed a plane—because the world is a fucked-up, terrible place, with terrorists and rapists, okay? But you can’t help her anymore, Mary. This all happened almost ten years ago. What’s done is done.”
“Maybe she should have died on that car ride,” Mary says icily. “We both should have.”
“I’m not going to listen to this.”
At the airport in Athens, when Nix pulled away first, Mary thought, I will never see her again. All these intervening years, that moment of fear has seemed prophetic, when really it was too late: Nix was already gone.
Cars blur past. Rain pours down.
“Oh, sure!” Mary shouts at Geoff through a rising mist. “Don’t listen to anything you don’t want to hear! You’ve been living in a dream world anyway! Like we were going to have babies and ride into the sunset. Like that was ever going to happen! You should never have married me.”
“Why?” He leaps off the scooter to approach her, then turns abruptly and kicks it so it falls, hard and clean, to the ground. “Jesus, this is ridiculous! You’re right here in front of me, aren’t you? Nix is the one who’s dead—you’re not her. She was, like, a person, okay? She wasn’t just some symbol for your own doomed life. Her death wasn’t about you! Stop hiding behind her already!”
Mary wraps her arms around herself to keep out the rain. Her hair is damp in her eyes. She glares at Geoff, but she can’t even see him for the drops of water, the wet strands. “I wish sometimes,” she says, “that you had kissed her that night instead of me. Then every time I tasted you, I’d taste her, too. You think I didn’t know something had happened? It was . . .” She sinks to the ground, legs finally surrendering. “It was fucking obvious, even to you, and you were nothing but a stranger. From the minute I woke up at the villa and Titus went to get Nix out of that room, she was a ghost already. There was nothing left of the person I’d known. I must’ve always suspected—but that’s not fucking true either. It never occurred to me. Still, it was always there. I’d have done anything to bring her back—if I could have given you to her, if I thought that would have made her feel better, I would have.”
He pulls her to her feet with a roughness she has never felt in his touch, and she thinks, for one crazy moment, that he will strike her, and finds she is wild with anticipation—that she is eage
r for the blow. But instead he clutches her to him hard. He holds her, whispering, “Stop it, stop it, don’t say anything more.”
Her legs, though, will not hold. She and Geoff sink to their knees together in the downpour, red dirt staining their bare skin like paint. Geoff rummages inside his pack, still holding fast to Mary’s arm with one hand so that she cannot escape. He roots around until he finds a can of Coca-Cola Light, extracts it, and flips off the top. He tosses the can to the side—Mary is surprised, even amid everything, by his blatant act of littering. Grasping the tab of the can in his fingers tightly, he holds it out to her and slips the oblong opening uncomfortably onto her ring finger.
Can I say “My Dearest Nix”?
You do not fit into the narrative of my life anymore. I am a grown woman with B. cepacia and a husband I love but who wants to keep me in a beautiful cage, and I long for a child even more than I did the night I fled Kenya or the morning Geoff first walked into my hospital room like the answer to all my deepest questions, but there will be no baby now, and that has become an immovable, irrevocable fact. So here I am, trapped inside my own skin, waiting for my body to finish its unromantic assault on itself. But what, suddenly, is this? Everything I have believed about you turns out to be wrong.
He says, “I’m not going to let you do this. If you want to get away from me, you’re going to have to get on that scooter and ride it back to town and leave me here on the road. Because I’d marry you all over again, and I don’t care if you think that makes me an idiot. I accept you for who you are, whether or not you can accept yourself. I don’t care if we can’t have a baby. I don’t care if you die—I, Christ, that’s not what I . . .” But he stops. He clings to her hand, pressing its aluminum soda tab into the delicate flesh between her fingers. Under the rain, his eyes are leaking, too. “I know you’re going to die,” he says, his voice steady. “And I have no regrets.”
“You will,” she promises. Tourist buses roll past, racing toward the final ferry of the night, unmindful of the storm. “Nix died on me, and look at me now. I’m a mess. I’ll go, and I’ll ruin everything.”
“I don’t care,” he insists again. “I want to be ruined.”
Here is what I have left of you that you never meant to give me. The feel of your foot through the back of my seat in Zorg’s car, your will to live overriding my temptation to just lie down and be done with it. A terror of winding roads. The rushing of the ground, coming for me, too. Yet also, the will not to just survive but to live, rushing hard in my ears like the inexplicable roar of the sea inside a fragile, finite seashell.
Here is what I have tried to give back to you, best friend, blood sister, fellow adventurer. A vow to keep moving, keep going, as you always told me you were going to.
Soon Mary and Geoff will have to get back on the scooter. At the speed Geoff will drive, they will never make it back in time for the boat. They will spend the night in town, will walk the dark, narrow streets looking for a place nothing like their Tenerife resort. At last they will find a little room, and later that night while her husband sleeps, Mary will finish her letter.
All this time I’ve viewed your life as some wild freedom jaunt, cut short by random tragedy. But you faced your own isolating hell, a secret that cut you off from me. Everything, from your failure to scream to the fact that you ushered me back to the States without explanation, points at some effort to protect, to keep this ugliness from me. Even your strange letters from London, so curiously devoid of your spark, your soul, make a dark kind of sense now. What can I say? As usual, you succeeded in your aims. All these years, and still I’ve looked at you the way you wanted me to, with awe and envy and even (lately) disdain. But your life was not a child’s, though you died too soon. All this time, you faced a woman’s sorrows, no differently than I.
In those months between August and December 1988, you somehow refused to give up or lose sight of beauty. You could easily have run home to the haven of your childhood bedroom, but instead you forged on, beyond Kettering or Skidmore, to London alone. Where does a courage like that come from? How can it be that even now, when I am almost thirty, you are teaching me still, inspiring me? Maybe I conjured you on that ferry, on the winding roads, as a reminder that I cannot just lie down and die either. Whether I have four months or four years, I have to find the strength to make my time count.
Someday it will be here, to the Canary Islands, that Geoff will return alone to scatter Mary’s ashes. First, though, long before death, before sleep, before lovemaking and a whispered renewal of vows, Mary and Geoff will simply need to eat. And so they will wander in the rain to find an open door, plunking wet into folding chairs at a small table, the storm still raging outside. Afterward, they will always call it “our little place” because they never learned its name. The food will be nothing special, but they will eat as though famished. They will fill themselves with the sound of water pouring from the sky, the taste of the chicken’s crispy skin, the tiles on the floor slippery beneath their shoes, the beating of their hearts in their ears. They will try to remember every last detail as though their lives depend on it.
I hear you, Nix, I hear you always. Urging me on.
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
(GREECE: ZORG)
The first ferry to Ios leaves Mykonos at 6 a.m. This has been their goal. Nix walks with Mary and the two Harvard men through the empty streets until they reach the open port. Mary and the men keep turning to see if they are being followed, but Nix does not turn. Her attention is focused on the small adjustments to her movements she must make—on the way she would normally walk and use her limbs in the absence of pain. Before sleep, she had not yet realized the pain. This, she thinks numbly, is what somebody referring to injured victims of a roadside accident would call shock: She’s still in shock. The shock is wearing off. She wants to wave her hand to an imaginary waitress and say, I’ll have another order of shock, please. It is hard not to laugh and never stop; it is hard not to scream and never stop; it is hard to walk. She urinated into the sea last night at Plati Yialos so as not to have to touch herself, but now she has to go again badly.
Sandpapery Greek toilet paper is wadded up inside her underpants to catch the blood. She brought tampons, of course, in her rucksack, but she is aware from some distant place that if she uses them the way she would have to now, she will never be able to use them again. This is what her day has come to: preserving the sanctity of tampons. Mary kisses the good-looking Harvard one good-bye, and the other one waits for Nix’s kiss, but Nix pretends that she is alone, that he does not exist.
On the Plati Yialos beach chair, she would have let Irv fuck her right in front of Mary and Geoff if those yowling cats had not materialized. This seems a sick joke now, not entirely possible. Her body is barely a thing that can walk. Yet it had seemed briefly possible that Irv’s innocuous dick could be a scouring pad, erasing traces of what was there before. It had seemed briefly logical that one should immediately get back on the horse or one would be doomed.
It had seemed briefly conceivable that she was not already doomed.
There is another ferry, headed for Athens. “We’re getting on that one,” Nix says. “Forget Ios, we’re going back to the airport and getting the fuck out of this country.”
Mary begins to protest. Mary says things. Mary talks, gesturing with her hands.
“Look,” Nix says, to make Mary stop. “You should never have come. You were a fucking wreck yesterday on that balcony. You’re lucky you didn’t drop dead from all that albuterol you were shoving down your throat. I should have known better—this is no place for you.”
The two Harvard men hang back. They are headed to Athens tomorrow themselves, then to Boston or someplace, though Nix reminds herself that is also entirely possible that they are only real in this context, and after she and Mary leave Mykonos, they will evaporate. At one point Mary says, “This is crazy, you’re acting like a total bitch. Fine, you want to go back to Athens, then go, I
’ll stay with Geoff and Irv and their friends!” and just for an instant Nix feels a spark of life inside her, a fight-or-flight adrenaline injection at the prospect of Mary’s remaining on this island with Zorg and Titus, but no, the Geoff one comes over and says, “Look, you two, don’t fight. After a night in Athens, things may seem different. You need to stick together.”
Nix watches Mary fold her arms across her chest like a betrayed child. She watches Mary storm onto the ferry without giving the Harvard man her address in Kettering, her body rigid with confusion and fury. Once Mary is safely on the ferry to Athens, Nix, too, boards.
NOTE HOW OUT of place they are among the other passengers: locals commuting for business, or families—tourist and Greek—with young children. Other backpackers of their ilk are all still in rented rooms rendered dark by drawn curtains, sleeping off the island merriments of the night before. Wordlessly the girls find a bench in the sun, in their exhaustion mistaking the air for chilly, though already the sun beats down relentless. If they were thinking straight, they would find seats inside, away from the glare, but instead they sit on a white painted bench out in the open, jean jackets clutched around their shoulders, hair piled up in disheveled knots atop their heads, rucksacks on the bench between them so as to have something on which to lean or a barrier to deter each other from sitting too close. The ferry sets off into rocky waves, and still the two are silent.
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