Lily and the Lost Boy (2 page)

She could see nearly the whole village. Her own roof was like a beacon among the rooftops. Wherever she was wandering with Paul in the hills, she would pause to look for it and its untended garden that descended in terraces to the Temple of Poseidon, where chickens scratched among tethered goats and fishermen's wives hung their wash to dry on cords strung from stakes stuck in the ground amid the fallen columns.

Old and new were side by side in Thasos—a puzzle of time. A team of French archaeologists, who came every summer to the island, had arrived last week. It was their work to find parts of that puzzle and fit them into time. She spotted two of them now, digging in a corner of the old marketplace, the agora. Then she grinned to herself and stood up.

She'd seen, at the back of her house, a familiar head of dark, curly hair. It was her mother, standing beneath a mulberry tree and washing clothes in a large basin. Lily saw her pause in her work and look out to sea. She and Paul and people in the village often did that—look out at the water as though it might speak if you stared at it long enough.

She heard the thud of feet on the path and turned to Paul as he skidded to a stop next to her.

“He is American, and he lives up the mountain in Panagia,” he said. His cheeks were flushed; he was smiling. The goat bleated once. Lily's heart fell.

They had grown close during these last months. Paul was nearly fourteen, but it was as though they'd become the same age. She knew it was partly because there hadn't been any ordinary days since they'd left Williamstown and partly because nothing was familiar.

In a family you got so used to everyone you didn't think about them anymore as separate people, and so used to daily life you didn't think much about that either. Here on this island he'd become her fellow-explorer, quick to see what she might have missed, who let her read aloud to him from her book of myths, who met her in the kitchen late at night when everyone was sleeping and made her cups of tea and canned milk.

“Why was he staring in that crazy way? Did you ask him what he was looking at?”

“He's training himself not to blink in sunlight,” Paul replied.

“Great!”

“Lily, don't sneer at what you don't know about.”

“Oh, let's go home,” she said crossly.

“His name is Jack Hemmings,” Paul said. “His father has a motorcycle. They go everywhere on it—Turkey, Thessalonika, all over the island. His father is a great dancer—the Greeks say he's the best on the island—and he writes poetry sometimes. Jack can speak Greek perfectly. They've lived here almost a year. Do you know what he did? What nerve! He slept in the acropolis last night. He can walk up the mountain to Panagia in just over an hour. That's eight kilometers.”

Lily started down the path, Paul following her.

“What about his mother?” she asked, not looking around, not wanting to see in his face that eagerness that had nothing to do with her.

“I don't know. Maybe she and his father are divorced. I asked him, and he said. ‘Oh, her … she's somewhere in Texas.'”

“What was the matter with his hand?”

“He fell on a rock in the acropolis. The cut bled for an hour, but he didn't tell anyone about it.”

“He told you.”

Paul was silent a moment. Lily knew she had a quick tongue, knew she was what her father described as being too fast on the uptake. When she was feeling mean, as she was now, she knew she could confuse Paul and make him uneasy.

“Well, I asked him,” he said defensively. “You'd like him, Lily. He's smart. Sometimes he takes tourists to the ancient remains and gets paid for it. He's been out on a fishing boat, and he caught an octopus.”

“So did you,” she said. “What was he doing? Trying to get a job with you?”

He laughed at that. Her irritation with him suddenly went.

“He's going to take us places we haven't seen,” he said. “We're supposed to meet him tonight at the Gate of Herakles, around eleven, he said.”

“Mom will love that,” she remarked. She hesitated, then she asked, “Did he say I should come?”

“Mom doesn't worry if we go out for a while at night. It's not like at home. We'll go after they're asleep.”

He hadn't answered her question. She guessed that Jack whatever-his-name-was hadn't said a word about her.

A faint cry drifted up to them from the village. It sounded like “Yawurti! Yawurti!”

It was the boy who sold fresh yogurt. Lily and Paul had stopped him one afternoon as he wheeled his bicycle on the quay. He'd opened the cover of a wooden box attached to the handlebars. Inside it were white bowls filled with yogurt. Paul told him they didn't have any dishes with them. He'd grinned and said if they'd open their mouths, he'd feed them yogurt until they ran out of drachmas. He was the cobbler's son, and like most of the young people in Limena he worked.

Lily wished she had a job herself. Even though Paul had included her in his intention to meet Jack tonight, she suspected things would change between them. There might be fewer myth readings in the kitchen over cups of sweet, tepid tea, fewer of the musing conversations they carried on in all of their roaming, talk that was filled with surprises for both of them, as though there had been barriers between them back home that had melted away beneath the flooding sunlight of the island.

TWO

Paul caught up with Lily where the hill path joined another broader path that was steep and stony. They moved down it cautiously, keeping their eyes on their feet. When they reached the rough stone steps where the village began, Paul said, “It was a relief, speaking English to someone.”

“What have we been speaking? Duck?” Lily asked.

“Duck!” Paul shouted and burst into laughter. “Quack! Quack!” he cried.

As though in response an elderly couple called out greetings to them from a fenced-in garden. The children called back, “Yes, we're fine. And you?” Lily peered past the gourds which hung from the fence like small yellow moons. The old people would be taking their ease before starting to cook their evening meal. It was hard to find them among all the roses and dahlias, the fig and damson plum trees that filled their garden. She saw a pale hand waving among the green leaves.

“You know what I mean,” Paul said. And she did know. Though she learned new Greek words every day, it was often a strain stumbling around in a new language, especially one for which you had to learn a new alphabet, too.

One of the reasons Mr. and Mrs. Corey had chosen the island was that they'd guessed there wouldn't be any English-speaking tourists visiting it. Such tourists, her father had said, drove up the cost of things because they wanted big hotels and nightclubs and tennis courts. There were tour ships that occasionally anchored off the island and sent sightseers ashore in small boats, but they usually stayed only a few hours. The Greek families who spent their vacations in Limena appeared to like the island the way it was. Mr. Corey had hoped they would all learn the language—and had been rather solemn about it. The funny thing was, he was hardly able to speak it himself, though he studied a grammar book for hours every afternoon. “I've become a prisoner of grammar,” he'd said once to Mrs. Corey. “Throw me some nouns, Kathleen. I'm drowning in the passive subjunctive!”

Mr. Corey was a history teacher, and he was finishing a book on the Children's Crusade. It was because he had a sabbatical that they were able to come to Thasos for a few months.

When Lily thought about home—not very often—it was her room she pictured. From the window she could see two maple trees, a long-forgotten croquet wicket rusting on the lawn, and a narrow stream that dried up in summer. She had come to feel they had always lived on the island, and her room at home was like a snapshot in an album. She had had a hint of that feeling from the day in April when they had stepped off the small ferry from Kavalla onto the wharf and stood there, all of them blinking in the brilliant light, their suitcases piled around them. They had stayed for a few days in a small hotel. On her first morning there Lily had looked out a window and seen, not a stream, a croquet wicket, and two maples but a tall shepherd leaning on his crook, standing among a flock of sheep, behind him the steep rise of a mountain on whose lower flank old, thick-trunked olive trees seemed to whirl like dancers.

Then Mr. Kalligas had found them a house to rent. He had strolled over to them one evening as they sat around a table at Giorgi's taverna, introduced himself, sat down, and spoken to them in his quick, odd English, which, he told them, he'd learned during the years he'd been a cook in the British navy. It was clear from that first meeting that he'd appointed himself their guide and friend on Thasos.

“Come
on
, Lily!” exclaimed Paul. “You're dreaming.”

He hadn't spoken to her so impatiently in a long while. “As if you didn't stand around half the day like an owl,” she said sharply.

“There's Mr. Kalligas,” Paul said. Far down the path, she saw the old man in the dark blue suit he always wore. He was making his way around the temple of Dionysus, carrying a platter covered with a cloth. He would be taking a roast home from the baker. The Coreys too, like almost everyone in the village, took their roasts to the baker to cook in his large oven. Only bread was baked in the small clay ovens people had in their yards.

They reached a high wall beyond which was their own yard. “Wait!” warned Lily.

An ancient woman was dragging herself by her hands across the path to her house opposite the Coreys'. Behind her the pipe of a public water faucet poked out of the ground. Every afternoon she came to it to wash her feet. Lily heard her groaning and sighing. She looked like a long bundle of sticks tied together, quite like the sticks they had seen her gathering as she crept and crawled about in her own yard. It was her chore in her family, collecting firewood for their bread oven. Her great-great-granddaughter, Stella, told the Coreys she was 103 years old. Almost ten times her own age, Lily had figured, born in a time that was nearly as remote to her as the great marble wall.

Paul was fidgeting. Lily touched his hand. “Another minute,” she said.

“Another hour,” he grumbled.

“She'll get upset if she hears us.”

The old, old woman spoke some mumbled words, as indistinct as though they'd risen through deep water. Her stiff body trembled now and then with the tremendous labor of dragging herself into her yard. The last they saw of her were her narrow feet, yellow and fragile as late autumn leaves. With a jerk of her shoulders, she pulled herself out of sight.

Lily and Paul went around the wall to a high filigreed-iron gate, and Lily yanked at a cord that lifted a latch. They ran in, and the gate clanged shut behind them. Along the wall meandered a huge wisteria, its whale-colored branches nearly hidden by cascades of purple blossoms. Everything looked good against a stone wall, Lily had decided. A few yards beyond the front door of their house, shading the uppermost terrace, stood a large mulberry tree under which Mr. and Mrs. Corey sometimes read in the afternoons. Mulberries could stain, but the tree had been divested of its fruit since the morning a group of women had come to Paul and asked him to climb up among its branches and shake them as hard as he could. They had spread large cloths to catch the berries as they rained down and had taken them away to make preserves.

Lily loved to wander, but she loved coming home, too. The wild beauty of the garden still startled her. New flowers were always blooming; fruit swelled and ripened on apricot and peach trees. She didn't venture down to the lowest terrace. She was sure there were snakes there, coiling and uncoiling in all the tangle of bush and grass. She imagined Jack visiting. He and Paul would leap from terrace to terrace and laugh at Lily and her fears.

The front door was open as usual. One morning when someone had forgotten to close the gate, five goats had run into the long hall that went from one end of the house to the other, and had raced, their hooves clattering, into Lily's room just as she was putting on her socks. Bleating, their bells jingling, they had jumped through her window and out into the yard.

People came to visit with no more advance notice than the goats. Cousins of the woman who had rented them their house had come one day and spent the afternoon, drinking coffee, smiling at Mrs. Corey as she tried to make sentences from nouns, and looking sympathetically at Mr. Corey as he struggled to produce a small, correct sequence of words. Stella came too, when she could spare an hour from her large family, and Mr. Kalligas, of course. Mr. Corey was especially happy to see Mr. Kalligas, with whom he could speak English. Mrs. Corey fared better with Greek; she wasn't afraid of making mistakes. Their neighbors and the butcher, the baker, and Mr. Xenophon, who owned a small grocery store where the Coreys shopped, seemed delighted by her efforts.

Paul and Lily walked into the cool dark hall as their mother crossed it to the kitchen.

“Mom, there's another American on the island,” Paul said.

“That's nice. After all, it's not our island,” Mrs. Corey said. She was cranky, Lily guessed, because of the supper problem. Except for breakfast, meals took a good deal of thought. The children followed her into the kitchen. On an oilcloth-covered table lay a large bowl of strawberries.

“If we could only live on strawberries and honey and eggplant and bread,” Mrs. Corey said, sighing.

“And Swiss canned milk,” said Lily. Though both the children liked goat cheese and yogurt, they couldn't get down goat's milk.

Mrs. Corey was staring at the stove. It sat on a stone shelf in a niche. It had two burners and an extra tiny one for making Turkish coffee. Except when they went to a restaurant, most of what they ate was fried or stewed.

“There are eggs,” Paul reminded her.

“And chocolate,” added Lily.