Souvenir

The ferry, tied still to the dock, pointed north, toward where the Bosporus opened into the Black Sea. The boat wasn’t headed there, but was bound for Istanbul, and it left in fifteen minutes, at three.

“ ‘Nicely done, nicely done,’ ” Chris said, inspired by the sight of the Australians sitting a hundred feet away, not on the ferry yet but at one of the waterfront cafés.

Jo studied the guidebook. Or pretended to. Earlier, up at the castle ruins, she’d laughed at “Nicely done.” But that was before Chris had said he was glad the airport had been attacked. Since then, what words Jo had spoken to him had been licked with cold, and she hadn’t once looked at him. At least, not directly.

Feet pounded on the ferry’s metal roof. Then a splash. Another boy had dived. The boys were in constant motion, running onto the ferry and up through its lower deck to the open-air level, where Chris and Jo sat, then climbing onto the roof, leaping off its edge, and swimming to the dock to do it all again. When first they’d charged the ferry, Chris had been (only briefly!) scared. Then he’d wondered if the boys would beg for tips. But they dived for pleasure, he saw—the ferry, whenever it was in, being the best place for diving in the village. He was relieved that he hadn’t shared these initial fears and suspicions with Jo. She would have added them to what he’d said about the airport, and then he might never have a chance at getting her to admit that they both were still, as they’d always been, equal.

Illustration by ELENI KALORKOTI

________

It was Jo who’d brought up the airport. That in itself made the whole thing unfair. On their way back down from the castle, they’d stopped at a small, overgrown playground to eat the lunch they’d gathered beforehand in the village: sodas and chips from one shop, oranges from another, and the giant disc of anchovy corn bread recommended in the guidebook, which Chris had been so proud to find, the two of them the only ones from the ferry who’d bothered. In the playground, a pair of swings hung from the set’s metal frame, and Chris and Jo had sat in them and eaten quietly as they faced the path that curled down to the road, which itself led back to the village.

“It was good to get out,” Jo said when they were almost done.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Chris said. “I mean, we can’t let our vacation be ruined.”

Jo had stayed in yesterday. During their usual, pre-breakfast internet time, they’d both seen the news: suicide bombers had rushed the international terminal at Atatürk Airport late the night before. They’d argued over what they should do. Jo, frightened, couldn’t be convinced to leave the hotel, and so, after he had posted on Facebook that they were fine, and for good measure messaged his mother (she and his stepfather were keeping Chris and Jo’s son, Toby), Chris had gone on his own to the Chora Church and the city walls, their original plan for that day.

“And you know what? Honestly?” Chris said as he bobbed back and forth, arms hooked around the chains of the swing. “I’m glad they attacked the airport. Think about it. We were here, the worst actually fucking happened, and we were totally fine. It’s like”—here he pitched his voice to what he would admit, if challenged, was a secondhand imitation of an imagined urban youth—“bring it on, ISIS motherfuckers.”

Jo didn’t answer at first. She had the chips— sour cream and onion, no different from back home—and was finishing them off. Chris thought that alone the reason for her delay. But after she crumpled the bag she said, “That’s horrible.”

“You know what I mean,” Chris said.

But Jo...