The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “Like me,” Richard said with a far-off look in his eyes. “I’m never around for my daughter.” Then his expression cleared. “What about your mother?”

  “She left us.” She wanted to go on, but the words stuck in her throat like a thistle. There was an empty space where her heart used to be. That she’d told him this much was causing her stomach to churn. Why? She had lied early and often to everyone she met who knew her as Angela Chase. Why should lying to Richard be any different? Because, like it or not, he was different. His concern had awakened something in her she had thought dead. Could ashes be reignited; could something phoenixlike arise from the dread of her past? His concern for her was precisely the same as it was for the Etruscan artifacts he was searching for. And why not? A lost civilization, a lost girl. It had been so long since trust had not turned into betrayal that she had lost faith in its existence. And yet she had to admit to herself that she was beginning to trust Richard, to believe in what he said, to consider the fact that he had her best interests in mind—that he, in fact, not only respected her intelligence, her ability to learn at light speed, but also liked her as much as she liked him.

  But he was pressing her now, and surprising herself, she responded, “My mother was gone by the time I was sixteen, suddenly, in the middle of the night.” And that was as far as she was prepared to go. “Why do all awful things happen in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know, but it certainly seems to be the case.”

  “Anyway, a year later, my father died—of a broken heart, I have no doubt.”

  “So we were both orphaned at an early age.” He took a breath, let it out slowly. “It’s a terrible thing to have your parents die when you’re young. I don’t think you ever recover. Your capacity to love is . . .”

  “Broken,” she finished for him. “Stricken from the book of life.”

  FOUR

  The night before Bella disappeared, Maggie was sitting at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a mug of tea heavily larded with Irish whiskey, now her alcohol of choice. She had swallowed a couple of Vicodin, along with something else; she couldn’t remember what, except that it numbed her mind. Where was Bella? Up in her room, as usual, which suited Maggie just fine; she wouldn’t have to look at her. Her hands trembled; the great serpent in her belly, lodged there at the moment of Bella’s conception, uncoiled, spitting its poison through her system. As a naive little girl in Maine, she had dreamed of falling in love, marrying, living happily ever after. This was what she thought had happened to her when Dr. Richard Mathis had come along and swept her off her feet. Her heart had opened, expanding toward him, and everything had been fine—better than fine, perfect. That was how deluded she had been, to think anything could be perfect in real life. Real life was a bitch, filled with disappointments, coercion, betrayal.

  Richard was always leaving. At first, it was only for a week, nine or ten days at the most. She supported him, like any good wife would, as his fame grew and his world expanded, as he became more and more in demand. She was justifiably proud of him, rabbited on about him incessantly to any of the other wives who would listen. One by one, they all got bored, preferring to discuss the PTA, playdates for their two- and three-year-olds, carpooling. Subjects that made Maggie’s eyes cross. In time, the women drifted away.

  Then Richard had told her he wanted a child. At first, she had rebelled, but in the end she gave in. She always wound up giving in to him. The pregnancy was fraught, as if her body continued to rebel against the inevitable, as if it knew some sort of tragedy was coming. Then, after it all, she was all alone with just Bella. Richard was away for first a month, then several months at a time. He left her all alone with this wet, whimpering bundle of flesh that yowled, attacked her swollen nipples at all hours like an insatiable vampire, deprived her of sleep, of relaxation, of quiet. Bella never stopped crying, never, it seemed, slept. She was assailed by an endless chain of maladies: colic, strep throat, ear infections. High fevers, scarlet face, inconsolable: every illness terrified Maggie, anxiety for her and for the child making sleep a state of being she could scarcely remember. When Richard did return, the baby nestled into his arms as if she were a part of him. Not a cry, not even so much as a whimper, sending Maggie into a drugged sleep, where she tossed and turned on the rough seas of resentment. And then he was gone again, and she was bound to the house, joined with this needy thing whose insatiable desires would never allow her a minute’s surcease.

  As if that wasn’t nightmare enough, each morning she would stand in front of her full-length mirror, staring disapprovingly at someone she didn’t recognize. Her breasts were swollen, her nipples darkened, her hips wide enough to support a tank. About her buttocks, flat as a Mercator projection, the less said the better; after the first time, a furtive glance thrown over her shoulder, she did not care to return her gaze to them ever. To cheer herself up, she went shoe shopping, but the two styles she loved most didn’t fit her, though they were the right size. When she blamed the lasts, the salesman said, “Madam, your feet are flat. You can’t wear these styles anymore.” This enraged her more than anything else that had come before, and she pitched an impressive fit at the store.

  Sloshing more whiskey into her empty mug, she drank half in one go. This kitchen was so dismal, just like the rest of the house. Was it any better than the hospital room from which she’d been released a month ago? Finishing off the whiskey made her feel no better. In fact, it had turned her melancholy into despair. She and Richard had been happy once, hadn’t they? It was getting more and more difficult to remember, as if those memories belonged to someone else, some character up on the silver screen where happy endings were assured. Where was that girl now? Gone, gone, gone, sucked up into the violent twister and, like Dorothy, deposited somewhere strange, with no ruby slippers to get her back home.

  FIVE

  17K: Angela and Richard resumed the delicate excavation they had left off late yesterday. Working alternately, sometimes in tandem, they spent the next six hours in nerve-tingling, back-breaking intimacy—a kind of intimacy Angela had never before experienced and that she began to treasure—at the end of which they had completely freed the bucchero. As fine an example of Etruscan handiwork as Richard swore he had ever seen: a handleless jar mounted with the magnificent bas-relief of a regal sphinx. Lion’s body, eagle’s wings, and the impassive face of an Etruscan, whether female or male it was impossible to tell. Perhaps, Richard opined, it was both, for though the traditional sphinx had a female head, with the Etruscans, he said, one knew only enough never to take anything for granted.

  “One thing is for certain: the Etruscan sphinx is a guardian of the interred,” he said, his voice vibrant with elation. “Here we have solid evidence that we’ve stumbled upon the tomb of a member of a high-ranking family.” He turned to her, grinning. Then he kissed her lightly on the cheek. “You see, Angela, it seems you’ve brought me the greatest good fortune!”

  Holding the bucchero gingerly between her two palms, Angela traced the Etruscan sphinx with her eyes, as if the intensity of her gaze could bring it to life.

  “The dead are here,” Richard said. “I can feel it.” He was on his feet, fingertips running along the rock face of the inner wall. Leaving her, he moved off to his right. “And I want to see their dead, Angela. It’s vital because so little is known about them. It’s as if they disappeared into the early Roman Empire, as if they assumed a new identity.”

  He moved farther to his right. “You see, the wall here describes a slight curve that runs into the current end of the 17K tunnel.” He turned back to her. “I’ll need to get Kieros to lengthen this tunnel.”

  “Through the solid rock?”

  “Maybe.” He turned back to the rock face. “But maybe, if we’re very, very lucky, this is nothing more than a wall.”

  “The entrance to the main Etruscan tomb.”

  He whirled, grinning. “Yes!” Then his expression darkened. “But to get him to do that . . . Kiero
s is a pragmatic man. He guards his budget like Cerberus. I suppose I don’t blame him, the budget he’s been allotted. No verbal argument is likely to sway him.” He tapped his fingertip against his lower lip. “Besides, another issue has raised its head.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If Kieros was unhappy before, he’s now totally pissed.”

  “Ever since he came by and saw the bucchero.”

  “He was expecting to find evidence of the Minotaur. Instead he stumbled across the Etruscans.”

  “Not his field of expertise.”

  “Precisely. It’s fear that’s making him so unhappy.”

  She gave him a sideways glance. “What d’you mean?”

  “He’s worried that I’ll replace him as team leader.”

  She hadn’t considered this, but she thought he might be right. “Would you?”

  He stood so close to the rock that he might have been a corpse dog sniffing out the dead. “That’s a good question.”

  She considered further. “It’s a matter of power, isn’t it? Purely a male thing.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t do it, given the opportunity?”

  “I very much doubt I’d be given the opportunity.”

  “Why d’you say that?”

  “First, archaeology, like most disciplines, is male dominated. Second, women aren’t heard the way men are.”

  He frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “When a man voices an opinion, it’s taken into consideration. If a woman voices an opinion, she’s either ignored or told to calm down.”

  He turned, watched her staring at him. “You may be right.” Then he waved a hand. “Anyway, Kieros has nothing to fear from me. I have to be in Sinai soon.”

  She felt her heart skip a beat and thought, What the hell? “How soon?”

  He shrugged. “Not sure. I’m not my own master.”

  “No,” Angela said. “I suppose you have many masters.”

  He grunted. “Back to the problem at hand. Getting Kieros to do what we want.”

  She liked that he said we instead of I. She liked it very much.

  She lifted the bucchero up as an offering. “How about this for a start? Kieros can’t very well ignore what’s right in front of the entire crew’s eyes.”

  “Right you are,” Richard said. “The bucchero’s a good start. But for him it won’t be enough.” He came back to where she knelt, the artifact cradled like a baby in the crook of her arm. “We need to find more evidence that we’re near an Etruscan tomb, that the bucchero isn’t merely part of a small find.” He took up his implements and set to work: tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. “No time like the present.”

  One-two. One-two. One-two-three. The banging of the shade against the sides of the open bedroom window, where the butter-yellow walls met the inset metal frame. This was the sound that Laurel, who would one day in the future become Angela, had associated with the screaming from her parents’ bedroom next door from the time she was nine years old. Many nights she would be awakened by the window shade or the arguing. She would lie in bed, waiting, while the rhythmic banging and raised voices continued unabated. The ferocity of their arguments, the pitch of their voices, hurled at each other like knives, defied space and drywall alike. For over half a dozen years she had been paralyzed by those voices, by the venom they carried. She would imagine a pair of spitting cobras she had seen on a National Geographic special. Then scrabble beneath her pillow for her iPod, stick the earbuds in, and press play. She would leave the iPod on shuffle. Lenny Kravitz’s “Again,” which was a joke either on her or her raging parents, then Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss,” which also might be irony heavy, if she were in the mood for such things. She would fall asleep to Eagle-Eye Cherry’s “Save Tonight.”

  But now, as for the past many months, a silence, heavy as smog, hung in the kitchen as father and daughter solemnly ate the breakfast he had prepared: scrambled eggs, toast and butter, coffee.

  “Great stuff, Dad,” she said, her voice bright, inviting him in, as she wolfed down her food. “Where’d you learn to cook eggs like this?”

  Her father, toying with his food, said, “When you’re alone, you learn . . .” But he stopped there, his voice drifting off to some other time or place he might wish to be in.

  She tried to talk to him, tried to rally him, but it was no use, and finally she gave up. After rinsing her plate off in the sink, she bent, kissing her father on the forehead.

  “Love you, Dad.”

  “Love you, too, Rabbit,” said so mechanically it broke her heart all over again.

  Down the gritty brownstone steps, out into the rumpled West Village morning. A crushed 3 Musketeers wrapper spun along the gutter like a tumbleweed, chased on the breeze by the warm, yeasty smell from the bakery wafting around the corner on Seventh Avenue; kids and their mothers, a smattering with their fathers, skipped past, laden with Hello Kitty or Batman backpacks. Laurel was in high school, too old to have a parent walk her to school, although the idea of it was beyond her ken.

  Truth be told, school had always bored her, and at sixteen she felt high school was no better. Of late, her incessant reading had taken on a voracious edge. She devoured books the way kids ate those pyramids of cherry turnovers, bear claws, and chocolate cigars displayed in the bakery window. She was a ferocious self-learner who needed neither teacher nor mentor. The library was her universe. She harbored an almost desperate need to learn, as if some passage in the most arcane tome would provide the means for her to fix her parents, to remake them into what she wanted—needed—them to be. That the natures of her parents were unfixable by her or by anyone else save themselves was brought home to her again and again through her reading of psychology texts. Yet it was one thing to learn something and quite a bit different to feel it in her bones, to accept it as truth. For a while, at least, hope sprang eternal, and she continued her assault on wide-ranging knowledge. And even after the truth had sunk in, she never lost her thirst for learning. She was like T. E. Lawrence staggering out of the desert into an oasis of unending water. For her, the library was that life-giving oasis.

  Often, she would hide out at closing time, eluding the staff, waiting until the vast space was locked up, utterly silent. Then, flashlight in hand, she’d roam the stacks, searching for more books that would stretch her knowledge far past its normal age limit. She had been known to read all night. But there were other nights when, meaning to do so, she would instead fall asleep at the table, head on crossed forearms, only to start awake to the sound of her own desperate sobbing.

  The sidewalk had emptied of kids. Parents now far away, starting their adult rounds. Classes were about to begin—history, chemistry, language lab. Of what use would they be to her? She turned around, hurried the other way.

  At the library, she once again dove into the latest textbooks on computer programming, the subject of which more and more fascinated her. When she could, she worked on one of the library’s computers, which she found as winded as a runner about to have a heart attack. One evening she had spent several hours cleaning out the hard drive and defragging it, clearing the browser caches of cookies.

  When she’d had enough of C++, C, and Java, she took down a copy of Moby-Dick to clear her head. Making herself comfortable at a table, she commenced to lose herself in Herman Melville’s thrilling prose: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . then I find it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

  She looked up from the page and thought, Get to sea. Be in the world, not in the classroom, where dusty ideas and the weariness of teachers were all to be had. She returned to the novel but could no longer concentrate. It was time, Ishmael had thought, to get to sea before he stepped into the street and deliberately knocked people’s hats off.

  Quitting the library, she walked east and entered Washington Square Park. It was a damp and overcast day in late May, the sky low and flannel gray. The plane trees were ful
ly budded out, the ground covered with an undulation of newspaper pages crackling in the wind like sails. She sat on a wood-slatted bench, watching with critical alertness the men play chess on the park’s inlaid concrete-aggregate tables. The slats were painted grass green. Each table had a little wooden box with a metal post on top, which the players slammed down every so often with the flat of their hands. Timing the moves.

  On the other side of her, a junkie, no more than seventeen or eighteen, lay half sprawled, mouth open, closed eyelids fluttering with dreams of a better life. One of the chess players, an Italian with a natty panama and neat goatee, glanced up. He had a wandering eye that made it seem as if he could see everything at once.

  “What’re you doing here all by your lonesome?” he said, not unkindly.

  He was younger than the other players by, she judged, a good decade. “Hanging,” she said.

  “On a school day, huh?” He grunted, lifted his hirsute chin toward the junkie. “That there could be you, piccola,” he said, again not unkindly, “you don’t watch yourself.”

  She snorted. “I’m too smart for that.”

  He eyed her for a moment. “I’ll just bet you are.” He shooed away his playing partner with a practiced flip of the back of his hand. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you here. You know how to play chess, piccola?”

  “Some. Maybe.” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, come on over here, and let’s see what you got.” He watched her take the seat opposite him. There were some hee-haws and guffaws from his fellow players, which he shushed with a sidelong glance. His nimble fingers moved over the chessboard, arranging the pieces to start a new game. Out of courtesy, he gave her white. “Your opening move. I’ll show you.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather do it myself.”

  His hand, which had been hovering in the air over her rank of pawns, withdrew. “Be my guest.” He observed her with a mixture of curiosity and a certain proprietary amusement as she made her first move: pawn to king 4.