by Alex A King
"In the world," Kiki says. When the coffee comes, it's cold and missing its sugar. Kiki drinks. It tastes like her life.
18
Helena
After Kiki is gone, Helena drops into the chair beside Stavros.
"Don't say anything. Please."
The good son says nothing.
"I'm losing my mind. Maybe it's already gone."
19
Leo
A stranger comes to town.
No, not really. But he may as well be. It's been about that long.
The bus passes out at the curb. The way its engine dies, it might never get up again.
He steps off the bus and into deja vu. He's been here before, but in a smaller, younger body, getting on the bus with his Greek father and American mother, who hated the place. As the lights of Volos faded behind them, she said, "So long, God forsaken shit-hole." His father choked on his cigarette, jabbed his thumb at Leo. Leo, the kid, didn't care. Hearing his mother swear was like watching porn. It was exciting, dangerous, and eventually someone would need tissues.
"Leonidas!"
There's only one person standing there, calling his name. A man older than dirt—and Greek dirt is older than most.
"Papou?"
"Socrates. Grandfather makes me sound old, and I am in my prime." He opens his arms. "Come here!"
Leo accepts the hug and gives one back. "How did you know I was coming?"
"A vision told me you would be on this bus."
"A vision?"
"Yes, that is what I say." He looks Leo up, down. "What is with the uniform?"
Five weeks and it's like he was born in the thing. "I'm in the army."
"What for? Are you stupid? Because when you left here you were not a stupid boy. But who knows what happens in America? They do many stupid things."
"No choice, Papou. They snatched me off the plane."
And took his passport. And threw him into basic training. And denied him clemency. He spent this morning appealing to the US Embassy, but they showed him their best shrugs. Now here he is, searching for alternatives.
"Socrates."
"Socrates."
"Okay," his grandfather says. "We can fix that. I do not have a basement, but you can dig one under my house and hide there."
Leo slaps him on the back. "Great idea. Let's do that."
"The older I get, the better my ideas are. When I am dead I will be Greece's biggest genius. Can you drive?"
"I can drive."
"Can you drive a motorcycle?"
"Sure."
"Good. You drive. I will sit on the back and watch the girls."
It's a moped built for one. Two is risky, at best, and its heartbeat doesn't have much enthusiasm. His grandfather helps by throwing out a bunch of encouraging curse words. Nobody violates religious figures like the Greeks.
The moped does what it can. Soon they're putt-putting through the streets of Volos, down to the road that hugs the gulf.
It's like he remembered, but more vivid. His childhood memory is of a watercolor, but this is an oil painting. The Pagasetic Gulf is a bowlful of blue-green marbles, constantly shifting. Saints Constantine and Helena's church is still on its urban corner, flanked by a park and the sea. It watches over the promenade and the long string of tavernas. Today a man is scraping its backside with a bucket and brush, brushing away the fack spray-painted on its rock.
Leo laughs. Things never change.
"Stop," Socrates hollers in his ear. "I lost my hair."
There's traffic both ways, but not too much, so Leo does a quick u-turn. Sure enough, there's his grandfather's toupee sitting in the opposite lane. From here it looks like roadkill. One car zips over it. Two. The synthetic hair flaps in the breeze.
"Can't you get a new one?"
"It is my lucky hair. I won it in a donkey race."
"Donkeys race?"
"It was a very slow race." He nods to the hair. "In my vision, you pick up my hair."
It's the least he can do. Leo parks the moped, snatches up the hair, leaps back in time to avoid being hit by a truck filled with watermelons and Roma.
"We curse your sons with four nipples!" one of the men yells.
Leo laughs. What else can he do—they're already gone.
Sons. He wonders if he'll ever have them. Or daughters. Daughters would be nice. Healthy, happy, that's what matters.
Too bad he and Tracy could never agree. Before they married she was determined to have kid and so was he. Right up until his sister-in-law had a child with Down's Syndrome. Then Tracy started singing a different song, where the chorus was "No kids. Not ever."
The no-kids thing was one of many nails in the coffin.
Socrates slaps his hair into place, then they're rolling again toward Agria.
Agria. It's a suburb of Volos now, but from what Socrates has been telling him, you don't say that too loud. Agria, to the people who live there, is still Agria. They refuse to be a subset.
St George's fills its same old slot at the southwest end of the promenade. Butted up against its right flank is the playground where he used to hang. It's wild with children today. Parents everywhere; there never used to be any.
"That's new," he says. "Almost no parents when I played there."
"Very new," Socrates tells him. "There was a murder, and now everybody is crazy. Bah! They act like we have not seen murder before. We have seen plenty of murders, but we called them accidents. It is this detective. He sees murder everywhere, even when it is a hangnail."
"Who was it?"
"Kristos and Helena Boutos's boy. He was hungry, so he ate a gun. Or someone fed it to him."
"Vaguely familiar."
"A wild boy. But a very good accountant. And now everybody thinks his fiancée did the murder."
"Did she?"
Socrates scoffs in his ear. "If anyone can kill a man it is a woman. Especially an angry woman. But I know that woman and she is not angry, except at me."
"What did you do, Socrates?"
"Maybe I pinched her bottom."
"Maybe?"
"Eh, maybe. Her bottom is a very nice bottom."
The moped chugs along the waterfront. After all this time and his body still remembers the way home. It knows when to take a left at the grimy old waterfront supermarket, and left again at the Agria's first apartment building on Drakia Road.
His grandfather's house sits on the same old corner, across from a tiny bakery and a shack that pretends to be a grocery store. Chickens everywhere. Turkeys, too. The old cat lounging in the bakery window watches the birds with one open eye. The other eye other doesn't give a damn.
Same old dump, his grandfather's place. Hasn't seen whitewash in what looks like forever.
They used to live here, with Socrates, when he was a kid. His mother hated that, too. It's one of a million reasons why they left.
Yeah, it's definitely the same-old, right down to the outhouse sitting next to the chicken coop. No chickens, but there's a stack of newspapers sitting outside the outhouse door.
"No toilet paper?"
Socrates slaps him on the back. "What do I want toilet paper for? Better to wipe on the Greek news. That is what I think of the politics now. Come, you can have your old room. The bed is still there."
"Hey, Papou, do you have a phone?"
"Socrates. It is in the kitchen. Who you need to call, eh?"
"My folks."
"Give your mother and brother my love, but give your father a little fart, eh?"
* * *
It's one of those old rotary phones. With a cord. Been a while since he saw one of those.
When he lived here there was no phone. If you wanted to talk to someone, you did it the Greek way: stand in their front yard and yell. So this is progress.
He'd use his cell phone, but it's dead. No Internet meant there was no paying the bill.Yeah, yeah, there's auto-pay for everything now, but sometimes companies have a way of randomly snatching out more than their d
esignated share. It's not that he doesn't trust them, it's that he doesn't trust them.
He laughs at himself, because for this one thing he should have trusted them. Then he wouldn't be relying on his grandfather's antique.
He dials his mother's cell number, but nothing. Just her prompting him to leave a message. Leo's not big on leaving messages, so he calls Dad next.
Dad's not busy. He picks up on the second ring.
"Dad, it's me."
"Leo? Where are you?"
"Still in Greece. I'm on leave."
Mumble mumble, then: "Still in Greece? How soon will you be back?"
"I don't know. How is Mom?"
"Not better, but not worse."
His father almost sounds convinced of his own lie.
20
Kiki
The kitchen is hot, steamy. There's a breeze floating through the window and door, but it's only passing through.
"Have you spoken with Thea Helena recently?"
Mama looks away from the pot she's stirring. It's thick with rizogalo.
* * *
You want diabetes? Come, eat some of Greece's rice pudding. It's made of sugar, rice, and a half dozen cans of NOYNOY (pronounced noo-noo) evaporated milk. One bite and you'd better start shopping for a larger wardrobe. Or take the whole bowl and call a doctor the morning.
* * *
"No. She will not speak to me." The spoon stirs faster, acting out Mama's frustrations.
"I went to see her today."
"So?"
"She needs help."
Now Margarita Andreou abandons her spoon, looks at her daughter with twenty-eight years of exasperation. "Kiki, you cannot help somebody who does not want to be helped."
Sure she can. It happens all the time.
* * *
With her hands on the wheel of Soula's Mini Cooper, Kiki runs away.
("Why must you buy a red car, Soula?" Mama had said when her sister bought the Mini home. "Red! People will think you are a communist! Only the communists buy red cars.")
"Take it," Soula insisted when Kiki asked to borrow her car. "I can catch the bus—no problem."
"Are you sure?"
"Always I am sure of everything."
Now here she is zipping up Mount Pelion, in search of inner peace or a skull-crushing pile of wisdom, because she's fresh out.
Helena needs help. Right now, she's a bag filled with shattered pieces. But Kiki won't be the one to hang her insanity on the line for the neighbors to see. Maybe Helena doesn't care now, while her mind lives in its cozy fog, but she will—in time.
In a place like Agria, where the minds lean toward small, one drop of insanity is the same as a bucketful. So Kiki needs to step carefully, lest she drip blood in the water.
Beautiful day, but it barely registers. She's too busy dodging sheep and buses fat with tourists, creeping up and down the mountain. There's no room for speed here; the road threads itself around one sharp, steep corner, then another. Occasionally, a sapling breaks off the main ribbon of faded blacktop and jags left. Houses and shops bud off that one thin vein and form villages.
People live in small pockets all over Mount Pelion, every one its own miniature paradise.
(Pick up any postcard and you'll see.)
She's relieved when it's her turn to cut away from the road, bump down the path that leads to the Holy Mother. Her cousin Max's Jeep is parked outside, so she will have two counselors. Her timing is perfect. Max is a physician—a pediatrician, yes, but he will know somebody who can help Helena. And he knows Agria well enough to fly beneath its omnipresent Cylon-like radar.
Peace washes over her as she tugs opens the wooden door that sits in the rock's face. The cool air rushes out, pulls her into its arms. This unusual church dwells in a natural cavern. Hundreds of years ago, the Greek Orthodox church made itself at home here, and there's been no reason to leave.
It takes a few moments for her eyes to adjust, for the light to come. Pinpricks, at first, then the pale glow of candles left by those who care. Unlike St George's, and most Greek Orthodox churches, the Holy Mother's interior doesn't look like King Midas sneezed on the walls and icons. The real gold here is not a metal.
She lights her own candles, presses their stems into the sand-filled dish. For Thea Helena and Theo Kristos, for Stavros, for her family. And a fourth for Detective Lemonis, may he find his man—or woman.
Where most Greek Orthodox churches separate the sexes during services, the Holy Mother seats everyone equally. Kiki slides into a pew, bows her head until it's touching the cool wood of the seat in next row.
What now?
Marriage to Stavros has been a fixed point for so many years, an inevitable evening star. His death has left her untethered, free.
It's been so long since she was a loose end. Which way will the breeze blow her next?
It's an illusion. She is anything but free. Not now, when almost every finger in town wants to pin her to a dartboard. Kiki is the flavor of the month, if the flavor is ass. Already she's hearing the whispers. They don't know why she killed Stavros, only that she killed him. Who else would want him dead? Nobody. Stavros was a one-man party. And they love a good party.
Therefore Kiki is the crowned queen of the party poopers.
A warm body slides into the seat next to her. Max.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey. You okay?"
A small shiver as her body adjusts to the cooler clime. "More or less."
"When you're ready, there's frappe upstairs with your name on it." He squeezes her hand, then he's gone.
"Tell me what to do next," she whispers. But the man at the head of the class is silent, crying on his wooden cross.
21
Kiki
True fact: There is frappe and it is perfection in a glass. Kostas makes it the way she likes it: coffee, cold water, ice, too much sugar, and a splash of milk when the shaking is over and the glass is wall-to-wall foam. He shoves the straw in and sets it in front of her.
"I love you," she tells her cousin.
"I know. I'm a lovable guy."
Max laughs. "He wishes."
There's a sparkle in Kostas's eyes that never fully goes away. "I wish for many things, brother. But that is a fact."
Max laughs harder.
Good-looking men her cousins. Tall, dark, handsome. The kind of faces the camera—and women—love. Kostas's nose leans a little to the side. He was the family's bad boy, and like all bad boys, eventually his nose met an angry husband with a retsina bottle in his hand. But that was years ago. Kostas is a changed man, a holy man. He settled down with the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and now all four of them are happy—cozy in this village, in this small apartment above his church. And who wouldn't be happy here? The view alone lifts the weight from her shoulders and sets it aside. If she squints, she can see where the Earth curves away from Greece, toward Turkey.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," she murmurs.
Now both men laugh. "You and everyone else in our family," Kostas says.
She smiles, but the laughter won't come. "What would you do if someone you knew went mad?"
Max takes a short drink of his frappe. "Are you talking about your grandmother? She's always been just this side of crazy."
Head shake. "Thea Helena. Stavros's mother."
"She lost a child," Kostas says gently. "Let her have her madness. It will fade, in time."
"Not always," Max says. "It's not natural, outliving your children, and the mind knows it. I'd go crazy, too."
Kiki stirs the foam, licks it off the straw. "This is more than grief. She needs help. She really believes Stavros is still alive."
It's not easy, but she tells these two men she trusts about the visit.
Please don't let them laugh.
They don't laugh.
Max is the first to speak. "Do you think she's a danger to herself or to anyone else?"
"Maybe," she says. "I don't know. The doll sounded
menacing, like it hates me."
Kostas looks at his older brother. "This one is in your hands. It is too big for the church."
"Are you saying God can't handle it?" Max says.
"I'm saying that for some things, God put the more suitable tools in your hands."
Kiki says, "Max?"
Max nods. "I know some excellent psychologists. But I can't compel Kyria Bouto to meet with them, unless she's dangerous or in danger."
"Triantafillou?" Kostas asks.
Max nods. "She'd be my first choice."
That's the rub, isn't it? A benign madness is never a call to arms. "She believes he's alive, Max. Truly believes it. She's giddy with joy."
Max nods. "Kostas, maybe we can talk with Kyrios Boutos together. His generation, he won't listen to Kiki. And odds are he won't listen to a doctor, either."
"So the church needs to stage an intervention. I'm not his priest, but I can still speak on behalf of God, for some things."
Kiki slumps on the table. "Thank you."
"What about you, little cousin?" the priest asks. "How are you coping?"
"I'm great," she says, glancing up at him. "This is what I wanted—right? Not for Stavros to be dead, of course. But I wanted my freedom, and now I have it."
Max says, "Until your mother lines up another husband."
She looks at Max in horror. He holds up both hands. "Joking," he says. "Joking."
"He has no sense of humor, that one," Kostas says. "He can joke about arranged marriages, now that he is happy."
It wasn't too long ago, Max was staring down the barrel of an arranged marriage, contrived between her aunt and an old family friend. Max escaped. Barely. She never met Anastasia, but she's heard the horror stories.
Max shrugs. "It's sad about Stavros. He was an okay guy. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be glad you're free."
"They think I did it."
