In Between Frames (12 page)

“He said you told him I could go with him on a boat ride,” Mabel said, to Sam.
 
“So we went on the boat, and he said we were going to have a really big adventure together, and that we’d go to a place so secret that nobody could find us, and that we could have a real adventure like the explorers did.
 
We got out of the boat, and then we walked here, carrying all of the stuff, and then he was going to set up the tent and the sleeping bags when he got bitten.
 
He—he said—“

She started crying again, but before Sam could tell her she didn’t have to continue, Mabel
plowed
ahead, sniffling and sobbing all the while.
 
“He said he was fine at first, but then a little later he wasn’t fine, and then he told me I had to be brave and asked me to hold his hand.
 
And he asked me to stay with him, and then he died, so I stayed with him, but it was so scary—“

“Shush, Mabel,” Sam whispered.
 
“It wasn’t your fault.”

“But if I hadn’t wanted to go with him on his adventure—“

“Little girl,” Jon said, squatting to look her in the eye.
 
Then he hugged her, his face wet and streaked with tears, and cried.
 
“He had friend with him.”
 

Somehow, those words managed to soothe her in a way that all of Sam’s reassurances couldn’t.
 
But Sam didn’t snap at Jon when he stood back up.
 
She hugged him, instead—and, much to the surprise of Miles and Aaron, he hugged her back.
 
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
 
“I’m sorry it all had to end like this.”

In the distance, they could hear the steady thumping of a Med-
evac
cutting through the still, hot air.
 
Help was on the way.
 
“He had a friend with him at the very end,” Sam was whispering to Jon, as they watched the chopper approach.
 
“Take comfort in that.”

Mabel was crying now, too.
 
“I want him to come back, Mummy,” she said, crying.
 

Then the chopper landed, and conversation became impossible.
 
The medics brought Stephan’s body out from the brush, already encased in a
bodybag
, and as one loaded the body, the second began talking to Sam and Jon.
 
Miles watched Sam the female medic pull out a stethoscope, and squeeze her eyes shut as she listened, or tried to listen, for Jon’s heart.
 
“Some health problem,” Aaron told Miles.
 
“Or maybe not.
 
With doctors, you never know, eh?”

Finally her eyes snapped open, a decision made.
  
“We’re heading for Athens,” she said.
 
She came over to where Miles and Aaron were waiting.
 
“We’ll be taking them to the
Giorgios
Hospital complex.
 
It doesn’t seem like they’re in too bad of a condition,” she said, indicating Sam and her daughter.
 
“But for them, it’s probably better to be certain, and for him, I’m afraid he might have suffered something worse.”

“Will he be okay?” Miles asked.

She shrugged.
 
“That’s what we need to find out,” she said.
 
“You will have to go to Athens to see them.
  
There’s no room in the helicopter.”

She made a signal to the pilot, and together they all got into the body of the helicopter.
 
Miles and Aaron watched as it lifted off, thwack-thwack-
ing
quickly towards Athens.
 
Aaron sighed.
 
“You never think that this should happen,” he said, to nobody in particular.
 

They were alone, in an empty field.
 
Miles went into the brush, for the first time, to see if there was more water for the long walk back.
 
There was—Stephan had apparently camped here before.
 
There were jerry cans of water, cans of food, and what looked like a few mess kits from the Second World War.
 
There were also, tucked against the tree trunk, a case filled of beer, and two field cots were nestled in the tiny space, side-by-side.
 
On the other side—outside the “back door”—there was a bare plot of earth, and a circular patch of ashes.
 
It would have been nice to camp here, Miles thought.
 
No wonder he was able to convince Mabel to come away with him.
 
And it looked like he’d stocked away enough beer for all of them.
 
If there hadn’t been a snake, they probably all would have been having some kind of party.
 

Oh, who are you kidding?
 
The way Sam looked during their trek out here, she would probably have killed him on sight with the force of her anger.
 
Or would she have?
 
Miles liked to think that she would have been so relieved that Mabel was all right, that she would have forgiven Stephan, and then they’d all clink beers and someone would shoot a goat (not that he’d seen any goats, but in the myths there was always a goat around to kill) and they’d have a barbecue and then they’d all go back on Aaron’s boat.
 
That was what was supposed to happen, and the more Miles picture it in his head, the more vivid it seemed.
 
He and Stephan would even become friends, and they’d make him promise to come visit again—

It was only then that grief overwhelmed him, not for the loss of Stephan, per se, but for the loss of possibilities in his and Sam’s life.
 
There had been the possibility of so much happiness, and now there would be only grief for everybody who ever thought of Stephan.
 
He’d been walking alongside Aaron for a while, stabbing the ground before him dutifully with his stick, but now he had to sit down.
 
Aaron turned to look at him, and said nothing when he started to sniffle, merely tilted his head and watched him as he cried.
 
At long last, he said, “If you cry so much, you need to drink more.”

For some reason this struck Miles as insanely hilarious, and he started laughing hysterically.
 
He was vaguely aware that this was due to the heat, and his dehydration, which should have bothered him, but all he could do was laugh because it was so.
 
Damn.
 
Funny.
 
Finally, Aaron slapped him, hard, and just as abruptly, the laughter left him, and he and Aaron continued on back to the shore, Miles a bit shamefaced and Aaron as stoic as ever.
 
They didn’t say anything to each other as Aaron piloted the boat back to
Loutraki
.
 
When Miles disembarked, Aaron shook his hand.
 
“Wish them good for me,” Aaron said.
 

“You could come with me,” Miles said.
 

Aaron shook his head.
 
“You don’t need me now,” he said.
 

Miles walked back to his rental car.
 
He’d received a ticket for overstaying in the parking space, but they hadn’t put a boot on the wheels, and it was late in the day so the police station was closed.
 
As he pulled out and pointed the car in the direction of Athens, the ticket fluttered away.
 
He knew he should probably take care of that, but he was having a hard time mustering the guilt required to make him go to the police station.
 
Guilt was too complicated a way to end a day like this, a day of black and white, life and death, joy and grief.
 

~~~

When he got to Athens, he first booked an extra night in his hotel and returned the rental car, opting for a taxi to get him to the hospital.
 
He should have made reservations for a new flight out of Athens, Once there, the nurse at the front desk helped him locate Sam and Mabel—they were in their last hour of observation, she said, before they could be discharged.
 
They were in the general ward.
  
Visiting hours were technically over, she said, but if he asked nicely they would probably let him in with her for the last hour.
 
Miles also asked about Jon.
 
“In the cardiac wing,” the nurse said, frowning.
 
“No visitors allowed at this hour.”

Miles was relieved to see that the hospital gift shop—strange, how hospitals everywhere all seemed to be the same—sold small bouquets, and Miles bought one and had it sent to Jon.
 
He had to ask the clerk to help him write, “My condolences for your loss,” on it, but he signed the card himself.
 
It was the least he could do, he decided.
 
Then he went to see Sam.
 

She was in a room with three other patients, an intravenous line taped to her arm and Mabel snuggled in her bed.
 
On the tray table, the remains of a hospital dinner—a pile of brownish-green sludge that might have been a either a plant or an animal at some point—sat, untouched.
 
They were watching TV, or at least trying to.
 
Mabel kept nodding off, while Sam kept a close guard on her daughter.
 
When they saw him, they both smiled.
 

“Hey,” he said.
 

“Hey,” Sam said.
 
“We’ll be let out soon.”

“I know,” he said.
 
“It’s the only reason why the nurses allowed me to be here at all.”

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“It was the least I could do.”

They watched the TV for a while, but Miles couldn’t make heads or tails of what
Spongebob
was doing.
 
“Jon is in the cardiac unit,” Miles said, after a moment.

Sam nodded.
 
“He had a heart attack on the way here,” she said.
 
“Luckily the medics were already suspicious so the damage shouldn’t be too bad.
 
But still…” She broke off, visibly shaken.
 
“I hope he’s all right.”

“I sent him flowers,” Miles offered.
 

“That’s good of you.”
 
She leaned back against the pillow, and then suddenly sat up again.
 
“Miles, what if he dies?
 
Then I’ll have killed both him and Stephan—“

“Stop,” he said.
 
He leaned over and pressed a kiss to her forehead:
 
There was nothing you could have done.
 
“You haven’t killed
 
anyone,” he said.
 

“If I’d been more clear about my intentions not to date him--

“He made his own choice,” he said, gently, taking her hand.

She withdrew it, and then replaced it.
 
“You’re so much like a Yank,” she said.
 
“You believe everybody makes their own way in this world.
 
No wonder Americans have such a hard time with love.”

“What, you mean to say we don’t suffer the consequences of our decisions?” he asked playfully.

But she wasn’t playing around when she answered, “No, only that our decisions aren’t always our own.”

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.