by Rajia Hassib
At night, she woke up sweating, imagining she had discovered how her sister ended up next to the suicide bomber, only to find out that the terrorist had, in fact, been her own sister, or that she, Rose, had been standing in the shadows, her finger poised on the button that detonated the bomb.
She couldn’t handle any other discoveries.
She placed Gameela’s wedding certificate back where she found it, folded and tucked between the pages of Rose’s childhood book on archaeology, her sister’s dream nestled inside hers. That book, too, sits in the box, hidden from sight by the container’s opaque plastic but still palpable, as if it were emanating radioactive waves that make Rose’s eyes itch and the hairs on her arms stand on end whenever she glances in its direction.
Mark never mentions it, though Rose has caught him staring at the box when he thought she was not looking.
* * *
—
ON A SATURDAY a couple of weeks later, Mark leaves early in the morning and returns with a rental car. “I’m taking you to the beach,” he tells a pajama-clad Rose.
“In December?”
“It’s a warm December day! Besides, beaches are not just for swimming.”
They drive to Staten Island. Rose has seen the Verrazano Bridge from Brooklyn but has never been on it. She looks out the window at the suspension cables, then through the sunroof as they pass under each of the two towers.
“This is beautiful,” she says, thinking of ancient monuments and new marvels of technology, pyramids and skyscrapers. “Beautiful.”
They park by a wooden boardwalk overlooking a sandy beach. Rose follows Mark to the wide walkway bordered by a white-painted iron railing. They stand together, Rose’s gloved hands and his bare ones resting on the railing, looking out on the sea.
“Welcome to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Boardwalk. Not exactly Alexandria, but still a beach. Close enough, in my book.”
Ahead of them, gentle waves crash on the beach. Rose lifts both hands and puts one open palm on each side of her face, blocking her peripheral vision. Now all she sees is water and sand. Too much sand—Alexandria’s beaches are narrower than this. She tilts her head up until she sees only a narrow strip of sand, then water and sky. “Now I’m in Alexandria.”
It’s warm enough to pass for Alexandria in the wintertime. Rose closes her eyes, allows herself to indulge in this fantasy for a few minutes, but the sounds and smells are all wrong, and she knows it. She opens her eyes and drops her hands. “Then again, I haven’t been to Alexandria in years. Who knows how it looks now.” She remembers family vacations when she was a child, trips to El-Agamy beach with its fine white sand. Gameela’s hair inevitably bleached golden by the sun and the salty water; Rose’s remaining stubbornly black.
“Let’s walk out on the sand,” Mark says.
They climb down the stairs and walk up to the waterline, then stroll toward a fishing pier in the distance. Rose inhales the fresh air, letting it fill her lungs. Next to her, Mark is silent, hands in his pockets. Her sneakers scrunch on the wet, compacted sand by the water, and Rose looks behind at her footprints and at Mark’s.
“It’s not fair that your stride is so long. I have to take four steps for each three of yours.”
He laughs. “The advantages of being tall.”
Ahead of them, fishermen are sitting on the pier, casting their lines into the ocean. Mark and Rose walk back to the boardwalk and onto the pier, stroll toward the blue-roofed pavilion at its end. On their way, they stop and watch a fisherman unhook a large, round, hard-shelled marine creature from his line. He flips it over, handling it with gloves.
“What is this?” Rose asks.
“A horseshoe crab,” Mark answers. “Also called a living fossil because they go back four hundred and fifty million years. So right up your alley,” he smiles.
Rose watches the creature. Upturned, it shows multiple legs and a threatening-looking tail. The fisherman is struggling to free the crab, and when he finally does, he flips it right side up and looks at Rose, smiling. “Want to touch him?” he asks.
“No, thank you.” Rose does not hesitate.
He laughs. “Harmless creature, really. Doesn’t bite or sting or anything.” Gently, he lifts it by the sides of its shell, carries it over the railing, holds it there as if ready to drop it into the water, then hesitates. He turns around, carries the crab all the way to the end of the pier, off onto the boardwalk, then down to the water, where he releases it. In a moment, the crab is gone. Rose watches the man as he walks back. Probably in his sixties or seventies, his pace slow, hunched forward as he approaches his fishing gear. He smiles at her before he takes his seat, and Rose smiles back.
They resume their walk toward the pavilion. There, they lean against the railing again, this time looking out at the ocean that stretches in all directions.
“Thank you,” Rose says. “I needed this.”
“I thought you’d like a change of scenery.”
“A new place to add to my list of places?”
“Why not? One more step toward feeling at home.”
Rose watches a couple of seagulls dive down toward the water then swoop back up. In the shade of the pavilion, the day feels suddenly colder, and Rose shivers. Mark takes his jacket off, steps closer to Rose, wraps his arm around her shoulders, and throws his jacket around both of them. The lining of his jacket smells like his aftershave: sporty, familiar.
“We should have brought a quilt,” Rose says.
“Maybe next time.”
“Yes. Next time.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, Rose inches closer to Mark in bed. He is asleep with his back turned to her, his chest rising and falling softly with each breath. She presses herself as close as possible to him. She wants to whisper something into the back of his neck, something deep and meaningful, maybe that home is not only a place but a person, too, but it sounds both silly and superficial, like an attempt to label something that should not be constrained by a simple definition. She thinks of Gameela’s home or homes, wherever they were, and of the person she felt most at home with. For a moment, the ongoing, persistent ache that has never left her since her sister’s death parts just slightly enough to allow one ray of light to seep in: that her sister was married, that she must have loved her husband, that she had, even if only for a short time, someone to inch closer to at night, someone to hold on tight to. With this one thought, one of the endless pebbles that have weighed down her heart for the previous months seems to pop, disappear, leaving a shimmer in its wake, as if it were a bug that flew into an electric zapper, illuminating the area around it for the second it took for it to die.
Her heart felt suddenly lighter. One pebble gone, many more to go.
Mark stirs. Rose is still not sure whether her anger with him has fully subsided or whether it ever will. He has played a part in Gameela’s death, even if unwittingly—that’s a fact that will not change. She still looks at his sleeping back and wants to stay as close as possible to him—that, too, is a fact. For a moment, she thinks that maybe there are multiple versions of her, too, just as there are multiple versions of him and multiple versions of Gameela, and that her different Roses will have to learn to coexist, that Gameela’s sister and Mark’s wife cannot go on believing that they are enemies, citizens of warring countries.
The night is calmer than usual, and Rose glances at the clock: 3:00 A.M. She reaches over Mark’s torso, finds his hand, and grabs it in hers. She squeezes his fingers, and in his sleep, he squeezes hers back.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, Rose walks into the kitchen for coffee and notices sunlight trickling through the window and drawing playful shadows on the kitchen countertop. She places her palm on the countertop and the shadows bend and break over her skin, the surface’s warmth welcoming her outstretched hand. Taking her
coffee with her, Rose opens the window and listens to the birds chirping, watches Mrs. Kumiega sit on her bench in the backyard and play with her cats, and she feels a new, partly exciting, mostly calming kind of peace.
She feels at home.
When she walks back to the living room and looks at the plastic bin, she no longer detects that near suffocation that had made itself quite comfortable in some nook of her chest for the previous months. She waits for it to peek out, announce itself, but it has vanished.
When Mark wakes up, he finds Rose sitting at the kitchen table, the plastic bin opened next to her, Gameela’s things stacked in neat piles on the table’s glass top. She looks up at him and smiles.
“Come. Help me decide what to do with this stuff.”
They sit at opposite sides of the table, sifting through the things. Rose looks at each paper before discarding it, reads all the mail she had not yet opened, rubs the edges of sheets between finger and thumb to make sure they are not stuck together, hiding anything from her view. Because she is now ready to find anything—documents proving that Gameela was an international spy; that she was the leader of a ring of terrorists; photos of her on top of the mountains of Saint Catherine or diving with sharks—she finds nothing. Shortly, the garbage bin she has placed on the floor next to her overflows with old bills; work documents that Rose decides cannot be important; copies of academic articles.
Mark has separated the photos in two piles: those with people in them, and those without—snapshots of building sites, exposed metal beams and concrete perpetually waiting to dry. He lets Rose look through the photos containing people, but he has already pulled one out and now slides it across the table toward her.
“Keep this one,” he says.
The photo shows Rose and Gameela in their teens. They are standing at the beach (Alexandria, perhaps? Rose is not sure), pants rolled up to their knees, their backs to a visibly stormy sea, waves breaking behind them, their arms laced. Rose’s hair is cropped short, a mass of black curls, while Gameela’s, longer, auburn, flows sideways behind her, like a single wing extended. They are both laughing and looking at the camera.
In one of her desk drawers, Rose finds a new frame, carries it back to the kitchen, and puts the photo in it. The frame is too large for the photo, which stands crooked, Gameela’s side of the snapshot higher than Rose’s.
“I’ll fix that,” Mark says, reaching into one of the kitchen drawers behind him for Scotch tape. Moments later, the photo stands perfectly centered in its wooden frame.
Rose places it in the middle of the bookcase in the living room, in the section where the East meets the West. She stands looking at it.
“Feels like a lifetime ago. It’s like I’m looking at a different person.”
Mark walks closer, places one hand on her shoulder, squeezing it. “Not a different person. An earlier incarnation of the same person.”
She leans against him for support, her shoulder resting on his chest.
“I wish I had known how things would turn out. I would have changed so much. I would have spoken to her more often, at least.”
Mark holds her tighter, closer to him. Rose looks at the two smiling girls in the photo, their arms entangled, frozen in a moment that is now forever theirs.
* * *
—
AT WORK, Rose dives into the preparations for the new exhibit with renewed fervor. Dr. Winkenstein has been back for two months, and while he did not disapprove of including evidence of communication with the dead in the exhibit, he wants her to present this as part of a section on ancient Egyptian religious rituals. Shifting the focus to highlight celebratory traditions, Dr. Winkenstein suggests she include holidays such as the annual Khoiak Festival, celebrating the myth of Osiris. During the festival, Osiris’s death and resurrection were reenacted in processions that marched across Egypt, and ordinary people made figurines of the dead god. The University of Chicago owns multiple such figurines in bronze, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has one as well, a corn mummy made as a replica of Osiris’s mummy. Dr. Winkenstein is sure the Met would be able to borrow some of those for the duration of the exhibit.
Rose puts the letters to the dead aside and starts researching the celebratory figurines of Osiris.
* * *
—
AT HOME, a couple of weeks after their trip to the beach, Mark presents Rose with a sheet of paper. The paper lists an address and a phone number, both in Egypt.
“What is this?”
“Fouad’s contact information.”
Sitting in her living room, her legs extended on the coffee table, a book in her lap, Rose stares at the paper but does not move.
Mark brings it closer to her face. “Take it. It’s not going to bite you.”
“How did you get this?” Her voice is hoarse. She notices Mark’s still-outstretched hand, reaches over and takes the paper.
“I am a reporter, remember?” He smiles, obviously proud of himself.
She looks up from the paper at his face, feels she should say something, but is not sure what. “How did you get this?” she asks again.
“I had a friend from the Cairo office do some investigating. Not hard to do if you have the right connections in Egypt.”
“You didn’t call Marwa, did you?”
“No, of course not. Don’t worry.” Mark sits down next to her.
They had discussed that before, the possibility of asking Marwa about Fouad, but Rose had opposed it. She didn’t want to risk revealing her sister’s secret, and she couldn’t be sure Marwa knew about the marriage.
“How did you find him?” she asks one more time.
“We assumed Gameela lied to your parents when she said she was traveling to Rasheed for work after she had quit her job, but then I remembered that she had said Fouad had a farm in Rasheed. He even mentioned the English name: Rosetta. That’s how I knew it was the same town. So I thought maybe she lied about the purpose of her travel, not the destination. I had a friend make some phone calls and, sure enough, there was a Fouad Salem Sedky in Rasheed. A big landowner, apparently. We’re lucky it’s such a small town.”
“How do we know it’s the same man?”
“My friend’s source is on the local police force.” Here Mark hesitates. Softly, he adds, “He said the man had always been secluded but had grown more so since he recently lost his young wife in a terrorist attack.”
Rose stares at the sheet of paper in her hand. “Now what?”
“Up to you. But at least you have a way to contact him, if you ever choose to do so.”
* * *
—
“ANOTHER TRIP?” Dr. Winkenstein asks.
“Just for a few days. Three days and a weekend. Maybe four. Certainly not longer than a week, I promise. I’ll aim for the New Year weekend and the first couple of days of January. And I’ll take it out of my annual vacation time.”
“I know it has been a difficult time for you, Rose, but there is a board meeting coming up. I need to have something to report to them about the exhibit’s progress.”
“You will. I’ll work on it while I’m there. I’ll work weekends when I come back. I’ve already done so much since the last meeting. I probably even have enough for you to report right now, if you wish.”
He sighs, pushes his glasses back, and looks at her. “I don’t know.”
“There is someone there I need to see,” she pleads, softly. “Someone I didn’t get to see the last time I was there. Please.”
He looks down. Rose scoots to the edge of her seat. On his desk lie stacks of papers, documentation of his ongoing research that Rose has been helping him with as well, in preparation for the exhibit.
“I’ll stop by the Egyptian Museum and take multiple photos of the entire cabinet holding those Old Kingdom embalming tools,” she says, pointing to a sheet of paper on his desk.<
br />
“You don’t need to bribe me.” He looks at her above his glasses.
“I really need to go, Dr. Winkenstein.”
He nods, sighing. Rose makes a mental note to add this to the ever-increasing list of things she owes the kind man, promising herself that, at some point soon, she will throw propriety through the window and give him a peck on the cheek.
* * *
—
ON HER LAST DAY before heading to Egypt, Rose wraps her work up early, and, instead of going straight home, she walks into the Egyptian art wing of the museum and finds the Temple of Dendur. Again she marvels at how grand this minuscule temple looks in its large exhibit hall with its wall of slanted glass, which keeps the temple doused in clear but placid light. This room is Rose’s favorite: an Egyptian temple to the goddess Isis set in the heart of Manhattan, the multiple layers of her various homes overlapping. She finds a spot on the low partition encircling the temple, sits down looking at its walls, tries to imagine them painted in their original bright colors, not in the uniform beige of the two-thousand-year-old blocks. All around the temple, visitors are walking in awed silence, and Rose, as always, cannot help but feel proud. She does not begrudge the museum this temple, which would have been flooded under the waters of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s, had the U.S. and UNESCO not helped rescue it. It is a legitimately earned piece of Egypt’s history, not like the bust of Nefertiti, housed in the Berlin museum for decades since it was illegally smuggled out of Egypt, just like many other artifacts that should never have left their country.