Page 63 of Slanting Towards the Sea

FIFTY-EIGHT

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I park at the Lovorun main gate.

There are people milling about, construction workers building additional walls.

I have to hand it to Asier, the place looks good.

He’s honoring the traditional aesthetic with the drystone walls, instead of concrete ones that would have come cheaper.

I open my trunk and lift out a chain saw.

The workers shoot me a wary look as I walk through the smaller gate and into the olive grove.

The trees are lush and green, basking in the morning sun.

Olive fruits hang in clusters, like constellations in the night sky.

The yield would’ve been good this year, I think, and for a moment, I almost backtrack, change my mind.

I take the chain saw and approach the first tree.

I pull the cord and the saw roars to life.

One by one, I saw the branches off the old trunk, this act of maiming cutting into my own soul.

My vision blurs. My shoulders burn with exertion.

After each branch falls, I feel so exhausted, like I won’t be able to lift my arms anymore, but then I do, over and over again down the three rows of trees.

The workers gather along the small iron gate, watching with indignation.

What I’m doing is sacrilege. Olive trees have earned an almost mythical status in these parts, and seeing healthy trees get castrated like this is no better than seeing someone desecrate a church by pissing in it.

Their murmurs of disapproval travel through the short intervals of chain saw silence.

But I know what I’m doing. Early fall isn’t the best time to transplant olive trees, but if I cut the foliage way back, it will reduce the shock and give the trees a fighting chance when they’re transplanted.

Once I’m done sawing, I call out to the excavator operator standing with the other workers by the gate and ask him to dig out the root balls with caution. The excavator is jerky and imprecise. I shout instructions over the loud roar of the engine.

The truck comes at two p.m., along with the owner of the mill where I used to take the yield.

The two men cover the root balls in burlap and pile the trees onto the trailer.

When the trees are loaded, the mill owner gives me a wad of cash, and I put the money into my back pocket without counting.

“Thanks for thinking of me,” he says. “There’s a big demand for old trees like these. ”

I ask him if he knows where they’ll end up, and he says, “A friend of mine is renovating his estate on Dugi Otok.”

I’m ashamed for not being able to hold back tears. For the first time since I found my father on the floor, they come, hot and fat. Stringed like pearls.

The man looks at me with the type of understanding only another olive lover can have. “They’ll have a good home there. They’re in good hands.”

I nod. He leaves. The workers disperse. The money in my pocket burns like Judas’s thirty pieces of silver. I could’ve refused it, but what difference would that have made, except to make me look even more pathetic, even less in control. I turn to the land.

Its emptiness is shocking. The holes in the ground are like gunshot wounds, bleeding red dirt, gaping in the yellowed grass.

The piles of cut branches lie scattered around.

I’m tired but I can’t leave it like this, Baba’s land.

It deserves more. I pile the branches into big heaps, then take the chain saw again to cut the thickest ones into smaller pieces.

I start a fire in the center of the field so that it cannot spread. Slowly, I feed it the remnants of the boughs, of my dreams, of myself.

“Hey, Gorgeous!” Asier’s voice comes from behind me.

I turn to face him.

“The workers called,” he says. “Said a madwoman came out here with a chain saw and cut down the olives.”

I can’t speak, so I shrug. Seeing him here is making all my emotions burn closer to my throat.

If I say anything, I might fall apart completely.

He opens his arms to me. I want nothing more than the containment of those arms, but he is wearing a blindingly white shirt, and I’m covered with sweat and dirt and ashes. “I can’t. I’ll get you dirty.”

He smiles. “You can get me dirty anytime you want.”

I start laughing, but when he folds me in an embrace, the relief is so instant that the laughs turn into hiccups turn into sobs.

“It’s okay. Let it all out,” he says, kissing my sooty hair, but instead of enticing my tears to come more freely, it makes them retreat.

I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve him after all I’ve done.

“Come with me to London,” he says. We’re sitting in the dry grass, the flames devouring the last of the twigs and branches.

The sun is hanging low between the islands in the distance.

A round bug with an emerald exoskeleton weaves its way through the blades, and it strikes me that it has never seen its own beauty, the gemlike glint of its dress.

Asier is looking at me with his slate eyes.

I can imagine an entire life with him, free from the constraints of everything I’ve ever known.

A chance to reinvent myself. Enough time to see where I fit into this world, a thing I should have determined long ago, but that continues to elude me.

But that means giving up on Vlaho. I’ve been plenty unfair to Asier already—to both of them.

And even though I don’t know if Vlaho will choose me yet, I can’t drag Asier through my own muck anymore.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I say.

“I think it’s a great idea.” He turns his gaze to the flames in front of us.

“Look, I’m not proposing that you marry me or move in with me or anything.

But a change of scenery might be good for you.

Stay with me for a while. I can show you around town.

We have the best gardens and parks. And you could water my plants while I’m away.

” He nudges me with his shoulder. “Or you can come travel with me.” He looks around the empty plot of land, and adds, more quietly, “There’s nothing left holding you here anyway. ”

His words coalesce between us like mercury.

I think of my dad, lying in a cold morgue.

Of the olives, on the ferryboat somewhere toward Dugi Otok, shocked into silence after what I’ve done to them.

Of Marina, and the painful acknowledgment between us the last time we talked, that our friendship has come to an end.

And Vlaho. How I already bet all I had on him and lost, but all of me wants to bet on him again.

Again and again for as long as it takes.

Asier puts his arm around me. His embrace is a mirror, reflecting the least flattering version of me.

Someone who cheats, who does stuff behind other people’s backs.

Someone who inflicts the kind of pain I always resented others inflicting on me.

For the cool businessman I initially took him for, Asier’s been nothing but wonderful to me, and I’ve not paid him in kind.

“There is something you should know.” I reach for the last few branches and toss them into the flame, unable to look at him. “Vlaho and I… Something happened. We… Something happened, and we haven’t resolved it yet.”

Asier lets his arm slide off my shoulder. “I see.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I’m always apologizing to him, it seems, then ending up doing more stuff worth apologizing for.

He picks up a stick and draws infinity signs in the dirt, then erases them. “We never spoke about being exclusive.”

“That’s such an American concept,” I say. “Or foreign. I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh?” He grins. “How so?”

“Here, you’re either with someone or not.” I feel hot in my toes and fingers for saying this, because this means that, at least by my standards, I’ve cheated on him. By the sound of his silence, it must be what he’s thinking too.

I rub my face with my dirty, ashen hands.

“You really got to see me at my worst,” I say.

First with the ghosting, now with sleeping with Vlaho behind his back.

“This is not who I am.” But even as I’m saying it, I wonder if that’s true.

I wonder if, given the chance, I wouldn’t have done it all over again, because this is what happens when you want something so badly, the way I want Vlaho. “You deserve better.”

“I’ve seen some good parts of you too,” he teases, but then adds more seriously, “And don’t we all?”

I remember what he said to me when we were watching the Perseids, when he quoted Heraclitus.

That there is an impermanence to all things, both good and bad.

I thought it sounded either cynical or superbly Zen then.

How he shrugged off the pain of being rejected over his acne, or denied the ache of living his uprooted life, his mother dying while he was still so young.

Now I can’t help but think there’s a sort of defeatism to it.

That it’s a coping mechanism. A way to keep the pain in check.

The sun has dipped into the sea, the fire has turned to embers.

“It’s late, we should head back,” I say.

He gets up, and I know this is it, this is goodbye.

I run my gaze along the terrain. It is pockmarked where the olives were, and are now gone. Imperfect, like the skin along Asier’s cheeks.

We face each other.

“I’m sorry about your shirt,” I say, the greasy motor oil stains and ash a mirror reflection of the filthy composition on my own T-shirt.

“This old thing?” He smiles, though knowing him, it’s probably an Armani.

He waves the stains off, but I can sense his hurt for this parting of ways.

Perhaps he’s thinking, as I am, about our bodies together, our laughs over coffee, the way we fed each other ripe fruit at the beach, and how all that is over.

I kiss him on the lips for the last time, taste the ash and salt gathered on them.