White Horse (35 page)

“It’s the baby.”

“It’s too soon.”

“Yes, once. But now? Who knows?”

“It’s not the baby.”

It can’t be. Not yet.

But in truth, I’ve lost track of time. Or maybe it lost me.

The storm rants and rages
, but we are safe in our wood and stone bubble. Our wet clothes are limp flags hanging over the altar. Like all Orthodox churches, this one has a generous supply of thin candles meant for prayer. They remain unlit. Why leave a porch light on for trouble? Instead, we bury the ends deep in the sea sand holder and offer our prayers in quiet desperation.

The first shift is mine. I use the altar as a seat so I can look Jesus in the eye.

I have a bone to pick with You
.

Choose whichever most pleases you. I have many
.

Your Father let everyone die
.

No. You were all at the mercy of one man’s free will
.

What about the rest of us? What about our free will to live?

He chose for you all. For selfish reasons, but it was still a choice. My Father could have no more stayed his hand than He could stop Judas from betraying me
.

So You’re saying it had to be this way
.

I’m saying it
is
this way. It’s what you do now that matters
.

Do You have plans to come back?

Who’s left to notice?

I don’t really believe in You
.

His tears are frozen in paint.
I don’t believe in Me, either
.

With my scarred guardian angel
keeping watch, I am free to meet Nick. I feel like a teenager sneaking out the bedroom window; the waking hours are my prison while my real life comes in dream snippets.

My fingers draw lazy circles upon his smooth chest. He feels real and warm and not at all drawn by wanton parts of my brain.

“I had a dream,” he says, “that you walked across the world to find me.”

“Not true.”

His dark eyes ask the question.

“I flew in a plane, rode a bicycle, and sailed one of the seas in a boat.”

I love you
, my fingers trace on his skin.

“I told you to stay.”

“I couldn’t. You’re all I’ve got left. You and our baby. Morris died, did I tell you?”

He strokes my hair. “She told me.”

“You spoke to her?”

“She’s here.”

“Where? She can’t be. I watched her die.”

“Nearby.”

I wake with a sick feeling in my heart, like something I didn’t even know I wanted has been snatched away before I had a chance to love it.

The dream paints my mood
with a thick, foul substance that taints the day. To prevent myself from snapping at Irini for no good reason other than that she’s available and my temper desires a release, I hunker down in the corner nearest the doors. The ache in my lower back has eased some, now that I’m not constantly pounding pavement.

The rain, the fucking rain, rains on until I’m sick of the sound. No crash of thunder to break the monotony. No ease from downpour to sprinkle. Just relentless rain.

My turn to watch comes and goes and then I sleep again. Nick and I sit across from each other in his old office, the one where I first spoke to him of the jar.

“Pandora’s box,” he says. “I told you to open it.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“No. But you being here is.” He writes on his notepad. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“In the dream?”

“Greece. I should have told you. Why haven’t you opened my letter?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m your therapist, Zoe. Tell me.”

“Because I’m scared.”

“What scares you?”

“What’s inside.”

“What do you think is inside?”

“Something that takes away hope. I can’t let that happen. I need to hope. I need to have hope.”

He stands, pulls his T-shirt over his head, tosses it on the chair. When he reaches out to me, I take his hand and let him pull me close so that my back presses up against his hard planes. His fingers pinch my nipple, hard, so that I wince and moan at the same time. His breath is hot against my ear. It sets my blood to boil.

“I need you to wake up, baby.”

“But I want you.”

“Baby, wake up. Now.”

Invisible fingers drag me from my dream. With a gasp, I go from there to here. Clean, bright light pours through the colored glass, wrapping everything in a rainbow. The rain has stopped.

“Hello, sunshine,” I say.

Irini is at the doors, her ear pressed against the seam. The colors dance upon her shiny scars. Her forehead has that telltale crinkle. I go to her side, shucking off what’s left of sleep.

“What?” I mouth.

Her eyes meet mine. “Someone is out there.”

I’m not surprised. When he
would come was my only question.

Irini watches me arm myself. Cleaver. Baker’s peel. I’m a homeless ninja hopped up on pregnancy hormones.

“You can’t.”

“I am.” Her lack of understanding doesn’t stop me from explaining. “This way I control it. My terms. In the open.”

Foolish. Furious. Forced into a corner. Fucking tired of it. All those things are me. I own them as I stomp into the blazing light. For a moment I’m blind and helpless. Slowly the burn fades. My pupils do their job, get real small, while the dot on the horizon swells.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I tell him.

“And yet, America, I am here.”

“I killed you. I watched you die.”

“You watched me hold my breath until you scampered away like a coward. You are a failure in everything.”

“Come on, asshole. You and me. Right here.”

I must look a sight, ripe and round in the middle, bones jutting through my skin everywhere but there. Even a steady supply of chocolate hasn’t fattened this calf. My baby is taking all I can ingest, but that’s as it should be. Mothers go without so their children can
have
. Although I haven’t read all the right books, I still know that.

The Swiss is as ragged as the rest of us, a scarecrow with an attitude. Not like Nick’s confident, relaxed swagger, but more like he made it up one day after inspecting himself in the mirror.
Ah, yes. That’s who I want to be
. There’s nothing organic about the Swiss. I see that now.

He stares at me with an obscene fascination.

“I can’t wait to cut you, neck to navel, America. Slice you open like a melon.”

“Like you did to Lisa?”

We circle each other. Perpetual motion.

“No. You I will keep alive. At least long enough so that thing inside you can breathe on its own. Then I’ll cut it, too, piece by wretched piece.”

“There’s something men never quite understand about women.”

“What is that?”

“The most dangerous place in the world is between us and the things we love.”

“Like shoes and jewelry and shallow pleasures?”

“Like people.” My words are shrapnel right in his face. “Stuff doesn’t matter. Only people.”

“That thing which grows in your womb is not a person. It’s an abomination— of God, of medicine, of science.”

His words play me like a cheap violin. The notes are there but the melody is off, the tone hollow and thin.

“My child is fine.”

“You don’t know. Not for certain. Don’t you lie awake and wonder,
Am I going to give birth to a monster?
You’ve seen them out there. We saw them together, did we not? Creatures of mutant flesh and bone, like that creature in Delphi. It was a kindness what I did to her.”

“Who the hell are you that you can just walk in and dish out this … kindness?”

He reaches behind. Pulls out the gun he stole from the Italian soldier.

I fall to my knees. Hands on my head. See Irini framed in the doorway. She’s holding a large can of something. I can’t make it out. Run mental inventory searching for a match. Pineapple. I think it’s pineapple. I know what she means to do: hit him over the head until his skull mashes to gray-pink pulp. I can’t blame her: he killed her sister. But I can’t let her do it. Her reach is too short. Too much time for him to shoot. She won’t understand, but I have to protect what’s mine. And right now she’s part of what belongs to me. My world-battered family of refugees.

“Stop.”

She doesn’t listen. Maybe the English-to-Greek translator fails. Maybe it’s just too slow. Or maybe she doesn’t care, so much does she
want him dead. She rushes. Enough time for the Swiss to turn and backhand her with the pistol. Across her scars. The taut, shiny skin splits, bleeds. She tumbles sideways, slumps to the ground clutching her broken face. Physics is no friend to the losers in battle. Momentum carries them where it will.

He circles around us, the winning dog in this round. Waves the gun at me.

“Get up. Walk.”

TWENTY-TWO

T
he sound of two seething women is silence. Curious, because you’d think we’d be like silver kettles whistling as they reach a rolling boil. Esmeralda glues herself to my side and plods along, slowing when I slow, stopping when I stop—which isn’t often enough.

“Keep walking,” he says.

“We need water.”

A pause. “Okay.”

Greece’s most precious treasure is never mentioned in the travelogues. Springwater flows from the mountains into faucets dotted over the landscape. They jut from ornate facades of marble and stone. Irini goes first. Then Esmeralda. The Swiss indicates I should fill a bottle for him so I do. Then I drink for my baby and myself. When we’re hydrated, we continue the walk.

The Swiss took my map back at the church. The places Irini reads from the signs are different from what they should be. I know this from the furtive glances she gives me as she reels off the names. The sun still rises in the east, sets in the west. We are still going north, but on a coastal road that clings to the sea.

“Why are we taking this road?”

He doesn’t answer.

I can guess why. He’s worried we’ll encounter Nick or maybe Nick and several someone elses on the way. An ambush. I’d told him so little of my plans, nothing beyond the basics, born of my need to withdraw from the world, pull my resources in to survive, focus on my plan. My intentional isolation has had an expected side effect of the pleasant kind: he is uncertain, so he’s taking a risk calculated with arbitrary data.

“I thought the Swiss were neutral, not cowards.”

“I am no coward, America.”

“Tell me something.”

“What do you wish to know?”

“Why take us north? Why not back to Athens?”

“I want to go home. To Switzerland.”

“So, why are you here? Italy is closer to Switzerland.”

“My affairs are not your concern.”

“Bullshit. You’ve made them mine. If you’re going to kill me, at least tell me what’s going on.”

“I have business here.”

My raised eyebrows are wasted on him because he’s behind me. “There’s no business left anywhere.”

“You know nothing, America.” He reaches forward, nudges Irini’s cheek with the gun. “What happened to her face?”

“Fire. A childhood accident.”

“It looks new.”

“Sunburn,” I say.

I keep Irini’s secret close and walk.

She gives thanks later when the Swiss stops to piss on a gas station wall. I squeeze her hand, sorry I brought her into this, yet selfishly glad I’m not alone.

Night arrives with all her
baggage and none of the melodrama of day. She brings a hostess gift: a small hotel, a plain white vanilla cake hugging the road’s curve. Behind a wrought-iron fence, the swimming pool masquerades as a swamp thing filled with rotting leaves and mold. Esmeralda waits as we traipse inside. The Swiss is at the back. Always at the back with the gun.

The dead are inside, sprawled out on once-snowy sheets, their final resting places so far from home—wherever home is. Even the breeze can’t carry the smell of this much death out to sea.

“Take a mattress outside,” the Swiss barks.

We choose a queen from an empty room. The bed is neatly made and we keep it so until it’s in place where he wants it, butted up snug against the iron fence. I wait for him to demand another but he doesn’t.

“Is this for us?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“What about you?”

“Such comforts are for weaklings and women.”

I almost gag on the words. “Thank you.”

He laughs cruelly. “You’ll need rest. Soon we’ll be in Vólos.”

What business do you have there, you bastard?

Irini and I share handcuffs and a bed: the Swiss takes no chances. Nick doesn’t come to me that night. I’m too far gone, too wrapped up in crisp sheets with my head pressed into the softest pillow I’ve ever known. I hope he forgives me.

“Are you ladies in trouble?”
the Russian asks. He’s dressed in swimming trunks and introduces himself as “Me, I am Ivan.” For a man in a dead society, he looks well. Healthy. Nourished, but still too lean.

The gun muzzle is hard against my spine.

I smile and hope it doesn’t falter. “We’re fine. Thank you for asking.”