On day of her return flight, Nick walked with her for as far as airport customs would allow.
“Will we see you again?” he asked. “When you sell, will you at least come back to see us?”
Joanna didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t told him she was going to sell, but she hadn’t told him she wasn’t either. He had interpreted that to mean she was going to go through with it when the truth was she didn’t know yet.
All she knew right then was that couldn’t bring herself to look in his eyes. Not out of shame, but because if did she knew she would start crying. She embraced him with every ounce of strength she had, breathing in his scent one more time before she left.
Nick patted her hair and said, “Come back when you can. You are Skiathan, Joanna, one of us. You always will be.” He pulled her face to his, their foreheads touching, then turned and walked briskly away.
Joanna watched him for as long as she could before the crowds filled in around her.
On the flightback to New York, Joanna dug out the carry on bag that she had stored at her feet and took out one of her mother’s letters to her father.
The further across the Atlantic she travelled, the further the dream that was Skiathos was slowly fading away from her memory, and she needed some way to reconnect with it.
The letter was random, but appeared to be one of the last her mother had written to him before she died.
George,
I pray everyday that there is such a thing as reincarnation, one more chance with you. Even if it’s only for one day, I would cherish it with my entire soul.
I worked my whole life to become something that few other women before me have ever been: Powerful.
Now, as I sit upon my bed, drinking an orange juice that has never known refrigeration, eating a slice of stale cornbread and listening to gossipy nurses outside my room talk of some man named Dr. Phil, I know that no one knows who I am nor cares what I did.
Where is the reset button on life? It’s so fleeting! Surely it wouldn’t be hard to just rewind a little bit?
If I could just go back to that one night. No, all those ensuing years really… you sent me so many letters, so many opportunities, and I sent them all back like a maddened bull.
I expect nothing of you, George. I don’t expect your forgiveness, I don’t expect your condolences. Just know that I still dream of you every night, and waking up in a bed without you every morning…
I won’t lie, I wish I didn’t dream of you. Waking up from those beautiful, heavenly dreams is harder than I expect dying is going to be.
This I know with all of my soul.
Look for me in a white-washed hotel upon a hill overlooking crystal clear waters. I’ll be in room 111.
Waiting for you.
Chapter Twenty-Three
For one week Joanna tried. She really did. She performed her duties as a senior editor at Herod Publishing. She assigned junior editors work and went to meetings, fulfilled deadlines, answered emails.
She wanted to be thankful for the life she had earned, for the life she had fought for, but each moment she looked out her window and saw New York’s famous steel titans looming on the horizon, she didn’t feel like a modern woman in a sophisticated city anymore. Instead, she felt trapped and claustrophobic in a steel cage.
The city wasn’t liberating. It wasn’t inspiring.
It was imposing. It was finite. It was… wrong.
She put herself in autopilot mode, and went day by day hoping she was just suffering a case of post-vacation blues, but of course she knew better.
Her heart simply wasn’t in New York anymore, it was in Skiathos.
She wished she had a picture of Nick. She needed to see his dark, brown eyes. His simple smile. His tall, lean frame.
She missed spending time with him. She missed… it was weird, she knew, but she missed how he smelled. She missed smelling him. Like a bundle of herbs taken from the forest.
Nothing of real substance had happened between them, but now Joanna wished it had. If her life was going to consist of petty fantasies of him then at least she could have that one real memory. Where she allowed herself to forego rules and normalities, and indulged, even for just one night, in real passion.
