Lily and the Lost Boy

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

  Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

  Winner of the Paris Review’s Hadada Award

  “The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

  “One of America’s most talented writers.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Consistently excellent.” —The New York Times

  “Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.” —School Library Journal

  “Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox’s brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

  “Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —The New Yorker

  “As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox’s prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn, New York magazine

  “Fox’s achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

  “Fox has little of Roth’s self-consciousness, less of Bellow’s self-importance, and none of Updike’s self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

  “There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by homage or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb, The Boston Review

  “Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel, BOMB

  Lily and the Lost Boy

  “Greece itself is Fox’s protagonist, its roots in the past nourishing the present, its antiquities, vegetation, and people pulsing with vitality.… A quiet, beautifully crafted story.” —Kirkus Reviews, pointer review

  “Another thought-provoking gem from Fox … Simply written, with strong characterizations and overtones of Greek tragedy, Lily and the Lost Boy is an excellent choice for readers who share Lily’s own budding characteristics: thoughtfulness, integrity, sensitivity, and courage. A beautifully written story for thoughtful readers.” —School Library Journal

  “A haunting tale of American children living on the mysterious Greek island of Thasos … Beautifully written and filled with details of Greek daily life and island history.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Fox is unquestionably one of the most ambitious and skilled children’s writers around.” —Booklist, starred review

  “Writing in a calm, conversational yet imagistic style, the author impressively conveys both the outer atmosphere of place and the inner, highly charged atmosphere of personal emotions.” —The Horn Book Magazine

  Lily and the Lost Boy

  Paula Fox

  For

  William Weaver

  and

  Floriano Vecchi

  ONE

  At their first sight of the boy, the two children forgot they were in a foreign place. It must have been that after living three months on the Greek island of Thasos, much of its strangeness had worn off and the island had become home to them. It was he who looked foreign.

  He was standing motionless fifty yards or so up the path that led to the acropolis, the ancient stronghold whose ruins lay among a small forest of pine on the crest of a hill far above the coastal village of Limena where they lived. His bandaged right hand rested on a section of the great wall that had once enclosed the three hills around the village. He was glaring fiercely at something behind them. They turned to look.

  What they saw appeared to be suspended between the sky and the Aegean Sea, which was pale blue now in midafternoon, though it would change color as the light changed and the day drew toward nightfall. Fishing boats swung gently at anchor, their night’s catch long since delivered to the tavernas and restaurants on the waterfront. A quarter of a mile out beyond the small harbor directly below them was a tiny island that looked like a stroke of dark green crayon. It was too hazy to see the mountains of Macedonia on the mainland, two hours away by ferry.

  “What is he staring at?” Lily Corey asked her brother, Paul.

  “Nothing I can see,” he replied.

  “There’s our house down there,” Lily said.

  “You always say that. Talk in a low voice.”

  “Why should I?” she demanded.

  They turned back to the hill. “He hasn’t moved,” Paul said. “Maybe there’s a viper near his feet.”

  “Why are you whispering? Let’s go home.”

  “Wait!” he commanded.

  “Now he’s seen us!”

  “He’s only a kid,” Paul said in a louder voice. “I can see him now.”

  “He’s awfully tall,” she noted.

  “Look at his T-shirt. He’s probably American.”

  “Everybody wears T-shirts,” said Lily. “Even the snakes wear T-shirts—”

  “—and a baseball cap,” Paul interrupted, pushing her up the path. “Let’s go meet him.”

  “What about the vipers?” Lily asked, shivering.

  “I said one viper. You know they don’t attack people, Lily.”

  “They think about attacking.”

  “Snakes don’t think,” Paul said impatiently.

  “How do you know? On this island, even the rocks think.”

  “He’s coming,” Paul said.

  “See you later,” Lily said and headed down the hill. She didn’t understand why she didn’t care to meet the boy. Because of the vipers she usually picked her way along the hill paths, staring hard at the ground. Now she ran. The tiled roofs and cobbled lanes of the village seemed to rush up toward her, its flowers and trees like a huge bouquet into which she could press her face.

  Lily was nearly twelve. Until she had come to Thasos, she hadn’t often been scared in broad daylight. But there were places and things on the island that made her skin prickle and her heart beat loudly. Yet she loved it more than any place she had ever been.

  She stopped to wait for Paul at a spot where a nanny goat was tethered. She had been afraid of that boy. Was it because he was a stranger? Except for shepherds and their small flocks of sheep, Paul and she were used to having the hills to themselves. Or was it because he’d looked so wild and white-faced and seemed to be coming from the acropolis, a haunted place to her?

  Lily had gone there only once with Paul. They had clambered over fallen columns and stared into deep holes that had been chambers in the old times. It had been so still, so hot. A faded sign on a post had warned people not to walk beyond the acropolis to the steep edge of the hill, where they might slip on pine needles and plunge down to the sea far below. She had glimpsed the sudden movement of an animal as it disappeared between two great hewn stones. She had heard that young travelers who lacked money for a room would sleep there. Some of the Greeks in the village jokingly called it the Hotel Acropol.

  The nanny goat bleated and came toward her as far as its tether would allow. She s
cratched its knobby head. Its eyes were like two immense almonds laid side by side. They reminded her of the eyes that gazed from the heads of the oldest statues in the Limena museum. After a minute or so the goat lost interest in her and began to graze. No viper would linger near a goat’s hooves, so Lily sat down on the ground. Gradually, she felt herself fill up with the quietness that, like the scariness, was something new in her life.

  At home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, she was always waiting for the school day to end, for Friday to come, for summer, for holidays, for television programs and movies and birthdays. But here, on this island in the north Aegean Sea, she didn’t wait for anything. Each moment was enough in itself.

  Had Paul’s excitement at seeing the boy reminded her of all that waiting?

  She pressed her sneakers up against a stone. Beyond it grew a patch of thistles. Beyond that was a path to the theater, a place so old it hardly seemed the work of human beings. The great apron of the stage was overgrown with wild flowers, and the marble benches that rose in steps against the hillside had been partly dislodged by ilex trees. Still farther, olive trees grew in circular terraces, halted in their downward march by the roofs of Limena. And everywhere in those hills, still startling her when she came upon them, were sections of the marble wall built twenty-five hundred years ago, rearing out of the earth like dolphins from the sea.

  The cloth of her jeans was warmed by the sun. She sniffed at the smells of wild thyme and rosemary. She turned so she could look down into the harbor. Visible at this time of day, glimmering in the water like bones, were the remains of an ancient shipyard that had been in use when thousands of people had lived at the foot of the hills instead of the few hundred who lived there now. A ten-minute walk away was another harbor, where ferries from the mainland docked. Just behind the ferry piers was a broad quay where fishermen mended their nets and the villagers strolled in the evenings. There was Giorgi’s taverna facing the piers; late at night it was always filled with people who came to see the village men dance. Near it, leaning against a rough wood fence, were a dozen rusty old bicycles that a fat, sleepy-looking man rented to anyone who had a few drachmas to pay. The village boys, including Paul, rode them furiously about the quay until some grown-up, perhaps one of the village policemen, made them stop.

  She could see nearly the whole village. Her own roof was like a beacon among the rooftops. Wherever she was wandering with Paul in the hills, she would pause to look for it and its untended garden that descended in terraces to the Temple of Poseidon, where chickens scratched among tethered goats and fishermen’s wives hung their wash to dry on cords strung from stakes stuck in the ground amid the fallen columns.

  Old and new were side by side in Thasos—a puzzle of time. A team of French archaeologists, who came every summer to the island, had arrived last week. It was their work to find parts of that puzzle and fit them into time. She spotted two of them now, digging in a corner of the old marketplace, the agora. Then she grinned to herself and stood up.

  She’d seen, at the back of her house, a familiar head of dark, curly hair. It was her mother, standing beneath a mulberry tree and washing clothes in a large basin. Lily saw her pause in her work and look out to sea. She and Paul and people in the village often did that—look out at the water as though it might speak if you stared at it long enough.

  She heard the thud of feet on the path and turned to Paul as he skidded to a stop next to her.

  “He is American, and he lives up the mountain in Panagia,” he said. His cheeks were flushed; he was smiling. The goat bleated once. Lily’s heart fell.

  They had grown close during these last months. Paul was nearly fourteen, but it was as though they’d become the same age. She knew it was partly because there hadn’t been any ordinary days since they’d left Williamstown and partly because nothing was familiar.

  In a family you got so used to everyone you didn’t think about them anymore as separate people, and so used to daily life you didn’t think much about that either. Here on this island he’d become her fellow-explorer, quick to see what she might have missed, who let her read aloud to him from her book of myths, who met her in the kitchen late at night when everyone was sleeping and made her cups of tea and canned milk.

  “Why was he staring in that crazy way? Did you ask him what he was looking at?”

  “He’s training himself not to blink in sunlight,” Paul replied.

  “Great!”

  “Lily, don’t sneer at what you don’t know about.”

  “Oh, let’s go home,” she said crossly.

  “His name is Jack Hemmings,” Paul said. “His father has a motorcycle. They go everywhere on it—Turkey, Thessalonika, all over the island. His father is a great dancer—the Greeks say he’s the best on the island—and he writes poetry sometimes. Jack can speak Greek perfectly. They’ve lived here almost a year. Do you know what he did? What nerve! He slept in the acropolis last night. He can walk up the mountain to Panagia in just over an hour. That’s eight kilometers.”

  Lily started down the path, Paul following her.

  “What about his mother?” she asked, not looking around, not wanting to see in his face that eagerness that had nothing to do with her.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she and his father are divorced. I asked him, and he said. ‘Oh, her … she’s somewhere in Texas.’”

  “What was the matter with his hand?”

  “He fell on a rock in the acropolis. The cut bled for an hour, but he didn’t tell anyone about it.”

  “He told you.”

  Paul was silent a moment. Lily knew she had a quick tongue, knew she was what her father described as being too fast on the uptake. When she was feeling mean, as she was now, she knew she could confuse Paul and make him uneasy.

  “Well, I asked him,” he said defensively. “You’d like him, Lily. He’s smart. Sometimes he takes tourists to the ancient remains and gets paid for it. He’s been out on a fishing boat, and he caught an octopus.”

  “So did you,” she said. “What was he doing? Trying to get a job with you?”

  He laughed at that. Her irritation with him suddenly went.

  “He’s going to take us places we haven’t seen,” he said. “We’re supposed to meet him tonight at the Gate of Herakles, around eleven, he said.”

  “Mom will love that,” she remarked. She hesitated, then she asked, “Did he say I should come?”

  “Mom doesn’t worry if we go out for a while at night. It’s not like at home. We’ll go after they’re asleep.”

  He hadn’t answered her question. She guessed that Jack whatever-his-name-was hadn’t said a word about her.

  A faint cry drifted up to them from the village. It sounded like “Yawurti! Yawurti!”

  It was the boy who sold fresh yogurt. Lily and Paul had stopped him one afternoon as he wheeled his bicycle on the quay. He’d opened the cover of a wooden box attached to the handlebars. Inside it were white bowls filled with yogurt. Paul told him they didn’t have any dishes with them. He’d grinned and said if they’d open their mouths, he’d feed them yogurt until they ran out of drachmas. He was the cobbler’s son, and like most of the young people in Limena he worked.

  Lily wished she had a job herself. Even though Paul had included her in his intention to meet Jack tonight, she suspected things would change between them. There might be fewer myth readings in the kitchen over cups of sweet, tepid tea, fewer of the musing conversations they carried on in all of their roaming, talk that was filled with surprises for both of them, as though there had been barriers between them back home that had melted away beneath the flooding sunlight of the island.

  TWO

  Paul caught up with Lily where the hill path joined another broader path that was steep and stony. They moved down it cautiously, keeping their eyes on their feet. When they reached the rough stone steps where the village began, Paul said, “It was a relief, speaking English to someone.”

  “What have we been speaking? Duck?”
Lily asked.

  “Duck!” Paul shouted and burst into laughter. “Quack! Quack!” he cried.

  As though in response an elderly couple called out greetings to them from a fenced-in garden. The children called back, “Yes, we’re fine. And you?” Lily peered past the gourds which hung from the fence like small yellow moons. The old people would be taking their ease before starting to cook their evening meal. It was hard to find them among all the roses and dahlias, the fig and damson plum trees that filled their garden. She saw a pale hand waving among the green leaves.

  “You know what I mean,” Paul said. And she did know. Though she learned new Greek words every day, it was often a strain stumbling around in a new language, especially one for which you had to learn a new alphabet, too.

  One of the reasons Mr. and Mrs. Corey had chosen the island was that they’d guessed there wouldn’t be any English-speaking tourists visiting it. Such tourists, her father had said, drove up the cost of things because they wanted big hotels and nightclubs and tennis courts. There were tour ships that occasionally anchored off the island and sent sightseers ashore in small boats, but they usually stayed only a few hours. The Greek families who spent their vacations in Limena appeared to like the island the way it was. Mr. Corey had hoped they would all learn the language—and had been rather solemn about it. The funny thing was, he was hardly able to speak it himself, though he studied a grammar book for hours every afternoon. “I’ve become a prisoner of grammar,” he’d said once to Mrs. Corey. “Throw me some nouns, Kathleen. I’m drowning in the passive subjunctive!”

  Mr. Corey was a history teacher, and he was finishing a book on the Children’s Crusade. It was because he had a sabbatical that they were able to come to Thasos for a few months.

  When Lily thought about home—not very often—it was her room she pictured. From the window she could see two maple trees, a long-forgotten croquet wicket rusting on the lawn, and a narrow stream that dried up in summer. She had come to feel they had always lived on the island, and her room at home was like a snapshot in an album. She had had a hint of that feeling from the day in April when they had stepped off the small ferry from Kavalla onto the wharf and stood there, all of them blinking in the brilliant light, their suitcases piled around them. They had stayed for a few days in a small hotel. On her first morning there Lily had looked out a window and seen, not a stream, a croquet wicket, and two maples but a tall shepherd leaning on his crook, standing among a flock of sheep, behind him the steep rise of a mountain on whose lower flank old, thick-trunked olive trees seemed to whirl like dancers.