Those cigarettes in your closet. Let’s share one.
Lili shrugs. “Not really. It’s the same pack.”
Later, Lili heads inside the restaurant to find the bathroom. As she glances across the dining room, a familiar face catches her notice. In a mirror behind the bar, she sees a glimpse of her own reflection, and God, the sight of herself, unexpected, caught by surprise.
Skin pale, despite the days of sun. Dark hair, tucked behind her ears, an open face: open with hurt, and fear, and tiredness—this vulnerable brink in her gaze, so hesitant in this sadness she won’t let burst, fragility in this tension she’s holding, the sense of tears held back, lips bitten raw. She looks so young.
I don’t want to hate myself, she thinks, looking away.
I so badly do not want to hate myself,but she only sees reasons, all around her.
The days continue. Long hours on the water, brightness in the sky. Lili lies beside Amina on the boat’s bow, while she sketches. “That’s pretty,” Lili murmurs, face nestled against her arms.
“Thanks,” Amina says. She tilts her head to better examine her piece. It’s a quick sketch of the coast seen just beyond the mouth of the inlet.
To the sounds of Amina sketching—pencil scratching over thick parchment, brush of fingers, smudging out a line—Lili lets herself doze, with the motion of the sailboat, the waves.
She is tired.
She is so, so tired.
They continue visiting towns along the coast. These busy villages are old, beloved. Full of both awed tourists and relaxed locals, the French on holiday. When they’re off the boat, James lends the two of them some of his light blue button-downs, cotton gentle against sun-sore skin. Amina takes them to her favorite sorbet shop and hidden inlets. The comfort of warm stone, rocks, underfoot. Beaches, salt water; what day of the week is it? Hill towns, lavender fields, fish markets, tiny churches with masterpiece murals. Walking through these streets, Lili looks at all the people around her, passing by, and she still sees him—moments of him in other men, in glimpses of overheard conversations. Confusing, and then heartbreaking, all over again.
As they come into the Menton harbor one afternoon—“No, Jamie, we are not sneaking into Italy, this is close enough,” Amina warns—waves roar against the shore. It’s mostly pebble beaches here, along the Riviera. Grating, the sound of these pebbles that the waves draw back.
There was a Matthew Arnold poem Lili used to love in undergrad. Melancholy with scale, a sense of continental exhaustion, precipitating twentieth-century war but somehow anticipating it; the poem’s lines were grounded in this detail of pebbles drawn back by waves.
She has never felt particularly young. She’s always worried, instead, about time slipping by, always worried about things leaving—but now, oh, she feels both so incredibly young and already exhausted.
Because she will be here, and she will feel all this, and then one day she won’t.
The exhaustion of all that’s to come, the blink of how fast it will be.
She wanders into the garden in the evening. Dinner is cooking—tomatoes simmering, greens chopped; she had overheard the soft chatter of her friends, as she’d come down the stairs from showering. Glancing into the kitchen, she’d spied Jamie sitting at the table, leafing through the day-old newspapers, Amina’s hand resting on his shoulder, soothingly running up and down, as she spoke to him, tones low, warm, and simple with affection. As Lili watched, Amina had settled into his lap, commenting on something on the newspaper page. His arms absently wrapped around her, and she’d rested her cheek against his hair. Lili slipped away, unseen.
Barefoot in the grass, she skirts the pool. There was a bottle of openwine set out on the dining terrace, clean glasses under the heavy pink shade of bougainvillea. She’d poured herself a glass—red wine—and padded down the old, tiled steps, wandering away from the house. Driftless, she heads towards the far side of the garden, near the orchards and the cliff’s edge.
Lili sets her glass of wine on the rough-hewn stone wall that marks the property line. It is a straight drop below. Its hip height stature affords an easy view of the expansive bay, fishing ports and vineyards, deep blue waters dotted by the white sails of boats. The beaches are thrumming, packed. People love this town. As Lili settles on the wall, she brushes against the dense bush of jasmine growing, dislodging its sweet scent.
Her mother loved jasmine. It grew on her godmother’s house in Beirut, it grew outside their North Beach apartment in San Francisco.
Lili grasps a twine of its vine. She slides its thin stem between her nails, its delicate, tiny flowers almost juicy with fragrance, petals soft and wet.
What does that word mean?A memory of her own childish voice, high, light, sweet.
It was after one of her mother’s regular phone calls to Beirut, in the evenings. Her father was late at work, her mum had finished classes for the day. Lili had been playing underneath the kitchen table—she remembers the tile floor of their apartment, tiny yellow tiles she could run her nails between—reading a picture book upside down to a few of her stuffed animals, the comforting sounds of her mother—switching between Arabic, French—above her.
When the call ended—the beep of the phone, silence—it hadn’t been a happy quiet; Lili peeked her head out, the shape of one of the words she’d overheard still ringing clear in her ears. She rested her little chin on her mother’s knee.What does that word mean?she asked.
Her mother gave a confused laugh, stroking her hair.What word, sunshine?She was absently fidgeting with the flimsy plastic long-distance calling card, its rows of tiny numbers and international area codes.
Lili repeated the word back, as best she could approximate, clumsy in her mouth, unfamiliar to her. She remembered how her mother’s face had shifted, almost fallen.
Oh. Watan,her mother repeated, pronouncing the word properly. Therecollection of her sad smile: distant in its inscrutability to Lili then, comprehensible to her now.Watan. It means home.
Like here?
No, it’s a bit more than that—like, homeland, the place you belong.
