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For Marge Gibson, director of Raptor Education Group, Inc., and to wildlife rehabilitators everywhere, who tirelessly and with untold devotion strive to make this world a softer, better place
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgments
Forge Books by Andrea Thalasinos
About the Author
Copyright
IN THE BEGINNING
You can never step in the same river twice.
—HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS, 535–475 BC
As a baby Paula Makaikis had trouble digesting milk products. She’d scream and double up with stomach cramps, kicking and drawing up her little fat-ringed legs in agony.
“Nothing stayed in this one for long.” Eleni pointed her chin toward her daughter, launching into the story for the millionth time—usually on someone or another’s Name Day. Paula and her two younger balding cousins (more hair on their chests than heads, clashing colognes) were trapped behind the dinner table against the wall. One cousin walked with a slight limp after having had his legs broken years ago by the mob; the other had served time as a juvenile for holding up a liquor store at gunpoint. A photograph of their three dead fathers hung overhead.
The two baldies traded insults, showing off to the blond kseni, or outsider, girlfriends, who sat on either side of Eleni across the table. Each cousin was the spitting image of his father and seemingly oblivious that only a few years separated him from the age of their passings, thirty-five years ago, when a New York City clerk typed the names of Alex and Demos on the Certificates of Death.
Eleni paused and her two nephews nodded attentively. A cue they were with her. Both were too afraid of the older woman not to pretend they weren’t hearing the story for the first time.
“Uchooooo.” Eleni turned to Paula before she proceeded. “Too bad your husband’s not here to listen.” She then explained to the cousins, “Roger’s a scientist; always busy doing experiments,” her eyebrows closed in on her hairline as she nodded her head slowly before continuing on with her story.
“All the way from the subway steps on Union Turnpike,” Eleni continued, “my husband could hear that girl crying.” Eleni always spoke of Paula’s father that way, as if no one remembered him or she was especially proud of having been someone’s wife.
She clicked her tongue and shook her head, fanning her décolleté with a white paper napkin blotched with lamb juice, folded accordion-style into a fan. The memory is too much. Her dyed red hair, though at one time chic, makes her skin seem sallow; nappy and thin, it smells of cheap hair spray and old-lady sweat. Though to her credit, at eighty, Eleni’s cleavage—though crepey from sun damage—is still ample enough to cloister a thick gold chain jangling with Vassili’s wedding ring, a tiny blue evil eye, an Eastern Cross, and a round gold image of the Parthenon.
“My husband”—she paused to look up at the family portrait like it’s an icon of Jesus—“complains, when he leaves, Paula’s crying, he comes home that girl’s still crying.” Eleni mimics his facial expressions.
So different were those three brothers. In the old photograph, Vassili’s expression was defiant and cocky as ever. Demos looked frightened, as if a ghost was standing behind the camera. Alexandros the youngest brother’s face was blank. Perhaps his hope had the good sense to evaporate the day he stepped off their ancestral island in the eastern Aegean and headed toward the New World.
“‘Po, po, po, po, po—that’s it!’ he’d holler,” the elderly woman went on. “‘I’m going back to work another shift with Demos.’ Then my husband would turn around to walk back to the subway.”
Eleni’s bird eyes pecked at Paula, who listened, fingering the fold-over clasp on her antique Victorian bracelet with the pink topaz stones. There was always something hanging around her wrist to monkey with. Her mother recognizes it as a ploy to avoid eye contact, though Eleni never lets on that she knows.
And after hearing the same story for fifty years, Paula’s learned. Patience borne from the understanding that her mother needs to tell it more than anyone wants to hear it. With each successive telling new wrinkles and sags devolve Paula’s mother’s face, though Eleni’s still a handsome woman. Vassili’s bride—now a widow for more than forty years, who never gives the slightest inkling of being sad.
“No amount of singing or rocking soothed that girl.” Eleni dipped her chin, her eyes looking across the table at her daughter. “Only loading her up on the front seat of the 1962 red and white Oldsmobile we co-owned with both your fathers, remember that car?”
Eleni waits. They all nod.
Vassili and Demos had been waiters; Alexandros was a janitor. Sixty years later Eleni still works for the same furrier, hand-sewing raw fur pelts together into coats and jackets. A slight hump has formed between her shoulders after decades of stooping over a wooden worktable nine hours a day creating garments she neither wants nor can afford.
For Vassili and Demos, twenty years of running up and down cement steps shouldering heavy trays of food from a basement kitchen blew out their knees. Their hearts quit by forty-two. Alexandros, after decades of sweeping and tending to a taciturn boiler in a large office building, made it to forty-six. For all of Vassili’s swaggering, his xhethia too big for underwear Eleni would allege after a few glass of Metaxa, often replete with a demonstration, “youda thought a man like that would live forever.”
“You know what calmed that girl down?” Paula’s mother asked.
Their eyes widen.
“Driving up and down Union Turnpike.” She looked at them, excited as if seeing the whole scene unfolding once again.
“And boom!” Eleni clapped her hands, startling the kseni who hadn’t seen it coming. “That girl was out like a light.” As her eyes rested on Paula, Eleni leaned back, causing the rickety wooden chair to squeak. “And then that girl’s face was the most peaceful little thing in the world.” The old woman’s black eyes gleamed.
Paula looked up at her mother.
* * *
And so it was when Paula’s ten-year marriage dissolved, boom. Ten years. The last bloom of her youth spent sleeping on the downstairs couch. Clutching the cool flesh of her arms, confused and ashamed that Roger, her husband, didn’t long for her in the way she did for him. Too embarrassed to let anyone know that he slept upstairs alone—ears plugged, door dead-bolted, the bedroom filled from floor to ceiling with boxes. Piles covered the side of a bed that by marital right should have been hers. But no marriage was perfect, she’d reasoned.
Excuses had peppered
their life together until one quiet morning a phone call from Celeste, Paula’s best friend, changed things forever. Boom—just like Eleni crashing her hands together. Paula woke up.
She would awaken from a decade-long slumber along the banks of the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, one of five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology. Whoever drank of the river’s irresistibly pure, blue crystal waters would grow drowsy and forget who they were.
And maybe that’s why, even today, Eleni speculates that perhaps her daughter’s early cocktail for tranquility was what triggered Paula to embark on the longest drive of her life.
CHAPTER 1
It had started out as one of the last quiet days of August. Down on West 4th Street overlooking Washington Square Park, Paula Makaikis worked as director of the Center for Immigrant Studies at NYU. The maples were beginning to singe red and orange; it was the twilight in between seasons right before the start of the new semester, when autumn surprises everyone with the first few mornings of chilly, fresh air.
Paula was struggling to relax by sneaking a cigarette. She stared out the office window, blowing smoke out the sullied bluish-black edge of the window screen.
While relieved the staff was gone for an early birthday lunch, the sting of their backhanded invitation still lingered. They’d gone to the Thai place everyone raved about. Paula likened the food to the detritus one clears from a kitchen sink.
“Paula?” Guillermo, the associate director, had asked. “You will join us, no?” He’d smirked and stepped back, folding his arms and shaking his sandy-colored pin curls. This was the man she’d called in every favor to hire, despite allegations he was a prima donna and intellectual lightweight. They’d believed he was banking on the legacy of his great-granddad who’d been assassinated, a leftist president from some Latin American country. The associate director’s smirk also triggered a dimple that he knew to strategically turn toward the young grad assistants, through whom Paula guessed he was working his way. A shaft of sunlight had broken through autumn’s early rain cloud, backlighting Guillermo’s hair as if he stood center stage in Jesus Christ Superstar.
“Paula-a-a?” Guillermo drew out her name.
The staff cringed, hoping she’d say no. She felt it. No one thinks the boss has feelings. Her chest ached for a cigarette; and while she hated smoking, the road to destruction was paved with comfort.
“Thanks but…” She’d gestured toward her computer screen. A half-written copy block for the Web page announced the daily schedule for October’s Conference on the Seven Stages of Immigrant Adaptation. “I’m hoping to tie up more loose ends.” Yeah, right, keep hoping, she thought.
Several of her staff harbored resentment over last month’s trip to Greece. This was the first time Paula had accompanied her mother on the annual weeklong trip. At eighty, traveling alone had become too difficult for Eleni; and, at the last minute, Paula agreed to help. Though she’d been back nearly a month, the staff still avoided eye contact—like she’d been hobnobbing on Scorpios with Onassis instead of cooped up in the mothball-smelling apartments of Eleni’s ninety-year-old first cousins. “Christos kai Panayia, may that be it,” Eleni had pronounced in the cab on the way back to the Athens airport. “What pushy people, eh?” She’d looked to her daughter for confirmation, but Paula was watching a handsome young man cup his girlfriend’s ass. Paula sighed; were it possible to die of aggravation, she’d have been riding back to JFK in cargo.
The conference schedule should have been finalized in April. Complaints were streaming into the Dean’s office. People carped to Christoff about mismanagement and having to make last-minute hotel and airline reservations. Yet despite the hullabaloo, Paula was preoccupied with the male cardinal that had landed on her window ledge.
Paula sighed, her cigarette a long line of white ash. She was sharp-tongued and sad eyed, with wild dark hair that no amount of expensive hair product would tame. Her eyes were light amber, a color that no one could recall having seen in either side of the family, that clashed with her drab olive complexion.
Three narrow silver Victorian bangles pinged together quietly like little bells as she pressed her stomach with her hand. Her gut churned. Early that morning she’d polished off yesterday’s half-eaten Egg McMuffin she’d tucked behind the computer monitor. Though its crinkly wrapper smelled of her cigarettes, the muffin felt fresh. As for the egg and Canadian bacon, in an office kept so frigid they wore sweaters year-round, she took her chances. The birds had scarfed up the crumbled bits of muffin she’d placed out onto the stone ledge. At one time she’d kept a bag of birdseed tucked beneath her desk, but the janitor left a note about it being a rat magnet.
Every day she set something out. Usually sparrows and chickadees gathered, with an occasional visit from an overly empowered blue jay. Pigeons avoided the ledge for some reason, and she was grateful to be spared the criticism of feeding “flying rats.” Birds would swoon as they’d land and peck at one another before looking questioningly at her through the glass. Their tan and brown feathers wove into perfect herringbone patterns where their wings met. Then they’d burst off in unison, like they’d been summoned.
Her window ledge was a regular stop on the circuit. It was relaxing to watch, reminding her of the years she spent between high school and college working in a pet store on Union Turnpike in Queens. Those were the most meaningful years she’d spent working anywhere, explaining to people how to care for their pets, finding homes for the animals—an event always tinged with sadness, but also happiness. Despite all the personal turbulence of her early years, days spent handling birds, guinea pigs, snakes and a mean-spirited chinchilla named Chilly were some of her most enjoyable ones.
During long staff meetings she’d excuse herself to dash downstairs to the basement vending machines. Repeatedly inserting a wrinkled dollar bill, she’d impose her will onto the electronic sensor until it caved. She’d get a Pop-Tart to crumble into small pieces for the birds, lest they think she’d abandoned them.
Guillermo would sometimes glance from his desk, watching as Paula spread crumbs. She could feel him watching. “Ella poulakia,” she’d murmur to them in Greek. How pathetic she looked. The whole staff found the devotion odd, yet glimpses of their boss’s loneliness were too raw to make fun of. Everything else was fair game—the bird-feeding, brilliant, dowdy director who had donned princess jewels and was obsessed with hair-straightening product. She’d given them a lot of material.
So far she’d frittered away the entire morning bird-watching, stalking and swatting flies instead of returning her e-mail. Then the Dean called.
“Paula. What the hell is up?” Christoff slowly enunciated each word. “For God sakes people are calling; they need to know if they’re presenting; you haven’t returned e-mails in weeks.” It was a mouthful and she heard him pausing to lick his lips, as they typically dried out during confrontation. “Is … everything all right … at home?”
It took her by surprise. She’d anticipated a collegial nudge but not a probing. There’d always been special warmth between them since it was twelve Junes ago in Christoff’s living room that she’d been introduced to Roger.
“Take the work home—get a bottle of wine,” Christoff instructed. “Go through the papers and decide. There you can smoke yourself to death.” Six months ago she’d have eaten her own entrails to avoid this conversation.
Funny how no one complained about smoking at department parties when everyone was drunk and puffing away, trading sly looks, being so clandestinely dangerous. Cool like Che Guevara. Paula had grown up to Eleni walking around, lips pursed, gripping a cigarette, farting as she explained how smoking helped her move her bowels. Vassili never wasn’t smoking. Even in the shower, an ashtray was balanced on the windowsill. He and Demos would have smoked as they delivered food had it been allowed. Paula would have bet a paycheck Alexandros had smoked as he’d checked for gas leaks. Smoking was their way to give life the finger.
Paula tugged on her dark ba
ngs, a habit from childhood. Humidity was springing them into corkscrew coils. “Shit,” she sighed deeply. One thing was clear; though her work and home life were on the verge of collapse, they also threatened to grind on forever. The boss doesn’t walk away with grant money sprouting on trees. And with a third marriage you force yourself into acceptance.
Life was easier when she alone comprised the Center for Immigrant Studies. But after ten years of meteoric success, grant money pouring in, people begged her for a chance to hop onto the gravy train. The Center had taken on a life of its own; it had reared its quantitative wings and turned on her, confronting her like an alien creature out of her control. Her staff regarded her as an artifact—by their sighs, silences and expressions, she knew. And in the quiet, still moments she believed it, too.
And if the staff elbowed her aside she let them. For better or worse, Guillermo was the hungry one, the ascending boss. She felt it, knew it, and he was better at it anyway. Sometimes gaining footsteps in the stairwell prompted a glance over her shoulder, wondering if he would just as soon shove her down the stairs like some nut-job in late-night reruns of Murder She Wrote.
Turning fifty last month hadn’t helped. She’d been unexpectedly rattled. Music from the Weather Channel made her tear up. While standing behind a broad-shouldered, heavily tattooed Polynesian-looking man in McDonald’s on her birthday she’d fought the urge to rest her head against his back. It looked so nice and comfortable.
But all hating aside, Guillermo was right. A delegator she wasn’t. He was the stronger one. She had neither the heart nor the backbone to tell her staff what to do. It seemed bossy and mean, and she’d gotten enough of that in childhood. And while Greece is long credited with being the Birthplace of Democracy, the Greek family couldn’t have been credited with its conception. She’d more “suggest” to the staff than issue directives. At first they were elated by their good fortune at getting the “cool boss.” But within weeks she’d get the stink-eye when asking them to do something that interfered with their coffee breaks.
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