Envious Moon(25)

“When you first saw me you had just woken up. Maybe you were confused.”

“I didn’t know a girl could be so beautiful.”

“Is that really what you thought?”

“I didn’t know a girl could get more beautiful every day. That every time you see her you notice something different.”

“Like what?”

“Like this,” I said, and I moved her hair where it rested off to the side. I ran one finger along the nape of her neck. “How soft your skin is here.”

“You’re going to make me cry.”

“I don’t want you to cry.”

“Then stop saying such nice things.”

“Okay,” I said. “No more nice things.” I played with her hair. I slid my fingers through it and I massaged her scalp.

“That feels good.”

And we lay in silence then. Somewhere in the distance a car made its way around one of the island roads, changing gears on the switchbacks. A reminder that there were other people in the world. Above I noticed now the first quarter moon, stuck in the branches of the overhanging trees. I pulled her tighter and soon she was snoring lightly and sometime after that I fell asleep too.

When I woke, the sky was subdued with the gray of dawn. A light fog had blown in off the water. It had cooled off and when I reached for Hannah I realized that she was already awake and had been crying. When she turned toward me, her eyes were rimmed with red.

“What is it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

“Tell me.”

She laid her head on my chest, away from me so that I could not see her face. “It’s nothing,” Hannah said again.

“Garota bonita,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Portuguese.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Pretty girl.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Tell me something else.”

I thought for a moment. I said, “Eu morreria por voce.”

“What’s that?”

“I would die for you.”

She lifted her head and looked at me. Then she punched me in the chest with her small fist, not hard enough to really hurt but it stung anyway. She said, “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean it. Promise me.”

“I won’t say it.”

She laid her head back down and her face was warm against my bare chest. The air was wet with the morning fog. I wondered what the day would bring. I wondered if it would rain. I ran my fingers through her hair and for some reason I suddenly imagined the beach in the winter, as I had seen it from sea. Snow-covered and windblown, the rocky cliffs slick with ice. In time Hannah fell asleep again but I did not. I watched the whitecaps rippling from east to west and I held her against the cold.





Berta visits me about once a month. She still lives in our small house and she still cooks at the college. At first she visited me more often but I know it’s hard for her to come here and I understand that. She takes the bus from Galilee and has to switch buses three times before she gets here. In good weather we walk around the grounds and I hold her hand and we talk about nice things, simple things, like the weather, how the old town has changed since I was last there, the condos that have been going up near the harbor. Rich people moving into our working town. There’s talk about large-scale development and someone has even made noise about buying every house in our neighborhood. Berta doesn’t want that to happen, even though they would probably overpay for those small houses and she could live somewhere better. But I know she sees my father in that house, and me before all this happened, and she remembers happier times. Maybe she thinks those memories would go away if she left. I think we all reach a point in our lives where the memories are all we have to hang on to. We stop living, in a sense, except in our minds. I know what Dr. Mitchell would say about that, but I don’t care. I like to picture Berta in front of the television in our house, sitting in the overstuffed chair, her eyes closed. But instead of sleeping, she reaches back across time and she remembers. She remembers my father and she traces their life together. All those moments when he made her laugh, how she felt when he opened the door after returning from sea and took her in his arms. And then she remembers bringing me into the world and even the little sister that I did not know. Maybe she pictures my father and me kicking the soccer ball back and forth in the sandy street. Father and son and the lives we had not yet led, the possibilities of everything unfolding in front of us like a map. Maybe she sees this and it warms her. Maybe it makes her happy and gives her solace. And maybe that is enough.





It’s hard to believe that I was on the island for less than three weeks. I think we both realized—once we were into it—that it was not going to last forever. The funny thing was that we never talked about this. We never spoke of time, of when I would have to leave, of when she would have to leave. I had told her I had missed my boat and she never asked me another thing about it. I know now that Hannah didn’t bring it up for the same reasons I didn’t. To do so would have been to give it words, and giving it words would have made it real. Something we couldn’t turn back from. I know you can’t control time like that, but both of us thought we could. Or at least the days and the nights seemed longer when we ignored the obvious.