by Diana Renn
“That’s a unique place to propose,” said Sage, who had quietly come up behind us.
I turned and she smiled at me over her cup of Turkish coffee.
“It was actually very romantic,” said Aunt Jackie, a faraway look in her eyes. “There’s a narrow trail way up there. Worth the hike. The view is spectacular.”
I shielded my eyes from the sun and tried to make out the top tomb. It was pretty high up, almost a sheer rock face. The rock face interested me way more than the trail. There’s almost always more than one route up a wall. I imagined which route I might take up that cliff if I had some gear, a rope, and a partner to belay me. I’d taken a lead climbing workshop last winter break at Burlington Boulders. I’d loved the feeling of not being anchored on top, plotting my line, and pulling myself up, bit by bit.
“Hey, would you like to invite Sage to hike up with us for the scattering ceremony?” Mom asked when Sage went to the kitchen to get a plate of food from Orhan.
“It might be good for her,” said Aunt Jackie. “She seems so lonely.”
Sage came back out, balancing two plates loaded with fresh fruit, yogurt, boiled eggs, and bread. “Any plans for today?” she asked.
I suddenly felt embarrassed. Maybe the family scattering ceremony was a little too weird. Aunt Jackie would be all emotional. Mom would be controlling. They might argue. And then they were going to fling dead flower petals over a cliff and pretend it was my uncle. The more I thought about it, the weirder it sounded. But Sage was looking at me questioningly. “My mom and aunt are going to do that memorial service thingy today. So, um, you probably don’t, but if you wanted to hike up there with us, and hear a bunch of stuff about someone you’ve never met, you’re welcome to join us.”
“That sounds cool,” she said. “I was actually going to hike up there anyway and check it out. I’d love the company.”
“You want to come?”
“Of course. I’m honored.”
“Great!” I grinned. Amazingly, nothing about my family so far seemed to weird out Sage.
While Sage sat at the table to eat, I ducked into the kitchen, hoping to catch Orhan. I wanted to thank him for putting away the raki and the glasses last night, and to make sure he wouldn’t tell my mom.
Orhan was putting food in the refrigerator. He smiled when he saw me. “Oh, Zan! Hello! Can I help you?”
“Uh, I just wanted to say thanks,” I said. “For the coffee, and for breakfast.” I tried to remember what Orhan had taught me. “Tea sugar and a dream?”
His eyebrows relaxed a little. “Your Turkish is improving! And you are welcome.”
I glanced at the bottle of Yeni Raki. He followed my gaze.
“You are welcome to anything in our kitchen,” he said. “Güle güle kullan—that means, ‘use it with joy.’”
“Thanks. And thanks for not telling my mom, too,” I added. “She doesn’t like me drinking. But you know what? I didn’t even like that stuff anyway.” I made a face at the memory of the bitter, burning taste.
Orhan chuckled. “Your secret is safe,” he said. “And I can see you are not going to drink anymore.” Then his expression became serious. “But I must ask you not to swim at night. It is not safe.”
“We won’t do it again,” I promised. “And thank you for not telling my mom about that, either.” I smiled, my most winning, camera-ready smile. The smile that sometimes got me off the hook with salesclerks who suspected me when I slipped the occasional item from the makeup counter at Nordstrom into my tote bag.
It didn’t work on Orhan. He remained dead serious. “I hope not. We are responsible for safety of our passengers. We need to know where they are at all times.”
“I understand. I’m so sorry. We won’t leave the boat at night again.”
“Good. I am relieved,” said Orhan. He held out a bowl of apricots. “Here. You hike today, yes? You should take these for extra energy.”
“Thanks.” I took four and put them in my cargo pants pockets. I turned to go, then realized Orhan might know the answer to something that had been on my mind ever since Mom and I had driven from Bodrum. And of all the crew on the boat, his English was the best. Maybe he could explain something that the Clarksons had alluded to last night. “So . . . are there police in this area right now because of the museum and mosque robberies?”
Orhan hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. Smugglers may be using porous borders to transfer stolen goods to their markets.”
I frowned. The Lycian Tours representative, Erdem Tabak, had said that the police presence at the docks was a basic safety precaution. Clearly that was not the case. The problem was wider than the port of Marmaris, and connected to an ongoing series of crimes.
As if realizing his error in admitting the truth, Orhan looked down. “But you are perfectly safe on this boat,” he quickly added.
“How exactly are we safe?” I spluttered. “If someone hijacks this boat, are you going to beat them over the head with a frying pan or something?”
Orhan stared at me.
“I mean, we don’t have armed security guards on our boat like they do on the Anilar,” I added.
Orhan raised his thick eyebrows. “They have guards on the Anilar?”
“Yes. Two. I actually had the pleasure of seeing their guns when Sage and I swam up to the boat last night. So I’d like to know how big a threat this is. Are we seriously in danger out on the water?”
Orhan met my eyes again, and this time he talked to me like a person—like an adult, even—instead of trying to sugar-coat his words.
“All right,” he said, leaning heavily against the kitchen countertop. “This is what I know. The police are searching all coastal villages, trying to stop a smuggling network. Interpol is offering a large ödül—what is the word in English? Reward, yes. They offer reward for information leading to capture and arrest of leaders in this network. They are working with local police and private security firms. They ask the Turkish people to be alert to any suspicious people or activities in this area.”
“That’s good, right?” I said. “I mean, if everyone’s on the alert, there’s a better chance of catching the smugglers.”
“In theory, yes. But it can also make people have bigger reactions to things.”
I nodded, holding his gaze. “Thanks,” I said. “I just wanted to know what was really going on.” As I turned and left the kitchen, I thought of Lazar and Vasil on the boat last night, greeting Sage and me at gunpoint. That had been quite a welcome for two teen girls paddling around in the water. At least now I understood it better. They weren’t just protecting the Clarksons; they were hunting for smugglers. They had probably meant to scare us and wouldn’t have actually fired. Anyone connected to the criminal ring would be worth more alive than dead. But one of my dad’s big issues was how ordinary citizens didn’t need guns to protect them from perceived threats like home invasions, that the risks of owning a gun far outweighed the benefits. Much as I hated to give my dad any credit these days, his statistics haunted me now. I shivered. The idea that bounty hunters with itchy trigger fingers could be out here on the water creeped me out way more than the idea of thieves on the loose. I was up for another nighttime adventure with Sage, but maybe we’d have to stick to stargazing. I did not want to become a statistic myself.
11
Sage and I stood on the narrow ledge at the portico of a cliff tomb, looking out at the sparkling water of the bay. The tomb offered shade from the searing sun: a cool and dark room, beckoning to me. But it also seemed, well, tomblike in there, so we lingered in the doorway, between two crumbling and moss-covered columns carved into the rock face. I marveled at the warren of cliff tombs surrounding us, at how the morning sun transformed them into gold.
I shifted my gaze to the path we’d just hiked up. The narrow, winding trail of two hundred precarious stone steps had turned steep fast. Mom and Au
nt Jackie were only about three-quarters of the way up, pulling themselves upward by grabbing onto bushes and tree branches that jutted out of the hillside here and there. A few switchback turns behind them were Nils and Ingrid, then halfway up the hill chugged Milton and Maeve. Still near the bottom were two gray-haired specks, Alice and Fiona.
They’d all wanted to come along when they heard why we were hiking to one of the highest cliff tombs. We’d thought it was because the tour representative hadn’t appeared at the dock to meet us as scheduled. But it had turned out to be for a different reason, a nicer one. “We’d like to pay our respects,” Nils explained on behalf of all the Geezers. “Even though we never had the pleasure of meeting Berk Yilmaz, we were very much looking forward to his lecture, and we feel so sorry for your loss.”
“Think they’ll all make it up here?” I asked Sage now, after I’d caught my breath.
“Not all. My money’s on the Norwegians,” said Sage. “And maybe Milton. Have you seen him swim? He may look like an old dude, but he’s fitter than you think. Maeve worries about him, so she’ll probably push herself.” Keeping one hand firmly on the rock at all times, Sage shifted her body so that she was pressed flat against the side of the tomb entrance. I followed her wide-eyed gaze. There was less than a foot of stone ledge separating us from a fall down the cliff face of the mountain. This didn’t bother me at all, but Sage looked almost green.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I hate heights,” she finally admitted.
“Want to go back down?”
“No. I can handle it. It’s good to face your fears. Right?”
“Yeah. Of course.” I leaned against the cliff wall, more casually than Sage, and took one of Orhan’s apricots from my pocket. I offered it to her, but she shook her head. I bit into it and sweet, delicious juice exploded over my tongue. I’d never tasted such good fruit.
“Besides, it’s nice to be included in something like this,” she added, with a wistful expression on her face. “My family never did anything special after my brother died. His body got cremated, but there were no services, nothing. They gave all his stuff to Goodwill one day. They locked up the empty room. And then both my parents sort of shut down, too. I feel like the house, and their lives, have been empty ever since.”
“Sage, that’s so sad.”
She shrugged. “I guess that’s why I bought them all those nice gifts yesterday.”
I thought of the souvenirs she’d bought from Baklava Guy—the figurines, the earrings.
“But none of that stuff could replace your brother,” I pointed out.
“I know. I guess I just want to bring my parents a piece of this magical country, and tell them about all the adventures I’ve had. I want them to see how fully I’m living my life. It’s like I’m living for two people now. Me and my brother. I feel like I have this responsibility to live for him, too, and experience as much as I can, because he can’t. Or maybe I just want one day where things are like they used to be, when we used to be a family.”
I nodded. “I get it.”
Sage sighed. “Anyway. I love what your aunt is doing, going to a place where she and your uncle felt most alive, and remembering her husband. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“Yeah, I guess it is.” But I wasn’t thinking about the ceremony. I thought about everything Sage had just revealed. She and I looked so different, but we both had sad family histories. I, too, longed for even one day where things could be the way they were back when things were good. Like when we’d sail The Whisper around Hingham harbor. Maybe it was all a façade, moments staged for family photo albums, but it had been real to me at the time: Mom with her legs stretched out, reading a book with a smile on her face; Dad at the helm grinning into the wind; me in between them, happy. Just the three of us, before the voting public and the media broke in and exposed our private lives, before Dad made all his stupid decisions that took him farther and farther away from us.
I drank in the air now, feeling clear-headed for the first time in a while. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the way my family used to be. Or how much I missed being up high, where my brain seemed to work better. I ached for the climbing wall at the gym, where I felt in control. There, all you had to do was follow the colored plastic holds. There, the route was clear.
But an indoor slab didn’t have anything like this view. I gazed out at it now while I polished off Orhan’s apricots. The water gleamed a deep turquoise. The occasional speedboat raked a colorful parasail across the blue sky. And directly below us, the tiled roofs of downtown Fethiye tumbled down the hill and spilled out toward the beach and the harbor.
“Hey, just think,” said Sage, following my gaze. “If you blocked out the buildings, this was the exact same view that ancient Lycians would have seen when they came up here to bury their dead.”
“Minus the police boats,” I added. “What’s going on down there?” I took Nils’s binoculars out of my backpack; he’d loaned them to us at the bottom. (“You kids are sure to beat all of us,” he’d said. “Have a look for us when you get up top and make sure none of us have collapsed and died.”) I trained the lenses on three blue-and-white speedboats that were zipping through the bay, gashing the water with their white wakes. They weren’t towing parasailers; I recognized the police boats from the Marmaris docks. They were on a mission. They slowed at the small marina, where they cruised from one end of the dock to the other. I also saw a larger white boat with a diagonal orange stripe on the side. I focused the binocs and zoomed in: Sahil Güvenlik, it read on the side in thick black letters, and beneath it, in English: Coast Guard.
I ducked behind one of the Doric columns, melting into its shadow and hoping no binoculars from those boats were trained on us. Then I tried to brush off the guilty feeling once and for all. I hadn’t done anything wrong. They weren’t looking for me.
“Can I see?” asked Sage. I passed her the binoculars.
While she focused the binoculars on the boats, I told her what Orhan had explained about the trafficking operations the police wanted to shut down, and the reward money being offered. “I bet this is all about the smugglers,” I said. “Look at them, swarming to the harbor. Like sharks drawn to the smell of blood.”
“Could be,” Sage said. She chewed her lip. “Or it could be something else.”
“Like what?”
“Well, things are tense in Turkey lately for other reasons, too. Refugees are pouring in because of the situation in Syria. And there’ve been some protests against the government.” Sage handed the binoculars back to me. “They’re probably always looking for someone or something. This is a complicated country. But . . .”
I caught the look on her face: she looked as if she might cry. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh.” She turned so I couldn’t see the look on her face, and cleared her throat. “I just suddenly got this stab of sadness. I know that must sound stupid . . .”
“No, it doesn’t. I get that sometimes, too,” I admitted.
She slid down to a squatting position against the cliff wall, then sat cross-legged on the ledge. I came out from behind the column and sat beside her, hanging my legs over the ledge.
“I’m going to miss Turkey so much,” she said in a small voice, drawing swirly lines in the dust with her finger. “Even if it’s unsettled right now, I’ve always felt at peace here. Like I was meant to live here all along, like I was born in the wrong place.”
“Why don’t you just stay, then? You could go to college here. Or work.”
“It’s not that easy. Visas and stuff. Money. God, money’s a huge pain in the ass.”
Again I thought of the stack of cash she’d handed over to Baklava Guy, and the fact that her parents had bankrolled her Blue Voyage.
As if she’d read my mind, she continued. “Yeah, my parents gave me what they could for this study year, and this farewell c
ruise, but now I’m being cut off. They want me home. You know how I mentioned my mom’s been in and out of the hospital?”
I nodded.
“It’s sort of a big deal. I have to go and be there for her.”
“Wow. That’s scary. What’s wrong with her?”
“It’s a heart thing.” She cleared her throat. “Hey, speaking of heart things, did I tell you the story about the sultan’s heart?”
I shook my head. There was that emotional whiplash again. A deeply personal confession by Sage followed by some breezy anecdote. Now you see her, now you don’t. It was as if she sought safety in facts and stories. It was frustrating, but I understood it. Emotional conversations that went on too long could feel as if you were standing in too-bright sun: they’d leave you overexposed. So instead of pushing her, like my shrink had pushed me, I just did what Aunt Jackie would do and let her talk about whatever she wanted, trusting she’d say more when she was ready. “No. Tell me about the sultan’s heart,” I said finally.
“One of my international school teachers told us this story. There was this sultan in Ottoman Turkey. Suleiman the Magnificent. He was in Hungary with his troops, taking over a castle. A day before their victory, he died in his tent. Natural causes. He was old. But his death was kept a secret so the soldiers wouldn’t lose morale. And his internal organs were removed to help preserve the body.”
“Ew.”
“I know, right? But they were at war. And they couldn’t bury the body there. So, after the victory, his body was taken home to Constantinople. Which is now Istanbul. And his heart, they say, was left behind, in Hungarian soil.” She paused dramatically, then smiled. “He fell in love. Not with a person, but with a place. He wanted his heart buried there. And researchers are looking for it to this day, or at least for the box that contained it. I guess the heart would be dust by now. Isn’t that kind of beautiful? The whole leaving-your-heart-behind thing, in a country where you’re not from.”
“It is.” I smiled.