Lily and the Lost Boy

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

Winner of the
Paris Review's
Hadada Award

“The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

“One of America's most talented writers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Consistently excellent.”
—The New York Times

“Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.”
—School Library Journal

“Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox's brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott,
Newsweek

“Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —
The New Yorker

“As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox's prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn,
New York
magazine

“Fox's achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

“Fox has little of Roth's self-consciousness, less of Bellow's self-importance, and none of Updike's self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

“There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by
homage
or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb,
The Boston Review

“Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel,
BOMB

Lily and the Lost Boy

“Greece itself is Fox's protagonist, its roots in the past nourishing the present, its antiquities, vegetation, and people pulsing with vitality.… A quiet, beautifully crafted story.”
—Kirkus Reviews
, pointer review

“Another thought-provoking gem from Fox … Simply written, with strong characterizations and overtones of Greek tragedy,
Lily and the Lost Boy
is an excellent choice for readers who share Lily's own budding characteristics: thoughtfulness, integrity, sensitivity, and courage. A beautifully written story for thoughtful readers.”
—School Library Journal

“A haunting tale of American children living on the mysterious Greek island of Thasos … Beautifully written and filled with details of Greek daily life and island history.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Fox is unquestionably one of the most ambitious and skilled children's writers around.”
—Booklist
, starred review

“Writing in a calm, conversational yet imagistic style, the author impressively conveys both the outer atmosphere of place and the inner, highly charged atmosphere of personal emotions.”
—The Horn Book Magazine

Lily and the Lost Boy

Paula Fox

For

William Weaver

and

Floriano Vecchi

ONE

At their first sight of the boy, the two children forgot they were in a foreign place. It must have been that after living three months on the Greek island of Thasos, much of its strangeness had worn off and the island had become home to them. It was he who looked foreign.

He was standing motionless fifty yards or so up the path that led to the acropolis, the ancient stronghold whose ruins lay among a small forest of pine on the crest of a hill far above the coastal village of Limena where they lived. His bandaged right hand rested on a section of the great wall that had once enclosed the three hills around the village. He was glaring fiercely at something behind them. They turned to look.

What they saw appeared to be suspended between the sky and the Aegean Sea, which was pale blue now in midafternoon, though it would change color as the light changed and the day drew toward nightfall. Fishing boats swung gently at anchor, their night's catch long since delivered to the tavernas and restaurants on the waterfront. A quarter of a mile out beyond the small harbor directly below them was a tiny island that looked like a stroke of dark green crayon. It was too hazy to see the mountains of Macedonia on the mainland, two hours away by ferry.

“What is he staring at?” Lily Corey asked her brother, Paul.

“Nothing I can see,” he replied.

“There's our house down there,” Lily said.

“You always say that. Talk in a low voice.”

“Why should I?” she demanded.

They turned back to the hill. “He hasn't moved,” Paul said. “Maybe there's a viper near his feet.”

“Why are you whispering? Let's go home.”

“Wait!” he commanded.

“Now he's seen us!”

“He's only a kid,” Paul said in a louder voice. “I can see him now.”

“He's awfully tall,” she noted.

“Look at his T-shirt. He's probably American.”

“Everybody wears T-shirts,” said Lily. “Even the snakes wear T-shirts—”

“—and a baseball cap,” Paul interrupted, pushing her up the path. “Let's go meet him.”

“What about the vipers?” Lily asked, shivering.

“I said one viper. You know they don't attack people, Lily.”

“They think about attacking.”

“Snakes don't think,” Paul said impatiently.

“How do you know? On this island, even the rocks think.”

“He's coming,” Paul said.

“See you later,” Lily said and headed down the hill. She didn't understand why she didn't care to meet the boy. Because of the vipers she usually picked her way along the hill paths, staring hard at the ground. Now she ran. The tiled roofs and cobbled lanes of the village seemed to rush up toward her, its flowers and trees like a huge bouquet into which she could press her face.

Lily was nearly twelve. Until she had come to Thasos, she hadn't often been scared in broad daylight. But there were places and things on the island that made her skin prickle and her heart beat loudly. Yet she loved it more than any place she had ever been.

She stopped to wait for Paul at a spot where a nanny goat was tethered. She had been afraid of that boy. Was it because he was a stranger? Except for shepherds and their small flocks of sheep, Paul and she were used to having the hills to themselves. Or was it because he'd looked so wild and white-faced and seemed to be coming from the acropolis, a haunted place to her?

Lily had gone there only once with Paul. They had clambered over fallen columns and stared into deep holes that had been chambers in the old times. It had been so still, so hot. A faded sign on a post had warned people not to walk beyond the acropolis to the steep edge of the hill, where they might slip on pine needles and plunge down to the sea far below. She had glimpsed the sudden movement of an animal as it disappeared between two great hewn stones. She had heard that young travelers who lacked money for a room would sleep there. Some of the Greeks in the village jokingly called it the Hotel Acropol.

The nanny goat bleated and came toward her as far as its tether would allow. She scratched its knobby head. Its eyes were like two immense almonds laid side by side. They reminded her of the eyes that gazed from the heads of the oldest statues in the Limena museum. After a minute or so the goat lost interest in her and began to graze. No viper would linger near a goat's hooves, so Lily sat down on the ground. Gradually, she felt herself fill up with the quietness that, like the scariness, was something new in her life.

At home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, she was always waiting for the school day to end, for Friday to come, for summer, for holidays, for television programs and movies and birthdays. But here, on this island in the north Aegean Sea, she didn't wait for anything. Each moment was enough in itself.

Had Paul's excitement at seeing the boy reminded her of all that waiting?

She pressed her sneakers up against a stone. Beyond it grew a patch of thistles. Beyond that was a path to the theater, a place so old it hardly seemed the work of human beings. The great apron of the stage was overgrown with wild flowers, and the marble benches that rose in steps against the hillside had been partly dislodged by ilex trees. Still farther, olive trees grew in circular terraces, halted in their downward march by the roofs of Limena. And everywhere in those hills, still startling her when she came upon them, were sections of the marble wall built twenty-five hundred years ago, rearing out of the earth like dolphins from the sea.

The cloth of her jeans was warmed by the sun. She sniffed at the smells of wild thyme and rosemary. She turned so she could look down into the harbor. Visible at this time of day, glimmering in the water like bones, were the remains of an ancient shipyard that had been in use when thousands of people had lived at the foot of the hills instead of the few hundred who lived there now. A ten-minute walk away was another harbor, where ferries from the mainland docked. Just behind the ferry piers was a broad quay where fishermen mended their nets and the villagers strolled in the evenings. There was Giorgi's taverna facing the piers; late at night it was always filled with people who came to see the village men dance. Near it, leaning against a rough wood fence, were a dozen rusty old bicycles that a fat, sleepy-looking man rented to anyone who had a few drachmas to pay. The village boys, including Paul, rode them furiously about the quay until some grown-up, perhaps one of the village policemen, made them stop.