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
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.
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,
“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
The 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.
