Lily and the Lost Boy (6 page)

“A slug is a body without a tomb,” Paul said.

“Lame,” commented Lily. But he was grinning, and she giggled. The match was over for the moment.

“How come you're up so early?” he asked. “You didn't go back to the beach, did you? I can't believe it!”

“Well—I did,” she said. She took out a piece of cheese and wrapped bread around it.

He looked at her with interest. “Did you get any sleep at all?”

“None,” she said. She held out the tortoise. “I almost bit into Glaucus,” she said. “Would you put him out in the yard?”

He took it from her and examined it closely. “We could keep it,” he said.

“No—he was born free,” she said. Paul laughed and took it out the back door. She watched from the window as he put the tortoise down beneath the mulberry tree. She was thinking about Jack, who might be awake by now.

If she told Paul she'd found him there in the shack, he would know Jack had lied, was hiding something—about his father or himself. Would it matter to Paul? She was confused suddenly. Why did it matter to her? Why not tell Paul in the usual way she told him things? Because she knew it wasn't usual; because she was worried. But did it matter to
her
what Jack did?

She had left him the sandwich partly from an impulse of mischief—to baffle him. But she'd pitied him too, asleep on the ground, snoring like an old person. What she was feeling now—at least, so she thought—was an odd protectiveness toward Jack. But she couldn't think against what.

“Did you put all the tables and chairs back the way they were?” Paul asked as he walked into the kitchen.

“I did. When I got back here a while ago, there was an old blind man playing a pipe. Didn't you hear him? He told the whole street a story about his wife locking him out of his house.”

“I only heard you stomping around in the kitchen,” he said.

She yawned. “Paul, would you get the bread and eggs this morning? I can't stay up another minute.”

“What are you going to tell Mom?” he asked with an intent look at her.

“Oh, don't worry, I won't tell about your silly trick out there on the beach. I don't know what I'll tell her. Would you say I didn't sleep much last night and please don't wake me?”

Paul nodded. “Poor Jack,” he murmured. “Going all the way up the mountain—”

“He's not poor Jack,” she broke in angrily.

“Okay, okay …” he protested mildly, looking surprised.

She staggered into her room and sank down on her bed.

When she woke up, the sun was shining in her face through the window. A man was singing from far down on the last terrace.

It must be one of the village men who worked for the archaeologists, she guessed. She knew they'd found a great stone archaic bird just a foot beneath the soil at that end of the garden. They must have started a dig there today to see what else they could find.

She changed her clothes and went down the hall. Her father was sitting at his table, smoking his pipe and staring at a closed book he held in one hand. There were chopping sounds coming from the kitchen. She felt as though a week had passed since she'd walked home from the beach.

“Well!” her mother exclaimed as Lily walked into the kitchen. “The sleeping beauty! You look flushed. You haven't got a fever, have you?”

She put her hand on Lily's forehead.

“Cool as a cucumber,” she said and turned back to the table where she had been cutting up cucumbers and tomatoes.

“What are you making, Mom?”

“A cold soup,” Mrs. Corey said. “Something I can make with the materials at hand. It's called gazpacho.”

“What else is in it?”

“Oh, pork chops, bacon—the usual,” said Mrs. Corey, grinning.

“Oh, Mom!” Lily said, smiling. She took an egg from a bowl, intending to hard-boil it.

“Lily?” her mother asked in a serious voice.

Lily kept her back to Mrs. Corey.

“I went in to look at you last night—”

“—to make sure I was covered,” Lily interrupted, trying to delay what she knew was coming.

“Yes. And you weren't there. Where were you?”

“I couldn't sleep. I went out for a walk. A kind of long walk.”

Her mother didn't speak for a few minutes. Lily filled the little blue Bulgarian saucepan with water.

“Lily, go out on the balcony when you can't sleep. Everything is very—very benevolent here. But I don't like the idea of you walking around in the middle of the night. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Lily. She sighed. She wasn't sure whether it was from relief or regret.

FIVE

When Paul returned in midmorning from his trip to Keramoti with Manolis and his father, he wanted Lily to go with him at once to the acropolis.

“But what happened?” asked their father. “I mean—Paul! Think of it! For thousands of years Greeks have been sailing the Aegean, a cargo of those splendid storage jars in their ships' holds. And now you've done what they did—”

“It was just a big messy rowboat with a kerosene motor. When we got there, a couple of men helped unload the jars, and we came back,” Paul said.

“Talk about understatement!” Mr. Corey exclaimed. “I'd like to hear your report on the Trojan War.”

“Well—it wasn't much,” Paul said flatly.

Mr. Corey, who had been smiling, looked faintly irritated.

“It's just daily work for Manolis' father,” their mother said. “It always
has
been someone's daily work.”

“Well …” began Mr. Corey dubiously.

“Speaking of work—” said Mrs. Corey, looking at him.

Mr. Corey sighed and went off to his desk table.

Lily was thinking about temples and shrines, about portals partially blocked by earth on which nameless carvers had left flowers and birds and the faces of beasts and men. When she traced with her fingers the letters of an ancient inscription on a stone or touched the shaft of a column, she sensed something else the workmen had left, more mysterious than daily work; something she could feel with the tips of her fingers but couldn't name, a thing that came from them across the centuries to her. It was as if she touched their hands.

“Lily, stop looking that way!” Paul exclaimed.

“What way?” she asked, startled out of her reverie.

“You look asleep with your eyes open. It's creepy.”

“You should see how you look when you get up in the morning,” Lily retorted. “Super-creep!”

“Now, children,” their mother murmured as she went out into the yard.

“Come with me right now,” Paul said to her urgently. She knew he hoped Jack would be at the acropolis.

“I hate to go up there,” she said.

“You can take a book and sit on the path with the goat. Maybe I'll find some valuable coins.”

“All right,” she agreed reluctantly.

For the next few days they went up the hill. Lily stayed by the nanny goat, reading. After an hour or so Paul would come slowly down the path.

“Any coins?” Lily would ask.

One morning he said in a discouraged voice, “I don't really know where to look.”

“Okay. Let's do something else.”

That afternoon she went down to the quay with him and sat under a plane tree while he and Manolis and the boys who could afford a few drachmas to rent them rode the battered bicycles back and forth along the water's edge. Girls didn't ride. She had rented a bike once, when they first came to the island. Just as she had taken hold of the handlebars, the handsome policeman had appeared from an alley leading to the quay and stood in front of her. He had smiled apologetically. “No, not for little girls,” he had said gently. “Very dangerous.”

She hadn't known enough Greek then to argue with him. Now that she did, she'd lost interest in riding. All the boys did was to shout and try to cut each other off. Most of them didn't speak to her. They look shyly at the ground when she greeted them. Only Manolis, and Nichos and Christos, the young sons of Costa, the museum keeper, exchanged a few words with her. On the evening promenade she had noticed that teenagers didn't mix unless a boy and girl were engaged to be married. Then they could walk together. People were kind and affectionate in Limena—they hugged each other and kissed when they met—but there were some strict rules about the way you were supposed to behave that you found out only when you broke them.

Mr. Corey had hit a good work period and stayed at his table until late afternoon. The beach took too long to reach, so they went off to the rocks to swim, wearing their suits beneath their clothes. When they reached the embankment above the old city, Lily saw one of the French archaeologists. He waved to the Coreys, then squatted down to study something in the pile of dirt near his feet. It looked awfully far down to where he was.

“I saw you riding Christos on your handlebars here today,” she said in a low voice to Paul. “You shouldn't do that. What if you fall?”

“Don't be a prune,” he said. “I only did it once. Why don't you go hide in the cellar? You're so scared of everything.”

“I'm scared of what's scary,” Lily said.

“Aren't you great!”

“Yes, I am,” she said, looking at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. She could tell by his face he was trying to think of something to say that would get her. But she had always had the last word, at least so far.

It was a lovely hour of the day. The wind would rise soon, as it did in the late afternoon, and blow away the heat. Shadows lengthened. The light lay in long golden swaths across the hills and village and on the fishing fleet, where the men were making things ready to depart at twilight. Flocks of homing birds flew swiftly toward the woods. People in the streets walked quickly, buoyantly, refreshed by the coolness, looking forward to their evening meals. As the Coreys scrambled down to the smooth, large rocks from which they could drop off into the water, Lily looked up the hill and saw a section of the marble wall gleaming among the pines.

Paul was the first one in, but he rose up almost at once with a watery cry, a grimace of pain on his face. He clambered up on a rock, hunkered down, and gripped his head. Mr. Corey pulled his hands away. Lily saw the black spine of a sea nettle sticking out of his hair. Mr. Corey pulled at it, and Paul let out a shriek.

They hurried back along the path toward home, Mrs. Corey, her arm around Paul's shoulders, promising she could take out the spine with tweezers.

Stella was washing down the stone walk to her house. She paused to ask Mrs. Corey what was wrong, and when she heard, she looked sympathetically at the groaning boy. She dropped the wet rags she had been using and said she knew exactly what to do.

In the Coreys' kitchen Stella made Paul sit down at the table. He was making an effort, Lily saw, not to cry. Stella went to the wire mesh where Mrs. Corey kept olives and cheese, took an olive, and heated it over the flame on the stove. When it was smoking, she dashed to Paul and pressed the olive on his head where the spine had entered. Paul howled. Then he looked surprised. Stella was holding up, for all of them to see, the smashed olive with the spine sticking out of it.

“It stopped hurting just like that!” Paul exclaimed.

“Have coffee with us?” Mrs. Corey asked Stella. She shook her head. She had to go home to finish her work. In the afternoons everyone in the village cleaned up their yards and washed down their stone paths and then themselves. When they appeared later in their gardens or on the quay, they looked sea-washed as though they'd just emerged from the Aegean.

“Saved by the olive,” remarked Mr. Corey.

“It is beautiful here,” Mrs. Corey said. “But so full of stinging, biting creatures. In fact, it's so dangerous, I feel like eating out tonight.” She took Paul's hand and pressed it in her own.

“Could we go to the movie after supper?” he asked.

“The film breaks a dozen times, the children cry, the sound is fuzzy, and we've seen that awful movie twice,” Mr. Corey protested.

“It sounds wonderful,” Mrs. Corey said. “We'll see.”

Lily went to her room and changed into the cotton dress she wore when they went out to eat. It seemed a little tight, though it had fit her a week ago. Flowers and trees grew so wildly on this island—perhaps she was growing wildly too.

People ate late in Limena, so Lily settled down with one of the books Mr. Corey had brought back from the American library in Kavalla a few weeks earlier. It was a history of the wars between Persia and Greece. It was often boring to her, but on Thasos, she was desperate for anything to read. The one thing that interested her in the book was the plight of the farmers. Whether it was the Greeks or the Persians who advanced across their land, the farmers always found themselves in the same fix, trying to hide their flocks and grain from soldiers. They hardly ever had time to complete a harvest, and when they did, the soldiers from both sides made off with all of it.

Paul wandered into her room.

“What do you think happened to him?” he asked. It was the first time in days he'd referred to Jack, even indirectly. Lily had been practicing forgetting him, and she had almost been successful.

“Maybe he and his father have gone back to wherever they came from,” she answered with an indifference she didn't feel.

Paul's face fell.

“Or he's up in Panagia with his father,” she added quickly.

“I guess he has friends there,” Paul said.

“Well—you have friends here in Limena,” Lily noted.

He stared at her but she wasn't sure he was seeing her.

“Do you think this dress is too tight?” she asked him.

“Ha-ha!” he cried. “Too tight! You look like a balloon in a Christmas stocking.”

“Thanks.”

“How do I know if it's too tight?” he asked. He picked up a deck of cards from the stone sill of the window and began to shuffle them. Lily went back to her book; the words were packed so tightly on the page, they looked like a mob of ants.