White Horse

by Alex Adams

Detached.

  I stride down the hall in the direction of the broom closet. Bucket-and-mop time. Someone has to clean the Morris mess.

  It’s me who lights the match that burns my friend. I try to pretend I can’t smell her body cook. When she’s reduced to the contents of an ashtray in a dive bar on a Saturday night, I let myself into Nick’s room and pull his letter from my pocket. The envelope’s edges are worn now and the paper brittle from the cold. This room smells like him, like sunshine and citrus still, although there’s nothing of his left in here. Not that any of us brought much. A person doesn’t need a lot of stuff for survival in a temporary home.

  That Nick smell intensifies as I lift my feet off the floor and sink into his bed. I close my eyes and rifle through my memories, searching for the perfect image.

  I remember him. I remember us. The things we did. The things we talked of doing back when I had no idea how little time was left for us. A mixture of anger and lust builds inside me. How dare he go without giving me a choice? How could he make that decision for me? I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be safe. I can’t exist on some fucking pedestal like some precious thing. I picture him standing there, listening, riding out the tempest until I’m empty of rage-coated words.

  My hand slides down the flat plane of my stomach, down, down between my legs, and I remember everything good until I’m biting my lip to stop from calling out to him.

  Sometime between the storm and the calm that comes afterward, I slide Nick’s letter back into my pocket, unopened still. And I know that I am leaving.

  The librarian would understand: I tell myself that as I tear maps of Europe from her precious atlases. She would understand.

  The week whittles away.

  Monday creeps. Tuesday crawls. Wednesday stumbles by like a drunk searching for the perfect gutter to piss in. Christmas never took this long to arrive.

  On Thursday I hear a familiar rumble. The bus sounds close, but it’s still blocks away. Nonetheless, I pull on my boots, grab my backpack, and run, leaving my good-byes to float back over my shoulder. The well wishes fly at my back like arrows. They hit true: right at my heart. It’s all I can do not to turn back and look at what’s become my family. But I have to go. I have to find Nick, if he’s still to be had for the finding.

  The morning air takes a crisp bite out of me like I’m a chilled apple. I jiggle to stay warm.

  The bus hisses to a stop. The doors whoosh open. Same guy behind the wheel.

  “More questions?”

  “I need a ride.”

  He chews on this a moment. “Where to?”

  “The airport.” I slide the backpack strap off my shoulder, offer him payment: a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He snatches them from me, stashes them between his heavy legs.

  “Where else?” he mutters.

  Shocks whine as we take the first corner. The old school disappears from my view, probably forever. In the round mirror mounted high at the front of the bus, I see the driver peel the foil from the candy. He meets my eyes and something primal creeps across his expression as he chews furtively. Don’t you touch them, don’t you dare. Mine.

  I slide my hand into the backpack’s front pocket, finger Feeney’s soft fabric, and hate that the world has become every man for himself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  DATE: NOW

  The easiest distance between the two towns is a highway. The shortest distance is whatever road our feet can make for themselves. My biggest problem with the former is that it’s so visible. Our every move is out there for the Swiss to see.

  I remember his too-healed wound and wonder if he used this same voodoo to overcome the death I gave him.

  The battle rages in my head. Take the high road and hide, or take the highway and risk open warfare?

  “You cannot walk the mountain,” Irini says. I know she’s right. Neither of us is as sure-footed as a goat.

  I nod. There’s nothing else to say. At least if we’re in the open, our enemy is, too.

  We are turrets with feet, so tightly are we concealing our respective pain, following Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice, doing the things we think we cannot do. I lose myself in thoughts of Nick; he is alive there in perpetuity.

  The numbers parade through my head. I divide the total distance into palatable chunks that we can safely chew in a day. One hundred and forty miles. It’s nothing compared to the trek across Italy, but the funny thing about the past is the gloss with which it paints itself the further it is removed from the present. Those miles passed seem sweet and easy, walked with a calm and luxurious gait, while these are fraught with tension and peril. Maybe because the Swiss walked with us instead of chasing behind us, when he should be good and dead.

  My feelings divide themselves in two teams: one berates me for not waiting until his body cooled on that cot bed. The other gleefully wipes the black smudge from my soul with a ragged sleeve edge. In the middle is my heart which stands up for what it believes: we would be safer with him deep in a hole in Greece’s rocky earth.

  The sun moves faster than we do, waving as she climbs overhead and sails by. By the time a small arrangement of stones shimmers on the horizon, my shoulders have crisped to bacon. My face stings. Thank whatever deities are listening that I don’t possess a mirror. I don’t think I could bear myself.

  With her naturally olive skin, Irini fares better. Her hues deepen while mine fluoresce. She lifts her arm to point at the distant heap.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Right now, today, I believe if He exists, He’s an asshole. If we survive, I reserve the right to change my mind.”

  Her head tilts so, using crude sign language, I explain. Her mouth attempts a smile, but I can see by the way she presses her fingers to her scars that it hurts. So I change the subject. I don’t want this kind woman to feel pain. She’s had enough.

  “What is that?”

  “Is a shrine to Panagia. You know her?”

  I nod. “We call her the Virgin Mary.”

  “We will stop. I will pray to her for your child.”

  “Thank you.” My belief system is broken, but hers is not, so perhaps that’s enough.

  We walk on, our steps making strange sounds on the blacktop. The heavy fall of my boots. The soft shuffle of Irini’s rubber-soled espadrilles. Esmeralda’s keratin-thick clops. The shrine slowly comes into focus, its blurred edges sharpening until it’s crisp and real. Someone has taken care in building this monument, choosing stones carefully, pressing each layer into thick mortar, treating each to a slather of whitewash. Inside the arched hollow, a gilt-rich portrait of the Virgin Mary smiles as though she knows good fortune awaits. I wish I shared her optimism. I wish I did not think her a happy fool. Above her haloed head a brass bell dangles, and higher than that, on the shrine’s roof, the white cross is an advertisement to travelers, should they lose sight and forget that Greece’s old gods have been shunted into the backseat—at least for appearances’ sake.

  Irini crosses herself, moves to push the bell, shake it from its slumber, but I stay her. My silent warning feels foolish, because here we are out in the open, advertising our location to anyone with two eyes and decent vision; but for all we know, the ghost of the Swiss isn’t the only danger that stalks us. The lazy peal of the shrine’s bell could easily alert anything lurking in the hills that border this inland road.

  We pray silently, lost in our own heads. I pray for my baby, for Nick, for Irini, for Esmeralda, for everyone I love, and for the dead. I don’t pray for myself. When Irini asks why, while we eat crackers dipped in chocolate spread, I tell her that it feels like bad luck to offer that kind of temptation to the universe when it’s already having such a laugh at humanity’s expense.

  Then Esmeralda surges forward, her cereal scattering and popping as her hooves stomp it to powder. She lets out a cry of pain. I leap up, try to soothe her.

  Irini stoops, picks something off the ground. “Look.”

  There in the flat
of her palm is a rock, brown with old blood. My head snaps up. One hand shielding my eyes, I scan the hills for a glimpse of our enemy.

  Nothing.

  Cracks form in my fragile temper until I cast aside my own good counsel.

  “Fuck you!” I yell through cupped hands.

  Laughter echoes through the hills.

  We sleep in shifts, just like Lisa and I did. But unlike that poor dead girl, Irini is meticulous in her efforts. During the day we walk, until one day the scenery changes. The generous foliage bends over the road, concealing us from the sun, dipping us in a pool of cool shadows. My skin temperature plummets immediately. I sigh with the relief. Even Esmeralda perks. Temptation taunts us, urging us to walk faster, but the shade feels so good I want it to stretch on forever.

  Just before the bend in the road, there’s a sign shoved deep into the earth.

  “‘Lamia,’” Irini reads. “Half.”

  I know from the map she means we’re halfway to our destination. Halfway to Nick.

  “Have you been here before?”

  “Yes. On the bus. There is …” She mimes eating.

  Sure enough, there’s a roadside restaurant up ahead, its entire front made up of glass panels, the grounds dotted with picnic tables and umbrellas that were once dyed bold colors. Now, with no one to secure them in bad weather, their tattered and faded fabric flaps freely in the breeze. Tour buses sit abandoned on the roadside, waiting on passengers who will never pay their fare. Their seats beckon to us, issue seductive invitations of comfort and rest.

  So we do. There’s a ready supply of springwater, restrooms that—thanks to some miraculous feat of engineering—still have flushable toilets.

  “Tell me of him,” Irini asks when we’ve settled down in the plush seats.

  “Who?”

  “Your husband.”

  “Nick’s not my husband.”

  “Is okay.”

  I get up, double-check the door is secure, and give thanks that the glass is tinted a gray the sun can scarcely penetrate. Esmeralda is up the front, where she has room to move. I stroke my hand down her back, then let my tired hips sink back into the seats.

  “There’s nothing much to tell. He left. I followed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love him. Have you ever loved a man before?”

  “Once. Perhaps.”

  “Would you have followed him anywhere?”

  “Perhaps yes, perhaps no. He was killed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was many years now.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  There’s a pause, then: “What will you do if he is dead?”

  I think about the possibility, although it leaves me so empty each breathe is a knife wound.

  “Mourn him forever.”

  “What’s up here?” I point to the map beyond Lamia.

  “More.” She indicates the trees and the hills. “Then the water.”

  We walk on. I wonder where the Swiss is now.

  “What will you name her?”

  I look at her, surprised. “I don’t know.”

  “You have time. In Greece, babies don’t have names until …” She draws a cross on her forehead.

  “Baptism?”

  “Yes. Until then they are named Baby.”

  I try it on. “Baby.”

  “Does he know, the man?”

  “About the baby?”

  She nods.

  “No.”

  “What will he do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly, because until now that thought never occurred to me.

  “Do not worry.”

  Too late.

  Towns shuffle by. They’re ghosts now, dead and purposeless. They served the people, but now the people no longer keep them alive. They’re purposeless shacks. Even the trees look tired from living. The heat drinks the life from the land. We stop and look for food, but the perishables have long passed their expiration dates, forming decaying sludge in their containers. Sometimes we find cookies and candies, and after we scoff those hungrily, we add what we can’t eat to the stash.

  There’s salt on the breeze now. There’s something else, too: the bright acidity of new pennies or copper piping. I know what it means; I’ve smelled it before. Irini has, too, but she says nothing.

  “I smell blood.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I’m sorry about your sister. She was wrong, though: you should have stayed. It’s not safe with me.”

  “I need a reason.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “To exist.”

  We see a trio of Roma women who do not look us in the eye as we pass each other in the street. Tense and alert, them and us. Their mismatched clothes hang from their bodies like shapeless sheets.

  “Excuse me,” I say after they’ve passed. The short one stops, turns, watches me under heavy lids. I hold out a handful of candy bars. She moves away.

  They keep walking and so do we.

  Irini glances at me.

  “It costs nothing to be kind,” I say.

  There’s a chair by the ocean and it’s filled by an old man. The rising tide has its lips wrapped around his ankles. He minds not. On his lap is a puppet, the Edgar Bergen kind with a smart mouth and wooden composure. He and his companion turn their heads as one as our footsteps make themselves heard. He waves to us before turning back to the sea. The puppet continues to stare. As we draw abreast, I see the puppet is not made of trees but of flesh and bone and papery skin. Then she looks away and the two continue their tandem deathwatch.

  Wind whips the seas into a rabid frenzy. Sheets of hot rain blow off the ocean, drenching us so thoroughly I can barely remember what it is to be dry. Shades of Italy.

  Sanctuary appears in the form of a church, small and humble and dry. We bar the doors from inside and listen as they rattle on their ancient hinges. Jesus weeps for us from up high on His cross. Would that He had more to offer than painted tears. From window to brilliant window I move, peering through to the outside. Nothing is visible besides fat drops rolling along the glass. The length of the church passes under my feet several times while I contemplate our safety. Eventually, I abandon my task and do my thinking sitting in one of the few seats. Unlike American churches, the Greek Orthodox church is short on pews. Standing room, mostly.

  So normal is discomfort by now that I don’t notice I’m wincing until Irini kneels in front of me, her eyes wide and worried.

  “Is it the baby?”

  “No. I don’t think so. It’s my back.”

  “It’s the baby.”

  “It’s too soon.”

  “Yes, once. But now? Who knows?”

  “It’s not the baby.”

  It can’t be. Not yet.

  But in truth, I’ve lost track of time. Or maybe it lost me.

  The storm rants and rages, but we are safe in our wood and stone bubble. Our wet clothes are limp flags hanging over the altar. Like all Orthodox churches, this one has a generous supply of thin candles meant for prayer. They remain unlit. Why leave a porch light on for trouble? Instead, we bury the ends deep in the sea sand holder and offer our prayers in quiet desperation.

  The first shift is mine. I use the altar as a seat so I can look Jesus in the eye.

  I have a bone to pick with You.

  Choose whichever most pleases you. I have many.

  Your Father let everyone die.

  No. You were all at the mercy of one man’s free will.

  What about the rest of us? What about our free will to live?

  He chose for you all. For selfish reasons, but it was still a choice. My Father could have no more stayed his hand than He could stop Judas from betraying me.

  So You’re saying it had to be this way.

  I’m saying it is this way. It’s what you do now that matters.

  Do You have plans to come back?

  Who’s left to notice?

  I don’t really believe in
You.

  His tears are frozen in paint. I don’t believe in Me, either.

  With my scarred guardian angel keeping watch, I am free to meet Nick. I feel like a teenager sneaking out the bedroom window; the waking hours are my prison while my real life comes in dream snippets.

  My fingers draw lazy circles upon his smooth chest. He feels real and warm and not at all drawn by wanton parts of my brain.

  “I had a dream,” he says, “that you walked across the world to find me.”

  “Not true.”

  His dark eyes ask the question.

  “I flew in a plane, rode a bicycle, and sailed one of the seas in a boat.”

  I love you, my fingers trace on his skin.

  “I told you to stay.”

  “I couldn’t. You’re all I’ve got left. You and our baby. Morris died, did I tell you?”

  He strokes my hair. “She told me.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “She’s here.”

  “Where? She can’t be. I watched her die.”

  “Nearby.”

  I wake with a sick feeling in my heart, like something I didn’t even know I wanted has been snatched away before I had a chance to love it.

  The dream paints my mood with a thick, foul substance that taints the day. To prevent myself from snapping at Irini for no good reason other than that she’s available and my temper desires a release, I hunker down in the corner nearest the doors. The ache in my lower back has eased some, now that I’m not constantly pounding pavement.

  The rain, the fucking rain, rains on until I’m sick of the sound. No crash of thunder to break the monotony. No ease from downpour to sprinkle. Just relentless rain.

  My turn to watch comes and goes and then I sleep again. Nick and I sit across from each other in his old office, the one where I first spoke to him of the jar.

  “Pandora’s box,” he says. “I told you to open it.”

  “This isn’t your fault.”

  “No. But you being here is.” He writes on his notepad. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “In the dream?”

  “Greece. I should have told you. Why haven’t you opened my letter?”

  “I don’t know.”