AT PRECISELY FIVE O’CLOCK, LIKE every morning, hours before a single stirring would emerge from the rooms upstairs, Dora dragged herself from her bed and made her way down the hallway to the kitchen, where she put on a kettle and dropped a bag of Earl Grey in a mug. Still in her robe and hair wound in curlers inside a net, she slipped through the back door and into the vegetable garden, where she sipped her tea at the wrought iron bistro table she had set up for herself under the olive tree. She relished the stillness, the white roses moist with dew swaying like tiny phantoms in the yielding darkness, the night breeze caressing her cheek in a cool whisper.
It was a busy time. The cleanup effort after the banquet—which had been left entirely in her hands after the temporary staff hired for the occasion had departed—had dawdled endlessly, and Isabel had been asking constantly for freshly pressed skirts and ribbons, changing three times a day, dragging in girls she knew from whatever corner of the province for tea or a game of cricket.
It was not that she minded Isabel (at times her joie de vivre injected the home with a much-needed energy) but rather that Eva, in the flurry of all that activity, seemed to have disappeared. Most mornings she didn’t even come down for breakfast and slept until Dora went to her room and wrenched open the curtains. Then she would be out on the veranda with her books, sunglasses perched on her nose to hide her gaze, which seemed always pinned not on the pages but on the contour of the hillside or the vastness of the sky.
How strange she’d been this summer, Dora thought. Ever since she’d arrived more than three weeks prior, she’d been removed, taciturn. Even their conversations about the vegetable garden, which they’d planted together (their joint work of love, as Eva had described it only the summer before), were met with only mild interest. And that bothered Dora the most, this new distance between them, which had been in the past reserved for others, the space that Eva created around herself like a fortress that couldn’t be breached.
In the months after Mrs. César’s death, Dora came to think of Eva as her own child. During that long summer, not a word of tenderness was addressed to Eva—only commands, which Eva had met with a silent obedience. It made Dora’s blood boil. Sit, go upstairs, brush your hair, brush your teeth. Mr. César himself was hardly able to meet her eyes during those weeks, and his sister, who’d joined unexpectedly, regarded her with a thin, immutable smile, as if waiting for her to finish recounting whatever story so that she could be sent on her way. No one seemed to consider that the girl, too, had suffered a great loss, that perhaps she needed a kind word or a smile, a set of arms to embrace her. The only available ones, it seemed, had been Dora’s.
The day she packed Eva’s luggage to go back to Budapest, Eva burst into tears.
“Don’t send me back,” she begged. But what could she say, Dora remembered fretting, as Eva spread herself out on the bed and buried her face in a pillow. At the end of the season, the villa would be closed, the furniture draped in sheets, and Dora would return to her home. Surely they couldn’t stay here, in this vast empty space, just the two of them, and besides, Dora needed to get back to her steadier restaurant job, which she worked outside of the summer months. But the way Eva had looked up from the depths of the pillow shattered Dora’s heart, and in the glimpse of a moment, she’d made her decision.
Later that afternoon, perched on a damask chair across from Mr. César and his sister, she explained that it could be done. That Eva was in no shape to return to Budapest, where only three months earlier she’d seen her mother’s casket lowered into the ground, and that besides, now that Dora’s home was empty as well, she could take care of her through the fall, if they didn’t mind having her stay. It had seemed like a preposterous proposition, downright ludicrous, and Dora had expected a definitive no, perhaps even a stern admonishing. Instead, the pair exchanged a long look. Mr. César looked in the fireplace, then looked again at his sister, and in that single look, it seemed as if a decision had been made.
“If you’re sure,” the sister said, leaning against the fireplace and wrapping her woolen cardigan tightly around her. “We will pay you, of course.”
A week later, Dora took Eva to her one-bedroom home with the leaky roof and noisy pipes on the outskirts of Sopron, and as the leaves fell from the trees later that year, then the frost came in an overnight storm, there was no sign of her father. It wasn’t until the following summer that he returned, not with the sister this time, but with a lady friend, a tall, exceedingly slim young woman with a minuscule, upturned nose and large gray eyes who looked upon Eva as though startled to learn of her existence.
She did end up going back to Budapest at the end of that summer, fifteen months after she’d arrived. And in all that time spent together, Dora, in her heart, had never been more convinced that Eva had been sent to her by God to rebuild life again. Life again in the wake of loss, love that was still possible beyond a beloved husband, a beloved mother.
Perhaps—Dora considered now, finishing her tea—it was the engagement that had caused this recent change in Eva. Now that she was soon to be married, Eva needed no nannying, nor mothering; what she needed was her independence. Still, Dora couldn’t help feeling that there was a deeper need in Eva, something that couldn’t be assuaged—and Dora’s inability to fill it as she had in the past deeply unsettled her.
She looked up at the horizon, which was beginning to lighten, and she stood, lifting herself heavily out of her chair. She began walking back toward the house, when she heard a sound behind her, a rustling of sorts. A bird, or several, she thought at first, but then she heard footsteps. She raised the lantern up to her face but couldn’t make out anything beyond the glare, and a tremor of panic shivered through her.
“Who’s there?” she shouted in the direction of the sound.
“It’s me, only me,” came the voice, and Dora breathed out with relief.
“Eva, sweetheart, what on God’s earth are you doing out here at this hour? You gave me a fright!” On further thought, her eyebrows creased into a frown. “Please don’t tell me you’re smoking cigarettes before dawn now!”
Eva emerged from the shadow in quick, quiet steps, not in her robe but rather in a chiffon floral dress with a golden locket at her neck—both of which, Dora recalled with a flinch of surprise, were from the night before.
“I… I was just getting some air,” she explained. “Not smoking, I promise.” Even in this light, Dora could see the flush in her cheeks, an alertness in her eyes, which seemed out of place, given the hour. There was something in her hand, something that Eva drew behind the folds of her skirt.
Eva said nothing more, just walked past her to the iron table and sat down. She didn’t speak for a while. She placed on the table what Dora saw now was a journal. Shivering, she drew her feet up on the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees, her eyes pinned on the object.
“You know, Eva,” Dora said, sitting back down in her chair and reaching for Eva’s hand, “you can talk to me about anything. Darling…” What could she really say? How strange she’d been acting? How strange it was that she was here beside her at dawn, in last night’s clothes, at that?
“Is it the wedding, Eva?”
“The wedding?” Eva looked up, surprised. “No. I was just out for a walk. What makes you think that?”
“Sometimes weddings… they can be straining. One like yours, especially. But you know, it will be behind you soon. You mustn’t let it consume you so much. If you can find a way to see beyond it, I think, it will not seem so scary. And, dear Eva, you know I’m here to help.” She scooted in closer and smoothed Eva’s hair behind her ear. “Whatever it is, you know you can trust me. So talk to me, darling.”
“I do trust you, Dora, of course I do. You are like my own mother. But it isn’t the wedding.” Eva turned her head away and looked out across the emptiness, across the graveled path, the darkness.
“What is it, then, love?” Dora squeezed her hand. “Your happiness is all that I care about. You know you can tell me anything.”
“It must be all this heat. It’s… it’s been draining me. I can’t sleep well, that’s all. But thank you, Dora. I know you are here for me. And I love you for it. I love you so much.”
Yet even as Eva said this, she lowered her eyes and pulled that pad of paper from the table, close to her chest as if to protect it. Then she stood and went into the house, slipping off her heels at the kitchen door, closing it softly behind her.