Читать книгу White Vespa - Kevin Oderman - Страница 12

Four

9 June

Anne came awake all at once, breathless. The darkness pulsed around her. A dream, frightening. She couldn’t remember it, and she didn’t try. She took deep, controlled breaths, calming herself. There was starlight in the window, no sign of dawn, but she got up anyway, dressing in the dark. She’d been lucky with the room; she knew that already. It had quieted down early and stayed quiet, though it was only three houses above the paraléia where it turned from the island’s best hotels to a rougher neighborhood where the boatworks had once been big business. She’d been told a few boats were still built there every year.

Anne liked the location, close to the bustle of Yialós but out of it. She’d rented the place for the summer, though she had, really, only money enough for half of that. She’d get a job, manage. And maybe she wouldn’t stay. Hard to tell what would happen, once she found Paul. Finding him won’t be hard, she thought, he’ll be wherever the loafers congregate.

A little cold, she wrapped herself in a blanket off her mussed bed and sat in front of a window in a straight chair. She put her feet up on the sill and tilted back, easing into the darkness. In the quiet, sounds carried, and she listened to footsteps on the stairs, going down. She wondered if she was hearing the sound of a fisherman, or a man, maybe a woman, up early to bake the day’s bread. She didn’t know; she imagined. She imagined anyone up this early would be walking with a purpose, headed for a boat or a bakery and knowing what they meant to do when they got there. She envied them their purpose, their small certainties. She had no idea what she was going to do, but something. She felt she had to do something, anything.

Outside, the stars faded and it was morning. Anne looked around, a rented room. Nothing in it made any claim; it was just stuff, there. She liked it that way, a bed a bed, a chair a chair. “Heirloom,” she said quietly, finding the word ridiculous and pretentious. The stuff of the fathers, she thought, the manstuff. And the stuff of the mothers wasn’t much better.