The Lost Sisterhood

by Anne Fortier

  At no point had it occurred to Myrina the ships might take off without them; in fact, whenever she had envisioned their return from Mycenae, she had seen a pier just as deserted as it had been when they left, with the ships’ crews still fast asleep.

  But the Trojan sailors were up and about, too busy to pay attention to the women. The only one of them receiving the odd glance as they boarded was Kara, limping with exhaustion after the journey across the Argos Plain, and whose makeshift dress consisted of nothing but scarves.

  As they lugged her up the gangplank—slowly, so as not to lose their balance—Myrina caught sight of Paris on deck, looking their way. Arms crossed, he looked to be struggling to contain his temper, and yet he spoke not a word to his crew or to her. He merely watched the women’s approach with eyes that suddenly made Myrina weak with doubt. And then, the moment they were on board at last, he turned away and shouted the order for departure.

  PART IV

  ZENITH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I was picking fresh flowers gathering them into my robe, to take to Athene there in the brazen house when he caught me away through the bright air to this unprofitable country, poor me, made a prize of war

  —EURIPIDES, Helen

  NAFPLIO, GREECE

  MR. TELEMAKHOS DROVE US DOWN TO THE HARBOR JUST AFTER sunrise. Before getting into the car I reminded him of his promise to take me to the airport in the afternoon. “Yes-yes-yes,” he replied, brusquely opening the back door for me, “I know you have more important things to do.” The wounded defiance with which he spoke made me embarrassed to have reopened the issue.

  His boat—a two-master named Penelope—was moored in Nafplio, a few kilometers south of Mycenae. This ancient town had sprung up around a rocky peninsula that jutted far into the Aegean Sea, and its alluring crescent of vibrant façades made it a favorite stop for yachts and cruise ships. Even at seven in the morning the harbor was bustling with sailors enjoying the sun and looking for breakfast.

  The Penelope itself was a wooden ketch with cream-colored sails. The boat was clearly a labor of love, every piece of brass fitting polished to a shine, every sail immaculate.

  “She saved my life,” said Mr. Telemakhos, patting the gleaming golden-brown railing as he climbed on board ahead of us. “Used to be my father’s. He practically lived on her for the last ten years of his life. I didn’t even know he was still alive, but then, one day, he suddenly walked into my kitchen just as I was opening the letter.”

  “What letter?” asked Rebecca, helping him carry supplies on board.

  Mr. Telemakhos grunted and paused to balance a colossal tin of olive oil on his thigh. “The letter from the oligarchs of school administration, saying they didn’t need me anymore. Drink your hemlock, old fossil, they said. Take your scratched-up blackboard and be gone! Young people nowadays want teachers with remote controls.”

  He disappeared belowdecks with the olive oil, but we could still hear his booming voice as he rummaged around the galley. “So I retired. And the doctor said, hey, now that you’re such an old fossil, you can’t eat meat anymore. So I stopped eating meat, and that’s when everything started going wrong in the engine room. Before I knew it … my bookcases were gone.”

  As we helped him lug this and that on board the boat, I had to bite back my impatience. Why were we stocking supplies for an Atlantic crossing when we were just going to nip up the coast and be back in Nafplio by lunchtime? But when I voiced my annoyance to Rebecca, she rolled her eyes and said, “Will you relax? He has gone out of his way to host us; the least we can do is give him a hand.” She shrugged peevishly, still irritated with me for insisting on going home. “The rest of us may go back on the boat once you’ve left.”

  While Nick and Mr. Telemakhos juggled freshwater bottles belowdecks, I called the lodge at my Oxford college to assure the porter I would be back in my office, ready to see students, in a few short hours. Just as I hung up, my father called.

  “Sorry to put you through the grinder,” I said to him. “It’s all been a bit hectic, but I’m coming home tonight.”

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” he replied, in that brusque way of his, dressing his worry in verbal chain mail. “When do you arrive?”

  An ear-piercing drilling sound from below forced me off the boat and onto the pier. Rebecca was already there, sitting on a roll of rope, studying a chart of the coastline. “I’m not sure,” I confessed, steadying myself against a large anchor. The metal was pleasantly warm from the morning sun, but it would take a lot more than that to thaw out my conscience after leaving my poor parents in the dark for so long. Soon, I knew, I would have to confront them with my discovery that Granny’s notebook was not quite the work of madness they had hitherto assumed. Knowing how shocked they would be, it occurred to me that it might be wise to initiate the subject now, long-distance, in order to give them time to recover before we met.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, pressing a hand against my eyes to block out the distractions. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but a couple of weeks ago, I came across an inscription with an undeciphered alphabet.” I could almost hear my father exhaling with relief, thinking it was just about philology after all. “Except it’s not actually undeciphered.” I cleared my throat, struggling to maintain my nerve. “Because it looks like Granny deciphered it at some point. And wrote it down in … that notebook.” I gritted my teeth, bracing for his reaction.

  But I never got it. All I heard was Rebecca’s frightened outcry right behind me…. Then the phone was plucked from my fingers by a blond bowstring of a woman who shot right past me on Rollerblades.

  It happened so quickly I didn’t even fully comprehend I had been robbed until I noticed my empty hand. My body, however, responded instantly.

  Without even a look at Rebecca, I took off after the thief, who was making her way down the pier with strides worthy of an Olympian skier. She probably didn’t realize I was coming after her; only when she reached the harbor promenade and had to slow down for crossing pedestrians did she glance over her shoulder and spot me right behind.

  Because I was running as fast as I could, the woman’s face was blurry to me. But even so, it seemed that after that first grimace of surprise, she actually shot me a contemptuous smile that had the benefit of refueling me with indignation, enabling me to run even faster.

  “Stop!” I yelled, hoping someone would understand the situation and block the thief’s way. But the woman effortlessly slalomed past every obstacle, gathering speed as she went. Eventually, I lost sight of her as she disappeared around a corner, right between two cafés.

  By the time I reached the corner, she was long gone. But I was not quite ready to give up. A narrow pedestrian street stretched ahead of me, and I continued at top speed, checking every side alley as I went. Seeing they all ended either blindly or with a steep staircase, I concluded that the woman had shot right through the deserted street to hook up with some main thoroughfare on the other side.

  I was right. When I finally emerged into the sunlit exposure of an open square, it didn’t take me long to spot a silver Audi idling with its trunk open. Next to it stood the woman I had been following, unlacing her Rollerblades. She was not alone. On the other side of the open trunk stood a woman with a wet suit unzipped to the waist, calmly putting on a T-shirt.

  What should I do? Could I take on this pair all by myself? And what about the car’s driver, gesturing at them to hurry? Irritated with myself for my indecision, I nonetheless started toward the car. When the two women spotted me, the Rollerblade thief immediately slammed the trunk, and they both jumped into the backseat, half undressed. Less than a second later, the silver Audi sped away with squealing tires, leaving me completely alone in the sleepy square.

  Still out of breath, my head throbbing with defeat, I sat down on an overturned trash can to regain composure before eventually making my way back to the boat, my limbs as heavy as if I had run a marathon.

&
nbsp; “Hurry up!” exclaimed Rebecca, who was waiting impatiently for me on the pier. “We have to cancel your phone account before she makes all sorts of expensive calls—”

  “Bex!” I put a hand on her shoulder, but removed it right away when I realized how sweaty I was. “That was not a random pickpocket. This was planned. By someone far away.”

  Rebecca’s forehead contracted into a rather unbecoming mono-brow. “Don’t be absurd. Who would—? Why would they—?”

  “Two more excellent questions to add to the world’s longest list of excellent questions,” I said, climbing on board the boat just as Nick emerged from below decks.

  “We need to find a police station,” insisted Rebecca, staying on the pier.

  “And do what? Sit around for five hours while some grumpy clerk misspells my address on a ten-page form that’s going right back in the filing cabinet?” I shook my head, aware that Nick was looking at us both, mystified. “Let’s just go, for God’s sake.”

  Rebecca was clearly not ready to quit the subject, but Nick’s presence made her hesitate. I had told her about his clandestine phone call and the Amazon Hoard earlier that morning, and although her first reaction had been to exclaim “How exciting! We’re on a treasure hunt. Too bad you’re going home,” it didn’t take her long to agree that something illicit was afoot.

  “Pickpocket,” I finally said, in response to Nick’s raised eyebrows. “On Rollerblades. She took my phone. I almost had her.”

  “Did you?” His eyes did a tour of my disheveled clothes and red face. “You must be the fastest philologist in the world.”

  “Not as fast as I would like,” I said, more sternly than intended. “Please tell me we are ready to go.”

  ONCE WE HAD CLEARED the harbor traffic, I searched through our pile of luggage for the windbreaker Rebecca had lent me. The sunny lee of Nafplio had been deceiving; as soon as we were away from the protected bay, the briskness of the northerly wind reminded us that it was, after all, early November.

  It was then, as I went on to look for my lip balm, that I discovered the full magnitude of the Rollerblade heist. “Bex?” I stood up, tightening my salt-spattered ponytail. “Have you seen my handbag?” It wasn’t technically my handbag, but a tasseled suede loaner from Rebecca, seeing that my own had disappeared in the Knossos labyrinth. “I was sure I put it right here.”

  When we boarded the boat, I had made a point of wrapping the bag in Rebecca’s flight jacket and tucking it underneath Nick’s duffel bag for further concealment. The duffel bag and jacket were still there, but the tasseled wonder was nowhere to be found. Nor could Rebecca remember seeing it since we left port. “Nick,” I said, with growing panic, “have you moved things around?”

  But Nick had no recollection of touching “the hippie bag,” as he called it. While Rebecca and I had been loitering on the pier, he reminded me, he had been hard at work belowdecks.

  Maybe it was the choppy sea, or maybe it was the shocking confrontation with my own stupidity … but I suddenly felt woozy. Leaning against the boom, I had to fight to keep down the ham-and-sausage omelet Mr. Telemakhos had made us for our predawn breakfast. Granny’s notebook had been in that bag. And now it was gone.

  “Dee?” Rebecca gave my arm a little shake. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course!” I tried to laugh. “Now someone else will have to pay off my credit cards. And my passport was just about to expire anyway.”

  Despite my efforts at making light of the whole thing, Nick wasn’t fooled. He kept glancing at me, as if half-expecting me to blurt out some terrible confession along the lines of having carried around stolen gold coins, sewn into the lining of that unfortunate bag.

  Little did he know that, to me, losing Granny’s notebook was so much more devastating than any monetary loss could ever be. It was bad enough that I had lost the long list of translated words; I also couldn’t shake a feeling that there had been a mystery within the notebook I had yet to grasp … a secret message I had yet to find. And now I never would.

  ON MY TENTH BIRTHDAY—a sunny Saturday in April—Rebecca had arrived for the party an hour early, her face blotched from crying. “He was hit by a car,” she whimpered, as we hurried up the staircase together, away from the inflating balloons and rising birthday buns. “Mr. Perkins said there was nothing he could do. So, my father went out and dug a hole in the garden, behind the strawberry bed.”

  It took some calm prompting from Granny to make Rebecca sit down in the armchair and recount the story of Spencer’s death in a coherent manner. “Father wouldn’t even let me hold him,” was the sad conclusion to the dog’s hasty burial, “or talk to him. He said I had to pull myself together, because”—she could barely get out the words—”everything happens for a reason.”

  “That is wrong,” agreed Granny, who, to her credit, had either forgotten or suppressed her disdain of Spencer. “Death is a test. This is when we must remember that we are humans, and not animals.”

  Despite strict instructions to never leave the property without my parents, Granny put on her dressing gown and took us both over to the vicarage. We snuck into the garden via the little wooden bridge connecting it with the churchyard, where Rebecca assured us we were not visible from the house.

  “I assume this is the place?” said Granny, stopping at a small circle of freshly turned dirt with two shovels sticking out.

  “Yes,” nodded Rebecca, still sobbing. “He’s down there. All alone.”

  “Well,” said Granny, liberating the shovels. “Let’s dig him up.”

  It did not occur to me to protest. Seeing the determination with which Rebecca embraced the task, I started digging, too, while Granny stood right beside us, overseeing the work. When we finally spotted a tuft of white fur, barely a foot into the ground, Granny pushed us both aside and personally dug out the rest of the dog with her hands. “Here,” she said, placing the limp body in Rebecca’s arms as gently as if it had been a sleeping baby. “Now you can talk to him.” Then she sat down right there, on the little heap of dirt we had just dug up, and waited.

  I have no idea how long we stayed there, waiting for Rebecca to stop crying. In the beginning, I had cried, too, over the shock of the whole thing, and later at the sight of the dead dog I had known so well. But after a while all I could think of was Rebecca, and whether she would ever be my happy, funny friend again.

  We were all stiff with cold by the time Rebecca finally sighed deeply and said, “I’m so tired.” She had been lying on the ground with Spencer in her arms, but now she sat up sluggishly, so pale and worn I was afraid she was going to faint.

  “Good,” said Granny, looking as if the damp ground did not affect her at all. “Now collect his favorite things. His bed, his best toy, something to eat—”

  “His leash?” suggested Rebecca, struggling to focus her swollen eyes on Granny’s face.

  “Did he like his leash?”

  “He always got happy when he saw it,” said Rebecca, chin trembling again.

  “Off you go, then, both of you,” ordered Granny. “Help each other, and come back here as quickly as you can. Hurry-hurry-hurry!”

  When Spencer was finally laid to rest on his blue cushion, with his favorite things around him—all snatched from the house while the vicar and his wife were busy with a clogged toilet—Rebecca started crying again, and so did I. But it was a different kind of sadness now.

  “Remember,” said Granny, “you can always come back and talk to him whenever you like. But now he has to sleep a little. Bow your heads.” We dutifully did as she said, while Granny recited a long string of words in a foreign language. We understood none of them, but they had a strangely soothing effect. Then she gave us the shovels and told us to fill up the hole. When we were done, she took a handful of soil and brushed it over our faces with her palm. “You are in grief,” she told Rebecca, framing the dirt-smeared face with her hands. “But you have done the right thing.”

  It was not until we stepped throu
gh the front door of my house that I suddenly remembered the birthday party. A few balloons were floating about aimlessly, and there was a warm smell of ginger cake, but the whole house was eerily silent. A small collection of gift bags sat on the tile floor beneath the coat rack, but the gift givers were nowhere to be seen. Only then did I hear the clock in the living room strike five. The birthday invitations with the embossed silver horses had said three o’clock.

  Just as we were tiptoeing up the staircase, my parents appeared in the kitchen door. They were both grave and pale, but they didn’t say anything, merely watched us as we stood there caked with dirt, not knowing whether to go up or down. “I fear this is all my fault,” said Rebecca to them in a feeble, but unfaltering voice. “And I apologize. I know it’s all … quite unforgivable.”

  “Well,” said my mother, pulling her shawl more tightly around her, “why don’t you girls come and have some birthday cake?”

  After that day, there were no more nocturnal discussions in the living room, no more appealing glares from my mother to my father … merely silence. A pained, exhausted silence, heavy with finality. And within a week, my parents began driving off to meetings in faraway places, only to return with brochures and forms that they were careful to hide from me.

  But I knew, with a child’s instinctive grasp of adult skullduggery, where all this was going. They were preparing to send Granny away, to some impenetrable building with unsmiling men and large iron keys, and I would never see her again. They would strap her to a bed and put needles in her arm, and it would be my fault—for letting her be my friend.

  THE ONLY ONE NOT afflicted by the theft was Mr. Telemakhos, who stubbornly refused to think of my handbag as being stolen. “It will show up!” he kept saying, waving a hairy hand at the wondrous ways of fate. “They always do.”

  To hide my misery, I threw myself into every available task around the boat and endeavored to ruminate as little as possible. The scheme was so effective it took me over an hour to look up from what I was doing. Only then did I feel a tremor of suspicion. If we were just going up the coast, why was there nothing but bright blue sea in every direction?