An Accidental Odyssey Read online

  It’s not until I’m paying my bill that I remember he embedded a link, so I pause beside my table and click through before the Wi-Fi can drop off.

  The window on my screen opens to a page on the British Vogue bridal site, and one look at the image makes me sink back down into my seat. It’s a shot of a famously tall supermodel, swathed in a columnar confection of ruched satin. The white sheath has delicate, lacy straps and an elegant train sweeping the floor. But beginning at the bodice, the dress sports an almost egg-shaped explosion of layered ruffles—dozens of them—cascading almost to the knee. The model, of course, looks beautiful, with her long neck and even longer legs balancing out the ludicrous explosion of tulle across her torso. How could Anthony’s mother think this dress would suit me? It’s designed to hide every curve.

  And the price?

  The price is fifteen thousand. Pounds, not dollars. It’s British Vogue, after all.

  The server leans across in front of me and wipes the table. Taking the hint, I get to my feet again and walk toward the little gate separating the tables from the street, but not before I scroll down to load the full page.

  Anthony and I have often discussed the disparity in our financial backgrounds. I’m not sure he really gets it, to tell you the truth. He’s never had to save for anything in his life. But he knows my mom has offered to buy my dress for me—we’ve talked about that, for sure. And there is absolutely an extra zero in the price tag of this dress that she will definitely not be counting on.

  Now, my mother is nothing if not practical, and I’m sure she wants me to be happy. If this designer dress was the one I wanted, she’d find a way. But it’s not—and the dress is her wedding gift to me. She’s making a special trip up to the city next month so we can pick it out together.

  All thoughts of sending a sexy little reply back to Anthony fly out of my head. The only thing worse than the price tag is the silhouette. What this willowy model pulls off with ease would leave me looking like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

  Don’t get me wrong—I love my body. I do. I’m strong and reasonably fit, mostly because I spend my life walking everywhere. I even do Zumba with Devi, at least when she’s off on Thursday evenings. I kept up with my swimming all the way through university, so my shoulders are strong. I also like to eat, which—you know—kind of comes with the territory in my line of work.

  I think back to the few times I’ve shared a meal with Anthony’s parents and try to remember if I’ve ever seen his mother actually eat anything. I mean, she sips her tea, but . . .

  Suddenly, the memory of her raised eyebrow as I scraped out every last, luscious crumb of my tiramisu that time after dinner at La Bernadine takes on a whole new meaning. Could those ruffles be intentional?

  Quickly scrolling through the remainder of the dresses on the page, I see they are, if anything, even uglier than the one Cara is wearing. I take a deep breath and try to use logic to calm the sudden emotional maelstrom swirling in my gut. Maybe his mother isn’t being passive aggressive about my figure. Maybe we just have wildly different tastes.

  In any case, this is all wrong. The plan was to pick out a pretty dress with my mom. I’m not willing to bury my body under an explosion of tulle designed to hide every curve.

  Let alone spend more than twenty grand on.

  My good feelings evaporating, I step onto the sidewalk. It’s my own fault. This is what I get for sending Anthony that picture of Idris Elba in a tux.

  As I drop my phone into the pocket of my sundress, a car screeches to a halt beside me on the street.

  My dad rolls down the side window as I try to get a grip on my heart rate. He’s waving his phone at me wildly.

  “There you are! I just got off the line with Teresa. She’s managed to move up the flight. Get in—we need to pick up your things from the guesthouse.”

  He reaches back awkwardly and unlatches the rear door.

  “I thought we were spending the day here in Alexandroupoli.” I slide inside. “I need to punch up my . . .”

  “Sorry, koritsi, but there is no time. I’ll explain on the way, yes?”

  He pulls his medication bottle from the breast pocket of his pink shirt and rattles it at me. “I have so much energy today! These things must be working. I think maybe you’re right, eh?”

  This is likely the closest thing I’ll ever get to an apology, but before I can work myself into any kind of a decent gloat, we pull up to the guesthouse. Ari leaps in through the door ahead of me, and as I head to my room, he’s over beside the front desk pressing cash into the clerk’s hand.

  My dad never has gotten the hang of the contactless purchase.

  I have so little stuff, it takes me only a moment or two to collect everything. By the time I get back to the front desk, my dad is gone.

  Instead of the desk clerk, a round little woman wearing chef’s whites—and who looks exactly like an older version of Iliana—greets me.

  “Your papa waits in the car,” she says with a shy smile before pressing a foil-wrapped packet into my hands.

  “Ilias tell me you like my baklava. For your trip, yes?”

  She vanishes back into the kitchen so quickly I have to call out my thanks through the swinging door as it closes behind her.

  A woman after my own heart. Bet she didn’t wear a puffball dress to her wedding either.

  Seconds later, I’m hopping into the back door of Taki’s car, while my father taps his watch impatiently from the front seat.

  Herman is clearly delighted to see my dad again. “Dr. ARI!” he croaks as I slam the door closed. His tone is so note-perfect that at first I’m sure it’s Taki’s voice, and it’s not until I slide across the back seat that I see the excited cockatoo bouncing on his perch.

  As the car rockets away from the curb, Herman flutters suddenly past me into the back window—which is startling—and then sidles sideways along the back of the bench seat, stopping only when he reaches a spot next to my dad’s ear. Raising his crest, he leans forward to peer into my dad’s face.

  “Hello, Hermy.” My dad runs a finger along the bird’s beak.

  I swear that bird begins to purr.

  Taki takes a tight corner, and I grab for the door handle and glance over at my dad. “Pops, I’m supposed to submit my rewrites today. I thought the next flight wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow?”

  He shrugs. “That dig is no good—not for what I want. That Malik kid cares so much for the layers in the earth, but . . .” He gives a dismissive flick of his fingers, and his voice trails off as Taki pulls out onto a highway and accelerates to light speed. We are both forced back in our seats, and even Herman staggers a little on his perch beside my dad’s ear.

  After a moment, Ari somehow manages, against all laws of gravity and momentum, to lean forward and pluck his worn copy of The Odyssey out of his bag. He riffles through the pages until he finds what he is looking for.

  “It was Paulo’s stories that gave me the idea,” he begins and pulls his reading glasses down from their usual place on his forehead. “Here!” he shouts over the roar of the wind pouring through the front windows. “This is it, exactly!”

  I feel a rising sense of dread creep into my gut, which must show on my face, because my dad pauses in his explanation and laughs. “You needn’t look so worried, koritsi. In fact, this should please you. Going a day early is a shortcut, yes?”

  This is not what I’m worried about.

  Holding the book up, he takes a deep theatrical breath as I make my move. I dive forward, pluck the book from his fingers, and toss it onto the empty seat beside me. I’ve had that book read to me so often I can recite whole swaths of it from memory. And not by choice.

  “Why don’t you just tell me in your own words?”

  His eyes narrow. “Well,” he snorts, clearly insulted, “I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details. The obje
ct I’m looking for was not in Makri. I didn’t think it would be but needed to confirm to be sure. This means I can head south early and make my way directly to the next site.”

  He turns away huffily and stares out the window as the scenery hurtles by.

  I consider reminding him how his reading always puts me to sleep and instead decide to try pacifying him by asking for more detail. “South? Where in the south? One of the islands?”

  My father arches an eyebrow. “Perhaps if you read a little more widely, it would be obvious.” Then he snaps his mouth shut and returns to the view out his window.

  I sigh and watch the sea go by as Taki hurtles down the highway to the airport. It’s astonishing how sitting beside my father makes me feel like a teenager again. On the rare occasion we’d hang out together when I was growing up, it was just like this. In retrospect, my guess is he was so used to everyone at the university acceding to his every whim that having to actually communicate with his own daughter, someone who wasn’t contractually obligated to listen to him or obey his orders, threw him off his stride. Also? Once he takes offense, it can be hours before he forgets why he’s mad and starts talking again.

  Before now, I’ve always had my own life to return to until he recovers from his huff. But stuck here in this moment, all I can do is stare at the sea and regret every choice I’ve made in the past three days.

  I should be home tasting cakes and trying on dresses with my fiancé. Or at worst, I should be sitting on a shady Grecian portico gently rubbing aloe vera into my singed forearms and refining the text of my submission for Charlotte. But instead, I’m sitting in the back of a car driven by a bird-loving maniac beside a sulking man-baby.

  I take a deep breath and vow to spend less energy on catering to my dad and more on editing. At the moment, I’m more concerned about impressing Charlotte than I am over the wedding dress, and that’s saying something.

  Since my dad is still refusing to speak with me, it’s not until we get into the airport that I learn that our flight is bound for Crete. I take advantage of his snit to sit by myself in the departure lounge and have another look at the original itinerary. Digging around in my bag, I pull out the file folder I snatched away from Evan that day in my dad’s office.

  It feels like an eternity ago.

  In any case, looking at the itinerary does cheer me up a little. We’ll be flying into Heraklion Airport on the north coast of Crete, where we’re scheduled to spend only a single day. If my dad can get whatever he needs to see wrapped up in a day, I for one am not going to argue about moving things along.

  Nevertheless, while distances in Europe don’t really compare with those in the US, this part of the journey is no short hop. The flight to Athens is just over an hour, and then we have to wait for a second flight to get to Crete.

  I jam Evan’s file back into my bag with a sigh and pull out my tablet, but just at that moment, they call us to board. Stepping into line behind my still-distant father I look for the bright side. I can always work on the plane.

  Which means, of course, that I get exactly zero work done.

  In the first place, the plane is the smallest I’ve ever flown in—seating maybe forty people?—and to my surprise, Taki is coming along for the ride. I spend the entire time jammed ignominiously into a seat between my dad and Taki, who is holding Herman’s cage on his lap as carry-on luggage. Our route crosses the Aegean Sea all the way down to Athens, and there’s no real option to get any work done onboard. The plane is so buffeted by gusting spring winds that the flight attendants have to remain buckled in for the duration of both flights. I don’t get a chance to lower my tray table even once.

  Instead, I spend my time fretting. While we wait for our second flight, I use the airport Wi-Fi in Athens for a quick text exchange with a very sleep-deprived Devi. This doesn’t really help, as it turns out she’s pulling an all-nighter in the hospital’s ER and sounds almost as out of sorts as my dad. I should note that his mood did improve eventually, especially after he spent the layover in Athens in the airport bar with Taki.

  “Only a small gin and tonic, darling,” he calls from his seat. “Practically medicinal!”

  While Taki and my dad live it up in the bar, I sit out in the departure lounge and finally manage to put together a reply to Anthony. Lots of emphasis on our shortcut and the time saved, and a promise to discuss the dress in more detail when I get home. But between his refusal to text and his disciplined approach to his inbox, I know it’s likely I won’t hear back from him until later tonight, at the soonest. There hasn’t really been time for a full accounting, but I send him a list of all the wedding-related sites I’ve been perusing, with my favorites underlined. And even after that, I spend the second flight alternating between nausea from airsickness and worry that I am letting my fiancé down.

  Nearly five hours of teeth-rattling, legroomless travel later, we finally begin to spiral down toward the airport. As the plane circles, I watch a large ferry steam past an enormous breakwater protecting the port city. The waters lapping the shore as we land are a brilliant, impossible shade of blue, even compared with those off mainland Greece. We touch down with a gently vertiginous bounce in Heraklion, Crete. The relief I feel at having my feet on the ground is clearly shared by Herman, who squawks loudly as we shudder to a halt and then carols “Olé, Olé” all the way out through security.

  However, even our arrival in Crete doesn’t offer my anxiety a reprieve. A quick check of my e-mail while we wait for my dad’s bag shows no reply from Anthony. Worse, there is an e-mail from Charlotte. The subject line is just a series of question marks, and there is no text in the body of the e-mail. The sense of panic in my gut ratchets up a notch. My fiancé is incommunicado, and the woman I want most in the world to impress decidedly . . . is not.

  Lost in my own thoughts, I trail along after my dad, who is at least looking a bit more cheerful now that we’re on the ground. But Taki, who was born here, is glowing. As we walk out of the airport, he pauses and then raises his hands in the air like he’s just scored a goal. Suddenly there is a roar and a rushing sound, and the three of us find ourselves in the middle of a cheering, bouncing mob. With a sense of self-preservation far superior to my own, Herman flies into the sky above us as the mob surges around in joyous rapture.

  A short, barrel-chested man, the spitting image of Taki but with the addition of a mop of grey curls and a possibly even lusher mustache, throws his arms around both my father and me.

  “Kalos IRTHATE!” he bellows. “Welcome! Welcome to Crete!”

  And as the crowd takes up this chant, from in the air above us, I hear Herman squawk, “Olé!”

  chapter fifteen

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  Tsakiris Chips

  Gia Kostas, special correspondent to NOSH, in Heraklion, Crete

  Snacking is universal in any culture, and what greater delight than when something you assume you know well surprises you. Just when you think the staid potato has seen and done it all, these salty, spicy specimens come along to offer a new take on an old theme . . .

  The chaos outside the arrivals level at the airport takes a while to settle down. By the time it does, I have learned that (a) Taki has a very large family, and (b) they are extremely happy to have him home.

  As all the yelling and kissing and pinching of cheeks and crying swirls around me, I am suddenly reminded of my own jet-lagged introduction to Greece in the Athens airport. The large, joyous family greetings then seemed so much a part of an alien culture to which I had no connection at all. Can that really have only been last Monday? Less than a week ago—way less. Five days.

  Amazing what a difference five days can make. I am with my own father, for starters, and am now surrounded by one of those surging, loving families that I so desperately tried to avoid that day back in Athens.

  Yet somehow, here in Crete, the fact that I am not of this family d
oes not seem to matter at all. I remember that Taki is only a nickname, and his actual given name being Stavros Panagiotakis means this whole crazy family are Panagiotakises. My hands are shaken and squeezed, my cheeks are pinched and patted, and the rest of me is thoroughly hugged in both group and singular iterations, without the least regard for any attempt at social distancing. Almost everyone is crying tears of joy, and I am surrounded by a surging sea of human emotion. As the only child of a single mother, I’ve never been greeted even remotely like this before. It’s overwhelming and shocking and . . . quite, quite lovely.

  As there is very little English being spoken; in the moment, I am able only to grasp a couple of the introductions. Taki’s brother, whose name is Spiro; and Giagiá—pronounced Ya-ya—his grandmother. She is a round little woman, dressed entirely in black. Her white hair is pulled back under a grey scarf, and even in this heat, she is firmly buttoned into a well-worn cardigan. As Taki introduces her to me, there is a sudden flurry of feathers, and Herman alights on her shoulder. I steel myself, expecting a shriek to rival the one she let out when she caught sight of her grandson, but no.

  Instead, Herman steps gingerly along her shoulder and settles in right beside her ear. He places his cheek against hers, and the two of them coo at each other so quietly I can barely hear it under the cacophony of family greetings.

  “Ermie!” she whispers. “Ermie-mou!”

  The tiny pink patch on Herman’s cheekbones darkens, and he drops his crest as she caresses him with one thick, wrinkled finger.

  After a few moments, the noise level drops enough that Taki’s brother Spiro is able to shepherd everyone, still all talking at once, into the airport parking lot. After several false starts, since each Panagiotakis seems to have a distinct—and opposed—memory of where the family car is parked in this remarkably small lot, we finally stop in front of what has to be the strangest vehicle I have ever seen.