You Are Always Safe With Me (17 page)

A pleasure boat had moored in the cove where the
Ozymandias
was anchored. Though it was some distance away, Lilly could see the forms of people moving about inside the lit salon and on the upper deck. She could hear the faint strains of music coming over the water.

Where was Izak? She wanted to go down to her cabin to use the bathroom but she still uneasy about putting weight on her foot. She had not strapped on the ankle support after they’d been swimming.

Had he gone down to sleep below deck? Could he have left her alone on the boat and taken the Zodiac to pick up the others? She knew he was to meet them on shore at a certain time, but she did not think he would leave her without waking her to tell her he was leaving. She wished she had not slept and wasted even a moment of their private time together.

She tried to stand, testing her ankle. She thought she could walk by leaning against the rails or the walls of the salon. She could hop quite well. She hopped along the side deck, and saw Izak approaching her, holding a pair of binoculars.

“Please, look there.” He put them in her hands and supported her as she stood on one foot. He guided the glasses in her hands. In the magnifying lenses she saw the occupants of the pleasure boat quite clearly. They were dancing on the deck, moving to the music of musicians who were playing oud and drums. At this distance their dance seemed in slow motion, an eerie ballet.

“I remember how you dance at the café,” he said. “So beautiful. I wish that you dance for me now.”

“Dance without moving, perhaps,” Lilly said, “…without my feet.” She handed back the binoculars and made a few tentative movements with her shoulders. She rested her weight on the heel of her foot and snaked her arms from her waist up to her shoulders, along the side of her face and through her hair.”

“Yes,” he breathed. “This I remember, how you belly dance in the cafe. Maybe I play some Turkish music. And then I can cook dinner for you?”

“When do you have to pick up the others?”

“Eight o’clock I go to shore. They have long trip back from Saklikent Gorge. Many mountain roads, very narrow. Goats block sometimes the way.”

“I’d like to take off my bathing suit and get dressed before we eat.”

He helped her to her cabin, waited for her to change her clothes and then helped her up the few steps to sit her at the table in the salon while he prepared a dinner of broiled fish and rice. She watched him moving in the tiny space of the galley from stove to sink to refrigerated cabinets and back to the stove. He sliced lemons, he sliced bread, he sliced cucumbers—all with the speed of a magician.

When the dinner was ready, he helped Lilly to the upper deck and plugged in a tape player. By the time he set the food on the table, Turkish music was swirling through the air. Lilly could hardly sit still, the insistent drum rhythms made her body move involuntarily.

“You like music of Turkey?” Lilly glanced up at the Turkish flag flying from the mast—a white crescent moon and star in a red field.

“Yes, I like Turkish music,” Lilly said. “I like Turkey.”

“Maybe you love.”

“Maybe I do.”

“You love your country?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s so different there. My life is so different. I am a teacher. I am very busy all the time. There is no time to think.”

“But you are lonely,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“You have no family, no child. Women want this in my country. Men, too. I wish it for me.”

“I wish it for me, Izak. God! How I wish it.” Again, unexpectedly, tears filled her eyes. As Izak comforted her, held her, the cell phone rang. She had heard it ring many times on the boat and seen Izak answer it often, but at this moment she could have thrown the phone in the sea.

He retrieved it from the shelf under the wheel and held it to his ear. A conversation ensued in Turkish and she understood nothing. Izak became separate, separated from her, became a stranger during the moments he spoke to an unknown person in an unknown tongue.

When he hung up he said, “Morat is calling, he says three are lost. Harrison, Gerta and Marianne, lost in Saklikent Gorge. Police now are searching. The others wait at restaurant with Morat and Barish. Maybe too dark to find them now. Maybe they have to stay till morning in hotel nearby.”

“My mother…?”

“Only those three. Everyone else safe. Morat later is calling.”

Izak shut off the tape player. “So. This bad thing.” He held his head in his hands and she saw his alarm and his worry. “Marianne, she makes them go too far. Her mind is angry. I feel angry, too—how she plays with Barish. Not in good way.”

“I don’t think you know this, Izak. Marianne had a daughter she loved very much who died when she was seventeen. I think that’s why she’s angry and looking for some kind of peace. If she takes chances and does dangerous things, it’s because she’s daring the universe, daring God, something like that. Maybe she wants to die herself.”

“Daring God, this is not good. There are better ways to find peace.”

Then the cell phone rang again. This time, Izak spoke briefly and handed the phone to Lilly.

“Lilly? This is Fiona. Listen, darling, I am terrified. My son and Gerta didn’t come back, and neither did Marianne, and we waited and waited and then Morat and Barish went to look for them, and couldn’t find them. The water rushing through the gorge is ice cold and they are out there somewhere, the three of them, daring each other, I’m sure that’s what they did, you know that song, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’ They could all be dead by now.”

“Oh Fiona, that’s not likely.”

“But if something terrible did happen—I was just talking to your mother about this—if they were climbing too high up the gorge and they fell, or if they drowned, I asked your mother if you might want to take…if she thought you might…I know, it’s a crazy idea, I know, but maybe you would be the ideal one…”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Fiona.”

“It’s the baby, darling. The little baby, my grandchild. I don’t know who will raise her if Harrison and Gerta are dead. She’s going to be born very soon and if they’re dead, there’s no one to raise the baby. I’m too old … I’m really too old to raise a baby, darling, but you aren’t! You have a good job and a nice home and many women your age are single mothers!”

Lilly’s heart began palpitating. She felt her skin grow clammy.

“Fiona! Don’t be silly. They’ll be fine, all of them will be fine. They just went too far, there’s that competition between Marianne and Harrison, they’re always needling one another about who is tougher.”

“But if worst comes to worst, say you’d do it for me, darling… I know if you were raising my granddaughter, you’d be happy to let me visit her, see her grow up.”

“They’ll all be fine, Fiona. Just wait a while and you’ll see.”

“But you
must
tell me if you’d take the baby. I have plenty of money to help you raise her, you know.”

“I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Just tell me—would you consider it?”

“Please, Fiona, it won’t come to that!”

“But would you consider it, please?”

“I’d have to think about it, of course.”

“But maybe?”

“Maybe,” Lilly said. “Yes, maybe I would consider it, Fiona. Yes! Maybe I would! Goodbye. Call me later when you know more.”

She handed the phone back to Izak and felt herself reeling.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They come back, hard to get lost in Saklikent Gorge, too narrow. Too high. Nowhere to go except too far.”

“It isn’t that,” Lilly said. “It’s what Harrison’s mother wants me to do if they never come back.” She thought she could almost feel the tiny weight of the baby girl in her arms. Now she hoped, to her amazement, that the infant’s parents were
never
to be found.

“Then what is it?”

“Fiona wants me to take the baby. You know about the baby? That Harrison and Gerta are having a baby, but another woman is bearing it? So Gerta’s body would not be spoiled, stretched out?”

“I heard this, I know,” Izak said. “Never any woman do this in my country.”

“But Fiona offered me their baby, Izak. Oh God”…and again Lilly began to cry. “She wants me to raise it.”

“And—you don’t want?”

“Oh, but I do! I would love to have a baby, Izak. This is my dream. I want a child more than anything. Women in my country do this even if they’re not married, even if they’re…as old as me. Sometimes they adopt a little girl from China, or they have
in vitro
fertilization by a donor—they get the baby from a stranger’s sperm—or they just get pregnant by some friend—they can’t wait for the ideal moment, a husband, babies, in that order. Izak, I would
die
to have a baby.”

“If you want a baby this much,” Izak whispered to her, “…maybe—please understand what I say now—maybe I try to give you one.” He put his arms around her. “I am serious, Lilly. If you want,” Izak said, with every consideration in his voice, “…and if you let me, I do the best I know to give you my baby.”

While the stars were high above them and the sea rocked gently under them and the wind sighed against the mast and fluttered the silken cloth of the Turkish flag, Izak moved slowly above Lilly’s body till she cried out once and then again. With one last, long movement he delivered to her the hope of life.

They slept all night on the foam pad, curled together, his body enclosing hers, her back pressed against his chest, his breath moving the hairs on her neck. She breathed in unison with him, and in unison with the swells of the sea beneath them. Caught up in a journey larger than any she had ever taken, she was aware of a constant forward motion—of the tides, of time, of the world tilting into the future, moving her forward into a new dimension.

Though she woke several times during the night, she was without any anxiety, need, or fear. In the protection of Izak’s arms, she was insulated from all her usual terrors and doubts, and knew only an overwhelming sense of peace and joy.

When the first rays of light illuminated the clouds, Izak stirred and moved onto his back. Lilly shifted and turned on her right side. Propped on her elbow, she examined his face, the shape of his bones, the curve of his eyebrows, the length of his eyelashes. There was no part of him she did not love; no design that could bear improvement, no shape that was unshapely, no feature unseemly. Perfection, she knew, was in the eye of the beholder, but her eyes were worshipful, a condition new to them.

She rested her head on his shoulder, and he shifted, touched her bare thigh, then somehow encircled her with his arm and lifted her onto his body. He was already stiff as the mast that flew the Turkish flag and he gently coaxed her down, inch by inch, till she was beautifully impaled upon him. Then they did not move at all, merely held their place that way, dozed and breathed, not quite awake but utterly conscious and blessed by awareness.

The pressure of her softness against the shield of his chest cushioned them both; she felt held up by his power as the
Ozymandias
was supported by the sea. She floated upon him, secure and buoyed up by his presence.

They began to move as the sun grew stronger, not very much, but with intent and purpose; she rode up just a tiny bit, and then pressed herself down; he waited, then made an answering movement. They savored the pause, they waited again. Once, she raised her head and looked at his face and found him watching her with a gaze of such focused intensity that she could not look upon it for long. She closed her eyes again.

Her mind was in a locked position; no thoughts could begin to intrude, no distractions tapped for admittance; only the moment existed, this tension, this space, this fusion.

They stayed this way for half an hour more, an hour more. She was in a cone of pleasure, whirling upward toward the point. When he finally chose to take her there, she had given herself up entirely, she did not exist, but was only a luminescence, a light growing brighter and brighter till he made her, by his will and his beauty, explode into radiance.

*

They slept till noon, and woke to the ringing of the phone. Naked, Izak rolled from the deck pad and walked to the helm to answer it. He stood talking, with his back to Lilly, allowing her to memorize the shape of his uninterrupted form, the indentation where his vertebrae moved down his back, the curve of buttocks into thigh, the swelling of his calve muscles, the narrowed ankles.

He laughed briefly into the phone, and she knew there was no bad news. A moment later he came back toward her, proudly naked, unselfconscious, smiling.

“They are found,” he said. “Marianne led them too far and night came. Harrison lifted them to a ledge, above the water of the gorge. In daylight, police found them. All are well now. They are resting, eating. They will come back here by dinner.” He smiled. “We have one more day together.”

“One more day,” Lilly echoed.

“So, we must take every minute” Izak said.

*

She showered while he made a meal for them, then she lay in the sun, though she needed no extra warmth. She was heated to the core. He bent to her ear and whispered he was going to find her a treasure in the sea. She saw him dive from the top of the ladder and heard him swimming. Her eyelids were closed against the sun, but images of him were painted on their interior, a tiny form swimming in the egg-yolk color of her inward gaze.

*

She sat atop a step of the ladder, her feet hanging into the sea, waiting for him to return. The day glistened with sunlight, the
Ozymandias
creaked slightly as it rose and fell in the wake from a passing motorboat. When the water stilled, she could see tiny, yellow-nosed fish swimming just below the surface. At times, when she was in the water herself, she had felt little delicate taps against her legs and had seen these schools of fish passing her by.

She leaned her head against the ladder’s chain, closed her eyes, and soaked in the sensual beauty of the world. When Izak returned and touched her hot leg with his wet hand, she jumped and cried out.

He rose from the sea like a vision, holding something mysterious in one hand.