Chapter Thirteen
Rose has spent the past fifteen minutes lying on her bed fanning herself with a magazine. She’s still running on cortisol and the crazy nervous energy that comes from running a successful group session.
Villa Artemis has air-conditioning but, right now, she’s fanning herself. If she wasn’t off grid, she might see a doctor and get her hormones tested. She’s fifty-three, surely somewhere in the warzone that is the peri- or menopausal crisis?
Right now she craves cool and a bar of dark chocolate, in that order.
When she hears the distant noise of dishes rattling, she knows it’s time to get up.
Rose pats her face with a hand towel in the bathroom and glugs down a huge glass of bottled water.
Adriana had warned her to drink lots when she first moved here five years ago.
‘I’m used to the heat here in September but for tourists, it’s still too hot. The only answer is to drink lots of water. Heat stroke is for people from colder places who don’t behave appropriately in Greece.’
Rose leaves her room and steps down the marble back stairs to the kitchen, which is built into the mountain and thus is blissfully cool, despite both Christos and Adriana doing things involving the oven.
Lunch today is simple mezes: juicy Kalamata olives; a crisp Greek salad in a turquoise porcelain bowl; tomatoes the size of cooking apples glistening on matching turquoise plates and drizzled with olive oil; bowls of hummus, taramasalata and tzatziki sitting in handmade bowls with homemade pitta bread warm beside them.
Beata is not around – she’s worked the morning shift and this evening Christos and Adriana will be on call.
Christos is having second thoughts about Rose’s plan for the group to cook dinner tonight. Rose insists that it will shake the group up a bit and encourage them to talk to each other.
‘I don’t want anyone in my kitchen,’ Christos is saying mulishly to Adriana.
He doesn’t understand this part of Rose’s therapy.
Adriana, small and dark, tiny beside her economy-sized husband, hugs him comfortingly.
‘It’s part of Rose’s system,’ she says, patient as ever. ‘We talked it all through.’
‘I’m not comfortable with it,’ he says. ‘They won’t clean up properly. We will have ants!’
Christos has a constant battle with Greek insect life.
Ants are enemy number one: once they get in, they take over. With opposable thumbs, ants could rule the world.
‘The group will clean up.’ Rose is firm. ‘I need them talking to each other, doing simple things.’
‘Huh,’ snorts Christos. ‘Cleaning this kitchen is not simple. It’s vital.
Besides, I do not see any natural cooks among them.
That Grazia woman has servants, I can tell.
The Australian woman knows work, her hands show that.
But Grazia! If her husband died, I bet she would cut him up and cook him. Husband fritters.’
‘Dis-gusting,’ says Adriana, laughing.
‘You’ve nearly put me off lunch,’ says Rose, grimacing, but she takes up a plate and fills it just the same. ‘Don’t diss the guests, Christos. They’re all in crisis. I’ll monitor them tonight. The place will be spotless, I promise.’
‘Sorry,’ says Christos humbly. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude about the people – they are here for our help.’
‘It’s OK,’ Rose says gently. ‘We’re all adjusting to this. It’s our first try at a retreat. We all grizzle a bit and we all have things we’re concerned about. Your kitchen is important to you. No harm done, Christos.’
She takes the plate back to her room and sits at the table where all her notes about the group are laid out.
India and Keera have paired up: that’s excellent.
Rose feels that Keera is missing out on normal friendships. Rose has the sense that, despite Keera’s seemingly starry existence, her personal life is bare.
Rose cannot put a word on the feeling she gets about people’s inner lives: it’s ephemeral but always crystal clear.
Someone once called it magical.
Someone she loved.
Theo.
Rose closes her eyes and vehemently wishes she didn’t keep going back to thinking about Theo.
How often has she told people that there’s no going back, only healing the past and going forward?
But the call of the past is insistent.
She allows herself a moment of quiet and reaches into the pocket of her flowing dress to take out the small piece of turquoise Theo once gave her.
It’s a piece from the Sleeping Beauty mines in Arizona, old and glowing.
She carries it everywhere with her, holding its smooth curved shape until it grows warm from her palm. It’s like holding onto a little bit of Theo.
‘Miss you,’ she breathes, every one of her senses remembering.
Soft kisses on her neck. The safety of being with him. Warmth, acceptance, his laugh, his shaggy dark mane of hair tickling her skin. How he swept her off her feet when the snow was deep and she got stuck on the way back to the cabin when they stayed in Lake Tahoe.
‘My boots!’ she’d cried, laughing as he crashed through the snow and he adjusted her body against his, angling to get the cabin door open.
‘I’ll get them,’ he said, once he’d put her safely on the floor.
The cabin was so warm, had a real fire with crackling logs. It was an escape from real life, a glorious bolthole. Theo was so kind to her, nurtured her in a way she’d never experienced before. The kindness was startling in its newness—
Rose lets go of the turquoise as if it has burned her and it falls back into her pocket. She returns to her files, wiping her eyes.
There’s no point wallowing in what might have been. If she was advising herself, she’d allow a little wallowing but Rose Talisman does not allow herself to sink into any form of self-pity. The past is the past.
Shit happens. Pain heals. Yadda yadda.
It’s over.
Work will heal her.
Rose stares with blurry eyes at her notes about the group.
When she’d had a private practice a long time ago, she was often amazed that patients thought she had her life totally sorted.
As if being the one sitting straight in the therapist’s chair meant that you had a perfect life.
But therapists have to have therapists too – someone to talk to when drama shakes their lives. Hers was Vida, a woman so wise that Rose was convinced that Vida could have no issues in her personal life.
‘Always with the jokes!’ Vida said in amusement the first time Rose said this to her.
People’s lives are always works in progress.
‘Focus,’ Rose tells herself now. ‘If work is going to heal you, you have to actually do it.’