White Horse

by Alex Adams

  The vicious retort is there, balanced on my tongue, just behind my teeth. One small flick is all it needs to nail its target. Shred him with my words. But one word stays my tongue.

  “Zoe?”

  The voice comes filtered through a door, but still I know it and my heart races.

  “Irini?” I yell.

  The Swiss explodes like a flare in the night. “Shut up. Shut up, you idiot.”

  “I told you she was alive.”

  “You know nothing. Look,” he says. “She has betrayed you to her kind. Monsters uniting with other monsters.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You should see her, America, standing on the dock with the others. She means to kill us, and perhaps your child.”

  Your child. A shift. He no longer wants her now that he knows one of her parents is dead from the virus he created for Pope in Pope Pharmaceuticals’ labs. What a fickle bastard. But that bothers me. It really does. Because now she’s as useless to him as I am, which means my daughter’s life is worth as much as a foam cup.

  “How can I look if I’m cuffed to the floor?”

  A dance ensues. Two choices wrestling for the lead. He wants to gloat, he wants to keep me subjugated, and the two are mutually exclusive in this time and place. His ego seizes control. My restraint falls to the floor. I am free as I can be while still imprisoned.

  On gelatin legs, I amble to the door. See Irini for myself, her skin glowing under the moon’s caress.

  The Swiss is right: she is not alone. They swarm the dock’s end. People who are not people. And yet, under this moon, they appear real and whole. I can’t discern what is still human and what is other. Irini stands on the gangplank, apart from the others. It is from there that she calls to me while my daughter wails on. It is there the moonlight stops to admire itself in the blade she holds.

  “Is a girl?” she calls out.

  “Do not speak,” the Swiss says.

  But I do not take orders from him. “Yes.”

  “Is she well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come. I want to see you.”

  The Swiss’s hand is an iron band around my arm. “You cannot go.”

  I stare him down in the dark. “How many rounds do you have left? One? Two? Enough for me and them? Or are you saving the last one for yourself?”

  He reaches for my child.

  “Touch her and you will die.”

  Then I step through the door. I choose the lesser of the evils.

  The gangplank bows and flexes under the weight of my broken heart. Bodies shift and shuffle to let us come ashore. What they are isn’t clear in this light. They look like me, world-burned and weary. Maybe they are me, but with tongues that speak another language.

  “Who are they?”

  “People,” Irini says.

  “Are we safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re still alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe not only my face is changed. Maybe inside, too.”

  Irini lifts my child from my arms, cradles that fragile skull in her sunburned palm. Too close to the knife’s fine edge.

  “Please.”

  “I will not hurt her.” She smiles down at that sweet, new face. “We want people to go on.” Then she turns that smile on me. “We come for you. To save you. I prayed we were not late.”

  They surround us then, peer at my child, and she falls silent, done with her song.

  “It’s like they’ve never seen a baby before,” I say.

  One by one, they dry-spit on my child.

  “To ward away the Evil Eye,” Irini says. This comforts me, knowing they are all still human enough to cling to their superstitions.

  “They will never have their own,” the Swiss says from his fiberglass perch. “No abomination can breed.”

  I turn, stare at him, barely able to contain my disgust. “Is there anything you didn’t take from them?”

  “The disease stole from me, too.”

  “There’s no excuse for the hurts you’ve caused,” I say.

  My rescuers move away now, a human tide peeling itself from the rocks. And when they return, they bring the Swiss with them and hold him fast.

  He looks to me for help. “Will you let them take me?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t have any mercy left to give. You’ve used it all up.” Gently, I take the knife from Irini’s hand. “My hands are already stained with blood,” I tell her.

  A piece of my soul flakes away as the knife moves in an elegant arc. I wrap it in silk, encase it in an ice block, and stow it in a lead-lined trunk. Someday—if there are days left that belong to me—I may pick the lock and set that fragment in the sun to thaw. Ah, I will say when I look upon it again. I remember now. I remember who I used to be. Just a girl with simple dreams and a crush on her therapist.

  How does it make you feel? Nick says from the past.

  Terrified.

  The blade skims the surface of his man-made Adam’s apple, draws a thin red line upon the skin, a half inch above the scar I already made, allows gravity to pull it down into a neutral position at my side.

  “You can’t do it,” he gloats.

  “I won’t do it,” I say. “There’s a difference. You poor bitch.”

  I reach out to Irini, the snake woman of Delphi, and take my daughter from her arms. Then we turn and go and leave the Swiss at the mercy of his own creations. He owes them.

  My heart is still tender enough that I flinch at the sound of his screams.

  I am still human, with all the frailties and strengths of my kind.

  We walk in the half-light of a benevolent moon. North again. Always north, we four. We’ve taken what we can from the boat: things for us and Baby. Esmeralda hauls them without complaint. There’s barely enough energy in my body to carry my daughter and myself.

  “Why?”

  “Forward is the only way. One foot in front of the other.”

  “We could go back to Delphi.”

  “Just a little further,” I tell her. “Nick wanted to know if his parents were safe. Now”—my tongue thickens—“I have to do that for him. You’re free to go wherever you choose, my friend.”

  She holds her head high now. Proud. As she should be.

  “We are more. Family.”

  I wonder how a fractured heart, with all its ragged holes, can still hold so much love.

  We stop so I can bathe in the ocean and drag dry, clean clothes over my purified skin. Then we move on.

  Onwards. Past the gray stone church with its misspelled English graffiti. Alongside a gulf filled with diamonds. We move slowly, but that’s okay, the bomb no longer ticks with the same urgency. The Swiss is dead—Nick, too —and my daughter is here.

  Dawn comes. Morning slides into noon.

  Greece is made of roads that curve and hug the landscape like a favorite pair of jeans. We skim her hip and find a cement factory hulking over the water. On the mountain behind the abandoned facility, terraces are tribal scars cut into the land by men with dynamite and hard hats. In the water, rust buckets with Cyrillic letters painted on the side await cargo that will never come. There are bones on the low-slung decks, sucked clean of the bodies that once held them. Cement dust clouds, stirred by a fledgling ocean breeze, smell of freshly poured pavement. I double-check that Baby’s head is protected from both sun and smut.

  Beneath the red, Irini’s skin is pallid. When I touch her forehead, she smiles.

  “I am okay. You?”

  I don’t believe her. She’s dry when she should be steeped in sweat.

  “Fine.”

  A falsehood. We both know it but we’re too proud to admit to our lies lest we seem weak—not for ourselves but for each other. I’m losing blood and so is she. Only my baby has skin still pink and new and alive.

  We don’t speak as we walk. Conversation comes when we’re resting. When we’ve cleared the cement factory, we break again u
nder the protective cover of an olive tree. Its fruit is green and thick like a man’s thumb, but the crop will rot without someone to pick the bounty at harvest time. We sip water from bottles refilled from a roadside faucet. Candy bars for the sugar rush that comes slower and slower each time. Baby pulls what she needs from my breasts faster than my body can replenish the source, so I stir formula on the side of the road to satisfy her. She’s a good girl. Quiet. Alert. The road is all she knows, so the vibration from my footsteps must soothe her soul in ways it will never comfort me. I yearn for a home that’s mine, on a piece of land that never shifts, in a place not teeming with death.

  “What happened?” I ask Irini when we’ve filled our shrunken stomachs.

  “I do not know. I … was dying. Then not.”

  “And in between?”

  “The gods came for me and made me whole.”

  “You’re still bleeding.”

  “Whole … a little … to help you and the baby.”

  Just enough. How do you thank someone who turns away from death to come back for you?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The first sign of life is no sign of life: abandoned cars and motorcycles, rusted and rotting along the winding road. Conspicuously absent are corpses, which have become the most prevalent form of litter in urban streets. Bones and half-eaten carcasses are as omnipresent as burger wrappers and beer cans—but not here.

  Irini shades her eyes, smiles as she delivers the news. “Agria. This is the place.”

  My everything sags with relief and I slump against a BMW with a chronic case of rust acne. We’re here. We’re really here. Some magical how happened and we are here.

  “This is your ancestral home, baby girl.” My daughter’s hair is soft against my lips. She makes a small sucking noise. Then the fear comes for me, rolling, rolling on wooden wheels, a chariot carrying its terrible driver, his bullwhip held aloft waiting to strike me down.

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You must.”

  “What if they’re dead?”

  “Then they are dead and you have lost nothing.”

  “Just more hope.”

  “Hope is what you hold in your arms.”

  The truth of her words can’t hold the gathering storm at bay. I sink my teeth into my lip, clamp the delicate flesh tightly until the physical pain reduces the emotional to a dull ache. I nod. This is reality. Nick was a beautiful, magnificent fantasy, but now he’s dead and soon I might be, too. I look at my girl and I know in that instant that, if not for her, I would be fine knowing that today was the last day, the end cap of my life. I wish I was home. I wish I was in that place before all this. I choke on a sob, because I’m longing for something so dead, so cold, so gone, that I might as well wish for a rocket ship to Mars.

  It takes a cluster of clanging bells to pull me from own head. I look to Irini in case it’s a sign I’ve lost my mind and I’m doomed to spend all my days as a tragic hunchback in a bell tower that doesn’t exist on any earthly plane.

  “Goats,” she says. “Sheep, maybe.”

  Bo Peep–less goats. They bleed between the cars and motorcycles from someplace beyond the crook in the road, swarm around us, inspecting our belongings with slitted yellow gazes. Then, just as quickly, they mosey on down the cracked street in search of green pastures. Their dull bells jangle and fade into the past.

  Each new step depletes me further. I see it in Irini, too. She’s my mirror, and in her I watch myself wilt and weaken and drain myself dry. If this was a video game, we’d be out of extra lives.

  “I can do this,” I say. “I have to. Sit. If there’s help, I’ll send it.”

  “No. Together.”

  I take her hand in mine and we walk. The strangers are come to town.

  Around the corner is a village that resembles the last, and the one before that, and all the others before those. This place is not unique. Tavernas line the streets. Fishing line still hangs outside so fishermen can display the day’s catch. The gulf laps at the shore like a thirsty cat. Two chairs sit by the shore, between them a small table and two glasses filled with brown liquid and foam. Two people stand in the middle of the road, intent on a conversation. A man and woman dressed in Bermudas and tanks.

  A vacation snapshot. The end of the world is someplace else.

  Irini and I limp into the picture. We two bums and our donkey spoil the perfect scene with our broken bodies. Irini’s stomach blooms with its carmine stain. She needs help, and soon.

  I stand there in the same middle of the same street. “Hello?”

  They turn. Echo. “Hello?”

  Americans.

  The woman is built like a good armchair: soft, sturdy, her skin sun-worn to a rich nut brown. Her companion is tall and lean, with eyes I’ve seen in another man’s face.

  “You’re Nick’s parents,” I say. And then I cry.

  They stare at me, at each other, at me again. The man speaks.

  “The world’s gone mad. We quit asking questions a long time ago, just accepted the strangeness as much as we could to survive. But now I have to ask: How the hell do you know our son?”

  The woman slaps him, gentle, mocking, only a minor punishment for his lack of etiquette. A whole conversation in the space of a heartbeat the way only couples who are tightly cleaved can communicate.

  “Don’t you know?” she says. “It’s Nick’s Zoe. Who else could she be?” She looks to me for confirmation. “You are, aren’t you?”

  All the words I prepared have poured back into the soup of unspoken thoughts, broken down and formless once more. Nod; that’s all I can do.

  She comes to me, touches my face with a palm callused and cracked, and yet the touch is tender: a mother’s touch.

  “I miss my mom,” I say.

  “You always will.” Her gaze falls. “Who is this?” Rises.

  “Nick’s daughter.”

  “Oh my God. What have you brought us?” Then she holds us both in her comfortable arms. Her husband comes next.

  “I don’t believe it,” he says. “How can this be? How did you find us?” But he’s crying, too, so I know he believes, even if his mouth can’t yet form the words.

  I look to Irini. Her scars are bathed in tears.

  “You brought hope,” she says.

  But I didn’t. The message I carry is a mixed blessing. I know how this will go. I am the messenger, the one who bears news both good and bad: Here is your grandchild, but your son is dead. Then the struggle will begin inside them: Should they love me for holding hope in one outstretched, sunburned palm, or hate me for performing the bait and switch of an inexpert con man? Have this child, for yours is dead.

  “Nick.” I swallow; his name hurts.

  Miracles are tiny things, meaningless except to the person who seeks one. To that one person, a miracle is everything. One happy event can change the course of a life. In the blackest moments, they hide.

  Wait. …

  Wait. …

  Ignoring prayers and pleading, miracles enjoy the element of surprise. They love those who would step forward and meet them halfway.

  Nick’s father moves slowly, a boulder being rolled aside. And there it is: my miracle. My white knight does not ride a steed, nor does he hide behind armor gleaming from the goodness of his deeds and a polishing rag. He does not need those things. He comes instead in shorts and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, bare-chested and barefoot, a fishing rod in his hands instead of a sword. Just Nick.

  “Zoe!” he yells. And then we are one again. Me, Nick, and our daughter.

  This is my miracle. It is small to everyone but me.

  Irini leaves us that night, slipping out alongside the sun. The men bury her while I sob quietly for the woman who saved our lives.

  We name our daughter for her, Nick and I. Irini. Peace. As the ground claims her for its own, I pray the snake woman of Delphi has found her peace as I have found the beginnings of mine. I thank her—for all days.

  And whe
n I lay my head upon his chest on those hot summer nights, I try not to notice Nick’s beating hearts.

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