by Rajia Hassib
“Her nerves are so tightly strung, I think I can hear them vibrate all the way from here,” April whispers as she moves closer to Rose.
“She just wants to make sure everything is perfect.”
“Nothing is ever perfect, and there isn’t anything she can do about it. She just can’t accept that.”
“Maybe she needs you to talk to her. If she is stressed and not dealing well with her stress.”
“She will never accept anything I say.”
Rose shifts in place. She wants to say that she lies awake at night thinking of the endless ways she has not helped Gameela, regretting all the times she almost picked up the phone but got too wrapped up in the hustle of life and postponed the call. For weeks, she has imagined the things Gameela might have told her, if they had spoken more often: revealing why she quit her job; explaining how she managed to keep this a secret from their parents; whispering one detail that Rose may have responded to and somehow changed the course of fate. No, don’t do that. Don’t do that. But don’t do what? Which single misstep on the trail that led to Gameela’s death could Rose have prevented over the phone? She may never know. She considers explaining all of this to April, urging her to become more involved in Emily’s life, to throw fears of intrusion to the wind and just help your sister, but she doesn’t want to compare Emily to Gameela, and she certainly doesn’t want to preach to April, who, along with Jarred, was the first to make her feel like a welcomed member of the family. She glances behind her at her father-in-law, sitting in an armchair, looking up at Bill, Emily’s husband, who, drink in hand, has been talking nonstop since Rose entered the room. Jarred catches Rose’s eye and winks at her, and Rose smiles. From the dining room, she can hear Laura talking to Mark as they both set the table. Rose suspects they are talking about her, which usually would have irritated her but now doesn’t. She had gone to bed early the night before and woken up with a newfound warmth toward her mother-in-law, the result of their encounter on the deck. The feeling is so new and fragile that Rose has tiptoed around Laura all day, afraid to do anything that could sever this brand-new tie.
“Come,” April says, pulling her by the elbow.
Rose follows April out the door. They walk up to Emily, who has hung up but who is still standing at the end of the walkway, looking out for the caterer.
“Are they almost here?” April asks.
“He’s been ‘almost here’ for the past fifteen minutes,” Emily says. She has her arms wrapped around her chest, her cell phone still clutched in one hand. “The man is an incompetent idiot.”
“It’s not even two yet. Relax. There’s no rush.”
Emily exhales loudly, letting her arms fall to her side. She glances at the house where Bill is still talking to Jarred, both visible through the bay window.
“He’s going to bore Dad to death,” she says.
“No, he’s not. You know Dad doesn’t mind,” April responds.
“He should be watching the girls. I told him to keep an eye on them.”
“They were in your bedroom when I walked down just a few minutes ago,” Rose says. “Do you want me to go check on them?”
“Would you, please?” Emily asks.
Before Rose turns around to walk back into the house, Emily grabs her forearm and squeezes it. Rose pats Emily’s hand, wondering why everyone is suddenly touching her, how un-American it seems, this constant patting and hugging by other women, something that happens all the time in Egypt but that seems surprising here. Must be a side effect of bereavement, she thinks. Emily’s grip relaxes, and Rose heads back inside.
The girls, both wearing puffy dresses, have set up a fort between the bed and the dresser, drawing a perimeter using every pillow in the room plus, Rose suspects, quite a few pillows from other rooms as well. They are sitting in the center of the pillow fort, two coloring books abandoned by their sides, playing instead with a long strip of fabric that seems to be made from several sashes and belts tied together, their ends then joined by the leather shoulder strap of Emily’s Coach purse. The five-year-old is trying to get her younger sister to hold one end of the sash in place while she wraps it around the pillows, but the younger girl is totally absorbed in picking at the flowers adorning her Mary Janes.
“Where did you get those belts from, Maggie?” Rose asks the older girl.
“Mommy’s suitcase.”
Out the window, Rose sees Emily and April talking. She knows she should be cleaning up this mess, carrying the pillows back to their rooms, carefully untangling the mass of belts, putting the strap of Emily’s purse back on before she discovers the vandalism and suffers another twist to her already frail nerves. In a few minutes, she will do all that and then walk the girls down to join the family. For now, she stays by the window, listening to the two young sisters chatter, watching the two older sisters talk, their heads close together, keeping her arms wrapped around herself, trying to think of nothing.
* * *
—
ON THEIR LAST DAY in West Virginia, Mark takes Rose on a hike. He drives her to Bridge Road, parks in the lot serving the small, upscale strip mall, then guides her a block down a curving street, where they step off the high-traffic road and onto the hiking path and, within minutes, are so fully enclosed in the tree-studded trail that Rose cannot believe they are still in the heart of one of Charleston’s busiest residential neighborhoods.
“My aunt brought me here the first time when I was a kid. Back then, she told me a story about how this trail was built by a wealthy man for his wife, who liked to ride in a horse-drawn carriage. I believed that for decades, always associating the trail with some kind of Victorian romance,” Mark laughs. “Then I looked it up and it turns out the trail was built by some governor in the early twentieth century so that workers could transport bricks to a house that he was building up the hill. He eventually used it for his carriage, and I’m sure his wife did as well, but the whole brick transport thing ruined the romantic story. I still like the trail, though.”
The path winds down, wide and well maintained, unlike the narrow trails strewn with fallen branches that Mark has taken Rose to before. Curving and turning, it alternates between spots totally enclosed in trees and others with a clear view of the river below and the city on the other bank. One such spot has been fitted with a stone bench. Mark takes Rose by the hand and guides her there. They sit down in silence, watching the city, its handful of high-rises sprouting between the river on one side and the forest-covered mountains on the other.
“I have something for you,” Mark says.
From his pocket, he takes out a red-and-white-checkered kerchief, unfolds it, and pulls something from its center, placing the object in Rose’s palm. For a moment, Rose mistakes it for a stone, but then she recognizes the rough object.
“Is this an arrowhead?”
Mark nods. “I found it on a hike when I was in high school. I tried to look it up back then and was told it may be Early Archaic—as old as the Pharaohs—but of course, this may not be true. You might be able to find out.”
The arrowhead is a reddish granite, smooth with a still-sharp point. Rose places it in one palm and runs her fingers around its ridge and down to the base where it was once attached to a wooden shaft.
“That’s a perfect gift to give an archaeologist, isn’t it?” she smiles. “I feel spoiled, like we’re courting all over again.”
“I’d like to spoil you a bit. You need it.” He pauses, extending one foot and ruffling some leaves that have fallen on the ground before them. “I need it,” he adds after a while. “I’ve been kind of afraid I was losing you.” His short, nervous laugh sounds like a hiccup.
Rose says nothing. She wraps her palm around the arrow, feels its sharp edges dig into her skin.
“Am I losing you?” Mark’s voice has lost its artificial humor.
Rose opens her palm and looks at the lin
es the arrow’s head has drawn on it, imprints that will soon vanish. She has always taken pride in how transparent her relationship with Mark is, how she never lies to him, never holds anything back. Now it occurs to her that she has taken pride in something that was more coincidental than a product of her character: she has held nothing back because she has had nothing to hide. She thinks of the nights in the previous weeks when she lay in bed, insomniac, thinking of Gameela and of Egypt. She would fall asleep only after playing a trick on her mind: imagining that she was back home, living with her parents again, taking care of them, embracing Egypt the way she should have embraced it back when she lived there but did not, loving the country that she has made into a career but that she has failed to feel attached to the way Gameela had, the country that she has so willingly deserted. She is almost certain that Mark would go back with her to Egypt now, if she wanted to—wasn’t that what he had craved? To report on the developing world from the heat of its overcrowded streets? But for the previous weeks, she hasn’t been sure she wanted him there with her, and to complicate things, she isn’t sure she truly wants to go back herself. Still, the dream of being back home—alone—was the only way for her to fall asleep, and that is something she cannot share with him.
“Of course you’re not losing me,” she finally says. She considers adding that she feels she is losing herself, that she has been shredded into parts that have been scattered, like Osiris’s body, all over the place, but that unlike him, her scattering is not restricted to Egypt, but is global: her arms in Egypt at her parents’, wrapped around them in a tight hug; her head in New York, studying and producing enviable scholarly work; her legs in West Virginia, hiking its many trails; her heart buried with Gameela. She imagines Mark in parts, too, and when she looks up at him, she sees not the West Virginia Mark that she is expecting, all at ease and at home, but the eyes of the young Mark she never knew, the one who spent the night out in the cold next to his dead dog, the one who glimpsed something shimmering and reached for it, holding on to his prized arrowhead for decades only to share it with her now, just because he knows she would like it.
“You just need to give me some time,” she says.
He nods, reaches over and holds her hand in his. His hand is moist with sweat. Rose has rarely felt his hands sweat before, not even in Cairo, where the temperatures routinely rise to over a hundred degrees in the summer. She wonders if Cairo was too dry to cause his hands to sweat, if this is a product of West Virginia’s humid heat, or if this is another manifestation of his stress, a sign to add to the ones she has noticed since Gameela’s death: the sudden jerks in the middle of the night; the detached air that sometimes envelops him as he sits in his armchair in the evening, appearing to gaze into a book but obviously far off; that time she passed by the bathroom and saw him standing with his hands on the vanity, his head bowed down, visibly shaking. She had imagined such signs were indications of Gameela’s ghost brushing against him. In her darker moods, she had found Mark’s suffering gratifying, a well-deserved retribution. Now, with her hand in his, she cannot rejoice in his pain anymore. She squeezes his hand, and he squeezes hers back.
The arrowhead is still nestled in her other palm. Rose examines the stone’s uneven surface, the many facets that someone carved thousands of years ago.
“I can’t believe you actually found this.”
“I’ve always been lucky.”
“Did you look for it? Or did you find it by accident?”
“I looked for an arrowhead every time I went hiking for my entire childhood. The hills here are rumored to be strewn with them, but it’s quite hard to find one. It only took me about eight or nine years.” He laughs. “Still lucky, though.”
“Maybe you’re confusing luck with hard work.”
He shrugs. “Maybe it’s lucky to be able to work hard at something and actually get it.”
“Now you’re being too philosophical.” She reaches over for the kerchief Mark has put on the bench between them, wraps the arrowhead back in it, and places it in her pocket. They stay in place, her hand in his, watching the trees around them and the city ahead, until Rose feels that perhaps those trees, too, have taken her in, and that she can now count this spot as her own.
◆ 15 ◆
I don’t understand,” Ingrid says.
Rose sighs. “Why? What don’t you understand?”
“Why do you need to collect her things? What do you expect they will tell you?”
“What all things tell us—how she lived, what mattered to her, what she believed in. It’s our field, Ingrid. I thought you of all people would understand.”
Ingrid runs her tongue between her teeth and her lips, tilts her head to the side, and stares at a point in space right over Rose’s shoulder. They are sitting at a coffee shop two blocks away from work. Ingrid just finished her lunch. (A pastry. She said she was in the mood for refined sugar.) Rose, who has not been in the mood for food in general lately, is on her second extra-large cup of coffee. She has been back from West Virginia for only two days, and already she feels as if she has been in New York forever, the massive city actively erasing the memory of all that precedes it. Rose, resistant, insists on wearing the turquoise stone at all times, and now carries the arrowhead in her backpack everywhere she goes.
“It’s a basic archaeological approach. Examine artifacts to come to a better understanding of the people who used them. All I need is to catalog all the things I brought with me, find a pattern, a thesis, some general thread that links them all, and then I’ll understand her better. It’s just killing me, how we hadn’t really spoken for so long. And then, if I do that, maybe I’ll find out why she happened to be near that boy when he blew himself up. I just can’t believe that was a coincidence.” She pauses, contemplates adding that driving all this is her suspicion that her own life had influenced her sister in a way that led to her death. But she knows Ingrid will deny that thesis, and she doesn’t want to say something designed to produce a reassuring response from her friend.
“I don’t see how her basic possessions can reveal anything about how she died, Rose.”
“They’ve already revealed one thing I didn’t know: that she had quit her job. I found proof of it among her things, and it’s blown my mind, that she could have kept such a thing to herself. Makes me see all the other aspects of her personality in a new light.”
Ingrid puts her coffee down, looks at her mug. Behind her, three people sitting at the next table burst out laughing. Rose is tempted to yell at them to be quiet.
“There is one fundamental flaw to this approach,” Ingrid starts, speaking slowly. “Yes, we collect artifacts to find out about people, but we do so because artifacts are the only things that survive over hundreds or thousands of years.” She looks at Rose, her eyes apologetic. “Artifacts are not the best way to find out about people; they are the only way to find out about people who lived a very long time ago. This is the difference. Even now, you still have better access to your sister than whatever those things will tell you. You have her friends. Your parents. Her colleagues at work. All of them knew her. You should be talking to them, not staring at her old T-shirts and scarves and hoping they tell you something. Do you think if we could interview Rameses’s priest or even one of his servants we would have spent years staring at wall engravings? Do you think if we could call up the residents of a settlement and ask them what day it was we would have spent a fortune carbon-dating shards of clay?” Ingrid reaches over and clasps Rose’s hand. “You need to talk to your parents. They will tell you much more than what your sister’s things can reveal.”
Rose pulls back, sits straight in her chair. She counts to ten in her head before she speaks. “I am done with interviews. I don’t want to think of them, conduct them, or come anywhere near talking to someone I don’t know, so that rules out her friends and colleagues. And I can’t talk to my parents. Not in any detail. I don’t think they
’re ready to talk about her.”
“Is it possible you don’t want them to know that you felt so distant from Gameela? That she may have confided in them but not in you?”
Rose looks out of the window to her side. Someone is smoking, a young man in a suit and tie. Rose wonders if he finds the tie constricting. She follows the rising smoke, tries to make out shapes.
“Rose?”
She ventures a look back at Ingrid, whose face is spelling out compassion so openly that Rose inhales deeply to prevent herself from crying.
“I can’t go to my parents. Not yet.”
Ingrid nods. “Okay. How about her friends? Her colleagues at work? You can’t rule them out just because you don’t like interviews.”
“What am I supposed to say? Hello, I’m Gameela’s sister, and I wonder if you could tell me why she quit her job and didn’t let us know and where she was traveling to every time she claimed she was away at work? And, while you’re at it, could you let me know if any of this had anything to do with how she died?”
Ingrid purses her lips. “That does sound ridiculous. Maybe a subtler approach?”
“A lie?”
“A discreet inquiry,” Ingrid corrects her. “Something like: I was wondering if Gameela cashed her last check? People will always believe that the relatives are after money. They will suspect you of being a bloodhound but not of being a fool who doesn’t know anything about her own sister. Then you can try to find out if they know why she quit.”
A man and a woman make their way to the table next to Rose’s. They squeeze between Ingrid’s chair and the table behind her, and Ingrid scoots forward to let them pass. The woman thanks her, a bit too loudly, and Ingrid nods. Both she and Rose watch them settle down. The man pulls his chair closer to his companion, laughing at something she said. They are new to each other, Rose can tell, still all excitement and little familiarity. She looks at Ingrid and catches her watching them, too.