Kyra Read online

  I said nothing.

  She waited, fiddling with a paper clip.

  “It’s okay,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  She made a note and closed her book.

  “We have three weeks now until the break,” she said, like dropping a stone into a pond. She waited for the ripples.

  What did she want me to say? “Please don’t go”? And then she would leave anyway. It was absurd. “Go now if you’re going to go”? That was a thought.

  Or I could leave first, leave her sitting alone in this room. She would get up, turn off the lights, close the door, go downstairs, call a friend maybe, go out for coffee, or have tea with her husband, a suddenly free hour, like a snow day, I thought, the memory bitter.

  That night I dreamed I was climbing down a ladder and suddenly two rungs were missing, leaving a gap. The ladder led down into a boat, and I wanted to get in the boat, or felt I had to get in the boat, but there was no place to step. My foot dangled in the air. I became terrified and woke in a panic.

  The dream seemed obvious to me. The night Simon was killed, we had left in a boat. If we hadn’t gotten into the boat, we might have been killed as well. Our parents had disappeared. It was why Simon had wanted me to leave. They should have gone too.

  “What about the ladder?” Greta asked. It was Monday. I had told her the dream.

  I looked at her, puzzled.

  “You know,” she said, “in every dream there is a navel, a knotted place where it opens into the unknown.”

  The feelings in the dream came back. Terror, panic. I looked at the clock. It was time to stop.

  “We can come back to this on Thursday,” she said.

  “To what?”

  She said, “I have the feeling these days that whatever I say is wrong.”

  I glared at her and left.

  On Thursday, I was talking about the project and plans for the summer when Greta said, “I’m thinking about that dream, about the ladder, and wondering if it’s telling us something about the summer and the break in therapy, just when you were starting to get down into it.”

  Her words grated. She wanted me to talk about my feelings about her leaving. Talk about yourself, I wanted to say. How do you feel? Weren’t you getting into it too?

  “I’m thinking that maybe we have to go back down that ladder and find the missing rungs. Where you put your foot out and there was no place to step. Two rungs were missing. I will be away for two months.”

  She sat back.

  “Is this the leaving cure? A Roman therapy?” I asked, thinking of David. He would get the point.

  I had told Anna that it didn’t make sense. You go to therapy to work through your feelings about people who have left you, and then the therapist leaves you.

  “That’s the point,” Anna said, peeling an onion, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “You can work through your feelings, talk about them rather than hurting yourself.” She put down the knife and looked at me pointedly.

  “That’s not why I cut myself,” I said. “What’s the point of therapy? To introduce the toxin like a vaccine, gear up your immune system so you become impervious to being left. Leaving? So what?” I walked out of the kitchen.

  “It’s part of life,” Anna called after me, “like death. You learn to accept it.”

  I came back in. “You’ve completely missed the point. There was nothing natural about Simon’s death, or for that matter about Andreas’s leaving. It was a shock. Unnatural. It came out of the blue. He said he was in love with me, that he had never felt this way about anyone before.”

  “Maybe that was it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Maybe he left because he had fallen in love with you.” She gathered the little squares of onion to one end of the board and slid them into the pan, turning down the heat. “Maybe it was because of the strength of his feelings for you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” What she said was precisely what I had thought, which is why I cut myself, I wanted to say, because my feelings had come back, so strong, overwhelming, and I needed to see beneath the surface, to know if they were about something real.

  The smell of onions cooking filled the kitchen.

  “Actually, I agree with you,” she said, crossing to the table and taking the dead flowers out of the vase. “About therapy.” She took the vase to the sink and ran the water. “To invite relationship, encourage trust, and then work through the grief over its ending, or as they would say, the termination. You’re right. It makes no sense. It’s why I can’t do it anymore.” She threw the flowers into the garbage.

  “I feel that I’m not getting through to you,” Greta said, rearranging herself in her chair, “or rather that we’ve managed to talk about the break on some surface level that might just hold the relationship through the summer.”

  “Like the skin that forms over milk when it cools?” I asked her, deliberately provocative. Milk, mother. Her response was predictable.

  “I’m wondering about the ladder, the ship in your dream. I am leaving, maybe you want to come with me and can’t because of the missing rungs. I am leaving for two months and you feel left, suspended in midair.”

  An invitation into a maze. Whatever I said always led back into my feelings, my problem. What about her feelings? Was the separation no problem for her? I thought of Andreas. He had no problem leaving.

  “But you know,” she continued, “you know how to move in the face of impasse. This is part of your history as well, and it may have been one of the reasons you became an architect. Because you have an eye for how to build things.”

  It’s true. I do. Something inside me released. The child got up and left. I took her place. It occurred to me that I could bridge the summer by writing.

  There was something I wanted to say, something I wanted to convey to her that I hadn’t managed to say. I was an academic, or at least I could pass for one. I would write it, show her what she hadn’t seen. What I hadn’t found a way yet to say.

  She worried that this would take me back into the feelings that had led me to cut myself, at a time when I would be alone with them. I reminded her that I would be with Anna, that I would not be alone.

  In the end, she gave me her phone number in Wellfleet, telling me that this was where she would be, that I could call her if I wanted to, that it would be fine with her if I called. She said she hoped the summer would not be too hard, that I would have some good times. I took the paper with her phone number and left without saying a word.

  I thought of her often during that long, hot July, how she would sit in her chair so still sometimes, like the water in the bay, except that it was translucent and she was opaque, or at least she liked to think she was. What was she doing now? I could see that she needed a vacation. Still, the structure of therapy didn’t make sense. The sudden drop-offs, like falling into space. I saw her smiling, my architect’s eye again.

  Was she also thinking about me?

  On the island, there was haze in the air, like the mists I had described to her, when the air holds the sea. The grasses stayed green even though there wasn’t much rain. What was it like on the Cape where she was? The colors would be less intense because it was farther from the Gulf Stream.

  At the beginning of August, Anna and Tony were going to Provincetown to meet with a marine biologist. A friend of mine had a show in one of the galleries there, and I decided to go to Provincetown with them. I wandered down Commercial Street, wondering if I might by chance run into Greta. Wellfleet was nearby. It was a cloudy day, not one for the beach. Anna and Tony finished early and found me in the gallery at the east end. The biologist had recommended a stable where they rent horses, and we decided to ride along the beach. The stable was desultory, or maybe it was the day. Tony urged me to take the black mare and I liked the knowing look in her eyes. She seemed more spirited than the rest. We filled out the forms and headed out, the horses picking up speed as we reached the water’s edge. We had cantered far down
the beach when the mare suddenly reared and turned, heading back to the stable, determined to go her own way. The others followed, and as it turned out, we got back just before it stormed. “See,” Tony said, “she knew.”

  The biologist had invited us to a party. He was staying with a friend who had a house at the west end overlooking the bay, and Tony said that I might like to see the house. The friend was a musician from Cambridge. I wondered if he knew Greta. The house reached out over the sand, the deck cantilevered at a nice angle to the water. I wondered who the architect was. I picked up a glass of red wine from the bar at one corner of the living room and made my way through the crowd, thinking I would go out on the deck since the rain had stopped.

  And then I saw him.

  He was standing next to the rail, looking out at the sea. Like on the boat that first day when we went to Nashawena. I froze. “I don’t do this,” he had said then, meaning us. “I don’t either,” I had said, the two of us laughing because it was at once improbable and true.

  He turned, and his face went white. I couldn’t breathe. I reached out toward the door to steady myself and it opened. Like a sleepwalker, I stepped onto the thin wet boards of the deck.

  He didn’t move.

  Rain dripped from the overhang. A gust of wind blew the door shut and I startled.

  “Kyra,” he said.

  A distant bell, the clang of a buoy.

  I looked in the direction of the sound.

  “Kyra, Kyra,” he said. Words coming through a fog.

  Rivulets of water ran down my hair. I stepped away from the overhang.

  He glanced at my face, his eyes drifting toward my arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “Was I…” he began. “I couldn’t believe that I…I didn’t want to go—” He stopped.

  I steadied myself.

  “Can we speak?” he asked, his face mournful.

  Something inside me stiffened. No.

  The lights of a boat, the sound of an engine. Fishermen returning. Too late.

  “I cannot do this with you again,” I said. Once broken. Not again.

  I turned. Anna was standing by the door, her face a mix of attentiveness and alarm.

  “I’m here only for a few days,” he said.

  Anna and I left the party immediately.

  2

  I COULDN’T BREATHE. AIR WOULD START TO COME IN AND THEN catch in my throat. I felt I was suffocating. On the boat back to Nashawena, running lights red and green, Anna put her hand on my arm. “What did he say?” she asked. I wanted to tell her but I couldn’t.

  Instead, I thought about Simon. The summer before he was killed, we had taken our bikes to ride down the coast to the beach at Protaras. I was wearing my new white pants over my bathing suit. I had forgotten about the chain. We hadn’t gone very far when the cuff caught and I fell, my leg attached to the bike, the white cloth gripped in the greasy links. I dragged the bike to the side of the road and stood there, holding back tears. My pants were ruined. Why hadn’t I rolled up the cuff? Or used a clip, as I used to at school? I hadn’t thought about it because that summer I was wearing mostly skirts and the day was so sunny, like a day when everything will be fine. I was standing there in the heat, an appendage to my bike, when Simon, who had been riding ahead, turned and saw me, and raced back, taking me in his arms and asking the one question I hadn’t thought to ask: Kyra, are you hurt?

  Peter was busy with a new production, but he came over to Nashawena the last week in August. The director this summer was doing The Tempest, but I had kept my distance. We sat together at the back of the amphitheater, darkness coming earlier now. “Come unto these yellow sands—” Shakespeare’s words broke through my gloom. The actor playing Ariel was tiny, her body elastic, her voice enticing. I settled into the magic of the play. “Curtsied when you have and kissed, the wild waves whist.” Peter leaned toward me. “It’s perfect here, to do The Tempest on this island.” But it was later, in the fourth act, when Prospero said to Ferdinand, “You do look my son in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed,” that it came back. Not the island and the vision but the house, the deck, the thin boards, Andreas standing at the far end, chairs and table wet with rain. “Our revels now are ended. These our actors as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.” Tears ran down my face. Peter put his arm around my shoulder, warmth radiating into the place that was shut. “Do you want to talk, Kyra?” he asked.

  Quietly we got up and left.

  There was a flat outcropping of rock above the theater, off to one side. Peter draped his jacket over one of the stones. We sat, watching the actors in the distance, their voices reduced to a blur of sound. “Are you cold?” he asked. A white moon lit the sea. I shook my head. “He told me he saw you,” he said quietly. The word dismay came back. “As if you were dismayed.” I began to weep. “I was the one who told him,” Peter said.

  I picked up a stick, the ends frayed, and began to peel the bark, staring into the whiteness.

  Peter took a deep breath. “He couldn’t believe he would hurt you so terribly by going.”

  I broke the stick in two. “That wasn’t it,” I said, my voice rising in defense. Of what? My pride? It wasn’t about him, what he believed or couldn’t believe. It was that he had treated me this way.

  The play ended. Applause. The actors reappeared. More applause. Then the stage lights went out. Below us, the audience dispersed. Boats waiting at the dock. Stagehands gathered up the props.

  Peter spoke softly, his Dutch face solemn, lines down the sides of his cheeks like a woodcut, moonlight accentuating the hollows. “He said he had written to you.” He had. Over a month after he left that letter, the long white envelope with Hungarian stamps. A drifting relationship between us is impossible. We have both said it countless times, and it is inescapably true. I suddenly felt cold. All my fantasies and considerations and concerns are centered around the question of a marriage. And in my current state, marriage seems very distant and unreal.

  What state? My mind took refuge in trivia. He told me once of a woman he had met. We were walking around Fresh Pond. She had asked him what he did, and when he said conductor, she said, “Train?”

  I turned to Peter.

  “When he heard, he wanted to come,” Peter said, “but Felicia told him it wasn’t a good idea. You had just left the hospital. It might reopen the wound. And fortunately, nothing terrible had happened.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. Nothing terrible?

  “I meant, you hadn’t actually…He thought that in person, he might be able to explain.”

  “Explain what?”

  I didn’t mean to get into an argument with Peter.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” Peter said. “It’s really okay.”

  He bent his head and massaged the back of his neck. Then he let out a deep breath.

  “These things are never easy,” he said, “or simple.”

  For a moment, he sounded like Greta.

  “Abe is in the hospital,” he said. “Abe came here for the summer to visit his sister. He brought Jesse with him since Andreas’s new company was touring in Europe. Edith noticed that Abe was forgetting things. She worried Abe was losing his memory. She was afraid he might get lost. It wasn’t safe to leave Jesse with him. She arranged for Abe to go into McLean for tests, and they decided to keep him for observation. That’s when Andreas came to the U.S. To see Abe and to take Jesse with him back to Budapest.”

  “And Abe? How is he?”

  “Not well,” Peter said. “They used to call it senility. Now it has a fancier name.”

  “He was such a sweet man,” I said.

  “Still is,” he said.

  The cold of the rock had penetrated through his jacket, and I was shivering.

  “We should go,” I said.

  Greta stood up when I came in. It was the Thursday after Labor Day and the
weather had turned hot. She was wearing white linen pants and a knitted blue top, her face tanned, looking younger. She extended her hand, a bit formal, but still I was glad to see her. My body relaxed, the touch reassuring. The room, the couch, the chairs, the plants, the painting of the blue door, everything was the same. I placed my new leather tote on the floor beside the chair, a symbol of my resolve to move on.

  “So?” Greta said, scanning my face.

  “I saw him,” I said, realizing in that moment that I had been waiting to talk about it with her.

  I began the story but something was unsettled.

  Her face was alert.

  I remembered a dream. “Last night, I dreamed I was in a car with a man. I was driving and we had to cross this open terrain to get to the border. There was no road. I looked down at the gearshift to see if there was four-wheel drive. When I looked up a man was standing beside the car, his face menacing. I tried to lock the doors but the buttons kept popping up. I started to panic. ‘Ignore him,’ the man sitting next to me said. I floored the gas and the car jolted, then sped across the open field. At the border, a sign said, ‘Free State.’”

  I looked at Greta. She was waiting.

  “The man in the car,” I began, “I think it was my father, but maybe it was Andreas. He was wearing a leather jacket. I couldn’t see his face. The other man standing by the car? My first thought was Anton, but actually he looked more like Simon, his face distorted with rage. The road we were on was shaded, trees hanging over the pavement. Like willow trees, except that doesn’t make sense because it was a darker green. The summer my father was teaching me to drive, we found a road lined with trees, a long, straight road with very few cars. The border?” I laughed. “The sign says it all. I guess it’s a dream about finding a free space, escaping from menace. I certainly know about that.”