Free You Are Always Safe With Me by Merrill Joan Gerber Page B

pan. As he hunted for the ingredients, holding up several wrong items, they burst into silly laughter. Izak passed by them and her heart curled into a tight knot—she was ashamed, she was pained, she was horrified. What if he thought she was engaging in some flirtation with Morat?
    But Izak merely paused, interested to see what dish she was preparing. He watched as she beat eggs and milk in a bowl, asked Morat to slice the stale bread and heat the oil in a pan. Soon the fragrant aroma of French toast frying wafted up to the deck. Lance peered into the galley and said he couldn’t wait to taste it, Marianne came down the steps and said what she needed with French toast was some good old American coffee. Jack Cotton said he had a surprise, that at the last village he had bought a real American drip coffee maker and would bring it up from his cabin and they could have coffee that didn’t stand one’s hair on end.
    There was no maple syrup for the French toast, only green fig jam, and sugar cubes they could crush with their spoons. But as the Ozymandias headed back to port, now with Barish at the helm, everyone congratulated Lilly for the great breakfast.
    *
    They were sailing back to reach a port where some supplies were required for the boat. The names of the towns where they had been and where they were going, Antalya, Kas, Kalkan, Patara, Letoon, Fethiye, Oludeniz, Tlos, faded in and out of Lilly’s mind. She saw all of their precious and remarkable ruins as one great mural painted on the ceiling of her mind. In all of the towns they’d visited, guides led them to climb on jagged rocks, sit in great amphitheaters, examine mosaics, exclaim over Roman baths. Sometimes they would sit on the rocks of an ancient city overlooking a great valley, with no sound but the wind in the high grasses. The lack of other tourists was one of the great pleasures of being here, in the quiet, having the peace to explore at their own pace.
    Local children often followed them, offering sprigs of mint for sale, saying “Buy, please, please, will you buy?” begging Lilly to smell the leaves, and to—please, please buy. Lilly had no coins in her pocket, only the million lire notes, whose worth confused her. The children were, every one, exquisite: dark luminous-eyed, olive-skinned beauties.
    She saw children herding goats, one child and three or four brown or gray animals with shaggy beards. Bells rang around the animals necks as they climbed among the rocks and grazed. She had fantasies of seeking out the parents of such a child, begging to borrow him, to be allowed to take him home, to educate him, raise him in comfort, in shoes! She would return him, of course, but much later, after he’d forgotten the mosaics, the sprigs of mint, the sounds of goat bells.
    She had not been vulnerable to such imaginings for so many years! She was surprised at the images that filled her mind here. The space in her head that was so often rigid with schedules, papers to grade, appointments to keep, projects to finish, was open now to unexpected longings. At home, when she had leisure time, she’d fill it with concerts, movies, programs on the educational TV channel. Sometimes she’d indulge herself in front of the TV with a pizza or a take-out dinner of shrimp and honey walnuts from the Chinese restaurant. She’d felt safe in front of her television until one day she’d accidentally come across a program called “Baby Story” in which a couple was filmed in the days before their baby’s birth. The camera followed them through a trip to shop for baby furniture, to the baby shower, to the workshop teaching baby-massage, to the class rehearsing the steps of labor and what to expect in its various stages. In the last ten minutes of the half hour show, the woman was shown in a hospital bed, her legs apart, a baby descending in her birth canal, a nurse yelling “Push, push, push!” and her husband whispering encouragement into her ear.
    Lilly could still