Lily and the Lost Boy (15 page)

She had been sent to Mr. Xenophon to buy the last can of Swiss milk they would probably need. She lingered by his little table beneath the baobob tree, thinking about what had happened there the night before.

The Coreys had supper at Efthymios-Onassis'. “I've come to the end of what I know how to do with eggplant,” Mrs. Corey had said. “So I guess it is time we were going home.”

As they left the restaurant and walked down the street, it seemed to Lily that more people than ever spoke to them—strolling families, men in tavernas, people who called out greetings from their gardens. She had wondered if she would ever again live in a village where every single person knew her name.

As they went past the grocery, Costa had called out to them. Her parents had halted, standing motionless as though turned to stone. Costa was sitting at Mr. Xenophon's table, a tall glass of water and a small glass of brandy before him. He stood up and bowed formally to them. All at once, both Mr. and Mrs. Corey had rushed to him and put their arms around him.

It had been eight days since Christos had been buried. Lily felt tears spring to her eyes. She kept her head down. In his low, courteous voice Costa called her name twice as though she were running away from him. She looked up at him, conscious of the tears on her cheeks. He was smiling. He had grown so thin that his shoulders looked like bones without flesh. The pockmarks on his face were like the pale craters on the moon. His eyes had sunk deep into their sockets. But his shirt was neat and ironed, and the hand with which he touched her head was firm and warm. There was hardly any conversation. He asked them if they were well; he'd heard they were to leave Limena very soon. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Corey asked him how he was. That would have been a cruel and meaningless question, her mother had said later. They only murmured and held his arms briefly, and then they went on home.

As she glanced at the table where their meeting had taken place, Lily felt as though she had already left Thasos, that she was recalling an event from a great distance away.

She walked on, thinking now of home, of her room in the old house in Williamstown. She was going to change it, give away the stuffed animals she had had for as long as she could remember and take down the frilled green curtains from the windows so that the light could shine through, moonlight and sunlight and the gray light of rain.

Paul was sitting beneath the mulberry tree when she came through the gates, reading an English detective story they had gotten in Kavalla. He must have read it ten times by now, Lily thought. He looked up at her, lifted his hand, and bent his fingers slightly. Not much of a wave. He didn't smile, didn't shout some familiar insult at her. He hadn't done anything like that for some time. It wasn't that he had grown silent—he talked to her, and they played cards together—it was more that he had become quiet. He took walks by himself in the village, stopping to visit his former employer, the cobbler, or walking down to the quay to watch the fishermen mending their nets. Lily had followed him several times. She hadn't tried to keep hidden. He had seen her, but he seemed not to have minded.

She knew he hadn't seen Jack or Mr. Hemmings. As far as she knew, no one in Limena had seen them.

Mr. Kalligas had told Lily about Jack's going to Costa's house the morning after she had discovered him on the islet. He had gone with his father. But Mr. Hemmings had not gone in; he had waited outside in the street.

“That boy, he stood in the doorway,” Mr. Kalligas reported. “Costa got up from the chair and brought him to the table with the food. He wouldn't eat nothing. Then Nichos run to him and lean against him. I see the boy's face. He looked wild! Pretty soon he left Costa's house. Then he went up to Panagia with his father. They been staying in their rooms. The father go out to buy food. No more dancing.”

“Here's the milk,” Lily said, putting the can down on the kitchen table. Her father, who was drinking coffee and staring out the window at Paul, asked, “Did your brother speak to you?”

“He waved,” she replied.

“I'm always telling him to think,” Mr. Corey said, “and now that he seems to be thinking, it worries me.” He sighed and put his arm around Lily. “Well, we'll be home soon. Paul will put all of this behind him.”

Lily didn't say it, but she didn't think that would happen. How could she and Paul recall only the joyful days? How could there be light without the dark?

Mr. Kalligas visited the Coreys in the afternoon. As usual, he was bringing news. A huge German company had sent representatives and products—kitchen equipment, all electric—to Limena. They had arrived on the early boat from Kavalla, and that evening the products were to be exhibited in Mr. Panakos' shop. Mr. Panakos had cleared away all of his goods to make room for these extraordinary objects, and everyone in the village would be going there to see how they worked.

“This isn't electric, but it works on batteries,” said Mr. Corey, holding out to Mr. Kalligas their transistor radio. “We would like you to have this.”

Mr. Kalligas clapped his hands together once. “Bloody wonderful!” he exclaimed. Lily knew he had always admired the radio. He was so plainly delighted that she felt delighted herself. He would take it home to play for Mrs. Kalligas, he said, and then he would come back. He had a gift for Lily.

When he returned a half hour later, he wasn't carrying anything Lily could see. He stood in front of her, smiling, gradually opening his hand. A small piece of terra-cotta lay on his palm. He held it up to the light from the kitchen window. Lily saw it was a carving of a woman's head. Her nose was arrowy, her forehead noble, and her bound and braided hair was so beautiful that Lily gasped.

“Artemis,” said Mr. Kalligas. “I give it to you because you like our old gods so much. You see—her ear is missing and a piece of her chin. But she is still there. I found her in my garden. I was planting a tree, digging, digging, and there she was!”

Lily held the little carving in her hand. It seemed to grow warm. Mr. Kalligas was watching her. “I see you like,” he said, grinning. She could only nod.

In her room she examined the head. Artemis-Hecate, goddess of the crossroads. She thought of the crossroads that she had passed six times at night. She thought of Jack and herself on the islet when he had put out the last ember of the fire. She thought of the silence and the darkness through which they swam to the beach.

“Lily,” called her mother. “Put on your dress. We're going to the Haslevs for supper.”

“It doesn't fit anymore,” Lily called back.

“Just don't breathe deeply,” her mother said, coming to the door and grinning.

After they had eaten beneath the thick green arbor from which grapes now hung as they hung over the face of the satyr at the Silenus Gate, the two families went for their last stroll together.

“I've never seen so many people on the streets,” commented Hanne Haslev.

“It's because of the German exhibit,” said Mr. Corey.

“Let's go see,” Mr. Haslev said.

There were lines in front of Mr. Panakos' store. Lily peeped through the window. The alabaster goat and the wool bags were gone. In their place were machines, beaters and knife sharpeners and can openers, all whirring and circling madly as people looked at them with intent curiosity.

“How strange,” Mr. Haslev remarked as they went on to the pastry shop where they were to have dessert. “Many of the houses have no electricity. Yet the people were so eager … did you see how they looked at those things and touched them?”

“They'll all get electricity. They have to. And everything will change,” said Mr. Corey, adding pensively, “because it has to.”

The next morning, which was the day before the Coreys were to leave, Paul and Lily and their father went down to the village to find some young man they could hire to help them get their bags to the wharf. It would be simple to pack; there weren't any cupboards and chests of drawers to empty. As they went by the museum, Costa came out and called to them. He would like to give Mr. Corey a coffee, he said, and the children something sweet to drink.

Costa led them through the small rooms of the museum across stone floors smelling of damp stone. Costa had been cleaning, as he did every day. Lily saw a dented pail of water standing beside a great terra-cotta bowl. A few yards beyond the back entrance was a cleared space raised a few feet above the meadow, which had been one of the ancient city's squares. The earth was packed down there; sections of columns lay against each other, but several were standing and the right height to serve as chairs. Behind the space ran a tangled hedge. Costa clapped his hands loudly. At once, like a good witch in a fairy tale, an elderly woman dressed in black poked her head up over the hedge. Costa spoke quickly to her, and she reappeared in a few moments with a tray; on it were two cups of Turkish coffee and for Paul and Lily tall glasses of water in which floated strips of vanilla.

Mr. Corey took his Greek-English dictionary from a pocket and pressed it into Costa's hands. Costa's pale skin flushed. He opened the small pages at random, spoke a few Greek words, flushed again as he tried to pronounce their English equivalents.

It was quiet there, the sounds of the village muffled. The two men spoke haltingly to each other. Conversation, though, seemed unimportant. There was a kind of tenderness between her father and Costa that Lily felt directly, just as she felt the warmth of the morning sun.

Paul was staring at his feet. Now and then he cast a quick glance at Costa. She wondered what he was thinking, wondered if he were recalling the dreadful night of the accident. And Nichos wasn't there as he usually was, always by his father's side. Perhaps he would not come to help out in the museum for a time; perhaps his mother wanted him close to her in the little house where there had once been two children.

Costa asked Paul and Lily if they would be happy to see their own country again. Paul only nodded, his eyes cast down.

He had turned away from his family to be with Jack. He had forsaken her. She didn't think she was angry about that anymore. She was puzzled by it. In a way, it interested her. It made her wonder if anyone would ever take up her whole attention the way Jack had Paul's.

In front of Paul, Jack had ignored her existence. But she and Jack had been alone together. That was her secret. She hadn't told Paul or anyone else that it had been she who had found Jack on the islet in the middle of the night. He had talked to her then. He had even laughed. Once.

Mr. Hemmings no longer danced for the Greeks at Giorgi's taverna or, as far as she knew, in any other place in Limena. Jack hadn't been around since the death of Christos. Paul didn't speak his name, nor did she. She was looking at him, vaguely aware of her father struggling to say something in Greek, Costa murmuring encouragement. Paul turned his head toward her as if aware of her scrutiny. She smiled. She hadn't meant to; the smile had come to her lips without thought.

She kept looking at him when he'd turned away to stare at a far corner of the agora. He had smiled back at her, but his forehead had furrowed. He must be thinking all the time about everything that had happened here on Thasos. She believed he would think about her too, just as she thought about him. In some way, they would always hold each other in some corner of their minds.

“Lily, I hope you will come back to us here,” Costa said to her.

She shook his small, hard hand, which touched the museum antiquities with reverence, which had clasped the shoulders of his boys with such gentleness.

A word came to her that she had used before only at the sight of a very small baby or a young animal. Sweet. Costa was full of sweetness. He smiled down at her. The burden of her feeling for him was so heavy at that moment, she was relieved when they left him to go on to the waterfront. There they found a young fisherman who would be able to help them with their luggage. She mused about Costa all the way home, past the police station and the House of the Turk, past the shrine of Dionysus, a crumbling ruin in the brilliant sunlight.

The Coreys were standing on the wharf. Odysseus had helped Mr. Corey load their suitcases and books onto the deck of the
Maria
.

Lily was astonished at the number of people who had come to see them off. Even some of the store owners, usually busy at their counters at that early hour, were standing on the quay along with Efthymios-Onassis and Mr. Xenophon, Giorgi, Dimitrious, Stella, and Mr. and Mrs. Kalligas. At the outskirts of the group stood the handsome policeman in his beautifully pressed uniform, wearing his sunglasses. Mrs. Kalligas draped some crocheted doilies over Mrs. Corey's hands, and she put them into her Greek wool bag. Then, hurrying past her, Mr. Panakos came directly to Lily and told her to hold out her hand. When she did, he placed on her palm the tiny alabaster goat.

“Oh!” she exclaimed with delight. Mr. Panakos grinned. He didn't need a translation.

“You looked for so many months at him,” he said, “that you must take him home with you.” He stared at the goat, and for a second Lily thought she detected a faint regret on his face. Then he shrugged. “Good journey,” he said, and walked rapidly across the quay to his shop.

Lily and Paul stood on the forward deck. She had been hugged flat, she felt. She looked up at the mountain that rose toward Panagia, at the house where they had lived, nearly hidden by trees except for its tiled roof, at the theater, and beyond it, the crest where the acropolis stood.

“I am glad we're going home,” she said to Paul. “Are you?”

“Yes,” he replied.

If she lived a lifetime on Thasos, she wondered if she would have been able to know it all—the mountains, the villages, Theologos, Kastro, Prinos, the ports they had not visited: Limenaria and Stavros and Skala Potamia. There were trees she did not know the names of, and flowers and birds. There were ghostly places where the ancients had left their cities and their temples, still buried, but which would be gradually brought into the light of day by the archaeologists.