The Other Language(10)

It was done; she had made it. A gust of wind and the drone of the cicadas’ chorus welcomed her to safety. She emerged from the water, her chest still heaving, rivulets of water streaming down to her feet, elated from the exertion like an athlete who has just won a race.

David whistled again, this time to signal his position. He was crouched on a slightly higher rock, looking out. His legs were long and thin like a stork’s, so that his chin came to rest on top of his knees without having to bend. Scrambling up a couple of flat rocks she came up and sat next to him. David remained silent, as if he didn’t want to be disturbed in his contemplation of the stretch of sea between them and the beach. She wondered whether it was up to her to start a conversation but decided it was more grownup to be quiet. She was catching her breath, and anyway it still required an effort on her part to speak English. She had to pay a lot of attention to the sounds; often it felt like guesswork, pasting an unknown word to one she knew, and figuring out the meaning of the phrase that way. In order to keep pace her brain had to quiz and buzz at maximum speed. This was nice, to be quiet in this light breeze, the only sound being the bells of the goats. David lay flat on the rock and closed his eyes. Emma, still sitting upright, gazed at the white strip beneath his belly button, where his skin had not been exposed to the sun and his hip bones jutted forward; there was a thin shadow of fuzzy hair pointing down toward his crotch. Emma took her eyes away guiltily. She looked toward the beach opposite, toward the blue chairs of the taverna, where she could just about make out Monica’s tiny shape sitting on the sand all by herself. She was a good girl, she’d stayed put, as she’d been told to do.

David sat up again.

“How did your mother die?”

Emma froze. She decided she had misunderstood the question.

“What?”

“Your mother.” David spelled it out. “She died last year, right?”

Emma nodded.

“How?”

“It was an accident.”

She turned her head down and tried to concentrate on her toenails. There was another silence, but this one was charged with tension. Emma held her breath, feeling David’s eyes on her profile.

“Is it true she killed herself?”

Emma stared at him, speechless. David stared back with his big blue eyes widely set apart, waiting for an answer.

Emma’s hands were shaking; she shook her head vigorously.

“No,” she said. “She was in a car. It was an accident in a car.”

“Penny said she drove off a bridge,” he insisted.

“No, no,” Emma said in one breath.

“She said it was a suicide,” David pressed. Emma glared, and looked the other way. She felt her face turn red.

The idea that Penny might have had this conversation with her children and her husband at the kitchen table filled her with shame. When had the English boys learned about this? And why did David feel entitled to discuss this with her?

“It was an accident,” she repeated forcefully.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know—”

She searched for the word exactly but she couldn’t find it anywhere. She knew this sounded dumb and unbelievable, despite its being the truth. So she added:

“I don’t remember.”

There was another silence. David seemed perfectly comfortable, as if they were having just any conversation about their favorite music. He hurled a couple of pebbles in the water, attempting to make them skip and bounce on the surface. Emma fixed her gaze on the tiny shape of Monica across the water. Her silhouette was moving up and down the beach mechanically. She could be playing something—maybe she was running after a ball—or might she be panicking, desperately looking for help? Monica didn’t speak any English or any Greek and there was nobody around who could understand her if she was having a crisis. Emma felt that pang of guilt again, reminding her that she shouldn’t have left her little sister all alone. If last summer Monica had seemed lighter—happier even—despite the tragedy that had just happened, this year she seemed more frightened, as if something darker had begun to sink in and bury itself inside her. Maybe she feared that they too—Emma, Luca, their father—could abandon her and leave her stranded in the blue taverna, because that was just what happened once you grew up. People left you.

David threw another pebble and this time it bounced three times.

“My mother died too,” she thought she heard him saying.

Emma turned. This obviously couldn’t be right. What had he said? His accent was harder for her to understand than Jack’s.

“What?”

“I said that my mother also died.”

Emma shook her head, as if to say she was confused. Maybe she had misunderstood the entire conversation.

“I am adopted. Penny is not my real mother.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly.

“She died when I was two and my real father had disappeared before I was even born. I was taken into an orphanage and Penny and Peter adopted me a few months later.”

He paused. “But I don’t remember any of that because I was too small.”

Emma stared at him, stunned. Actually it made sense: he looked nothing like Penny or her husband. This whole story was so unexpected, it turned around the whole image she had had of the boys.