Chapter Four
Four
Skye woke with a start, heart leaping into her throat and arms thrashing.
The air bed had slowly deflated during the night, and she winced as she eased herself up into a sitting position.
Beneath her, the floor was hard, the boards uneven and slightly damp to the touch.
Blinking, she rose, staggering on still-slumbering feet to the nearest window, which was blocked by a wooden shutter so decrepit it let in more light than it blocked.
The sun was yet to rise fully, and clouds lay like smudges against the mountain.
So often in recent months, she’d found herself starkly aware of her breath.
The drawing in and letting go of air should have been the most natural thing in the world, and yet it felt finite, as if by acknowledging it, she was daring it to cease.
Skye stood for a few minutes, watching the dark wash of distant sea, waiting until the sensation of panic abated.
The room she’d slept in was all straight edges and flat walls, though the plaster was flaking away in patches, and there was no shade covering the single bulb.
There had been nowhere to hang any of her clothes the previous day, and having rooted through her suitcase, Skye extracted a pair of shorts and a simple black tank top.
Her crinkled blond hair she tied back off her face without bothering to brush it first, and having eyed her cosmetic bag with disdain, she left it in the bottom of her case untouched.
Nobody to dress up for here, nobody expecting her to look a certain way.
Sunscreen, however, was a nonnegotiable, and this she slathered on thoroughly, remembering to smear dabs on the tops of her ears and along her hairline.
Downstairs in her barren kitchen, she boiled water for coffee, deciding not to risk the milk but sawing a few slices of bread from the loaf and coating them in soft, tangy goat cheese.
These she balanced in one hand while she unlocked the back door with the other, stepping out into her modest garden with its overhanging tree and fragmented stone wall.
Steam swirled from her cup, and bringing it up to her lips, she blew gently, taking a tentative sip, followed by a bite of bread, then another, her hunger returning with a rush of ravenous enthusiasm.
Skye paid no heed to the crumbs that tumbled down her chin nor to the cheese that oozed between her teeth; she chewed loudly, swallowed noisily, smiled broadly at the simple pleasure of eating unobserved, consuming what she’d prepared so fast that her throat swelled, leaving her with no choice but to belch.
The resulting sound was so loud and came from so far down in her gullet that Skye burst out laughing.
What would her mother say if she could see her now?
Back in the kitchen, she put her empty mug in the sink and frowned at the half-melted pat of butter she’d left on the side.
Her fridge could not arrive soon enough, ditto the oven, though she had no crockery, save for the two cups donated by Andreas, and nothing in the way of furniture.
For a moment, Skye thought longingly of the old wing chair she’d inherited from her father.
He had reupholstered it in orange velvet, doing all the work himself, right down to the final stitch.
The grooves of his body had still been visible in its cushion when it arrived at her small flat in London, and for weeks she had not been able to bear to sit in it, could not have borne the guilt of having altered any remaining part of him.
In the end, she’d had to leave it behind; she’d had to leave everything behind.
The space she was in felt suddenly stifling, the walls closing in as her hope began to fade.
Before the sensation could consume her, Skye fled, pausing only to fetch her purse and mobile phone.
She had not seen a single bar of signal since arriving in the village and was glad of it.
What better excuse for ignoring the world than being—quite literally—cut off from it?
Once outside, the sun raised her spirits somewhat, as did the sight of Tigri, who was back in his spot next to the wall.
This time, she bent to scratch him behind the ears, and having responded by squirming against her, the cat let out a contented purr.
“It’s a tough life, isn’t it?” Skye said wryly before turning to look back at her house.
Of the six situated up on the hillside, hers was one of only two with a hip roof.
The other four were flat-roofed, and only a handful had more than a single story.
The largest, which was the closest to her own, had what looked to be a long barn-like building at the rear, and its facade was freshly whitewashed in the traditional Cycladic style, bright as a brand-new veneer.
Skye studied the faded frontage of her more modest abode and noticed for the first time that there was a dark stain running up and around one corner, as if someone had sparked a giant match and held the flame to the stone.
She continued to stare, disquieted by the silence, wondering why she had not thought to question more deeply the abandonment of this place and the reasons why nobody local had taken ownership of the houses before now.
Folegandros might not be as popular as its Aegean neighbors Santorini, Mykonos, and Naxos, but there were a handful of hotels on the island and rentable apartments dotted around.
Why had no property developers homed in on this tiny hamlet?
The explanation provided by the municipality in charge of the lottery had been vague—perhaps deliberately so—but Skye could not shake the sense that there was more to the story.
She thought again of the K inscribed so carefully in her attic.
Someone had loved that house, been proud enough of it to leave their mark.
She wanted to know what had happened to them.
The sun continued to crawl steadily upward, a single throb of gold in a gradient sky.
Loose earth and pebbles trundled down the path ahead of her, while the far horizon shimmered in a haze.
It took less than ten minutes to reach the island’s single stretch of tarmacked road, and Skye followed it down toward the center of the village, admiring the crisscross of veins in stony walls, gnarled olive branches, and occasional splashes of vibrant color from a painted shutter or potted plant.
The sea was her constant companion, visible in snatches of blue, and the wind coaxed loose strands of hair across her cheeks.
It wasn’t until she reached the first taverna that Skye saw another person, and while the elderly woman sweeping the terrace returned her smile, she made no attempt to speak.
There were further signs of life outside a small bakery, and she stopped for a moment to inhale the scent of fresh bread.
A vast bougainvillea was draped in splendor over the wall, a shower of papery pink petals below it.
Skye shook her head. It was as if she had walked into the pages of a travel brochure, only this was not a two-week vacation, it was her life, the scene in front of her not a picture postcard but her home.
She knew it was nothing more complex than luck that had brought her to the island, but it felt more profound than that, more as if someone, or something, had intervened to make sure that it happened.
The road led her onward, past acres of sparse grassland and dust-coated parked cars, until eventually, perched on the very edge of a bend with the sea spread wide far below it, she found the mini-market.
“Kaliméra,” called a voice as she pushed open the door. Skye glanced up to see a slight dark-haired man clutching a basket of figs. For a moment, she was thrown, unsure what to say. The man put the tray on the top of a chest fridge and came toward her.
“You are on holidays?” he asked, and Skye shook her head.
“I’ve just moved into one of the houses at the top of the hill.”
“Ah.” He beamed at her. “The lottery houses.”
“You heard about that?”
“Everybody in Ano Meria heard about that,” he confirmed, beckoning to her. “Come, come. What do you need? I don’t have many English foods, but here there is tea bags. And you will need some milk, perhaps bread also.”
He took a plastic red basket from a stack beside the till and passed it to her.
“Are you Klodi?” she asked, and his smile grew even wider. “I met Andreas,” she went on, and he nodded.
“Andreas is a great man—the best. He has not stopped working on the houses. For many months now, he is there every day, making things ready.”
“He didn’t tell me that,” she said. “I assumed that…well, I don’t know what I assumed. Did the houses need that much work?”
Klodi looked at her as if she’d said something funny.
“Of course,” he exclaimed. “Nobody except the goats had lived in them since the end of the war. Everything had to be done, there had to be power and water”—he ticked each off by tapping his hand—“and there is still a lot of things to finish.”
Skye pictured her cracked floorboards and broken shutters, the mound of rubble in her garden, and the holes in her walls and agreed that there were. Klodi ushered her toward a display of fresh fruits and vegetables, pointing out the best grapes, the plumpest peppers, and the shiniest tomatoes.
“We grow a lot of these things ourselves,” he told her with obvious pride, “and we have a lime tree in our garden, the fruits from which are the sweetest in all of Greece. Ah,” he went on as a diminutive woman in a pale yellow dress and apron emerged through an open doorway at the rear of the shop, “and here is my wife, Cora.”
Skye smiled a greeting as the woman came toward them, murmuring a “Kaliméra,” which she followed with a timid “Hello.”
“Geiá sou,” Klodi said to Skye. “ ‘Geiá sou’ is how we say hello in Greek.”
Skye did her best to repeat the words, feeling at once embarrassed to be so inept and encouraged by the Greek couple’s earnest expressions.
“You are living here?” Cora said, making the leap more rapidly than her husband had. “In one of the old houses? Very good. Poly kala. They have been empty for too long, ever since I was a girl.”
“Did you both grow up on the island?” Skye asked, helping herself to several eggplants. Klodi shook his head.
“I was born in Thessaloniki, but I came here, to Folegandros, one summer with my family. We went for swimming one day at the beach in Livadaki. I have seen Cora there, and”—he smiled warmly—“I was a lost man from that moment. I knew that she was the one for me.”
“Just like that?” Skye said, looking at each of them in turn.
Cora glanced at her husband.
“It was the same for me,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest. “I felt it inside. And you?”
“Me?” Skye feigned a laugh.
“You are married?”
“No,” she said, readjusting her grip on the handle of the basket. “Not married.”
Cora and Klodi exchanged a look.
“You came here by yourself?” the woman clarified, to which Skye reluctantly agreed. Her skin was beginning to prickle, but the two of them had her penned. To get into the aisle behind and continue her grocery shopping, she would need one of them, at least, to step out of her way.
“I should really—” she began, only to be interrupted by the arrival of another customer. Skye had a few seconds with which to register the unruly mass of tawny curls, stacks of bracelets, and bright pink harem pants before the woman bowled across and grabbed her by the hand.
“Please tell me you speak English?” she said in a broad Australian accent. Then, when Skye said she did, “Thank God for that. I’ve asked about twenty people between the boat and here, and they all looked at me as if I was talking in bloody Liki.”
Klodi started to say something, but it was impossible for him to get a word in.
The woman had launched into an animated story about “the bloody ferry crossing,” how she’d had to leave her luggage down at the port because there were “no bloody taxis,” and how the woman she’d collected her key from had been “worse than bloody useless” at giving her directions.
“Apparently my new digs are at the top of a place called Ano Meria, but I’ve got no clue where that is or even if I’m pronouncing it right, and my phone’s no bloody help,” she went on, glaring at the mobile in her hand.
“There’s no signal.” Skye held up her own phone. “I’ve had the same problem, but you are in the right place. This is Ano Meria.”
Klodi and Cora had melted away, he to resume the restocking of figs and she to the counter, where she propped herself on a stool. The woman moved past Skye and slid open the door of the freezer, extracting a bag of ice and holding it against her chest.
“That’s better,” she said with a sigh. “It’s hot enough to sizzle steaks on the road out there.
I thought I was going to pass out walking all the way up here—forty-four sure isn’t twenty-four, if you know what I mean.
There was a likely chance you’d have found me in a ditch, half-eaten by mountain dogs. ”
“I don’t think they have those here,” Skye mused.
The woman laughed.
“Well, that’s something to be cheery about, I guess. I’m Joy, by the way.”
“Skye.”
“Good to meet you, Skye. Now, I don’t suppose you happen to know where I could find a load of houses that have just been given away for less than two dollars, do you?”