The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (43 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Take your time, he told her. Pace yourself. This could take a while.

She flipped on her back to gaze at the sad receding outline of the
Sea Nymph
still afloat, wanting to witness the exact moment she went down. Backstroking, she
checked on her father breaststroking, his head up like a golden retriever, then rotated
her own head to get a better sense of her bearings out in the bay, the current already
tugging them past the solitary clump of lights on the southern shore, the storm paused
atop the northern peninsula, its interior roiling with belches of sheet lightning.
My God, she thought with callow reverence, swimming idly,
We’re so alone
. She rolled on her stomach and with a sudden burst of energy raced ahead for the
pleasure of it, just to the addictive point where her body exerted predominance over
her mind and then she stopped and treaded water, waiting for her father to catch up
but he was not there. She called out to him in the darkness and swam back toward the
beacon of his muffled voice.

The length of his image was wrapped in a snowy shroud of phosphorescence, greenish
flakes of swirling light, and she heard him speak—
Let’s stay together
—before she could read the strain of his face. Her father’s condition, as it had throughout
the day, distressed her, and when he groaned she made him confess to leg cramps and
relieved him of the duty of the dry bag and tied its cord around her own ankle. She
tried to grab the collar of his life vest to tow him to shore, but he brushed her
aside with the cavalier insistence that he had so far found their evening dunk in
the sea to be rousing and rather enjoyable. After a few minutes swimming side by side
she noticed the night growing more impenetrable, the seas higher, the bounce and slap
of sounds more threatening. Surf, her father barked, and moments later her ears were
assaulted by a booming cannonade as the storm advanced from its redoubt atop the peninsula.
The first flash of lightning brought with it a scary glimpse of her father’s face
painted in wide-eyed cold insanity, his jawline hidden underwater below an expression
of homicidal determination.

The second blaze of lightning revealed an image more viscerally horrifying: directly
in her path spread a garden of small ghostly craniums planted in the water like translucent
floating skulls of infants, and she gasped, reeling backward, feeling a slithery graze
across her left forearm, suddenly afire with stinging, as the current swept them into
the school of jellyfish. She swam frantically and then stopped abruptly, pulling in
her legs and paddling back with her hands, realizing she was being sucked forward
by the crest of a breaking wave. She pivoted to swim back toward her father, splashing
and cursing somewhere in the darkness, and found him faltering.

My lips tingle,
he murmured as she grabbed his collar, dragging him southward parallel to the shoreline,
determined to escape what would surely result in slamming mutilation among the rocks
on shore and the next thing she knew they were being flushed out into deeper water
by the riptide.

The current seemed to bulge inward around a promontory she could sense but not see.
Then they were captured back into the coast-bound swell and there was nothing she
could do about it. Lifted and catapulted precipitously forward, she tumbled down the
curling face of a wave, her hand torn from her father’s vest and her body yanked backward
through the wave’s base by a deadweight suddenly attached to the dry bag, the following
wave breaking on top of her before she could catch her breath, gyrating in a chaotic
sliding vortex until she felt the toes of her free leg scrape the bottom—first crusty
stone and then sand—and she popped back into the air, her father floating facedown
behind her on a mattress of ebbing white water, his right hand snared in the dry-bag
line. Trying to stand up she was knocked down by still another foamy surge, which
she bellied into and rode to the beach, her father rolling behind her.

In the next flash of lightning she saw her father expired, done in, immobile, his
face nuzzled in sand, his limp and swollen hand leashed to her ankle, and in a final
bolt before the downpour began she saw him return to life, his shoulder blades laboring
to lift him.

Her heart thumped wildly when she turned him over and heard his urgent but incomplete
command—
Pill
—rattle behind his clenched teeth and the choking gurgle of what she feared might
be his last breath. For a moment she was paralyzed by the riddle of what was required
of her and then she pounced on the dry bag, freeing her father’s tangled hand, and
began clawing furiously through its contents. Her blind fingers groped among a mash
of clothes and toiletries for a flashlight or the first-aid kit, whichever came first,
and then she had them both and stuck her head in the bag, snapping open the plastic
kit to find her choices blessedly limited—aspirin, Benadryl, an empty vial of penicillin—and
ripped an antihistamine out of its foil sheet. Lashed by wind-driven rain, she pried
down her father’s clasped jaw and slipped the tablet onto his tongue but instantly
determined he could not swallow and rammed the pill into the warm cavern of his throat
with trembling fingers. In the rain-shredded cone of light framing his streaming face
he looked at her with fluttering eyes and rasped,
More,
and she stopped when he shook his head after five doses, squatting over him, panic-stricken
and helpless, observing his struggle to breathe, until finally he began to smack his
sandy lips and snort water from his nose and she watched the slow and then greedy
rise and fall of his lungs, only now aware that she herself had been hyperventilating.

On his feet again in the pelting rain her father was unsteady and she insisted he
lay an arm across her shoulders for support. Like a pair of drunks they careened ahead,
the yellow beam of the flashlight hopping erratically through the liquid darkness.
At the top of the beach they discovered a path leading into the rocks and scrub and
followed it to a grove of gnarled and ancient olive trees where, unable to discern
an exit, they found instead a low wall of quarried biscuit-colored blocks that disappeared
ahead into the brambled undergrowth.

Her father said,
Up,
and they picked their way over the uneven spine of stones, Dottie behind him, aiming
the flashlight into the rain, the wall like the path leading them to a confusing end—not
olive trees this time but rubble, which they descended haltingly back to the ground.
He took the flashlight from her hand, swinging it in a half circle across a field
of ruins, and seemed to give in to their predicament, his body stiff and surrendering,
and he lowered onto the fluted marble drum of a collapsed column. Not good, she thought,
get up. In desperation she took the light from him and left the bag at his feet, begging
him not to stray, and began to probe deeper into the site, searching for anything
that would serve as shelter. What she found instead, between a channel of half-fallen
walls, was a narrow alley of overgrown flagstone and she retraced her steps back through
the mounds to collect her ravaged father.

He walked with a sightless man’s grip on her shoulder as she trudged a serpentine
route back through the heaps sprouted with wind-whipped thistles and tufts of wiry
grass, rediscovering the crumbled outer walls of what tomorrow he would tell her was
Cyzicus, a city once heralded as a wonder of the ancient world, and followed the paving
stones into its labyrinth of destruction, a phantom architecture of indiscernible
fragments and toppled hulks, until their dogged meander brought them to a clearing
and the raised platform of a former temple landscaped with scattered remnants, like
abstract pieces on a gigantic chessboard. They arrived at the base of the temple,
Dottie’s light sliding over the terraced layering of its enormous foundation, up to
the shorn mesa of what had once held the grandness of its roofed structure, and down
again along its length to a series of marble steps like subway entrances descending
into black mouths, the closest of which she edged them toward with increasing caution.
The beam of light from her hand crept toward the opening, her adrenaline stirred as
she realized the steps went steeply down to vaults embedded beneath the temple’s floor,
a honeycomb of underground space that beckoned and repelled.

Inexplicably, her father dropped his hand from her shoulder and resisted this, their
first and only chance to get out of the weather, until she said, Dad, I’m freezing,
and he let himself be guided down the cracked steps until she stopped abruptly and
pressed back against him, aiming the light beyond the vault’s threshold, the beam
jittering across a lumpy array of shit, broken glass, ouzo bottles, animal bones,
cigarette butts, a spew of bricks beneath a gouge in the back wall, and a dead cat
decomposing in a puddle. She hurried him back up the steps in disgust and took his
hand to lead him down to the adjacent vault, scouring its spooky interior with the
flashlight but spying nothing more offensive than spilled scoops of round goat turds
and the rubbish from a shepherd’s meal. When he balked again she said,
Come on!
forced to yank her father’s arm to make him budge and they stepped through a fluid
curtain of crystal beads out of the rain, properly shipwrecked and stranded, their
ordeal perhaps in recess for the remainder of the night.

I remember this,
said her father dully. By now she was shivering uncontrollably and had no idea what
he was talking about and did not care.

They had stripped out of their wet suits and dressed in the clothes her father had
jammed into the bag and got down and tried to sleep. Sometime during the night the
rain stopped and she awoke scrunched against the back wall, in the same position in
which she had nodded off, knees drawn into her chest and arms clasped around her folded
legs and head wilted forward. The pain was back where she had left it before accepting
a calming double-pinch of
naswar
from her father—a cut on the bottom of her left foot, the bracelet of raw tissue
from the burn of the dry-bag cord on her right ankle, the scoring of welts across
her flesh, identical to but less numerous and inflamed than her father’s—and she did
not open her eyes, letting her ears take responsibility for the state of her consciousness.
The rain’s harsh monotone had splintered into a much less intense dripping, plinking,
splatting, pattering like tiny feet. She strained to hear what should also be there—her
father’s breathing, which she seemed to have misplaced. Wasn’t he next to her, within
touching distance? When the batteries failed, she had leaned her head against his
shoulder for warmth and comfort but found neither, his body prone to excruciating
adjustments—reflexive kicks and twitches and endless unsatisfying shifts, as though
insects had gotten trapped under his shorts and T-shirt—and she had little choice
but to scoot away from him, just far enough to separate herself from his intolerable
torment.

Sometime later she felt a spreading caress soft as flannel along her skin as an exhalation
of warm moist air pushed into the vault, its soothing breath laden with a potent myrrh-like
fragrance that assaulted her nose with the strangeness of its arrival, and then her
head snapped up alert, her eyes open but unseeing, and she heard her father’s throaty
croaks across the vault, a mad oracle mumbling nonsense, though his lilting inflections
and pauses seemed credulously engaged and conversational, a man on the telephone.

Daddy, she hissed, her hand instinctively searching for the flashlight. Who are you
talking to?

Can you see it? he said, the surprise of his lucidity making the hair stand up on
the back of her neck.

What? she said. I smell something.

Yes, yes.

Where are you?

You can see him, then? her father said, the words stretched and clutched with emotion.

Him what?
she implored. You’re scaring me.

The frantic sweep of her hand located the flashlight and she switched it on, casting
a receding glow of pink light across the vault before returning them to darkness,
but not before her eyes had composed an image of her father on his knees, his arms
flung out to embrace or receive the emptiness at his fingertips, silver rivulets of
tears etched down his cheeks and his face expressing a contorted pleasure so beyond
happiness she shuddered.

Dad, she said. I’m totally freaked. Was somebody here?

He chuckled knowingly and said, If I said an angel, you’d be worried about me, wouldn’t
you? and she heard herself asking more with reluctance than disbelief, What did the
angel say?

Nothing I don’t already know, he said.

It was weird and exhausting talking this way, like two glaze-eyed converts exchanging
heavenly revelations in a Roman catacomb, yet she forgave him with a gush of sympathy
when without a sound he transported himself across the room with dreamlike ease and
she felt the tentative touch of his hand exploring her arm, her heart absorbing his
great weary sigh as he sat down next to her and bent her head to his chest, whispering
with the pure sweetness of paternal love into her damp hair,
Go back to sleep now, baby
.

Okay, she mumbled, half-asleep and falling away, wondering was she entering a dream
herself or leaving it when she heard him say, thought he said, imagined him saying,
they had been summoned by God to Ephesus.

You were dreaming, right? she mumbled again, drifting down into his warmth.

Get some rest now, her father said. We’ve been called.

What awaited her in the morning was not what she anticipated—his supernatural recovery,
her father restored to an even more vibrant and contagious version of his former self,
outside in the ruins singing like Caruso, his gusto a questionable tonic for her own
low mood, its thirst and famished appetite, its itch and ache. Grotty hair and exasperation.
She complained to herself, wanting her hairbrush, carelessly emptying the dry bag
onto the floor and repacking everything in a fit of sullenness. He had at least bothered
to rescue her drawstring pouch of jewelry, from which she removed Osman’s evil-eye
bracelet to slip over her wrist, feeling no better for its belated protection.