The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “You’re right. And I have no academic creds. I told Kieros I was whip smart and likely the fastest learner he had ever seen.”

  “And?”

  “He told me to stop wasting his time. He told me to get out of his office.”

  “Did you?”

  “What d’you think?”

  “Well, you’re still here.”

  She nodded. “I said, ‘What d’you have to lose? What you’ll pay me is shit anyway.’ That made him laugh. He said, ‘How d’you feel about cleaning out the latrines?’”

  Richard lifted an eyebrow. “That bad?”

  “Not quite, but almost. I’m a female with no academic background. Ergo, to these eggheads I’m a moron. I’m ordered around like a third-world employee.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can fix that,” he said. “You’re my assistant now.”

  They worked down in 17K, one of the deepest parts of the dig’s southernmost axis. 17K was the largest of the rest of the dig’s squared-off sections. It was also the newest. A tunnel had been found. It led them downward. LED lamps had been set at intervals on the left, where floor met wall. The farther they proceeded, the more steeply the tunnel descended. At the same time, the tunnel’s ceiling pressed down, obliging Richard to duck his head, curve his back.

  For seven days straight, they worked side by side in the cramped quarters, Angela watching every move Richard made, absorbing every word he said as he described to her what he was doing and why. For seven days straight they found nothing of value, and she began to wonder whether the pithos was the only Etruscan artifact in the dig, whether the dream of an Etruscan necropolis on Crete was just that: a dream. They daily emerged from one twilight world to another, aching and frustrated. “Don’t lose hope,” he’d say to her like a prayer. “Never lose hope.” At dinners they exchanged barely a word. Richard was plunged into thought, distracted, as if he was trying to work through a whole subset of his world of which he had not made her aware. To distract herself, she took to bringing books to read, first Eric Cline’s brilliant Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology and then more often her beloved companion, Moby-Dick, immersing herself in the minutiae of life aboard the Pequod.

  Afterward, walking back to their tents, he might offer her a drink. She felt a tidal pull of wanting to know what was troubling him, but she sensed that asking him would be to cross a line. She already knew enough about him to understand that she needed to take her cues from him.

  Those nights they would sit up in his tent drinking and talking about the day’s work. She felt his intensity, his dedication, his optimism like a ray of morning sunlight. And the next day, she would join him in the morning sunlight for a quick breakfast before they returned to 17K and set up shop all over again.

  But once, at dinner, when he noticed the book she was reading, he said, “How do you find Melville’s writing? Most people can’t get through it, or if they do manage to struggle to the end, they don’t understand what he was getting at.”

  She looked up. “It’s a wormhole to another time, another place, that elates and terrifies me. The strands of revenge, punishment, madness, God’s will, the nature of evil, mysteries that are beyond human comprehension.”

  “Ah, a fellow lover of Moby-Dick,” he said with soft smile. “What are the odds? It seems to me some form of sign or portent.” His gaze drifted away for a moment. “I gave my copy to my daughter: a legacy of wonders, you might say. But the sad thing is I have no idea whether Bella has even read a word of it.”

  After that, they spent their nights reading their favorite portions of the novel to each other in the slow, hushed tones of storytellers Melville would have recognized and approved.

  On the fifteenth day, as he did each day, Richard carried with him to the work site the pigskin satchel that held his own tools. He wouldn’t touch any of the team’s tools, an idiosyncrasy that Kieros could at least grumble about under his breath without too much fear of retaliation. Richard would simply smile a Cheshire cat smile, an expression Angela felt sure he had spent an inordinate amount of time perfecting. In any event, that placid, goofy smile produced in Kieros visible angst and poorly suppressed anger. The tension between her boss and Richard was slowly increasing to the level of an overclocked computer. She could not help but feel that in his neurotic way, Kieros was spoiling for a verbal argument with Richard over something he could actually document. Clearly, Richard was amused by Kieros’s increasingly Rube Goldbergian machinations.

  Richard unpacked his tools, unrolling the length of chamois in which they had been carefully wrapped. He switched on his headlamp. He took out a brush and dusted off what seemed to be a rock outcropping. Almost at once, the area darkened, and Richard said, “Bingo! You see? Black fired clay. I do believe we have ourselves a bucchero, an example of Etruscan funerary pottery.”

  Slowly and methodically, Richard unearthed the leading edge of a piece of finely etched bucchero. “Depending on the carving, this could be a very important find,” he said excitedly. He was rarely wrong, in Angela’s short experience of him.

  Pocketing the brush, he took up a pick, small as a dentist’s instrument and just as sharp, and a hammer of approximately the same dimensions and began to work around the area, never coming anywhere near the slice of bucchero he had exposed. After perhaps forty minutes of this, he moved aside, handed the tools to Angela, and said, “Okay, your turn.”

  Her heart thumped heavily in her chest. “You must be kidding.”

  “Not at all.” He pushed her down on the stool, pressed the pick and hammer into her hands. “There’s only so much you can learn by watching. In archaeology, as in all human endeavors, learning comes by doing.”

  She looked up at him. “What if I make a mistake?”

  “All we can hope for, then, is that you learn from your mistake.”

  “But you’re trusting me with your bucchero. I don’t—”

  He gestured with his chin. “Begin at the beginning, as the Red Queen told Alice.” He smiled reassuringly. “You’ve observed me long enough. Have faith.”

  She returned her attention to the rock surrounding the precious Etruscan artifact. A bead of sweat snaked its way down her spine. Her upper lip was damp, her armpits suddenly swampy. Nevertheless, she took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Focused on the spot where she would start to the point where everything else faded to gray. Drew on her own training to calm herself, steady her nerves and thus her hands. Set the point of the pick to the spot she had chosen, the one where Richard had left off. Raised the hammer back, then struck downward. She hardly heard the impact. A fistful of dust flowered outward, then subsided to the space between her boots.

  “Too tentative,” Richard said softly, not unkindly. “Put more of yourself into it.”

  She did as he ordered, heard the resounding smack, felt it through the bones of her hands, into her wrists. Willed herself not to flinch. A silent explosion of dust, a satisfying chink in the stone. She moved the pick, hammered down, again and again, finding a rhythm, moving in a clockwise direction as she had seen Richard do.

  “Good,” he said. “As I suspected, you are indeed a quick learner.”

  She returned her full concentration to freeing the bucchero from its centuries-old entombment, and when bit by bit it began to emerge, her elation was almost too great to contain. She set her implements—Richard’s—on her thigh, concentrated again on taking deep breaths.

  “You felt it, didn’t you,” he uttered softly.

  She nodded, for the moment unable to speak.

  “What did she feel?” Kieros, in his usual manner, had come upon them with the stealth of an owl hunting its prey.

  “The ecstasy of discovery,” Richard said without turning around or, in fact, acknowledging in any other way Kieros’s unexpected presence. It was the flip side of his Cheshire cat smile, intended to belittle Kieros, to keep him at a remove.

  Kieros wasn’t having any. “What d’you think you’re doing, Richard?” />
  “Uncovering what appears to be an exceptionally fine piece of bucchero. What have you been up to, Kieros?”

  The Greek slapped away his question with the hairy back of his hand. “No, what you’re doing is taking advantage of an assistant—a dig novice without a degree—to do your work for you.”

  “I’m teaching her.”

  “Whispering in her ear? Bullshit.”

  At this, Richard stood up, but even now he did not turn around, obliging Kieros to move if he did not want to keep talking to Richard’s back. When the Greek hove into view like an overladen ship, Richard said, “Kieros, my dear sir, you are paying this girl a salary, penurious though it might be.”

  “Blame the museum, not me.” Richard’s habit of turning conversations against him clearly irritated Kieros, but just as clearly he didn’t know how to untangle himself.

  “All right then. If a salary is being paid, a service must be rendered. Am I right?”

  “Of course you’re right,” Kieros snapped, “but—”

  “But nothing. With every strike of the hammer she is learning her trade, which means each day she becomes more valuable to you. Since her salary is fixed—I assume that’s true . . .”

  “It is.” Said grudgingly and with not much volume.

  “Exactly. Then the more she learns, the more expert she becomes, the greater her value to you and this team, and the bigger bargain she becomes.” Richard impaled Kieros with his stare. The Cheshire cat grin appeared like sunlight through clouds. “Am I right?”

  Kieros, unable to meet Richard’s penetrating gaze, shifted his own gaze to the blooming quadrant of the bucchero. He frowned, as if deep in thought. “If she so much as chips it, Richard, she’s gone. And it’ll be on your head.” Then he turned on his heel and strode away.

  THREE

  In the dead of night, Angela awoke with a start, her heart hammering in her breast. She shook like an alcoholic detoxing, drenched in sweat that had nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with her dread of her former life. It had been this way for four long years—so long, in fact, that she had more or less gotten used to these symptoms, rarely remarked on them to herself. But now she felt them acutely; now they pained her greatly; now she suspected that she could no longer tolerate them. And why?

  Richard Mathis had come winging into her life fresh from the Turkish coast, the dust of Ephesus, of lost civilizations on his boots, in his hair. Richard Mathis with the twinkling eyes, the ironic lopsided smile that made him seem boyish. Richard Mathis, twenty years her elder, with a wife named Maggie and a daughter named Bella; he was forbidden. And though the forbidden was not unknown to her—the gate to the path others would not take had always stood open for her—she knew that wasn’t what she wanted from him. Someone who listened to her, someone with whom she could talk. My God, how she had missed that! When she was with him, the deadening tension she lived with day and night melted away. She relaxed. Her self-sufficiency—the bedrock upon which she had based her vanishing act—was shifting. Richard had spun that coin, the other side coming into view, the dark side: the bleakness of being alone. Now, when she wasn’t with him, she felt the near death of being alone, without trust, without faith. Without joy.

  Excited and frightened in equal measure by these thoughts, she brushed aside the flap of her tent, stood staring at the dim outline of Richard’s tent. She very badly wanted to talk with him, even if it was only to say, I can’t sleep. How about you? But she couldn’t get her feet to move in the right direction. Reluctantly, she did an about-face, picked her way across the rocky terrain to where it sloped down steeply to the shingle where Crete met the Mediterranean. A half-moon, cool as milk, followed her, dripping its light onto the water, a bridge on which she imagined walking out and away, farther away than Crete, farther away than any foreign land.

  She sat, arranging herself with her knees up against her chest, arms wrapped around her shins. Staring out into the water, she wanted to hear a sound other than the slap of the wavelets against the shore—a bird’s cry, even a cricket’s chirp—but there was nothing. Just the water and the wind stirring her hair against her cheek.

  Drifting in reverie, she was unaware of time passing. But thinking about the past was for her never a good idea, and inevitably tears burned her eyes, ran down her cheeks. She felt the disturbance of the air by her side, felt his heat just before Richard sat down beside her without even a simple “May I?” Of course he may; that was how he approached life. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she flung herself back into the present.

  “You looked very alone out here,” he said.

  “I am alone,” she said, but she thought she heard a subtext in his statement, a larger meaning that might constitute a concern.

  “What are you doing here, Angela?”

  “Learning about the history of the lost.”

  “Not at the dig,” he said. “I mean here on Crete.”

  “Where else should I be?”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere where there’s nightlife, music, dance, people your own age.”

  “You talk as if I’m sixteen.”

  “My daughter, Bella, is sixteen. You’re what? Seven, eight years older?”

  “I’m twenty-five.”

  “Ah, youth!”

  “Going on forty.”

  He laughed. But then the laughter cut short when he saw she wasn’t joining in.

  “I don’t get along with people my age,” Angela said curtly. “I never have.”

  He turned to her. “What are you running away from?”

  His question chilled her.

  “I hope it’s your past,” he said, “because you can’t run away from yourself.” Picking up a small stone from between his feet, he cast it into the sea. “Take it from me: I know.”

  This interested her. “You’re running away too. From what?”

  “You first.”

  When she shook her head, he inhaled deeply, then said, “When I was fourteen, my parents died. Their car was T-boned by a drunk at the wheel of a semitruck.” He paused for a moment, searching for another stone to throw, but he couldn’t seem to find one of the right shape. “We were all supposed to be going to a family birthday party. By rights I should have been with them, but I pretended I was sick. Stuck a finger down my throat and vomited. My mother didn’t want to leave me alone, but I persuaded her I’d be okay. Even then I had a gift of saying the right thing in the right tone of voice. After they left, I made myself popcorn, dug into a quart of chocolate ice cream, and settled down on the living room sofa to watch Clue. I remember all I was interested in was Lesley Ann Warren’s boobs. I must have been watching them in her low-cut dress when they died. Maybe not the exact moment, but close enough.” He gave her a frightening smile of a skeleton; his voice had changed, become thick and clotted with emotions dredged up from the swamp of his past. “I’ve been trying to escape that moment all my life.”

  “Survivor’s remorse.”

  He nodded. “Their death hit me like a cannonball.” Raked fingers through his hair. “I’m what you might call off-axis.”

  “Not according to all your awards, your discoveries. The press treats you like a superstar.”

  “Uneasy lies the head that wears an identity, to unpardonably mangle Shakespeare’s Henry IV.”

  She laughed at the joke made by this charming and erudite man with a wicked sense of humor who wasn’t afraid to make a stand against authority. He treated her like a human being; he did not condescend to her as the others at the dig did. He stood up for her with Kieros. But at the dark heart of his words lay a truth for her as well as for him. She knew more about slipping into a new identity than he could even suspect. Beneath Angela Chase, the identity she had adopted when she’d fled New York, lay Laurel Springfield, silent, unmoving. Waiting, perhaps, for this very moment to stir and return to life. Still, there was uncertainty.

  “Why are you telling me all this.”


  “Because you asked.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t seem to be someone who responds to intimate questions.”

  He looked at her levelly. “I don’t. Under normal circumstances.” He gestured. “But here we are on Crete—enisled, you might say. I see you down here, and you seem sad. You were crying.” His head tilted. “Yes?”

  He waited and waited. Someone inside her opened her mouth and said, “Yes,” startling her.

  “I hate to see you sad.” He stretched his long legs, dug the heels of his sandals into the scree. “That’s no crime, is it?”

  “That depends on how many sad girls you know.”

  He laughed softly. “Your turn,” he said.

  “Truth or consequences.”

  His smile was soft, almost dreamy, the hard edges of his public persona continuing to round off. “Oh, nothing as severe as that.” He shrugged. “But, you know, if you’d rather not . . .”

  It was a dare; if she backed down now, she was sure she’d lose respect—and his attention. “All right then.” She pursed her lips to keep them from trembling. For a moment, she felt poleaxed. The past bound her in its winding cloth. Giants in her chest were using her heart as a bowling ball. “I left New York under something of a cloud.” Breathless, scarcely believing that she would admit as much to someone she had known little more than a week. “That was four years ago. I guess you could say I’m in exile.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  No, that wasn’t going to happen, not even with him. It was too devastating for her to go there. A lie, then. But to be believed, all lies must be interwoven with a truth, preferably a universal truth: “My boss wanted something from me. When I refused, he accused me of embezzling, said he had evidence against me.” And now a bit more of the truth slipped out: “But I guess I would’ve left anyway. I loved my father so much, but he was never around.”