You Are Always Safe With Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Ozymandias alternated between peaceful mornings in the coves while the guests chose to read and sun on the deck with periods of swimming in the turquoise pillowy waters, and days of organized outings when they all boarded a tour bus at the pier’s end and were taken to ruins and tombs and amphitheaters and churches high in the hills over the seashore villages.
    Harrison, not having known that some of his mother’s elderly friends would be passengers on this cruise, had arranged outings that required strenuous climbs on rocky pathways, hours of driving over pitted dirt roads, and included activities in hours of such intense heat that they’d all be close to collapse by the time they got into the bus at the end of the day.
    On one of these days—a trip to see Lycian tombs—during which they had struggled over slippery rocks, tripped on vines growing across the road, been nearly assaulted by a cloud of bees swarming past, and were limp with exhaustion on the return trip, Lilly noticed that Jack Cotton came up to whisper something to the bus driver. When the driver nodded, Jack stood at the front of the bus and said “Announcement! May I have your attention?” He told everyone that they would be stopping briefly in the village at a shop that sold spirits so he could buy a case of champagne for a party that night to honor his wife’s 50 th birthday. His wife, Jane, blushed charmingly, and murmured that he should not embarrass her. “Not only that,” he said looking quite cocky to Lilly, looking like a man who had too much money, “I’ve arranged for Morat to cook us a special dinner tonight, no expense spared.”
    “And then,” called out Fiona’s son, Harrison, not one to be outdone, “Why don’t we continue our party tomorrow night in Kas? They have a famous belly dance café there. Izak has told me about the musicians—a superb drummer and fantastic oud player. So plan that for tomorrow night’s party. The treat’s on me!” Harrison sat down, satisfied to have wrested back some control over the events.
    Lilly turned to observe him and Gerta in the seats behind those in which she and her mother sat. Gerta looked like a little Dutch doll, golden hair in long pigtails to her waist (her tiny waist), and pink circles on her cheeks as if they’d been drawn there with a marker pen. Her eyes were so blue they were like glass marbles in their sockets. Gerta’s breasts seemed something manufactured or designed rather than grown in a natural way; her hips were nearly flat, her legs long as a flamingo’s. Harrison never took his hands off her; he was always holding on—hanging his arm around her waist or shoulders. When they walked in the ruins, she appeared weighed down by the weight of his arm, as if she were supporting both of them. While the guide was discussing Roman ruins, Harrison was usually whispering in Gerta’s shell-like ear, something that made her bat her eyelids up and down, or made the pink circles on her cheek turn bright red.
    Lilly wondered about life’s throw of the dice, the proverbial crap shoot. If you came to life as a woman and a beauty, life would come to you in a way that was entirely different than if you were merely born a female with nice forearms.
    Some came into the world, destined, like Jack Cotton, to be a cyberspace millionaire, and some, like Harrison, were born favored sons of rich mothers, and some, like those in the crew—Izak, Morat, and Barish,—were born to be sailors on the blue Mediterranean with no money, little education but an amazing knowledge of the sea and its creatures as well as of the boats that floated on its surface.
    All of life was a mystery, finally. How Lilly had come to be born, to be the person she was, and to have the life she now had—wasn’t it all an accident, a combination of genes and DNA and the mishap of whose sperm and egg had come together all those years ago and made her? She could have been anyone, but she had turned out to be just