The pain in his voice was almost tangible. “Eventually she found work as a housekeeper for the lighthouse keeper in Akrotiri, a man named Giorgos who had no connection with the vineyard and was practical enough that he wouldn’t have cared if he did. She did his cooking and cleaning and took in laundry when she could. My mother worked very hard and was deeply unhappy. It wasn’t the work or the loss of all her nice things that bothered her; it was that she had lived her life as a lie.”
He dropped his gaze down to our map, his voice suddenly quieter. “If he was feeling particularly generous, the lighthouse keeper, Giorgos, allowed me to follow after him while he did his work. One day, he told me a story. A smart and important man I’d never heard of before—Plato—had once written an account of a beautiful and idyllic island that had sunk into the sea after angering the gods. A paradise lost. The people had once had everything, but their pride had cost them. It had been their downfall.”
His eyes moved to mine. “I recognized the story in my soul. It was my story. I also had lost a paradise. In the space of a few weeks, my mother and I had lost safety and contentment to a life of instability and fear.”
His eyes returned to the camera, and I couldn’t look away.
“I became obsessed with the story. If I could find Atlantis, then all would be well. My mother would stop crying. She would no longer suffer from pain. For years, I waited for my father to come back. I waited for someone to come save us. But no one ever did. And soon my mother’s sadness became something more.
“By the time we found out what was wrong, it was too late. The disease had progressed too far. I dropped out of school, tried to find jobs, find a doctor to help us. But we had become outcasts on the island. I was only sixteen. I knew where my father was by then, and I wrote to him for help, but there was nothing.” My dad’s voice broke. “She died a few months later. That’s when my love of Atlantis became a quest. I would find it. I would contribute to the world. I swore to her that I would find it. Paradise would be restored. What was lost would be found. And now I believe it has.”
He shifted his gaze from the camera to me. I couldn’t move. Could hardly breathe. I’d forgotten we were filming. I’d forgotten everything, only that my father had once been a child who had been hurt, the same way I had. A child who had waited and waited for his father to come home. A child who had wanted to make things right.
Theo slipped his arm around my shoulders, and I was grateful for its weight, the way it kept me glued to the earth.
“Finished,” my dad said, and then he looked down, like he couldn’t bear to see my reaction.
I was seeing a little boy at the lighthouse. After his family fell apart, he’d needed something to hold on to, something to get him through all those difficult years. A magical, peaceful city with a hundred golden statues and a god keeping everyone safe was as good a thing to hold on to as any. I understood that. I’d done the exact same thing.
His loneliness was an ocean. A vast body of water as heavy as it was frightening. When my dad left, I’d had my mother and grandparents, and then later James and Julius, plus countless friends and neighbors all along the way. When his dad left, he’d had his mother, and then he’d had no one. Regardless of the fact that he had put me in a similar scenario, he hadn’t deserved that experience. Neither of us had.
And I knew, with a ferocity that surprised me, that he would not do this next part alone. Not while I was around to make it otherwise.
The words appeared on their own. “Dad, I’m diving with you.”
Chapter Twenty-One
#21. HOMEMADE SCARF, BLUE AND CLUMSY-LOOKING
For a while my dad was in bed a lot, and my mom told me I had to spend my after-school time with Mrs. Douglas, who lived upstairs. Mrs. Douglas claimed to have once been a third-grade teacher, but I found that hard to believe because she had no idea what to do with children. After a lot of trial and error, we eventually fell into a routine. The routine went like this: graham crackers, Jeopardy! and my knitting kit.
She found the kit in one of her overstuffed closets, and when I saw the color of the yarn snarled inside, I was over the moon. Knitting was not easy, and Mrs. Douglas was not particularly patient, but after three weeks I had a vaguely scarflike creation.
I managed to wait an extra two weeks until his birthday, and when I gave him the present, I was so excited I had to tear the paper off with him. As soon as he held it up, I told him, “It’s to keep your neck warm! That way you won’t get sick anymore and I won’t have to go to Mrs. Douglas’s apartment!” He was quiet for a long time after that. I knew I’d gotten it wrong, but I didn’t know how.
I DON’T THINK I SLEPT more than two hours. Every time I closed my eyes, the water was rising up to meet me and I struggled to surface, my body on fire with adrenaline. Eventually, I gave up on sleeping and stared up at the dark ceiling, my mind whirring.
My mom once told me that it’s difficult for kids to recognize their parents as anything but supporting cast members in their own feature films, and here it was true. I’d been so wrapped up in my own story with my father that I hadn’t stopped to think about what his story was. So many things were clicking into place—everything from my dad’s constant service to his neighbors on the island (Had he been trying to make amends for the people his father had hurt?) to why he’d left Santorini so abruptly in the first place.
But for every aha moment, there was a WTF as well. Because if my dad knew what it was like to have a parent leave, how could he possibly have turned around and done it to me? And if Santorini had been terrible enough for him to flee, what had convinced him to come back when he did?
A nagging feeling pulled at me. His story explained why he loved Atlantis so much, but it didn’t explain why he’d built and then abandoned a family on an entirely different continent.
His pre-filming words came back to me. I will tell you the beginning. The beginning wasn’t all of it. The beginning was just… the beginning. My dad’s childhood wasn’t the whole story. I was almost positive of it.
I called my mom again, but her phone went straight to voicemail, so I left her a vague message. Mom, I have something important to tell you; call me back. But what I really had were questions. Something was still buried.
* * *
Theo stumbled down from his bunk around six a.m. and patted my face clumsily before heading to the cave. We both got ready in silence before my dad and Ana showed up soon afterward, packed and ready, followed by a puffy-eyed Geoffrey, who had spent the night arguing via phone with Mathilde. Emotionally distressed or not, he would man the store single-handedly today.
While Ana set Geoffrey up for the day, Theo went to beg for coffee from Maria’s, leaving my dad and me alone up on the roof, a pile of bags at our feet. After last night’s filming, I hadn’t known what to say and he hadn’t seemed to either, and now it all sat in a heap between us.
“Indiana Olive’s day has finally come,” he said, breaking into a smile. According to his face, he’d gotten roughly the same amount of sleep I had.
“Dad, about last night…,” I started, and he put a reassuring hand on my shoulder.