Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  They glanced up indifferently. I started to apologize for disturbing them when I spied a figure curled on the pallet farthest away from the entrance. She was on her side in a snail-shell position facing away from me, only partially covered by a flimsy blanket—in fact, as I drew closer, I saw it was a beach towel. Her damp T-shirt had bunched up high above her waist, exposing her pale back and the shiny beige elastic of her bra. I could see the delicate keys of her spine and her ribs pressing through her skin and the downy triangular indentation of her coccyx peeking above the loose waistband of her jeans. Her chestnut hair streamed down over the side of the pallet, damp and tangled as seaweed as she heaved and shuddered. I had seen her lying in this position a thousand times before.

  “Ashley?” I stepped quickly over the girls—they were both girls, I saw now. “Ashley, honey?”

  The girl staring at her phone glanced up at me. “Oh, you are her mother?” She waggled her screen at me. “I am Dagmar. We spoke on my phone. I let her use it to Skype you.”

  I looked worriedly from Dagmar over to Ashley. “How high has her fever been?”

  She shrugged. “We only got to use the thermometer once. So I think it was”—she looked to the other girl for confirmation—“38.8?”

  I squinted at her in the dark. Nothing anyone was saying made any sense. 38.8? Was she frozen? I stepped over them and sat down on the pallet beside Ashley, watching her body heave. “Ashley, sweetie, it’s Mom,” I said softly, touching her cheek, then her forehead. It was burning.

  “Yes, I am looking for it on my phone,” interrupted Dagmar helpfully. For an anarchist, she was awfully solicitous. “38.8 is 101.84 degrees in Fahrenheit.”

  “Okay. That’s high.”

  “A few other people here have had this sickness. The intestinal problems can last many days. But the fever is not usually so long. For that, we are worried. Our medications, they are all finished. Our friends are bringing more from Athens tomorrow.”

  “Ashley.” I jostled her again, more forcefully this time. “Ash, wake up, honey.”

  Her eyes fluttered. She rolled fitfully for a moment. Then she jolted awake. “Mom, you came! You came! Oh, Mom.” She sat up weakly, pulling me toward her, gasping, “Oh Mom. Oh my God, I am so happy to see you. I am so sick. And I feel so awful. I am so sorry. I am so sorry, Mom.”

  Holding her, I was shocked by how thin she had become; she was not that much more substantial than the anatomical skeleton in Brenda’s living room. Letting out a sob, she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “They took everything, Mom. Every single thing.” Clinging to me again, she sniffled into my neck, “It’s a total nightmare. There are children. And they gave this man mouth-to-mouth. And all these people just keep coming and coming in waves, and it doesn’t stop, and the screams and the smells, oh my God.” She doubled over. “I think I’m going to be sick again.”

  “Okay,” I said with alarm. I didn’t know if she was still hallucinating, or what part of what she was saying was real. By my count, she’d had a fever four days. That was a very long time. “Hang on, just hang on there, Ashley. Take a deep breath. That’s it. And another. Now. Can you stand up?”

  Tearily, she gulped and nodded. Gingerly, I helped her up from the pallet. Her thin shirt was stuck to her back with sweat. Now I could see her fully. Her hair wild and knotty. Her skin angry pink with not just fever, but blistery sunburn. Besides a dirty, lemon-yellow T-shirt that I did not recognize, she had on her favorite pair of low-slung jeans, now stained with mud to the knee, so that the legs looked as if they’d been dipped into brown dye. Otherwise, she was barefoot. A pungent odor emanated from her, acidic and grimy, of vomit and perspiration and musk. Oddly, it was like the whiff I’d caught of myself in the bus station after my night in jail.

  “Do you have any shoes?”

  She shook her head.

  “You can take my flip-flops,” Dagmar called over, nodding to a pair by the tent flap.

  “You sure?” Ashley said uncertainly.

  “Just pass them on when you’re done.”

  “Dagmar, thank you so much for your help,” I said. “I am really so grateful.” I glanced around the tent. I felt like some grand maternal gesture was in order, a hug or a gift of some sort, but what did I have? Money? I needed every borrowed euro I had—but for my daughter’s safety? For gratitude? I reached into my purse but Dagmar was already looking back down at her phone, scrolling and showing her friend something on the screen, and Ashley saw me and shook her head with a quick, vehement No, Mom. Don’t.

  “Okay, then.” I exhaled awkwardly. “Ash, do you want to gather up the rest of your things?”

  Ashley looked at me, helpless, about to cry again. She held out her hands, then let her arms flop at her sides. “These are all my things, Mom. I told you. This is all I have left.”

  Chapter 18

  “The good thing about Lesvos? Here, everybody knows everybody,” Thodoris said. Ashley hobbled between us, her arms draped over our shoulders like a casualty of war. He helped her down into the backseat of his taxi.

  His brother Yannis, Thodoris explained, was married to someone named Nikolina, who had a godmother, Vassiliki, whose brother Cosmo was married to Helen—blah, blah—I quickly gave up trying to follow—the names alone were epic—somewhere in his daisy chain of Greek relatives, there was even an Aunt Eurydice. But one of them, it turned out, lived in Skala Sikamineas and had a next-door neighbor named Dina. And Dina, it turned out, had a spare room.

  “Usually, she rents only to journalists. But I explain to her, you are a mother with a sick child. You are very nice older woman from Michigan who is a friend of Stavroula’s uncle. Okay, I maybe stretch the truth a little. But Dina, she says yes.”

  “Oh, Thodoris,” I said swooningly (though a tiny voice inside my head did balk: older woman?).

  Thodoris held up his hand. “It is eighty euros a night. Cash only. This, I think is too much. But I cannot argue. This price, she is okay for you?”

  I supposed it would have to be. Besides, what the hell did I know? Euros might as well be Monopoly money. When I’d withdrawn four hundred from the ATM at the airport that morning—the absolute limit—all that had registered was Oh! Pretty! The bills were peach-colored, pink, and baby blue, like favors at a bridal shower. Mostly, I was just relieved that Joey had been able to replenish our account fast enough so I could access some backup funds before flying on to Lesvos. I’d learned the hard way: Always best to travel with extra bills stuffed in your bra.

  My plan now was to get Ashley healthy enough to travel, then book us on the first flight back to Athens. Have the US Embassy there issue her an emergency passport—and vamoose!

  I could only hope that the medicine I’d brought from America would do the trick—and quickly. If her fever didn’t break soon, I’d have to get her to a doctor. And from what I was learning, this would not be easy. There was only one hospital in Lesvos—back near the airport—and the medical services throughout the island, such as they were, were already stretched to breaking. Plus, I’d need to find food and shoes and clothes now for my daughter, too. And some way to contact Joey and Austin on a regular basis.

  As I watched Thodoris take a fresh bottle of water out of his trunk and uncap it for Ashley, it occurred to me that there simply wasn’t enough money in the world to pay him what he was truly owed, either.

  For a moment, I was so overwhelmed, I leaned against the side of the taxi, breathing in and out, in and out. One step at a time, Donna, I told myself. Just like AA.

  The dark, clayey room was off a small porch in the back of Dina’s house. A zinc sink jutted out of the wall. Metal storage shelves held jars of atrophied paintbrushes, chair spindles, and dusty plastic flower arrangements. On a table made from two sawhorses was an electric teakettle and an old, cathode-ray television. Noodles of flypaper spiraled from the ceiling, though the assortment of flies zipping around were a testament to how purely decorative they’d become. The whole place smelled faintly o
f turpentine and solvent and cigarettes and mildew.

  Most disturbingly, however, was that Dina had hung an array of her own, original artwork from hooks across an entire wall of pegboard. Her subjects of choice appeared to be kittens, Greek sailors, and clowns.

  Still, a sleeping area had been carved out with a rag rug and a narrow daybed pushed against one wall. Dina had set up a cot beside it, so that the room could now sleep two. She showed me the small, unfinished, grouty bathroom. Because she spoke no English, she pantomimed that we’d have to turn on a water heater bolted to the wall every time we wanted to shower.

  Then she handed me two keys, said something elaborate in Greek, and vanished.

  “Oh God,” Ashley moaned. She flopped down on the cot; it promptly collapsed beneath her. “Ow ow ow ow ow!” she howled, clutching her elbow. In a moment, Dina hurried in, apologizing in Greek. She hoisted the bed back up and checked a gizmo on the frame to ensure it was locked in place this time and pounced on it herself just to make sure. By then, however, Ashley had already rolled onto the other bed—the daybed with its iron frame—and lay there moaning and gasping. Dina returned with a large bottle of water and a fistful of assorted tea bags and a pomegranate. She pointed to the electric kettle, then fled again.

  And there we were. My daughter and I. Alone and together on Lesvos installed in someone’s hastily converted storage room costing 80 euros a night, staring at a collection of oil-painted clowns. “God,” Ashley groaned, motioning to the wall. “Those really aren’t helping.” I knelt by my suitcase and dug out the Tylenol and the hydration tablets and the Cipro I’d gotten. Dutifully, Ashley took them. As she lay back on the narrow bed, I perched beside her and stroked her damp hair with the same vigilance I’d had when she was six with the chicken pox. “Ash,” I whispered, as calmly as I could, “just one thing, before you drift off.”

  “Mmmm?”

  “I need to know. Did somebody hurt you? Were you assaulted, or sexually—”

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Oh, God, Moooooom. Really?” Weakly, she shook her head. “I just really, really need to sleep is all, okay?”

  Remembering that there was a plastic thermometer in the first-aid kit I’d bought, I dug it out, tiptoed across the room, and poked it into Ashley’s slackening mouth. Only after it came out reading 99.5 Fahrenheit could I finally, finally, exhale and doze off a little myself.

  After I awoke, I rinsed out Ashley’s clothes in the zinc utility sink and hung them out on the porch railing to dry. The sun arced higher, bleaching the yard beyond our window sage and white.

  Once Ashley herself got up, showered, and swaddled herself in the threadbare towels Dina left us, I made some tea using the odd electric kettle. We installed ourselves outside on the crumbly little back porch.

  She nibbled weakly at some of the crackers and packages of Weetabix cereal I’d stolen in bulk from the breakfast bar at the airport hotel in Athens…and the two of us looked at each other, stunned to find ourselves together on the other side of the globe, listening to the scrape of the waves and the moored boats dinging in the distance…

  And finally…only after all this, did my daughter clear her throat and swallow and slowly begin to tell me what had happened.

  She’d been unhappy in London. “The city itself is awesome. But my housemates, Mom? I mean, just once, I asked them ‘Why do British people always talk with English accents but sing with American ones?’ It’s a totally legitimate question. But after that, they were horrible to me. It was like a zillion micro-aggressions. One guy, Eric? Whenever he saw me in the kitchen, he’d start mimicking the way Americans talk, going super-nasal, like, ‘Oh my God, Ashley, like, isn’t this, like, totally faaaan-tas-tick!” She picked up her cup indignantly. “I never even use that word, Mom.

  “And they’re all alcoholics. Every night, they go through, like, a liter of wine. They buy it in these boxes from Waitrose.”

  She turned for a moment to watch a cat slinking through the grass below us. As she did, her towel loosened; her clavicle was so bony, it looked corrugated.

  “I was just so lonely,” she said. “And then, at the same time, I kept seeing all the horrible stories about the refugees. Fleeing the war in Syria and the Taliban and ISIS. It’s all over social media. But also, oh my God, they show so much more on the news here in Europe than they ever do in the US! Here, Mom, they actually show live-streaming videos of, like, innocent people getting mowed down by artillery fire in Aleppo, and guys being beheaded by ISIS, and all these rubber rafts full of families capsizing in the sea. You saw the photo of the father with the drowned little baby, right? It’s like that every day. It’s horrible!”

  I looked at my daughter.

  “Oh, c’mon, Mom. How did you not see that?”

  She widened her eyes. “And the governments aren’t doing anything! They’re saying this is the biggest humanitarian crisis, since, like, World War II. But no one’s mobilizing to help. No one’s granting these people asylum. Except maybe Greece. And Germany. But in Britain, they won’t even let teenagers cross over from France because they’re afraid they’re ‘terrorists.’ So, there are all these kids from, like, Africa and the Middle East camped out near the Chunnel in Calais, in France. These poor kids, they’ve done nothing wrong except, you know”—she rolled her eyes—“they’re black or Arab, so, like that’s a ‘crime’? And they’re, like, my age, Mom! And they have nothing! No parents, no money—nothing!”

  Ashley was so weak and dehydrated, her voice cracked. As she spoke, though, the passion and pain reanimated her face. As much as I’d felt like slapping her for getting herself into this mess, I also felt a niggling sense of pride. My kid: You certainly couldn’t say she didn’t care about the world.

  “And I was thinking about how your grandparents fled the Nazis, and Dad’s were Polish immigrants. I mean, could you imagine if, like, they’d had Twitter or Instagram back then? It’d be the same thing.” Sniffling, she drew the towel tighter around her and glanced at her clothes drying on the railing.

  “If you want,” I said, “I can lend you something to wear.”

  “I’m okay for now. It’s good to feel totally clean for a change.” She took a belabored sip of tea. “So then, okay, in my seminar there was this Danish girl, Pernille? And she was also really upset about the refugee crisis and wanted to do something. So first, we found this Scandinavian humanitarian group online, but it turned out that they wanted you to be at least twenty-six and maybe a lifeguard. So then Pernille was tweeting with these German anarchists. And they said they were helping to run this refugee camp on Lesvos and needed volunteers. So we were just like, oh my God, we are so there. Now.”

  I couldn’t help it. Crossing my arms, I leaned back in my chair. “And you never once thought to tell your dad and me? Or your housemates?”

  “Mom, I told you. My housemates were, like, these drunken British douche bags.”

  “Your father was calling and calling because he was trying to FedEx you your meds. And guess what? Nobody in London knew where the hell you were, Ash. In fact, they hadn’t seen you for days. He practically had a heart attack. He was ready to contact Interpol.”

  “I was going to tell you,” she said. “Eventually.”

  “This is how you go about saving the world?”

  “Mo-o-om!” She shot me a wounded look of protest. “Can you just not be so judgy for just, like, a minute?”

  “No. I cannot ‘not be so judgy.’ I just flew halfway across the globe for you.”

  She looked down. “I knew if I told you, you’d be completely against it.”

  I squeezed my tea bag out over my cup, then dropped it on the side of the saucer.

  “Oh my God.” Ashley sat up suddenly. “What happened to your face?”

  “Nothing. An accident.” I coughed. “So how did you wind up with no money and no passport and no clothes?”

  She squirmed in her chair and rotated her wrists in the serpentine way she did when she was trying to be evas
ive. “Um, it started, I guess, on the boat?”

  “Boat? Oh good God.” I sat forward. “Tell me please you weren’t helping to smuggle refugees across the Mediterranean.”

  “No, Mom. Jesus. The ferry. From Athens to Lesvos. It’s, like, thirteen hours. That’s how Pernille and I got here. We thought, like, it would be totally culturally insensitive to fly. I mean, here are all these refugees arriving in rafts and dinghies, but we’re just going to jet to the island? So we took the ferry in solidarity.”

  I was unable to hide my irritation. The one-hour flight from Athens had cost me 58 euros. The thirteen-hour boat ride, on the other hand, had cost 144 euros. I knew this because it was one of the disputed charges flagged on our emergency Mastercard. Joey and I had gone over them, item by item, as I sat anxiously waiting for the flight out of Nashville and we tried to piece together what might have happened. Someone had charged a passage for two people plus a vehicle on the Bluestar Ferry Line in Greece.

  “You brought a car over?”

  For a moment, she looked confused. Then she said, “Oh. Yeah. No. That. Well. That’s sort of the other part of the story.” She glanced at me apprehensively. “So, like, waiting in line at the ferry terminal to buy the tickets, I kind of met this guy? And he was totally hot, and I thought he was just, like, really sweet. And really funny and smart. He was from Serbia, but his English was amazing.”