This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  Tick paused, stilled. “If you want.”

  He didn’t really seem to care, and Renee was a little offended. They traded standard assurances, that they were free of disease, that nothing terrible would come of whatever they decided.

  “Then go without,” she said, and he just nodded. He didn’t ask if she was on the pill. She expected to have the opportunity to tell him that she wasn’t using anything, hadn’t since she and the Frog broke up. She’d planned on seeing how he reacted. But because he didn’t ask, she felt strange announcing it. Renee wasn’t sure in that moment that Tick was even thinking about their conversation in the restaurant. But he did as she suggested, and Renee was unwilling to stop him.

  Afterward, Tick slept, and Renee watched his still face, his closed eyes. He looked strangely beautiful in a fragile way, like Greek statuary reduced to a head or a torso and a placid, immovable expression. “Tick,” Renee whispered, and when he didn’t move said, “Tock.” She put her hand in his hair and tugged it gently back and forth. “Tick tock,” she said. It was so rare that she saw him sleep. He looked very vulnerable. He made her want to do something for him, although she was not sure what that might be. He looked like he needed something, and she didn’t know what.

  He was in the bathroom when the phone rang the next morning. It was an American voice on the other end, a woman. “Do you know a boy named Ticknor Whitworth?” she asked.

  A boy, Renee thought. Tick as a boy. There was a long pause.

  “This is his mother.”

  “Oh.” Renee was startled, reluctant to announce that Tick was in the shower, with all that implied about their relationship. “I can have him call you.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine. Is there a problem?”

  “I just need to make sure he’s okay. I lost track of him after Corfu. When his friends left. One of them called from Dubrovnik. They said he was scaring them. I don’t know what they should have done. They said they thought they could send a message by leaving.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I believe they thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “Professor Whitworth,” Renee said, because the woman’s occupation was the sole thing she knew about her. Renee paused when she heard how ridiculous it sounded, as if she were enrolled in a difficult class and needed help with the material.

  “Ava,” Mrs. Whitworth said. “It’s Ava, please.”

  “Tick was already in town when I got here. He’s been on the mainland for weeks.”

  “I’ve been calling all the hostels. He told someone in Patrai that he was headed to Nafplio. The hostel there said he’d moved to the Pension Dioscouri. I described him to your desk clerk. She said she couldn’t give the number but she’d connect me. She said he was staying there with an older woman. She said you were a dentist.”

  Renee wondered what Mrs. Whitworth was picturing. What was “an older woman”? Than Tick, almost anyone.

  “I had an extra bed,” Renee lied. “And the local hostel’s pretty down at heel. He was traveling on a budget, and I thought I might as well offer.”

  “I’m glad someone’s looking after him,” Ava said, not without suspicion in her voice, and Renee wondered if what she was doing with Tick could be called looking after.

  “Is he still using?” Ava asked, and Renee almost answered “Using what?” before her throat clamped closed in the rush of recognition. Of course. Of course of course of course. The lightning of him, the flint and the spark. The frantic energy and confusion and the way he was too old to act so young, too young to look so ragged, his graying teeth and angry skin. Renee’s face flamed; below her stomach her insides clenched, as if last night was something her body could disallow. Ava took her silence as confirmation.

  “I’m glad you’re there. You’re making sure he eats?”

  Renee nodded, said yes. She was making sure Tick ate. She was doing that much.

  “Can you tell him to check his email? I’ve written him—I don’t know how many times I’ve written him.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “What’s your name?” The woman’s voice was suddenly sharp and needy.

  “Renee.”

  “Are you a mother, Renee?”

  She was silent. The water shut off in the bathroom. “I have to go.”

  “Let me give you my number. It’s a new cell phone. Can you give it to him? As a mother, I’m asking you. Please help send him home.”

  As the woman recited the number, Renee jotted it down automatically on the hotel notepad. The bathroom door began to open, and Renee hung up without making any promises, any plans, without comforting the woman or saying goodbye.

  Tick emerged, flushed and wrapped in a towel. “What?” he asked when he saw her staring. “Enjoying the view?”

  Renee’s left hand was still hovering by the phone, her right still holding the pen.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Nobody. The front desk.”

  “You made notes.”

  “It’s—a number we’re supposed to call if we have any complaints. A customer satisfaction thing.” Renee ripped the page from the notebook. “You have any complaints?”

  “Nope.” Tick frowned slightly as she folded the note tightly into halves, quarters, eighths. “You’d better get ready, if we’re going to make that bus you wanted.”

  Renee nodded, stood and carried the note with her into the bathroom.

  Every gesture, every possible conversation, felt more difficult than simply going through the motions of the day. She packed her sightseeing bag: camera, water bottle, sunscreen. She added a book and pulled it out as soon as they took their seats on the bus. When Tick saw that she wasn’t going to be any fun, he put earphones in, loud music seeping murkily out, and played a complicated tapping game with his own fingers. The bus was largely empty, and a few old women gave them odd looks, these mismatched strangers who could have their own seats.

  The book, her favorite, was too familiar to be a distraction. Renee anticipated the plot points, the suitor’s suspicion that his lover had been unfaithful: One woman, a hundred snakes/ One woman, a thousand piles of garbage, he wrote her, while the woman groped for the nouns that could vindicate her. Finally the suitor came rushing back, a handmaid having snuck away to tell him the truth. This part had never bothered her before, but now she felt cheated at the omissions. She needed to know what the handmaid had found to say, what single speech had rescued them all. “Tick,” she whispered, as curious as anyone to know what her next words might be. With his earphones in, he didn’t hear her. He was playing air-drums with a pencil and a tube of chapstick, his eyes closed.

  They toured the Sanctuary of Asklepios, where ancient Greeks once brought their illnesses to the gods of healing. There was a temple where the afflicted spent the night and hoped to dream their cures, to wake up knowing how to solve themselves. Tick wandered off and Renee walked the old foundations in a daze. The sun was climbing, the day already hot, and Renee sat with her back against a boulder. Nothing had changed, she tried to tell herself. Tick was always Tick; she was just seeing him now in his proper light. Ava Whitworth’s phone number was a stone in her pocket. Renee knew what she was supposed to do—place it in Tick’s palm and curl his fingers over it, urge him to call his family and get the help he needed. Instead she lowered herself onto the dirt and flagstones, spread her arms out against the warm ground and pointed her toes. She could just lie there, she thought, until her child-hunger faded to a murmur, to something impossible and half-remembered. She could wait until Tick had crashed or somehow gotten sober, bad enough or well enough to go home on his own, no longer her responsibility. She could lie there until all her choices were gone and Asklepios appeared to her bones to take credit for the cure. A tour group approached and then faded down another route. She asked her body, part by part, whether anything felt different, flaring with infection or improbable life. The reports came in from her flexe
d toes and fingers, from her nervous stomach and lower, from the cradle of her hips and between her legs. No, they said. Probably not, they said. It was a single night, they said, and she felt emptier than ever, her body stripped even of the possibility of disaster. She should be changed, and all she was was humiliated. She thought dark words about Ava Whitworth, who was granted a child and managed to misplace him like a lost suitcase, delivered accidentally to Renee’s doorstep.

  A single set of footsteps came closer and she opened her eyes. Tick was standing above her. He noticed her squinting in the sun and leaned forward, his body shading her. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Just fine. You?”

  Tick shrugged.

  They took another bus to Mycenae, the next stop on their planned itinerary. They traced the upper Acropolis and the Cyclopean walls. All just piles of stones. They looked out at the dry, yellow hills, planted with orderly rows of olive trees. They stood among the ruins and decided they were ready to go. The day felt very long.

  They consulted the bus times listed in the guidebook but waited at the stop nearly an hour. There was a tiny post office kiosk in the parking lot where the clerk made them buy something, a single stamp, before she explained that the buses had switched to new off-season schedules. It was September, the woman said, and the next bus to Nafplio wouldn’t leave for nearly three hours.

  “Let’s go back up to the site, I guess,” Tick said. He licked their stamp and stuck it to his forehead.

  “You could have used that,” Renee said.

  “I am using it.”

  “To send mail. I was going to buy you a postcard. You never write to anyone.”

  “I make cards. I don’t want more.”

  They walked up the wide stone ramp, through the Lion Gate back into the heart of the old citadel, where Tick read from the guidebook to pass the time. He wriggled his butt onto a comfortable rock, announced, “I have gazed upon the ass groove of Agamemnon.” He put names to the heaps of stone Renee had no patience for, the storeroom of the archers and the temple of Hera. “Listen to this,” he perked up. “Apparently there’s ‘an underground cistern, approached by a long flight of uneven, unlit stone steps, ending in an abrupt five meter drop into icy water. While not explicitly off-limits to tourists, the descent is discouraged for obvious reasons. Anyone considering it should be equipped with a good flashlight and take the proper precautions.’”

  He looked at Renee until she shrugged, aware she was disappointing him.

  “What are we doing still sitting around here?” Tick asked rhetorically.

  “The pitch-dark, five-meter drop and icy water are three reasons I’m still sitting here.”

  “Come on,” Tick urged. “Where’s your sense of adventure? We’ve got ages ’til the bus.”

  This convinced Renee, this reminder that unless they descended into the cistern, they would have to make hours of conversation.

  They didn’t have a flashlight, and there weren’t any for sale in the parking lot souvenir stand. They took Renee’s camera out of the backpack and tested the flash. In the daylight, it looked feeble. They found the entrance marked on the guidebook map, a simple stone doorframe leading down into blackness. Renee felt a shiver of excitement; American tourist attractions would never allow such danger, such palpable potential harm.

  There was the awkwardness of deciding who would go first, when Tick took her camera and held it in front of him. “I’ll protect you,” he said. “My Lady of Mycenae.”

  Renee stretched her arm in front of her and took his shoulder like a blind woman as they descended. Tick took a picture of nothingness and in the flash, fading as soon as it burst, they shuffled forward. The steps were uneven and worn smooth. Renee slipped once and nearly knocked them both over. The flash illuminated only a foot or two ahead and in the darkness the flash blinded as much as it helped. Renee wasn’t sure how much battery-life was left in the camera. “Do you think we should turn back?” she asked.

  “No way,” Tick said with sincerity, but he paused in the dark. Renee could feel his shoulder lowering the camera. They listened to the darkness, to the sound of their breath. It felt like they had been descending forever. Tick reached back with one arm and took her hand. His palm was soft and warm, slightly damp, and Renee was filled with tenderness. There was nothing else. No light, no sound. No burble of water. Then the mechanical click and wheeze of light, and the next stumble forward, the lengthening and closing of their joined arms as they descended together.

  Then the flash illuminated a blank stone wall.

  “The hell?” Tick said, and pulled his hand away, triggering the flash over and over until Renee grabbed his arm.

  “They’ve sealed it off.” She held his hand and they rotated in a tight circle, illuminating the squared-off edges of a small landing, bricked on three sides by solid stone.

  “It isn’t here,” he said, sounding shocked.

  “Or it’s been drained, and we’ve been walking down into where the water used to be.” Renee was disappointed but relieved.

  “It isn’t here,” Tick repeated, and continued to flash the camera in a circle. “It was supposed to be here. The book said it would be here. It’s supposed to be here,” Tick chanted.

  “So they changed it,” Renee said. “It’s okay.”

  Tick fumbled the camera, his fingers illuminated as they groped at the falling flash. Renee heard the camera hit the ground, then the sound of what she thought was Tick kicking it against the bottom of the stairs. “Tick,” she said, scolding.

  “It isn’t fucking fair,” he wailed. She could hear the flat, thin percussion of skin against stone, his hands, she assumed, slapping the walls. “Tick, stop,” she said, and said it again, as the sound continued. “Stop!” she yelled, when she heard a dull, rounder sound, what she was terrified was the thud of his forehead against rock. She got her arms around him and managed to turn him and push him down the wall. She was grateful that he was so thin. She slid herself behind him, her legs spread to fit around his hips. He tensed, then leaned his head against her shoulder. She stroked his hair with her right hand, held him tightly across the ribcage with her left. Eventually he was quiet. She curved a palm on his forehead and felt a strange, smooth square. The postage stamp, she remembered.

  “Renee?” Tick finally whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to be a dad,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Oh Tick.” She pressed her right temple against his left and they breathed together. His skin was damp. “It isn’t, is it? I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have ever asked you.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She drew both arms firmly around him and felt him shake. “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I’ll think of something else,” she said, and meant that too. She said it for herself, not Tick, and hearing it aloud she believed that she would. Her legs ached, spread on the hard ground. She stretched them out farther and her toes brushed the front edge of the bottom step. She was comforted by the stairway now, that in the dark it offered them a direction, a single possibility. She held Tick tighter and rocked him. “Are you ready to go home now?” she asked. She listened to his body for an answer. She listened to her own.

  In a moment, they would rise and go.

  This Is Not Your City

  Nika is missing. Her daughter is missing, and there are two policemen in Daria’s kitchen. She does not know what to say to them. “Do you want coffee?” she asks, her voice cracking on the upswing of the question. It is one of the only perfect sentences she knows, one of the first she learned. The policemen shake their heads, and Daria’s husband Paavo makes it understood that he will answer their questions, sign their forms. He lifts his fingers curled around an invisible pen and signs his name with a flourish on the air. Daria goes to sit on Paavo’s bed. Missing is better than it could be. Paavo had groped for the word in his dictionary. The policemen looked embarrassed for them, and Daria remembered w
hy she did not usually open the door to strangers. The first entry Paavo pointed to meant gone, and Daria almost died. It was several minutes, terrible gestures, the younger policeman with his hand like a visor on his forehead, pretending to look for her daughter under the cupboards, until Daria understood as much as she did.

  She has left the kitchen still holding Paavo’s dictionary. They each have one, pocket-sized, with a larger one on the bookshelf in the living room. They have not needed the big one yet; their conversation is not so complex. She turns to dead in Russian and rips out the page. She will eat it, she thinks, like an old-time spy, so no one can bring her bad news. She thinks she is joking to herself until she takes a bite of the upper-right corner. She chews and swallows, creases the page in half, tears a bite from the middle. She unfolds it and holds it up in front of the window. It is late evening, but the sun is still up. She washed and bleached the curtains a week ago and admires through the paper how white they are now. The page is soft but substantial, good to chew. It has a flat taste like raw oats. She realizes that Paavo would not need this page to tell her that her daughter is dead. He would turn, of course, to the Finnish, and Daria has already swallowed the translation so she does not know what word to rip out. She eats the rest of the Russian page anyway.

  Daria hears the policemen leave, and Paavo comes into the bedroom, gestures for his dictionary. He sits on the edge of the bed with a pencil and pad of paper, and Daria is relieved that he doesn’t notice the missing page. He looks studious, reading glasses pushed down his nose as he writes things out for her, his Cyrillic letters as misshapen as a child’s. Nika and Matti, her boyfriend, have not come back from their camping trip. They were due in the morning at Matti’s house to return the car and were going to spend the day there. All day Matti’s mother tried to call his cell phone. All day nothing, and at dinnertime she called the police. A Russian interpreter will be by tomorrow morning, to explain things better, to ask Daria some questions. Daria nods.