I was out late somewhere I shouldn’t have been and so was Charlie Baby. But we were tired, so tired, and we’d forgotten so much back home. We had been paid for by our parents to skip across the pond—that means to fly from New York to Crete, that island in Greece—so that we could go on one of those wellness retreats for people S.O.L.
S.O.L. stands for Shit Out of Luck. My father’s called me that since I was a Shit-Out-of- Luck-little-girl.
Shit Out of Luck again, I was twenty-one and still not over my ex-boyfriend, sad in the department of good looks because I was an ugly girl and I knew, and losing my religion much like Charlie Baby. Charlie Baby was thirty-three and his nine-figure-fortune father caught him doing blow off the pool house toilet seat. Charlie Baby, being sensitive and such, told me about his puppeteer career and being banished to the pool house after a failed bout in show biz where he threw intellectual parties with big-wigs and that’s how he caught the affinity for coke.
I asked Charlie Baby, Did you not lock the bathroom door or something? How do you forget to do something like that, Charlie Baby?
Charlie Baby told me he was a forgetful sort of fellow and said I’d better have a good sense of direction or else maybe we might die out there on the downward descent to the village.
The place we were not supposed to have been was the village supermarket. We weren’t allowed our cell phones at the wellness retreat because cell phones were considered poor for our connection to nature; they were locked up somewhere, so we didn’t have a map.
But I told Charlie Baby not to worry, that I could read the Ancient Greek alphabet from years of private schooling, and that I was a revered chauffeur. I used to drive my boyfriend around all the time. I said that I’d be a great resource for the both of us. Sorry, I said, my ex-boyfriend. He didn’t have a car or good attitude. He did, however, sell purses on the side of the street and owned a mandolin and he was no good for me, I told Charlie Baby, no good no good no good.
Sounds like he wasn’t any good.
Well, I told Charlie Baby, there are always good things even about people who are generally no good. For example, my ex-boyfriend sometimes gave me sunglasses and purses. Sometimes he sang to me and played me his mandolin. And he was a poor musician and had a grating, gritty voice, but he wrote about birth and death and female nudity. Like me, he was in a gospel choir. This is how we met. Through church. He used to go to the church that my parents made me go to, out of the city, inside the suburbs. My parents were always making me go to church and doll-up and stand and sit and sing. Sometimes we had flesh and blood which was code for dark wine and bakery bread. It was actually pretty good, Charlie Baby. At least me and my boyfriend—I’m sorry ex-boyfriend—thought so, about the bread. I made an X in front of my face with my arms then let them fall. The bread was pretty good.
Charlie Baby plucked a leaf off the olive tree scaffolding up overhead. He used the stem like a toothpick. He grunted.
We were both wearing sandals with no back strap and had dust and small pebbles pressing into our soles. When we clomped into the village, we heard only cicadas chirp chirp chirping. Nobody out.
Long story short, the supermarket was closed. Charlie Baby kicked a metal sign when we got there.
Damn! He shook his head, damn damn damn, and he kicked up a cloud of dust.
What did you even need, Charlie Baby?
Cigarettes, he told me. And although it was dark and although it was night, I thought I could see his eyes well up with water like he was about to leak.
Same, I told him and kicked a little bit of dust myself.
The truth was that I was not in the market for cigarettes but didn’t want Charlie Baby to be the only one kicking up dust. I didn’t even know how to smoke them. I was actually in desperate need of a notebook and pen. I wanted to draw pictures. I wanted to draw pictures of the ocean.
This blows, I said after a while not noticing my delayed pun and I apologized for my lack of low-thought. I was thinking too much about the wrong thing, thinking back to the beach.
We should break in, said Charlie Baby. He walked up to the metal covering over the door, hanging there limply, not used to people like Charlie Baby kicking it.
Thunk thunk thunk, he kicked.
Wait wait wait, I said.
He paused, turned to look at me standing back in the dry-dirt street.
I asked, What are we going to do if we get caught? That’s when the car came. Red car, old car. It went loop-de-loop around the supermarket and rolled down its passenger window. There was a man inside the car, mostly bald with a red shirt to match the car.
Because Charlie Baby and I were affluent, youth-sick Americans, we did not know what to do when the man spoke to us in his modern Greek.
Charlie Baby was lit up by the stars and headlight rebounded and said to the man, We speak English, old buddy.
The man killed the engine, tuned down the headlights and the built world went quiet, the cicadas went hush. He trotted to our side of the car and leaned on the passenger door where he’d neglected to roll back up the window. The man said in a knowing sort of way, You know Homeros?
And I went, Homer?
Homeros? Yes?
And I said, Sure I know him.
He nodded at Charlie Baby, You know Homeros?
And Charlie Baby said, Not personally, of course.
The man shook his head and crossed his arms and looked down at the dust we’d been kicking around. He looked up and asked, Americans?
Yeah, Charlie Baby said. Ya know where we can get smokes at this hour? And the man said, You break into village supermarket?
Charlie Baby squinted and said, Yes?
You need a cigarette?
Charlie Baby said, Yessir.
The man reached in through the window and took out a little plastic bag with loose tobacco and rolling paper and went to the still-hot car hood.
You’re a real one, Charlie Baby said, You’re a real one, you know that? He slapped the man on the back where his red shirt stuck to him. The man rolled and packed and licked three cigarettes and placed them between the lips of himself and Charlie Baby and then me.
I was thinking about communicable viruses when he lit us all up with a little lighter and our eyes looked hollow with the glow from the end of the cigarettes there in the dim street of that small village. We were in a strange valley between tall mountains. I saw olive trees and trees of figs. Houses with the laundry lines empty. Houses with grapes growing on the roofs. Houses made of pearly stone. Our heavy, heavenly moon glowed up above.
A cat screeched. The lighter flicked down. What’s your name? Charlie Baby asked the man.
He said Adonis.
Oh, Adonis, I said. I knew someone named Donnie once.
The man shook his head like he knew what I meant.
Charlie Baby turned to me, Tell us about him.
Oh, no. I said, Too painful. Too much to tell. Too little time.
Adonis said, Please. Tell. We listen.
So I told them the story about the night Donnie got kicked out of the gospel choir and I did too. It was just a few days ago. Mere hours ago, really. Me and Donnie got caught fooling around in the graveyard the way people sometimes do in antique books or mythology and a police van rolled by, then another. My parents drove ten miles through the suburbs to pick me up and Donnie, my ex-boyfriend, was taken to the station because he lost all his clothes among the headstones. He called his best friend’s cell phone with his one phone call but the friend didn’t pick up. The guards felt sorry for him and they let him call me.
My parents drove me to the station where, promptly, he broke up with me on a metal parking-lot-picnic-table under one of those tall lamp lights. A flood light, I think it’s called. He was wearing a terrible t-shirt with a crusty stain on the front and these terrible cargo shorts and terrible flip-flops from a lost-and-found bin. I didn’t even know lost-and-founds still existed. Whatever happened to lost-and-founds?
Goodbye, I told Donnie in the moonlight. I won’t miss your terrible mandolin music. And Donnie just waved and waited there on the bench as I trotted back to my parent’s tinted window SUV .
Crying, I was taken to the passenger loading zone at JFK with a suitcase packed by my mother. I was like, Mother! Where the hell are you taking me? And she was like, Shut ya’ yap. Ya father called a friend of a friend of a friend ‘cause Donnie’s been no good for you! No good no good no good! She shook her finger in my face. Ya goin’ to Greece, darlin,’ you’re goin’ to the sea. And I was like, But! But! But! What will happen to Donnie? And my father was silent still driving and my mother was like, Oh, darling, Donnie is so S.O.L.
But, oh, her packing skills have always been inept. She loaded my luggage with things no girl of twenty-one should need or even want. Frilly dresses. Granny panties in a ten-pack. Long skirts. Loose shirts. Toothbrush and hairbrush. Clip-on-your-book reading light and a pack of ballpoint pens. A Bible, KJV, Jesus’s lines printed in special red ink with tiny font. She didn’t pack any blank paper and all I wanted to do was draw pictures. I wanted to draw pictures of the ocean.
Your wounds, Adonis said. They are fresh.
Charlie Baby asked, You didn’t lose your clothes in the graveyard?
I said no, I was wearing a skirt. Then I coughed from the cigarette. My throat was feeling the way I imagined a fireplace might feel.
Charlie Baby nodded his head. Adonis with the red shirt nodded his head. Then they looked up at the sky, at the stars, and they were shooting, really shooting. Charlie Baby went, Woah.
Adonis said, Stars falling from the sky. Not Homeros. Zeus.
Charlie Baby nodded.
I tried smoking again and coughed.
Adonis asked what we were doing there in the village in the middle of the night. He dragged and blew a stream of smoke.
I said, We’re jet-lagged. It’s early morning here by now and yesterday back home.
We forgot so much at home, so said our Charlie Baby.
Then we gave Adonis the rest of the spiel. Well-to-do, bad-behaved younglings who’d flown from the East Coast way further east and to a wellness retreat in the Cretan mountains. We met first at the airport where we were sweating hot on a delayed flight and shook hands and rode in a taxi together with a wellness counselor named Joan. Joan was blond and born in Oregon and had just gone through the program herself. Then she moved to Greece. She’d already taken in a feral cat and had an olive tree in the yard of her rented condo.
Adonis shook his head, Yes, I am friend of Joan.
Anyhow, Charlie Baby went on. The resort. It was made of concrete and stone. It had lemon trees and a little vineyard area. There was wine, but we haven’t drank any yet. And I don’t think Joan’s gonna let us have any. We tossed our luggage in our respective rooms and waved ta- ta to our cell phones as Joan locked them away in her office. There was a pool and an area with English books about feelings and how we’re supposed to share them. The building was on a sort of cliff that butted up next to the ocean. And the people there were a little—and he did one of those moves, spinning his pointer finger in a circle next to his head. Charlie Baby whistled. Cuckoo. A modern Greek chicken went plucking down the long supermarket street and across the road.
Charlie Baby said, Joan hiked us down to the beach where she found a piece of driftwood and christened it a talking stick. There were ten of us total and each of us went around to say what was wrong with us and what we’d done to get all the way to Greece. This one—he pointed at me with his thumb—told us all she’d been banished by the parental unit. Someone was grieving. Someone else was trying to commit a career change. Two people were actually a honeymooning North Dakota couple who’d read the wellness retreat website wrong. Go figure. Everybody else, so it seemed, opted in for the post-beach-time nature-immersion-stroll save for us. He held out his arms, Here we are.
Charlie Baby and Adonis looked at one another, at me, at their feet snuffing out dead cigarettes. I dropped mine on the ground and stomped, too. In unwritten social code which I didn’t know I had access to, we piled fast into Adonis’s red car. He said, I shall take you to my goat farm. Yes?
Charlie Baby said, Whatever works, riding shotgun, and the car started up and started rolling. Charlie Baby stuck his head out of the window the way dogs sometimes do in cinematography.
I can’t recall the length of the car ride but remember the smell of plants and rust and the words Adonis taught us. He pointed to a mountain. Ορος. He said the word for ghost. Φαντασμα. Καλος means beautiful and good.
Because it was nighttime, we pulled down a long driveway made of that same stiffly crumbling Greek dirt. At the end of the lane was a house and a long string of metallic fence.
Adonis pulled in at the end of the driveway and looked at me in the rearview, You have been to goat farm?
No, I said, no no no.
Charlie Baby’s stomach growled. No.
You speak? Adonis asked.
We were still sitting in the silent car and Charlie Baby said, I can’t see any goats and boy am I beatnik-tired and boy am I hungry. How about something to eat?
My guests, Adonis said. He stepped out of the car into the Greek air and it was smelling like the season of spring smells back in America. Flowers everywhere. Flowers flowers flowers. A fecal odor from the goats. I knew, then, they were nearby because I could hear their screams.
The goats are screaming, Charlie Baby said. He sang a little ditty the way people like Billy Holiday used to sing little ditties that were actually heart-sick, oh-so-sad songs of mourning, The goats are screaming tonight. The goats are screaming. Tonight. And he really dragged out that second tonight. Tired, lonely night.
I don’t know how we found our way to the patio. Something like memory led Adonis there and Adonis led me and Charlie Baby. We should have been sleeping, so late, but Adonis said, I go in house. You do not go in house. Both sit where you like. Then he left us at a table.
We sat across from one another. Adonis set the table with most of a Greek salad and plates. There was also a bowl of dolmades and a dribble-empty carafe. Adonis waved his hands at us, Eat. Then he trotted across the patio to smoke something that wasn’t a cigarette. He sat in a metal chair with a round seat and did not face us. I was letting my eyes adjust to the light coming from a shrinking-wicked candle on the table. There was another, bigger candle on a piece of house furniture—something like a nightstand—pressed up to the stone siding of the house and it was made of wood with a little drawer. I imagined opening the drawer and finding olive pits.
Charlie Baby took all the tomatoes off the Greek Salad and left them in a hill on my plate. I thought about North American mother birds regurgitating worms and cicadas for their young when he piled those filmy guts and seeds there in front of me. I wondered if Mediterranean mother birds did that, too.
So, I said to Charlie Baby, tell me why, at the airport, and at the resort, and when we were all together out on the ocean, tell me, Charlie Baby, why did you introduce yourself as Charlie Baby? Tell me, who are you?
Everybody called him Charlie Baby because he had a baby-fat face on a lank-arm body, our Charlie, our baby. In America, he listened to the radio in his car although he could have connected his phone because he said it was a human thing to listen to a song somebody else had picked. His favorite fruit was a plum for reason some. He didn’t like going to gas stations in the state of New Jersey. He never used public restrooms. He used to eat meat, but no longer; his grad school friends killed his pet rat by feeding it to an escaped Burmese python, Python bivittatus, found slung around the balustrade of their apartment’s front porch to get it to go away, so they claimed.
Charlie Baby, I said, that’s so sad. About the rat. I meant the rat.
When the rat was gone along with the tears he had shed, they sang him that Dirty Dancing song about babies and people being called “baby” and Charlie Baby had been a dancer, long ago, in boyhood—ballet. A sensitive, shy child, his mother helped him step into and roll tights up his legs, watched him spin. She clapped.
Oh, Charlie Baby, I said, what about the dancing?
No longer, he told me. He’d given up on dance when he’d given up on the gospel and converted his interests to theater.
You’re not religious?
I don’t follow Descartes is the thing.
Can you define the word “thing,” Charlie Baby?
Charlie Baby let out a huff of air, took a bite of a leaf and chomped and chewed the way cows sometimes do when they graze.
I asked him, Ever think about bovines?
Ah yes, Charlie Baby swallowed, pastoral creatures. He held a hand to point towards the groves beyond Adonis. There on the stone-paved Greek patio underneath an arbor covered all over in mulberries, I watched the goats, way out in the distance. I figured there must have been cattle too, slim creatures on grass-dead mountain. I heard a goat cry and a metal bell. Because it was June, sometimes the mulberries fell on Charlie Baby’s head and he patted it and said kop kop kop kop.
A few minutes later, a mulberry fell on his head and he went through the routine. He patted the place where, years from now, there’ll probably be a bald spot. He patted and after the pats he said, Do you believe in ghosts?
Fantasma? I asked him. In Greek, I asked, Φαντασμα?
That’s just the thing, Charlie Baby said. Father, Son, and Holy One.
Amen. I said, Amen.
He asked, Why are you not eating?
I told Charlie Baby I was so sick with worry and fatigue of the liminal sort that anything I put into my frail system, well, it’d come right back up. And all the goats that we couldn’t see would see us by the light of the winding-wick candles. One of the goats let out a scream and Charlie Baby took a raw bite of pepper.
He said, Wouldn’t it be funny if they could understand what you were saying?
How do you know that they can’t?
Charlie Baby did one of those moves with a flick of the wrist to tell me he wanted me to stop asking him questions. And so, I stopped asking him questions. Instead, I closed my eyes and told him about the things I saw.
I said, I see the ocean when I close my eyes.
Charlie Baby said, We were just there.
You think we’ll go back?
He went, Back where?
Back to the wellness retreat. That was such a blow.
Charlie Baby raised his eyebrows at me and stopped chewing.
Sorry, I said, I forgot about the cocaine complication.
It’s alright, Charlie Baby said. He said that all his life, people had been forgetting about him and not caring about anything that he did, not ever. Charlie Baby studied Fine Art—of the theater sort—down in Texas as a graduate student. He wanted to be an actor, and even though he might have been one, he could never keep a job.
Why not? I asked Charlie Baby.
He said, Don’t know. I just got bored. So easily. I got bored so easily. I read too much philosophy and every time I got up to do my part in theater or a screen test or what have you, everybody said I seemed like I was thinking too hard. Not making the right faces. I’d forget lines and make up my own.
What’s wrong with that?
He shrugged, Nothing. That’s why I became a puppeteer.
I told Charlie Baby I’d never met a puppeteer. What was that like?
He said easy at first. He started doing small gigs at local libraries and birthday parties but the shows became existential and referential of death and of war. Always, people are dying. Always, people are fighting. Always, the two go together and this is the note the puppet shows would end on. Children cried. Charlie Baby got escorted out of infantile spaces. Somehow Charlie Baby’s father got him a gig in Vegas where he opened for a magic-type show. People booed. Charlie Baby said his father never came to any show, anyhow. Whatever. Then Charlie Baby moved back to Long Island.
I told him my gospel choir met at a Long Island church.
Charlie Baby said Amen.
Father. Son. Holy One, I bowed my head to the floor.
Adonis was still sitting across the porch and put out his not-nicotine-cigarette and he went, My father is a father I do not know.
Charlie Baby said, I hear ya, friend.
Adonis said, I hear you talking, and I ask, you have never been to a farm of goats, no?
When he said goats, I thought it sounded like ghosts. I said in my head, Φαντασμα.
Charlie Baby said, Not ever.
I shook my head no.
I live on goat farm since I was boy. Adonis talked with his hands.
Charlie Baby said, I was conceived on Long Island.
Adonis shook his finger. Charlie Baby shook his finger back. I looked out into the darkness and listened to the goat bells clinking and the creatures crying under shooting stars and I thought about how it’d still be light out back home. I said, It’s so late, so dark, we’ve been through so much. All three of us. We’ve passed through so many places.
Adonis nodded with his eyes closed in the dimness, Φανταςμα. Then he stood and started walking back, close to the house.
Charlie Baby placed his fork on the table.
Wait out of doors, Adonis said and he walked inside through the house’s screen door. He brought us back mats made of bamboo and blankets to lie out on outside for sleep. He pointed at Charlie Baby, In the morning, you help work goat farm. I give you both cigarettes. Yes?
We said that sounded like an alright deal.
But Charlie Baby was a curious fellow, Why can’t we go in?
Adonis said, House is full to brim. He held up a flat hand above his head. He laughed a little chuckle, With pits of the olive!
Charlie Baby went haha. I went haha. Adonis went, Καληνύχτα.
Me and Charlie Baby laid down on those bamboo mats in our clothes unchanged from Joan’s beach, under the mulberries blooming, falling, juice spattering on our skin. And the cicadas sang. And the stars shot. And Charlie Baby talked about Homer.
This story is true and real. Zeus was born in a cave on top of a mountain on top of the island of Crete, quite nearby where we were then. He had fallen from the sky the way I’ve been told an angel did. Perhaps he was scared or knew no better than to escape back to the abyss from which he was bred. The universe exploded. Stars fragmented and collided and poof! There he was. His father tried to eat him but he ate a stone instead. Thunder and lightning. Iphigenea. Peter Paul Rubens. Etcetera. Years passed. Then, there we were, me and Charlie Baby, belly-up on the goat farm’s back porch.
I asked him, Have you ever loved anybody, Charlie Baby?
Lacier H., he said with a French twang. There was this boy back home named Lacier H. who was born on an island off the coast of the Côte de Azure. But that was a long time ago. I can’t remember what the H stands for. It would have never worked.
Why not? I asked.
It just wouldn’t have worked. He knows all kinds of French. I only know how to French kiss. His family skis. My family sails. His father does real estate. My father does finance.
Oh no, I said, because I knew the relationship could have never worked under circumstances as such, so I said, And your mothers?
Met taking us to Tots by the Sea.
Tots by the Sea?
Baby ballet on Long Island. They’re both freelance accountants. They like the same things like listening to folk music and buying designer purses off the street.
I see, I said. Whatever happened to Lacier?
He became Rat King in Cirque du Soleil’s The Nutcracker: Ooh La La in Las Vegas.
That’s sad, I said. About the rat. I meant the rat.
Hey, Charlie Baby said, what’s your mother and father do?
My mother’s a pulmonologist. My father’s a drug dealer.
Charlie Baby went, For real?
Yeah, basically. He’s a pharmacist. Have you heard the Good News about Ozempic?
He said, I thought you were religious.
We’ve got to make a living somehow.
That’s why I became a puppeteer.
I asked Charlie Baby, What was your dream?
I’ve just wanted to be happy, my whole life. But I am S.O.L.
I said, My whole life I’ve been waking up every day knowing that one day I’ll pass gently away. I’ve thought about that for a very long time. Do you ever think about that?
Charlie Baby snored off, Every day. Every day every day every day. I count the goats to fall asleep.
I said, Night night night night night Charlie Baby, my friend, my constituent. I fell asleep and woke up to a mulberry pattering off my face.
My skincare routine, I thought. I sat up and Charlie Baby was already sitting across the porch with Adonis, smoking silly cigarettes.
I stood. I looked out and saw a mountain covered with specs. There were goats with cowbells and olive trees and a tall mountain off to the side. I remember cattle on grass-dead mountain.
Adonis turned back laughing, The girl is awake! He pointed at the mountain, That is the place Zeus was born! He went, Hahaha.
Charlie Baby went, Haha.
Haha, I went as well because I didn’t know what else to do.
Adonis said to Charlie Baby, We do go mad out here. And I asked where is here? And Charlie Baby snorted. He looked at me, You’re funny. You remind me of a cat.
How so?
Charlie Baby started singing, Curiosity.
Adonis crinkled his nose. He sniffed. He had a little bit of facial hair people like my father call whiskers. Curiosity.
Curiosity? I was confused. Curiosity? A cat? Curiosity. Curious. I. Tea. Bags. Tea bags. Hahaha.
Adonis went, Haha.
I went, Come on, Charlie Baby. How are we going to make it back to the wellness retreat? How are we going to get out of here? Adonis, I said and I looked hard at his cold eyes struck by hot sun and I asked him, When can we go?
Too late, he said. Joan’s time is coming.
Of Arc? Charlie Baby asked. Fontaine? Didion?
Sad Joan, Adonis shook his head. Sad is Joan. Joan is sad.
I was trying to count goats in my peripheral line of eyeshot. They were scraggly-looking things. One screamed. When we heard a vehicle pulling down the road, Adonis’s face changed and he shouted something in Greek, dropped his smoke and ran around to the front of the house. Charlie Baby said, This guy grows all sorts of stuff! All I did was help pull weeds this morning way out in the pasture, but it’s like, weed, you know?
I turned to look down the road where a black van had pulled in at the end of the lane.
Adonis putzed up to the van’s door and I thought it would have been some sort of police. But Joan got out. She passed Adonis flailing his hands in the side yard area that wasn’t really a yard at all and went stomping around the house to the back patio.
How did you get here? She was shouting at us.
Apparently the North Dakota couple ratted us out. They, too, had stayed behind at the beach when they watched us leave the estate. They were wandering near a rock. Wandering on rocks. The only reason Joan knew where to find us was because Adonis gave her a ring on the telephone.
But how did she have Adonis’s phone number?
She, like us, had escaped the wellness retreat her first night, Shit Out of Luck to a religious extent. She was tired and looking for cigarettes at the village supermarket. Her ex-boyfriend had just broken up with her and she walked up from the beach to the wellness retreat with its pearly stone and Hellenistic trees, then down the tall hill from that very same retreat and into the very same village. The supermarket was closed. Adonis rolled by in his red car. We never knew where he was going or what he was doing, as Joan was telling us the story of how she, too, had been feckless and how she, too, had ended up on the goat farm with Adonis at some point or another. She said, My condo now is just down the road and I came here to stop by Adonis’s home because he’s my friend and, and, and, and—
And Charlie Baby said, He grows all kinds of stuff.
Joan huffed, Yeah.
We did not stay at the goat farm. Joan led us into the van and she talked to Adonis for a while.
What are they saying? I asked Charlie Baby as we looked out through the insulated doors of the van.
Can’t read lips. Can’t tell.
I thought you were a puppeteer.
He turned to me in the back seat. Dear girl, you have gone mad.
Joan trotted back to the van, hands in the pockets of her cargo shorts.
Must we part ways so soon? Charlie Baby said looking into the black glass of the window. We waved him goodbye through tinted windows to Adonis. He stood in the center of the road. Joan put the car in drive, said, We are always part-way to somewhere. And Charlie Baby said, Is this true? And Joan said, Does it matter?
I said, Yes.
What’s that? she asked me in an Oregonian accent. Can’t hear over the AC.
Yes. I said, Yes.
Charlie Baby sang again, She said yes! He held out that last note.
It matters so much, I said. Yes, these things matter so much. Where we are going and—
Where we have been, Charlie Baby interjected. He said, That’s J.C. Oates. Ha!
I went, Jesus Christ? Cereal grain?
Maybe so, Joan said. She looked at me in the rearview mirror with eyes the color of dead grass. She said to me, It’s okay to miss someone. You’re halfway-healed. I’m half sleep- deprived. Someone sings a song about being halfway to Hell and I think to myself, Joan said taking a hand off the wheel, Doesn’t it sometimes feel like we’re there already?
Halfway, Charlie Baby whisper-screamed, making his hands go in a marquee. That’s a great name for a puppet show.
Joan said, You think so?
Swear, cried Charlie Baby in a British twang. He cleared his throat and went, Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, line 168.
Joan nodded her head. I pressed my forehead to the window. Joan drove us back down the road away from the goats with their bells, back through town with its then-open market, back up the long, tall lane with the olive trees lining the road, and back to the beach where we sat on rocks with sticks for talk and told one another about what we’d done wrong, how we ended up sleeping on bamboo mats at a goat farm. We never even entered the house. Mythology tells us it was full of olive pits.
The ocean purred. The other people at the wellness retreat scuffed their shoes in the sand. Charlie Baby sat next to me. He stared out at the ocean. On his turn, he asked, Does anybody have a piece of paper? I think I’d like to draw a picture. I’d like to draw a picture of the ocean. There’s so much I forgot back at home. He asked Joan, Can we bow our heads and pray now?
