In Between Frames Read online

  Mabel, after a while of not hearing anything from her mother, skipped out of the cottage and ran to the shore, pausing only to pick up her animal- and plant-identifying guides that Sam and David had bought her last year. Sam didn’t know if she ever used them—she supposed a better mother would know, but Mabel seemed happy, and so far she hadn’t poisoned them yet with the plants she brought home for their salads.

  “Don’t forget that Stephan comes by today for Greek lessons!” Sam called after her daughter. Mabel waved and kept going.

  Sam sat down at her typewriter, knowing she should be studying verb conjugations, or writing, but her head wasn’t in it anymore. The bleak depression that had settled on her as she and Mabel watched the bus pull away with Miles in it would not lift. She tried to tell herself that he was just a nice stranger, but the idea felt wrong. The vision of Miles standing by the stove frying eggs in the morning—that felt right. He’d instinctively, without thought, reached for Mabel’s hand when they crossed the streets. When their hands brushed—purely by accident—he was reaching for the fries and she wanted more ketchup—it was true that there had been no thrill, the way there had been with David. Instead, it had felt extraordinarily ordinary—as if she’d been meeting with this man and eating at McDonald’s with him for her entire adult life. All of which led to a grey funk when they got back to the cottage, and the three rooms and attic, which had seemed so cozy just that afternoon suddenly felt vast and empty.

  She couldn’t possibly be in love, though, she thought. She’d imagined that, if she were to fall in love again, it would be with a lot more guilt than she was currently feeling, guilt about betraying David’s memory. But Miles didn’t inspire guilt, and it was the total clarity of her conscience that made her realize that this was, indeed, different. She slid another sheet of paper into the typewriter:

  I am irritated today because I think I like a man whom I just met, when I think I should be in love with the man who’s been making my life easier for the past two months. The man I just met is the father I want for my daughter, but the man who’s been making my life easier for the past two months is the man I always imagined I would fall in love with at some point. Yet the raisins have stopped appearing.

  She tore it out, crumpled it up, and put in a fresh sheet. The raisins made no sense—how to explain that they’d disappeared from her pantry? Then she remembered that the verbs needed conjugating, so she set aside the typewriter and pulled out her notebook, wishing that her handwriting in Greek was less childish, more flowing, like Miles’s hair, and the how he never realized it was falling over his eyes—

  Okay, stop it.

  But it was pointless to deny that she wanted him to come back, to stay with her and win over Mabel. “I want,” she whispered to herself, “The-lo.”

  “What the lady wants, the lady gets.”

  She looked up to see Stephan leaning against the door frame. “Stephan,” she gasped. “You’re early.”

  He shrugged and walked in. Right away, she could tell—he knew, and he didn’t like it. There was a slight slouch to his shoulders, an understatement of the rage that he was holding in. And as if on cue, she felt her temper starting to rise: who was he to tell her who she could and couldn’t date? It wasn’t as if she were his girlfriend. Besides the dinners that he ate with them twice a week, and running into him on the beach every now and then (and she was always wearing a sarong and a t-shirt—he was the one prancing about in his skintight Speedos that left little to the imagination) they never saw each other—

  “You like men?” he asked, sitting down across from her. “Strange men?”

  “Stephan, please.”

  “Tell me, am I too boring for you? Do you want to see how I can fuck you?”

  “Stephan!”

  “Did he—“

  “He found me,” she said. “He wanted to show me some photographs that were on the camera that he bought from my late husband, in case I wanted to have them.”

  This seemed to stay his temper, but only for a few heartbeats, when he started shouting again, “What is he doing with your photographs?”

  “Being a gentleman with them, which is more than you’re doing now,” she snapped.

  “This gentleman—you like him?”

  “For heaven’s sake, it’s not like I’m your girlfriend,” she said. “Stop it, already.”

  He fell silent, and for a moment she thought she’d won, but only until he said, “My friend George saw you with a strange man at McDonald’s. What am I supposed to think?”

  “What have you been telling your friends?” she asked. “That we’re a couple?”

  His face turned red with embarrassment. She’d suspected as much, but until today she didn’t realize how seriously he considered their relationship. What there was of it. “Stephan, in all the three months that I’ve known you, you have never invited me to a discotheque, asked me to dinner, taken Mabel to the pier to go fishing—“

  “Fishing is for men,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” Sam retorted. “It’s about making her feel happy, which in turn makes me feel happy. You have done nothing to make me feel like we have a relationship that goes beyond the fifty euros and two dinners you get from us every week in exchange for Greek lessons.”

  “You want me to do these things? Then you be my girlfriend?”

  How the fuck did we get here? Sam wondered. “I—I don’t want to be your girlfriend, Stephan,” she said. “I have a child. I have a life.”

  “But you will be his, because he can take you to McDonald’s.” He pronounced it “Mack Donald’s”, the disgust dripping from his voice.

  “Well, maybe if you, I don’t know, brought me flowers every now and then I might have realized that we were dating,” Sam snapped.

  The silence that followed chilled the cottage. But Stephan took a deep breath, got up, and left, slamming the door shut on the way out. “Find your own Greek teacher, then,” he shouted. Sam shook her head, hoping that this would be the last of it. But she knew, with a sinking feeling, that this was only the beginning. She went out to call back Mabel from the beach—and for the first time since she’d opened the cottage, took the key with her.

  ~~~

  All that day, he couldn’t forget her. In his mind, he was scratching her calf with the toe of her ballet flat as she’d done while they were waiting at the McDonald’s the night before, while he apologized to the expats he’d dropped the day before, and spent the morning rescheduling shoots. He ended up doing two shoots that day—and even though he spent the day shooting with his digital setup and not the Leica, he felt disappointed every time he looked at the display screen and didn’t see Sam or Mabel. At the end of the day, when the sun cast dramatic shadows against the dirty-beige of Athens, he took out the Leica and shot off another roll of film. It was harder to find a place that would develop it—eventually he learned that drugstores still had film drop-offs—but he knew, even as he released the envelope, that there would be nothing mysterious about the pictures that came out. The camera had done its job. It had brought them together. He even liked her.

  Like? Love, more like.

  He hadn’t been this smitten with anybody since he fell in love with Nellie, and yet his kind of love did not feel like a betrayal, but a gift—that he could love again, that he could be loved again. It felt like a second chance at life, and he felt like a man who, after a long dark night, finally saw the dawn rising.

  Miles was hungry, but he found himself walking the streets of Athens, smelling the scents of restaurant offerings mixed with diesel fumes, unable to contemplate the idea of sitting down. It just felt terribly off, to sit down, alone in a restaurant, after that charming and lovely night with Sam and her daughter. He wanted to see her again, and the more he walked, the stronger the urge.

  Finally, just before the workday was officially over, Miles managed to squeeze into a car rental agency and rent a car. The man working grumbled and warned him that they only had stick-shifts�
��it’d been a while, but Miles was pretty sure driving a stick was like riding a bicycle. At least, he hoped it was. It did not come with a GPS system, but Miles’s smartphone had a mapping program, and he knew the general direction he wanted to go in, and the road signs were in both Greek and English.

  He was right that he never truly forgot how to drive stick, but it still took him a bit of time zipping around Athens to get used to the car—a tiny Renault with an “Eco” decal proudly displayed on the fuel cap—before he dared take it on the highway. He stopped by a roadside stand to purchase a bunch of limp white flowers—some kind of lily, he thought. They weren’t roses—the idea was to indicate romantic interest, not to declare love—and he hoped that she would feel the same way. The car behaved nicely, at least—the shift was a bit squirrely and the engine slightly underpowered for the steep inclines, but it got him to the coast in much less than three hours. The highways were empty, save for the semis making their overnight trips. It took Miles another twenty minutes to make his way to her cottage, but this time the door was locked. He knocked.

  “What do you want?” she asked, when she opened it.

  “To see you again,” he said, but he could see that he’d made a mistake: she was haggard, her face worried and drained. “Unless you don’t want to see me,” he added, backing away.

  “Yes,” she said. “No, I mean—come in, Miles.”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, as he entered. The flowers, acceptable when he bought them, were now frankly wilted. He dropped them outside when her back was turned.

  “Oh, nothing—it’s just that our Greek teacher seemed to think that he and I had a thing.”

  Despite the fact that she called it “nothing”, Miles understood that it was a lot. He went inside, closing and locking the door. Mabel sat at the table, practicing writing her numbers while nibbling on spanakopitas with the other. “Does she—“ Miles began.

  “Not really,” Sam said. “I just told her that Stephan and I had an argument.”

  Miles nodded, uncertain of who to sympathize with. Sam didn’t strike him as the kind of woman who would lead a man on, but he had been seventeen once, and crushing hard for one Cynthia Grant, who finally rebuffed him by kissing the high school quarterback in front of him. He’d always felt a bit sympathetic towards jilted lovers of either sex (File that one under ideas to work on), even if they were delusional about just how attracted the other one was. But tonight, he was mainly relieved that she’d rebuffed Stephan—it meant that she wasn’t interested in him, which increased the probability that she was interested in Miles.

  Mabel said, “Hi Miles.”

  “Hey kiddo,” he said. “Your mom says that she had an argument with Stephan.”

  Mabel shrugged. “I’m going to start school soon,” she said.

  “School?” Miles echoed. “Really?”

  “Yes,” the little girl replied. And then she blurted out a long string of Greek.

  “Mabel,” Sam chided. “Be polite. Miles doesn’t know Greek.”

  Mabel smiled mischievously. Miles grinned back. “Mabel, would you mind going to your room so that Miles and I can have some time to talk?”

  Mabel sighed dramatically, flounced out of her chair with the air of someone who had been terribly and irredeemably offended, but went into the bedroom anyway. Sam smiled and shook her head. “She’s probably just going to sit on my bed and read,” she said.

  “Reading is good,” Miles said.

  “Of course it is.”

  They sat in silence for a little while. Sam got up and put the tea kettle on, while Miles wondered if he’d made a mistake coming here, after all. Sam didn’t seem especially glad to see him, and he cast about in his mind for a conversation topic that would be safely neutral. “How are the schools here?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Good enough,” she said, as she got out two mugs and set tea bags in them. “Loutraki is small enough that everybody knows each other and the school teacher is a good woman. “ She turned to face him. “Why did you come here, Miles?”

  “I wanted to see you,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you all day today—and you know the camera I told you about? I shot off another roll with it, hoping to see you appear on it.”

  “You have a crush,” she said. “It’s just a crush.”

  “Probably,” he admitted. “But I haven’t been this smitten since I dated my…late wife.”

  “You’re a widower?” she asked, her expression softening. “You didn’t tell me that last night.”

  “She died seven years ago,” he said. “I’ve had some time to get used to her absence, but until last night, I didn’t think it was possible that I could get past it.”

  “I’ve been wondering how anybody could do that,” Sam said. She poured the boiling water into the mugs, and brought them to the table. She took the chair that Mabel had occupied. “After David died, I couldn’t imagine being with anybody else, but it was all I could think about.”

  Miles reached over and took her hand. It wasn’t something he usually did with women because of all the sexual harassment lawsuits these days, and he was embarrassed by how tentative the gesture was. But Sam didn’t fight it. She was looking into her mug, swirling it with her free hand while she spoke, “David truly had a perfect life. He was the chief doctor at Charing Cross, on his way to becoming the head of the hospital. He had Mabel, and we were talking about a second child We were happy and our lives were so perfect that when he died I didn’t know if I could be with anybody else even though I also knew that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone.” She wiped a tear away. “I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense.”

  Miles shook his head. “You make perfectly good sense,” he said. “I remember feeling the same way when Nellie died.”

  “So seven years go by, and you never found anybody?”

  Miles smiled sadly. “It wasn’t for a lack of trying, at least not at first. My friends tried to get me back into the dating game, but I just wasn’t able to let her go.”

  “And now you think I’m the one?” A smile played at the edges of her lips—she was being coy. Miles couldn’t resist smiling back.

  They stayed up late, talking and sipping at their mugs of tea. Sam offered him their futon, and Miles accepted. She went to the bedroom to get sheets and the extra pillow, and then came back, grinning. She beckoned him to follow her:

  Mabel had indeed stayed up reading in her mother’s bed, and she’d passed out, folded into an anatomically improbable position—Miles didn’t think that it was possible for an arm to bend that way. Sam pointed at the spiral staircase that led to the attic. Miles understood, and gently picked up the sleeping girl. “Daddy?” she murmured.

  Miles didn’t know what to say. He carried her up the stairs and tucked her into the little bed she slept in, but it felt incomplete to leave her there like that, without kissing her on the forehead, so he did. Mabel smiled in her sleep, but for some reason, as he tiptoed back down the stairs, Miles felt like he was the one who received the benediction of grace.

  ~~~

  Sam woke up early the next morning, vaguely recalling the long conversation with Miles and how nice it was to be able to connect with someone who knew what she was going through. There would be something she could use in her book in that, she thought: the relief, the opening of a floodgate of emotions she didn’t even know she had, the almost bodily pleasure a conversation could give. Today would be a good day for writing, she decided, and she stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen, set up the coffee, slid a few rolls into the toaster oven—

  “Oh my god,” she gasped.

  She’d forgotten he was sleeping on pull-out sofa. And she was out here, wearing only her camisole and (mismatched—as if that mattered, she thought, annoyed and not a little embarrassed that such a thought would even occur to her) underwear. Miles was stirring now—it would be useless to try to sneak back into the bedroom, as all he had to do was just open his eyes and he’d s
ee her, nearly naked.

  “Good morning,” Miles said, as he pushed himself up and opened his eyes. “I hope—“

  She crossed her arms in front of her—the camisole she was wearing featured a low neckline, so although her breasts were still concealed, there was still a large expanse of skin revealed, more than she was comfortable with when there were strange men around.

  “I hope I didn’t disturb you,” he finished, flushing red and averting his eyes. “I’ve been told I snore.”

  She darted into the bedroom, and slammed the door shut.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard him say, through the door. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  It wasn’t that you scared me, she wanted to shout back, as she found yesterday’s t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants. It was that I’m not prepared to share that much with you. But as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, she wondered why: last night she’d already bared her soul to him, laying out to him why she’d left England, how she wanted to be loved but couldn’t let go of David. And he understood that, far better than anybody she knew who was still young enough not to be Mabel’s grandfather. They’d already connected on a far more intimate level than the merely physical—why she should feel so flustered about having breasts suddenly no longer made any sense. And besides, wasn’t he a photographer? He’d probably seen many naked women before.