The Other Language (6 page)

The door to the villa was open, so Emma peeked inside. The kitchen was silent, on the big table the usual array of rusty spanners and bolts next to half-eaten plates of congealed scrambled eggs, magazines and sandy towels strewn over chairs. Then she
heard footsteps and Penny appeared, a towel wrapped around her head, wearing nothing but a tiny acid green bikini bottom with two minuscule strings tied on the hip bone. Her small breasts were just as tanned as the rest of her slim body. She welcomed Emma.

“Hallo, darling!”

She didn’t bother to cover her breasts but grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the table and lit one.

“Are you looking for the boys? Sorry for the clutter, dear, we are terribly disorganized, as you can see.”

Penny sat down at the kitchen table, crossed her legs and blew out the smoke. She looked around the room and sighed.

“God only knows why, no matter how hard I try, it always looks like a pigsty in here.”

Emma wasn’t sure it was okay to keep staring at her breasts but Penny seemed fine with that because she smiled and gestured for her to sit down.

“Jack is with Peter, they went to the hardware store in town. Let me call David for you.”

She called out his name a couple of times, in a prolonged lilt, then whistled as if calling a puppy.

“He’s still asleep, I’m afraid. I’d better wake him up, he needs to get out in the sun and breathe some fresh air before he positively rots up there.”

Penny got up and left the kitchen.

Emma felt her disappointment rise into her face and settle there; she had hoped to be alone with Jack today and to seize this opportunity to try and touch him. She had envisioned their fingers brushing by accident at first and then their hands clasping. Imagining the feeling of his palm against hers had stirred something in her stomach. She didn’t dare imagine anything further although she knew the next step would have to be kissing. It was still too big a step for her, but it was inevitable they would get there. But now Jack was at the “hardware store” (Emma didn’t know yet what the word
hardware
meant, but it sounded important
and she gathered he must be on a serious mission) and she was going to get David instead. But perhaps David, being his big brother, would at least carry a bit of Jack-ness with him while at the same time giving her the opportunity to practice her English. Then—barefoot, slightly puffy and dazed—David appeared in his swimsuit, as if he had just been dragged out of his bed.

“Hallo, Emma,” he said and smiled so sweetly that Emma felt instantly much happier than she expected. Penny reentered the room, still topless and still perfectly at ease. She ran her fingers through David’s blond, matted hair.

“Darling, do you want to have a piece of toast before you go? Otherwise get a cheese pie at the bakery on your way, that’s much easier, here’s some change, luv. Get one for Emma as well. Now off you go, you two, it’s such a glorious day, I don’t want you hanging around the house!”

Penny kissed David on the cheek and puffed out the smoke of her cigarette from the other side of her mouth. David grunted something inaudible and Emma followed him outside into the bright midmorning light.

They walked along the main road, nibbling their fragrant cheese pies without exchanging a word. It was very hot, there was no wind. Nobody was around at that time of day. David took a turn toward the beach, and stopped in front of the jetty.

“Should we go to the island?” he asked her.

Emma had feared this moment all summer long, though she had prepared for it. Yet when the time had finally come, the task seemed colossal. She looked at the island in the shimmering light. It had never looked so far away.

“I don’t have my flippers,” she said, hoping that David might change his mind and come up with a different plan. But he pulled his hair behind his ear and smiled at her again.

“Okay, we’ll take it slow getting there, then.”

Emma prayed as she slowly advanced in her imperfect crawl. She prayed for her breath not to run out, for her legs not to get a cramp, for the water to keep still, for the wind not to rise, for the panic not to overwhelm her. There were so many elements—natural, physical and psychological—that had to be controlled and synchronized in order to avoid her drowning. The island loomed in the distance, looking hopelessly far, each time she opened her eyes. She prayed and prayed to an unknown God to keep her afloat and breathing. David was always slightly ahead of her; every now and then he turned to check that she was still behind him and raised an arm from the water to signal his presence. Emma tried to wave back, but the movement caused her to drop down, lose her rhythm and drink. The bitter taste of the sea in her mouth felt like the taste of her death and she decided to spare any extra movement. Her heart rate was speeding and her breath was shortening. Just past what seemed the midpoint, she felt a mix of desperation and rage building inside her chest. This would be the end of her, she knew. Just then she opened her eyes again and suddenly the island seemed much closer, almost reachable. She could see David, this time on terra firma, on top of a rock he had just climbed. She could hear him whistling a tune. Then, after only a few more strokes, her feet touched the rocky bottom.

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.”