by Jodi Picoult
After the end of my second day in the tomb, I finish drawing the hieroglyphs closest to the shaft entrance and give them back to Alberto to input digitally. He is the only person in the Dig House who is cool to me, even though I try to be as cheerful and amenable as humanly possible. That afternoon, while we are all back at the Dig House avoiding the blister of afternoon, I find him at his computer. “Hi. I was wondering if you finished my file?”
“I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“If you teach me how to do it,” I suggest, “then maybe I won’t even have to bother you.”
He glances at me. I watch his hands flying over the keyboard, and then I hear the ding on my iPad that lets me know the file has been sent back to me. “Prego,” he says flatly. You’re welcome.
Joe, who is cataloging his flints, catches my eye and shrugs.
Suddenly the air changes in the room. Wyatt stalks into the communal work area with his cellphone pressed to his ear. “I don’t give a damn,” he fumes. “If you want the paperwork, then you have to provide the paperwork—”
He streaks out the doors onto the porch and the doors close behind him.
I walk to the window, watching Wyatt pace and rant on the porch. It strikes me how lucky we had it, fifteen years ago—to be Dumphries’s pawns, instead of the Mudir, the director in charge of everything. It makes me wonder: while we were trapped in our own story, what was the one Dumphries was living? Did he know, then, that he was sick? That he was racing against time to publish his work before he stepped down from his post at Yale?
Wyatt looks regal and demanding, the sun anointing him, frustration billowing out behind him like royal robes. He jams the phone back into his pocket and braces his arms on the stone balcony. For a moment, he bows his head.
I am filled with the overwhelming desire to step out there, touch his arm, rub his shoulders. To take some of the responsibility away just long enough for him to breathe again.
I tell myself that it’s because of what I do for a living—I’m used to helping people. Wyatt does not need my support; it’s the other way around.
But when he turns, his eyes find mine through the window with unerring accuracy, as if he knows I’ve been there all along.
* * *
—
AFTER THE SUN sets, Wyatt brings a bottle of cognac up to the roof and holds a meeting, explaining to his team how the excavation will be done, step by step. Wyatt, of course, will be the first one inside. Joe is in charge of making sure the generator is working—since it will be dark in the burial chamber, we need portable electricity for lighting. Alberto will be on hand to photograph everything in situ, before it is removed. “Dawn,” he says, “you’ll be with me.” Before Alberto can open his mouth to complain, he adds, “She’s smaller than the rest of us, and given how tiny the chamber seems to be, she may very well be the only one who can maneuver around the coffin.”
No one is brave enough to contradict him.
Alberto gets up and lights a cigarette, then tosses the match off the roof.
“My mother used to say you should never light three cigarettes off one match,” I murmur.
Wyatt turns to me. “Another superstition?”
“No, actually. It came from her dad, who was in the war—if you kept a match lit that long the enemy would see the flame and shoot you.”
Wyatt refills his glass. “Here’s to the knowledge that keeps us alive.”
I shake my head. “If being a death doula has taught me anything, it’s that we know nothing about life. At least not till it’s too late.”
“Evidence,” Wyatt barks.
“Well, you have to be near death to understand why life matters,” I say slowly. “Otherwise, you don’t have the perspective. You believe you have the time to put off that phone call you haven’t made to your mother. You let an old argument fester. You fold down the page in a travel magazine and tell yourself one day, you’ll get to Istanbul or Santorini or back to the town where you were born. You have the luxury of time, until you don’t—and then it becomes clear what’s most important.”
An awkward quiet settles. “Wow,” Joe says after a moment. “You must be a real hit at cocktail parties.”
I look at him. “What keeps you up at night?”
Joe frowns. “Climate change?”
“Something more personal,” I ask.
“I’m a pretty chill guy—”
“You rub the lamp and the genie says, I’ll answer one mystery for you and only one mystery. What is it?”
“Why did my dad leave?” Joe blurts out.
“You’re not going to know that on your deathbed,” I say gently. “Not unless you use your life to figure it out.”
Alberto narrows his eyes. “Is that why you’re here?”
I pin him with my gaze. “I know why my dad left,” I reply, deliberately misunderstanding. “He was deployed, and then he died in a helicopter crash.”
Alberto grinds his cigarette beneath his boot. “Maybe what you know isn’t as important as what you don’t know, right?” He gives Wyatt a pointed look before he walks downstairs.
Joe stands up. “Guess I’m gonna go figure out what I did to make my father disappear,” he mutters, and he leaves.
“I should apologize to him.” I bend my knees, groaning. “I’m an idiot.”
Wyatt shrugs. “No, actually, you’re quite bright. But your sense of tact could use a polish.”
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember not everyone spends all day with people who are dying.”
“True,” Wyatt says. “Some of us spend all day with people who are already dead.” He nudges my shoulder. “Besides, you’re not wrong. It’s why the Coffin Texts even existed. What’s the point of life, if not to accumulate knowledge?”
I glance at him, surprised. “That’s absolutely not the point of life. It’s who your existence snags on. Who changes, because they knew you. There’s not a single tomb without art that represents a relationship—a father and his children, a man and his wives, even a noble and his citizens. What you know isn’t nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.”
Wyatt studies me. “Who misses you?” he asks quietly. “Whom do you miss?”
Since that first day, we have not talked about Meret, but suddenly I miss her so fiercely that everything in me aches. I look at Wyatt, while the call to prayer runs over us like a river.
I imagine Re ducking underground, slipping into the corpse of Osiris as if he’s wrapping himself in a blanket.
I think about why I came here.
I think of all the people whose hands I have held while they step off a cliff, into the unknown. Each time, I am floored by the bravery of humans. Each time, I am aware of what a coward I am.
“I miss lots of things,” I say lightly. “Food without sand in it is at the top of the list, right now.”
“Ice cream.”
“Air-conditioning.” I laugh.
“Well, there are some lovely hotels in Egypt. Or so I hear.”
“I didn’t come for a vacation.”
“Right,” Wyatt says, tightening the trap he’s laid. “What did you come for?”
I hesitate. “Clarity.”
He tilts his head. “I may be completely off the mark here, but my guess is that you left a comfortable home with a daughter and a husband who love you to prove something to yourself.”
“You’re partially right,” I admit, hedging. “I wanted to be an Egyptologist ever since I was little, and I fucked that up.”
“There’s a host of things I wanted when I was a child that never came to pass,” Wyatt counters.
I give him a sympathetic glance. “Friends?”
He whacks me on the shoulder. “No. But…French fries.”
“You never had French f
ries?”
“Not the kind you get from a drive-through,” Wyatt says. “Mine were pomme frites. And I wanted the kind of birthday cake with little sprinkles in the batter.”
“Funfetti?”
His face lights up. “Yes. I saw it once on a television show.”
I burst out laughing. “Are you really complaining because you had a private chef?”
“Grass is always greener, right? I truly think I missed out on a childhood rite of passage because I never had a cake that came out of a box.”
“I forget you were born with that silver spoon up your—”
“Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever had a proper party. My birthday was always during the school term,” Wyatt says. “I think once my mother had a cake shipped to me. From Fortnum’s. But that was because she canceled a visit to see me to go to France instead.” He shrugs. “That’s the thing about being obsessed with the past. It keeps you from having to notice the present.”
He is speaking lightly, words running like mercury, just like mine were when I didn’t really want him to look too closely at my responses. Even so, I’m reminded of who Wyatt truly is, and not what he projects into the world.
“You’re the marquess now,” I state. “So why haven’t you gone back to England?”
“Turns out being the director of an Ivy League program is a much more acceptable profession than being a fledgling Egyptologist.”
We both stare over the lip of the balcony at the cheek of the horizon, and the blush of the moon. “Your father, was he alive when you took over at Yale?”
“He was,” Wyatt says. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and cues up the voicemail. “He called me and left a message. Honestly, I think he probably had to get my number from my mother, since he’d never done that before. I didn’t answer—not because I was busy, but because I didn’t know how to have a conversation with the man.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. Never listened.”
“You—what?”
He looks down at the glowing green screen. “I couldn’t,” he says softly. “At first because I was afraid I might still be a disappointment. And then—after he died—because I was afraid that maybe I wasn’t.”
I know how something in you changes when a parent dies. You go about the rest of your days just like you have before, pretending you are fine, knowing it is all a lie. It isn’t until you lose a parent that you become an actor in the play of your own life.
I hold out my hand. “Give it to me.”
“No,” he says.
“I’ll listen for you.”
Wyatt’s eyes widen. “Absolutely not.”
“Why? Is this all some scam for pity? Is the message really from a restaurant in Cairo confirming your reservation on Friday at eight?”
Scowling, Wyatt passes me his phone. I press the little paused arrow and hold the phone up to my ear.
The voice is much like Wyatt’s, but deeper and grained, like old wood. I hear congratulations are in order.
A beat.
Well.
Well done.
Son.
I realize that his father could have simply left out that last word, and it would have been enough.
I hand Wyatt back the phone. “Your father wasn’t disappointed in his child,” I say. “Trust me.”
He slips it into his shirt pocket and fiddles with a button at his cuff.
“Like, how much of a not-disappointment?” Wyatt asks. “On a scale from one to Jesus?”
“You’ll just have to listen one day if you want to find out.”
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it. Forty-three years old and I’m still looking for a crumb of approval. Clearly that’s why I suffered under Dumphries for so long.”
I blink, and I can see Dumphries doing the fox-trot again with his wife. “Did he know? That he was sick?”
Wyatt glances at me. “I think so. But he didn’t tell me at first. I don’t know if it was because he was private, or because he wanted to make sure I was qualified for the job before he handpicked me to succeed him. Ironic, isn’t it? All that time he pitted us against each other, and in the end, he would have been better off served by you while he was dying by degrees.”
“I wasn’t a death doula then,” I point out.
“No,” he says. “You weren’t.”
“I wish I’d known. I would have liked to let him know what he meant to me.”
Wyatt turns so that he is facing me. “I tried to tell you.”
“Dumphries didn’t get sick until years after I left.”
“But I wrote you,” Wyatt says. “Daily, at first. They all were returned undelivered. When I was in New Haven again, I emailed you through Yale’s server—and they bounced. After that, once a year, I’d go to the alumni network and see if they had any forwarding information for you. But it was the damnedest thing. It was almost like Dawn McDowell never existed.” Wyatt stares at me. “I know why you left. I just don’t understand why you didn’t come back.”
I can feel all the blood rushing from my head, making me dizzy. Snail mail from Egypt was spotty at best, but even if it had reached Boston, I was at the hospice with my mother, too consumed by her illness to pay attention. When I moved in with Brian, he had patiently gone through a Rubbermaid tub of bills and junk mail and had paid whatever was outstanding and tossed out the rest. Were letters from Wyatt in there? Had Brian deliberately thrown them away?
By then, I was pregnant. Everything had felt so fragile—loss, love, life—that maybe he had just shoved aside whatever might have threatened the equilibrium.
I swallow. “I never got your letters.”
Wyatt takes my hand. He turns over my palm as if he is a special type of soothsayer who can read the past, if not the future. His fingers are scarred, warm, gentle. “I thought,” he says, “that you were avoiding me.”
I remember sitting at the airport with Wyatt, windshield wipers racing between us like a shared heartbeat. I remember thinking, I have to get out of this truck, and not moving. I remember running into my mother’s room at hospice, twenty hours of travel collapsing down to the head of an arrow as I ran to her bedside. I remember being in Boston, thinking that one of us should get to grab the brass ring of the life we wanted, and if it couldn’t be me, then at least it could be Wyatt.
Don’t do it, I tell myself.
Don’t.
But my thumb closes over his knuckles and my fingers curl around his. Every word I speak is ballast. “I didn’t know you were looking.”
I close my eyes and pull my hand away and stand.
“Big day tomorrow,” I say, and I do what I do best.
I leave him behind.
* * *
—
IN MY TINY room, I lie in my underwear on the princess mattress. It is still so hot, even at midnight, that the room seems to breathe with me. A fan wheezes on an overturned milk crate, blowing a tongue of faded yellow ribbon in my direction.
Whenever I’ve thought about my life, it has been before and after, scored on different fault lines: Egypt. My mother’s death. Meret. It’s like there is one Dawn who inhabited the space on one side of the division, and a different Dawn who inhabits the space on the other, and it’s hard for me to see how one evolved from the other. I wonder if this is a new fault line. I wonder if you can erase an old one, by going back to the spot where everything changed.
I have heard Brian expound upon this theory enough to realize that the answer is no; that we get no do-overs and whatever consciousness we are in negates the consciousness of any other timeline we might have traveled down. But surely that isn’t the case. The World War II vet who winds up getting his college degree fifty years late; the man who marries his elementary school sweetheart seventy years after they shared a peanut butter sandwich; t
he boy in a developing country who is orphaned by Ebola gets a medical degree, and goes back to his homeland to cure the disease. In all of those cases, Fate was fulfilled eventually. But even so, the recipient wasn’t who he had been at the beginning—wide-eyed and full of promise. By then, he’d lived. And when he was holding his diploma or his wife’s hand or his stethoscope, you can bet he was thinking, Well. That took forever.
Maybe Wyatt is not the only one who’s wrong about the point of life. Maybe it’s not about accumulating knowledge or accumulating love. Maybe it’s just about collecting regrets.
I can’t sleep, and find myself twisting my wedding band around my finger. I got married on a Tuesday afternoon, a little less than a year after my mother’s death. I did not actually ever tell Brian I would marry him. At the time, Meret was a few months old, and Kieran was used to seeing Brian as a father figure. His home had become mine: I no longer had to ask where the extra linens were kept or which drawer held the tiny screwdriver set for eyeglasses. When he casually suggested that we should make it official, because of things like taxes and health insurance, it made sense. We had settled into a comfortable routine; it wasn’t as if a piece of paper was going to change much of my daily life. By then, Wyatt was so distant in my mind, he might as well have been something I dreamed.
I did not know much about modern marriage. My own parents, after all, had never managed to tell me they never officially tied the knot. I wondered if there had been a reason for that, beyond my father’s family’s wariness about an Irish girl who spent so much time longing for the sea, she was only a shadow onshore.
Ancient Egyptian marriage, though, was not all that different from what Brian was offering. We have no record of what the ceremony was like, but scholars know it was an economic partnership: finances were combined, and the resulting house and children were the products of that merger. It was so professional, in fact, that as terms of endearment husbands and wives sometimes called each other “brother” and “sister”—not because of the incestuous overtones, but because in legal and financial terms, they split holdings equally. Even in divorce, Egyptian women could take a third of the property and full custody of the children. In fact, divorce law was so fair to women in Egypt that Greek women took Egyptian names, preferring to marry and divorce under Egyptian law.