Page 30 of Slanting Towards the Sea
TWENTY-SEVEN
MARINA ASKS ME TO give her a hand cleaning her sailboat.
She has a tour coming up, and her young cousins, whose help she usually enlists, are getting ready for their prom.
I don’t think much of her request; I’ve helped her now and again over the years, and she and Vlaho have helped me with the olive harvest in return.
Besides, it’s better than spending time in the caustic atmosphere reigning between me and Dad, between me and Asier’s unanswered texts.
It’s a beautiful mid-April afternoon, the sky so low and thick-weaved I could comb my fingers through it.
Marina is waiting for me on her boat, moored in the marina near the town center, two buckets of soapy water laid out before her, and a couple of bottles of our favorite craft beer sweating on the aft deck.
The boat looks suspiciously clean, but we take our long-sleeved shirts off and get to work, running sponges up and down the lengthy teakwood beams.
“You look different somehow,” Marina says after a long stint of working in silence. We haven’t seen each other since that day in the town when the three of us had coffee and I told them about the hotel sale. I can’t help feeling she’s still fishing for answers.
“Different, how?”
“I don’t know, just… different vibe I guess.” She is scrubbing away, not making eye contact. “Does it have anything to do with that man, what did you say his name was?”
She looks at me now. I sit back on the freshly washed gunwale, ignoring the moisture soaking into my pants.
I want to ask her, What’s it to you? Why do you in particular—you, Marina Oberan, the current wife of my ex-husband, ask me that question with such obvious discomfort? But of course, I can’t ask her that.
I squeeze the sponge dry, gathering thoughts that scatter like beads of soapy water over the ship’s beams. I don’t know if over the years she sensed my yearning for her husband, the gaze I’d let linger on him sometimes, when a conversation stalled.
That sense of possessiveness that still haunts me, this flawed belief that he’s mine despite being married to her.
I tried not to let it show, but who knows what my body reveals when I let my guard down.
If she noticed, she never said anything.
Why would she? At the end of the day, I went home to my father, and Vlaho was making his home with her.
“I fought with my dad and Sa?a about Lovorun,” I say, unwilling to answer the question she’s really asking.
Telling her that I like Asier the way she suspects would be as good as telling her I’ve moved on, and I’m not ready to absolve her, whether she needs absolution or not.
I’m painfully aware that it was my decision to leave Vlaho, and I got over myself in so many ways to be able to be near them, but a small part of me is still resentful—will always be resentful—that the two of them paired off.
“They don’t want to sell, and I don’t want to run the hotel.
But I don’t know if I’m just being selfish. ”
Marina fetches us two beers then rests her back against the stainless-steel railing. The setting sun creates a halo around her blond hair, and a thought occurs to me, that she looks kind of beautiful.
“Weren’t you eager to sell?” she says.
I exhale all the turmoil that’s been pressing hard against my chest these past few days. “I was. But does it make sense to sell? Is it the right thing to do?”
She shrugs. “Does it feel right to you?”
“I think so. But that’s subjective. The real question here is, does it make sense, objectively?
Sa?a has a full-time job and lives a three-hour drive away, and Dad’s sick.
So my decision seals the deal for us all.
If I accept what they’re proposing, everyone wins.
Dad gets to see his dream come true and, in time, all three of us get recurring revenue.
We keep the land. I keep my olives. Instead, if we sell, we get money that will melt away over time.
Dad loses this one last chance to do something big before he dies, my brother loses a second income, and I lose the grove.
” I let out a long breath, tallying all these losses.
Seems like I’ve answered my own question.
Marina gets up and throws a shirt over her back.
It’s become chilly now that the sun is setting.
“Sometimes, when it’s really important, we have to do what’s right by ourselves.
It sucks, I know. I’ve hurt some people I care about deeply that way.
” She holds my gaze for a beat too long. “But it’s the God’s honest truth.”
The skin along my spine pricks, but before I can say anything, she pushes herself against the railing and goes into the cabin to put away the cleaning supplies.
Just as well. We never talked about the fact that she took Vlaho from me, and this oblique apology, if that’s what it was, is likely the most I can bear to talk about it without giving away too much myself.
I breathe in, looking around the marina.
A cool breeze sweeps in from the park across the street, raising the hairs on my arms. The evening is so beautiful it hurts.
It feels abundant, like raw potential, like everything is possible, but nobody knows better than I do how misguiding potential can be.
I take a swig of beer and watch the diamonds glint on the sea surface.
There one moment, lost the next, hard to fixate on, forever elusive.
I mull over what Marina said, and the decisions I made.
Refusing to go to New York for that competition all those years ago for fear of putting a wedge between Vlaho and myself.
Moving in with my dad, and taking over his company, because there was no one else to do it.
Leaving Vlaho so that he wouldn’t be punished for my infertility, so that his mother could have grandchildren.
Decisions I felt forced, even coerced into for the greater good.
For the first time, they reveal themselves to me for what they were. Choices.
My choices.
Because even conceding to someone else’s wishes, giving in to meet someone else’s needs—even sacrificing yourself—is a choice.
These decisions then became threads, that became strings, that became ropes, wound tight around me, and Dad, and Vlaho, and all the other people I love, braiding into this particular reality we are living now.
And who says this reality is any better than any other reality could’ve been, had I braided my ropes differently?
When I get back into my car, I reach for my backpack and take out my phone. With my pruned fingers, waterlogged from all the washing, I open the text thread to Asier that has been sitting silent the whole past week. “I’m ready for the viewing whenever you are.”