The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  The first few hieroglyphs are rough. But then, instinct takes over. I find my fingers moving of their own accord, like the planchette of a Ouija board, demarking the beak of a cormorant and the ears of the Hr face. The language pours through me, water in a rusty pipe, coming clearer.

  I lean back, rubbing the bones of my wrist, aching and electrified.

  It is painstaking.

  It is glorious.

  I remember my mother telling me that when she was a girl, she dreamed in Irish. She would imagine herself under the sea with kelpies and merrows, and their silent conversations winged from mind to mind in the same ancient language that her grandmother used to speak. I thought she was lying until, during my last season at the Dig House, I began to dream in Middle Egyptian. I was always walking through the desert at night desperate for the sun to rise, my eyes straining to see the person in front of me. Don’t turn around, I would say, in the ancient tongue. Trust me. I’m still here. But he never heard. Or he did not speak the language.

  When my fingers cramp, when I lose feeling in my foot and need to shift my weight, I peek down the hole of the tomb shaft. I watch Wyatt, part of the parade moving rock and sand. I listen to his quiet orders. I see how he commands respect; how authority sits on his shoulders the same way the sun tangles in his hair, as if that’s exactly where it belongs.

  * * *

  —

  DURING THE SEASON, Professor Dumphries’s wife would come stay at the Dig House for a week. We called it the Conjugal Visit, and it was a time of celebration. Bette Dumphries brought with her a case of French champagne and boxes of HoHos and sugared American cereal. When she was here, Dumphries was as happy-go-lucky as a demanding, mercurial genius professor could be. For the duration of Bette’s visit, we put a plastic tablecloth on the scarred wooden table where we took our meals. We fought to sit next to her so that she could tell us incriminating stories about Dumphries—the time he was afraid of a bat that got into the bedroom; the way he once started a fire in a microwave and shorted out an entire apartment building.

  On Bette’s last night at the Dig House in 2003, Dumphries set a record player up on the roof of the Dig House, and we all drank Taittinger and watched him whisk his wife through a fox-trot. It felt gloriously old world, as if we had spiraled back to the 1930s, and we were no longer students but expats in Egypt, re-creating a slice of home beneath the stars.

  It was after midnight. The other graduate students had slowly drifted down to their bedrooms. The unwritten rule to all this celebrating was that you could stay out as late as you wanted, but you were still expected to be up at 4:30 A.M. to work. That left Dumphries and his wife, still dancing to tinny Big Band music, and Wyatt and me.

  There was no way I was leaving before he did. Even when you didn’t think you were being tested as a student of Dumphries, you were being tested—and I didn’t want to look like a quitter. Plus, Dumphries had a habit of expounding on everything when he’d finished a bottle or two of wine. What if, in a moment of weakness, he revealed a new idea he had for publication and invited Wyatt to be part of the research? If I wasn’t there, I couldn’t reap the same benefits.

  I poured Wyatt another glass of champagne. “You’re empty,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Since when are you the consummate hostess?”

  I shrugged. “Since the booze is free.”

  Wyatt must have decided that his suspicion wasn’t worth the trouble, because he flopped down on an orange satin pillow and pointed up at the night sky. “Lepus,” he said. “The rabbit.”

  “There is no rabbit constellation,” I insisted.

  “Of course there is. It’s what Orion’s shooting at.” He looked at me as if I were an utter idiot. “Why do you think it’s called the Hare nome?”

  I faltered, because I didn’t really have an answer to that. I was a little tired and a lot drunk and I didn’t want to show any vulnerability in front of Wyatt or Dumphries—who was dipping Bette gracefully.

  Suddenly Wyatt was on his feet, his hand extended. “Come on, Olive. Let’s show them how it’s done.”

  I blinked at him. “I don’t dance.”

  “I’ll do all the work,” he said. “As usual.”

  He grabbed my wrist and yanked me up so fast that I had to clutch on to his shoulders or else smack directly into him. One hand bracketed my hip, one caught my fingers, and I was a phrase caught between those parentheses. When Wyatt started to move to the melody, I stumbled, and he immediately tugged me so close that I didn’t have the space to falter. I had never danced with someone who was so good at it—strong, commanding. I couldn’t not follow him. I spun where he spun. I stepped into the spot he vacated. He pulled me in his wake like a tide.

  When the last strains of music hung in the hot air, the ghosts of the notes still vibrating in the dark, Dumphries bent over Bette’s hand. He kissed it and she laughed, curling her fingers around his and squeezing in the kind of silent communication that comes with longevity in relationships. “To the young, we leave the night,” Dumphries said, sliding an arm around his wife’s waist. “And the remainder of the champagne.”

  They disappeared down the staircase that led inside the Dig House. “Well,” I said. “We should go to bed, too.”

  Wyatt grabbed the last champagne bottle and popped the cork. “Why, Olive,” he said, pretending to be affronted. “I’m not that kind of guy.” He lifted the bottle to his mouth and took a long swallow, then held it out to me. “We could go to bed…or we could enjoy this fine vintage.”

  It was a challenge, and I was not going to back down from a gauntlet thrown by Wyatt, so I settled on the floor again. I took a long drink of champagne. “Where did you learn to dance?”

  “The lovely Eleanora DeBussy,” he sighed, looking up from beneath his lashes. “She taught me everything from body rise to the Carolina Shag.” I rolled my eyes, and Wyatt laughed. “Eleanora DeBussy was seventy-five and smelled like tinned sardines.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  “Because it’s much more entertaining to ruffle your feathers.”

  “I’m completely unruffled,” I insisted. “I don’t care what rises or who you shag.”

  Wyatt reached for the bottle and took another drink. “Just think. Right now, Dumphries is probably doing a slow striptease for the missus.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “I can’t unsee that.”

  “Just goes to show you, there truly is a lid for every pot.” He leaned back on the floor, staring up at the night sky. “Do you think they role-play? You be Isis, and I’ll be Osiris.”

  “Ew,” I muttered. “Stop. Talk about literally anything else.”

  Wyatt passed me the bottle. “Poor Olive. So easily shocked.”

  “Piss off.”

  He rolled over, bracing his head on his crossed arms. “Make me.”

  I couldn’t help it; I laughed. “You definitely bring out the kindergartner in me.”

  “Then let’s play a game,” he suggested. “Truth or dare.”

  The evening was pleasantly fuzzy, the stars burning holes in the blanket of the night. I could imagine at least ten dares I could give Wyatt, all in varying degrees of humiliation. “Deal,” I said, passing him the bottle again. “Truth.”

  “What was your first impression of me?” Wyatt said.

  “I thought you were an arrogant asshole. That was my second impression, too.” I leaned back on my elbows. “Truth or dare?”

  “Truth,” he said. I passed him the bottle again.

  “Craziest thing you’ve ever done while you were drunk?” I asked.

  Wyatt was silent. Either he had passed out or he was going to forfeit. But just as I was about to tell him he had to spend the night sleeping next to George, the mummy, in the magazine, he said, “I brought a new car into Eton—which is forbidden—and crashed it in
to the burning bush.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a lamppost. I convinced the head man it had been done by a bloke I hated. He got sacked and I never got caught.” His teeth gleamed white in the darkness. “Truth or dare?”

  “Truth.”

  “Last time you looked at porn online?” he said.

  “Never.”

  Wyatt sat up. “My God, Olive. You’re missing out.”

  “Maybe you’re the one missing out, if you need to get off via computer. Truth or dare?”

  He laughed. “Truth.”

  “How many relationships have you ended?” I asked.

  “All of them. Because then I can’t be left behind.”

  He seemed to realize, at the same time I did, that he had not meant to say the second part out loud. He ducked his head, running his thumbnail through a groove in the wooden floor, bright spots of color on his cheeks. “Truth or dare,” he said.

  “Truth.”

  “What’s your deepest, darkest secret?”

  That I can’t stop looking at you.

  Even when I didn’t want to. Even when he was being a dick. Even when I was resolutely trying to ignore him—I was always aware of where Wyatt was, in proximity to me, in the desert, in the Dig House, in my thoughts.

  The truth stung at my lips. “I changed my mind,” I said. “Dare.”

  “You don’t get to renege.”

  “Sure I do. American rules.”

  “That’s BS.”

  “You’re going to back down from a chance to give me a dare?”

  He considered this for a moment. “Eat a bug,” Wyatt decreed.

  I got to my feet unsteadily, bobbing along the half wall that lined the roof of the Dig House. I found something crawling along the railing and without thinking too hard about it, I plucked it off and popped it into my mouth. “Mmm. The crunchy kind.”

  Wyatt gaped at me. “You just ate a fucking beetle.”

  I shrugged. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “In addition to dancing, I can tell the difference between a dessert fork and an oyster fork and I know that you only pass to the left at a dinner table.” It hadn’t been an official question in the game, but I didn’t interrupt Wyatt as he answered me. “Eleanora DeBussy taught dance, and also etiquette. And she drummed Debrett’s Peerage into my head.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A very archaic and bullshit book about the titled gentry in the United Kingdom.”

  I remembered his friends calling him Mark, short for marquess. When I thought of titles, I pictured Jane Austen and gilded ballrooms and fat men in tails with quizzing glasses. Wyatt was frowning, lost somewhere inside himself, and he looked so miserable that I wanted to break him free. I felt an ache under my ribs, a shifting surprise at feeling more for him than just annoyance. “Hey,” I said. “Your turn. Truth.”

  Wyatt cleared his throat. “Worst day ever?”

  “My father was killed on duty. He was in the army.”

  He scooted to sit beside me, so that our shoulders were bumping up against each other. “That’s truly terrible,” he said.

  “That wasn’t actually the worst day,” I admitted. “It was like three years later, when I realized my mother was never going to get over it.”

  I tilted my head back, because I didn’t think I could bear to see the pity in Wyatt’s eyes, and goddammit, I saw the rabbit constellation he had been talking about.

  “My older brother died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma when I was twelve,” Wyatt said softly. “He was the Earl of Rawlings, not me. I was the bonus child and perfectly happy doing my own thing. It was the only time I’ve truly felt tied to anything noble. I mean, imagine being the child of a king who dies, and being named the new regent at the very moment all you want to do is burst into tears. My father has made it quite clear that I’m to get over this childish fascination I have with Egypt, to quit being Indiana Jones and come home and work in an investment bank and make gobs of money. But I never wanted that life. I want my own.” Wyatt huffed out a self-deprecating laugh. “My God, that took a turn,” he said. “What was your best day?”

  I was dimly aware that we had emptied the bottle of champagne. “Every summer my mom would take my brother and me to Newburyport for an afternoon. There’s a bird sanctuary out on Plum Island, and at the very tip of it is a beach. They only let a certain number of cars out there, so it always feels deserted. We’d watch the plovers nesting or walk along the water—it’s so cold there, you can’t feel your ankles after a few minutes. We’d collect the things that get thrown back from the sea—a boot, a fishing lure, once a whole plastic shipping container filled with canned tuna.” I hesitate. “It doesn’t sound so amazing, talking about it. But it was just the three of us, in a place where I only ever remember being happy, and I don’t have too many of those places.”

  When I looked up, Wyatt was staring at me as if he’d never seen me before, and maybe that was true. Maybe I hadn’t let him. “Truth or dare,” he said. “Take the dare.”

  My teeth sank into my bottom lip, and Wyatt flinched.

  “Dare.” The word fell dry from my mouth like an autumn leaf.

  “Forgive me, Olive.”

  I felt a prickle of fear, the sixth sense you have when you know your life is about to be cleaved into before and after. “For what?”

  “This,” Wyatt said, and he leaned forward and kissed me.

  The night tightened around us, a noose. Wyatt’s hand slipped under my braid, curving around the nape of my neck. I tasted champagne and butterscotch and shock. Somehow, Wyatt was just as surprised as I was.

  My hand settled over his heart, as if I could weigh it against a feather of truth.

  Then I pushed him away, stumbled to my feet, and ran like hell.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME we break for tea at 10:00 A.M. I feel like I’ve been awake for days. My muscles ache as I stretch them, leaving the shaded comfort of the tomb for the blaze of sun outside. The gaffir, a painfully thin man with the face of an apple dried in the sun, brings us tea and pours it into small glasses. You would think that drinking a hot beverage in the desert is like striking a match on the surface of the sun—superfluous—but it turns out to be just the opposite. Somehow, the hotter the drink, the cooler your body becomes. “Shokran,” I say, as he hands me my glass, and he ducks his head and offers a smile missing multiple teeth.

  Wyatt is the last one to the tent, accompanied by the inspector, Omar, whose motorbike has been fixed. “Ah,” the inspector says, his eyes lighting on me. “This is the one.” I wonder what Wyatt has told him. He gives a little bow. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  He turns to Wyatt, resuming a discussion about how much longer it might be before they are ready to open the burial chamber. I try not to eavesdrop, but I realize Joe and Alberto are doing the same thing. When Wyatt says that they’ll likely be able to get into the burial chamber tomorrow, and that Mostafa Awad—the head of antiquities—is coming, a current of palpable excitement whips between us.

  “We’ve been at this for weeks,” Joe murmurs to me. “Guess you’re the lucky charm.”

  Alberto grunts and leaves the gaffir’s tent.

  In ancient tombs, there were public parts, and private spaces. The public space was where visitors could mill. The private part was where the deceased was actually buried. A shaft was dug perpendicular to the floor of the tomb, and then a small burial niche was carved out horizontally at its base. After a coffin was lowered down the shaft and tucked into the burial niche, a limestone slab or blocks would have been placed in front of the entrance to the chamber. Then the shaft would have been filled with sand and dirt, and another limestone slab would have capped it, sealing off the entrance to the private part of the tomb.

  That slab wa
s moved aside weeks ago; if Wyatt is confident that we’ll be entering the burial chamber tomorrow, it means that the shaft is very nearly clear as well.

  From the corner of my eye, I watch him down the glass of hot tea in nearly a gulp, and then clap Omar on the back. Abdou ducks into the tent, apologizing for the interruption, and hands Wyatt a stack of papers. “Three more hours and we’ll probably quit for the day,” Joe tells me. “It’s too fucking hot to be here after two P.M.”

  “Inshallah,” I answer, and he grins.

  “You ready?”

  “To bend myself into a figure eight under a natural rock ledge? You bet,” I say. “There’s a reason grad students are your age, and not mine.”

  I’m following Joe out of the tent when I hear Wyatt’s voice. “Dawn. A word?”

  Joe raises his eyebrows: Good luck with that. The gaffir takes the glasses and teapot outside, leaving me alone with Wyatt. He is seated, and from where I am standing, I can’t read his expression. Then I realize that he isn’t holding a stack of papers.

  “That’s my iPad,” I say, stupidly.

  “Technically,” Wyatt answers, “it’s mine.”

  Immediately my heart starts hammering. Was I supposed to bring it with me to the gaffir’s tent, lest it get stolen? Did he look at my work, and find it lacking?

  Is this the moment he sends me home?

  I watch him flip it open, scroll through the work I have saved. He enlarges one of the areas I have been tracing, one with considerable damage. In the back of his throat, he makes a small sound. “I can do better,” I blurt out.

  “No, you can’t,” Wyatt says, and everything inside me turns to stone.

  He flips down the magnetic cover and hands it to me. “I have never seen anyone as good as you are at drawing hieroglyphs,” he murmurs. “It’s like you’re a scribe yourself.”

  I feel blood rush to my cheeks. “Thanks.”

  “Clearly it’s going well,” he says.

  “I’m glad I can be helpful.”

  “Likewise,” Wyatt replies, tipping back the brim of his hat so I can see his eyes. “Although I still am not quite sure what I’m helping with.”