In Between Frames Page 7

  Despite his uneasiness about the picture, he found Mabel’s enthusiasm impossible to ward off, and then after he tucked her in, she wanted a story, so Miles read the shortest one he could find, and then tiptoed back down the stairs, only to see Sam sitting at the table, a dreamy expression on her face as she swirled a half-finished glass of wine. “You’re so good with children,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Miles said. “I think something might be wrong with Stephan.”

  “You just figured that out?” Sam asked. “I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with him and why—“

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean that he might…I don’t know, try something.”

  Sam shook her head. “His father would kill him,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me ending up dead—Loutraki is too small for that. Anyway, what’s with you and Stephan all of a sudden? He stopped giving us Greek lessons and tried to get Mabel onto a sailboat with no outboard as a backup—“

  “I know that,” Miles said. “I’m just afraid that he might be in trouble.”

  Sam reached over and patted his hand. “You’re a good man, Miles,” she said. “But I’ve washed my hands of him. Let him be. I want to enjoy us.”

  Miles was surprised at how much he enjoyed her feathery touch on his hand, and at the sudden swell of desire racing in his blood, flooding out all of the other thoughts. Part of him knew he had to press the matter of Stephan, but Sam’s fingers, light and airy as a cloud against his palm, sealed his lips with the tantalizing promise of more, elsewhere.

  “Are you sure?” Miles asked, his voice hoarse.

  In response, she leaned over and kissed him. She tasted of wine, and for a moment Miles was afraid that she was drunk and he would be accused of something untoward. And then he decided what the hell, because if he was spending all of his working hours thinking about her, unable to stop imagining himself with her, driving forty miles each way to see her, he was the one besotted with her, so he might as well surrender to it. Then she shifted, and slid into his lap, and that was the last thing he remembered of the night.

  ~~~

  Sam hadn’t had that many lovers—David was the only man she’d ever properly slept with, and in high school she’d let a few boys touch her breasts—so she couldn’t say whether Miles was a “good lover”. He was attentive and gentle, which reminded her of David, but for some reason it didn’t feel creepy to think of him and David at the same time. She supposed Mabel must have known, though Mabel said nothing about it over yoghurt and muesli the next morning.

  Miles said nothing about it, either. He listened attentively to Mabel babbling about the dream she had last night, and asked her polite questions about the plants and birds. He would be a good father, Sam thought, as she watched him help her get her shoes on.

  “Did you want children?” Sam asked, as Mabel skipped outside to find her friends.

  For a moment, Miles’s eyes went bleak with sadness as he remembered Nellie. “We always spoke of it,” he said. “But I was just starting out, and she was a paralegal, and it was just never the right time, and then she got cancer.”

  “You’re so good with Mabel,” Sam said. “That’s why I asked.”

  Miles smiled. “I was the oldest brother to three sisters,” he said. “Little girls are easy. Little boys, on the other hand, are mysteries to me.”

  Sam felt her smile widen even further. “Do you have to go back to Athens today?” she asked.

  “I’m supposed to be on a plane in six hours,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “But I want to stay here,” he added. “With you. If you don’t mind.”

  A warm feeling began to spread in her gut. Sam didn’t realize how nervous she’d been about his impending departure until she felt how relieved she was. “That’s great,” she said. Then her modesty came back and she amended, “If Mabel approves, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “She didn’t like you as much as she liked Stephan at first, you know,” Sam said.

  Miles laughed. “I’m not surprised. I’m not exactly an exciting character.”

  “But you understand her so well.”

  He made a small bow on his way to the sink with their bowls. “Like I said, three little sisters. What about you?” he asked. “Wait, let me guess—you were an only child.”

  Sam laughed. “Yes—“

  There was a knock and the door swung open before Sam had time to get up from the table. At first, she thought he was a delivery man, but then she remembered that nothing was ever delivered in the mornings, and these days, with the new rounds of austerity protests, it was a miracle that anything was ever delivered, at all. He was as large an imposing as a bear, standing in the door with his arms folded across his chest, his face florid under his mustache. She hadn’t seen Stephan’s father since the second time she went to his store, and his name was slow to come to her. “Jon,” she gasped, at last. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Where is Stephan?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Don’t lie—“

  He stopped when he noticed Miles at the sink, washing their breakfast dishes. Miles waved and smiled, which annoyed him, but then she remembered that he didn’t know very much about Stephan, only that Stephan believed that they had a connection. “So, is true,” Jon Ionides said, after a long and ominous silence. “You are whore.”

  Sam sighed. “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head,” she said. “And I never, ever, promised anything to your son other than money and dinner.”

  He waved aside the flurry of words—he probably couldn’t understand her, she realized. It didn’t make her feel any more inclined to help him find his son, though. “You break his heart, ruin him for good, woman,” Jon said. “Now he run away.”

  Sam glanced at Miles, wondering what he was making of this. “I never said I loved him,” she said. “I never gave him any…” She could see he wasn’t listening, not to her words. There was nothing she could say that would change his mind—he was, as she remembered Stephan telling her, terribly old-fashioned and didn’t approve of her at all. It was almost comical, really, the irony of it all—neither she nor Jon wanted Stephan to date her, and yet here he was, calling her a whore because she wasn’t sleeping with his son. “What makes you think he’s here, Mr. Ionides?” she asked.

  “He said he come see you.”

  “I was with Miles all night,” she said, gesturing towards him. Miles was watching the exchange, his eyes not missing a single errant blink. “I can assure you that Stephan did not come around.”

  “He said he come here!” Jon insisted.

  “Maybe he lied,” she said.

  “He no lie! He’s a good boy!”

  “Maybe,” Miles said, the calm in his voice cutting through the rising tempers, “he changed his mind.”

  Jon stared at Miles, and Sam could see him working through the complicated emotional calculus to respond appropriately: this was the man the woman his son loved had chosen to bed, so how civilly to respond was a delicate balance of how much he despised her and how much he loved his son. “No,” he said, finally. “Is not like Stephan.”

  Miles looked at Sam. “Mister—“

  “—Ionides,” Sam supplied.

  “Mister Ionides,” Miles said. “Your son is a strong man, who will fight for what’s his.”

  “Yes, is true.”

  “What makes you think I’d still be alive, if he came around?”

  Jon considered that. Finally, he relented—his face relaxed, and so did Sam, now that she was certain that he wasn’t going to hurt her. “He not come home,” Jon said, finally. “I worry that he do something with this woman.”

  Sam bristled at being treated like she wasn’t even there. “This woman,” she said, “didn’t see him at all.”

  “Where he go, then?”

  “Did he say anything about where he was going?” Miles asked.

  Jon shook his h
ead. “Only that he want to take little girl to have fun.”

  Sam felt every muscle in her back seize. “Oh God,” she said. She ran outside, down to the beach, where the children Mabel usually played with were digging a hole in the sand. “Alex says that if you dig deep enough, you’ll get to China,” Mabel had told her. Sam had smiled at that story—she’d done it herself, with her friends—but there was no smile on her face as she darted up to them, searching frantically for Mabel.

  “Mabel?” she asked. “Where is Mabel?” Then she remembered that none of the children understood English that well. She tried again in Greek. The children looked at each other, and then finally the boy said something in Greek. Sam tried to follow him, but his voice was high and drowned out by the sound of the surf and all of the other voices that were also trying to tell her where her daughter was. But by now, Jon and Miles had caught up, and Jon supplied the translation: “Man come to take Mabel on boat,” he said.

  “Oh God, I told him not to,” Sam groaned.

  “You know where he is?” Jon asked, appearing hopeful for the first time.

  “Yes,” Sam said. She turned to Miles. “Can you drive us to the market?”

  Miles kept his mouth shut about the picture. It wouldn’t do anybody any good now, since it was just a photo of Stephan on a boat, and there would be no way to tell them how he’d come into its possession. “My camera is possessed” was the truth, but it was also unbelievable—and there was no telling if the photo had somehow morphed back into the picture of the burned out shell of a building after the protests. He didn’t dare look—he sensed that looking again would render the moment captured in the picture obsolete.

  Still, as he drove to the market, with Sam in the back and Jon next to him, he wondered about the camera did and what it showed, if it meant anything, why him. He could, he supposed, buy the idea that someone out there wanted him and Sam to get together and be happy, but then what was the picture of Stephan doing in the mix? Did whatever was out there want them to rescue him? Or was it Stephan’s final good-bye? How was he supposed to make sense of any of it?

  He wove the car around the perimeter of the market, and brought them up next to the pier where he saw Stephan for the first time. Sam got out almost before he parked the car; Jon was less than a second behind her. They raced into the little shack while he cut the engine, got out, and locked the doors. He felt as if the situation should have been more urgent to him, but at the same time he had no idea what more he could be doing. He felt hopeless and vaguely guilty that he’d been lulled into sleeping with Sam the night before—maybe, if he hadn’t, they would have found Stephan by now.

  And then he realized that Mabel had only disappeared that morning, so Stephan, if he was “missing”, couldn’t have gone very far. He walked down to the edge of the pier, hearing but not listening to Jon scold the owner, the owner yelling back. The ocean stretched before him, a lazy, shimmering blue, dotted with a few fishing boats. But there was no little sailboat, with the little orange and yellow sail, as far as he could see.

  Inside the little shack, the arguing had died down, and the three—Sam, Jon, and the owner—stepped out of the shack. Sam and Jon joined him on the pier. “The owner says that one of his boats has been stolen, and wants Jon to pay for the boat. I think he agreed to at least see if Stephan is on it,” Sam summarized.

  “I’m not seeing anything,” Miles said, looking out at the sea. “It’s so calm. How far could he get?”

  “Yes, calm,” the owner said, below them. He drifted up to them in a small boat, with an outboard engine. “But out there, is current. Very powerful.”

  Jon pressed his lips together. Sam swallowed. Miles took her hand—it trembled with the anticipation of the worst. The owner cocked his head. The three of them got in. “You look—“ the owner said to Sam, pointing portside. “You—“ Jon was assigned the rear, and Miles got the starboard. “We find him,” the owner said.

  As the boat puttered out, the owner explained, in his broken English, that the little sailboats were never meant to leave the bay. He was a small man, standing five feet, two inches in his army-surplus boots, and, like most of the permanent inhabitants of Loutraki, he looked as if he could be any age from forty to ninety—his form was delicate, but his body was strong, and he was confident in his movements. If Stephan had rented it properly rather than stolen it, the owner was saying now, he would have been told that. Out on the open ocean, the winds became unpredictable, as Sam had feared, and combined with the ocean currents, only a very skilled sailor could take the boat back to the bay. “Are many rocks below,” the man, whose name was Aaron. “Change the water, make it run fast and in strange direction.”

  They weren’t going very fast, but suddenly the wind picked up and Miles’s hair began lashing about his face. He reached into one of his pockets for a rubber band to tie it back with. Score another for the photographer, he thought. He scanned the waters, looking for something, anything, that might be a sailboat, but there was nothing.

  They were moving more quickly than he thought, judging by how quickly Loutraki receded into the distance. Aaron hugged the coast, saying that if Stephan had an ounce of sense he’d stay close to the shoreline, and not risk the true open ocean. “If he go on ocean, then we not find him,” Aaron said. “Better not waste fuel.”

  Jon erupted in a torrent of Greek, which Aaron promptly shot down. “Aaron’s right,” Sam murmured to Miles. “If we get stranded out here, we do nobody any good.”

  Nobody said anything for a long time, each one scanning their own edge of the horizon. Miles began to despair: the boats had been so small, and the world was so big. How could anybody have the hubris to think that they could sail away on something so dinky? It was a kind of craziness—just as he was crazy for wanting to abandon his career and move into a cottage with Sam. He could, strangely enough, sympathize with Stephan, even though the man had effectively kidnapped Mabel and then made the idiotic move to go on the open ocean in, what was effectively a dingy. It was the kind of craziness that could only be bought by nothing—having nothing to lose, because what mattered more than love? He was reaching for her hand when suddenly, Miles saw something on the shore, a spot of yellow and orange. “There!” he shouted. “I see something!”

  Aaron pulled a pair of binoculars out and pressed them to his eyes. There was a moment of nearly unbearable tension, as the three of them waited to hear the verdict: “Is my sail,” Aaron said, finally, smiling. “Come, let’s get them.”

  As they coasted onto the pebbly shore, though, their optimism disappeared. The dingy was Aaron’s, all right, but there was nobody around. Sam leaped out of the boat, and ran down the beach, shouting, “Mabel! Mabel! Maaaaayyybeeelllll!”

  Nothing. Not a sound. No little girl, running with her arms open, yelling, “Mummy!”

  It was a narrow beach, unlike the one that their cottage bordered. It sloped sharply, and there was a wall of rock that ended fifteen feet above it. Sam found herself recalling David’s voice telling her that this was a sign that the tides were drastic, here. She wondered if that meant anything.

  Jon also got out of the boat and began shouting for Stephan, walking in the opposite direction, but after a few hollers, he, too, realized that it would be futile to try to out-yell the sound of the surf. As they turned back towards the grounded sailboat, Sam saw the same worry in his eyes as she felt. He was someone’s son, too, she thought. Even if he was a selfish prick.

  Aaron was looking over the sailboat. “No holes,” he said, to Miles, who was the only one trying to keep track of everything and everybody at the same time. “No crash.”

  “What’s inland?” Miles asked, to nobody in particular. “Would they have gone there?”

  Sam felt a bit embarrassed not to have thought of that. Of course they would have gone inland. It was hot, and knowing Stephan, he probably didn’t bring any food, so that meant that Mabel would have tried to forage something for them. The Greek coast was mostly barren, b
ut there were occasionally shrubs and olive trees growing in the thin, rocky soil. Inland would be trees, maybe some edible plants. If Stephan brought matches, maybe they might even be cooking something.

  “How can we get up there, though?” Sam asked, pointing to the shelf of rock. It was well above their heads.

  “Here,” Aaron said. He’d found a steep footpath leading up the rock, little more than a foot wide, winding precariously back and forth. Hot rage surged through Sam’s veins. How the fuck did he dare? Mabel was only five. Taking her up the cliff, which was at least as high as a two-story building, on a ledge so narrow that even she had qualms about climbing it—if she wasn’t going to kill him before, she certainly was, now. She could feel her hands balling into fists.

  Aaron was leading the way up the path, followed by Miles. Jon waved her in front of him. “Lady first,” he said.