Kyra Read online

I SANK INTO THE CHAIR AS IF I’D LET GO OF A ROPE.

  “You can begin wherever you want,” she said. She smoothed the folds of her skirt.

  I looked around the room. Eaved ceiling, white walls. Brown couch nestled against one wall. A painting of a blue door over her chair. My eye settled on her face. A small woman, mid-fifties. A delicacy to her features. Her eyes keen, like a bird.

  “If you want to begin with silence, that’s fine. We’ll get the feel of each other in this room.” She settled in, fixing her gaze on the middle distance.

  When she came to see me in the hospital, her presence was calming, dispelling the din of carts and trays, nurses coming in and out. The silence was restful. I hadn’t intended to kill myself. She didn’t seem alarmed. I heard her voice in the corridor insisting I not be put on medications. A hush of conversation, footsteps dispersing.

  The clock on the desk said twenty to six. Ten minutes had passed. Could I really be silent here too? I looked out the window. Snow falling steadily through a cone of streetlight, days getting longer, the hopefulness of January. The plants on the desk waited, drawing nourishment from the artificially warmed winter soil. The visibility would be bad on the drive home.

  Ten to six. She shifted in her chair. My body stiffened. I would take her at her word. Her glance swept my face. Kind eyes. This birdlike woman of infinite patience.

  The door on the opposite wall remained silently shut. I could pick up my bag and leave. Or could I? The question was absurd. The hands of the clock moved imperceptibly. Time running out, like sand in the hourglass on the shelf next to the stove, my mother waiting, the white of the egg solidifying, three minutes. The light in the room intensified. One lamp next to her chair, the other on the desk beside me. Outside, the quiet of snow falling, spreading a clean sheet over the ground. Any footstep, and the darkness underneath would become visible.

  She raised her eyebrows, as if reading my thought. The clock said six, hands straight up and down. Stick figure in a child’s drawing. Mentally, I added arms and legs, a face and a nose. The figure was running.

  “It’s deceptive,” I said, “this time of the year. The light is lengthening, but still the winter has hardly begun.”

  Her face suddenly alert.

  I turned to the window and stared into the blackness.

  “Is that why you cut yourself?” she asked. “To see into a darkness?”

  “I had to know.” My voice sounded edgy, defiant. I turned to face her.

  “What didn’t you know?” she said.

  “What was true. What was real.”

  “With Andreas?”

  It was odd, hearing her say his name. Oddly comforting. Most people avoided it in my presence.

  I nodded.

  “It felt true to you, at the time?”

  Tears surprised me.

  “And you stepped with your full weight into that truth?”

  The tears welled, spilled onto my face.

  “And then you found yourself all alone.”

  I wept, letting the tears run down my cheeks. I had stepped onto ground I had sworn never to walk on again, and it had given way under my feet.

  Her eyes filled with tears, and for a moment, the truth seemed simple.

  Of course it wasn’t simple. I had betrayed everyone. Simon with Andreas, Anna by lying to her, myself. And then there was Richard, who had given me the commission, the students who counted on me, everyone involved in the Nashawena project. My feet tangled in a skein of regret. If only I had kept my vow and stayed with Simon, if only I had seen through Andreas, seen who he was. If only I had stayed with Anna and continued as we had been living. If only I had killed myself.

  “Do you do this,” I said, meaning her tears, “with all your—” I hesitated. What did she call them, patients? Clients?

  It was the end of the hour, time running over, six twenty-five.

  “I usually try with people to give them their space and not intrude. But I see that with you it’s more important for you to see what I feel,” she said, stumbling over her words, “and something in your story must have touched something in my life because my tears surprised me. So the answer to your question is no, I don’t usually cry.”

  I would come on time—waste not, want not—fold my coat over the wooden chair next to the desk, and then sink into the well, the circle of black leather. The lamp on the cabinet beside her suffused the room with yellow light, intensifying the gold of the rug. Field of gold, cloth of gold. She sat in her chair waiting, listening, inserting questions, quietly unsettling. One day she laughed. I had said, “You know, this therapy, I mean, look at us, two women meeting in a small room, the slant of the ceiling, the flat of the floor.” “There,” she said, “that’s an example.” She had spoken about my architect’s eye. “And you?” I said. “How do you see it?” She paused for a moment. “I don’t see so much as listen.”

  She told me she was a cellist, her ear tuned to the sound of the bass line. I looked at the rug, gold in the late-afternoon light. Henry the Eighth and the king of France, meeting to negotiate their peace on the field of the cloth of gold.

  A tide came in, the wash of desire drawing my life into the orbit of her—this woman I barely knew with her short hair and long skirts and odd name. Greta, she was called. A character from Grimm. Regretta, Anna said one day, unable to resist. Lines from a poem ran through my head: Look she said this is not the distance we wanted to stay at—we wanted to get close, very close. But what is the way in again? And is it too late? A suck in my stomach, an undertow of fear.

  The clock on the desk marked the hour, its tick barely audible, expectant. Anything could happen in the next minute, or the one after that, until then suddenly the hour was over and I left, bewilderment overtaking me as I descended the two flights of enclosed stairs.

  I had been talking about my mother. When she went to the market, open in the center of town, she would bring us back treats, reaching into her pockets, her fingers enclosing the secret. Which hand? We had to guess. When she called my name, her voice extended the syllables, Kyra, rolling the r. She taught me Hebrew phrases—lilah tov, good night, boker tov, good morning, and her favorite from the Bible: Ani l’dodi, v’dodi li, I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine. I was her youngest child. She called my sister, Anya, the three of us rolling down the hill at the side of the house, our faces flushed, the smell of wild thyme. Anton was away at school. Thorn in her side, son from her first marriage. A mistake. The atmosphere of the household lightened. It was before the political trouble began. I hadn’t seen what was coming then either, I said.

  Greta looked at me quizzically. Was that true?

  The hour ended. At the bottom of the staircase, light streamed in through a pane in the door. The house was silent, moving toward evening. What was she doing now? Making notes about me? Watering her plants? Waiting for her next patient? Or was I the last? Was she waiting for me to leave so she could come downstairs and start dinner? The door on my right leading into the kitchen was shut. Once when I had come in the morning, I saw a man sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. The kitchen window was level with the landing outside the door. I stood for a moment watching him, the graying hair, the ease in his body, the quiet absorption. Everything about him said husband.

  “Today is her birthday,” I said. It was March, and the light was strong. “My mother would have been sixty-three today.” Greta’s face blurred. I bent down to retrieve the letter I had salvaged, grateful for the curtain of my hair. Words, imprinted in memory, rushed up, dizziness overtaking me. I fished around in my purse for the envelope and then placed it in my lap, waiting for the turbulence to settle. Greta had her inquisitive look. Shadows of tree branches played on the wall behind her. Where was the branch to catch hold of? The door beckoned. I could just put the letter back in my purse and leave. It was what they call an option. “I brought a letter,” I said. She didn’t say anything.

  The plants on the desk reached into the light. It was the fir
st day of spring. “The coming of spring,” my father would say of my mother’s birthday, “born on the equinox.” He had cleared his throat, resisting the impulse to repeat once again the explanation, sun midway through its journey; he launched instead into the poem he had written for my mother that year, “Once more on this occasion, I raise my voice in celebration, of you my beloved, my dearest Katya,” his voice thickening as he said her name. She glanced shyly at us, her children gathered around the table, each bringing something we had written or made for her, she who had given birth to us.

  Forgetting the Kleenex on the table next to me, I wiped my eyes with my sleeve.

  It was the first year I was away at school and I was spending the Easter break with friends. I had written her a letter, sent it to my father to read at the table on her birthday. When I got back to school, an envelope was waiting for me in my mailbox, buried under flyers and college announcements, my name carefully scripted, a legacy of her European childhood. I took the letter and went to my room.

  “Do you want to read it?” Greta asked, her voice spreading calmness. A surface I could walk on. I unfolded the paper.

  “‘My darling Kyra,’” I began, the air in the room suddenly still. I glanced at Greta, her face intent. “‘Your birthday letter made me so happy. Papa read it at the table and we all laughed at the part where you described the travel.’”

  I don’t know what I had expected—that I would be overcome with a paroxysm of grief? Instead something lifted, my mother’s voice guiding me now like a beam.

  “‘I was of course relieved to hear that you arrived safely and I trust that you were careful about what you ate and drank only bottled water.’” The uncanny had turned into my mother. “‘I missed you, my dearest, your lively presence at the table, and yet in my deepest heart, I rejoiced to think of you on holiday with your friends. I could picture you swimming in the sea, and I too remembered the trip we took in September before you left for school, just the three of us, you, Anya, and me. It was one of the highlights of this last year. Anya had made me an album of her photographs and we spent yesterday afternoon before she left looking through it, including the ones from the trip, the little beach we found with the island to swim to and the simple lunch place where they made the best fish.’”

  I took my feet out of my shoes and folded my legs under me. “‘Papa said to send you a big hug and kiss from him and to tell you he will write soon. Freddie is sitting here right beside me, wagging his tail because he knows I am writing you. He says he misses you and is waiting for you to come home and take him to the beach, which we do not dare to do now that they have put up a sign saying “No dogs.” Charlotte said that you shouldn’t give people’s names to dogs but I explained that Papa wanted him to have an English name since he is an English dog. She said it wasn’t English, which is true. I said maybe we should have named him Yam, for the sea, like the Israelis do, naming their children for the sea or the dew, to make a clean break with the past.

  “‘We have had an early spring and I am trying to get the garden in, along with all the other things. Anya left this morning and the house is very quiet with just Papa and me and Freddie. If the food in the college is not fresh, you can go and buy yourself something in the market. Try to remember to eat some fruit every day. This afternoon when I go into town I will stop and ask Mr. Panopoulos if he can mail you a box of fresh oranges, which I think he will do since he knows me for so long.

  “‘It is a gift in life to have a passion and a blessing to be able to pursue it as you are now doing. It is what I pray for, that you should have this always. Take care of yourself, my darling. I send you a million kisses.

  “‘Your loving Mama.’”

  Greta’s eyes were glistening, her face lifted in expectation.

  “So you know what love is,” she said quietly.

  I startled.

  “What do you mean?”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “That you know.”

  I took a deep breath, air rushing into a space that had opened inside me. I remembered the Israelis, shedding their past, naming their children Yam for the sea or Tali for the dew, and then I remembered Tali, the soprano. I turned my arm over to look at the scar. It had faded, a thin white line like the crescent moon.

  “But if I knew,” I began, “then”—I was flailing around, reaching for logic to steady myself—“then I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have made that mistake. I would have known what was true.”

  She paused for a moment, her face reflective.

  “Maybe that’s why you’re here,” she said, a Buddha reciting a koan. “Because you knew.”

  I unfolded my legs and put my feet back on the floor.

  “Look,” I said, not knowing where to look—at her, at the door? “What’s the point of this, since you will leave too? I get stronger, you go.”

  Greta hesitated a moment.

  “We have to stop now,” she said quietly.

  I folded the letter, placed it back in my purse, put on my shoes, picked up my coat. Outside, the light glared back at me. All I could think of was the word disarray.

  April was consumed by an argument about therapy that seemed to lead nowhere—Greta tense, stiffening in her chair. I could see her willing herself not to be drawn in. But I was after something, something I wanted with her that seemed essential. Something about truth, about her feelings. “It doesn’t line up,” I said. “And he was a mistake.”

  One day I looked at her right hand and imagined a cellist’s bow moving steadily back and forth across a single bass note: you know. I smiled, in spite of myself.

  “People,” she had said, “are very good at winning at their own games,” a reminder that I could defeat her.

  The spring term was shapeless, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas lights, winter ignoring its official stopping point, a game without a referee. In endless faculty meetings, we argued about the curriculum, two teams forming, like color war at camp. Who would capture the flag? I had lunch with Emma, a friend in Visual Studies, and she said the same thing was going on there. “It’s the academic sport,” she said, biting into her melted cheese sandwich.

  I thought of telling her about Greta, but instead I asked where she got her boots.

  Greta told me she would be taking two months off in the summer. “Great,” I said. I told her I would be on Nashawena, that I had no intention of coming into Cambridge in any case. Hand in glove. Then May came with a string of warm days. The lilacs bloomed, transforming the air with a sensuousness I assumed the Puritans would have found alarming. Greta brought cut branches into the room, standing them in a tall vase on the floor next to her chair.

  My dreams were filled with houses. I would wander from room to room. Sometimes she would be in one of the rooms and I would come in, but then others would enter, making it impossible for us to talk. We would go in search of another room, looking for privacy. One night I dreamed that I went into one of the Newport mansions and the pipes had burst. A large Persian rug was covered with a sheet of ice. I was eating more, sleeping better. Looking in the mirror one morning after my shower, I noticed the pale skin of my face under my eyes. The dark circles had disappeared.

  In June it rained steadily, day after day. The term ended. On the day of commencement, David and I skipped the morning ceremony. “Ludicrous,” he said as we passed the bloated state official, costumed in black, staff in hand, rushing to take his place at the head of the procession, the faculty arrayed like birds of plumage in extravagant yellows and purples and blues and crimson. We turned toward the river.

  “You’re looking well,” David said, glancing appreciatively at my summer dress, yellow-and-white striped, sleeveless, the scar now almost invisible. Anna was right about vitamin E. David checked his watch. The degree-granting ceremony at the Design School wouldn’t start until noon. A friend of his had opened a coffee shop near Boston University. Perfect. A walk, coffee, another walk, and then we would be in the mood to cheer our students and
greet their parents before calling it a day.

  We followed the dirt path along the river, a scattering of mothers with small children playing on the grass, stray gulls overhead, messengers from the sea. We crossed at the B.U. bridge, found the shop—“Joe,” the sign said simply. Pine tables, Mexican tiles, espresso machine gleaming, Bach playing in the background, piano and cello sonatas. I thought of Greta.

  “What’s happening with the project?” David asked. Construction at the site had been suspended until I was ready to oversee the work. “Take whatever time you need,” Richard had said, kind, reserved, making space now as he had when we first came, when we also needed time to get our bearings, to find our way. “Not much,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you come to Rome with us, stay for a few weeks. It would do you good to get away.” He had won a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, Sarah was going with him, they would stay for the year. “To Rome?” I said. “No thanks.” Friends. They invite you to go with them.

  Joe, David’s friend, brought the coffee himself, an outline of a leaf etched in coffee on the surface of white foam. He joined us, pulling up a chair.

  On the way back, it started to rain. David was amused. It never rained on Harvard commencement. “See, Kyra,” he said, “it’s the universe speaking, time for a new city. You’d better stay and get to work.”

  By four in the afternoon it was pouring. The maple trees had leafed, spreading a tent over Greta’s street, turning the light green. The sewers were overflowing and the neighbor children had built dams with stones, flooding the sidewalk and wading barefoot through the water. I had changed into jeans, put on Wellingtons and an old yellow slicker.

  Greta looked up as I came in. She was holding her appointment book in her hand.

  “I need to ask you if you can make a change and come at ten in the morning on Monday instead of our usual time.”

  Why? I wanted to ask.

  She was wearing stockings, a pale yellow silk jacket, heels rather than her ballet flats. Had one of her patients graduated? Someone curable? I meant to sound ironic but the voice in my head sounded hopeful. A young woman with an eye for color and style, like me I thought, looking ruefully at my jeans and drab rubber boots. I could have been seven years old.