White Vespa. Kevin Oderman
June
Anne opened her eyes.
“See me,” the voice sounded insistent, pushy. “See me.”
Anne saw him, some unkempt guy in a black T-shirt getting in a girl’s face. The desire to intervene rose up in her, red and angry, but before she did the girl said, “Oh, oh,” and giggled, and Anne realized the guy had been trying to get the girl to correctly pronounce the name of the island, Sými. “Sim me,” she said tentatively, making it sound sure enough like she was speaking a foreign language, just not Greek.
Anne stood up, shoving her arms out awkwardly to keep her balance. The wind was blowing and the ferry rolled unpleasantly under her feet. She looked over the rail at the low waves and whitecaps. Then the ferry ran into the glassy water in the lee of the island and all the roll went out of it. Anne stretched, reaching up until her heels lifted off the deck and she felt a satisfying click in her back. She watched the island slip by, close now, the rocky hills dry and bare except for the ashy-green low scrub. No houses, no roads.
Ferries reminded her of her childhood, of Bainbridge Island and the ferry crossings to Seattle. But Sými looked nothing like Bainbridge, an island green and most of the time dripping wet. Still, the Puget Sound, too, had that sea smell, the same smell that was in her nose now, and ferries. She’d liked watching them best at night, glittering on the black Sound. Many a night she’d stood wrapped in a blanket at her bedroom windows looking out at the ferries crossing in the dark, from Seattle or Bremerton. Years ago.
She’d boarded this ferry in Rhodes in the morning, the sun already so bright it had bleached the color out of the sea and turned the sky almost white. But if the green world of Bainbridge seemed like another world, to Anne it didn’t seem far away. Anne thought she’d never gotten off of Bainbridge, not really, though she hadn’t set foot there in a long time. There had been years there before, good years, though she must have been lonely even then. A girl with a horse, little supervised. She remembered the long trail rides and walking Pie back on the narrow paved roads to the big house. Sometimes on sunny roads but more often under a low sky or through white mists. Those rides had been good, whatever the weather. That was before, she thought. And she thought there hadn’t been much happiness since then. Since Paul had hissed in her ear that if she told anybody he’d kill her, too. Since she’d heard that scream, a scream that still echoed in her head. A scream hers and not hers.
Anne shook herself, then poured a little water from a plastic bottle onto her fingers and slapped it on her cheeks. “Wake up!” A few heads turned toward her and she walked stiffly over to the rail. She’d been sitting alone on a bench on the shady side of the boat for an hour, but no one had approached her, and no one approached her as she stood shading her eyes, looking down at the glassy water. She didn’t mind. She preferred to be left alone. Anne was striking, very, without being attractive. People noticed her trim figure at the rail, men especially noticed her, the long legs in blue jeans, the wide black belt and the tight, ribbed sweater, but they didn’t talk to her. She had lines, an almost exaggerated angularity, thick dark hair blunt cut at the shoulders, eyes set wide, light blue, but she had that distant quality.
At the rail, she was thinking about the hissing boy, about Paul, her brother. She’d run from him, as soon as she’d been able. She hadn’t seen him again, but she hadn’t gotten away from him, either. Wherever she went, he was already there, because she was carrying him with her. And if she’d run, he’d run farther, though he hadn’t run from her. But distance didn’t seem to matter, oceans between them didn’t matter. He was there, intruding on her reveries, turning up in her dreams. In nightmares.
She’d never gotten free of Paul. And one day she woke up wondering if chasing might not be better than running. By nightfall she’d decided to go after him. She wanted to jerk the energy out of him, unplug him in her own head, somehow. She looked down at her hands on the rail, water rushing behind them, and she wondered how?
The ferry pressed ahead, the Aegean rolling out in a white wave on either side. Turkey would be close by, but the islands were Greek, the Dodecanese. Arid and beautiful. Rhodes, Kos, even Patmos, famous places, but Anne had never heard of Sými. Somehow Paul had found it out, and Anne had found it, too, tracking him down. On deck, the passengers, mostly Greeks, began to stir, to prepare for the docking on Sými. Anne didn’t budge; Paul, she thought, was there, right in front of her, somewhere on this island.
The girl who had failed the pronunciation test appeared at Anne’s shoulder. She had tied a red bandanna into her black hair but the wind and salt had made a mess of it. She grinned at Anne uneasily, gesturing ahead toward the narrow passage between Sými on the right and a low, barren islet to the left. The gap between them didn’t look wide enough for the ferry. “Are we going through there?” She asked.
“I’d say,” Anne answered.
“But is it wide enough?” She whispered, and Anne realized the girl was very young, perhaps not yet twenty.
“It must be. They’d know.”
As the ferry closed on the gap, the opening seemed to widen out, and the girl relaxed. Anne looked away, but the girl didn’t seem to notice. “My boyfriend wants to sunbathe on the private beaches. You know?”
Anne shifted her weight uneasily. “Not really,” she said finally.
“How about you? What are you doing here?”
“Me?” Anne said. “I’m looking for somebody. Somebody who won’t be glad to see me.”
Soon after the girl had returned to her boyfriend, the ferry slipped out of the narrows and swung right, toward Yialós, the harbor town. And there it was, the town scrolling into view as the ferry rounded the point, a clock tower shifting from left to right across the face of the town. Anne hadn’t meant to care that Yialós was beautiful, the buildings small but dignified, and somehow mournful. A lot of them looked neglected. Anne thought if it weren’t for the people she could see walking in front of the buildings that opened on the water, the place would have had the look of an old photograph. A hand-tinted photograph of a town from which all the people had long since gone.
Three
8 June
Paul folded the newspaper he’d been reading and tossed it into a basket of magazines and books that served as a lending library for regulars at Vapori. He was a regular. He swirled the ice in his coffee and smiled at the waitress, but he was just flirting for service. He wouldn’t ruin his regular café by taking up with a waitress.
He was sitting across the alley from the café proper; there were tables on both sides of the narrow street, under raw canvas umbrellas. The light in the street bounced in sheets off the foot-worn slates, but under the umbrellas it was soft, yellow. It made a good light for reading, and the waitresses were friendly. He’d made a point of charming them. Charm made the world more agreeable, more amenable to his desires.
A minivan inched down the alley toward the waterfront, turning the umbrellas on their poles as it brushed them on both sides. The tour boats were in from Rhodes and the gawkers were thick. Soon the tavernas and ouzerís would be doing a big business; there was always a big business at lunch. So lunch time was a good time to find a girl and picnic at the beach, swim a little, get brown. Paul was already very brown. But it wasn’t quite time for that yet. He ordered another frappé.
While he was waiting for the coffee, Myles Twomey sauntered into the alley. He looked hot and had probably just come down from Chorió on the city steps. He had a Nikon around his neck and wore a black leather backpack that Paul knew was heavy with lenses. Paul thought Myles a bit of a character, and sometimes he found it amusing to draw him out.
“Eh, Myles, what’s up?”
Myles turned his head toward Paul, blinking.
“Sit down. Want a Tribbie?” Paul asked, fishing the newspaper back out of the basket.
After Myles had ordered, he glanced