Where the Stars Still Shine(43)

He ushers us into a living room barely bigger than my Airstream. Although the drapes are drawn, lace curtains push back the sunshine and cast a gloominess over the room. It smells as if the whole room could use a good shaking. Seated on the couch is a woman—Evgenia, I presume—whose mouth is slack, and when she looks at us, I think she might be blind because her eyes don’t appear to be focused on anything at all.

“Evgeniki.” The man squats and pats her knee. She swings her head in his direction, but her expression doesn’t change. “Georgia is here to see you. You remember Georgia.”

She nods as my grandma sits beside her on the couch. I perch on the edge of a faded brown chair.

“I’ve brought my granddaughter, Callista,” Georgia says. “She’s been helping me with my garden today. Callista, this is my dearest friend, Evgenia, and her husband, Nikos.”

I wave, then feel stupid. What if she can’t even see me? I attempt a Greek hello. “Yia sou.”

Evgenia claps her hands and says something, but her jaw is stiff and the words are unintelligible. They sound more gibberish than Greek or English.

“Use your board.” Nikos hands her a white dry-erase board and red marker, then turns down the volume on the television. Georgia watches over Evgenia’s shoulder as she scrawls some words on the board. From my upside-down vantage point, I can’t read them, but I’m pretty sure they’re in Greek. So I couldn’t read them right side up, either.

My grandma smiles and looks at me. “She says you have grown into a beautiful young woman.”

“I, um—efharistó.” Thank you.

Yiayoúla nods her approval and nudges Evgenia with her elbow. “I’ll make a Greek of her yet. Even if she doesn’t like my dolmades.”

“I’ll leave you ladies to talk.” Nikos stands, then bends over and gives his wife a tender kiss. He strokes her cheek, and the sweetness of the gesture makes me smile. “Call if you need me.”

The conversation between Georgia and her friend alternates between silence as Evgenia writes and a flurry of words in English and Greek as my grandma talks. If you couldn’t hear the squeak of the marker on the whiteboard, you’d think Yiayoúla was talking to herself. With nothing to add, I look around the room. It’s not fancy and the furniture is old, but well kept and clean. Lived-in and loved.

Hanging on the wall is a picture of a much younger and thinner Nikos, his hair fully dark and his face without a mustache. He’s standing with a skinny blond boy—whose legs are disproportionately long compared to the rest of him—beside a white boat with Evgenia painted in blue on the side. Alex. Evgenia is Alex’s mother.

I walk over to the picture. Beside it is another photo of Alex. In this one he is older and broader, and in the water, surrounded by a group of other boys. His arm is held aloft with a white cross in his grip.

“That is Evgenia’s son, Alex. Phoebe’s brother.” Georgia comes over to me and slips her arm around my waist. “But you already know this, don’t you?”

I don’t look at her for fear my cheeks will give me away again. If they haven’t already. “Yeah, he, um—he came over for dinner once, and he does the spongedive tours on Sundays.”

She points to the picture of Alex in the water. His whole face is smiling and even then—whenever then was—he was steal-your-breath beautiful. “Each year in January, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River,” she says. “One of the annual traditions is the Epiphany dive, when the archbishop throws a cross into Spring Bayou and the boys dive in after it. It’s thought to bring good luck for the coming year to the boy who retrieves it. Alex won it that year and your father won it when he was sixteen, too.”

That was the year my mom got pregnant with me. Not so lucky for Greg, who ended up a father before he turned seventeen.

Behind us I can hear the squeak of Evgenia’s marker. We turn around to see her holding the board up. It says: Alex is good boy. Proud of him. A tear catches in one of the lines of her face and rolls down her cheek. She misses the son who never visits, and my heart breaks for her.

My grandma laughs to lighten the mood. “Haven’t you done enough matchmaking?” She turns to me. “It was Evgenia’s idea to fix up Greg and Phoebe, so now she thinks she’s an expert.”

Evgenia laughs as she wipes her eyes and cheeks with a tissue, then rubs out the words on her board to write fresh ones. Lunch now?

Georgia helps her up from the couch and walks her into the kitchen, where they assemble sandwiches for me and Georgia and mix up a milk shake of chocolate nutrition drink and banana for Evgenia. Yiayoúla explains that her friend suffers from progressive supra-nuclear palsy, a degenerative disorder that is slowly eroding her motor skills, including walking and talking.

“It’s become very hard for her to swallow,” my grandma says as the blender whirs. “So her meals are nearly all liquid. Nikos and Phoebe do what they can to make sure her nutritional needs are met, but it’s not enough. She’s getting weaker and more susceptible to illness. Eventually she’ll catch pneumonia and her body will be unable to defend itself, and she’ll die.”

My sandwich turns to dust in my mouth as she talks so frankly about death. Everything hits me at once—why Phoebe wants Alex to see his mom, and why he refuses. It’s hard to look at her face, almost expressionless, and know there is sorrow and fear behind it. Alex is pulling away, preparing himself for the inevitable. But what I don’t understand is how he can bear being apart from his mother. If she were sick, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for my mom. She is sick and I have kept terrible secrets to protect her.