“Sure. Once or twice.”
“It’s like that.”
“How do you feel when you wake up?”
My face burns. “Like shit. How do you think I feel?”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Feelings are healthy.”
“I’m
Sometime later, Morris says, “He wants you.”
Steam rises from the two coffee cups between us.
“I’m not going to risk loving him.”
“Who said anything about love?”
“What else is there?”
She laughs. “You want him, too.”
I slurp my coffee, fill my mouth with piping hot liquid so I can’t say, “I do.”
Moving into the old boarding school is merely a formality. Nick and Morris help me carry the few things I can’t live without. Clothing, important papers, the plain gold band Sam slid onto my finger on our wedding day. I almost never think of him now and it shames me. I could tell Nick, but I don’t want him to see me naked. My soul is not a newspaper to be read.
I claim a room on the second floor as mine. A space that has never known the jar.
In a world full of death, things are still born: legends, myths, horror stories. The imaginations of men don’t need to toil hard to create terror in these times.
The moon is a narrow slit once more. She waxes and wanes, oblivious to the planet beneath her. She is an absent guardian and a fickle friend, one who tugs the tides and denies she’s made of green cheese.
At night, the Roma congregate around the campfires. Meat and vegetables bubble over the naked flames. A lone accordion holds the night’s feral sounds at bay. After the meal, the music becomes infectious—
—flitting from body to body until most join in the song. When the song changes, voices drop out and others rise up to take their places. These are people who’ve never heard of karaoke or
Afterward, the vocal cords change patterns and tongues tell stories not set to music. There’s a rhythm to tales oft-told. A smoothness to the words. Polished stones that have witnessed a million high tides.
“I have to go soon,” I tell Yanni.
“The women say you will have your baby here.”
“I’ve been here too long already.”
I shake my head, feel the whips of my hair.
“I have to keep going north.” His head tilts. That is his tell, the one that signals that he hasn’t understood. “North is up.”
“On the road?”
“Yes.”
“The way up is not safe.”
“Nowhere is safe.”
“No. Listen,” he says, “to the story.” He nods at the man who, by his sheer physical presence, manages to occupy the head seat at a round campfire. Not a large man, but he expands to fit the tiny crevices in the air around him and defends his space with broad hand gestures that supply punctuation and italics.
Yanni translates in hobbled English.
“He talks of Delphi. Do you know it?”
All I really know is Delphi’s famous oracle, but my head nods regardless.
The boy listens for a moment before continuing. The Gypsy man has drawn his arms close to his body, hunched his shoulders, scrunched his neck. Taut vocal cords push out a voice drum-tight.
He talks of Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair and a gaze that turned all who looked upon her to stone. By Perseus’s hand she was decapitated, and from her neck sprang Pegasus, the white winged horse, and his brother Chrysaor. Greek mythology involves many creatures born from un-holey body parts.
The mood shifts to something darker. There are rumors, he says, that Medusa is reborn, that she dwells in the woods near Delphi, petrifying anyone who dares meet her gaze. The woods are filled with statues that were once people with hopes and dreams and families. Anything she doesn’t turn to stone she devours. The main road north along the coast was destroyed in a quake. Now the only way up is a perilous pass through Delphi, through the territory of this modern-day Medusa.
“You see? Is very dangerous.”
A flesh-eating woman who turns people into columns of stone. A year ago I would have scoffed, but no more.
“Has anyone seen her?”
Yanni thinks. “Many people. My uncle. He sees her carrying the wood and he runs away fast. Do not go north. Is not good. Stay here.”
I’ve lingered too long. I have to go soon. I have to find Nick before our child comes.
SEVENTEEN
Nick makes a list. He always does.
“You’re assuming blame that doesn’t belong to you,” he says. “You’re not responsible.”
“I opened the jar.”
“People were dying before that.”
“I know.”
“So taking the blame isn’t logical. Pope was going to do this—with or without you.”
“I know.”
He makes his list. Of what, I don’t know.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Yes.”
He checks my face for lies. There are none to find.
“What do you write now?”
“Now?”
“It can’t be a shopping list. There’s no shopping to do.”
“It’s a list,” he says, “of all the good things I’ve still got.”
“Like what?”
“Like you.”
“Why me?”
“I’ll write you a list.”
My body mends. My belly swells. My child treads viscous fluid, ignorant of the sins of men. She’ll never know a whole world, just the fragments of what civilization used to be. To the absent God I say nothing. Instead, I direct my prayers to the ones who once ruled this land. I ask for a safe place to raise my child, a place with enough food to nourish a growing body, and healthy people to serve as teachers. I want my child to know what we once were, and how we fought to maintain our humanity.
I am a being with three pulses now: my own, my child’s, and her father’s. All three dance to a steady beat in my soul. If he were dead, I’d feel the Nick-sized hole in my heart.
