by Jodi Picoult
I type in one more name.
Thalia O’Toole, who never knew that Maria married Captain von Trapp, or that Harold Hill was a shyster, or that Eliza Doolittle wasn’t to the manor born.
* * *
—
ONE MORNING, ON my way to see Win, I take a few moments with Felix. I’ve noticed a decline, and I am sure he has, too. Win is sleeping more, engaging less. She only eats a meal a day. She has stopped putting on makeup.
“How long do you think she has?” he asks me.
“If I knew that, Felix, I’d be a millionaire.”
He smiles and hands me a cup of coffee. I have become part of the household. I have my own assigned mug and Felix buys me a vanilla creamer that I like. I keep a toothbrush and a pair of sweats in a reusable grocery bag in the mudroom, in case it’s a late night. When we sit at the table together for dinner, I have a usual spot.
I slip into it now, and wait for Felix to sit across from me. “How are you doing?” I ask.
He sips his coffee and raises a brow. “I mean,” he says.
“Are you sleeping all right?”
“No,” he admits. “Every time I hear a sound—even if it’s a bug hitting the window—I jump out of bed to make sure she’s okay.”
We have moved Win to the guest room, to a hospital bed provided by hospice. There’s a wheelchair nestled up against the side of the refrigerator now, too. Caregivers are so busy trying to stay afloat, to remember medications and dosages and to be brave and compassionate and hide their own fear, that they don’t even see the water level rising.
“She’s not okay,” I say. “She’s dying.”
“I know that,” Felix snaps, and then his eyes widen. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It sucks. You are allowed to be angry, sad, frustrated, whatever.”
He rubs his hands over his face, making his hair stand on end. “The whole time we’ve been married,” he says, “we never said goodbye to each other. I know that’s weird, right? But when I left for work, or if she went out with friends, we just waved and went off, because we knew we were going to see each other in a few hours. It’s kind of our little superstition.” Felix looks up at the ceiling, as if he can see Win. “Now I have to say it. I have to say goodbye.”
I reach across the table and hold his hand. “I know.”
A sob folds him at the waist. “I love her. I love her to death.”
“You love her through death,” I correct gently. “You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.”
One of my favorite concepts from Ancient Egypt was kheperu, or manifestations. An individual was much more than just the khat, or body. You were made up of the ib—a heart; a ka soul—a familial legacy; a ba soul—your personality and reputation; shuyet—a shadow; and ren—your name. After death, while the ka stayed earthbound in the mummified corpse, the ba soul winged its way to Re, the sun god. There is an 18th Dynasty tomb in Luxor that shows a procession carrying all these different pieces of the deceased. The physical act of death affected only one of those, and the afterlife was where all the parts came back together.
“She’ll be here,” I tell Felix. “In the way your living room is decorated. Or the bulbs that come up next spring. The way you remember how it rained every day of your honeymoon.”
“She told you that?” Felix murmurs, blushing.
“She said you found other ways to pass the time.” I smile at him. “If you wind up remarrying, she’ll be there, too. Because she’s the one who taught you how to love someone.”
“I’m not going to fall for another woman.”
“Okay,” I say, privately thinking otherwise. The good ones often do, because they remember how it feels to be happy. It’s not a replacement; it’s more like an echo.
Then I hear Win’s voice behind me. “You can get remarried, Felix,” she says. “Just wait till I’m gone.”
There is a smile threaded through her words, and she looks better than she has all week. She has a bright scarf wrapped around her head and is wearing a sundress. Her eyes are dancing, illuminated. With the exception of bruises in her arms from where blood has been drawn, she doesn’t even look sick.
Felix stands and wraps an arm around her. He kisses her temple. “Don’t joke about that.”
“So,” she says, “I’d love to get some fresh air.”
Felix rises from the table, ready to do her bidding.
“Oh, baby,” she says, touching his arm. “You were up all night with me. I thought you could get some rest while Dawn and I take a walk.”
She looks good, but she doesn’t look that good. I hesitate, but Win interrupts. “I meant you could walk, and I could be pushed.” Then she crosses to the refrigerator and lowers herself into the portable wheelchair. “It’s beautiful out.”
Honestly, it isn’t. It’s so humid that my skin feels rubbery; it’s stagnant and hot, and the sky is threatening rain. But Win hasn’t wanted to leave the house for some time. If she feels like getting some fresh air today, we’re going, even if a freak blizzard hits.
I grab my purse and an umbrella. Then I push Win outside and ease her chair backward off the porch. “Where to?” I ask.
She points. “That way,” she says, tilting her chin toward the sun.
I push her several blocks, until we are sitting outside a small dog park. There is an insane Chihuahua barking orders at a mastiff, and a mutt humping its owner’s leg. “He should get a dog,” Win announces.
“Felix? Does he like dogs?”
“I don’t know. I’m allergic, so it never came up.” She nods more definitively. “Yeah. A dog.”
“I’ll make a suggestion,” I tell her.
“What about a wife?” Win asks.
“Instead of a dog? Or in addition to?”
She smirks. “Do you think he’ll get married again?”
“How would that make you feel?”
Win considers this for a moment. “Fair,” she says softly.
I wonder what she means by that. Does she feel like he deserves a partner, because she is leaving him? Does she feel that, if Felix were the one dying, it is what she’d want for herself?
“I want to be remembered,” Win announces.
“Felix and I were kind of talking about that today,” I tell her. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for him.”
“I wasn’t talking about Felix,” she says.
“Is there a charity you support?” I ask. “Maybe there’s a way to have an art scholarship in your name—”
“No art,” Win interrupts flatly, cutting me off.
I let the heat fan off the sidewalk, rippling toward me. “We could do a legacy project,” I suggest. “Something you can leave behind that’s a reflection of who you are.”
“No art,” Win says again.
“Okay, okay!” I hold up my hands in surrender. “It doesn’t have to be art. I’ve stuffed Build-A-Bears with the T-shirts of a client so her grandkids would have them. I’ve made recipe books and written down oral histories. One woman was a master quilter with rheumatoid arthritis who couldn’t finish a project, so she dictated instructions for her daughter to finish. I even had a client with dementia who was a master gardener, but he started forgetting the names of plants, so we made a picture book and he’d flip through and try to remember. He got frustrated sometimes, but man, the joy on his face when he got it right—” I break off, realizing that Win is somewhere deep inside herself.
“There was an artist in Seattle, Briar Bates, who was dying of cancer,” I say carefully. “She wanted her art to outlive her. So she choreographed a water ballet for her friends to perform as a flash mob after she was gone. She sewed the costumes and organized the synchronized swimming and they all came together to do it in a fountain after she died. She wanted her f
riends to grieve together and for it not to be sad, but joyful.”
“So…a way to leave a shadow in the world, even when you’re not in it.”
I nod. “That’s a beautiful way to say it.”
We watch a puppy race to the fence, turning on a dime to grab a tennis ball. “Felix would be terrible at water ballet,” Win says after a moment.
“But he’d do it for you.”
“I know,” she says, on a sob. “That’s what’s even worse.”
She lifts the hem of her dress and wipes at her eyes. I stand, rummaging for a tissue.
“You asked me why I don’t paint.”
I give her the tissue and then sit down with my back against the chain-link fence so that I am facing away from the dog park, but looking at her.
“When you’re an artist,” Win says, “it’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jeté, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it’s always the same. It’s the emotion there isn’t a word for. The feeling that’s too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable—people who are content—they don’t create art.”
“You stopped painting because you stopped hurting.”
She nods.
I reach for her hand, hold it between mine. “But you’re hurting now, Win.”
“I know. But not because there’s too much inside me.” She sucks in a breath. “Because there’s nothing left.”
I shake my head. “I don’t buy that. I know you. I see you.”
“You see what I’ve let you see,” she scoffs.
A dog owner hurls a ball, which bounces high enough to jump the fence. Win catches it before it can crash into her. She holds it up, as if surprised to find it in her hand. She turns it over like it is a Fabergé egg.
“Did you ever wonder who you would have been, if you hadn’t become who you are?”
I take the ball and lob it over the fence. “You mean like a center fielder?”
“No,” she says. “You know what I mean. I know you do.”
There are moments that feel more like spun sugar than time. A summer evening on a stretch of grass, when your tongue is blue with the heart of a Popsicle. A heartbeat when a hummingbird stops moving long enough to look you in the eye. A first kiss. A star flashing once in the sky before the sunrise. A goodbye. Blink, and it’s like it never happened.
“What if I want to be remembered by someone who may not remember me?” Win asks.
I wait for her to continue.
“I grew up in New York City. I was a good painter; I already knew that. When I was a freshman at NYU, a gallery owner saw my work at a student show and wound up representing some of my paintings. When I was a junior I went to study for a semester in Paris. I took an art class, and the professor was constantly standing behind me, criticizing this line or that intention. He said I was too technical, as if that could be a thing. I went to his office hours to tell him he was an asshole, and he brought me back to the studio. He tied a rag around my head like a blindfold, and told me to paint how he made me feel.” She twists the fabric of her dress in her hands. “I didn’t know how to do what he was asking, and he wouldn’t shut up, so I picked up the palette and threw it across the room. He ripped the blindfold off, and he was smiling. Now we’re getting somewhere, he told me.
“What I drew that night—I’d never done anything like that before. It wasn’t just art. It wasn’t measured or literal. It was like being a medium, and having spirit pour out of you. I started spending all my time in the studio. I met my professor for coffee. We were inseparable, even though he was twice my age. He took me to the Louvre; we’d have a scavenger hunt for the artist who was most in love with his subject, or for the mangiest dog, or ugliest Madonna. He taught me how to copy the masters and then to deconstruct them. And one day he asked if he could paint me.
“He set up the studio and locked the door. He sat me down near a window. First he did sketches, and we talked about stupid things—how the prime minister was caught with his mistress, where the best falafel could be bought. He couldn’t get it right. He was more and more frustrated. He asked me to close my eyes. I heard him get up and move, could smell the coffee on his breath. Then I felt the lightest stroke on my forehead. Down my nose. Over my cheek and chin and lashes. I opened my eyes, and he was painting me, just like he had asked. But with a dry brush. Tracing my ear and my jaw and my throat and my lips.”
She holds her breath, lets it out in a rush. “You know where this is going,” Win says. “I got pregnant. I was going to tell him, but then I found out he was married. And his wife was also due to have a baby in a couple of months. So I left.”
I look down between my bent knees.
“You’re judging me,” she says.
“No.”
“I like to believe I loved him so much that I couldn’t make him choose. But mostly, I think I was afraid to find out who he’d pick. I came home and wore baggy clothes until I couldn’t hide it anymore. I told my parents I was dropping out of school to have the baby, and that the father was a one-night stand I’d met in a club in Paris. A few years later, I married my driver’s ed instructor. Clearly, I have a pattern, falling for authority figures.”
“Felix,” I say.
“Yeah. I loved him. I love him. But I never forgot about Thane.” She stares directly at me. “I want him to know that. I want him to know that Arlo…was. I want that before neither of us is in the world.”
Win reaches up and pulls the scarf from her head. She runs her hand over her smooth scalp. “There’s so little left, already,” she says. “Before it’s all gone, I want him to remember me.”
My lips feel stiff. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“A legacy project,” Win says. “I want to write Thane a letter. I want you to find him and deliver it by hand.”
I stare at her, silent.
“I’ve thought a lot about what my life would have looked like, if I hadn’t left,” Win says. “Even though I was the one who made the decision.”
I feel a wash of heat. “What about Felix?”
The corners of her mouth turn up. “I don’t think he’d really be up for that errand.”
“You can’t hide this from him. He loves you so much.”
“And I love him,” Win insists. “Enough to not hurt him any more than I already am by dying.” She pulls at my sleeve. “Please?”
No, I think. Too close. This is crossing a line; this is unethical; this is wrong.
But I also hear the very words I spoke to Felix minutes ago: You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.
I get up and face the dog park. Two mutts are chasing each other in circles. “I can’t give you an answer right now.”
One dog nips the other’s tail. He yelps and scurries away from a friend who became an enemy. “Dawn,” Win begs. “Isn’t there someone in your life who got away?”
* * *
—
IT TAKES ME hours to sort through the boxes in the attic. At one point Meret comes up, sees a bin full of baby clothing, and exclaims her way through it—reliving a dress with a giant squirrel on it, and a onesie with bumblebee stripes. We find Brian’s mother’s wedding gown, yellowed in a sealed box. There are yearbooks from Brian’s college years, his ears sticking out like saucers and his hair too long.
“What are you looking for?” Meret asks.
“I’ll know if I find it,” I tell her.
She leaves not long after, which is good, because I cannot explain to her what I am searching for.
It is so hot in the attic that sweat pours off me, streaming down my neck and soaking my tank top. I wipe my face with the back of my arm.
It is hotter than hell in here. It might as well be Egypt.
I find it buried under a crate of books: Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar and an early translation of the Book of Two Ways and thick volumes in German and Dutch and French that I used to be able to read for research. Wrapped in a dish towel with blue edging is a limestone flake, almost triangular, its edges ragged. One side of it has been crushed under the weight of the tomes, but the writing is mostly intact, scrawled in black marker. I do not remember all the hieratic, but I don’t have to, because I know the translation by heart.
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.
AS IT TURNS out, Wyatt is not ready to excavate the burial chamber the next day, or the day after that. The first delay has something to do with the integrity of the shaft and shoring up the sides. The second delay has to do with the schedule of Mostafa Awad, the director of antiquities who has to be present before the chamber is opened. This means that Wyatt prowls around the Dig House and the site like a wounded bear, finding fault in everyone and everything. Joe says that when Professor Armstrong gets like this, it’s in everyone else’s best interests to get very, very absorbed in their own work.
I have had only two moments of interaction with Wyatt privately. The first was at the end of my very long first day, when he was unloading the Land Rover and handed me a tripod to carry back to the Dig House. “How did it go?” he asked, and I smiled broadly and told him it was great. The second was when he knocked on my door at 4:30 A.M. and unceremoniously tossed two pairs of women’s khakis and two long-sleeved linen shirts on my bed, along with some white cotton underwear and wool socks. “Thank you,” I said, wondering who had been dispatched to get me a change of clothing, if it had been Wyatt’s directive. He had merely grunted, “I want my shirt back.”
It wasn’t until I began sorting through the clothes that I realized he had also bought me a burner phone, the cheap kind sold at street stands in Cairo, which had international service.