The Dress Rehearsal Pact

The year after my divorce, I learned that a rooftop in late August is the cheapest therapist on the island of Crete.

My name is Abbey. I'm twenty-three, which sounds young until you mention that I got married at twenty-one and divorced at twenty-two, and then it sounds about right. My ex-husband Stavros runs a boat rental place down the coast, and I still wave at his cousin when she comes through the ticket line, because that's what living on a small island does to you. You wave at everyone, including people who watched you sign papers.

I work the reception desk at the cave tour office. It's a low stone building near the mouth of the gorge, with a plastic sign, a filing cabinet that sticks, and a fire escape ladder out back that leads up to a flat roof. On the roof there's one floodlight, one plastic chair, and a view of olive groves running down to the sea. On most nights that constitutes the entire inventory, and most nights it's enough.

That particular night I'd brought up a can of orange soda and my phone, and I was doing the thing I did most nights, which was watching the gorge. There was a research team working the underground river this summer. Hydrologists, they called themselves, though one of them told me they were basically plumbers with degrees. Every evening after dark you could see a headlamp bobbing along the lower trail where the tourists weren't allowed, one light moving patient as a firefly, sometimes two. I'd started timing my soda breaks to it, which is the sort of thing you do when you're alone and honest with yourself about being alone.

The weird freedom of the divorce had settled in by then. The first month I cried in the walk-in freezer at the taverna where I briefly worked. The second month I rearranged my apartment four times. By month six I was doing things like buying a chair for the roof, and by now I'd gotten to a place where evenings like this felt less like waiting for something and more like just evenings. I'd never had a casual anything in my life. I'd gone from my mother's house to Stavros's apartment with one box of winter clothes and a sense that this was simply what happened to women like me. Now the box was unpacked in a place that was mine, and I had no idea what I wanted, which I was telling myself was a kind of luxury.

The headlamp was out tonight, lower than usual, near the river gauges at the gorge floor. I watched it stop, start, stop again, and I made up my usual stories about it. Checking instruments. Talking to water. Some people talk to their plants. Plumbers with degrees talk to aquifers.

Then the light went out entirely, which had never happened, and about a minute later I heard the rattle of the fire escape.

Now, I should explain that nobody uses that ladder. It's rusted at the third rung and the office manager, Kyria Eleni, tells everyone it's for emergencies only, by which she means fires and nothing else. So when I heard metal clanking under my plastic chair, I did what any reasonable person does alone on a roof at night. I picked up my soda can like a weapon and said, rather stupidly, "Hello?"

"Hello," said a voice from below, and then a head appeared over the parapet, and it was wearing a headlamp.

The headlamp clicked off. Under it was a woman about my age or a little older, mid to late twenties, with dust on her forearms and a bandage on one thumb, and a face I did not recognize at all. She hauled herself up and stood on the roof, breathing a little hard from the ladder, and looked around at the floodlight, the chair, the view, like she was checking them off a list.

"Sorry," she said. "I saw the light. I've been staring at your roof for three weeks from the gorge and I thought I should finally see what it is."

"It's a chair," I said. "And a light. And me."

"That's more than I expected, honestly." She stuck out her hand, then noticed the state of it and wiped it on her shorts first. "Marianne. I'm with the river team."

"Abbey. I work downstairs."

"I know," she said, and then she went a little red above her headlamp, which was still sitting on her forehead like a very serious hair ornament. "Sorry. That sounded strange. I mean, I signed the visitor log. Everyone signs the visitor log."

She had, I remembered. There was a name on the log, M. Something, a foreign surname I'd had to ask her to spell, except I hadn't asked her, because that was the week Kyria Eleni took over the log herself. I let it go and gestured at the chair, and she sat on the parapet instead, which told me something about her right away. People who sit on parapets think rocks and edges are for them.

"Can I ask a dumb question?" I said. "Where's your bag? You're all in dust and your thumb is taped and you've got nothing with you."

"My bag," Marianne said, and laughed in a way that had no fun in it at all. "My bag has been in Athens for six weeks. The airline lost it on the way in. So I've been working in whatever I could buy at the village shop, and the village shop mostly sells clothes in two sizes, which are enormous and more enormous." She plucked at her shirt, which was indeed roomy enough to pitch as a tent. "This is the less enormous one."

"That's grim."

"It gets better. The replacement bag they promised finally arrived yesterday, at my hotel, and I opened it and it's full of someone else's clothes. Someone named Despina, who is apparently much shorter than me and has very different taste in sandals." She said this flatly, but the corner of her mouth was doing something. "So I've written to the airline again, and I've decided Despina and I will simply never meet, because I don't know what I'd say to her."

"Thanks for the sandals?"

"Thank you for the sandals, and also I'm keeping them, they're mine now, airline rules."

I laughed before I could stop myself, one of those laughs that comes out louder than you meant on an empty roof at night. She grinned at that, quick and surprised, and looked away at the sea like she'd been caught at something.

"So," I said, to give us both somewhere to put the moment. "The river team. You're the reason I keep seeing one light bobbing around down there after dark."

"That's probably me. I do the evening gauge readings when the tourists are gone. The water table moves most after the day's heat." She swung her feet a little, sitting up there on the wall with her taped thumb hooked in her knee. "Actually, that's half of why I came up. The other half is business, sort of."

"Business for the cave office?"

"For the tour. I heard from Nikos that you're running the full emergency evacuation drill next week. The dress rehearsal, with all staff and the volunteer group from the village."

"We are. Wednesday. Kyria Eleni has been rehearsing her whistle-blowing on the cat, which the cat does not appreciate."

That got a real laugh out of her, and I noticed again what her laugh did to the air between us, which was a thing I decided not to notice and noticed anyway.

"Well, I've been asked to attend," she said. "Officially, as the hydrologist on file, in case the drill touches the lower river route. Unofficially, I asked to be asked, which I feel vaguely embarrassed about, but there it is." She reached up and finally turned the headlamp off entirely, and the floodlight took over, yellow and flat. "I also heard the drill includes a scenario where a guide is trapped at the second siphon and the rescue party has to do the full kit check, ropes and packs and so on."

"That's the big set piece, yeah. Stavros's cousin is playing the trapped guide. She's very excited about it. She's been practicing her trapped noises."

"Her trapped noises."

"She yells down the shaft. It's the part everyone's looking forward to."

Marianne nodded slowly, and I could see her filing that away in whatever drawer scientists keep village gossip in. Then she said, "Here's my problem. My good pack, the one with my caving kit, is in the bag the airline lost. The first bag. The one that never came. So for the dress rehearsal I'm going to be improvising gear out of borrowed straps and hope, and if the airline sends me one more bag belonging to a stranger named after a saint, I may lose my mind on camera."

"There'll be cameras?"

"Eleni wants photos for the season report."

"Then definitely keep your composure."

"I'll do my best," she said, and she was smiling again, and the floodlight was buzzing faintly the way it always did once it warmed up, and out past the olive rows the sea was doing its flat black late-August thing, and I was sitting on my therapist roof with a stranger in a borrowed shirt and thinking, with no evidence at all, that next Wednesday was going to be more interesting than I'd planned.

"So I'll see you at the rehearsal," Marianne said, standing and brushing off her enormous shorts. "Probably fumbling with a broken strap of some kind. Come say hello so I know at least one person down there."

"I'm the one who blows the second whistle," I said. "You can't miss me."

"Good," she said. "I'll look forward to the whistle."

Wednesday came around hotter than the week deserved. By ten in the morning the gorge was holding heat like a bread oven, and the whole drill crew was down at the cave mouth sweating through their volunteer vests. Kyria Eleni had printed laminated cards for everyone. Stavros's cousin was already in position at the second siphon, yelling a practice trapped noise that echoed back up the shaft and made a German tourist outside ask if everything was all right.

Marianne arrived at half past, exactly when the schedule said she would, and I knew it was her before I saw her face because she was fighting with a pack strap that had given up on life. She'd borrowed gear from three different people and it showed. The pack hung off her shoulders at an angle no engineer would defend.

"Abbey," she said, when she spotted me by the entrance with my whistle. "You can't miss me, you said. You were right. I'm the one being eaten by equipment."

"You look fine. The pack looks like it lost a fight."

"It did. It lost a fight with gravity this morning." She shifted it and the strap, which had been holding on by three threads and a promise, went with a snap loud enough to turn heads. The pack hit the gravel and everything inside it came out. Notebooks, a pencil case, a coil of tape, and a red dress, cheap and crumpled, that landed in the dust like a casualty.

I stared at the dress. She stared at the dress.

"That's Despina's," she said, in the voice of a woman surrendering.

"You brought Despina's dress into the cave?"

"I own four shirts and Despina owns a whole wardrobe. I needed a bag filler so the borrowed pack wouldn't look empty. Don't laugh."

I laughed. We both knelt down and started gathering the mess, and that was where it got sort of embarrassing, because every time I reached for a notebook she reached for the same notebook, and our hands kept crossing. The first time I pulled back. The second time I didn't, quite, and her fingers were warm and dusty and stayed under mine a half second longer than gathering stationery requires. Nobody in the drill crew was watching. Everyone was watching the trapped noises. So I let my hand rest there and she let it rest there, and then she picked up the red dress, shook the dust off it, and folded it with a dignity the dress had not earned.

"There," she said. "Crisis managed. Put that in the season report."

We got through the drill itself without further incident. Stavros's cousin performed. Eleni got her photos. I blew my whistle at the correct moment and Marianne stood by the lower route with a borrowed clipboard looking official, and I caught myself watching her instead of the rescue party, which was a poor use of my one job.

Afterward the crew drifted off to lunch and I did not go with them. I went up the fire escape ladder to the roof, because that's mine, and I sat in the plastic chair I bought in month six after the divorce and looked at the olive groves and felt the weird loose energy that comes after a day of pretending something. Then boots on the ladder rungs, and Marianne's head came up over the parapet holding two small glasses and a bottle of ouzo.

"I brought a bribe," she said. "For the whistle."

"You didn't have to climb my ladder for that."

"Your ladder was the only way up. That's what ladders do." She sat down on the wall where she'd sat the other night and poured, and the ouzo went cloudy in the glasses the way it does, and we drank to nothing in particular.

Here's what I had been turning over since the strap snapped. I'm twenty-three, I got married at twenty-one, divorced at twenty-two, and