The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  EIGHT

  From: RB_Mathis@gmail.com

  To: MBella2316@gmail.com

  Hey, Rabbit,

  We’ve had a tremendous breakthrough today. We’ve been trying to determine whether this is the site of a big Etruscan cemetery. We’ve had inklings, which is why I was sent for so urgently, but today . . . well, today we unearthed a tomb guardian—the first intact one in the world! I felt like Indiana Jones. But don’t worry—there’s no Temple of Doom here! LOL!

  The guardian is a stone lion with wings. Marvelously carved. It stands over three feet tall (that’s an estimate—it’ll take days to unearth it entirely, but, wow, is it big!). I could describe it to you, but if you click on this link from Expedition, you’ll see the partial on the website for the Penn museum.

  Ours is in much better shape, and, even more astonishing the lion is clearly female. A lioness. Maybe we’ve stumbled upon the tomb of an Etruscan empress. Wouldn’t that be something? And you’re hearing it first!

  Needless to say we’re all very excited—all except the site director. Poor fellow, he was hoping to find signs of the Minotaur—that half man, half bull from Cretan mythology (have you read about him? I think you’d love the myth, very mysterious, like our winged lioness).

  BTW, I got an assistant when I arrived. Angela’s funny and smart. Only nine years older than you. I’ve told her all about you. You’d like her. She’s starting to think of herself as Lara Croft. My influence, I’m sure! She asked if she might write or text you sometime. That would be cool, right? I’ll bet you guys have things in common.

  I wish you were here, Rabbit, but you’re too young. Safety first! Rules are rules, isn’t that what I taught you? And then there’s school. But maybe when you finish high school, you might want to take a year off and spend it digging into the past with me. Would you like that?

  Anyway, I have to go. We’re working thru the night to get our guardian lioness unearthed. But listen, Rabbit, I know I don’t say it much, but I love you. And I miss you all the time. I have to go to Sinai for a bit when I’m finished here, but then I’ll be home—I promise. And we’ll go away for a long weekend, Maybe to Washington to see the White House and the Capitol and all the monuments. You’ve never been, and I think we’d have a grand time. I have friends all over. We could have a private tour of the Smithsonian.

  Write and tell me how you are. How’s your mother? How are you getting along with Elin and the family now that things have gotten so rotten for Muslims?

  Xoxoxo

  FR (Father Rabbit)

  “Did she respond?” Richard said when Angela returned from the soft night above the dig, where she had sent the email.

  “No. I waited, which is why I was gone so long.”

  In front of them, vivid in the semicircle of LED lights, was the winged lioness, eyes widened, mouth open in a snarl, wings unfurled, great claws rampant. Its triangular ears were back, and the small tuft of mane on the top of its head was nonexistent, one of the clues to its gender. Deep ridges at the base of its wings spoke of their power; the delicacy at their chiseled tips revealed their grace. Its deep chest was bifurcated, another clue the talented sculptor had provided. Richard had told her these Etruscan beast gods had their origins in ancient Asian cultures, brought to Egypt and Anatolia, thence to Greece and Mycenae. By the Etruscans themselves? No one knew. In all, the lioness was, as she had written, a majestic and magnificent beast.

  “So she didn’t write back.” Richard continued to flick dust and crumbled rock from the lioness’s haunch with a sable brush. “Well, what would she have said anyway?”

  “Richard—” She watched him working in his careful, concentrated way. “Maybe she’ll write in the morning. You don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice betraying his exhaustion, “I do know.”

  “Whatever you think, whatever the case, I won’t stop writing her.”

  He turned to eye her, his brush suspended. “You think it’s that important, huh?”

  “I wish my father had written me letters from work. I wouldn’t have felt so alone, so isolated.”

  As he went back to work, he made a sound deep in his throat, as the guardian might make were she alive.

  “You know,” she went on, “writing this email was like talking to my younger self.”

  Brush-brush, brush-brush. “And how is that?”

  “My own father used to call me Rabbit.”

  Richard paused, turned to her. “Really?” He smiled. “How extraordinary!”

  She had his full attention now. She very badly wanted him to hear what she said next. Really hear it. She cleared her throat. “I signed the email ‘FR.’”

  “FR,” he said, brow wrinkling. “What’s that?”

  “FR: Father Rabbit.”

  For a moment he stared at her in astonishment. Then a great smile spread across his face. “Father Rabbit,” he repeated, as if testing the name. “That’s quite brilliant. You see, I was right to have you write for me.”

  “A strange twist on Cyrano de Bergerac.”

  He laughed but could not keep the tightly held sorrow in check, and the laugh ended as a kind of sob.

  “Richard—”

  “Don’t,” he snapped. It was the first time she had heard him raise his voice. In his occasional altercations with Kieros he lowered his voice, deepened it. It took on an unmistakably steely edge that invariably caused the director to back off.

  There was nothing for her to do but to return to their silent work, watching the great winged lioness awakening as they slowly freed it from its ages-old entombment. A tiny sliver of fear slid between her ribs to touch her heart. He was angry with her; would he stay angry? What would happen then? She couldn’t bear the thought. The thing she must not do, she kept telling herself as she worked on the claws of a forepaw, was to mention Bella again, though Bella was who she most wanted to know more about. A kinship was forming, thin yet, like the first icing of a lake, but where the ice stretched itself, where it met the water, there surely was an inescapable bonding between the two. It was then she pledged herself to writing Bella every day—as Richard or, as she had suggested to Bella, herself.

  Hour after hour spent itself, melting into the rock dust of the underworld in which they stood. At length, Angela became so tired that she was sure the lioness had moved. Richard had named the lioness Cul, after the Etruscan infernal goddess of gateways to the underworld. Unable to keep her eyes open, Angela dropped her brush and lay down, curled herself around Cul’s powerful forepaw, and fell fast asleep.

  She awoke, achy and stiff, to find Richard sitting beside her. He was staring into her face, almost as if he was deep in conversation with her. It took a few moments for Angela to realize that she had awoken with none of her anxieties. For the first time since she had run from Dey’s employ, she was free of pounding heartbeats, cold sweats, the dread of the past catching up to her. Her gaze ran softly between Richard and the demonic Cul, who seemed more a friendly companion than a ferocious guardian to her, and she thought, It’s because of them.

  The next evening, they broke off work at more or less the normal time. Even Richard was feeling the effects of their long day’s journey through the night. After dinner, after the briefing Richard gave to the group at large, Angela went back to her tent, dragged her bedding and few belongings over to Richard’s tent, and set it all on the floor.

  If he was surprised, he gave no sign of it. They had a couple of drinks, talked about Cul and what her presence meant—Richard was of a mind that they would soon enough find her companion, another winged lion, perhaps a male this time, perhaps not—they did their quick ablutions and got ready for bed. By the light of the oil lamp, Richard entered the day’s events in his old-school logbook, while Angela typed her second message to Bella.

  Dear Rabbit,

  We have named our winged lioness Cul, the guardian of the gates to the underworld. She’s really coming into focus now, really beginning to seem alive to us. The
re’s something curiously comforting and loving about her, as if she’s protecting us as well as her ancient mistress. Sometimes she appears to be very close, then other times impossibly far away. Like you.

  xoxoxo, FR.

  Angela sent the email. Richard shut his logbook, placed it on a narrow shelf beside his bed. “It’s funny how we tell ourselves stories and later wonder whether they were true. Thinking back to just before I came here, I can almost believe I actually was in Ephesus.”

  Angela turned on her side, her head propped up on one elbow. “What do you mean? Where were you?”

  “Home. Dearborn, Michigan.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He was quiet for some time, his mind turning over something important.

  All around the tent the shadows stretched and yawned as the wind billowed the fabric of the tent. A conversation came to them briefly, too far away to make out the words. Then the burble faded into the night.

  “Why did you tell everyone you’d come from Turkey?” Angela asked at length.

  “My wife is very ill. She’s hardly conscious.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said sharply.

  What the hell does that mean? she wondered. “Do you mind me being here? I sleep better when I’m near you.”

  “I noticed. Last night in the dig you slept calmly as a baby. It was quite beautiful.” He was staring at the ceiling. “And when you woke up, I didn’t perceive a trace of fear or anxiety in you. Not a drop.”

  She wondered what he was actually seeing now.

  “You know, I was relieved when you dragged your things in here. I was actually worried you’d want to sleep with Cul from now on.”

  She saw his grin, and she laughed. “It’s you, Richard. I feel—I don’t know. Protected. Maybe that’s the right word. I can sleep without fear someone is coming for me.”

  Richard let out an audible breath. “That’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten.”

  Angela didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. But her heart beat a bit faster even though she felt as if he had just tucked her in.

  “You do understand that people will start talking,” he said. “They always do at digs; it’s such a small, enclosed society. Are you prepared for that?”

  “I don’t care,” Angela said. “But what about you?”

  “What about me,” he said dreamily. Almost like the refrain of a song.

  And then she understood why he had told her the truth about where he had been before coming to Crete. Whatever the stories that came about her sleeping in his tent, his wife wouldn’t hear them; she was beyond being hurt by either lies or the truth.

  “Tell me more about your father,” he said, and now she knew what he’d been seeing as he stared upward.

  “He wasn’t a big man, but he was strong—burly, like an old-fashioned hod carrier. He had huge hands, and they were—once when he took me to the Central Park Zoo, I was able to stroke the horn of a rhinoceros. His hands were like that.”

  “What was his line of work?”

  “He had two jobs, but he never spoke about what they were.”

  “You never asked?”

  “We didn’t have that kind of relationship. Looking back, he might have been a glassblower, a bricklayer, or a night watchman. He might have done anything that didn’t have an office title or business card attached to it.” She took a breath, memories flooding through her. “I don’t think he was proud of what he did. But maybe my not knowing is partly on me; maybe I wasn’t interested enough. The important thing, I guess, is that I was never with him, except on Sundays.” She laughed. “Like God.” Feeling a crick in her neck, she changed positions, lying on her back like Richard, staring upward. She wished she could see what he was looking at. “In the mornings he’d make coffee in an old, battered percolator. He loved the strong coffee that came out of it. He’d stir up hot cereal—oatmeal, Wheatena, cream of wheat. He’d rotate them. I hated cream of wheat. I’d have Corn Flakes or Wheaties those days, even if it was freezing out.”

  Richard was silent. He’d folded his hands across his chest. He was staring into his own life.

  “You loved him,” he said at last. “Your father.”

  “Very much, yes.”

  “Despite the fact he was almost never home.”

  Angela supposed the conversation was always heading in this direction. “I never felt abandoned by him. Not until he died, and then I hated him even while I was crying for him and for myself.”

  “Sorry sounds so inadequate,” Richard said. “And yet I am.”

  “He was a wonderful person, my dad. He just never knew how to talk to me.”

  “Did he ever tell you he loved you?”

  “When I was little, before his heart was broken. Afterward he said it, but in a kind of rote way. But every time he called me Rabbit, I knew.”

  Richard was still as death. Angela felt that it would be an invasion of privacy to look at him. She could hear the breath soughing in and out of him, like wind in the willows. She remembered reading The Wind in the Willows and wishing herself into Toad Hall.

  Without warning, Richard reached up, switched off the light. She imagined herself curled around Cul’s forepaw and, in that safe place, passed into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  NINE

  When Elin first came into the household, her presence caused nary a ripple. Elin was exceptional in taking care of Bella and was nothing but solicitous with Maggie. Still, though Maggie appreciated Elin’s help, the girl was an employee, and Maggie was scrupulous in keeping their exchanges to the bare minimum. Often, she wouldn’t even see Elin, even though they were in the same room together. To Maggie, Elin was a piece of furniture, albeit one that moved and took care of the Baby. Only when she was at her worst would she talk to Elin, out of an intolerable desperation.

  In her downward spiral, drinking took up more and more of Maggie’s life, and so did the pills of varying flavors and efficacy she started ingesting when, years later, alcohol was no longer sufficient to send her under the rainbow. That she restrained herself, painstakingly abstaining from all of her necessities, as she privately referred to her drugs of choice, when Richard was home was another symptom of her unsupportable burden of rage and guilt. She had become clever in the specific ways of criminals and madmen.

  By the time she was four, Bella had grown to love Elin; certainly she relied on her, felt safe with her, was comforted by her when she was ill. Elin provided all the empathetic responses that her mother was incapable of giving her. The core of her had imprinted itself on Elin in much the same way a dog will give its unconditional love to the human who feeds it, holds it, coos to it, loves it. At that age, God alone knew what she thought of her mother. Later, when she was older, perhaps seven or eight, when Elin had all but moved in, she knew Maggie was her mother, but her understanding of the word mother was vastly different than anyone else’s her age. “Mother” was someone who occupied the house she and Elin lived in. She always called Maggie by name, never Mother. That sobriquet was reserved for Elin’s mother, whom she lovingly called Umm, just as Elin did. As for her birth mother, she reacted to Maggie’s antipathy by shrinking away from her, closer to Elin and to Umm.

  Her daughter’s disinterest in her was precisely what Maggie had been working toward. Elin, however, was not so easy to keep at a safe remove. Elin was unrelenting in her attempts to get closer to Maggie—to understand her? Good Christ, Maggie did not want that. Nevertheless, it was fortuitous that Elin was in the house when Maggie had her first full-blown panic attack. Elin had the presence of mind to leave Bella, who was eight at the time, in her room. The edge of hysteria in Maggie’s voice fanned the fires of Elin’s innate empathy. She found Maggie lying on her bed, curled on her right side, in a fetal position, knees drawn up to her chest. She was turned away from the door; all Elin saw was her back, curved like a turtle’s shell.

  “Mrs. Mathis,” she said softly.

  Maggie moaned. She s
eemed frozen in place.

  “Mrs. Mathis, what is it?”

  No answer, or rather nothing coherent. Now Elin did something unusual. Instead of walking around the foot of the bed to get a look at her employer, she climbed onto the bed, kneed her way to Maggie’s side. Then she lay down beside her, waited. When she received no negative sign, she wrapped one arm around Maggie’s waist. Waited for Maggie to shrug her away. When that did not happen, she drew her own body against Maggie’s, began to gently rock her.

  After what seemed an eternity, she became aware that Maggie’s shoulders were shaking, that she was silently weeping. Then she felt Maggie’s fingers find hers, interlacing.

  “Shhh,” Elin said softly. “It’s going to be all right.” As if she were the mother, Maggie her daughter. She recognized, perhaps instinctively, that something essential inside Maggie was broken, that she was spiraling down into a pit of despair, and she thanked Allah for placing her in Bella’s path. In those days, in the aftermath of 9/11, she had already experienced enough despair to last her a lifetime. Unfortunately, the world had changed irrevocably; the calamity to befall American Islamics had just begun.

  As it turned out, Orfeo was far from a great chess player. Within eight months, Laurel was regularly beating the pants off him, to his unconstrained delight. In fact, she often drew some of the old hands, who watched her play with the concentration of crows on a treetop. More often now, passersby would pause in their peregrinations, curious as to the proceedings. Then the crowds started to form, three and four deep. Laurel would ignore them all, concentrated wholly on the march of her plastic soldiers and royal family across the checkered terrain. Her strategies were mercurial, one day attacking as boldly and methodically as a Roman legion, the next hanging back, cagily pouncing when her opponent made a mistake. And if all else failed, if she saw that she was being outmaneuvered, there was always the Sicilian Defense to fall back on, reimagined, remade, remodeled.

  Orfeo was far better at playing the guitar than he was at chess. Laurel found this out one evening when he invited her home for dinner. This was perhaps five months after they had met. It was November 1, the leaves on the plane trees sparser, letting more sunlight through than at the height of summer. It grew darker earlier. A smoky melancholy was in the air.