You Are Always Safe With Me (12 page)

Lilly stroked the gift—the baby bunting—she had bought for Gerta and pressed her face once, deeply, into the soft powdery-scented flannel. A baby had inhabited it. The garment seemed sacred as an altar.

*

At least this was not going to be one of those precious-gift baby showers. No one who had shopped this afternoon in the small Turkish village had unearthed a single Winnie The Poo blanket or Mickey Mouse bib or footed pajamas with footballs all over them. Jack and Jane Cotton presented the expectant mother with a miniature chess set made of finely sanded marble. “Your baby can be a chess genius by the time she’s six!”

Fiona’s present for the baby was a hand-crocheted lace tablecloth. “She can make this into a wedding veil when she gets married. And remember to invite me to the wedding!”

Harriet and Lance had chipped in together and bought a set of Turkish towels in the softest pink color.

“Someday when your baby is older you can dry her after her bath and tell her these towels were first unwrapped under a Turkish moon.”

Harriet looked to the sky and they all followed her glance. Above them were swirls of feathery clouds wafting through the heavens. Riding mysteriously under and over their filmy threads was the full Turkish moon.

Words came to Lilly’s mind from some childhood poem she’d read: “Riding like a galleon o’er the silver sea…”

For indeed the sea reflecting the moon was rippling with light, spreading pathways of moonlight over the gentle waves from the far horizon directly to where they rocked in the sea on the
Ozymandias
.

All of them seemed frozen in a tableaux, caught in this moment of fragrant air blowing off the cliffs, embraced by this aura of silver moonlight.

“My present to you,” Lilly said quietly to the expectant mother, “is a Turkish baby bunting. It belonged to a Turkish baby who isn’t a baby any longer. An infant has been kept warm in this, Gerta, I hope you don’t mind that it isn’t brand new. But her mother was happy to sell it, and I thought it was beautiful.”

“Oh, I adore it. It will always remind me of this trip and of all of you. I adore these gifts you’ve given Harrison and me. I only wish…I mean, I really wish that right this minute that
I was hugely pregnant
!”

*

They drank more of Fiona’s wine, they toasted the baby to be, her coming life, her beauty, her success, they wished her every happiness, every triumph, every bit of the health and love and luck that a human being might enjoy.

The hour grew late, but no one seemed willing to leave the enchanted circle to do the ordinary things one had to do to get ready for bed. On the foredeck, Marianne still slept in a sleep of such apparent exhaustion that no one thought to wake her. Harriet, however, went forward and covered her with a blanket.

As Lilly began to feel the night dampness settle on her bare arms, she glimpsed a flash of light in the water beside the boat. Looking over the side, she saw below her the figure of Izak, swimming with rubber fins diving mask and snorkel toward the cliffs, holding in one hand an underwater flashlight and in the other a spear. In an instant, she saw two other figures enter the water behind him, both moving their frog-like legs and both armed with underwater lights and spears. The two crewmen, like Neptune’s attendants, followed their captain through the silvery waves on some nocturnal hunt. They disappeared from sight. Some time later, after the guests had drunk several more glasses of wine, all three men clambered up the ladder, holding high their spears victoriously. On the point of each weapon was a blue-black creature with many tentacles.

“Dinner!” Morat called happily. The killed sea-creatures were dripping, their skins shining. The three men were laughing and displaying proudly the spoils of their hunt.

“Calimari!” Harrison called out. “Good for you!”

Izak’s catch was the largest. He displayed its tentacles almost tenderly.

“Oh, take it away,” cried Gerta. “Don’t you know that if a woman is going to have a baby and she looks at something hideous, her baby will be deformed?”

“Only if you’re pregnant,” Fiona said soothingly. “Don’t worry, darling. Your baby will be perfect. Don’t worry your pretty head one teeny bit.”

Sometime before dawn, Lilly, sleeping on deck, heard a strange noise: whispering, a thudding sound. There was also an odd physical sensation—as if she were dreaming of being in bumper cars and she had been bumped hard, from the side.

She lifted her head and saw, across the dining table, the other deck-dreamers still asleep: her mother on one narrow bench, and Izak on his bench beside the helm. Both had burrowed under their blankets. Their heads were invisible.

Above there was a gray sheen in the sky, the kind of pale light that foreshadows sunrise. Sea birds were flying and crying with sharp caws over the water. They circled and dove, circled and dove.

Lilly breathed deeply. The canvas of the deck pad was dotted with dewy pearls of condensation which soon would be dried by the hot sun. But now it was cool, peaceful. How strange to be here, silently observing the forms of her mother and Izak, the two people on earth to whom she was so deeply attached.

Again she felt a thud, a knock against the side of the boat. A fear rose in her and she suddenly saw why: the head of a man appeared over the side of the boat from the opening where the boat’s ladder hung into the sea.

“Izak!” she cried out, but he had heard something too and had bolted to his feet. Harriet sat upright, also—her white hair disheveled, her hand to her mouth in astonishment.

The man had boarded the boat, and now another man came behind him, speaking gruffly to Izak in Turkish. Lilly saw a gun in his hand. She felt her throat contract. The one with the gun seemed vaguely familiar to Lilly, but so many Turkish men had the dark hair, black eyes, black mustache. The man gestured to Izak, pointing below toward the cabins.

“What do you want?” Harriet said from her bench. “What do they want, Izak?”

“Mother, be quiet!” Lilly hissed.

“They want money,” Izak said. “Jewelry.”

“Well—send them right over here,” Harriet offered. “I have these gold earrings they can have right now.” She smiled and made a motion to unfasten her earring from one ear. “And my rings, of course.” She waved her hand, with her engagement and wedding rings on it.

Lilly saw the impossibility of the moment—two women and an unarmed captain, and these…pirates. Both their faces were dark and ugly with intent.

Harriet beckoned them toward her. “Come over here, please, I have some money right in my pocket to give you, too.” She reached into the pocket of the sweater she wore over her pajamas and held some Turkish bills toward them.

What
was
her mother thinking, waving those few million lire in the air? Harriet laid the money in her lap and as she was removing the earrings from her ears, one at a time, she said, sweetly, “You know, I remember you boys from that party you had next to our boat one night. That was a terribly hot night, wasn’t it?” As she chattered on, she graciously held the earrings and the money toward them while they stared at her in bafflement. She was smiling up at them, the dumbest, most innocent of smiles. “Oh wait, let me give you these rings, too.”

As the man with the gun came toward her to take the jewels and money, as he peered at the rings that she was tugging off her finger, Izak leaped across the deck and flung himself on top of the man, knocking him to the floor. The gun went flying along the floorboards toward Lilly—she jumped forward and grabbed it, her ankle turning under her as she leapt. She cried out in pain, but managed not to fall. She’d seen enough bad movies to know what to do—she held the gun in two hands pointed it at the other man who was still on his feet. A burning pain shot through her right ankle.

What should she do now? Where was the trigger? She had never even held a gun before. The man, seeing her hesitate, fled to the railing while Izak was subduing the fallen man and leaped over it into the water. Lilly heard a splash below.

Izak was now dragging the other man to his feet and pushing him into a deck chair.

“Give me the gun, Lilly,” he said, not taking his eyes off the man.

Lilly stood frozen, half afraid that if she moved the gun would go off in her hand. She was standing on one foot; the other could not bear her weight. In a moment she heard the sound of an outboard motor. She glanced at the water and saw the escaped man standing in a small boat, gunning the motor, taking off toward the cliffs.

Her mother came to her side and gently unwound her fingers from the gun. She carried it to Izak who said, “Please—the cell phone,” pointing to the shelf under the helm. Harriet, efficient and calm—even as she looked frail and a helpless in her pajamas, with her hair in a white halo flying about her face—brought the phone to Izak, who, holding the gun pointed at the man, called a number which must have been the police.

Barish had, at the sounds of the skirmish, come up from below and at Izak’s command opened one of the storage areas where rope was kept. Expertly, because he was practiced at tying the boat to the cliffs each night, he bound the man’s hands behind him.

When Izak saw Harriet’s gold earrings where they had been flung under the table, he crawled on his knees to retrieve them for her. Calmly, gratefully, she put them back in her ears.

“I bought these after much bargaining in Istanbul. It would have been a pity to have that man sell them on the black market or trade them for hashish.…”

Lilly was still standing on one foot, feeling that if she moved the other to bear weight, her ankle would snap from her foot. Izak came to her side, put his arm around her shoulders and led her, holding her up, to a chair. She leaned her head against his side and felt herself trembling. His skin was hot against the clammy chill of her forehead. Izak placed his hand gently on her head and stroked her hair.

“The man could have killed us.”

“No problem, Lilly,” he said. “You are always safe with me.”

“But you are only a man, flesh and blood.”

“Not just a man, Lilly. I Ottoman.”

*

When the police boat appeared, its loud idling motor brought the others up from below to see what was happening. Marianne, roused from her stuporous night’s sleep after her hours of spinning, came stumbling from the forward deck, still in her Whirling Dervish clothes. The other guests stood, silent and amazed, as they observed the young man whose hands were tied, saw him lower his head and refuse to reply to the questions in Turkish the police were asking of him. They watched, finally, as the two policemen led the man off the boat and into their custody. When the police boat had pulled away from the
Ozymandias
, Harriet said, “We must all thank Izak for our lives. He is truly a hero. Pirates came aboard and he subdued them single-handedly.”

Everyone burst out in applause. Embarrassed, Izak lowered his eyes, then looked up, unable to restrain a smile. Marianne pushed her way through the huddle of people surrounding Izak, rushed to him and threw her arms around him. “A kiss for the hero!” she cried, standing on tiptoes to raise her lips toward his face.

He turned his head away and pushed her off. “Excuse,” he said brusquely. “I serve breakfast now.” He signaled to Barish, and they both went quickly down the steps to the galley.

Lilly felt her mother pull on her arm. “Come downstairs with me. We’ll get dressed to face the day.”

*

Lilly hopped to the stairs, hung onto the walls. Five steps down to the galley, a turnaround, and five more to the cabins below. Her mother, it appeared, had not even noticed she was injured.

“Lilly,” Harriet said, shutting the door behind them as they came into their tiny room, “You
must
not fall in love with this beautiful Izak. My darling girl, princely as he is, the man is only a Turkish sailor. There is no point to it, you understand. There is no future in it.” Harriet began choosing her day’s clothes from the cupboard.

“Mother, please—”

“I don’t usually interfere in your life choices, Lilly. You know that. You’re a grown woman. But everyone has seen what’s happening….”

“Everyone? What have they seen? What is happening? Nothing is happening.” She let herself fall back on the foam mattress. She winced with pain. “I really can’t have this conversation. I don’t tell you what to think about Lance.”

“Lance has become my good friend, Lilly. He’s just a pleasant, simple soul. He’s a single man. He likes me. My life is lonely since Daddy died. What’s wrong with our being friends? Lance is an American. Lance lives ten miles from my house. If we want to continue our friendship at home, it’s possible. But look at Izak! Look at his life and where he lives it. You don’t even speak the same language. Another few days on this boat, and you’ll never see him again.”

“I know that all too well,” Lilly said. “There’s nothing to worry about. We all admire him. I admire him. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry, Lilly. I just must warn you. The
Ozymandias
is like a magic city, an unreal place. Shipboard romances are famous for being based on a fantasy. I fear you may be losing sight of what you have in your real life.”

“And what is that exactly?” Lilly asked. “What life do you mean? You know, Mother, try as I may, I can’t quite remember it just now.”

*

Lilly’s ankle, in the time it took her mother to dress, had become puffy and the skin over the bone seemed bluish. She cried out when she tried to stand.

“What is it, darling?” Harriet asked. When Lilly showed her mother her ankle, Harriet paled. “When did this happen. You may need a doctor!”

“I think just some ice, Mother. Will you ask one of the crew to bring me some, please?”

While her mother was gone, she stared up at the unfinished wood of the upper bunk. She considered all the polished, gleaming teak where it showed on the boat. But—here—where people slept, where they experienced their dreams, where they opened their eyes to greet the new day, they saw ugly, splintery rough-hewn wood inches from their faces. As with the guests on this boat, the
Ozymandias
was full of hidden flaws, raw realities.