With four minutes left before my session timed out, I looked up local addresses for Western Union, mobile phone stores, pay phones, bus ticket prices, airfares, a Walgreen’s close to the library. Though Ashley’s Skype account was no longer online, I typed out anyway: Ash. I love you. Hang in there.
Come hell or high water, I was not going to remain stuck in fucking Memphis.
Part Three
Chapter 17
The plane circled Mytilene for twenty agonizing minutes suspended above the sea. No announcement was forthcoming from the pilot. I’d managed to commandeer the armrest, and now I was clutching it in a death grip. The sun was just rising, the sky aflame. These small planes, these were the killers. Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Patsy Cline, Aaliyah—you could make a list of musicians who died in small aircraft—and right now, that’s exactly what I was doing. The plane banked sharply left. In the little oval window, I saw jagged mountains tilt, a lone road snaking along the coast. Rows of beach villas came into view on the bluffs. Yet as we descended, I saw they’d been abandoned, unfinished: Ghostly concrete boxes sprouted tentacles of rebar, home to no one. A cement mixer rusted beside them. Modern-day ruins: a tiny Detroit on the Aegean. This was the mythical island? Somewhere, somewhere down there beyond the wreckage, lying delirious in some camp, was my daughter.
When we landed, passengers applauded. Was this a European thing? As I wobbled down onto the tarmac, I was hit by the stench of jet fuel and sea wind mixed with eucalyptus. I was surprised how the air itself felt strange and unstable. The terminal was like an attenuated garden shed. Inside, nobody was speaking English, though I heard groups of passengers talking excitedly in French, Spanish, and German as they hoisted duffel bags, backpacks, and camera equipment off the conveyor belt and loaded their items quickly onto trolleys. Everybody seemed to be on a mission.
I looked around anxiously for the driver holding a sign with my name on it. Back in Athens during my layover, I’d arranged for an airport pickup online. It was insanely expensive—plus, who the hell rescues their kid from a bunch of anarchists in a taxi?—but there simply wasn’t another option. Rental cars, it turned out, were in impossibly short supply. Besides, in my state, I knew I had no business driving. The last thing I wanted was to get pulled over by the police again. In Greece.
One by one, I watched the other arrivals disappear through the glass doors and duck into awaiting vehicles. I was seized with the urge to run after them, flag them down, beg them to help me find a map, find a guide, find Ashley herself, a translator, an ambulance: something.
Soon, the only person left in the terminal was a Greek baggage handler who spoke no English. None of the other facilities in the small airport were even open; it was far too early in the morning. I checked the new phone I’d bought back at Walgreen’s in Memphis. Still no service. When I’d called Brenda before my flight out of the US, she’d warned me that an American cell might not work in Europe at all. She’d been right. My new smartphone lay useless and dumb in my palm—$99 of borrowed money: poof!
Not knowing what the hell else to do, I lugged Aggie and my purple suitcase outside. A narrow, two-lane highway ran past the airport and disappeared into oblivion. On the other side of the road, a line of low, feathery trees gave way abruptly to the sea. That was it. Right there in front of me. The very edge of Lesvos.
Oh, Ashley, I thought. Couldn’t you have had a garden-variety nervous breakdown in your dorm room? Or gotten your stomach pumped in the local ER after a frat party? As soon as I thought these things, I felt terribly guilty. Bad mother, bad mother! But those crises, I could deal with. Here, I was halfway around the globe. Until this moment, the farthest I’d ever been from the USA was Cancún, Mexico, for my honeymoon.
A tiny white church stood across the road as if inviting me to pray. Were these my only options now: God or the cops?
Me and the cops: Oh, we were just done now. Ashley herself had warned me about the Greek ones, too. Before I’d left Memphis, I’d managed to speak with her one more time over Skype. Her teeth were chattering. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her feverishness across the ether. She did not entirely make sense. Between her and the German woman, Dagmar, I was able to glean that she was being held in quarantine in a camp someplace with an unpronounceable name on the north of the island. When I told her, “Ashley, I’ve got to let your dad know. I can’t help you alone,” she’d seemed to understand, but then she’d implored, “Mom, whatever you do, don’t contact the police here, okay? They hate the anarchists. And don’t say anything to any locals, either.” She’d started sniffling. “Some of them are neo-Nazi sympathizers. We don’t know who’s who.”
Yet now, alone in this strange, deserted pocket of the world, contacting the local authorities seemed like the one realistic course of action left. Though how would I even do this, since I didn’t speak Greek? I took swift stock of the words I knew. Beyond names from mythology and letters on fraternity houses, there were exactly three: “spanakopita,” “acropolis,” and “souvlaki.” I could only imagine how far those would get me.
I sat down on the curb with my suitcase and guitar and buried my face in my hands.
A growl came. A small orange car with “Apollo Taxi” on the side jerked to a halt. A young driver jumped out. “Excuse me, are you Donna Kay?” he panted, holding a printout.
Immediately, he grabbed my suitcase and my guitar. “I am sorry. It is so early in the morning. You think there is no traffic. But first, there are goats. And then, there is traffic. Come. I am Thodoris. But in English, you can call me ‘Teddy.’ This is easier, yes?”
He ushered me into the backseat, loaded my things in the trunk. The interior of his cab was clean and citrusy with a bottle of water sweating in a cup holder in the armrest. Looking at it, I almost cried.
“Welcome to Lesvos.” He swung the car into gear. “This is your first time here?”
Lesvos. In the United States, it was still known as “Lesbos.” In fact, when I’d first heard Ashley rasp, “Mom, I’m in Lesbos,” I’d actually thought she was being euphemistic, that it was her way of coming out to me. Good God: the Greeks could build a monument to my ignorance.
“Yes, it’s my first time in Lesvos,” I heard myself tell Thodoris. There was, of course, a whole bunch of wisecracks to be made, but I suspected the people on this island were already sick of them. Ashley. Every time I thought of her, I swallowed.
Thodoris glanced at me in his rearview mirror. A small bracelet of worry beads dangled from it. On the dashboard was a photograph of a smiling baby. I wondered if it was a prop, like Isaiah’s.
“You are journalist? A volunteer?” he asked.
When Ashley was an infant, she’d only go to sleep if I set our washing machine on “spin” and set her on top of it in her baby seat.
He followed my gaze and tapped his dashboard proudly. “That is my son, Dimitri! He will be one years old next weekend.” Thodoris had a sweetly handsome face, with woeful eyes and an insipient double chin and goatee the color of butterscotch. A single small gold hoop glinted in his right ear. I was impressed by how well he spoke English—and hugely relieved. If I looked desperate and deranged to him, he did not let on.
“Next weekend is his christening. My wife, Stavroula. She is inviting forty people!” He turned the taxi left onto the long road. I felt glazed over. The entire way from Memphis to Charlotte, Charlotte to London, London to Athens, I’d tried to sleep. The airplane seats were only a slight improvement over the floor of the Dickson County Jail—and, come to think about it—over the cot at the homeless shelter in Memphis—and I’d dozed only fitfully, dreaming about searching for Ashley in a maze of corridors. And during my ten-hour layover in Athens, I hadn’t slept at the airport hotel at all. I was too worried I’d miss my 5 a.m. connection. Where the hell was all that Ativan now?
“Do you have children?” Thodoris asked.
“Two,” I said quietly. “A boy and a girl.”
“Ah. A matching set. Like
salt and pepper. So. Where are you from, Donna Kay?”
“America.” Beyond the windows, the peacock-blue sea glistened. Lavender mountains rose up the other side of it. The Greek mainland was a lot closer than I’d thought; I was all turned around. “Wait, is that where Athens is?” I pointed.
“Oh, no. That is Turkey. So, you are from America. Where in America?”
We were that close to Turkey? How far across the water was that coast? It couldn’t be more than a couple of miles.
“Someplace called Michigan,” I said distractedly. I didn’t want to make small talk.
“Michigan? Oh, I know Michigan! That is Detroit, yes?” Thodoris said happily.
“You know it?”
“Stavroula’s uncle, he lives someplace called Royal Oak. He is chiropractor.”
We came to a traffic light. Thodoris pulled over suddenly, put on his hazards. “Excuse me. But my brother, Yannis, he was supposed to drive you in his taxi this morning. But with everyone on the roads now, he had an accident last night. So I need for one minute to see where we are going. It says on the email you want to go to Sikamineas? Now, is this the town of Sikamineas or the beach, Skala Sikamineas?”
I looked at him blankly. I had absolutely no idea. All I had was the link that Dagmar had messaged me over Skype. When I’d opened it in the browser at the airport hotel, the names popped up only in Greek. I could recognize individual letters—alpha, delta, epsilon—but that was about it.
Thodoris studied the printout. “Okay. Yes. Skala Sikamineas. That is on the coast. Other side of the island. More than an hour. Maybe two if there is traffic. So you and me, we are going to be together for a while. Do you need a toilet, some coffee maybe?”
I shook my head, though I felt my eyes well up.
“Okay. Me, I will need some coffee. We Greeks. We run on coffee. People think it is the Italians who are about coffee. But no. It is us,” he shouted back to me over the noise of the engine as he started up the car again. “Also, we Greeks love to talk. Same as thousands of years ago. All those philosophers in the Parthenon. They never shut up. So we Greeks today, we never need therapy. Why? Because as soon as one Greek person meets another Greek person and says ‘How are you?’ we tell them everything. You go to café, you go shopping, everywhere you go, you are talking about your problems. By the end of the day, you come home, you are in wonderful mood. You have whole country of psychiatrists. Though right now?” He shook his head. “Right now, too much is happening. Too many problems.”
A dog wandered out on the dirt road in front of us. Thodoris leaned on his horn.
“You see the news, yes?” he said.
I nodded. Up until two days ago, though, I hadn’t even known where Lesvos was. In the USA, televisions at the airports had been focused on the Republican presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton, speculations about the World Series. In London, waiting to change planes at Heathrow Airport, I’d caught a debate on-screen about whether Britain should stay in the EU. (“They’re all a bunch of bastards,” the man next to me announced to no one in particular.) As for Greece? I’d heard a few snippets here and there, though most of what I knew, I’d glimpsed on Facebook, through Ashley’s Twitter account. “I understand you guys are getting some Syrian refugees here,” I said.
“Yes. Okay. That is one way to say it.” Thodoris glanced at me in his rearview mirror.
He steered the taxi down a rutted little commercial strip with a newsstand, a couple of tacky-looking snack bars. I was surprised. The only images I’d ever seen of Greek islands showed yachts in turquoise lagoons and white stucco churches. We stopped in front of a gas station. An electric sign saying LOTTO—the same in Greek as in English, apparently—sputtered in the window. I thought of Zack’s scratch-off lottery tickets. People everywhere, it seemed, were vying for better luck.
“Sorry. But since I get taxi booking last minute, I need to fill up gas now, when there are no lines. I will only be five minutes.”
As he climbed out of the taxi, something occurred to me. “Thodoris?” Rifling through my purse, I found my precious clutch of Euros. “Is there any chance they might sell a burner phone in there? And a map?”
He looked confused. “What is a ‘burner phone’?”
I glanced inside the gas station; a small refrigerator for drinks sat empty and unplugged. Behind the counter, a woman fanned away flies with her hand. “Never mind.”
“You need breakfast?”
“No, no thank you.” Just the thought of eating made my stomach seize. Thodoris disappeared and I sat there in the back of the taxi jiggling my leg and checking my watch, hoping that “five minutes” was only, in fact, going to be five minutes. Lowering the window, I looked around and wondered how Ashley was now, this very minute, in that camp somewhere near this Skala Sikamineas.
I could only hope my daughter sensed that I was on my way—that I was almost there, in fact. I hoped, too, that Austin had been tracking my flights so that he and Joey knew I’d landed okay. Joey and I were in communication now—my God, how could we not be—we’d had volleys of Skype calls back and forth from the library, Walgreen’s, airports—we were as wired together in communication as two Secret Service agents—discussing the fastest way to reach Ashley—how quickly could he pay off the Visa bill so it was usable again—and could Arjul book international flights for me himself, even though we were not related? We even wondered aloud, in a vein of our shared, grim humor, why our daughter had chosen to suffer a major crisis on Columbus Day weekend—couldn’t she at least have waited a week until the last-minute, economy-class flights to Europe out of Memphis weren’t four thousand fucking dollars a ticket? All of these bureaucratic and logistical details masked, of course, the bottomless throb of misery between us—and, okay, residual love—and copious despair. All that would have to be dealt with later. For now, all either of us could focus on was our daughter in distress, and the handful of details we knew: Ashley was seriously ill, trapped in a camp somewhere with a bunch of anarchists on Lesvos. She had no money, no phone, no passport. But how this had happened—and where, exactly, she was, beyond some red teardrop on a Google map—was still a mystery. Given that Ashley initially hadn’t wanted Joey to know about her predicament—well, I could only imagine what had really happened to her. In the bundle of first-aid supplies I’d purchased in Memphis, I had, among other things, a morning-after pill, along with all sorts of remedies Brenda said were good for treating trauma if we couldn’t get medical attention right away.
My daughter. My kid. My baby.
Thodoris emerged from the café holding two cups of coffee. A large triangle of filo dough, like a three-cornered hat, was balanced atop each one in a slip of waxed paper. He set the cups down on the roof of the taxi, then leaned in toward the back seat. “I buy cheese pie. I have to buy two. There were only two in the case, and if I only buy one, the other, it will be so lonely. It makes me too sad for the one lonely cheese pie.” He made a woeful face. “So if you want, you can have a cheese pie. If not, I will eat both, but we do not tell my wife, okay?”
Without waiting for my answer, he retrieved one of the coffees and cheese pies from the roof of the taxi and handed them to me. The coffee was small and dark and sludgy. “Greek coffee, you try it. If you don’t like it, I will drink it, too.” He winked.
“Also, you are in luck.” From his back pocket, he pulled out a faded tourist brochure with a crude map of Lesvos on it, the names of major towns and attractions printed in Greek and English and cartoon illustrations of landmarks. A lighthouse. A smiling mermaid.
He started up the taxi again with his own cheese pie clamped in his mouth, his coffee cup balanced on the seat between his legs. I didn’t think I could possibly chew or swallow anything, but once I started, I found I was ravenous. Whether this was breakfast, lunch, or dinner for me now, I didn’t know. But I needed to eat; I should, I realized. I needed fuel and strength. The filo dough was wonderfully greasy and airy at the same time, and the cheese inside was
creamy and salty, and suddenly, in spite of myself, I was covered with little dandruffy gold flakes and wiping my fingers off on the thin paper.
“Ah, you see. Sometimes, we do not know when we are hungry,” Thodoris said.
The taxi ascended a winding road in the rising light, rays glinting through silvery-green rows of olive trees. As forewarned, Thodoris chatted nonstop, briefing me in great detail about Dimitri’s upcoming christening—and the hideous state of the Greek economy in general—how the EU was punishing Greece with a bailout package that wasn’t bailing out the country at all so much as “making us, how you say? In servitude?”
From there, somehow, he went on to contemplate the merits of the television show Mad Men, which he and Stavroula had been streaming over their computer to improve their English. “It is good show. Very easy to follow. I think Americans, you like the nostalgia, yes? You are watching people smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey in the office on the TV show, and you say, ‘Oh, look at those stupid people smoking and drinking in the office,’ but really, you are also thinking secretly, ‘Oh, I wish I could still be smoking and drinking in the office.’” He glanced back at me. “I think all of us like looking to the past when we are frightened. Times here are very bad. Maybe that is why Greeks like this show now, too.”
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