He just waves. “If you’d have gotten it first try, you would be a prodigy, or something. No one gets it on the first try. Put it in neutral, start it up, and try again.”
I restart the motor, put it in gear, and try once more. I get a few feet, but it stalls again.
“More gas,” he says. “Too much, and you bolt forward and then stall. Too little, and you stall. You must find the Goldilocks zone, so to speak.”
It takes a few minutes of lurching attempts, but I get it going. The next challenge is shifting gears while moving—there are a lot of wince-inducing grinding sounds, but eventually I get the hang of it.
“You’re lucky this is a later version of the deuce-and-a-half,” Apollo says, once I’ve gotten the hang of it and we’re at speed; he’s slouched on the bench, resting his head, eyes drooping. “It has hydraulic steering. Most of the earlier versions did not, and those are a real bitch to drive.”
“Apollo, should I be worried about you?”
He shakes his head“Mmm-mm. I’m okay. Just…tired.”
“I’m worried about your blood loss.”
He cracks his eyes open and glances at his arm. “Just a slow seep. It is painful, but I will not bleed out.” He hands me a small sheet of paper with Arabic writing on it, and some numerals. On the back, a crude line-drawing map, with an asterisk indicating the desired location. “This is where we’re going. No idea how far it is from here. I’ll try to stay awake to make sure we find it.”
“I can manage, Apollo. You need to rest. You’ve been through a hell of a lot.” I reach and out touch his shoulder. “That was superhot, by the way.” I smile at him.
He smiles back. “Yes, it was.”
I grin. “I didn’t break you, did I?”
A derisive snort. “Not likely.”
A long pause. I swallow hard. He meets my eyes, knowing what I’m thinking about. “You said it,” I say, alternating between looking at him and the road. “You told me you loved me.”
He nods. “I did. And I meant it.”
“I never doubted that you love me, Apollo.” I look away—I’m still not emotionally okay, nor am I ready to delve into the mire of trauma responses I’m actively suppressing. “I just…hearing you say it…it meant more to me than I can say. I don’t want you to think I missed it.”
“In the long journey here—” he waves at the window, meaning Tunisia in general, “I had much time to think. There were many, many, many hours of nothing but thinking. And I realized my hesitance to utter those words to you was nothing but foolishness. Fear, perhaps. I know you love me. The fact that you chose—and continue to choose—to love me after the way we met…my kidnapping of you...it never ceases to amaze me. It stuns me. I wake up in the morning, and your beautiful face is the first thing I see. I sleep at night and I have the unimaginable pleasure of holding you.”
He halts, eyes closed. I let the silence move between us, allow him the space to say what he needs to say.
“Your love is…it has done more to heal the wounds of my childhood than anything else ever could.” Another long pause. “No amount of talk therapy could do that, and believe it or not, I did try that.”
I frown at him in stunned disbelief. “You did? When?”
He shrugs. “In my mid-twenties. I thought perhaps it would help me feel more stable. More…able to accept who my family truly was—it was just after I’d really discovered the truth of who my grandfather was, the kind of empire he’d built. And my mother—the truth of what kind of a person she was. I mean, I knew she was a terrible mother. That was an unavoidable fact. But I could also tell shedidcare about me in some capacity. Just perhaps she was not capable of expressing that—which I understand, given what I know of my grandfather. He couldn’t have been a very wonderful parent himself, obviously.”
He’s speaking with his eyes closed. A deep sigh escapes him.
“But finding out that your grandfather trafficked in people, that he was prone to murdering his own employees for the slightest infractions? Finding out he distributed drugs to children, sold arms to terrorists? How do you cope with knowing that’s where you came from? And my mother? Jesus.” He shudders. “The stories I heard about her. She had a predilection for torture, did you know that? People like my father, they were safe from that because she needed sexual partners who stayed…well, alive. But there were others. Stories that she would kidnap men, drug them, handcuff them to bed, rape them, torture them, and eventually kill them. Of course, she always got away with it, because everyone was terrified of my grandfather, and of her.” A disgusted sigh. “That’s who my mother was. She was jealous of your mother, that she’d caught the eye of your father. I’ve heard those stories as well. She hated that she couldn’t have him, so she kidnapped your father, and did terrible things to him. She also kidnapped your mother and planned to torture and kill her. But your mother proved the stronger, and killed mine, and rescued your father.”
I don’t know what to say. It was this history that had prompted him to kidnap me, in some misguided pursuit of…I don’t think he even knows what he was trying to accomplish, even still.
“Apollo….”
He shakes his head. “Your mother did the world a favor, killing Gina Karahalios. I can see that, now.” A rough huff of breath. “My point is, I was twenty-something when I finally got up the balls to dive into the truth of my family’s legacy. It really fucked me up. And I thought if I hired the best therapist money could buy, it would fix me.” A bitter laugh. “I hired a therapist of world renown from Vienna, flew him to Athens, paid him a fortune to live in Athens at my beck and call—to fix me.”
“How did that go?” I ask.
He snorts. “He refused payment, one day. ‘Young man,’ he said. ‘You need something I cannot give you. You need something no therapist will ever be able to give you, no matter how much you pay them. I cannot keep accepting your money and putting my practice aside when I know nothing I say, nothing I can teach you will ever truly help you.’”
I eye him. “You remember his words verbatim?”
“Pretty much, yes. It’s a speech that has been carved into my brain. I turned it over in my head a countless million times in the years since.”
