Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  The Jacuzzi’s hot water jets massaged her sides and the back of her neck. Steam soothed her throat. Under her, the tub felt gritty with sand.

  If Oliver had come up there would be three times as much. The Jacuzzi’s jets probably would have clogged, causing a short circuit, setting off alarms. The night manager would have come running—

  She sighed. If Oliver had come up his head would be at the other end of the tub, their legs intertwined as they sipped room-service champagne.

  iii

  Her mother is here, just her face, her eyes moving over a teenaged Cally, appraising. Her black angel-wing eyebrows have grown in.

  A smile opens. “Such a beauty.” Then closes again. Begins to fade.

  “No, Mom, stay with me, please.” The cancer, her death must have been a mistake. “Don’t let me lose you again.”

  Now her mother is staring into the refrigerator, apparently trying to decide which frozen package to dump into a casserole. Any minute now, looking around the kitchen, distracted, she will ask how school was. As if the question is enough, the answer irrelevant.

  “Mom?” There is really only one question too frightening ever to broach. Now is her only chance. “Why haven’t you ever liked me?”

  Her mother looks at her in surprise.

  “Like you? Of course I like you, hon.” But the tone is the same throw-away, bye-hon-love-ya voice she has always used. “Come on.” She slams the fridge door and glances at her watch. “Let’s go to the mall, have a quick bite, just the two of us. Girls’ night out.” Smile tight, eyes straying. “What do you say?”

  Memory, forgotten until now, surfaces into the dreamscape: Cally, about six years old, in bed with the red measles. The curtains are drawn because light is bad for the eyes. The house is silent, her Mom sitting on the side of her bed, her body warmth close as she strokes her daughter’s wrist. Such a wondrous feeling. She will not move, will not let on that she has woken, will give anything to prolong this moment—

  A spasm of coughing shattered the scene. Sunshine was leaking in between her hotel room’s curtains, reflections of the sea undulating across the ceiling. Her mother was dead and she was in Crete.

  Would Oliver be downstairs, waiting to sit opposite her at the breakfast table?

  He was not.

  Would there be a note then, delivered with her coffee? A telephone call while she debated how to pack the sodden dress?

  Of course there wasn’t. How many times had he shunned her last night? In the restaurant. On the dance floor. She had even invited him up to her room, and he had said no.

  What about his gifts though, the trip to the cemetery, his kiss—

  Tasty morsels, freely given. And she had been warned. “Do not dance with this man,” the waiter at the fish restaurant had told her. “Today he dances. Tomorrow? Gone.”

  Just as well. Twenty-four hours from now she’d be unpacking in New York. A couple of hours remained before the travel agent arrived to drive her to the airport at Heraklion. She told the hotel’s receptionist she would be in the gift shop next door—in case anyone asked.

  A carved olive wood bowl was silky smooth, nothing like the gnarled, bent trees on the mountainsides. She was wondering how many Cretan invasions its swirling grain had watched when her cough came back.

  A saleslady took the bowl out of her contaminated hands.

  “Sorry.” Cally spluttered. “Here, I’ll buy it.” She blew her nose, found some breath. “A souvenir.” Of this island, of mountain villages suspended just below the stars. Of last night. She was counting out her leftover Euros when the cough started up again, hacking, barking, one spate sparking the next, then the next.

  “Sorry. Sorry.”

  An elderly man, small, bald, gnomish, took her arm, called out in Greek. Someone brought a chair and a bottle of water. Someone pressed a handkerchief embroidered with a bouquet of spring flowers into her hand.

  More coughing, concerned faces too close.

  “Sorry. Sorry.” She got to her feet. “Efcharistó. Thank you.” Tears came, triggered by the coughing. Pain knifed through the side of her head. “Sorry, sorry.”

  “You have hotel?” The gnome had a German accent.

  She nodded. A few minutes to rest and take some cold medicine — that was all she needed.

  Diddly um diddly um—tinny computer notes—diddly um dum dum! William Tell’s Overture: “Diddly um diddly um diddly um dum dum! Diddly—”

  Her eyes flicked open. The room was dark. Her cell phone was ringing inside her handbag.

  10:03 p.m. said the bedside clock.

  She sat up. Why hadn’t someone woken her? Where was the travel agent? The cough started, hoarse and deep, jarring her head, her shoulders, her ribs, pelvis, hips, knees, ankles. Everything hurt. Her eyeballs were burning. The phone stopped ringing. The clock clicked.

  10:04 p.m. In Athens, her plane was about to board.

  Back home it was 3:04 p.m. Had Slee just arrived back in the office from court and was she calling to wish her a good flight? Cally turned on the bedside lamp, dug the cell phone out of her handbag.

  “Whoa, Cal, you sound awful.” Slee’s voice, so familiar, was full of concern. “What’s up? Where are you?”

  She looked around at the peach hotel room walls, the Toulouse-Lautrec Paris-alley print over the desk, the Jacuzzi. Someone had brought her suitcase up from the lobby and drawn the curtains.

  “Still in Crete, and I must have pneumonia, Slee. I got a little wet last night and then went for a motorcycle ride—” Her voice gave way to coughs which turned into a series of sobs which started more coughs.

  “Easy girl.” Slee offered to call the airlines and her boss in New York. Dear Slee.

  “No, no,” She found a bottle of water on the bedside table. “I should do it.”

  “Poor Cally, joyriding in a seaside town in Crete. Do I want to know with whom?”

  She started coughing again.

  “Okay, okay,” said Slee, “later. You want to know what I’m looking out at right now?”

  “No.”

  “Dead grey sky, hunks of hail the size of golf balls–”

  “I said no.” Laughter triggered a new round of coughs.

  Slee waited until it stopped.

  “Listen. You’ve missed your flight to New York because you’re sick. So rest, sleep. And then call your boss. Explain that you are extremely ill and will be a couple of days late. Keep in mind that the multi-national world is populated by sharks. Make sure your brain is clear before you make that call.”

  Slee was right. She took a pain killer and some cold medicine, and lay back down.

  Was it just a month ago that she had been lying in a bubble bath, sipping a glass of wine after a long day at school, when Gordon Sinclair, EO Petrochemicals’ director of marketing had telephoned? Her mother was asleep. Taking calls in the tub was supposed to be dangerous, but the portable phone wasn’t plugged in, so how could it electrocute her? Eating and drinking in the tub were hazardous too; what if you choked, or dropped your glass and it broke under the bubbles? Carefully, she returned her wine to the television tray table she had set up beside the tub, then picked up the receiver.

  When Gordon Sinclair introduced himself her body jerked upright, a tide of bubbles sloshing against the taps. He apologized for disturbing her in the evening, but perhaps she recalled meeting him last summer in Toronto, while she was working on EO’s latex glove marketing project?

  Of course she remembered. Grey suit, lush tie, blue eyes full of practiced warmth. Intimidating. Her Masters of Business thesis advisor had gotten her the summer internship—mostly writing press releases, arranging for gourmet sandwiches—but when EO’s director of marketing had arrived from New York, she and the two other students had been given the chance to pitch a five-minute glove marketing idea to him. The others had PowerPoint presentations, coloured graphs and photos, but her mother had just been released from the hospital and Cally was in the middle of arranging daytime nu
rsing care and giving up her apartment in the city to move back home. Having next to nothing prepared the day of the presentation, she had put on a pair of the latex gloves, used a Sharpie to draw a face and hair at the end of each of her fingers, then launched into an ad lib conversation among them about how smooth and unbreakable and downright sexy the gloves felt. There had been laughter.

  Now EO was preparing to launch a new product, a condom, and Gordon Sinclair would like to offer her a six-month contract helping to develop the marketing campaign. He knew it was short notice, but she was about to receive her degree, and this could lead to a full-time position. Would she be able to give him an answer by the end of the week?

  “Yes. Thank you, thank you.”

  A job, a future! In New York!

  Too bad she couldn’t take it. Downstairs the television was on; her mother was breathing peacefully through Jeopardy. Cally gulped some wine and punched Slee’s number into the phone.

  “Why me? There must be all kinds of marketing people in New York.”

  “Well, let’s see.” She had known Slee so long she could practically hear her thoughts before she spoke them. “We’re talking condoms, and who determines—in the end—which condom works best? The woman. So who do you want dreaming up the marketing? A woman, preferably young, single, smart, creative. You.” There was a pause. “Would Johnny come and take over the house for awhile?”

  “I doubt it.” An engineer, Johnny had escaped into the northern Alberta tar sands before his graduation day. Sam was a whitewater rafting guide in Australia, and Grampa MacIntyre was too old.

  Could telepathic messaging exist between a daughter and her dying mother when they had never really known each other? Two nights later Cally jolted awake in the easy chair. Nothing in the living room had changed and the only sound was the hum of the furnace, but the room felt totally different, every molecule of air suspended, her mother no longer breathing.

  Worry, dreams, delirium — at some point they must have given way to sleep because when next she awoke the sun had already moved across the top of the sky.

  She was supposed to be in New York, in the hotel Mr. Sinclair had arranged for her first night.

  Stay calm.

  The room smelled of stale sweat, but the fever had broken. Her skin felt cooler, her body freshly made, her headache no more than a twinge at the edge of her temple. The cough, when it started, rattled up from some deep place but at least it was looser.

  Cellphone towers had only recently penetrated Crete’s south-coast mountains. Service was sporadic but three messages were waiting: two from Slee “just checking to see if you’re still alive,” one from Mr. Sinclair looking forward to seeing her in the morning.

  She ordered room service (orange juice, coffee, eggs Benedict), ate, washed her face, and then sat at the desk to rehearse. She would tell him that here in Greece, love hub of Europe, she had come up with an idea for the condom’s marketing plan. This was true. Watching couples dance at clubs in Santorini and in Heraklion, here in Crete, where four thousand years ago Minoan artists had made some of the world’s most beautiful homages to love, she had seen it: Condoms for Zeus, packaged in black, the yellow logo Zeus’ weapon, the thunderbolt. The shot of electricity that started life on this planet, that raises and straightens the penis, that stirs the roots of the female self. Women rendered powerless by choice. Women who wanted the thunderbolt and were not afraid to say so would keep the little black packages in their purses because Condoms for Zeus would be the thinnest, the least intrusive, both the safest and the sexiest contraceptives. And memorable dreams made in Greece would carry them to Germany, Britain, France, England, Spain in a dance of testimonials that would spread to the U.S., Canada, India, and then into a burgeoning African charity market where women who fed their families by spreading their legs, who now charged more for condom-free sex, would have a third option: a condom so thin a man might even ask for it. EO could donate a whole shipment to the conquest of AIDS: Zeus Saves!

  She would follow this with a graphic description of her collapse in the shop—Mr. Sinclair would hear the verity of her cough—and another apology for the delay. She would be well enough to fly out tomorrow and in the meantime could email her plan. She cleared her throat and opened her cell phone. He would just have arrived at work.

  When he answered, her heart skipped a beat. The end of her last sentence echoed tinnily into silence. A time delay or— She pictured his cold blue eyes. Was he about to tell her—

  “Take the weekend,” he said. She searched for sound clues but the transatlantic signal had stripped any emotion from his voice. “Then change your ticket and fly to Mumbai. EO will cover the difference in fare.”

  “Mumbai!” The word disappeared into a series of coughs and croaked apologies. After their undergraduate degrees, she and Slee had spent a month exploring Europe and India and, flying into Bombay (now Mumbai), she had smelled the mountain range of garbage beside the airport runway, had seen boys with plastic bags hiking the stinking piles, had seen the cardboard and plastic hut neighbourhood hugging the perimeter. On the way through the city, in a roundabout where the traffic snarled, a dusty hand had reached up to the taxi window to beg while the legless body attached to it manoeuvred among the exhaust pipes on a little wheeled platform—

  “That’s where the condoms are being manufactured,” Mr. Sinclair was saying, “but something has come up and I need your help there with the media. Our Mumbai plant manager, Ali Haddad, will meet your plane and brief you, during the drive to the plant, on what to say.” Through exhaust-clouded streets jammed with honking cars and trucks, three-wheeled taxis, pedalled rickshaws. Past monuments to the past, mansions behind bougainvillea, broken concrete and the piles of gravel that might someday fix it. Past tiny, one-room corrugated-iron-roofed shops, and markets selling saris and bangles and spices, nuts piled on overturned drums. Along boulevards where a woman with a baby strapped to her bosom would be stirring a pot boiling over a fire in a tin.

  “Son of a bitch.” Slee-designed expletives consigned Gordon Sinclair to a slew of Hitchcockian fates. “His youngest, newest employee becomes deathly ill, and does he even ask how you are? No. Instead he sends you to India.” It sounded as if she were in a room full of people though it must be nearly midnight her time.

  “Well, at least he didn’t fire me, and I think I’m going to be okay now.” She was sitting up in bed. A room service tray in her lap held a medicinal tea made with Cretan herbs, a freshly baked cheese pie, slices of an orange. “The hotel set me up with Plakias’ doctor. He gave me some penicillin, and Slee, he is so hot! Everyone here drives motorbikes—”

  “Do I want to hear this, surrounded—as I am—by a living room full of stuffed judges and politicians?” But tall, naturally blond, and sleek in a long, body-hugging gown, white probably, Slee would be nodding to her guests, smiling. Her telephone complaints were verbal candy, the chuckle that accompanied them, gutturally sexual. Clever, quick as a fox during the day in court, at home she loved the goose-down bed in which she would conceive as many babies as Leonard wanted. Her tone to Cally became acerbic.

  “So, let’s see if I’ve got this straight: you have just spent twenty-four hours delirious, and now you’re going to get out of your sick bed to fly off to the capital of dysentery, malaria, and cholera—”

  “I’ve got another two days here first, and I’ll be home before the end of next week.”

  “Yeah, right. In a body bag.”

  As they chased each other around the Dragon’s Head, Aphrodite’s and Ares’ laughter sewed itself into the air.

  iv

  “Callisto.”

  Crossing the road to the promenade, looking forward to feeling the Mediterranean sun and sea one last time, she did not recognize Oliver. Seated at one of two tables set in the shade outside a souvláki restaurant, he was wearing a multicoloured madras shirt and shorts. His curls were gone, replaced by a quarter-inch buzz cut. Two girls in tank tops and hoop earrings, neithe
r of them a day over twenty, were sipping coffees with him, their backpacks stacked against the wall. Cally wondered if her dismay showed.

  Oliver rubbed a hand over his head.

  “It beats the heat and saves on haircuts. This is Beatrice from Oslo and Marina from Hamburg. Will you sit?” He reached behind him to pull a chair around from the other table. The girls shifted to make room.

  Her heart was beating too fast, beads of sweat were popping out on her forehead. She tried to include them all in the facsimile of a smile.

  “No thanks. I’m on my way to the beach.”

  A few minutes later she was stepping down off the promenade onto the sand when a motorcycle backfired, then drew up beside her.

  “I thought you’d left,” Oliver shouted over the engine. Perched in the sidecar, Wrecks was smiling.

  “I got sick. I leave tomorrow morning.”

  “I know a much better beach: stunning views, palm trees. Fifteen minutes away.”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on, you can’t leave Crete without going to Preveli.”

  “What about your lunch, your friends?”

  “I just met them at the youth hostel. They’re catching the three o’clock bus to Rethymnon.”

  In her weakened state, the sidecar looked safest. She could use her towel to protect her sun shirt and sarong from Wrecks. The bike tilted around bends, overtaking a grandfather nodding, half asleep in his donkey’s wooden saddle, then passing a tractor with a wagon full of hay. Stands of bamboo, olive groves, and ditches dotted with colour blurred as the sidecar rattled past. Strands of hair tugged out of Cally’s ponytail, whipping the air behind her. On the right, the land sloped up into headland mountains sheered off on their far sides, by the sea. Inland, the red-tiled roofs and whitewashed walls of a village sat on the mountainside just this side of the Kourtaliotis Gorge. Then Oliver took a right turn, and there ahead of them lay the valley she had first seen from the gorge far above. A stream that flowed down from the gorge came out of the bamboo to pass under the high arch of an old cobblestone bridge. Oliver slowed, turning left onto a flat, paved bridge beside the ancient one. A dirt track on the other side led south toward a small tavérna in the shade of some trees. The minute he stopped the dog leapt out of her lap.