After lunch, Captain Mehmet motored the gulet away from the cove, striking out for new waters. We all gathered at the stern, in the shade of the awning and around the table, seeking relief from the sun.
As we ventured farther out into the bay, away from land, the wind whipped up. Hard. It tossed Maeve’s paperback overboard, and scattered Fiona and Alice’s playing cards all over the deck. For a few minutes, we all worked together to try to collect the swirling cards. Then we stumbled into seats as the waves became choppier. The red Turkish flag snapped and hissed on its pole. Halyards and winch handles clattered and banged.
Sitting on a wicker chair, I squeezed my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around myself. My stomach sloshed.
“Watch the horizon line if you’re queasy,” advised Nils.
I tried to lock my gaze on the retreating horizon. But glancing at the other passengers, I saw they all looked uncomfortable too. Sage sat across from me on a cushioned seat, perched on her books to keep the pages from flapping, and tied her hair back more securely in a bun. Then she wrapped the pretty blue scarf with white stars over her head, tying it under her chin to keep her hair from whipping around. Clearly she wasn’t immune to the boat’s movements either, because she kept her gaze held fast to that horizon line.
She caught my eye at one point, and flashed me the barest of smiles—signaling sympathy or misery, I couldn’t tell which. But the smile was friendly. I managed a startled smile back just before she turned away. Then I noticed a spray of brown freckles on her pale face, and all up and down her arms. She was like the opposite of me, in a way. I felt something shift inside me and connect to her.
Maybe I was so starved for friends I was just looking for an excuse to break down her snobbishness, and my shyness, and talk to her.
Or maybe I was just incredibly bored.
“Where do you suppose the captain is taking us?” Alice, the older British lady, wondered aloud. “Seems we’re getting a bit far from shore. I’d hate to miss the ruins.”
“We’re trusting the crew to follow the archaeological itinerary, even without our guide,” said Ingrid, “but I’ve heard routes can change, depending on the weather.” Then, as if realizing what she’d just said about our lack of a guide, she glanced worriedly at Aunt Jackie and pressed her lips together. Aunt Jackie frowned but said nothing.
“Routes can change depending on the captain’s whims, too,” added Fiona, Alice’s daughter. “I read these cabin charter itineraries aren’t as fixed as they promise.”
“The captain is making a special stop to a quiet inlet near Dalyan,” announced Orhan, poking his head out of the galley kitchen window. “Lycian Tours has arranged for a shore excursion to Dalyan and a guide there. You may also be lucky enough to see loggerhead turtles resting on the beach. I think you will enjoy this place. It is very beautiful.” His eyes lingered on Mom a moment longer before he ducked back into the kitchen.
“Well, well. Somebody fancies you,” Maeve teased her.
Mom shook her head. “He’s just friendly,” she insisted. But I noticed her cheeks were no longer as pale, and I caught her smoothing her maxi dress.
Dalyan. I liked the sound of that. What kind of place was it? I took out my Lonely Planet and scanned the index. It was hard to read, or even hold the book steady, as the boat bounced over the waves, but eventually I found the page and read about the Lycian rock tombs that were visible on the eastern cliffs.
Cliffs! My heart beat a little faster. Maybe I could climb something. Whenever I felt totally out of control, climbing reset everything for me. The feeling of rock beneath my hands—even the fake rock of a gym wall—anchored me.
“Excuse me, everyone,” said Aunt Jackie, rising unsteadily to her feet. “This chop is really getting to me. I think I’d better head below.” She headed below deck and the rest of us could hear her retching.
“Poor dear,” murmured Alice. “She’s got no stomach for the sea.”
Minutes later, Captain Mehmet turned the boat back toward land. Golden pine-studded hills that reminded me of brown sugar came into sight again. The waves calmed, the wind lessened, and the sun beat down once more. About thirty yards away from an inlet beach, Selim and Mehmet cranked the winch and lowered the anchor with a splash.
I sucked in my breath as I looked from the starboard side to the port side. A large yacht was moored there, about twenty yards away from us. It was the fancy boat with the couple on it: the Gulet Anilar.
“There they are,” I heard Milton mutter as he too noticed the boat. “The lovebirds. Rich bastards. Hope they’re enjoying all that space.”
The tanned, fit-looking couple radiated joy, even from a distance. They stood close together at the prow, taking in the landscape together. The man stroked the woman’s blonde hair.
“They seem happy, don’t they,” said Mom, sounding a little wistful. Or bitter, I couldn’t tell. “This setting is made for romance. No wonder Berk proposed to Jackie around here.”
My eyes scanned for the hot first mate on the Anilar. It was a fun coincidence that our boats had ended up in the same place, even though we’d taken different paths. Maybe I’d dare myself to catch his eye. Back when I had friends, we used to hang out at local cafés and “fish” for boys, trying to get them to look at us without ever going up to them or saying a word. We tried to exert some kind of magnetic pull, willing them to turn around, and gave ourselves points if they noticed us within a certain amount of time.
But suddenly what caught my eye were rocks. Large, carved brown rocks, rounded at the top and perfectly smooth, jutted out here and there around the inlet,.
“Doesn’t it make you want to go in?” Mom nudged me and gave me a knowing look.
I ran down to our cabin and quickly changed into my swim tights and long-sleeved rash guard. From down the hall I could hear puking sounds. After I changed and locked up my suitcase, I paused at Aunt Jackie’s door and knocked softly.
She opened it, looking pale and drawn, her hair a mess.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked her. “Water, maybe?”
She shook her head. “No thanks. I’m fine. I’ll be up in a bit.”
“Should I get my mom? You don’t look so good.”
“No need,” she said. “Your mom’s a worrier. Really, I’m fine.”
She seemed anxious to be alone, closing the door midsentence, so I ran back upstairs and lowered myself down the ladder into the clear, cold water. Then I let go. In a second, the water had warmed to the temperature of a cool bath. I breaststroked to the nearest rock, taking care not to let my head go underwater and wash my makeup off. Just in case the hot first mate from the Anilar happened to look my way. The makeup was supposed to be waterproof, but past experience had taught me that the packaging lied.
I reached out and put my hand on the rock. It felt as smooth as sand.
“Hey,” said a girl’s voice.
I started and turned around to see Sage treading water right behind me.
Her curly red hair had come out of its bun and now spread out around her on the water.
“Quite a ride over here, huh?” she asked, grinning.
It took me a moment to find my words. I couldn’t figure out why I was so nervous around her, but I was grateful she’d decided I was worth talking to after all. “Oh, yeah, choppy water. I thought I was going to yurk.”
“Me too,” she said. “Anyway, I’m surprised to see you in the water. Everyone’s been saying you can’t swim.”
I’m surprised to see you in the water, too, talking to me, I wanted to say, but I stopped myself. It was incredible to be talking to someone near my own age at last; I didn’t want to blow it. “No, I can swim. I just usually choose not to. I have, um . . . highly sensitive skin.”
“Well, then let’s not waste any time! Come on. Let’s check out those rocks over there.” She flipped underwater and pushed off with her feet on the base of the rock. She glided several yards away before coming up for air.
I swam after her, keeping my head up to avoid Catastrophic Makeup Failure. The next rock we found had a large base and a ledge jutting out that was just wide enough for two people to perch on. Sage pulled herself onto it.
I glanced at the Anilar, where that hot first mate was oiling the deck. I hoped he didn’t see me. Sage looked like a voluptuous mermaid, her legs tucked up beneath her, hair tumbling over one shoulder. I looked more like a harbor seal. Or a drowned rat.
“Look.” Sage pointed to some cliffs. High up, they were honey-combed with windows and doorways. Some had columns sculpted on either sides of the doors. “The Lycian rock tombs.”
“Can we swim to the beach and climb them?” I asked eagerly.
Sage shook her head. “They’re fenced off. But there’s supposed to be more in Fethiye, and those tombs you can actually hike to.”
“Seems kind of wrong, doesn’t it, to hike around people’s graves?” I said as I clambered up beside her. It’s funny, I usually felt entitled to go anywhere—even stores after hours, or into locked rooms—but the tombs seemed different, despite the open doorways. The tombs seemed like they actually belonged to people. Which was almost funny, because it’s not like the people who occupied them could protest my being there.
Sage shrugged. “No different from a stroll through a cemetery. It’s just life moving on, right? Besides, any time you walk anywhere in Turkey, you’re walking on graves. There are centuries of buried civilizations here, layers and layers of them. Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, and more. One of my teachers at my international school liked to say that we’re always walking over the dead in Turkey.” She gave me a small smile, as if embarrassed by what she’d just said. “I’m so sorry, by the way.”
“For what?”
“About your uncle.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“How’d he die?”
“Hiking accident.” I was tempted to share Aunt Jackie’s theory, but I didn’t want rumors to fly around the boat. I knew what it was like to have people whisper behind your back. So I gave Sage the official story. “About six weeks ago, he went out to Cappadocia for a job interview. And he went hiking. Alone. He missed a sign that said a trail was closed for erosion. Lost his footing and fell forty feet. Broke his neck.”
Sage listened, then looked down, quiet for a few moments. “Jesus, that’s horrible,” she said. “I had an older brother who died,” she added, in a quieter but matter-of-fact voice.
“Wow, really? What happened?”
“Drug overdose.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. It was pretty much a nightmare,” she said, after an awkward pause. “I was only in sixth grade. He was in high school. My parents kind of freaked out. For two years my mom spent every evening sitting in his room. She kept it the way it was, like he might come back any day. My dad spent more and time out of the house. When he was home, it was like he was gone anyway. You’d talk to him and he wouldn’t hear you.”
“Wow.” I nodded, taking in her painful story, unsure of how to show sympathy or how she might take it. “So was your brother into drugs for a long time?”
Sage shrugged. “Who knows. I think he was in pain for a long time. Depressed or something. He spent a lot of time in his room, I remember, starting around freshman year. I think drugs became his bigger escape at some point.”
I hugged my knees close to my chest. I may have drunk a lot, and smoked a little weed on occasion, but I’d always stopped short of doing any serious drugs, even though they sometimes showed up at parties. I had enough escape hatches when my life got to be too much to handle. Or did I? Maybe ending up like Sage’s brother could happen faster than you thought.
Sage looked toward another cluster of rocks. “Race you?”
I felt something like emotional whiplash, trying to keep up with such a personal confession followed by a sudden retreat. “Uh, sure,” I mumbled, as she slid into the water.
We raced, sort of. She won by a huge margin, since I could only do a modified breaststroke to keep my face out of the water, and I’d never been much of a swimmer. That was fine by me. I was just happy not to be alone for once.
I wanted to ask her more about her brother. What he was like, what exactly happened. It was awkward because I didn’t know her. She’d told me this really intense, personal thing. Getting personal information from someone felt kind of like receiving a gift. But if I asked for more details, would I look interested, or just nosy? I didn’t want to screw things up. This was the closest I’d come to hanging out with a friend in two months, and I was desperate for company. The rules of friendship suddenly felt unfamiliar to me, the words that new friends typically say to each other like a foreign language.
As we climbed up the base of the next rock, Sage was still burying her confession by piling on questions about me. “It’s nice you and your mom came all this way to be with your aunt. Do you come to Turkey a lot to see her?”
“No. It’s our first time.”
She looked surprised. “Really? You didn’t come to your uncle’s funeral?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
I dipped a toe in the water and swirled it around, uncertain of how much to reveal about my weird family. Still, I felt I owed her something. “We were kind of busy. My dad was having some really bad, um, work problems. And then my parents sort of . . . separated.” There was talk of divorce; I just couldn’t bring myself to say it yet. I glanced at Sage’s face. She was listening intently, even sympathetically, but she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. So maybe the news about the scandal hadn’t made it this far. And if she were from Oregon, she probably didn’t follow news in Massachusetts. I could still be anonymous here.
Sage made a sympathetic face. Then she shook her head, as if in disbelief. “But wait. You never came to see your family in Turkey? I heard your aunt runs a boutique hotel in Istanbul!”
“They only opened the hotel two years ago, when my uncle lost his museum job and he inherited the building from his parents. But no, we’ve never visited them. It’s just—I don’t know. The timing never worked out right. And my mom’s seven years older than my aunt. They weren’t that close growing up. Mom always said they were like two only children whose lives overlapped for a few years.” I didn’t confess what I thought was the real reason we’d never made it to Turkey before: Dad. He’d never liked my aunt and uncle very much. Once, I’d overheard him saying something to Mom about her “freaky hippie sister and that moody guy she married.” And then he’d go on about how she had to be crazy to live in Turkey, citing crime statistics, Kurdish militia groups, wars in nearby Syria and Iraq, terrorist cells.
“So where to next?” Sage asked.
“Istanbul,” I said. “We’ll stay with my aunt for almost six weeks.”
“That’s cool. But I meant, where should we swim to next? Another rock or the beach?”
A warm feeling spread through me. She wanted to keep hanging out. I felt like I’d passed some kind of test. I pointed to the narrow spit of beach about ten yards away; people from nearby boats were already headed in that direction. She nodded and dove into the water headfirst.
“I noticed your books,” I said when we sat on the beach to dry off in the sun. “Who’s Freya Stark?”
Sage decorated a sandcastle she was building with a pattern of tiny pebbles. “She was a famous British explorer. One of the first woman explorers to travel around the Middle East alone. She died in 1993, close to her one hundredth birthday.”
“A ‘passionate nomad,’” I guessed, thinking of one of the book titles.
“Yeah. She also traveled through Turkey alone, and wrote a lot about it. I adore her travel writing. ‘To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.’”
“That’s cool. Freya Stark said that?”
“Yeah. Those words are like my personal motto.”
“I wish I had a motto.” My own motto, not my mom’s fake-optimistic family motto. I’d never thought much about what kind of life approach I wanted. It hadn’t ever been up to me to decide.
“You’ll find one. I’ll loan you one of her books, if you want,” said Sage.
“Sure. I’ll read it. Hey, how’d you end up traveling alone?”
“My family was going to come join me here, to celebrate the end of my exchange program. But my mom’s been in and out of the hospital. Nothing too serious,” she added quickly, when I started to express concern. “But travel would be hard on her right now. So they paid for the Blue Voyage and said to take a friend. I like traveling by myself, so I came alone.”
“I can’t believe they don’t mind that you’re on a cruise all by yourself!”
“They don’t exactly know that part. I mean, parents don’t really have to know everything. Right?” She glanced at the hot first mate on the Anilar, who waved at us. Sage waved back, and, emboldened, I did too.
Oh, yeah. We exchanged a knowing smile. Parents could definitely remain in the dark.
Back on the Gulet Yasemin, I ran down to my room, reapplied my sunscreen and makeup, and changed into fresh clothes: a long skirt and a button-down long-sleeved blouse. I caught my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of our door and made a face. I felt like freaking Laura Ingalls Wilder. But I wasn’t risking exposure in the midday sun.
When I went back to the upper deck to hang my swimming clothes to dry, I saw that besides the Anilar, three more boats were now moored in our inlet. All the passengers from our boat were either snorkeling or lounging at the stern. Then a put-put-put sound made me turn and look toward the front of the boat.
A motorboat had come right up alongside us. Whoever was steering it tossed up a line, and Sage caught it neatly and tied it in a perfect knot around the railing. A guy stood up on the motorboat and started talking to her. He was curly-haired, maybe our age, and more deeply tanned than the first mate on the Anilar. He wasn’t as hot as the Anilar guy, but he was still kind of cute. He held up a big silver tray and grinned at Sage.
Seeing me, Sage waved me over. “Baklava!” she said. “Want some? My treat.”
Baklava? In the middle of the water? She had to be kidding, right? But no. When I got there, I saw a tray with rows and rows of triangular pastries, phyllo slathered in honey and sprinkled with the greenest crumbled pistachios. There were also cheesy pastries, and powdered cubes of Turkish delight candy.
I took my time picking out pastries for myself, as well as for my aunt and my mom, and Sage did too, sampling some, licking honey off her fingers, and glancing slyly at Baklava Guy.
Sage bought baklava for everyone and asked me to distribute the treats to the rest of the passengers. “You’re buying for everyone?” I asked in disbelief.
“Consider it a gift from my parents,” she said.
I loaded up napkins with pastries and delivered the goods. When I walked back toward the prow, licking honey and sugar off my fingers, Baklava Guy and Sage were still talking.
Then Sage reached over for something on the guy’s tray. Something that flashed as she slipped it into her black canvas knapsack. It didn’t look like baklava.
Spotting Nils and Ingrid’s binoculars on a nearby table, I picked them up and put them to my eyes, my fingers fumbling to adjust the fit and the focus.
Sage reached for another item and put it in her bag. Then another. I didn’t know what she was buying now, but I was sure it wasn’t pastry.
There was no honey in the world that could shine like pure gold.