Finding You

by Jo Watson

  “Sure thing.” She smiled sweetly. “Just give me a moment, please.”

  She turned on the lights, fired up the computers, and fiddled with some knobs and switches.

  “Right.” She started typing with her excessively long, glitter-tipped nails.

  “Mmmm.” She looked up at me from the screen. “You’re lucky. There’s one last ticket available. When would you like to go?”

  “How’s tomorrow?” The words caught me completely off guard as they flew out of my mouth.

  The woman looked as surprised as I felt. “All right.” She sounded reticent but tapped away on the keyboard. “Ah. Lucky again. One more space on that flight.”

  “Great!”

  “And accommodation, where will you be staying?”

  I paused for a moment. This was a very good question. I had no idea where I was going to stay and certainly no clue where to start looking for my father.

  “What’s the most popular holiday destination?” My birth mother had been on holiday, so I reasoned it would have been somewhere touristy.

  The woman looked at me and blinked slowly. Her makeup was fresh and thickly applied. Her mascara was so heavy and moist that some of her lashes stuck together like large fat worms.

  “Mykonos, I guess.” She slid a pamphlet across the table. “Very nice there. Hot men,” she added with a wink of her sticky lashes.

  “Mykonos, Mykonos, Mykonos.” I repeated the word out loud a few times, stretching it out as I went: “Myk… o… nos.” I was hoping for some kind of inexplicable psychic feeling, or an Oprah aha moment that told me that I was on the right track. But nothing came.

  “Any more you can recommend?”

  “Corfu?”

  “Corrr… fu. Cor… fuuu. Corrr… fuuu.” But the more I said it, the stranger the word sounded and the less I wanted to go there. “Another one?”

  “Um, Spetses.”

  “Spet… ses… sss.” It sounded like something you might find floating in formaldehyde. “No. Definitely not there. Another one?”

  “Rhodes?”

  “Doesn’t sound Greek enough.”

  “Zakynthos.”

  “Perhaps a little too Greek. Anything else?”

  Glitter-Talon was officially looking at me strangely. She narrowed her eyes as if she was trying to bring a faraway object into focus. “Santorini?” she finally proposed.

  “Santorini. Santorini. Santorini, SAN… tor… ini.” I’d obviously heard of Santorini. I said it some more, and this time I felt a little something. Nothing mind-blowingly Oprah-ish. No heavens opening up with a chorus of trumpeting angels. Just a tiny little tug in my gut. Under normal circumstances I never would have based a decision on a barely there gut feeling, but these were not normal circumstances. And I certainly wasn’t my normal self today.

  “Perfect. Santorini it is,” I said quickly. She went back to typing and just as she was about to hit enter…

  “Wait!” Self-doubt suddenly gripped me. “Just give me a moment.”

  “Hello, I am Dimitri from Santorini,” I said, role-playing in a male voice. “Dimitri from Santorini.”

  Now she was really looking at me strangely. I pulled my phone out.

  WHATSAPP GROUP: Jane goes to Greece

  Jane: What do you think of when you hear Santorini?

  Val: WTF is going on?

  Annie: Sunburn.

  Lilly: Hot tour guides and tropical seas and parties and sex and love.

  Annie: LOL Lilly. She said Santorini. Not Thailand.

  Jane: Hot tour guides? Really? OK perfect. Bye.

  Val: Wait!!!! Are you really going to Greece????

  Stormy: how uou type oon thiS thjng?

  I pocketed my phone and looked at Glitter-Talon again. “Santorini it is then.”

  “Uh, you sure?” she asked, voice still dripping in sarcasm. “Maybe you’d rather go somewhere else? Somewhere closer to home?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, do you even know anything about Greece?”

  “Of course I do!”

  She looked at me expectantly. I reached into my brain to retrieve everything I knew about the country. What was there to know anyway? Their flag is blue and white… then there’s the Parthenon and… lots of other ancient ruins and pillars and rocks. Olives and the Olympics and dipping your pitas into sauces and there’s that famous dessert… balaclava?

  “So?” she said with a sigh that screamed irritation. This woman had a bad attitude, not to mention a slight gap between her central and lateral incisors. I hoped she flossed properly. She was really starting to piss me off.

  “It’s not like you have a million customers today,” I heard someone snap.

  “There’s no need to be rude.”

  I looked up and glanced around to see who she was talking to. But there was no one there. And when I saw her glaring at me, that’s when it dawned on me…

  I’d said it.

  I slapped my hand over my mouth. I said that? I had actually spoken my mind. Clearly the filters in my brain that stopped stuff like that from tumbling out of my mouth had completely malfunctioned.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  “Santorini. Please.” I tried to smile sweetly at Spider-Lashes.

  “And can I book you a tour guide? There are lots of reputable ones we use and lots of great tours,” she asked, grabbing for some additional leaflets.

  “No. I don’t need any guiding.” I raised my hand and blocked the oncoming bits of paper.

  She looked at me curiously again. “So no sightseeing then?”

  “No.”

  “No island-hopping? No wine tasting? No tours of the ancient ruins?”

  “No. No and no. Thanks.” I was still trying to sound polite.

  She half grunted to herself, “Fine. I’ll just organize for someone to fetch you from the airport at least.”

  “Fine.”

  “And how long will you be going for?” The fake pleasantry returned to her voice. She reminded me of one of those call center workers trying to sell you a death and disability insurance policy but sounding like they’re telling you that you’d just won the lottery.

  “As long as it takes!” I replied.

  “No, seriously. I need to put in a return date.”

  “As long as it takes,” I repeated.

  “As long as it takes for what?” she asked slowly and deliberately, as if she were talking to a child.

  “To find the answers.”

  She put down the pen that she had been grinding between her teeth and folded her arms. She sat back in her chair, and her eyes came up and met mine.

  “Um… are you sure you should be, you know, traveling? Alone? I mean, you seem… kind of sick?”

  “Sick?” This woman was treating me like I was trying to make a quick escape from the asylum, all the while tapping her stupidly long glittery nails and blinking her judgmental lashes at me. Something about this whole scenario struck a nerve deep inside.

  And then it snapped. The elastic band inside me that had been stretched to the breaking point over the years finally broke. And whatever it had been holding together and keeping neatly in place all fell apart in one surreal moment.

  “Look! I’m having a really weird, bad day today. And I don’t need you making it any worse than it already is. So I would really appreciate it if you would do your job and put your glitter nails—which you should really consider trimming by the way because it’s incredibly unhygienic—back down on the keyboard and type up my ticket as fast as possible. And while you’re at it you should really stop chewing your pen, you’re going to get hairline cracks in your tooth enamel, which can lead to all sorts of oral health issues not to mention bad breath if debris gets stuck in them.”

  Her bottom jaw fell open. “Who do you think you are?” She shot me a look that could murder kittens.

  “Sorry… here.” I quickly slid my credit card across the counter.

  She picked it up and glared at it. “Dr.
Jane Smith.” She looked up at me suspiciously. “Doctor?”

  “Dentist.”

  A smirk washed over her face slowly. “Well, that explains a lot.”

  When the whole encounter was finally over, I walked out clutching my ticket. I was leaving for Greece tomorrow; it was almost unbelievable. This was not how stealth Plain Jane behaved. How the hell was I going to explain this to my friends and family?

  How was I going to explain to everyone why I had just made the most bizarre, uncharacteristic decision of my entire boring life—one that not even I fully understood?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Did you know that chalk and cheese actually have something rather significant in common? They are both very high in calcium.

  So to say that my family and I were like “chalk and cheese” would be totally incorrect. To say we were more like pterodactyls and turnips would be far more accurate. They all seemed to be on the same page and I seemed to exist in an entirely separate book. That one lonely, dusty, neglected book at the bottom of the shelf.

  My mother enjoys lazy champagne-laced days at the country club. Trips to the spa for the latest breakthrough in cellulite treatment, wrinkle decreasing, lip upsizing, and lash extending. Her greatest ambitions in life are to have the eyelids of a newborn baby and Madonna’s upper arms. And when she’s not spending all her energy on looking at least two decades younger, she’s meddling in my life. She’s been meddling since I can remember and over the years has managed to turn it into something that resembles an Olympic sport.

  Being an ex–beauty queen, she places a lot of importance on outward appearances. She still has an old photo of herself winning Miss Johannesburg 1983. Despite the helmet-sized perm, blue eye shadow, and shoulder pads you could land a Boeing 747 on, she did look beautiful.

  But no matter how hard I tried, she despaired at my posture, held her head at my ungainly manner of walking, and recoiled at my overbite. She was practically heartbroken the day she discovered that my eyebrows were migrating toward each other. That could be fixed, though, and I was shipped off to a waxologist tout de suite. As a result, I’ve been waxing strange and unusual places for as long as I can remember. Which is a good thing, because these days it seems that having any form of body hair is about as sinful as letting your six-year-old smoke a cigarette while poaching rhinos. Everyone is obsessed with removing as much of it as possible. I made this shocking discovery a few months ago when the waxologist very crassly asked me if I wanted an anal wax—just like that.

  She also very kindly educated me on the new trend in male grooming… crack and sack. “Even the men are doing it these days.”

  I still declined politely.

  What couldn’t be fixed, though, was how much I let my mother’s “constructive criticism” and “helpful suggestions” break down my self-esteem. And to make matters worse, male admirers were pretty scarce on the ground, just confirming my suspicions about myself and fueling my mother’s relentless interference in my love life, or lack thereof.

  During my almost-twenty-five years on this planet I have had exactly two sort-of, almost, borderline “boyfriends.” Neither relationship went well.

  The first one was the kind of guy whose secretive nature gave me images of bunny boiling, or maybe a creepy serial killer wall covered in voyeuristic photos. Turned out, though, that his general sneakiness was due to the fact that he had a girlfriend back at home. The embarrassing scene that transpired outside my apartment one night confirmed that. The scene then went from embarrassing to crushingly humiliating when she screamed, “He says you’re shit in bed anyway!”

  As for number two, the guy was obsessed with Star Trek. His claim to fame was that he could speak in both Klingon and Ferengi. I suspected it wasn’t going to work when he met my friends for the first time and greeted them with the Vulcan finger salute. My suspicions were only solidified when during sex that I really wouldn’t write anywhere about, let alone home, he grunted into my ear…

  “HISlaH, HISlaH, HISlaH.” (Translation from the Klingon: “Yes, yes, yes.”)

  No. No. No. Naturally the relationship did not “live long and prosper.”

  And when a vaguely normal guy does pay me any kind of attention, my crippling shyness kicks in, leading to many embarrassing and less-than-desirable responses on my part. The last time a guy tried to kiss me, I told him that the adult mouth contains five to ten thousand different types of bacteria. Needless to say, we didn’t swap any.

  It would be accurate to conclude that my love life has been a rather lackluster affair to date. My heart is probably the most underutilized organ in my body, even more so than my appendix, which serves no medical function whatsoever. It’s not that I don’t like guys and sex; I like them very, very much. They just don’t seem to like me as much as I like them.

  So at the age of almost-twenty-five, I know absolutely nothing about this crazy little thing called love. I’ve heard it’s supposed to make the world go around and conquers all, and apparently it finds a way and is blind…

  It wouldn’t really matter if it were also deaf with bad skin and a limp, because I wouldn’t be finding it anytime soon. Correction, it probably wouldn’t be finding me. Love got lost years ago and clearly didn’t have a GPS.

  “You just need to meet more guys!” my friend Lilly was always telling me.

  But the only time I met men was when I had on a white mask and was preparing to plunge a sharp needle into their gums—not exactly conducive to romance. I did get a marriage proposal once, although he did make it when the laughing gas had kicked in.

  And let’s be honest about something while we’re at it: Everybody hates the dentist! I was already a person with naturally low self-esteem, and this job didn’t exactly boost it.

  But becoming a dentist just seemed like the right thing to do. I’d practically grown up in my dad’s practice. While my sociable sisters were being rushed around to extramurals in the afternoons, I sat in my dad’s office diligently doing my homework and reading the Guinness book of records.

  But had I even wanted to be a dentist? Let alone take over his practice so he could play golf full-time.

  Well, that’s what my whole wacky Wednesday was all about. I actually had no real idea who the hell I was. I had no idea where I came from and, as a result, had no idea who I was meant to become. All I knew for sure was that there was only one place on earth I would find all these answers.

  Greece.

  WHATSAPP GROUP: Jane goes to Greece

  Jane: I’m going to Greece tomorrow guys.

  Annie: What’s going on?

  Val: In detail!

  Jane: I can’t really explain it. I just woke up with a really strange feeling, and I NEED to go and find my biological father. I know. It’s weird.

  Annie: As in hot tour guide Dimitri?

  Jane: It’s been 25 years, I’m sure he’s not that hot anymore.

  Lilly: George Clooney! Hello!

  Val: Colin Firth! Mmmmm.

  Lilly: Pierce Brosnan.

  Val: David Duchovny.

  Lilly: Oooh, hello Mulder.

  Annie: GUYS! We are getting off track here.

  Lilly: Sorry

  Annie: How are you going to find him?

  Jane: I’m formulating a plan.

  Lilly: Hang on, I’m with Stormy (she came over for another iPhone lesson). She says she’s having a premonition about this.

  Val: LOL.

  Annie: Do share?

  Lilly: She says she feels the fates colliding (or some such thing) and says that something really strange is about to happen…

  Val: Like Jane going to Greece. That’s really strange.

  Jane: Yep. I feel like I’ve lost my mind a bit here.

  Lilly: No, she says something really big is about to happen to you. Something totally life changing! Something that will fundamentally change everything…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stormy’s words stuck with me all night. Usually the things she said went in on
e ear and out the other, but for some reason these didn’t. They resonated deeply within me; it was certainly time for a change. But a change into what? Her words were still playing in my head later that day when the plane had taken off.

  I thought about my biological father, too. Would I recognize him if he walked past me on the street?

  I was sure it would be easy enough to find him. How hard could it be? Anyone can be an amateur detective thanks to Google and Facebook. All I had to do was Google all of the tour guides named Dimitri and then meet up with them. I was confident I would know who he was the second I saw him, because we would share some kind of connection.

  It hadn’t been like that with my birth mother. When she’d refused to meet me, I’d written her a long letter in which I’d poured my heart out, and still… nothing. She’d rejected me once when I was an infant in desperate need of a mother’s touch and love, and then she’d done it again. She finally did write back to me. She really shouldn’t have. It was short and emotionless.

  She told me that she had a whole new life now, with new kids and a husband who didn’t even know I existed. As if I were some kind of dirty secret. She also said that dredging up past “mistakes” would do no one any good. And then she simply signed off with:

  P.S. I will always be grateful to your mom and dad for being your parents.

  Regards,

  Phoebe

  I remember turning the note over in my hands and looking for more. After all these years, was that all she had to say to me? But there was nothing. That was it. No explanation. No I still think about you and wonder what you’re doing. I think about you on your birthday. I wish I had never let you go.