The Lovers (14 page)

She told them about how it started with Aurelia’s visit. Their daughter had been out of their lives for a time, but now she was back from India, home for a week. She wanted to apologize, to spend the week repairing their relationship. “I know we can get back to a better place,” was how she phrased it on the phone.
Such a strange way to put it,
Yvonne thought. Yvonne and Peter were reluctant to forgive her, afraid to invite chaos. “Please,” Aurelia begged. “I’m different now.” But the years had taught Peter and Yvonne to be suspicious. They were wary she would disappoint—or devastate—them again.

Aurelia arrived on a Sunday morning in spring, and by that evening Peter and Yvonne were looking for ways to slow the conversation. They didn’t want to talk so much, afraid of what they might promise her, afraid they might forgive her fully if they weren’t careful. It was Peter’s idea to rent movies—“Ten, two for every night she’s here.”

“You don’t think she’ll accuse us of avoiding serious discussions?” Yvonne asked.

“We’ve had enough of those to last a lifetime,” Peter said. He never said her name, as if the name alone caused the pain. Always it was
she
or
her
. Peter would ask what
she
had wanted when she called. Or he would detail a conversation with
another former friend of hers
. They always knew who they were talking about.

And so that evening Aurelia had stayed at home and Peter had dropped Yvonne off at the video store while he went down the street to pick up dinner. He would be back to get her in five minutes.

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 pre
pared. 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.