Alex Adams: White Horse

She holds her head high now. Proud. As she should be.

“We are more. Family.”

I wonder how a fractured heart, with all its ragged holes, can still hold so much love.

We stop so I can bathe in the ocean and drag dry, clean clothes over my purified skin. Then we move on.

Onwards. Past the gray stone church with its misspelled English graffiti. Alongside a gulf filled with diamonds. We move slowly, but that’s okay, the bomb no longer ticks with the same urgency. The Swiss is dead—Nick, too —and my daughter is here.

Dawn comes. Morning slides into noon.

Greece is made of roads that curve and hug the landscape like a favorite pair of jeans. We skim her hip and find a cement factory hulking over the water. On the mountain behind the abandoned facility, terraces are tribal scars cut into the land by men with dynamite and hard hats. In the water, rust buckets with Cyrillic letters painted on the side await cargo that will never come. There are bones on the low-slung decks, sucked clean of the bodies that once held them. Cement dust clouds, stirred by a fledgling ocean breeze, smell of freshly poured pavement. I double-check that Baby’s head is protected from both sun and smut.

Beneath the red, Irini’s skin is pallid. When I touch her forehead, she smiles.

“I am okay. You?”

I don’t believe her. She’s dry when she should be steeped in sweat.

“Fine.”

A falsehood. We both know it but we’re too proud to admit to our lies lest we seem weak—not for ourselves but for each other. I’m losing blood and so is she. Only my baby has skin still pink and new and alive.

We don’t speak as we walk. Conversation comes when we’re resting. When we’ve cleared the cement factory, we break again under the protective cover of an olive tree. Its fruit is green and thick like a man’s thumb, but the crop will rot without someone to pick the bounty at harvest time. We sip water from bottles refilled from a roadside faucet. Candy bars for the sugar rush that comes slower and slower each time. Baby pulls what she needs from my breasts faster than my body can replenish the source, so I stir formula on the side of the road to satisfy her. She’s a good girl. Quiet. Alert. The road is all she knows, so the vibration from my footsteps must soothe her soul in ways it will never comfort me. I yearn for a home that’s mine, on a piece of land that never shifts, in a place not teeming with death.

“What happened?” I ask Irini when we’ve filled our shrunken stomachs.

“I do not know. I… was dying. Then not.”

“And in between?”

“The gods came for me and made me whole.”

“You’re still bleeding.”

“Whole… a little… to help you and the baby.”

Just enough. How do you thank someone who turns away from death to come back for you?

The first sign of life is no sign of life: abandoned cars and motorcycles, rusted and rotting along the winding road. Conspicuously absent are corpses, which have become the most prevalent form of litter in urban streets. Bones and half-eaten carcasses are as omnipresent as burger wrappers and beer cans—but not here.

Irini shades her eyes, smiles as she delivers the news. “Agria. This is the place.”

My everything sags with relief and I slump against a BMW with a chronic case of rust acne. We’re here. We’re really here. Some magical how happened and we are here.

“This is your ancestral home, baby girl.” My daughter’s hair is soft against my lips. She makes a small sucking noise. Then the fear comes for me, rolling, rolling on wooden wheels, a chariot carrying its terrible driver, his bullwhip held aloft waiting to strike me down.

“I can’t do it.”

“You must.”

“What if they’re dead?”

“Then they are dead and you have lost nothing.”

“Just more hope.”

“Hope is what you hold in your arms.”

The truth of her words can’t hold the gathering storm at bay. I sink my teeth into my lip, clamp the delicate flesh tightly until the physical pain reduces the emotional to a dull ache. I nod. This is reality. Nick was a beautiful, magnificent fantasy, but now he’s dead and soon I might be, too. I look at my girl and I know in that instant that, if not for her, I would be fine knowing that today was the last day, the end cap of my life. I wish I was home. I wish I was in that place before all this . I choke on a sob, because I’m longing for something so dead, so cold, so gone, that I might as well wish for a rocket ship to Mars.

It takes a cluster ofclanging bells to pull me from own head. I look to Irini in case it’s a sign I’ve lost my mind and I’m doomed to spend all my days as a tragic hunchback in a bell tower that doesn’t exist on any earthly plane.

“Goats,” she says. “Sheep, maybe.”

Bo Peep–less goats. They bleed between the cars and motorcycles from someplace beyond the crook in the road, swarm around us, inspecting our belongings with slitted yellow gazes. Then, just as quickly, they mosey on down the cracked street in search of green pastures. Their dull bells jangle and fade into the past.

Each new step depletes me further. I see it in Irini, too. She’s my mirror, and in her I watch myself wilt and weaken and drain myself dry. If this was a video game, we’d be out of extra lives.

“I can do this,” I say. “I have to. Sit. If there’s help, I’ll send it.”

“No. Together.”

I take her hand in mine and we walk. The strangers are come to town.

Around the corner is avillage that resembles the last, and the one before that, and all the others before those. This place is not unique. Tavernas line the streets. Fishing line still hangs outside so fishermen can display the day’s catch. The gulf laps at the shore like a thirsty cat. Two chairs sit by the shore, between them a small table and two glasses filled with brown liquid and foam. Two people stand in the middle of the road, intent on a conversation. A man and woman dressed in Bermudas and tanks.

A vacation snapshot. The end of the world is someplace else.

Irini and I limp into the picture. We two bums and our donkey spoil the perfect scene with our broken bodies. Irini’s stomach blooms with its carmine stain. She needs help, and soon.

I stand there in the same middle of the same street. “Hello?”

They turn. Echo. “Hello?”

Americans.

The woman is built like a good armchair: soft, sturdy, her skin sun-worn to a rich nut brown. Her companion is tall and lean, with eyes I’ve seen in another man’s face.

“You’re Nick’s parents,” I say. And then I cry.

They stare at me, at each other, at me again. The man speaks.

“The world’s gone mad. We quit asking questions a long time ago, just accepted the strangeness as much as we could to survive. But now I have to ask: How the hell do you know our son?”

The woman slaps him, gentle, mocking, only a minor punishment for his lack of etiquette. A whole conversation in the space of a heartbeat the way only couples who are tightly cleaved can communicate.

“Don’t you know?” she says. “It’s Nick’s Zoe. Who else could she be?” She looks to me for confirmation. “You are, aren’t you?”

All the words I prepared have poured back into the soup of unspoken thoughts, broken down and formless once more. Nod; that’s all I can do.

She comes to me, touches my face with a palm callused and cracked, and yet the touch is tender: a mother’s touch.

“I miss my mom,” I say.

“You always will.” Her gaze falls. “Who is this?” Rises.

“Nick’s daughter.”

“Oh my God. What have you brought us?” Then she holds us both in her comfortable arms. Her husband comes next.