Oh, My Darling

by Shaena Lambert

  “And what does your mother say?” she heard herself ask.

  A pause, while he positioned the shell above the anemone, preparing to drop it.

  “What does Shulamith say about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?” It hurt so much she wanted it twice. “What does she say?”

  “She never says anything.”

  He pushed the shell and it floated down on the invisible current, where it disappeared into a patch of seaweed.

  Nancy did not think of it as hiding. That would have been crazy and wrong, to hide on a child until he looked up and noticed his aloneness and screamed in terror, screamed her name and stood and—yes—there she would be, climbing up from below. It’s nothing, see? It’s nothing—just the wind moving the trees.

  She inched her way, crabwise, across the rock, leaving him gazing into the pool like a small Narcissus. Then she stood and made her way down the sandstone until it formed a smooth shoulder near the forest’s edge. She jumped down with a crunch into a driftwood nook on the beach, then undid her jeans and squatted. A hot stream poured onto the crushed shells. She shook and buttoned her jeans, then sat on the sandstone lip and lit a cigarette. A snake slipped between the rocks. The wind died and she heard him then.

  Afterward she was asked to relive it many times. First, in panic, as she yelled out to Shulamith across the gravel turnaround in front of the house. This was after beating her way up the trail, screaming his name, palms bleeding from her fall on the shell beach. Is he here? Did he run home? Then later, more slowly but still panicked, she told Charlie what she knew. Then, that afternoon, she went over it with the police. And eventually, slowly now, she described what had happened at the inquest.

  Didn’t you think a five-year-old might be in danger left on his own?

  How long were you gone?

  She had smoked a cigarette, but not all the way to the filter. That was her practice. She never smoked it all the way down.

  She had peed.

  At the inquest, Shulamith sat in the row ahead of her. Her hair was chopped short—she had gone at it with the kitchen scissors. Her head looked strangely small from the back, though she had (Nancy noticed this, over the high roaring of her own grief) the most beautiful neck Nancy had ever seen.

  A minute. A single cigarette, not even smoked to the filter, butted on a rock, thrown onto the clamshells. Three minutes at most. The wind had been fierce and then it had died down and she had heard something.

  A cry for help?

  I think I heard a moan. Then I ran to him—I ran but he wasn’t there. I ran home—

  Shulamith’s face in the turnaround. She had been pulling dead plants from a pot. She raised her gloved hand to her eyes and smiled. Then the shock as Nancy screamed that Ramsey was gone.

  A wildlife expert said he believed that the animal, a female cougar, 145 pounds, had been tracking them since they reached the beach, or possibly even before, since reaching the trail that ran from the schoolhouse through the forest. In the time Nancy was absent (five minutes at most) it was possible that Ramsey glanced up, hearing a sound through the din of the wind, seeing something brown from the corner of his eye, hairs rising. He may have had time to stand as the thing moved toward him. He may have had time to run. If so, he exposed his neck. Puncture wounds showed beneath the sixth vertebra, severing the spinal column. Then the cougar dragged him over the ledge, into a hidden spot beneath the lip of sandstone.

  This came out later.

  For now Nancy stands beside the tidal pool, holding the Spider-Man backpack. A Velcro running shoe lies in the murky bed of seaweed. She is calling out his name but the wind tugs at her voice and sucks at the sleeves of her rain jacket.

  Come out right now, Ramsey. I’m not kidding. Come out now.

  You’ve done it, she screams at him, and past him at the wind moving everywhere, stealing her voice. You win. Now come out. You’ve frightened me.

  In Delphi

  1.

  They had travelled for three days and arrived in Delphi, the centre of the ancient world.

  “Where’s the balalaika?” Nathan, Maya’s husband, sat down across from her on the terrace of the Café Agora. “Where’s the strumming of the lyre?” He bounced up again and crossed to the outdoor bar. Maya could hear him asking that the American music be turned down.

  “That’s better.” Nathan, seated once again, unfolded his handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  Maya turned away. Help me, she thought.

  This trip was Maya’s fiftieth-birthday present from Nathan: the fulfillment of a dream she’d had for years to come to Delphi, the seat of primordial wisdom, and pose a question at the temple of Apollo, just as travellers used to, from Persia or Lydia or Thebes. They came by foot or by chariot on the same winding route through the mountains that Maya’s bus had negotiated (God, what a trip—her body was still rocking from the jolts and turns), or they came by boat, blood-red sails bloating in the wind, dolphins leaping in their wake.

  The night before, Nathan had sent back his moussaka because it wasn’t hot enough. And now the elevation seemed to be making him jumpy. Or perhaps it was the wind, blasting down from the heated cliffs of Mount Parnassus. Maya turned to take in the view below the terrace: olive orchards, a few sentinel cypress trees casting an early shade, then the slope turned raw and rocky for miles, foothills pleating a path leading to a stone hut, until, at last, the entire, heated mountain flattened to a riverbed, the famed Pleistos Valley, where five sacred wars had been fought. Beyond that, at the tip of sight, Maya caught a glint of azure, the Corinthian Sea.

  Now Nathan leapt up to get the bill. No amount of gesticulating seemed to have worked. The waiter remained behind the counter, turned away from them, washing beer glasses, which he lined up on the counter upside down. Maya could see the line of hair running from the waiter’s bushy scalp down the back of his neck, and she wished, almost violently, that Nathan had a full head of hair.

  The truth was, she thought, watching Nathan receive his change, he was less than satisfactory when taken out of his habitual milieu. He looked capable behind his teak desk, or on the balcony of their condo in the morning, freshly scrubbed, smelling of Saddle Soap, the line of men’s natural cleansing products that Nathan distributed wholesale. It was a smell of leather and profit, and it suited Nathan. But when you set him down in a foreign locale, Thailand, for instance, or Greece, the top of his head gleamed like an egg in the extra sunlight.

  Nathan sat down again. “Does the sand keep getting in your eyes?”

  “I’m not sure. Something’s getting in my eyes.”

  “It’s sand.”

  Be still.

  And he was, for a full thirty seconds, until: “Have you come up with your question yet?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  “Today’s the day.”

  “I know.”

  “Then we’ll go now? To the temple?”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t ready yet, and after a moment Nathan offered the idea of visiting the museum first. Maya agreed, but still they did not move, and the wind banged a shutter closed and knocked over the sandwich board outside the café.

  In the hotel room, Nathan lay down on the bed and began to check his BlackBerry while Maya changed into her sandals. The hotel suite had two rooms, a sitting area that looked over the roof of the Café Agora and into the valley, and a bedroom facing a vine-covered courtyard. All night long they had heard tourists laughing on the road outside, Germans calling to one another. Now, in the morning, there was the heated huff of tour buses pulling up.

  Maya stepped onto the balcony. Restaurants lined the cliffside with dark doors facing the street and terraces turned to the view. She could hear walkie-talkies blaring instructions for the tour guides. Petunias cascaded from the hotel balcony next to theirs, and Maya inhaled, closing her eyes. The scent,
velvety and peppery, brought back summer nights at her parents’ lake house in the Okanagan, the willow tree scuffing its leaves across the concrete patio, the clink of coffee cups as her parents entertained their friends. Then her mother calling to her to come out. Maya wants to put on a show. Dear God, her mother’s voice, even in her head, was so affected. Terribly, dangerously affected.

  Dance, darling.

  The willow tree raked its long leaves across the cement. The stars shone, and you could hear swimmers going by, that was how close the lake was. You could hear waves lapping against the breakwater. Then Maya, age eighteen, ran through the doors painted bold Mexican purple and terracotta and leapt onto the terrace clad only in her mother’s batiked scarves. She danced and spun, while the adults commented on her lithe figure, and her father said, You send a girl to study dance at the Martha Graham academy and this is what you get back. Jesus, what a showgirl she had been, even at eighteen.

  One night as she danced, the knot at the nape of her neck slipped—she must have tied it very loosely—and her breasts spun free. It should have been humiliating, other teenage girls would have screamed and covered themselves, but Maya spun more fiercely, caught in a state of wonder at her own audacity, knowing she was desirable, spinning and spinning, her breasts jiggling in the moonlight. Her parents’ friends applauded, and her mother shrieked with delight, while her father looked on darkly.

  Maya went inside and closed the balcony doors with a clank.

  “Are you ready?” This was Nathan, not looking up from his BlackBerry.

  “Just about.”

  She slipped her new dress from its hanger. It was a muted plum shade, Grecian in design, with a pleated skirt. She had bought it for the trip, and she had been looking forward to wearing it, but now she wondered if it, too, was affected and showy. Would she look as though she had stepped off an urn? She remembered something nasty a lover once said to her, a friend of her father’s. She stared at the folds of the fabric, hearing his voice in her head, feeling stung, though it was over thirty years ago. You’re young. And you can prance and dance and it doesn’t much matter. But someday it will. You should learn the value of being authentic. He had been bitter because she was breaking it off. They sat in a car with the rain pouring down, in an alleyway near the acting school she attended, and he told her, brightly and bitterly, as though it were an interesting fact, that she was the most pretentious person he had ever met.

  She took the dress from the hanger and let it drop over her slim shoulders. She had to find a way to shake these voices—her mother’s, Jim Tanenbaum’s (that was the name of the old lover). In a few minutes they would walk to the temple ruins. Would it be hard to picture, from the remains, how once it had stood in a blaze of marble, Mediterranean gold displayed around it? In ancient days the oracle had been a woman called the Pythias. She sat on a tripod in the sanctum of the temple, over a chasm that belched fumes, giving answers about the future, but they were always in riddles. This was what had fascinated Maya as a child when her mother told her about the oracle, and fascinated her still: each riddle was simple on the surface, easy to interpret, but it carried a jagged hook—your own hubris, your pride, your desire to misinterpret.

  The most famous example, one her mother had told her about years before (Maya lying on the floor in the kitchen, her mother drying and returning cutlery to the drawer with a swift abandoned clatter), was of King Croesus of Lydia. He wanted to attack Persia. He was hungry for rugs and Persian sweets, for lapis lazuli. So he sent an envoy to Delphi to ask what would happen. “Rest assured,” said the oracle. “If you go to war you will destroy a great kingdom.” So King Croesus waged war and lost everything to the Persians. It was only as he was led away in chains to be paraded through the streets that he remembered the oracle’s prediction—and he grimaced, he had to, it was so clear now that the great kingdom had been his own sweet Lydia, Land of Horses.

  So what would Maya ask? Why had she come all this way, by plane and boat, and last, by bus (an experiment with Greece’s transit stations that entailed peeing in a tiled hole)? Why do all this if not to ask something important, something about turning fifty, an age she didn’t like particularly, though probably nobody did. It was true she was still beautiful, with remarkable eyes and a slender body, a heart-shaped face and shapely feet. She had been in movies (only one soft porn), and a TV series that got cancelled, before she stopped all that and married Nathan. Now she practised Feldenkrais, and he paid the rent of her studio in False Creek, and she was still beautiful, that was what everyone said. But it made her ache to think how old she suddenly was.

  Perhaps she groaned aloud, because Nathan appeared at the doorway of the bedroom. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “That’s a pretty dress. It brings out the colour of your eyes.”

  He came and kissed her, first on the cheek and then on her eyelids. It was as though he knew she was confused and dissatisfied and wanted to lift these sensations from her with the dry kindness of his lips. But it did not work, and she turned away and buttoned her dress.

  2.

  It came with a great flapping. It came with the scent of the air before lightning. It came with magnificent certitude. It came in a flurry. It came, and it spoke to him. It whispered like a snake.

  Nathan stood in the bathroom of the museum, clenching the edge of the sink. The polished concrete floor cast a glow through the soles of his feet and up his legs. He took a breath, but it was too late. Fingers twangled the top of his skull. He had the prescience to think, At last, some Greek music, before the Thing poured down his forehead and into his nose, carrying with it a scent of foreboding, of doom, and then, with something between a laugh and a groan, the Thing was gone.

  Dear fucking God!

  His eyes cleared. His head was framed in the mirror, his eyes furtive and alarmed. The message they held, the first message he could form, was: for God’s sake don’t let Maya know.

  He had been sitting beside Maya, looking at a statue on a pedestal, when all at once his heart had thrashed. He made his way to the washroom, syrupy dots clouding his vision, then clung to the counter ledge.

  Enough. Now Nathan took his pill case from his pants pocket, swallowed two sedatives and a blood thinner and closed the lid with a snap. When he returned to the atrium of the museum, Maya was still on the bench. He sat beside her, following her gaze to the stone statue. The Sphinx of Naxos, the wall plaque said. It had stood outside the Delphic Temple for seven hundred years, a gift from the Island of Naxos. It had a lion’s torso and legs, the wings of a griffin and the intense stare of a startled, angry woman. It was not at all like the Egyptian sphinx, with its mellow eyes and soft, square visage: this sphinx was taking things personally. It looked as though it could pick out, not just the travellers coming up the Sacred Way, but the dust at their feet, and the ants in that dust, and even the noise of the earthworms below. And it was ready to take offence at them all.

  Nathan took a breath. Was this the thing he had seen at the tail end of his vision? He remembered scales, or the gaps between scales, and something flapping at him with huge, gristle-tinged wings.

  Maya turned to him sharply. “Where have you been?”

  He gestured to the sign for the men’s bathroom.

  She peered at him closely. “Are you taking your medication? Did you feel faint?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She returned her grey-eyed gaze to the Sphinx.

  “Shall we?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  It was high blood pressure, Nathan told himself, and anxiety caused by travel. This was made worse now by Delphi itself, the town’s precarious perch—a few sharp terraces, and then that raging valley below. And of course, Maya’s moods didn’t help either. She could get so caught up in her own unhappiness. One morning their apartment would be clean and vacuumed,
crystals sparkling on the windowsill and then, with a clap of thunder, Maya would go under. Out came the white flour and sugar she kept hidden. Sometimes she used up half a pound of butter on sugar cookies, before lying on the couch, tender and swamped, watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the entire Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice miniseries. She had (he had told her this, rubbing her belly) a remarkable nature. She was the cause of magic in his life. Though on this trip, he had to admit, his attention to her remarkable nature was taking a lot of effort.

  Now Nathan walked toward the temple gates beside Maya, in her softly mauve, softly grey, softly pink dress with its pleats, and her sandals. They passed a group of middle-aged Greek men drinking espressos under a plane tree. The men stopped to watch Maya, appreciation on their faces. Strong cigarette smoke wafted toward Nathan and Maya. The leaves of the plane tree rustled.

  Then one of the men muttered something to a man with grey hair next to him. Both looked hard at Maya, and then the younger man (not so much younger—in his forties) pushed back his chair and came toward them, stopping them beneath the tree. He was dark and stocky. He said some words in Greek before turning to his friends and laughing.

  “We’re English,” Nathan said, which was ridiculous—they were Canadian. He meant they spoke English.

  The man had mischief on his face. He said, “Your wife?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “She is like Greek goddess.”

  Maya smiled blinkingly at them. Then the men erupted in clapping. They clapped for her.

  “Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you.”

  Nathan motioned to his watch, miming their tearing hurry to get to the temple. The bull-like man stepped aside, and Nathan and Maya carried on, into the hard sunshine beyond the tree. They heard an eruption of laughter as the man rejoined his group, and Nathan knew from the tone of their laughter, its darkness, that they had found Maya, or perhaps both of them, absurd.