by Laura Tucker
Off the bus now, we lined up with our backs against the museum wall to count off.
“You think he’s ever going to come home?” Alex asked me.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Alex would be missing my dad, too. But of course he did. After those long Saturday afternoons, my dad would laugh with approval and say, “That boy needs to be run like a big dog.” Alex’s energy had never gotten on my dad’s nerves the way it seemed to get on Linda’s.
But it was already our turn. Next to Alex, Vivian Yi called out, “Nine.”
“Ten,” Alex said, still waiting for an answer.
“Eleven,” I said.
“Twelve,” muttered Lady Day Rodriguez, who does not appreciate being herded.
“Thirteen,” hollered Rowan Merody, making sure to be louder than Alex.
“Fourteen,” Richard said absentmindedly, after Rowan bumped his arm.
And so it went until it was time for the class to turn around and walk in twos into the museum. Ms. Colantonio had separated Manny Weber and Javadi Awad for slap fighting during the count-off, so I was paired with Lady Day, leaving Alex with Vivian.
That was a relief to me, because I had absolutely no idea what to say to Alex.
I didn’t think my dad was going to come home. I didn’t think my mom was going to get up. And I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.
* * *
The museum, at least, was a distraction.
The Egyptian gods of the dead were terrifying, and mummification was incredibly gross. The guide didn’t have any trouble keeping order; I hadn’t seen my class this interested in anything since Mr. Dawson had let us look at snot under the microscope.
There was only one sixth-grader who wasn’t interested in the gory details of how you wrapped a dead guy in papyrus, and that was me. The whole time we were there, I couldn’t stop thinking about Egyptian brown.
“No leaning on the cases,” a guard with a caterpillar on his upper lip barked at me, as if I’d been leaning on purpose instead of letting people push their way in front of me as I made my way to the back of the room.
Irritated, I gave his mustache a long look before turning around to see exactly what it was that I’d bumped into.
Behind me was a series of glass cases at waist level. Inside the low cases were five boxes, about the size of lunchroom trays, filled with little people and objects and animals. They were models, like dollhouses, except they were open at the top instead of on the sides.
I looked around quickly, then leaned down to get as close to the glass-topped boxes as I could without making the guard with the awful mustache yell at me again.
The first model was a barn. A black-and-white cow was lying down, a man kneeling at its head with his hand outstretched to feed it. I got so close that my breath fogged the glass of the case. There was another cow, too, standing up, and I almost laughed out loud when I saw the expression on her face: She was bored!
The artist who made that cow lived ten thousand years before me. But it might as well have been yesterday, the way she or he had used the expression on that bored cow’s face to reach forward through space and time to share a joke with a kid in 1981.
I heard the guide telling our class about Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming, but I didn’t hear Lady Day come up quietly behind me. Checking first for the guard, she leaned in close to the little case, too.
“They’re like dollhouses, right?” I whispered. “What do you think they are?”
Lady Day didn’t even need to look at the information card next to the case. “Kings were buried with everything they’d want to have in the afterlife—real food, chariots, boats, jewels. Even servants.” She snorted in disgust. “They murdered people, just so they wouldn’t have to wash dishes after they were dead.”
I bet that wasn’t on the card.
“Anyway, rich people copied the kings by being buried with models of the things they’d need. That’s what these are.”
I guess I looked surprised by how much she knew because she said carelessly, “My dad’s a guard up here. Islam and the Asian galleries now, but he worked Egypt for a couple of years.”
I lifted my head. The guide was telling our group about how the Egyptians stored the mummified corpse’s organs in a canopic jar. (This was where Alex had gotten the idea for his first project.)
But Lady Day wasn’t done. “These were only found by accident. The grave had been robbed, way back in Egyptian times, and the archaeologists who found it thought there wouldn’t be anything valuable left. But someone from this museum went back to make a map of the site, and he stumbled into a hidden room, totally untouched, with these models in it.” She sounded proud. “It was a real find.”
A thrill went up me. A hidden room filled with treasure in a robbed tomb—that was better than one of Alex’s mysteries.
Lady Day leaned close again and pointed into one of the boxes, her finger a careful millimeter from the glass.
“This is a place to store grain.” Some of the little people in the model were carrying big sacks of flour; others were making notes on tiny pieces of real linen. “They’re making sure the dead man will have enough food in the afterlife.” She moved over so I could see into the next box. “This is a bakery, so the dead can have freshly baked bread in the afterlife.” She smiled a little, remembering. “It’s a brewery, too. My dad said it wouldn’t be heaven without beer.”
Before leaning over the next model, the box with the cows, Lady Day checked my face to make sure I wasn’t bored. Then she pointed to the lying-down cow they were feeding by hand. “This guy’s too fat to get up.” The lying-down cow was another joke.
I flipped over the boring fill-in-the-blank question sheet they’d given us at the beginning of the tour—“_____________ is the process the Egyptians used to preserve bodies after death”—so I could sketch. My pencil moved so fast, the paper was covered before I knew it.
The last box was a garden lined with trees, with terracotta tiles on the floor and a fountain in the center. Lady Day stood looking at it for a long time. She was even taller and skinnier than Alex, I realized. “This one is a garden, but there’s no food growing or anything. I think it’s just a place to hang out.”
She was going to say more, but Ms. Colantonio had appeared behind us. I was worried she’d be mad we hadn’t been listening to the guide, although unfortunately I had not been able to avoid the part about how the embalmers broke up the corpse’s brain with a long metal hook and then pulled it out through his nose.
But our teacher was looking with interest into the model garden. She pretended to offer me her arm. “Care for a stroll under the sycamores, miss? A snack of figs and honey? Or a game of checkers by the pool?”
Then she held out some of the extra question sheets to me, blank-side up so I could keep drawing.
“Olympia, it looks like you’ve found your project. Lady Day, I will expect great things, per usual.” She turned to join the group. “Catch up when you’re done, okay?”
After she’d gone, Lady Day drifted away, too; a statue in a case nearby had caught her attention. I kept drawing. I drew the little bakers, their forearms white with flour, and the tiny loaves of bread they were kneading. I drew a man kneeling patiently in front of the round black oven, waiting for the next loaf to be done. I drew another tiny man, his arms curving gracefully around the wooden urn of beer he was pouring into a bigger barrel. I drew the fat cow, and the bored one. And I drew the garden, each tile meticulous in miniature, so tranquil and cool.
As I drew, I could hear the guide telling the class about Osiris, god of the dead, who greeted the newly dead by weighing their hearts. If your heart was light enough, you could go on to the Field of Reeds, which was just like regular life, except without anything to worry about. But if your heart was heavier than the Feather of Truth, then the Devourer of the Dead go
t to eat your heart, and you were declared completely dead.
I wondered what made someone’s heart heavier than the Feather of Truth.
Eventually, the guide moved on to the next case, and I had to abandon my models to rejoin the class. But the sketches I’d made were good. On the bus ride home, while the boys talked about brains in jars like it was Christmas morning and Jennifer Kernicke got so freaked out about Osiris she convinced herself she was going to throw up and then had to go sit up front with Ms. Colantonio, I sat next to Lady Day, going through them again, adding details as I remembered them. Sketching next to Lady Day also meant I didn’t have to talk to Alex about my dad.
I couldn’t wait to get to the studio. For my project, I was going to make my own model of everything I’d need in the Field of Reeds—an afterlife just like my real life, but without anything to worry about.
NO ANSWER
There was no music on in the studio when the three of us got there.
Apollo bowed to Alex and Richard. “This is an unexpected pleasure, gentlemen. Welcome.” He turned to me. “Olympia, have I lost track of time? Is it one of our days?” I come in after school sometimes, to organize shelves or fold rags. Apollo and I used to mix colors together, but we hadn’t since my dad had gone.
I shook my head. “No, but we have an art project to do. Is it okay if we do it here?”
“Please do. I will enjoy the company.” He looked at me, making me the host. “Ask if you need help finding something?” That’s the best thing about Apollo: He doesn’t hang off you, trying to help like other grown-ups do.
I watched him as he turned away. I bet he knew what my dad was up to. And I bet he didn’t like it any more than I did.
Richard was studying Apollo closely, too, but lost love isn’t like chicken pox. You can’t see when someone has it.
The phone rang, and Apollo picked it up. I got too close trying to eavesdrop, so Apollo covered the receiver and told me to scoot, but not before I’d heard him telling the person on the line—more than once—that their piece wasn’t ready. I also heard the words “delays,” and “unexpected complications,” and that worried me, too. Apollo had been at the studio a lot, and he hadn’t been making his own art at all, but I had no idea if he could do everything that needed to get done for the business without my dad.
I went to help Alex and Richard, but we’d done so many projects there that they knew the rules already. Keep an organized workspace and be respectful of your tools. Don’t grind the brushes. Clean and dry the ones you use and return them to their places every night, even if you’re planning to take them out again the next day. And if you use a flammable solvent to thin paint, like linseed oil or turpentine, soak the rags you use in a bucket of water before leaving them to dry. Most people don’t let kids use real solvents because they’re flammable and not good for your lungs. But my dad and Apollo are okay with it, as long as you follow the rules. And none of us mind following the rules, mostly because they’re all the same rules that my dad and Apollo follow, too.
Collecting my own supplies, I imagined how satisfying it would be to show the studio to Lady Day. Richard and Alex have been my best friends forever, but they don’t really get art.
Apollo was still on the phone; I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could hear his answers getting shorter and tighter. Eventually, he hung up, but the big black earpiece had barely landed back on the receiver before the telephone rang again.
Apollo grabbed it. “Restoration,” he muttered between gritted teeth.
That conversation was shorter, and loud enough for me to hear. “As I have told you many times now, I am not in possession of this piece of art. However, this is a place of business, and your pestering is intrusive. I must ask you to stop these calls.”
I froze in place as he slammed the earpiece down without waiting for a reply.
The forgery expert, looking for that piece of missing art.
Missing, like my dad.
Apollo went over to where Richard was sitting with a bummed-out expression on his face.
“He doesn’t know what he’s going to do for his project,” I explained, still watching Apollo’s face for clues, though he’d wiped his expression back to a careful neutral.
Apollo listened to Alex explain the assignment, as if Richard’s project idea was the most important problem he’d deal with all day. He couldn’t fool me; I knew all about the power of distraction.
When Alex was done, Apollo shrugged. “This is easy. Richard will make a monster. Of course.”
Richard looked up, a little hopeful despite himself. “I’m not that good at making stuff. Also, it needs to be Egyptian.”
“Yes, I understand,” Apollo said, standing and swinging a big, water-damaged book of Egyptian art down from the bookshelf over Richard’s head.
Richard opened the heavy cover and began flipping through the rippled pages, not convinced.
“Look.” Apollo stopped the turning page with one finger, pointing at a statue with the head of a hippo, the arms and legs of a lion, the back and tail of a crocodile, and a gigantic pregnant belly. The caption said she was Taweret, the goddess of fertility and childbirth.
She was definitely close enough to a monster to be of interest to Richard. Unfortunately, she also had huge saggy boobs.
“I can’t,” Richard said, in a strangled kind of voice.
“Well, perhaps not that one exactly,” Apollo said, separating some pages that the water had stuck together, stopping when we could hear them tear. “But we are on the right track, I think.”
The phone rang again, insistent and loud. I got up to answer it, but as soon as I stood, Apollo told me sharply to leave it alone.
I sat down again next to Alex. The phone rang—five, ten, twenty times, which meant the answering machine was off, which meant that Apollo didn’t want to deal with messages.
Then it stopped.
Ignoring the phone, Apollo flipped through a few more water-damaged pages. “What about this gentleman?”
He’d stopped at a full-page photograph of a wall painting featuring a sun god called Khepri. A shiver ran down my spine at the sight of him. Khepri had a man’s body, but there was only a black scarab beetle where his head should have been: an eyeless mask split down the middle, with long antennae curving out from the side like horns.
Apollo was right: Khepri could have been ripped straight out of the pages of the Taxonomy.
Richard was chewing the inside of his lip and nodding. “I could make a maquette,” he said under his breath. Maquettes are scale models; people who make monsters for the movies are obsessed with them.
“Good,” Apollo said, pointing at me and Alex with his chin. “So. The two of you go ahead and get started. I will help Richard with the papier-mâché.” But Alex waved me off as he went around the studio collecting supplies; he never wants help with anything.
The phone rang again. I looked over at Apollo, who looked away. Richard and Alex watched him uneasily as the harsh bell rang out, over and over again, into the big space.
Eventually the ringing stopped, and I was relieved, even though I knew it did not erase the problem of Antonin Grandjean.
Or the problem of whatever it was that my dad had done.
BUNNY MUMMY
When Richard was set up, Apollo handed me a flat box filled with small tools he thought might help me work the clay—skinny picks with wedges at the ends and little bits of wire, as well as a few shreds of bubble wrap I could rest the pieces on while I was working on their other sides.
The best tool for carving turned out to be an ordinary yellow pushpin; the colored plastic hat on top made a handle and meant I could be very precise.
Even so, it’s hard to make things so small. Richard and Alex and I worked for a couple of hours, long enough for the light coming through the big windows in the studio to turn blue and the
n black. The phone rang a few more times. Eventually, Apollo unplugged it from the jack in the wall, but I wasn’t sure he wanted me to notice that.
When he threw the switch for the overheads, I straightened up and blinked hard. My back was sore, my eyes were blurry, and my hands felt crampy and tight. Richard and Alex shuffled in next to me, looking at their sneakers and trying not to laugh.
“Here, Ollie. We made you something for your model,” Alex said, stifling a laugh before dropping something into my hand. He’d rolled a long, skinny strip of toilet paper into a little toilet paper roll. “You wouldn’t want to be without that in the afterlife.” He could barely get the words out, he was laughing so much. “Eternity’s a pretty long time without any TP.”
Richard was behind him, snickering, too. He usually acts more mature than Alex, but a sixth-grade boy is a sixth-grade boy. I placed the toilet paper roll next to the pile of objects I’d already made without saying anything. I knew from experience that there was no point in getting into it with them. But I did think—not for the first time—that it might be nice to be friends with a girl for a change.
From across the room, Apollo announced that he was ready for a break. He turned on some more lights before heading over to the hot plate to put the kettle on for tea. The boys were both finished. While we waited for the water to boil, we all went over to look at what they had done.
Richard’s scarab-god looked great. He’s not particularly artistic by nature, which is why I have to do the drawings in the Taxonomy, but he’d given the maquette a real personality. He’d painted Khepri’s robe in the jewel tones the Egyptians would have used: a deep red and a bright, sunny yellow with cobalt and turquoise accents. The black scarab head, still wet with paint, made the god look both majestic and menacing.