In Between Frames Page 9

  Part VI

  It had been two weeks since he missed his flight, checked out of his hotel, and moved in, effectively, with Sam and Mabel in their little cottage on the outskirts of Loutraki. Sam was a lot more careful these days about letting Mabel out to play, making her promise to avoid places with tall grass and rocks, though Mabel hardly needed telling. She had become much quieter in the days since Stephan’s death, preferring to stay in her room, only coming out when her friends came by to ask her to play. It worried Sam, but Miles convinced her to let her daughter grieve in her own way. “She was closer to him than you were,” he reminded her.

  On the day of the funeral, it rained. Sam and Miles sat in the back of the church, and though Miles couldn’t follow a word of the ceremony or the conversations, he gathered that it was a family-and-close-friends-only affair, and that he and Sam were permitted but not expected to be there. They left immediately after the service—Sam had sent flowers, and the last thing they wanted was to be at a party getting hammered on ouzo while Stephan’s relatives disparaged his tastes in women. And anyway, Mabel had fallen asleep and Miles had to carry her out.

  But Jon followed them out, shooing his retinue back inside the church. He had gone alarmingly soft in the two weeks that had passed: his mild heart attack on the helicopter, coupled with the dehydration and undiagnosed high blood pressure, meant that his stay in the hospital was prolonged to five days while the doctors tried different blood pressure medications, because Jon couldn’t stand the side effects of the three most common ones. Eventually they got the mix right, and though they told him to exercise and not to stop working, the shock of his near-death and Stephan’s death caused him to close the store. Sam and Miles had both gone to see him, but the store and the apartment were both shuttered. It frightened Sam to think that the change might be permanent.

  “Samantha, Miles,” he called. They stopped and turned around. Jon was making his way down the stairs of the church, with his wife holding his arm. She was a pretty woman, with large liquid eyes and hair done up in the old way, coils of braids looped and curled about her head. “I must thank you for coming,” he said.

  Sam went up to him. “You’re welcome,” she said, handing a tissue to his wife, who’d started sobbing again. They both recognized the sound as the one that had broken the priest’s intonations. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Sam said, and repeated herself in Greek. Jon’s wife—the obituary in the local paper said that her name was Helen—blinked in surprise. Sam said something else, and Helen smiled and began crying again, louder this time. At first Jon and Miles and the people in the church thought Sam had said something to offend his wife, but then Helen crushed Sam against her chest in a rib-crunching hug.

  “What did you say to her?” Miles asked, after they’d extricated themselves from the church.

  “That he’d been a good teacher,” Sam said. “And, you know, he was. I think he might have been a fantastic teacher, if he’d been able to get certified and find a teaching position.”

  “Speaking of positions,” Miles said. They were walking along the beach, heading in the direction of the cottage. It was almost September, but the summer hadn’t shown any signs of breaking. Day after blue day with calm seas and gentle breezes, interspersed with an occasional gentle rain, seemed to be a permanent state. They both knew that at some point, the clouds would come, and the town would be saturated in a mist that would envelop it throughout the winter, and the fresh offerings of the market would be replaced with stodgy winter foods: cabbages, hams, pea soup. But for now, it was tempting to view the weather as they did their relationship—a state that felt permanent, even though they both knew it wouldn’t last.

  “Have you decided?” Sam asked.

  Two nights ago, they’d sat at the kitchen table, talking about their future. Miles had put off his obligations to his publishers for as long as he could, and in any case his life, and the darkroom, were in the United States and couldn’t be (easily—he had to confess that it could be done if he wanted to spend around $5000 to pack it and then wait two months for it to arrive) moved to Greece. Then there was the fact that the Grecian school system did not satisfy Sam when it came to Mabel’s education. They’d have to find her a private school, and those were only in Athens. Sam didn’t want to return to England, but when she mentioned moving to America to be with him, Miles had discovered that he wasn’t ready for her and Mabel to move in with him.

  “What do you mean you’re not ready?” Sam had demanded. “You’ve been living here with us for almost two weeks!”

  Miles tried to tell her: the cabin was where Nellie had lived, and then died—she was buried on the shore of the lake, in a little clearing where they’d talked of setting up a beehive. He’d kept everything, pretty much, the same from seven years ago—their old battered couch, five dollars from the Goodwill; the mismatched crockery from when they’d moved in with each other; the old rag rugs that Nellie had braided when they were too poor to buy real rugs, and then after Miles got his break they kept them because they matched the cabin so well. Nellie’s presence had never left the cabin, and Miles didn’t want it to. Yet he couldn’t imagine how Sam and Mabel would live there without changing things. Their guest bedroom would become Mabel’s room, and instead of the charming little soaps in the basket on the dresser, it would be filled with her barrettes and hair-ties. And the mere thought of sharing the sheets with someone else gave him the willies. But the only thing he’d managed to say was, “The place isn’t ready yet.”

  “Then it’s just a matter of time,” Sam had said.

  But was it? Miles couldn’t be sure, and he’d said as much, and then they started arguing and woke up Mabel, and Sam kicked him out and he ended up sleeping on the beach that night. The next morning, she’d apologized, but the subject was still hanging around the cottage, like a puddle of cat puke that nobody wanted to clean up, or the last cookie in the jar—nobody wanted to touch it, but that just made everybody all the more aware of its existence.

  Miles had spent yesterday shooting photos of Mabel and seagulls and seashells and just about anything else he could see, mostly out of boredom, but also to have some filler images for his book. He also worked on transcribing interviews, writing out the first chapter of the expat-food-book. Mabel wanted to learn how to use the Leica, so he took a little time to show her how to load a roll of film and what the numbers meant, and how to imagine the image as it would come out. She seemed to understand everything—at least, she made adjustments in the same direction as he would have—and when she finished shooting off a roll, she made him promise to have it developed. He’d stopped at a one-hour photo place (they did exist after all, he just needed to learn enough Greek to read the signs) on their way to Stephan’s funeral, and now, on their way back, he ducked inside the store to pick up the photos.

  No more surprises, right? He opened the package, curious to see how Mabel’s photos turned out: she was a natural, as he suspected. There was a picture of her seashell cairn (there wasn’t anything buried there, but once he taught her that word, she insisted that that’s what it was), a spread of the ingredients for last night’s moussaka, their shoes lined up in the kitchen. She had a good eye for composition, and a good sense for exposure times—she tended to underexpose the film, but that lent her photos a pensive gloominess that suggested they were taken by a Serious Photographer.

  And then he saw it—a photograph he didn’t remember sitting for, but then again, Mabel had been running around all day and he and Sam had sat on the beach for a few hours in the afternoon: he and Sam, she was leaning against him. They looked like any other couple in love, but Mabel had somehow managed to frame the shot so that the first thing the eye was drawn to were their hands, intertwined. Had they sat like this, he wondered. He couldn’t remember, and given his history with the Leica, he wasn’t entirely sure that Mabel had taken it.

  Still, it was a beautiful picture—Sam’s eyes were closed, and he was looking up at the sky. He tried
to recall the moment that that would have happened, but couldn’t: they’d taken a bottle of wine with them—it should have also been in the picture, along with the plastic cups they’d used to drink it. And then he realized that the sand in the picture was different from the pearly white sand of the Grecian beaches—it was full of shells and there was a bit of seaweed asserting its presence in the corner, and he was certain that he’d have never chosen a spot so close to seaweed to drink wine.

  “Are they nice pictures?” Sam asked, reaching for the packet.

  “Yeah, she’s a natural,” Miles said, quickly tucking the mystery photo behind the rest. “She took some really nice ones.”

  “Let me see,” she said.

  Miles gave her the packet. She began flipping the photos, nodding and “mmm”-ing in approval at the shots that Mabel had taken the day before. Would she see the mysterious photo, Miles wondered, and would she know what it meant, or would she freak out about it? She was getting close to the end of the packet—he’d have to say something, soon, and then he decided what the hell and said, “I think we should move to the States together.”

  Sam blinked, surprised. “I thought I was going to have to argue with you a lot more to get you to come around to that,” she said, a smile breaking over her face.

  “Honestly? Me, too,” Miles said.

  “So what changed your mind?”

  Miles shrugged. “Just seeing things from a different point of view,” he said.

  Epilogue

  -I told you he’d do it.

  -Yes, well. You have to confess that my worry was justified.

  -All right, so it was. Sheesh, I knew he was a stubborn son of a bitch but I never thought he could cling that hard to his doubts.

  -If it makes you feel any better, I was surprised at how easily Sam went along with it. We just don’t know them as well as we thought we did.

  -I guess not. The living are full of surprises, which is why they’re the ones still alive, right?

  -I’ll drink to that.

  -We need to have drinks, first.

  -You don’t suppose we could also get a table and some dinner?

  -We can’t actually eat it—what’s the point?

  -We can’t actually drink, either, but let’s have a toast anyway.

  A sigh, and a rolling of the metaphysical eye.

  -We should figure out some way to help Jon, though.

  -Maybe help him win the lottery? Or do you suppose Helen is still young enough for a surprise?

  -Excuse me, but those are my parents you’re talking about.

  -Yes, well, we’re merely trying to ease their grief.

  -So you were the ones who brought Miles to Loutraki.

  -Well, actually, he brought himself to Loutraki—

  -And let’s be honest, here—she never really liked you like that.

  -I know that now. But sheesh, did you have to be so cruel about it?

  -Be fair, now. We weren’t cruel. But you were interfering with our plans.

  -Your plans. And what about mine?

  -That, my dear boy, is what this whole place is all about.