Within a month of being released from the hospital, T had sold his house in Salem, given away or sold most of his possessions, and moved to Crete, where already he felt more at home than he ever had in Virginia. He found his villa comforting, with its view of the Aegean, its thick stone walls and oak bookcases, and its growing collection of art he was acquiring from visiting painters, as well as from a local gallery in Hania, where he had developed a friendly relationship with the owner, a thin Greek woman in her fifties with a caustic sense of humor and a genial smile. Time seemed to move more slowly in Crete, and in a good way, not the way it had slowed down in Salem, thickening in the air, suffocating him, but in a comfortable way, in a slower pace, in an atmosphere that allowed him to breathe easily as he moved among the island’s mythic places, looking, and taking pictures.
He thought a lot about Carolyn. He was reading her books of poetry again, working his way deep into them. He was coming to see her as a kind of storm force of intellect and talent that had swept over him as a young man. It didn’t seem necessary anymore to keep his relationship to her a secret. He had even written about her to Maura and Evan, though he was writing to them about everything in his life. He had taken to writing them twice a week, long letters in which he talked about his past and tried hard to explain himself, and to convince them that they were both immensely important to him. Maura
had begun writing back. Evan had called a few times. He planned to keep writing to both his children, the letters having become a twice-a-week ritual. He kept all of the letters in a computer file, and nights he’d sit in front of the glowing monitor and read through them.
He didn’t think about Jenny and Lester much anymore. He remembered them as tragic figures whose lives had intersected with his for a fiery instant. When he thought back to that weekend, he wound up thinking about his time on the water. He had been out of his mind for most of that night, but not so out of his mind he hadn’t known to cling to the guitar. He had been picked up by an Argentinean freighter, though he remembered very little beyond the vivid images of rising up into the early morning sky as their dinghy was hauled by winch up the side of the ship. Now the restaurant where he had dinner so many nights, a Greek restaurant on a Greek island, was called the Argentina. Did that mean something? Was there a message there somewhere? If there was, he didn’t get it. He was a rube scratching his head before the work of a masterful magician. All he knew was that he didn’t know much of anything beyond that he wanted to live. You don’t cling all night to a guitar case while floating in the Saint Lawrence with a bullet lodged near your heart unless you want very much to live. He did. He would. Nights in his villa, when he was finished reading whatever book he was reading, or tinkering with the red guitar, or rereading his own letters, he’d turn off the lights and get into bed and stare out his open window at the sea. Sometimes in the moments right before sleep, those moments
that are like floating on water, the shame he felt that night on the Saint Lawrence, when that child’s eyes searched out his eyes and found him watching in the dark, that shame returned so vividly that he had to get out of bed and turn on the lights, because he knew if he closed his eyes he’d see the nightmarish hallucination of an ocean littered with the bodies of murdered women. Those nights he’d get dressed and walk along a dirt-and-cobblestone road that wound its way along the Aegean and into the village, where he’d usually find someone still talking over wine or raki at the Argentina, and he’d join them, taking part in the conversation, which somehow, always, for reasons he didn’t understand, helped him reclaim a sense of his own decency, just sitting at a table over food and drink and talking about each other and the world. Sometimes he’d spend half the night there, among Greeks who it seemed could talk forever. Often he was the first to leave, to get up amid the chatter and laughter, to finish off his drink and start back for his cottage, looking forward to the quiet walk along a seaside road.