Escape Plans

Teri Vlassopoulos

Description

My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when she found out.

Niko Kiriakos, tentative heir to the ailing Calypso Shipping fleet, always suspected he was cursed. Following his sudden disappearance, his wife, Anna, and daughter, Zoe, are left adrift. Unmoored, they begin to test the boundaries of their lives, struggling with issues of loyalty, identity and what it means to be a family. Spanning years and tracing a route from Niagara Falls to Greece, Escape Plans is an unblinking look at the ties that bind us together and the things that pull us apart.

“Vlassopoulos has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books

Sujets

• Montreal
• List of Canadian writers
• Grief
• Family
• Myth
• Niagara Falls
• Greece
• Novel

Informations

• Publié par: Invisible Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781926743622
• Langue: English

Extrait

EscAPE PLANS










Invisible Publishing
Halifax & Toronto
Copyright Teri Vlassopoulos, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Vlassopoulos, Teri, 1979-, author
Escape plans / Teri Vlassopoulos.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-926743-56-1 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-926743-62-2 (epub)

I. Title.
PS8643.L38E83 2015 C813’.6 C2015-905225-4
C2015-905226-2

Printed and bound in Canada
Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Toronto | www.invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Invisible Publishing recognizes the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture & Heritage. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Culture Division to develop and promote our cultural resources for all Nova Scotians.
For Andrew and Clara
I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking
about love;
adorn your hair with the sun’s thorns,
dark girl;
the heart of the Scorpion has set,
the tyrant in man has fled,
and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae,
hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess;
whoever has never loved will love,
in the light…
— George Seferis, from Thrush
prologue: zoe



My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of Piraeus. When it happened, my mother and I were at home in Toronto. It was early evening in Greece, afternoon for us, and I was at school when she found out. She didn’t tell me right away. After class I went to a swim practice and then I walked home and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich. The phone kept ringing and I saw my mother only in passing, but I was always pleasantly weary after swimming and associated the lingering smell of chlorine and shampoo with a kind of deep, sweet exhaustion, so I ignored the phone calls and fell asleep without saying goodnight.
My mother, in those few hours after she found out there’d been an accident, hoped that a sailor in a passing ship would find my father and pull him on-board. At the very least, she thought he could’ve been clinging to a piece of driftwood or a mermaid—anything—treading water and waiting patiently to be rescued. Her hope finally waned, and at dawn she woke me up. I was still lying in bed when she knelt down and rested her head on the mattress, close to mine. I sat up, bleary-eyed, and looked around my room: yellow-grey morning light filtering through the curtains, my mother on her knees, my bathing suit a damp lump on the floor where I’d discarded it the night before.
Sometimes I wonder about those few hours, how it was possible that I could’ve lived through them without sensing any overarching and fundamental change. Didn’t I notice a strong, cold breeze on my walk home? Did I bite my tongue or even feel ringing in my ears? I can’t remember anything out of the ordinary. I mean, I was thirteen years old when it happened; it didn’t occur to me to pay attention to cosmic signs.
I imagined that my father’s ghost must have flown through our house, waved its hands in my face and tried to tell me something was wrong. He was a big man — his ghost would’ve had a heft to it. The electromagnetic forces must have been off the charts, and I didn’t even notice or figure it out on my own. I want to say that I’ve gotten better at reading signs as I’ve gotten older, that I’ve taught myself how to become better attuned to the universe, and while I think I’ve improved, sometimes I’m as clueless as I was back then.

I’ve been to Greece twice in my life, once when I was six years old and then again for my father’s funeral, so my memories of the country are either fuzzy with age or intensely, painfully bright. From my first visit, I remember my father and I walking down a steep street and riding a trolley bus. I met my grandparents too, but I remember even less about them—the musty smell of my grandmother’s dresses, my grandfather’s scratchy kisses. I have pictures of them holding me up like a prize fish, the two of them smiling wide, proud and triumphant. We returned to Toronto and they died before I had the chance to meet them again.
Before we left for my father’s funeral, my mother told me that in his will (he had a will?), he’d requested that his body (body?) be buried in his family’s tomb (tomb?) in Athens. She asked me, gently, if I minded. I was a kid and my father had just died and I don’t know if she truly thought I was capable of giving her a rational answer, no matter how carefully she asked. I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that I was worried that it would be lonely for him in Greece, that there would be no one around to visit. I didn’t ask her if having a family tomb meant I’d have to be buried there, too. I wondered what it meant to be buried, if it mattered where you were, ultimately. When I told Mom that it was okay, it was for her sake and not mine. It was the answer she wanted to hear and besides, the decision had already been made, so there was no use making it more complicated.
I don’t know if I’ll visit Greece again. I don’t think my mother wants to return and the thought of going on my own, without someone to guide me or translate the language, is intimidating. My father never taught me Greek. Mom didn’t speak it and when I was younger he didn’t see any point in me learning; it wasn’t necessary in Canada. It seeped in small increments anyway. I’d listen to my father when he called my grandparents and became accustomed to the lilt of the language. Soon after he died I wanted to learn it, though, as if it might bring me closer to him. I sat down with a book called Learn Greek in Three Months , and fell behind when it took me too long to memorize the alphabet. For hours I would sit and practice writing out the letters, learning the new symbols.
In Greek, there are two letters that make the o sound. There’s omicron, which looks like the Roman alphabet o , and there’s omega, which, in lower case, looks like a little rounded w . Usually the omega will come at the end of the word, while the omicron will be the o buried in the middle, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. In my name, Zoe, the o in the middle is omega, not omicron. Z . I remember being satisfied that my short name had two alphabet endings: the Roman zed and Greek omega.
A few times after my father died, I would walk into a room and find my mother crying. The first time I caught her was in the kitchen over breakfast, and I had no idea what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“Zoe,” she said, “do you know that your name means ‘life’?” I shook my head. “Your father picked it. Your grandmother was so mad when he didn’t name you after her. He’d promised he was going to.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
But I did. My father loved this story, and would tell it to me often. Normally I’d cut him off, bored by my familiarity with the anecdote, but this time, my mother telling me the story and looking so sad, I pretended I didn’t know, that it was the first time I’d ever heard it.
Maybe it isn’t hard to keep important information from the people you love. You just meet at a comfortable halfway point of truth and semi-truth. Maybe it’s better to know less than it is to know more, or to at least act like it.
I’m still trying to figure it out.
niko



I’ve always been good at leaving. I left Athens when I was twenty-three and while the lead-up had been difficult — studying, worrying about money, mandatory army service — by the time it came to leave, I was ready. I showed up at the airport four hours early and while waiting I realized that I was no longer seized with panic about my future. Jacqueline Kennedy had recently married Aristotle Onassis, and my mother thought it was a good omen, as if the union of a Greek shipping magnate and a beloved American president’s widow had a bearing on my life abroad. I dismissed it at first, but when I landed in the United States, the first newspaper article I saw was about them, and for once I thought my mother was right: it was a good sign.
After that first departure, each subsequent move was easier. I assumed this momentum would carry forward to my latest decision to return to Athens from Toronto to work for Calypso, the shipping company that had once, long ago, belonged to my family, even if circumstances were different from when I’d been in my twenties.
My cousin George met me at the airport. He’d insisted on picking me up, and after saying goodbye to Anna and Zoe and then sitting through my flight in silence, I was happy to see him.
“Are you excited to see your new home?” he asked in the car as we drove into Athens.
“You tell me.”
When I’d finalized my plans to take the job at Calypso, I’d asked George to help me find a place to live. I’d given him the bare minimum of criteria and within a week