And the Mountains Echoed

hand, sweat staining her back, pounding nails and sanding planks of wood. Racing against her own failing neurons. Wringing every last drop of use from them while there is still time.
    â€œWhen are you coming home?” Mamá says.
    â€œSoon,” I say.
Soon
was what I said the year before too when she asked the same question. It has been two years since my last visit to Tinos.
    A brief pause. “Don’t wait too long. I want to see you before they strap me in the iron lung.” She laughs. This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of bad luck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self-pity. It has the paradoxical—andI know calculated—effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune.
    â€œCome for Christmas if you can,” she says. “Before the fourth of January, at any rate. Thalia says there is going to be a solar eclipse over Greece that day. She read it on the Internet. We could watch it together.”
    â€œI’ll try, Mamá,” I say.
    It was like waking up one morning and finding that a wild animal has wandered into your house. No place felt safe to me. She was there at every corner and turn, prowling, stalking, forever dabbing at her cheek with a handkerchief to dry the dribble that constantly flowed from her mouth. The small dimensions of our house rendered escape from her impossible. I especially dreaded mealtime when I had to endure the spectacle of Thalia lifting the bottom of the mask to deliver spoonfuls of food to her mouth. My stomach turned at the sight and at the sound. She ate noisily, bits of half-chewed food always falling with a wet splat onto her plate, or the table, or even the floor. She was forced to take all liquids, even soup, through a straw, of which her mother kept a stash in her purse. She slurped and gurgled when she sucked broth up the straw, and it always stained the mask and dripped down the side of her jaw onto her neck. The first time, I asked to be excused from the table, and Mamá shot me a hard look. And so I trained myself to avert my gaze and not hear, but it wasn’t easy. I would walk into the kitchen and there she would be, sitting still while Madaline rubbed ointment onto her cheek to prevent chafing. I began keeping a calendar, a mental countdown, of the four weeks Mamá had said Madaline and Thalia were staying.
    I wished Madaline had come by herself. I liked Madaline just fine. We sat, the four of us, in the small square-shaped courtyard outside our front door, and she sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes one after the other, the angles of her face shaded by our olive tree and a gold straw cloche that should have looked absurd on her,
would
have on anyone else—like Mamá, for instance. But Madaline was one of those people to whom elegance came effortlessly as though it were a genetic skill, like the ability to curl your tongue into the shape of a tube. With Madaline, there was never a lull in the conversation; stories just trilled out of her. One morning she told us about her travels—to Ankara, for instance, where she had strolled the banks of the Enguri Su and sipped green tea laced with
raki
, or the time she and Mr. Gianakos had gone to Kenya and ridden the backs of elephants among thorny acacias and even sat down to eat cornmeal mush and coconut rice with the local villagers.
    Madaline’s stories stirred up an old restlessness in me, an urge I’d always had to strike out headlong into the world, to be dauntless. By comparison, my own life on Tinos seemed crushingly ordinary. I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent most of my childhood years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home.
    Madaline said that in Ankara she had gone to a place called Kuğulu Park and watched swans gliding in the water. She said the water was dazzling.
    â€œI’m rhapsodizing,” she said, laughing.
    â€œYou’re not,” Mamá said.
    â€œIt’s an old habit. I talk too much. I always did. You remember how much grief I’d bring us, chattering in class? You were never at fault, Odie. You were so responsible and studious.”
    â€œThey’re interesting, your stories. You have an interesting life.”
    Madaline rolled her eyes. “Well,