Where the Stars Still Shine

by Trish Doller

  “Where were you?”

  “I, um—I was with someone.” The words surprise me. I wasn’t expecting to reveal anything this personal to him.

  “Someone who is, apparently, not Connor.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you—are you—?” His face is pink and he pinches the bridge of his nose. “God, this is not a question I ever thought I’d have to ask, but if you’re, um—are you being careful?”

  My own cheeks get warm. Mom and I had the sex talk years ago. It was after Frank, so she was kind of too late, even though he didn’t have actual sex with me. But it’s a never-in-my-wildest-dreams scenario to be discussing birth control with Greg. Despite the weirdness of the moment, it feels, maybe for the first time since I got here, as if he’s really my dad. “Yes.”

  “If you need Phoebe to take you to her doctor, I can ask her.”

  I nod. “That would be good.”

  Greg hoists himself to his feet, then helps me up. Right there, where it’s as if we’re standing in the sky, he hugs me and tells me he loves me. My cheek against his T-shirt brings back a thin slice of memory, of him hugging me when I was little. I was jumping off the porch steps of wherever we were living when the three of us lived together. I had no trouble on the first step or the second, but when I tried from the third, I fell and skinned my knees and palms. Greg was there to pick me up and wipe away the tears. My arms circle around him and so quietly that I’m not sure he’ll hear me I whisper into his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  He kisses my forehead, which makes me think maybe he did.

  I follow him back down the plywood staircase, trying harder now to picture what this house—our house—will look like when it’s finished. He talks about drywall and bamboo flooring and other things that mean nothing to me, but I don’t mind.

  “So this boyfriend of yours—” he says, as we walk our bikes out to the street.

  I climb onto my bike. “Just trust me, okay?”

  Greg sighs. “I’m really not comfortable with this, but—okay.”

  He turns off at Ada Street—after telling me that he plans to install a propane tank this afternoon so I can shower in the Airstream—and I ride on alone to Georgia’s house. When I coast to a stop at her front walk, she’s already puttering in the yard, wearing floral gardening gloves and a pair of rubber clogs. When she hugs me, she smells of dirt and grass and lipstick. It’s a pleasant combination.

  “Did you get yourself all sorted out the other day?” The gloves she hands me are blue and much larger than the ones she’s wearing, and they’re a little scratchy inside. She leads me to a stack of mulch bags.

  “I guess so.”

  “If I can throw in my two cents,” she says, “I suspect you’re not much like your mother at all, Callista. You may go off on your own to work through your thoughts, but the difference is—and this is important—you come back.”

  I never thought about it that way.

  “You’re like your father in that regard, and”—she gestures at the top bag and indicates that I should spread it around the low shrubs along the front porch—“I suspect that you’re not running away so much as you are running to something. Or, someone.”

  My thoughts go immediately to Alex and, as if she can read my mind, Georgia smirks. She reaches up and puts her gloved hands on my face. “Your cheeks give you away, matákia mou.”

  “What does that mean?” The bag of mulch is heavier than I expected and I stagger over to the shrubs with it.

  “It means ‘my eyes,’” she says. “Not literally, but—it’s like saying you are the apple of my eye.”

  “What about ‘korítsi mou’?” I ask, repeating the words Greg used at the sheriff’s office in Illinois, as I tear open the bag of mulch and upend it on top of the old mulch. I’m not sure I’m even saying the words correctly. “What does that mean?”

  “The literal translation is ‘my girl,’” she says. “But it implies that the girl in question is loved and held dear. It’s used by parents. Now, if a young man were to say latría mou, which means ‘my darling,’ he loves you … or he’s trying to charm you out of your underpants. Either way, he’s serious about something.”

  I distribute the dark and earthy-smelling mulch around the bushes and laugh that Alex didn’t need to trot out Greek terms of endearment to get me out of my underpants. But it’s a good laugh, not one rooted in I’m-shit-in-the-back-of-someone’s-truck shame. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  The work is sweaty, but it doesn’t take long before the mulch is spread and the weeds are pulled. Georgia did most of the weeding herself and confessed she paid a neighbor boy to mow the grass so I wouldn’t have to do that part. I feel as if I got off pretty light on my punishment, but—I don’t know. I guess I get what Greg was trying to tell me.

  “I’m having lunch today with my friend,” my grandma says, as we peel off our gloves. “Would you like to come with me?”

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “I wouldn’t invite you if it was an imposition,” she says. “And Evgenia wants to meet you.”

  The name feels familiar, but I can’t place it. “Okay.”

  I wash up in Georgia’s bathroom, finger-combing my hair to work out the tangles and sniffing the underarms of my T-shirt to make sure I don’t smell foul. I look as if I’ve been working in someone’s yard and the end of my nose is a little pink from the sun, but I hope her friend won’t mind.

  The tiny stone house with an old-fashioned sailing ship carved into the wooden front door is within walking distance, and not far from the sponge docks. On the way, Georgia teaches me how to say hello and thank you in Greek, making me repeat the words over and over until I have the pronunciation down cold. We’re greeted by a salt-and-pepper-haired man, barrel shaped and broad enough to nearly fill the doorway.

  “Georgia!” He kisses my grandma on both cheeks. “Good to see you! This must be your granddaughter. We’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” His hand swallows mine as he shakes it. “Come in, come in! Please, sit.”

  He ushers us into a living room barely bigger than my Airstream. Although the drapes are drawn, lace curtains push back the sunshine and cast a gloominess over the room. It smells as if the whole room could use a good shaking. Seated on the couch is a woman—Evgenia, I presume—whose mouth is slack, and when she looks at us, I think she might be blind because her eyes don’t appear to be focused on anything at all.

  “Evgeniki.” The man squats and pats her knee. She swings her head in his direction, but her expression doesn’t change. “Georgia is here to see you. You remember Georgia.”

  She nods as my grandma sits beside her on the couch. I perch on the edge of a faded brown chair.

  “I’ve brought my granddaughter, Callista,” Georgia says. “She’s been helping me with my garden today. Callista, this is my dearest friend, Evgenia, and her husband, Nikos.”

  I wave, then feel stupid. What if she can’t even see me? I attempt a Greek hello. “Yia sou.”

  Evgenia claps her hands and says something, but her jaw is stiff and the words are unintelligible. They sound more gibberish than Greek or English.

  “Use your board.” Nikos hands her a white dry-erase board and red marker, then turns down the volume on the television. Georgia watches over Evgenia’s shoulder as she scrawls some words on the board. From my upside-down vantage point, I can’t read them, but I’m pretty sure they’re in Greek. So I couldn’t read them right side up, either.

  My grandma smiles and looks at me. “She says you have grown into a beautiful young woman.”

  “I, um—efharistó.” Thank you.

  Yiayoúla nods her approval and nudges Evgenia with her elbow. “I’ll make a Greek of her yet. Even if she doesn’t like my dolmades.”

  “I’ll leave you ladies to talk.” Nikos stands, then bends over and gives his wife a tender kiss. He strokes her cheek, and the sweetness of the gesture makes me smile. “Call if you need me.”

  The co
nversation between Georgia and her friend alternates between silence as Evgenia writes and a flurry of words in English and Greek as my grandma talks. If you couldn’t hear the squeak of the marker on the whiteboard, you’d think Yiayoúla was talking to herself. With nothing to add, I look around the room. It’s not fancy and the furniture is old, but well kept and clean. Lived-in and loved.

  Hanging on the wall is a picture of a much younger and thinner Nikos, his hair fully dark and his face without a mustache. He’s standing with a skinny blond boy—whose legs are disproportionately long compared to the rest of him—beside a white boat with Evgenia painted in blue on the side. Alex. Evgenia is Alex’s mother.

  I walk over to the picture. Beside it is another photo of Alex. In this one he is older and broader, and in the water, surrounded by a group of other boys. His arm is held aloft with a white cross in his grip.

  “That is Evgenia’s son, Alex. Phoebe’s brother.” Georgia comes over to me and slips her arm around my waist. “But you already know this, don’t you?”

  I don’t look at her for fear my cheeks will give me away again. If they haven’t already. “Yeah, he, um—he came over for dinner once, and he does the spongedive tours on Sundays.”

  She points to the picture of Alex in the water. His whole face is smiling and even then—whenever then was—he was steal-your-breath beautiful. “Each year in January, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River,” she says. “One of the annual traditions is the Epiphany dive, when the archbishop throws a cross into Spring Bayou and the boys dive in after it. It’s thought to bring good luck for the coming year to the boy who retrieves it. Alex won it that year and your father won it when he was sixteen, too.”

  That was the year my mom got pregnant with me. Not so lucky for Greg, who ended up a father before he turned seventeen.

  Behind us I can hear the squeak of Evgenia’s marker. We turn around to see her holding the board up. It says: Alex is good boy. Proud of him. A tear catches in one of the lines of her face and rolls down her cheek. She misses the son who never visits, and my heart breaks for her.

  My grandma laughs to lighten the mood. “Haven’t you done enough matchmaking?” She turns to me. “It was Evgenia’s idea to fix up Greg and Phoebe, so now she thinks she’s an expert.”

  Evgenia laughs as she wipes her eyes and cheeks with a tissue, then rubs out the words on her board to write fresh ones. Lunch now?

  Georgia helps her up from the couch and walks her into the kitchen, where they assemble sandwiches for me and Georgia and mix up a milk shake of chocolate nutrition drink and banana for Evgenia. Yiayoúla explains that her friend suffers from progressive supra-nuclear palsy, a degenerative disorder that is slowly eroding her motor skills, including walking and talking.

  “It’s become very hard for her to swallow,” my grandma says as the blender whirs. “So her meals are nearly all liquid. Nikos and Phoebe do what they can to make sure her nutritional needs are met, but it’s not enough. She’s getting weaker and more susceptible to illness. Eventually she’ll catch pneumonia and her body will be unable to defend itself, and she’ll die.”

  My sandwich turns to dust in my mouth as she talks so frankly about death. Everything hits me at once—why Phoebe wants Alex to see his mom, and why he refuses. It’s hard to look at her face, almost expressionless, and know there is sorrow and fear behind it. Alex is pulling away, preparing himself for the inevitable. But what I don’t understand is how he can bear being apart from his mother. If she were sick, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for my mom. She is sick and I have kept terrible secrets to protect her.

  After lunch, Georgia helps Evgenia into bed for a nap and Nikos returns a few minutes later. He looks in on his sleeping wife, then thanks us for coming over. “Georgia, I don’t know what I’d do without you and Phoebe. Caring for Evgenia is a full-time job.”

  “It’s a blessing you have a strong, capable son to run the boat, eh?” His thick eyebrows nearly touch as he frowns, but before he can say anything, my grandma pats his shoulder and cuts him off. “Call me if you need a break. I’ve got nothing but time.”

  As we walk down Mill Street, Georgia laces her fingers through mine. “Last evening I was visiting a friend of mine who owns a soap shop on Athens Street when I happened to see a young couple kissing on the sidewalk.”

  My eyes go wide. If she knows—

  “Relax.” She waves her hand. “Your father has no idea. But, my silence comes with a price.” She laughs. “That makes me sound so sinister, doesn’t it? Not so much a price as a very big favor in exchange for keeping your secret.”

  I have nothing of value to offer her. Nothing of which I’m aware. “What?”

  “Convince Alex to go visit his mother.”

  “But—I can’t do that,” I protest. “Phoebe brought it up at dinner and he got mad at her.”

  “Well, of course he did,” Georgia says. “She’s his sister and she was nagging him. You, Callista, are a beautiful girl, and beautiful girls can always persuade boys to do things they don’t want to do. Also, you’re smarter than he is. You’ll figure it out.”

  Chapter 14

  I’m curled up on my couch with the novel I bought downtown at the bookstore and a blanket against the chill that’s settled into the December evenings—something that surprises and delights me about Florida—when I hear a soft tap at my door. Alex called me from the dock a little while ago to tell me he was leaving, but maybe he’s come over to say good-bye in person. I smile to myself as I unfold and go to the door.

  It’s my mom.

  I pull her inside before anyone sees and close the outer door. There are no lights on in the house, but for all I know, Greg is watching from the window to make sure I don’t sneak out again.

  “Mom, what are you doing here?”

  She looks worse than the last time I saw her. The dark roots of her hair are bleeding into the platinum, and the fairy lights deepen the bruise-colored half circles beneath her eyes. Her signature red lips are too present on her washed-out face. I wrap my arms around her, but she feels different to me. Slight and insubstantial, an autumn leaf that could whirl away in the breeze. And she doesn’t hug me back.

  “This is a real nice setup you’ve got here.” She touches a dangling vine on the philodendron hanging above the sink, then skims her fingertips along the countertop to the book I was reading. “Is this all it took to win you over to his side, Callie? Some books and a couple of expensive gadgets?”

  “It’s not like that.” Except when she says it like that it makes me wonder if I have been seduced by stuff.

  She picks up my cell phone and cocks her head at me. I can look up things on the Internet with that phone. It was expensive. “Oh?”

  “Mom—”

  “You left me there in jail.” The phone clatters when she drops it on the counter. “And went off with him as if I didn’t even exist.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I didn’t have a choice. He’s my father.”

  She lights a cigarette and I wince, thinking about the mini-lecture I just received from Greg about my pretend smoking habit. Then I feel bad for worrying about what he thinks. Maybe she’s right. She blows out a stream of smoke. “There’s always a choice, Callie.”

  “What could I have done?”

  “Well.” She drops down on the couch and props her feet up on the table. The black velveteen of her favorite ballerina flats is worn thin and the heels are rubbed down to nothing. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”

  I’ve hidden some of the pocket money Greg has given me in the body of my guitar, and I have my pay from the gift shop now. There’s no reason why I couldn’t leave.

  “I’m sorry.” I sit down beside her, not sure why I’m apologizing. I could ask her where she thinks I could have gone on my own, or how I would have found her, but this is my mother. She believes all of this is somehow my choice. And even though I know it’s her personality disorder that makes her believe this, I can’t
silence the tiny voice in my head that agrees. “Aren’t you worried that you’ll be caught?”

  Her face softens and she gives me a grin that dimples her cheek. “You should know by now that I’m excellent at not being found. And anyway, I won’t be here much longer. As soon as I have enough money for us to start over, we can get out of here.”

  “How much did you get for the computer?”

  “Fifty bucks.”

  “Can you get it back?”

  She laughs. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because it was mine,” I say. “You stole it from me.”

  She reaches out and touches my hair. It’s comforting and familiar and I want to press my head into her hand for more. I want her affection back. “We can go to Colorado the way we planned or”—I see the excitement flicker to life in her eyes as she ignores my question completely—“anywhere. We can go anywhere we want, Callie. We can be free.”

  Free.

  “I, um—” In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve found a job, a friend—even as turbulent as our best-friendship has been so far—and a parent who grounds me when I mess up. Greg’s been a safety net when I fall. And that’s a kind of freedom I would have never expected. But none of this is what she wants to hear. I smile and rest my head on her bony shoulder. “Sounds good, Mom.”

  My cell phone buzzes with an incoming text message. She reaches for it and I see Alex’s name flash across the screen. “Ooh, Alex,” she teases. “Let’s see what Alex has to say.”

  “Mom—” I make a grab for the phone, but she holds it out of my reach as she fumbles for the button that will reveal his message. I stand and lunge for it, ripping it from her grasp.

  Her eyebrows lift.

  “Interesting.” Her voice is soft as I pocket the phone without reading his message, even though I’m dying to know what he said. “Is he Greek?”

  I never told her about any of the other guys I’ve been with because they weren’t worth mentioning, but now—Alex might be worth it, and I’m afraid telling her will ruin everything. “He—he’s nothing.”