Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  Copyright © 2014 Jane Bow

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5V 2R4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Publisher: Greg Ioannou

  Editor: Kate Unrau

  Front cover image: Jane Bow

  Front cover design: Mariel Kelly

  Book layout design: Meghan Behse

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bow, Jane, author

  Cally’s way / Jane Bow.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-036-5 (pbk.).–ISBN 978-1-77180-037-2 (epub).–

  ISBN 978-1-77180-038-9 (kindle).–ISBN 978-1-77180-039-6 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8553.O8985C35 2014 C813’.54 C2014-900000-6

  C2014-900001-4

  This is the original electronic edition of Cally’s Way.

  For Sarah

  “Callisto, the virgin huntress, was seduced by Zeus …”

  —Gods And Heroes in Greek Mythology

  I

  2002

  i

  Twenty minutes after the cruise company’s van nosed into the parking lot outside Crete’s famous ruin at Knossos, Cally slipped out of King Minos’ palace, away from her tour. The other eight people on the catamaran were couples—English, German, American, no other Canadians—boyfriends or husbands and their girlfriends or wives glancing at each other seductively, or at her furtively, questioning, pitying, pretending not to notice this morning as she snuck an orange and a napkin-wrapped bun stuffed with bacon and cheese into her bag at breakfast. (Lunch was not included.) She found a bench in the shade of a plane tree by the entrance kiosk. Birds twittered in the branches above her, a rose-scented breeze stroked her cheek. She did not notice.

  A stupid reconstruction, that’s what Knossos was, one Englishman’s vision of what the ancient Minoans had built, the truth of it gone. Irretrievably.

  Like her mother—face, nails, hair carefully coloured—back home her mother had always been too busy showing a house, making a sale, sealing a deal, to sit chatting over a cup of tea with her daughter. Home was ringing phones, dinners forgotten, smiles guilty, attention already flown. Whenever she had asked about her mother’s childhood in Crete, all she got was: “I don’t remember. I was very little when we left.”

  Not true, apparently. One night, a week before her mother died, Cally had noticed that her wedding rings were no longer on her mother’s ring finger. Her father had been gone for years, but her mother never took the rings off. So where were they? The nurses, who tended her mother during the day while Cally was at university, would not have taken them. She searched a secret compartment in the back of a shallow drawer built into the moulding around the top of her mother’s dressing table. A private, forbidden place. The sliding lid stuck. Wriggling a finger in under it, she felt a folded paper and, flattening it, released a full-colour “Cruise to Crete” pamphlet: tanned people lazing on a catamaran moored below a whitewashed mountainside chapel. The rings were taped to a patch of sky, her mother’s handwriting below them shaky: “For Cally.”

  Oh, Mom. She searched the brochure, but there was nothing more.

  Her mother’s hospital bed had been set up in the living room. The curtains were drawn, the lamp beside the easy chair casting a soft glow. Her mother’s eyes were closed, their lids papery in the lamplight. The last dose of morphine must have kicked in. The skin on which she had spent thousands of dollars sagged over her cheekbones as the cancer fed itself. But maybe she had not yet drifted into sleep. Cally leaned close, smelled the sweetness of drugs and decay on the wisp of her breath.

  Please Mom, she wanted to cry, talk to me! Just this once. Give me something, a fact, a memory, anything, to hold onto.

  Instead she just held her mother’s vein-blue hand. Inside it the cells gathered their energies, communicating, gaining power until, sometime after midnight, the hand spoke. Its tremor, slight as a movement of air, woke Cally out of a doze. Her mother’s eyes were closed but she thought she saw her lips quiver, shaping sound.

  “I’m right here, Mom.” She leaned closer. “What did you say?”

  I love you.

  Three words, towering, life affirming. Twenty-five years of need erased in an instant.

  If her mother had uttered them.

  Or, in her exhaustion, afraid and alone, had Cally turned incoherent mumbling into meaning?

  Her mother’s mouth fell open, into sleep. There was no way to know.

  Cally picked up the telephone. Slee, her best friend since grade school, would still be up.

  “Of course she loves you, dummy. Think about it: if her intention was to thank you for looking after her, the brochure would have been for somewhere close, the Bahamas, or Jamaica. But no, she wants you to go halfway around the world, to know the place she came from.”

  Why? Cally looked up into the plane tree’s shivering leaves. What could it matter now? Pain deep inside her threatened to shake loose something she had not even known was there.

  A rack of brochures beside the entrance kiosk advertised seaside hideaways, mountain hikes through meadows full of orchids. Getting up to look at them, she paid no attention to the yellow Fiat pulling up to the curb, or to the middle-aged man who unfolded himself from the driver’s side and came around the car into the plane tree’s shade. He tapped a cigarette out of its package.

  “You like to visit the real Kríti?” Smiling, pointing at the pamphlets, he appraised her capris and sun hat. The name of a travel agency was stencilled on the door of the Fiat.

  “No, no. Thank you.” She dredged up a smile. He had a kind face.

  He ducked his head to light the cigarette and smoked for a while.

  “This Plakias,” he said, nodding at the brochure she was holding, “is very beautiful, on the south coast. Away from this.” He waved toward the fleet of tourist buses in the parking lot. “I have an office there.” He was driving down tomorrow morning. “You can visit the real Kríti from Plakias.”

  “No,” she told him again. “I can’t. I’m on a cruise around the island and I only have three days.”

  The travel agent shrugged.

  “Three days is forever. I charge you only the bus rate and two nights in the Plakias hotel, very cheap this early in April.”

  Out in the parking lot a whistle blew. Her cruise mates homed in on it and began to climb into the van that would bounce back up the highway to yet another group dinner and dance, the boyfriends and husbands taking turns with her, sliding a hand down her back—

  “We will drive back to Heraklion in time for you to catch your plane home.”

  Not home. There was no home now. Her flight would be to New York, to start her first job. She was alone now in a world where American-hating madmen flew planes into sky scrapers, where bombs or anthrax or cancer could gobble a life, if not today then very possibly tomorrow.

  She looked at the name on the side of the Fiat. It was advertised on billboards by the highway and at the hotel. And imagine the freedom of three days with no one but herself to care for, or answer to, or think about—

  No. The cruise was paid for—

  The agent glanced at his watch and then at her.

  Take the opportunity or leave it. Have an adventure or don’t. Stay cautious, closeted in h
er bunk on the catamaran, or drive south with a total stranger, through flower-filled pastures punctuated by thin, priest-like cypresses and these graceful plane trees, deep into the mountains whose outlines she can see on the horizon. Into the land that her mother might have known.

  ii

  On Crete’s north coast highway, cars passed three abreast, the slower ones hugging the shoulder. Feet braced against the Fiat’s floor, she tried not to look down the steep embankments. If her mangled body was dragged up from one of these, Slee would have to identify it. Cally had called her last night, so excited, on the pink plastic phone Slee had given her at the airport.

  Turning south, they left the highway traffic behind. A flock of sheep blocked the road, bells jingling, until their shepherd, catching up, waved his crook to shoo them on. The mountains grew closer, closer until, winding deep into their folds, the travel agent geared down into a curve under a rocky overhang. A gorge that might have been sliced by the hand of a giant opened before them, the road hugging a towering wall of rock — yellow, rust, gold, grey — broken by sheets of scree. High above them the black-hole mouths of caves gaped. Something peppered the windshield, sharp as machine gun fire. She ducked. The agent laughed.

  “Falling stones. This Kourtaliotis Gorge is something, no?” He pointed and, craning her neck, she glimpsed two brown-and-white baby goats skipping along behind their mother on an impossibly narrow path between shrubs that had somehow found a way to root themselves in the rock. “Welcome to the real Kríti.”

  Beyond the gorge a valley opened between these high mountains and three great headlands that stood between them and the Libyan Sea. To the west, great fingers of barren rock sloped down to the water. The travel agent slowed through the narrow streets of villages he said had been overlooking the knolls and valleys and sun sparkling bays below them for centuries.

  “Many, many invasions have they seen: Dorians, then Greeks, then Venetians, then Turks, then Nazis, all of them violent—many, many deaths.” He crossed himself then smiled at her. “But here they still are, peaceful in the sunshine.”

  A wide, impossibly blue bay came into view below them.

  “Plakias.” The agent pointed to a few buildings clustered around a small harbour. The Fiat wound down toward it through olive groves, past bamboo stands and flowering bushes waving in the wind off the sea. It came to a halt outside a white hotel. To its left a seaside promenade, stretching the length of a sandy beach, ended in a cliff where the mountain’s skirt had split and fallen. At the other end of the bay, past the town’s scrabble of seaside restaurants and gift shops, a humped and jagged spine of rock formed Plakias Bay’s western headland. Its tip lay low on the water.

  “The Dragon’s Head,” said the travel agent. “When the famous meltémi wind blows from the north, you will see how he snorts.”

  Sun, sea, flowers nodding everywhere in a breeze that caressed. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one she had to talk to. A tickle at the base of her throat, that she had been ignoring, was blossoming into a cold, but Cally did not mind. The sea was too cold for swimming, so she ambled up the mountainside through olive groves where the trees, gnarled and twisted by the winds, must have been hundreds of years old. When she was tired, she spread a hotel towel to lie on Plakias beach and, protected by a range of mountain peaks that had stood guard over humans fishing, trading, making hay, birthing, farming, working clay, killing those who would invade this curving line of sand for thousands of years, Cally rested.

  Once while visiting Grampa MacIntyre, her mother’s father, in Montreal, Cally had been rooting through Grampa’s rolltop desk for the watch he said he had left there when she came upon a two-by-four-inch photograph of a young woman squinting into the sunshine. Behind her in the image were mountains like the ones Cally was now exploring. The picture was mounted in an antique, tooled silver frame.

  “Who’s this?” she had asked. The girl’s black hair and blue eyes resembled her own. But Grampa MacIntyre, usually all warm lap and pipe smoke, had glanced over his newspaper and then pretended not to hear. She took the picture back to the den and dismantled the frame, looking for a clue, maybe some writing on the back, but the picture had been cut out of a page in a book.

  Her mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner with Angelique, who lived with Grampa. She showed them the picture.

  “That’s your grandmother Callisto,” Angelique told her, “your mom’s mom.” Grampa, a Scot, had met her in Crete, where he had fought during World War II, but that was all Angelique could tell her. Her mother went on chopping carrots.

  “Mom?”

  “I never knew her. She died and then we left.”

  Cally looked up at the mountains. Her mother had been born in Crete, in 1942. A month ago, after the funeral, Cally’s father had asked her out for dinner. Grampa MacIntyre had been imprisoned by the Nazis after their invasion of the island, he told her. Grampa had escaped and then been rescued by the British. After the war he had returned to Crete to take his little daughter, Cally’s mom, home to Scotland and then to Montreal.

  “So much I never knew,” said her father. “I should have asked, but your mom and baby Sam were on their own when I met them…and I was always so busy.” He cleared his throat. “Your mom was such a live wire in those days. So free and bright, so quick to laugh…a brilliant rainbow across my rather humdrum horizon.”

  Quick to laugh? A brilliant rainbow? Not the mother she had known. She raised her head to look at the mountains guarding Plakias Bay. Flanks softened, dreamlike in the late afternoon light, they looked back in silence.

  On her last afternoon a north wind, gusting suddenly at the west end of the bay, picked up the crest of a wave and turned it into white spray. The dragon’s breath! She heard herself giggle—a strange, unfamiliar sound. It ended in a cough.

  Never mind, she would take herself out for a last dinner then have an early night before her flight tomorrow.

  The fish restaurant—blue gingham table cloths, rattan chairs under a bamboo roof, plastic sheet walls rolled up on this sweet spring evening—was nearly empty, its only other diners a middle-aged European couple in hiking vests, and a man with scruffy sun-blond curls, torn jeans, and sandals. Her mauve-and-green dress was cruise wear, too formal. She chose a table at the back, outside on the seafront promenade between a tamarisk and a fat, vase-shaped palm tree. Waves murmured onto the beach a few feet away; thin streams of light from the other side of Plakias undulated on the water to an unheard tune, as if out of sight beyond them, under the rising moon, Aphrodite were dancing. A black-and-white cat sidled out of the shadows to rub against Cally’s legs.

  “Here you are, Miss.” The waiter arrived with a carafe of white wine, poured her a glass.

  “No, no, I didn’t order—”

  Two tables away the curly-haired man raised his beer bottle.

  “Yámas.” Not Greek. American, a few years older than she was, maybe thirty. Not on holiday—his hair was too wild, and what tourist had a little mutt watching from under the table?

  “No, no.” If she accepted the wine there would be no way to stop him from pushing back his chair, sauntering over. “I am sick.” She pointed to her head. “A cold.”

  “So you drink,” said the waiter, “and I bring you some nice sea bream, yes? Caught today. Good for every illness.”

  The American made no further move. Cold wine slid over Cally’s sore throat. The candle on her table flickered in a sea breeze that stroked her arms, and the American’s banter with the waiter, in English now, was soothing, amusing as she ate fish and spinach-like greens and boiled potatoes.

  Across the bay more lights streamed onto the water—rust, indigo, blue, green. A wave picked up a swath of gold, carried it on its crest then spilled it into the next swaying stream of light. Her mind was trimming the American’s curls, giving his jaw a shave, exchanging his baggy jeans for chinos, when band music—guitars, drums, unintelligible Grecian or Middle Eastern or Kasbah vocals, a violin—started play
ing somewhere nearby. It sounded live. The American stood, drained his bottle, and nodded to her.

  “Enjoy your stay.” She watched the dog follow him out.

  Inside the restaurant, the silence felt empty.

  “You like to dance?” The waiter brought the restaurant’s complimentary little dessert pastry and a thimble sized glass of Crete’s traditional rakí liqueur.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes.” Truthfully, she loved to dance but—

  “Well, do not go dancing with that man.” The waiter pretended disdain, nodding toward the doorway.

  “No? Why not?” She took a sip of rakí. “Oooph!” It must be nearly a hundred per cent proof.

  The waiter laughed.

  “Because. This man is my friend but …” He shook his head. “Tonight he dances. Tomorrow? Gone. Sometimes for weeks. To pick oranges or olives, or high into the mountains to look after somebody’s sheep.” His face cracked into a grin. “Better you should dance with me, Yannis. I am very good dancer.” The man’s gold wedding band was clearly visible. He must be kidding, complimenting her to make her feel better.

  “Not tonight, but thanks, Yannis.” She blew her nose.

  Plakias’ main street ran along behind the row of seaside eateries. The fish restaurant was at the harbour end, her hotel at the other, where the bathing beach began. The American’s mutt was sitting in a splash of light outside a dance club halfway between the two, watching as couples, hand-in-hand, a gaggle of young men, two brass-tanned women in their forties gravitated toward the pounding beat. Seeing her, he scrambled to his feet, his flag of a tail waving.

  “Hello, mutt.” She scratched him behind his ears. She would step into the club just for a minute, to see. Because Yannis was right: after the wine, fresh fish, and rakí she did feel better.

  A throng of bodies was pulsating under the strobe lights to a cacophonous mix of rock and Greek music. The crowd opened suddenly and there was the American. Seeing Cally, he bent to speak to the Greek girl dancing opposite him, who glared balefully at her and then whirled away. Then, reaching for her arm, he drew Cally into the throbbing crowd, pulling her toward him, then pushing her away swing-style only to reel her in again. She could do this. Oh yes, speaking this vernacular, flying so spectacularly, she had done it since high school, where contraband Black Russians, blotting out discussions, helped a girl find her rhythms. The beat grew faster, louder—the band’s guitars weaving in and out, dancers grafting traditional Greek steps to New York chic. The American’s arms were tattooed with some kind of insignia, his hands, hard and smooth and sure, his curls, a mass of shifting colour under the lights, his body, unhinged apparently. Music was the only ground under his sandalled feet, his reality checked at the door. Laughter rose inside her chest, broke free, and turned into a cough as the music ended. The dance floor became a mass of laughing, calling, drinking bodies. The drummer started a new riff. The American touched her shoulder. His eyes were hazel, flecked with green.