Seven Days of Friday (Women of Greece Book 1) (8 page)

T
hey’re going to die
, and it will be the cab driver’s fault.

He picked them up at the airport’s exit, a round guy in a Greek fisherman’s hat.

His mustache asked, “Where you go?”

“The Liosion bus station,” Vivi said.

“No train?”

“Does it go to Volos?”

“Eh,” he said, raising both hands. “I don't know, I just drive taxi.”

“In that case take us to the bus station.”

“Okay.”

Now he’s zipping in and out of traffic like he took driving lessons from NASCAR. Melissa is a pale sheet hanging from the handgrip, and Vivi knows she’s just as limp.

“You want to see Olympic stadium? Maybe National Garden?”

“Just the bus station.”

“You are sure?” The mustache rises and falls in the rearview mirror.

His tip is shrinking by the second.

“I’m Greek, so stop trying to con me.”

He laughs big. “You are not Greek, you are
tourista
.”

“My parents were born here, which makes me Greek. So just take us to the station.”

Grudging respect on Melissa's face. Finally Vivi is doing something right.

“You are American, yes? I have cousin in America. Maybe you know her?”

Surely he isn’t serious. “I doubt it.”

“She lives in New York. Do you know it?”

“Sure, I've been there a few times.”

“Where you live?”

“Oregon.”

“That is close to New York, yes?”

“Nope.”

“How far can it be? America is not so big.”

“Two days drive – if you don’t stop.”

He twists in the seat, until he’s looking her in the eye. The cab is still moving. “I don't believe it.”

“Look at a map.”

He goes back to the road. A honk from behind and he smashes his foot on the gas pedal. Another honk, from up ahead, and he slams the brakes, blasts his horn. Tires screech.

“You know Robert DeNiro? Maybe he is your friend, eh?”

“No.” She swaps her terrified face for a bored one, but he rolls right over her.

“Are you sure? He's very famous. Best actor in the world.”

“I know his movies, but I don’t know him personally.”

“You are certain?”

The traffic starts to move again.

“Positive.”

Vivi reads his mind:
Stupid American
.

“People say I look like him.” He points to a mole on his face. “Say hello to my little friend,” he says. “That sounds like him, yes?”

Melissa bites her lip, goes far, far away.

“Scarface. That was Pacino.”

“No! It was DeNiro.”

“Pacino.”

He swivels in the beaded seat, face like a rock. “Prove it!”

“I'm in a cab – your cab – how am I supposed to prove anything?”

He turns back around, smashes his palm on the horn. “Go to the devil!” he hollers out the window. “It is DeNiro.”

“Fine, it's DeNiro. You win.”

He grunts again, zooms another few feet before crunching down on the brake. Oh look, they can fly.

“Get out,” he barks. “This is bus station.”

He tosses their bags on the grimy sidewalk, waves his hand for the fare. Ten percent tip. A fair price for a near-death experience.

Melissa covers her nose. “It smells weird.”

Swanky place. Doesn’t reek too much of stale urine and old tobacco.

“Try not to breathe,” Vivi says.

She steers them past a group of old men sitting in a smoke cloud, all the way to an empty bench. The old men fiddle and flip their worry beads, gold teeth shining at the pretty women. She dumps their bags, says, “Sit. Stay. If anything weird happens, scream.”

“I’m not a dog. Woof.”

So her kid’s a smart ass. Vivi’s glad to see the return of her spark. “I mean it. I'm going to get bus tickets.”

A woman with a bad perm and a pretty smile sells her two tickets to Volos, departing in about an hour. Vivi drops coins in the pay phone and leaves a message for her aunt.

Ten minutes out of Athens and Vivi’s asleep. Two hours after that she wakes with a head full of cotton and salt in her eyes. Melissa gives her what’s left of a warm Coke.

Caffeine and sugar don’t take long to strike. She comes alive, more or less.

They’re on a bus with a mixture of tourists and natives. It’s language soup in here. A bit of everything from all over Europe. Lots of pale-skinned people in eye-gouging colors, wearing sandals for the first time in what looks like forever. But they’re happy-happy. And who wouldn’t be? It’s paradise on the other side of the window. Even the dry patches are new and different. Vivi likes the way nature struggles in places, the way the olive trees punch their fists out of the dirt and claw up toward the sun.

“What’s that smell?” Melissa says.

M
ost people
who follow showbiz news know the story of how a bunch of actors trained for months so they could be in a movie cobbled together with special effects. Their Thermopylae pass was a green screen, their King Leonidas some Scottish guy. Three hundred Spartans play-fought and play-lost to a CGI Persian army, while a giant Xerxes (clearly an escapee from a BDSM porno) flipped between stomping his foot and gloating.

What most people don’t know is that the real world Thermopylae stinks.

Hot springs.

Greece sits on a nest of fault lines.

V
ivi says
, “Sulfur.”

“It smells like really bad farts.”

“So hold your nose.”

“I am holding my nose. See?”

A group of Germans sees Melissa holding her nose and they start to laugh and hold theirs. Then Melissa is laughing at their laughing.

“
Po-po
,” the old Greek woman across from them says, waving a hand in front of her face.

Vivi can’t help herself – laughter spreads faster than Ebola.

T
he bus is
in decent shape, but it’s the wrong shape for prolonged sitting. Vivi is a volatile mixture of uncomfortable and anxious.

Hurry up, hurry up.

Slow down, slow down.

All the way into Volos.

Now that she’s basically a captive in a tin can, she has time to think about what she’s done. There’s something unsettling about the idea of staying with family she’s never met. Eleni grudgingly arranged for Vivi’s aunt Dora – Eleni’s older sister – to meet them at the bus station. From there they will travel the few minutes or so to Agria, a fishing village that used to be its own entity, but has now (on paper) been assimilated into the city. Resistance was futile.

Vivi doesn’t know a thing about her aunt, except that she’s apparently a small snake. She’s seen pictures, black and white and wrinkle-free, but that’s it. Nothing about character and temperament.

Stress, stress, stress.

Now they’re here, and she’s steering Melissa ahead of her, off the bus and into the vindictive light. She barely has time to step away from the door, when she’s accosted by a pillow with arms.

“Vivi, you are here! Come, let me look at you!”

Her aunt has an addiction to exclamation points, while her younger sister lives an italicized, underscored life.

She’s a big woman, but soft in body and face. Greying hair, but so what? She wears it like she’s happy for it to be there.

“
Thea
Dora?” Vivi asks.
Thea
being the Greek word for aunt.

“Yes, I am
Thea
Dora.” She reaches for Melissa. “And this is little Melissa. What a beauty!” The large woman leans back and spits without letting saliva fly.

Melissa looks horrified.

“It's okay,” Vivi says in English. “It's to ward off the evil eye.”

Turns out her aunt speaks English.

“Yes, the evil eye. You do this when someone pays you a compliment. Evil likes to attach itself to beauty, so you spit to cancel the compliment. It is one of the old, Greek ways, from the time when we had our own gods.”

Melissa's eyes grow even wider. “Do you believe in God, too?”

“Of course! It is his work we do when we remove the evil eye. Just do not mention it in church, that is all, or they will chase us away with their brooms.” Mischief dances naked in her hazel eyes. “And now come, we will go home. You both look like you could use a good meal.” She shakes her head. “So skinny, you American girls. My daughter – your cousin Effie – she is fat. She eats too much, does nothing for exercise except nag her husband and children.”

She talks and talks and talks her way to a tiny BMW, circa nineteen-eighty-something, with rust bubbling all over its yellow paint. Sea air loves to eat. The car has two speeds: fast and faster.

Thea
Dora’s mouth runs on the same engine. Questions, historical factoids, gossip – she never stops.

“Your mother and I, we used to dive off that pier every day during summer,” and, “Look, they make the best
frappe
in town right there.” And, when a man walking two donkeys with packs comes into view: “Look, a Greek car!”

Vivi laughs.

“What's
frappe
?” Melissa asks. “Is that like a Frappuccino?”

“Iced coffee. You will try some when we get to the house.”

“Mom doesn't let me drink coffee.”

“You don’t let the girl drink coffee?”

“Maybe this once,” Vivi says.

Melissa shoots her a look.

“How is my sister?”
Thea
Dora wants to know.

“The same. She never changes.”

Not a grain of sand on the beach. The shore is made up of rocks and pebbles, but swimmers and sunbathers don’t seem to care. The water is slightly more perfect than the weather – that’s what matters.

Thea
Dora laughs at the sky. “That is Eleni. Our parents were stricter with her. It was a big scandal when she married your father.”

Vivi perks up. “Scandal?”

But her aunt is three conversations down the road already. “See, there is our Church,
Agios Yioryios
– St George.”

An elderly woman in black is lugging a huge red bottle up the road. She’s leaning way left, hem bobbing several inches above a black knee-high stocking.

Melissa says, “What’s she carrying?”

“Water. It comes down from the mountains. The water here is not so good, so we go to faucets around town and fill bottles with good spring water.”

“Why don't you buy it at the store, like Fiji water?”

Hands off the wheel,
Thea
Dora roars with laughter. “Why we want to give money for it when this way is free? Soon we go up to Makrinitsa. In the mountains you will drink the best water in the world. Like a spoonful of cold, wet sugar!”

“Sounds like heaven,” Vivi says.

“That's why God put it so close to the sky, so He can smile down upon it when He is having a bad day.”

K
ids and young lovers everywhere
. Holding hands, sharing ice cream, pausing to kiss.

It hurts Vivi hard. She doesn’t miss John, but she misses all the frills she’s never had, the things lovers do because they have love.

The wheel turns and they bounce around a corner. Now the BMW is crawling up a narrow street with concrete straight out of a war zone.

This is not a postcard, but it has its own brand of . . . can she really call it charm?

Stucco houses, pastel paint, flattop roofs. Red flower pots everywhere. Bright, dipped-in-paint red. Gardenias in some, geraniums in others. That’s just the plants she knows.

The car stops at the top of the street, outside a white house with peeling iron teeth. The fence used to be blue, before it took a few thousand glances at the sun and gave up.

There’s a view of the gulf, of the heart of an emerald.

“It’s so quiet,” Vivi says in wonder.

Her aunt slams the car door, shatters the silence.

“It is siesta time. Everyone is sleeping. Wait until tonight, you will not find it so peaceful when the children come out to play.”

Vivi looks over Melissa’s shoulder. She’s fiddling with her iPod.

“So what do you think, Kiddo?”

Shrug. “I don’t know.
Thea
, do you have cable?”

The older woman raises her hands to the sky. “My doll, you are in the land of the gods. You won't have time to watch TV.”

S
he’s dying to pee
.

Being here is like . . . being here but also not being here.

But if she’s not here, where is she?

Nowhere.

“Can’t we stay in a hotel?” she whispers to Mom. Thea Dora is busy making coffee and something she called
finikia
.

“Shh,” she says with a weird look on her face. “Let's give it a chance.”

A couple of minutes later, her aunt (great-aunt, if you want to get all picky about it) bustles back in carrying a big black tray. On top are three tiny coffee cups and three small plates.

She kind of wants to throw up, because there’s a damp turd on each plate.

Except it’s not a turd, it’s a kind of cookie, and the wet stuff is honey syrup.

It’s pretty much the best thing she’s ever eaten. Way better than Grams’s desserts, for sure. Not that she would ever say that aloud, because Grams can turn people to stone.

She nibbles the cookie while Mom and her aunt talk. She can’t hear a word they’re saying, so they look funny with their mouths moving out of rhythm with the music. She makes up a little play in her head, where
Thea
Dora is berating Mom for being the shittiest mom ever.

What about Dad? Does he even miss her?

Does she miss him?

It’s complicated. She doesn’t miss him so much as she misses old Dad. Seeing your father French another guy changes things. He dumped them for Ian. He dumped her.

Thea
is staring at Melissa, lips moving. She wonders if
Thea
knows she’s got hair on her chinny, chin, chin.

Mom tugs on the ear buds, and sound pours out. After the smoothness of music, speech sounds harsh and jangled.

“So, Melissa.”
Thea
Dora says it like she hitched her name to the back of a car and dragged it a few miles.
Meeleessaa
. It sounds weird but she kind of likes it. “Are you good in school?”

She looks down at the plate. Empty. If they were home she’d go get another one.

“I guess. I don't love it or anything, but I do okay.”

“You have lots of friends?”

Shrug. “Just the one. But since we're here now, I guess I'm down to none.” Mom's mouth droops, but Melissa doesn’t care. “
Thea
, where’s the bathroom? I really need to go.”

“Down the hall and second left,”
Thea
Dora says.

She leaves and they keep talking. Probably talking about Melissa and what a screw up she is. Hey, it wasn’t exactly her idea to move here, to this . . . this . . . thriving metropolis. Heavy on the sarcasm.

Metropolis. Cool word.

That’s what she wants, to live in a metropolis filled with people. Blend in. Become invisible.

Vanish.

Second door to the left.

She steps insides, closes the door and lets the darkness hide her from her own critical eyes. A temporary vanishing.

How long can she stay?

Not long. Too long and they’ll think she’s doing number two, and that’s embarrassing. So, she can’t stay forever.

Say goodbye to the dark, Mel. On with the light.

She blinks.

Something is really, really fuc –