The Lovers (16 page)

Yvonne walked upstairs toward the bathroom door, which was ajar. The tub was empty. She entered the master bedroom, and then the closet—she expected she would see Özlem there, rummaging through the lover’s clothes once more. But the clothes were on the floor, in the same disarray she had left them.

“Özlem,” she said. The house was darkening earlier than usual. Through the windows the rain was diagonal, a thousand silver arrows.

Özlem wasn’t in the bedrooms or bathrooms, and she couldn’t have come downstairs without Yvonne noticing. There was only one other place—the third floor. Yvonne climbed the spiral staircase.

Özlem was sitting with her arms around her knees. The towel that had been wrapped around her was now unfastened so one breast was revealed. She was seated before the open trunk, staring. The sex swing.

“Do you want me to bring you some clothes?” Yvonne said, pretending she didn’t know what was inside. These were two of her strengths: changing the subject and feigning ignorance.

“I’m going to leave Ali,” Özlem said.

Yvonne nodded. She thought Özlem had already made
this decision, but now, seeing her like this and hearing her say it in that tone, she understood that Özlem had not meant it before.

“I’m going to get my things tomorrow,” Özlem said. “Do you think I could pass the night here?”

“Of course,” Yvonne said.

Özlem pulled the towel around her torso and stood. With her bare foot, her painted toes, she closed the lid to the trunk.

They ate dinner and Yvonne tried to distract her. “My daughter is coming to visit,” she said. She heard excitement in her own voice. “It’s too bad you’ll miss her.”

“Yes, too bad,” Özlem said, convincingly.

“She’s flying to Istanbul and then coming here. Is there something I should tell her to see when she’s there?”

“Give her my number in Istanbul,” Özlem said. “She can call me.” She wrote down the number and made Yvonne promise to give it to Aurelia.

There was the question of which room Özlem would sleep in—she didn’t want the master bedroom below the hook. She settled on the room with the twin beds, and Yvonne didn’t admit that this was the room in which she herself had been sleeping.

After Özlem had gone to bed, Yvonne sat on the master bed with her laptop. She wrote Aurelia. “Yes, please come,” she typed, and gave her the address and phone number to
the house, and Özlem’s phone number in Istanbul. “Call her if you need something,” Yvonne wrote. “She’s a good friend.” She began writing something about how sad she was about the breakup with Henry and then deleted what she had written.

She turned off the lights and got under the covers.
I am the mother of whatever household I enter
, she thought. It was her role tonight, as Özlem slept in the twin bed, and it would be her role again in a few days’ time when Aurelia would arrive, fresh from heartache and whatever else.

The next morning, the sun, looking pale, reappeared. Yvonne went to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker. She listened for Özlem, but heard nothing. After an hour, she knocked on the door to the room where Özlem had slept, and when she received no answer, she slowly opened it. Özlem was gone.

Yvonne pulled on her swimsuit and the turquoise sundress, packed her bag, and removed the euros she had hidden in the raincoat pocket on her first day. It was windy out, the sun not yet hot. She needed to see Ahmet. She worried he was upset with her. She needed him to know she would pay him the commission she had promised.

She descended into the bay at Knidos and parked. No sign of the boy. She walked toward the beach, passing a family of four, Turkish tourists on their way back to the road. The young girl was naked and covered in sand. The parents were bickering, perhaps about how she had gotten that way.

Yvonne looked up and saw him. Ahmet was on the beach, wearing a different set of swim trunks today. Red. He was squatting by the edge of the water, making some sort of structure out of the small sticks and debris that had been deposited by the waves.

She was so happy to see him she jogged to him, and almost hugged him hello. She composed herself.

“What are you building?” she asked him.

He looked up to her, and as though he had been waiting for her and for this very question, he began trampling over his construction, kicking the small branches and rocks in all directions. When he was finished, Ahmet looked up at the archaeological site on the hill, and then back down to his feet. “History,” he said, smiling and pointing.

She nodded, understanding that he was using a word she had taught him. She laughed. He was a smart one. She pictured him a little older, and in her class. He would be the kind of student who would keep in touch after leaving Burlington High. For years she had kept a shelf in her office to display the accomplishments and correspondences of former students, but, save for a handful of postcards, a bound thesis about female knitters in literature, and a book about the Civil War written by a student who had transferred out of her class, it had remained disappointingly bare. She had recently placed three small cacti on the shelf instead.

“I brought you something,” she said, and she removed the crisp new euros from her purse. “Your commission,” she said. She paid him more than she had planned, more than he
could have expected. But he did not look surprised. Instead, he took the money solemnly, as though he now had an enormous task before him. She considered asking for some of the money back to ease his burden. She should have known he was the kind of boy who would live up to whatever expectation he felt was placed on him.

He rolled the money like a cigarette and buried it beneath his towel. He looked around the beach to see if anyone was looking. Now that the sun had shown itself again, Knidos was filled with people. There was still a strong wind—the boats were rocking, their masts waving to and fro like errant compass arrows—but no one wanted to spend another day inside.

“I look,” Ahmet said, and he walked into the ocean with his kickboard. Once he reached water that was deep enough, he scooted his stomach onto the board and set out, away from Yvonne. She watched him paddle with his small arms. He was exploring a different area today, closer to the rocks. To see him better, Yvonne walked down the beach, maybe fifteen feet further than she’d ventured before, and took a few steps into the water. She hadn’t wanted him to leave her so fast.

The floor of the ocean was different here, more difficult to navigate with its sharp rocks and slippery weeds. The water was up to her calves, and she took a step in the direction of the boy. Her foot! A crab, a jellyfish. Or a piece of glass. The pain pinched and she leaped away from it and hobbled back to shore so she could examine her toe. She sat on the edge of
the ocean, the tide making its sizzling sound before retracting, and cradled her foot in one hand.

With her other hand she spread her toes to assess the damage. A twig had lodged itself in the delicate space between her fourth and fifth toes. She removed the wood, and a small red dot of blood spread into a wider circle. She applied pressure with her fingers, and then looked up and out into the water.

She couldn’t see the boy. She nursed her foot for another minute, and looked up again, this time fully expecting to see him paddling back to her. She stared at the dramatic rocking of the boats. The water was louder today. She looked toward the rocks. Surely his red swim trunks would stand out; surely she would be able to see them. Or at least his kickboard, which always remained on the surface even when he dove down below. But she saw nothing.

She moved slowly at first and then quickly, leaping into the water. Her foot pulsed with pain. Then she stood still, waiting for him to reemerge. She counted to ten. She counted to twenty. She adjusted her gaze to see farther out and then closer to shore.

He was playing a joke. He was demonstrating how long he could hold his breath. Or he had swum to a boat, and was hiding behind it.

Already she wanted to yell at him for this prank. She knew she would find him and would want to grab his arm and tell him how hurtful such jokes were.

Where was he?

She dove into the water, her dress twisting itself around her legs. She stood on tiptoe where her feet could reach the bottom and pulled the dress off over her head, leaving it in the water to float or sink, and continued to swim out to where she had last seen the boy.

She got to where he had last been, but she saw nothing. Treading water, she looked around, her legs beating beneath her. She tried to see below the surface. The water was as thick as marble. “Ahmet!” she screamed. “Ahmet!” The panic in her own voice was frightening her.

“Ahmet,” she called again more casually, as though she were summoning him to the dinner table. “Ahmet.” The boats were to her left, the rocks to her right. She saw no sign of him in between.

By this point others on the beach and on the boats had taken notice of Yvonne’s panic. A few men had jumped off boats in the harbor, one with a life preserver in hand. Some had left their chairs at the restaurant to come out to the dock. Yvonne appealed to all of them now instead of to Ahmet. “Help!” she screamed. “A boy! A boy!”

She swam diagonally to the left and then to the right, plunging her head below the surface every few strokes. But underwater, she could only see a few feet in front of her. She kicked with her legs, hoping she would touch a foot, a finger.

She screamed to everyone on shore. “A boy! A boy! Find the boy!”

More men and women jumped in and swam to her. Maybe
he had gotten trapped in the weeds below. If she could only feel some part of his small body, she could dive down, untangle him.

She was thankful now to be surrounded by others—by men swimming, by a small fishing boat. She was growing weak. She needed them. Everyone tried to speak to her in Turkish, except for one man who spoke in Spanish. She told him that the boy was ten, that he was diving for shells. Suddenly she felt something against her leg and hope blossomed inside her, until she understood that one of the men diving underwater had encountered her calf. He swam to the surface, disappointed to see Yvonne’s face.

Now the others were getting in the way. The splashing! Yvonne was afraid none of them would find him. She couldn’t tell how much time had elapsed—three minutes, or thirty.

“Ahmet!” she yelled as she swam among and around the rocks. The water was rougher here, and she looked to see who could help her if she needed it. Many of the swimmers had now turned their attention to the docked boats, and were yelling up to the passengers, confirming, Yvonne assumed, that no boy had climbed aboard.

She turned her eyes to the rocks and there she saw something. The kickboard. It was knocking against the rocks, each wave turning it round and round, like the hand of a clock.

Yvonne sat upright in the basement of the Datça house, five towels pulled around her, shivering. She sat on a musty circular rug, in the dark.

The fishing boat had rescued her. The current had pulled her toward the rocks, and two or three men had hoisted her up onto the boat. There had been so many hands upon her, under her armpits, her knees.

When they arrived at the dock a crowd had gathered there, and on the beach. They were looking at her the way bystanders had after Peter’s accident. They thought it was her son who had drowned.

But then there were others, the waiter among them. They looked at her as if she had submerged the boy with her own hands, her own weight.

She had swallowed so much salt water. Someone gave her a thermos of tea, which she drank in small sips.

She looked around for someone asking questions. She didn’t know whom she was searching for—someone official. There were no ambulances or lifeguards. A boy had drowned and—

She spat out the tea in her mouth and vomit followed. It was pink and sinewy and attached itself to her hair. It covered her feet.

The fisherman was wearing a bandanna around his neck, and he handed it to Yvonne. But the smell of fish, and the man’s sweat, made her vomit again. She looked up and saw faces staring at her as she stood in front of the amphitheater, vomiting onto the sandy white path.

How long had she stood there, bent over, while they watched? How long had they watched without coming to her side? It might have been an hour. She didn’t want to consider that less time could have passed before she walked to her car.

She had waited in her car. Doors closed, air-conditioning on. She waited with the engine running for five minutes, ten. She expected someone to come and question her, someone to come and stop her, arrest her, admonish her, punish her, scream.

But no one did. They had all watched her vomit, walk to her car, and sit in the parking lot, and no one had done a thing.

Even the fisherman who had rescued her and left her with his bandanna had returned to his boat.

She had known when she was doing it that walking to her car might not be the right thing to do. She knew she might regret it. But the limbo, where no one was accusing or assisting her, had made things worse. Her brain seemed to be swelling in the heat. She cradled her head in her hands.

She needed to go to Datça and think. She needed to be away from the sun, the stares. She needed cold water, shade. She needed stillness, the fortress of the house. She would go and think and come back. She waited for someone to stop her. She waited for someone to come running to the car and say the boy had been found. He was found and alive.

She waited but no one came.

When she got back to the house, she didn’t remember driving there.

Inside the house she still felt trapped. Even the sun, usually meek through the windows, felt accusatory. She made her way to the basement. The pungent scent of the owl still lingered.

She needed to think clearly.
Think
, she told herself. She knew she only had a limited amount of time to set things right. She had left Knidos without a word. That had been a mistake—she knew it now. She had known it then. She had behaved the way someone guilty would behave.

But nothing had happened. He had gone into the water, paddled out, and then nothing. No sound. No splashing. No cries.