You Are Always Safe With Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  *

  When Lilly woke, she found that one of the bolsters on the deck pad had tipped and was resting on her head. She shoved it away and tried to calm the pounding of her heart. She saw that her mother was stirring on her narrow bench and Lilly quickly put her head down in order not to have to talk to her. But she heard Harriet get up and pad across the deck. Lilly sat up and saw Izak’s sleeping body; a yellow blanket wound around him and covered his face. He looked like a mummy.

  “Lilly,” her mother whispered. “I’ve decided not to go to Saklikent Gorge today; I’ll just stay here with you.”

  “No! You must go!” Lilly said, “you must!

  “But your ankle…you may need help down to the bathroom. You may need me to bring you something to eat.”

  “My ankle is much better. It isn’t even throbbing this morning. And with this special shoe I can really walk if I put my weight on my heel. I’ll be fine.”

  “What about food?”

  “Izak will take care of it,” Lilly said.

  “Exactly,” Harriet said. “Don’t you see how this looks? You and Izak on the boat together?”

  “Mother, I warned you. This is not your business. And there’s nothing to your imaginings. I’m just going to stay here and read all day. I’ll appreciate the quiet. I’ll even work on my book, which you know I should be doing. I brought so much research material, and I haven’t even unpacked my notebook.”

  “I should stay here,” she said.

  “No—you should not and you will not. You mustn’t miss this special trip, it sounds marvelous. And Lance will be so disappointed if you don’t go. Please Mother. You have nothing to worry about at all. Just go and have a good time.”

  “What about pirates?” her mother said. “I don’t want you abducted by pirates.”

  “Izak is an Ottoman warrior. I am always safe with him.”

  *

  Somehow she got through the morning, the breakfast speedily served by Morat and Barish, who were going to accompany the group to the gorge. She made herself invisible, pretending to read while the others gathered their equipment for the trip, the hats, water bottles, towels, extra pairs of shoes. The Zodiac was deployed for several quick trips to shore where the tour bus was going to meet them and take them up to Saklikent Gorge.

  Izak stayed down in the salon, sitting at the table opposite the galley, where he appeared to be reading maps of the local waters. Lilly had passed him on her limping passage down to her room to shower; he barely glanced up at her, barely acknowledged her.

  His indifference thrilled her, somehow, because it was an act of protection, a promise of their privacy, their secret. While she showered, she saw her body as an accomplice, a silent partner to her and Izak’s conspiracy against the world.

  Now, uncomprehendingly, she read words in her book, whatever book she held in her hand. She hadn’t even noticed which one she’d pulled out of her suitcase.

  Marianne was on deck wearing a turquoise blue halter and shorts. She looked aggressive to Lilly, no matter how she stood or what she did, there was a fighter’s stance in her attitude. Her well-formed muscles seemed to offer challenge to everyone. Perhaps daily she had to fight the impossible and inexplicable death of her daughter, confront it and do battle or she could not survive it. No one seemed able to break down the “I dare you” barriers she erected, although this morning she made it a point to address Barish in an almost coquettish manner: “You won’t let me get lost, will you Barish? You’ll hang onto me so I’m not swept away in the river’s currents, won’t you Barish?”

  The boy nodded wordlessly, agreeing to whatever she said.

  Harrison and Gerta were in exceptionally high spirits. Her cheeks were rosier than ever, her long blonde hair in two narrow tight braids down her back. On her feet she wore high-heeled clogs.

  “Honey,” Fiona said to her. “You don’t want to wear those in the river, do you?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Just till we get there and rent water shoes.”

  “But if you have to cross that shambles of a catwalk in those, you’ll kill yourself.”

  “Oh no. I’m used to these. I could climb a mountain in them.”

  “I hope you don’t have to,” Fiona said. “That would not be a good plan.

  KAYAK MERMAID

  The sound of the returning Zodiac after its last trip to shore sounded to Lilly as loud as a fleet of hovering helicopters might. Her face was burning as Izak came up the ladder, she kept her head in her book. When she did glance up, he was sitting near the helm, shuffling through some papers, a pen in his hand, his shaven head bent down, studying what might be a sheaf of bills.

  She said nothing, she read on, seeing no words, only the pulsing beat of her heart behind her eyes. He was using the cell phone now, talking in measured tones to first one person, then another—doing business of some kind. When he was done with the phone, he opened one of the side benches and began rearranging things in it. Still, he didn’t look at her, and she was suddenly stricken with panic. Perhaps she had imagined what was growing between them, hopelessly and foolishly imagined it while the truth was now revealed: she was simply a tourist marooned alone on a boat with a hired captain doing his daily duties. She could not go ashore with the others because of her ankle, and he was simply tolerating the inconvenience of having her aboard when he had hoped to have a free day to himself.

  All that had happened, all that she imagined had happened was a fevered fantasy. Whatever she had imagined was going to happen today would not happen. Nothing would happen. She would read. He would take care of business. Tonight everyone would return, and in two days more the cruise would end. She and her mother would take a plane from Dalaman to Istanbul, from Istanbul to New York, from New York to Florida. She would have some photos, some postcards, and a blue glass eye by which to remember Turkey. She would take up residence in her old life, dusting away the cobwebs, becoming whoever she had been and was now unable to remember or even imagine.

  Photos! She had taken so few. She must go down to the cabin and get her little camera, She wanted to take picture after picture with Izak’s head, his sudden and brilliant white smile, his powerful arms and legs, his strength and his beauty. She wanted a record of him helping her into the Zodiac (how she fell against his chest, trying to find her balance), a record of him leaning over to set a platter of steaming food on the table, a record of him swimming along the side of the boat holding his spear and the underwater flashlight. She was a scholar, wasn’t she? She needed a permanent archive of his every gesture, stance, motion. She wanted retrievable images of him sitting on the foredeck, silent and at peace, of him leaning against the wall in the café, watching her belly dance, of him crouched over her, massaging her body. She wanted an action film of his tackling the pirate and watching the gun slide along the deck in her direction. She wanted a CD of his voice.

  At that moment she saw him throw a kayak over the railing and lower it to the water by rope. Then, without a word, he went down the ladder; his head disappeared from view and he was gone.

  So—he was going out to sea by himself. He would leave her there to guard the boat and have his day on his own as he had hoped for. She had been right! He didn’t want to spend the day alone with her. This connection she imagined had been crazily conceived by her sun-drenched brain—there was not a grain of truth to it.

  Humiliated, angry, and feeling frightened to be left alone on the boat (what if pirates came again!) she put her face down on the hot canvas of the pad and berated herself for her foolishness. She would manage somehow. She had survived other disappointments, she would live through this, too.

  Izak’s head appeared as he came back up the ladder. “Okay, Lilly,” he said, smiling at her. “I have surprise for you.”

  She was so stunned by his return, she could not even speak.

  “I put kayaks in the sea. Together we will see treasures along the cliffs.”

  “What?” she said. She had spun herself so far fr
om this world that she felt unable to find her way back. “What?”

  “We go down now. I carry you down, and we take the kayaks on the sea.”

  “I can’t! My ankle,” she said.

  “No ankle in the kayak. Just arms to paddle. Ready?”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You’ll see. Very easy. I have thoughts to take you to the place where beautiful sea turtles swim.”

  *

  Izak helped her below to her cabin where he waited outside the door for her while she found her sunblock lotion, used the bathroom, changed into her two piece swim suit and then let him carry her upstairs again. She left behind her strange walking shoe with the straps.

  “Life vest,” he said, “it must be used.” He slipped a brightly colored blue nylon swim vest over her head and adjusted its straps around her body. “Now we ready!”

  The day was bright and hot; the sea was smooth, clear, and inviting. Somehow Izak maneuvered her down the ladder where the two glistening kayaks were tied in the water below. “Now—I slide you in, you put feet straight out, careful not to bang ankle.”

  “I don’t know how to kayak!” she said, but she was laughing as the ladder swayed, the boat drifted away from them and Izak struggled to keep his balance while holding her and directing her legs into the opening of the kayak. Then they were both laughing as he negotiated her body into place and tried not to fall into the water. When she was safely centered in the kayak, Izak handed her a smooth wooden paddle. “Easy to do,” he said. “Push with one hand, pull the other. Push, pull, that’s all to do. Very safe, nice fiberglass boat.”

  He easily slid his long body into the other kayak, pulled the ropes loose from their knots around a step of the ladder and fastened them on hooks at the front of each boat.

  “Now, you begin, no problem. One side, then another. Not lean too far one way or could tip over. But no problem. I catch you.”

  She dipped her paddle in the water, pushed and pulled, and the kayak moved away from the Ozymandias in a smooth, graceful movement.

  “I’m doing it!” she cried gleefully. Izak laughed again. There was that smile she loved, the flash of his white teeth in his sun-darkened face. He paddled his own kayak till he was abreast of her, and showed her by example how to steer, how to turn.

  “No ankle, you see? Can go fast and far, and not walk!”

  She seemed to catch on quickly, it was easy, she felt the lightness of the little boat around her as if it were part of her body. Her hair blew in the wind, the sun danced off the water, her paddle cut into the sea on one side of the kayak and then the other. Izak pulled ahead, paddling toward the edge of the cliffs and she followed. His bare back moved gracefully, his muscles rippling like currents under the surface of the water.

  She was light-headed with relief that she had been wrong, that he had held the idea of this day in his mind with as much anticipation as she had. She was giddy as a girl on her first date. (“He wants to be with me! He planned this!”)

  She was surprised at her own sense of innocence, of purity. She was trembling with anticipation of what treasures this day would bring. Somehow, being on the Ozymandias had stripped away her adult shell of armor and brought her back to her essence, that of a young girl, young Lilly, vulnerable and full of hope.

  The world of hard truths had been left behind, that arena where rapes and murders and explicit sex were celebrated on every television program, where children were being seduced on the internet, where once she had typed in “harem” on her internet search engine, knowing she would visit the harem in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, and what came up on her screen was a pornography site.

  At home, women she knew through school or her various classes, women who were her age and in her unmarried state, often took lovers when the opportunity arose, but mostly for entertainment and temporary pleasure. Those who confided in Lilly admitted they expected nothing permanent, that most of the men who were not married were pretty reliably “the walking wounded.” (Two of the women she knew, both in their forties and believing they would never marry, had applied to adopt baby girls from orphanages in China.)

  But here, in Turkey, Lilly seemed to have lost all cynicism and skepticism. She felt strangely newborn. She could be sixteen now and it wouldn’t surprise to discover she actually was.

  *

  She was quite good at kayaking. She was strong, and she followed close behind Izak as he skirted the edges of the cliffs, pointing out to her various ruins and tombs above, and below small yellow-nosed fish, swarming in schools among the shallows.

  He called back to her, “I thought maybe I bring food for us, but I can’t leave boat for too long. No problem to worry though. Many pleasure boats in cove, no one will be doing harm to my boat, I think.”

  “Shall we go back now?”

  “First, follow me…just a little…”

  He set forth again around the curve of the cove they had entered and when they rounded the edge of the cliff, she saw a fish fly out of the water, arc in the air, and splash down again. Suddenly others flew after the first; like a flurry of fireworks, the fish flew up, danced in the sky, and dove underwater again.

  Izak glanced back and laughed at Lilly’s delight. “Now follow again.” He moved out toward deeper water, and she followed till he stopped paddling. When Lilly caught up with him, he pointed and she followed his direction. An enormous sea turtle was visible just under the surface of the sea, its fins flapping like wings and its great shell rising almost to where she could touch it.

  “Oh, this is wonderful,” she called to Izak.

  “Yes,” he said. “Very much wonderful. They live very long time, sea turtles. I show you many beautiful things.”

  “Your wonderful world,” she said. “I love it.”

  *

  She followed him back, feeling her feet had grown into the kayak, that she was a kayak-mermaid, a woman from the waist up, a kayak below. She could give up walking and never miss it. Izak too could be soldered in his kayak, he and she could live together in the sea forever and have little kayak-babies.

  It must be sun-stroke, or close to it, giving her these thoughts! But she was utterly elated and content. She was not tired at all, and she followed Izak back to the Ozymandias without faltering or missing a stroke of her paddle.

  YOU ARE ALWAYS SAFE WITH ME

  As Lilly approached the Ozymandias in her kayak, the boat looked to her like a fortress, solid and impervious. At the same time it appeared as a mirage, a floating continent, a dream universe. The water was so calm the boat sat as if perched upon a silver mirror. She saw twin images, itself and its reflection: two boats, with their tall masts, graceful bows, and sturdy hulls. Behind them was a hill of pine trees and above a brilliant blue sky.

  Paddling slightly ahead of her, Izak seemed at one with these dream-like images, a man from the waist up and a boat below, as if he had merged physically with the sea.

  All of Lilly’s perceptions were heightened. Had she swallowed some hallucinogen, some magic mushroom of the mind?

  Izak called over his shoulder to her, “I get out first, Lilly. Then help you.”

  There was no hurry, she wanted to tell him. She was happy to stay there, a kayak mermaid in her enchanted state. All too soon the clock would strike twelve, the kayak would turn into a pumpkin and the fairy tale would end.

  *

  He carried her up the ladder without effort, a feat of such balance, dexterity and acrobatic accuracy that she marveled at it. Why were prizes not given for gifts such as Izak’s? Oscars were awarded to actors who said words that others had invented, crowns were set on the heads of those who had merely been born into the right family, fortunes were conferred on those who bought lottery tickets. Yet in every small village and city in every country in the world were men and women who were skilled in their special knowledge, people who sang and danced and told stories, fished and jackhammered holes and strung wires and taught children and nursed others and received no reco
gnition.

  *

  As Lilly rested on the deck pad, she could smell broiling meat that Izak was cooking for lunch in the galley. The silence of the empty cove, the stilled motors of the boat, the delicate breeze in her hair, the vista of blue-green water, conferred on her such a deep sense of peace that she wanted to give thanks for it. She was not in the habit of imagining there was “someone to thank.” The world was a random accident, so far as she could see, yet to look upon its beauty at this moment was to imagine that it had been created: (“‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”)

  But if each life and its beauties were created, there was also built into the plan a perfect, timed destruction. If she could only stop time, arrest the moment and not allow it to grind mercilessly on. Could not a moment so sweet as this be prevented from passing? Was it the movement of time that made life so precious? An old conundrum, she knew, but at times a common idea would strike her mind with enormous force, as if no one had ever thought it before. Why not be here forever? Would life be as precious as it now was, or then seem no better than a prison sentence?