by Jodi Picoult
I tried to say yes. Really, I did. I had a hundred reasons why this was not a good idea, starting with the fact that we didn’t really like each other and ending with the reality that two graduate students would not be taken seriously for this discovery if we weren’t acting the part. But, still, I couldn’t say it.
Wyatt moved so fast that I didn’t even see him coming. He backed me up against a row of shelves, whose contents rattled with the force of my weight. His mouth was a bruise. He ripped the seam of my pajama bottoms, lifted my hips, and drove into me. I wrapped myself around him, the source of the flame, and set myself on fire.
“My God,” he said, shaking in the circle of my arms when I finally slid along the length of his body and let my toes touch the floor. “Did that feel like a mistake?”
But just because we were combustible didn’t mean we belonged together. Just because we’d made history together didn’t mean we were a team. “Dammit, Wyatt,” I said. “I’m trying to let you walk away.”
“Who says I want to?” he blistered. “Olive, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who gets the joke without me having to explain it. I was so busy trying to figure out what made me better than you that I didn’t pay attention to what we had in common. Every time I looked five years out, there you were. I thought it was a threat. But what if, all this time, it’s because you’re supposed to be wherever I am?” He stepped away from me, breathing hard. “Stop bloody trying to save me from yourself.”
Then he pressed a broken piece of limestone into my hand. “This is why I came down here, you idiot.” He turned and walked out of the magazine.
The stone was a lopsided triangle, and he had written on it in hieratic with a Sharpie. I recognized the writing from Ostracon Gardiner 304, about which I had once written a paper, comparing this poem to the Song of Songs in the Bible.
Both texts were exchanged as tokens of favor during harvest festivals. Both had nothing to do with politics or religion—just intimacy.
Both were about lovers who aren’t married.
The original poem had been scrawled on a limestone flake. Since papyrus was pricey, limestone or potsherds had been used as cheap writing surfaces. Wyatt had given me the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of a Post-it note.
I shall kiss [her] in the presence of everyone,
That they might understand my love.
She is the one who has stolen my heart—
When she looks at me it is refreshment.
That piece of limestone was the only thing I took with me from Egypt, when I left.
I GREW UP knowing that love came at a price. My mother would tell me the story of Tristan, who journeyed to Ireland to bring back beautiful Iseult to his uncle, the king, only to fall in love with her himself. His uncle sentenced them to death—Tristan by hanging, Iseult by burning. Tristan escaped and rescued her, and brought her back to the king out of honor. Years later, when Tristan was married to another and was struck by a poisoned lance, he sent for his first love. He didn’t know if she would come. If she said yes, the ship bearing her response would have white sails. If she said no, they were to be black. Iseult rushed to be with her old love, and the sails flew white. But Tristan, too weak to leave his bed, couldn’t see the ship. He asked his wife what color the sails were, and jealous, she lied and said black. He died of grief, and when Iseult saw his body, she died of a broken heart. After they were buried, a hazel tree grew from Tristan’s grave, and a honeysuckle from Iseult’s, and they twined so tight they couldn’t be pulled apart.
The moral of this story, my mother told me, was to plant your honeysuckle far from your hazel.
* * *
—
IN FRONT OF Meret, Brian and I act as if nothing has changed. And there are moments where, when we are together, I forget that we ever argued. But then, there are times I am furious at him for being stupid enough to upset the balance of our relationship. At night, I sleep in my office, and sometimes I wake up with the memory clenched between my teeth.
The truth is that it is easier to spend time with a woman who is dying than in a relationship that I am struggling to bring back to life. Win quickly becomes my primary client. I visit her three times that first week, and four times the next, and I tell myself that spending so much time with Win has nothing to do with the fact that it means spending that much less time at home with Brian.
One day, Win and I take the T to the MFA. A collection of Manet paintings is on loan from the Met, and she wants to see them. We wander through the exhibit, stopping to sit when she gets tired. Eventually we end up in a room full of contemporary art.
“I don’t understand modern art,” I tell her, when we are standing in front of Picasso’s Rape of the Sabine Women. I tilt my head, looking at the geometric warping of figures, the distorted bodies being trampled by horses, the eye of the naked soldier painted on his sword.
Win laughs. “You’re not supposed to understand it. You’re supposed to feel it.”
“They don’t even look human,” I say.
“That’s the point. That’s what war does to people. It makes them into killing machines, where a weapon might as well be a body part. And it makes the victims bleed into each other, indistinguishable.”
I stare at her, blinking. “Did you ever teach?”
She laughs. “No. I just listened really well in class.” Win fumbles for her phone and pulls up a picture of a beautifully rendered painting. A woman reclines naked on a bed, while a Black servant brings her a bouquet of flowers. “This is Manet’s Olympia,” she says. “It’s widely considered the start of modern art. See how she’s staring right at you? That was so upsetting to people that when Manet displayed it in Paris in 1865, he was critically crucified. The painting had to be guarded so it wouldn’t be destroyed. He wasn’t glorifying a goddess or a religious icon. He was showing you a real woman—a sex worker—who was daring the viewer to look her in the eye instead of pretending she didn’t exist.” Win shrugs. “All those fancy rich dudes at the salon were screwing prostitutes, but they sure as hell didn’t want to be reminded of it.”
I take the phone from her hands, touching the image to enlarge it. I look right into the woman’s eyes. I look at how her hand presses down on her thigh, the dimple in the flesh. “I’d like to see this one in person.”
“Go to the Musée d’Orsay,” Win says. “It’s glorious.”
I try to imagine traveling with Brian to Paris, spending time wandering around a museum. I can see myself doing it. But beside me is just an empty space. Brian is wary of art, of film, of anything meant to manipulate emotions. If it can’t be quantified, it isn’t legitimate.
We have turned the corner into a room full of canvases that remind me of the paintings Meret used to bring home from nursery school: drips of paint that look like they belong on a drop cloth, giant blocks of gray and brown sitting on top of each other. “This is what I mean,” I tell Win, gesturing to a Rothko. “Even I can do that.”
“Ah, this is abstract art,” she explains. “It’s all about universal expression. And believe it or not these artists were influenced by the Renaissance masters, too.”
“I’m not seeing it.”
“They knew that a great painting could pull emotion out of a viewer. But the world’s different from how it was during the Renaissance, when beauty was as necessary as oxygen, and when religion was an entry point for art. So they tried to figure out what it would take to inspire that same flood of joy or grief or awe today. It’s what feeling would look like, on canvas, if it was in its most raw form.”
I stand in front of the Rothko—the dark, muted blocks of color. “This just depresses me,” I say.
“Yup. How you react tells you something about your emotional state, and you can unpack where that comes from.”
“Canvas as therapist,” I muse.
“Exactly.”
; “What’s your favorite painting?”
“Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Win says without hesitation. “By Georges Seurat.”
“Isn’t that the one made up of dots?”
“Pointillism. Yeah. It represents the two sides of art that I love—on one hand, it’s just beautifully rendered because the artist made sure every inch of the canvas was pulsing with life. But there’s a whole other side of it—pointillism is a metaphor for society and politics. Painting dot by dot stands in for the industrial revolution and how it was filtering into leisure time in society. I could write a whole paper on it.” She smiles. “I did.”
“Sounds like a perfect marriage of skill and significance,” I say.
“A perfect marriage,” Win repeats. “Yes.”
We stop in front of a Pollock mural. Win stares at it, silent, and I look, too. It is full of swirls and sharp edges, yellows and blues and crimson flicks that remind me of blood spatters from a CSI show on television.
“I like the blue in it,” I say.
“Yes,” she breathes. “The blue.”
“So when you painted, was it like this, or like Manet?”
“Neither.” Her lips are bloodless, white. I watch her shrink within her own bones. “I don’t feel well,” Win says. “We should go home.”
Immediately I give her the strength of my body. I wrap an arm around her waist, holding up her slight weight. As we walk through the galleries, I feel a prickle at the back of my spine, a magnet that twists my gaze to the right.
Through the entryway I can see the wooden models that came from the tomb of Djehutytnakht and his eponymous wife. If I take three steps in that direction, I will be able to see the coffins, nestled into the case against the wall. The wavy lines of the Book of Two Ways drawn against the wall of one of them.
I wonder who looked at that and first thought it was a map.
Then I see him, crouching in front of the glass.
I gasp, and the man stands up. Younger, then. Less blond. A stranger, not a ghost.
“Dawn?” Win says, her voice a frayed thread.
“I’m right here,” I reply, and I help her move forward.
* * *
—
YOU CAN ARGUE that all fear is related to death. Fear of spiders? You’re really afraid of being bitten and killed. Fear of heights? Falling to your death. Fear of flying? Crashing. Snakes, fire—you get it. Jerry Seinfeld even says that people are more terrified of public speaking than dying, so if you’re asked to give a eulogy, the person inside the coffin is better off than the one giving the talk. Why are people so afraid of dying? Well, that’s easy. Because it’s hard for us to conceive of a world without us in it.
As Win’s health deteriorates, she becomes more anxious and she can’t sleep. Felix tells me she is eating less, and I can see her fear eating away at him, too, like termites at the foundation of a house.
“What did you do before to relax?” I ask her.
“Every now and then I’d take a Xanax,” Win answers. “But I’d rather not sleep away the limited amount of life I have left.”
“We can try magnesium, if that doesn’t interfere with your meds,” I suggest.
She grimaces. “No more pills.”
“How about more holistic methods? Meditation, aromatherapy, massage, sound bath—”
“You know what?” she interrupts. “I want to get stoned.”
Pot is legal in Massachusetts, which makes it simple. I have a choice of weed, lollipops, CBD pills, even milkshakes. In the end, I bring gummy bears.
I have no plans to partake, but Win—who has, amazingly, never tried pot—is so anxious about the possibility that it is negating all the benefits. I finally say I will be right there with her, and she makes me chew the gummy bears in front of her like she is Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I settle down next to her on the couch, letting the corners of the room go pleasantly furry, feeling my eyelids grow heavier.
“How long have you been married?” Win murmurs beside me.
I slide my glance to her. Her arms are crossed over her chest, in the archaic position of death. I decide not to mention it. “Fourteen years,” I say.
“Why did you get married?”
That follow-up makes me blink. Usually, you ask how or why someone fell in love; how you knew he was the one. I’m reluctant to answer, not just because I don’t feel like poking at an open sore, but because in this relationship with Win, I’m supposed to be helping her, instead of the other way around.
Then again, I’m getting stoned next to my client.
“It was right. At the time,” I reply. Trying to steer the conversation onto neutral ground, I add, “Did you know that modern Egyptian women pinch the bride for good luck?”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“There are all kinds of superstitions around weddings. Veils protected the bride from evil spirits. Bridesmaids confused the Devil, if he came to snatch the bride. And a long train made it harder for her to run away.”
“Wow. Those are some grooms with seriously low self-esteem.”
I laugh. “The reason we ‘give the bride away’ was because she used to be a property transfer.”
Win twists her wedding band around her finger. “When Felix and I went shopping for this, Felix asked the difference between platinum and white gold. The saleslady said that as it got older, platinum would go a little gray at the edges. Felix pointed to me and said, Oh. Like her?” Win looks down at her hands, as if she does not recognize them as being part of her own body. “I’m not going to get gray at the edges, am I,” she muses. “I’m not going to last that long.”
I sit up, aware that there are people for whom pot does nothing; there are others who feel paranoid instead of relaxed. I don’t want this backfiring for her. “Win,” I begin, but she interrupts.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what this disease is teaching me,” she says slowly.
“About death?”
“No. About life.” Win runs her hand over the couch, making the nap of the suede stand on end. “I mean, life is supposed to make us grow, right? To become better? If that’s the case, what is death going to do to me?”
“Death doesn’t just happen to us. In fact, there’s no passive voice in the English language for it. It’s an action verb. You have to die.” I shrug. “Three hundred sixty thousand babies are born every day while a hundred and fifty thousand people die. On a micro level, the body’s sloughing off skin and brain cells while we’re still alive. Even after the heart stops pumping, the cells still have enough oxygen to be considered alive for a little while, even after the doctor pronounces us dead. Life and death are heads and tails. You can’t have one without the other.”
“Maybe in order to grow and become better, part of us has to die to make room for that new thing,” Win says slowly. “Like a broken heart.”
I turn to her. She has tears in her eyes.
She dashes them away with her hand, giving a little embarrassed laugh. “Here’s some breaking news: it’s harder to face the death of someone you love than your own. Go figure.”
I thread my fingers through hers and squeeze. “Win. I will make sure that Felix has all the grief counseling he needs. I will be with him through the funeral, and I’ll check in with him afterward. I swear to you, he will not be on his own until I know he’s doing all right.”
She glances up, surprised. “That’s good to know. But I was talking about Arlo.”
Her son. The one who died.
“I’d like to hear about him, if you feel up to it,” I say.
She sinks deeper into the cushions of the couch. “What can I tell you? He came a month early. His lungs weren’t strong enough, and he had to be in the NICU for weeks. But he came into this world laughing. I know they say babies can’t do
that, not for weeks, but he did. He laughed all the time. When he pulled himself up in his crib; when I gave him his bath; when I sang to him. And, honestly, my singing makes most people cringe.” A smile ghosts over her lips. “He laughed all the time, until he started to cry. We didn’t know what was wrong. Neither did Arlo. It was too hot, or too cold. The tag on his shirt hurt. The teacher didn’t understand him. The other kids didn’t like him.” She hesitates. “It was always someone else’s fault. There were some days when he would crawl into the closet and sob until he fell asleep. And then there were other days when he broke every window in the house with a baseball bat.”
She draws in a breath. “We took him to a psychologist. Family therapy, the whole nine yards. Arlo was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. You know what that is?”
I had heard the term before, applied to a little girl in Meret’s elementary school class who had been adopted from an orphanage in the Ukraine, and who just never seemed to settle into her new family. She bit and scratched and sobbed. “Doesn’t it have something to do with not being able to form an attachment?”
Win swallows. “Yeah. Imagine how that made me feel. It was three weeks in the NICU, and I was there every day. Every day. No one loved Arlo like I loved him.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees. “Nothing worked. Not reward systems, not time-outs, not even—I’m sorry to admit—spanking. I used to pretend that my real boy had been taken by faeries; that this…this creature I didn’t understand…was just a temporary replacement. I know, ridiculous. But it was easier than admitting that there were times I wished Arlo had never been born. What mother can admit that, and still call herself a mother?
“Then one day my pediatrician told me about holding therapy. It’s pretty controversial. There were conferences where you could take your kid and be taught how to do it, but we couldn’t afford that. So I read books, and I tried to do it myself. Whenever Arlo had a meltdown, Felix or I held him. I held him so tight, for hours. The rules were that he could scream and shout, he could curse me, he could say terrible things, but at the end of the two hours he had to look me in the eye. That’s it. And I’d release him,” Win says. “It worked. Until he was too big to hold.” Her face becomes a lantern. “Arlo still had bad days, but he came to me when he did, you know? I wasn’t the enemy. I was fighting beside him. I was his safe place. And then, one day, I wasn’t.” She knots her hands together. “I don’t know the first time he used. I don’t know who gave it to him. It was easy, and cheap, and when he was high, he was happy.” Win glances at me. “He laughed again. Like, all the time.”