Free You Are Always Safe With Me by Merrill Joan Gerber

bracelets of oddly shaped beads, “Only one million, please buy, only one million.”
    Unable to resist, Lilly had bought a few scarves and bracelets, for whom she was not sure, but tucked them away in her suitcase with the “lucky” glass eyes. Now she said to the girls, “You make these to sell?”
    “No for sell,” said the older girl. “Wait,” and she got up from her chair, went into the house, and came back holding a pink dishcloth with lace around its edges. “For us,” she said. “For Mama. For our house.” She took up her crotchet needle from where she had set it down on the chair, sat down, and resumed her handiwork.
    From this simple wooden porch, Lilly could see the view the girls had as they sat on their porch looking across the road: the magnificent Lycian cliff tombs perched on one another, carved into the side of the mountain. It looked as if palaces had been hacked out of the granite, each tomb a house-shaped room, rich with scenes of family life, each boasting an intricate relief to indicate the activities that had gone on before the death which had taken place.
    Such amazing images to have looming above one’s simple, almost primitive home, the operatic backdrop to the little ice cream wagon, the stage setting for two young girls edging dishtowels for their mother.
    “Thank you for showing me these towels,” Lilly told the girls. “Your lace is very beautiful.” Before she crossed the road to the tombs, she bought an ice cream pop for a million Turkish lire.
    *
    She didn’t think her mother would try to make the climb, but Lance pulled Lilly’s mother up steep drops, offered support as she stepped from rock to slippery rock, congratulated her on her good choice of walking shoes, and pushed her up from behind when she didn’t have the strength to lift her own weight on one foot and then another.
    Again, everyone was in partnership, Marianne helping Fiona, Jack helping Jane, Harrison helping Gerta. Bravely, Lilly clambered up the narrow paths and over rocks, her own hand-holds her only support, the treads on her tennis shoes her only security. She was high above the road. Below she could see the corrugated tin roof over the ice cream stand, the white top of the van that had driven them to the site, the little signs advertising beer and Coke flapping slightly on their hinges.
    The others had gone ahead of her, around a bend. She stopped in front of a tomb, felt the hot wind coming from below, saw the yawning open door before her, and stepped inside. It was cooler here, smelling of rock and burned coals, empty of the bodies that had once reposed within, but full of the sense of whomever they had been, their human lives and human deaths. She recalled an engraving she had once seen on a tombstone in a New England cemetery:
    Stop Here, My Friend
    As You Pass By
    As You Are Now
    So Once Was I ,
    As I Am Now
    So You Will Be ,
    Prepare For Death
    And Follow Me .
    Tearful again, but hidden from the others allowing herself her emotion without censure, she touched the wall with her bare hand, tried to link her soul with the souls who had passed by here, to make contact, to be part of some vast movement of life through time. More than anything, she did not want to be so alone. Why should she be, at this time of her life, alone, so irrevocably alone?

AT THE HELM
    Curled asleep under her blanket, Lilly sensed a violent motion beneath her body, a bucking of her pillow beneath her head. Waves were heaving themselves against the Ozymandias . She lifted her head and saw that the cliffs of the Turquoise Coast were behind them and the prow of the boat was heading toward open water.
    Cold spray splashed upward and dampened Lilly’s face and hair where she lay, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, on the foam pad of the deck. She could see her mother was still asleep on the narrow bench. Izak stood at the helm. As always, he was barefoot, bare-chested and wearing shorts; he seemed not to notice the early morning