by Jodi Picoult
He nods at a mallard. “You go, buddy.”
“Speaking of which. Are you dating anyone?”
Kieran rolls his eyes. “You could just ease into it.”
“Then I wouldn’t be your big sister.”
“I spend a lot of time with my right hand—” he says.
“Ew.” I grimace.
“—doing surgery,” he finishes, grinning.
“I’m scarred. You could have put that a different way.”
“Then I wouldn’t be your little brother.”
“What happened to Adam?” This was his last boyfriend, a nurse.
“He decided to date someone less stressed out about his job. An air traffic controller.” When I laugh, he shakes his head. “Hand to God.”
“Right hand?”
Kieran throws a potato chip at me. “Moving on. How’s Meret doing?”
“She’s thinking about playing tennis and she’s loving science.”
“So much better than the way I remember fifteen.”
“Which was?”
“Trying to explain to all my teachers why my sister was the one coming to back-to-school night. And actively avoiding gushing about the Jonas Brothers.” He looks at me. “You did a good job, you know. Taking care of a little closeted orphan.”
“Thanks,” I say.
He crosses his legs and begins to tear at the grass. “I know I complain a lot, and I’m sleep-deprived, but I love what I do, Dawn. And I get to do what I love because you gave up what you loved, for me.”
“I love my work,” I argue.
“Okay, fair,” he says. “But it wasn’t your original plan.”
I shrug. “Plans change.”
“If Mom hadn’t died, I don’t know if I would have gone to medical school,” Kieran muses.
This is news to me. “Really?”
“I felt so…powerless when it happened. I didn’t want another kid to go through what I did, and I remember thinking that I could become an oncologist. But I got sidetracked by brain tumors.”
“They are seductive,” I agree.
“Well, they’re also safer,” Kieran says. “I never look at the patient and think of her.”
We are quiet for a few moments. Kieran finishes his sandwich and tosses the crust to the ducks. “You know what’s weird? I’ve been alive without her longer than I was alive with her, and I still miss her.”
“Yeah.”
“Like—I’ll clip my fingernails and collect them—”
“—in case mice take them and steal your soul,” I finish, laughing.
“What is that superstitious Irish bullshit, anyway?”
“Remember the Christmas she gave you a Swiss Army knife and insisted you pay her back with a penny, because if you didn’t, you’d get into a fight?”
“Or that if you sat in the corner at the table, you’d never get married?” Kieran pauses. “Come to think of it, my seat was in the corner.”
“She’d be so proud of you,” I tell him.
“You, too.”
I wonder why we always want to have conversations with the people we love when we’ve run out of time. The Egyptians wrote letters to the dead—they’d paint the message on a bowl and leave offerings in it and place it in the tomb. Even if the deceased hadn’t known how to read, it was assumed that in the Netherworld, he or she was literate. A wife might write her husband if her daughter was sick, and she was worried that the girl had been attacked by an aggressive ba spirit. The dead husband could take that spirit to court in the afterlife.
What would I write my mother now, if she could read it?
Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you were sick?
Why did you leave me?
How am I supposed to be a mother when I can’t turn to you for advice?
How am I supposed to understand marriage, when you never married my father?
Out of the blue I remember a Saturday we spent the night at the aquarium. It was a special thing for kids, like a slumber party in a museum, called Sleep with the Fishes. My mom worked it because she got time and a half, and once, she brought us with her. We packed sleeping bags and snacks; toys for Kieran, homework for me. I was fifteen, and while my mother worked, I was expected to watch my three-year-old brother.
My mother was doing a tide pool lesson with a rowdy group of fourth graders. “The water in the ocean never stops moving,” she told them. “Who knows what makes it move? I’ll give you a hint…look out the window.”
I had glanced out at the moon. Gravitational pull seemed romantic to me. Imagine being light-years apart, and unable to keep your metaphorical hands off each other.
I’m not sure how long I listened to her before I realized that Kieran was missing.
A lot of people have stories about losing younger siblings, but most of those stories do not take place in a building that literally has sharks in it, and ladders that lead into those tanks, and brothers who like to climb. I didn’t want to panic my mother, so I slipped away, whispering Kieran’s name in the psychedelic jellyfish exhibit and searching for him near the octopus tank. The last place I looked was the giant tank in the middle of the aquarium. I could see the orbiting shells of sea turtles, but I didn’t see Kieran.
Panicked, I started running down the walkway that spiraled around the tank, looking for a bright sneaker caught in coral and praying harder that I wouldn’t see one.
I finally found Kieran sitting on a rock in the penguin enclosure. I was not sure how he got there without falling into the water surrounding it. “Jesus, Kieran,” I said, and I literally jumped over the railing into the calf-high pool and grabbed him.
“Do you remember the time you got lost in the aquarium?” I ask him now.
“Yes. Penguins look so fancy, but it turns out they smell like fish and shit.”
“I was having a heart attack, and you were just…sitting there.”
“I was waiting for you,” Kieran says. “I knew you’d come for me. You always did.”
I consider this. I went to college when Kieran was six. In my mind, he stayed a baby, because I wasn’t around when he was growing up. I was studying and taking finals and getting stoned for the first time and applying to grad school. Boston was a memory. I likely wouldn’t have gotten close to Kieran at all if my mother hadn’t been sick.
“Things have a way of working out the way they’re supposed to,” I reply.
* * *
—
I’M PUTTING ON my nighttime moisturizer when Brian turns to me from his own sink. “I was reading this article today about unsolved problems in quantum physics,” he says. “It was talking about the concept of the past, and whether there’s a single past, and if that means the present is physically distinct from the future—”
“Brian,” I interrupt. “You lost me after the first sentence.”
“Oh,” he says, his face falling. “I just wanted to hear your opinion.”
“Why me? I can name ten people at Harvard who could actually hold up their side of that conversation.”
“But you’re the one I’m married to.”
Suddenly, it all clicks into place. I rub the remaining lotion into my hands. “Ah,” I say. “Is this number seventeen on the list? Or eighteen?”
He blushes. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him blush. “You know about the list?”
“Yeah.” I move closer to him and lean against the vanity. “I don’t need a husband who brings me flowers or chocolate. I need one who watches the news with me and complains about how many ads there are. I need the guy who thinks the second verse in ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ is Oh bring us some friggin’ pudding.”
“Figgy isn’t an adjective,” he insists.
I smile a little. “The only person I ever wanted you to be is you…not who Cosm
o thinks you should be.”
I love that he wants to try. I love that he doesn’t know how, any more than I know how to solve an unsolved problem in quantum physics. I love that he is actively thinking of me.
But none of this keeps my mind from drifting to someone else.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I dream of Egypt for the first time in years.
I remember a moment from my first season in Egypt, when I hated Wyatt Armstrong. I was sitting under a tent attempting to pick the grit out of my cheese sandwich as Wyatt and two undergrads discussed mythology and sex. “Greek myths are the weirdest,” said one student. “Zeus gets it on as a swan.”
“Pan stalked a nymph who turned into a reed to get away from him, and he made a flute out of her so he could blow her,” said another student.
“Typical,” I muttered, as Wyatt said, “Genius.”
“I’ve got this all beat,” he said. “Our story starts with Seth and Osiris, who are basically Sonny and Michael Corleone. You’ve got Seth, the hothead, always at odds with Osiris, who’s all about staying calm and cool while he destroys his enemies as the King of Egypt. Plus, Osiris is married to his sister Isis, because divine royals are down with incest, especially when a relative is smoking hot.”
He was telling the story of the tribunal of Horus, albeit the soap opera version. I rolled my eyes and looked up at the roof of the tent, which was snapping in the wind.
“Seth is crazy jealous of his brother, so he murders Osiris and hacks his body into forty-two pieces. Isis and her sister Nephthys hunt for the bits and they find everything but his dick. Anubis, the jackal god, mummifies Osiris. After that, Isis turns into a bird and sits on her dead husband’s corpse and fucks him, getting pregnant with Horus.”
“Wait,” one undergrad said. “Without a dick?”
“Oh, they find that eventually,” Wyatt said. “So Horus grows up and has an epic battle with Uncle Seth. Mind you, Seth is chaotic and probably shouldn’t have chopped up his brother, but he also kills Apep, the serpent of evil, so he’s more Loki than Thanos. Horus wins and becomes the divine template of the king on earth, while Daddy gets to be king of the Netherworld. All because his mother fucked a dead guy.”
“That’s messed up, man,” one student said. “It’s like Hamlet.”
Wyatt grinned. “Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.”
I stood, giving up on eating lunch. “Apologies,” he said, not looking at all apologetic. “I think we’ve put Olive off her feed.”
I took a bite, just to be contrary, and nearly broke my tooth on some grit.
“You do know it’s called a sandwich,” he said.
I left the tent and walked into the wadi to pee. I was just buttoning my pants again when I heard Wyatt’s voice behind me. “Don’t stop on my account, Olive,” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
“The same thing as you, I imagine.”
I stalked past him, wondering if someone’s penis could get a sunburn, wondering why it was so easy for Wyatt to annoy me. At lunch he’d been showing off, but nothing worse than I’d heard before, and the other students found him entertaining. “Why does everything have to be a joke to you?”
He stilled, his hands at his belt. “Maybe it’s not, Olive. Maybe that’s just what I want people to see.”
“I really don’t think you have to work harder to get attention.”
“You’ve probably heard that my grandfather has a wing at the Met named after him, and that I come from four generations of Yalies?”
What an egotistical asshole. “So what?”
“What you haven’t heard is that my father effectively wiped out the family fortune in a single generation and he hates my guts because one of his sons died and it wasn’t me. And that I graduated with a double-starred first from Cambridge because I worked my bloody arse off, not because I was given a free pass. But it’s easier for people to assume I’m just another entitled idiot.” He blinked. “Why am I even telling you this,” he muttered.
“You should tell everyone. They’d like you more.”
Wyatt was quiet for a moment. “You know, the Ancient Egyptians believed that words were so powerful that if you spoke them, things might happen you didn’t want to happen. It’s why when you read the texts about Osiris being murdered, they only allude to it. And it’s probably why we keep secret what we wish for on our birthday candles, and why we never tell our wildest dreams out loud. It’s too bloody terrifying to think how our lives might change, if you just put it all out there.” I heard the buckle of his belt jingle. “I’d recommend you take your leave, unless you’re kinkier than I thought.”
As I walked out of the wadi I realized that although I had been working in close proximity with him for the past three years, I had only just met Wyatt Armstrong.
* * *
—
I DON’T SLEEP well, and finally give up the battle an hour before sunrise. I sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and picking at a stain on a place mat. I know why I dreamed what I did. All this discussion of the unfinished past with Win—no matter how hard I keep trying to focus on Brian, the memory of Wyatt keeps surfacing.
Brian pads into the kitchen in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, bleary, looking just as exhausted as I feel. He stands in front of me, rocking on his heels. “Hi.” He sees the look on my face. “Did I do something wrong?”
I hate that this is his first assumption; that I’ve driven him to that. But it’s not him; it’s us. I force myself to look into his eyes. “Do you ever feel…broken?”
Brian stares at me for a long, quiet moment, the way I’ve seen him focus on a puzzle in his lab when he doesn’t know why an experiment isn’t coming out the way it is supposed to. Then he pulls me into his arms. “I know you by heart. I can put you back together.”
He has made the assumption that I am talking about myself, not our marriage. Because our relationship has always been rock-steady. It’s why he didn’t think twice about going to Gita’s apartment; it’s why he was so shocked by how upset that made me. I’ve always trusted him with my heart; why would that stop now?
You are so lucky, I tell myself. You have this wonderful man. Stop obsessing over what might have gone wrong and focus on what could go right. I lean into him. “Brian? Even if I forget to say it…I love you.”
His hand strokes up and down my spine. “I know,” he says.
I know.
Suddenly I am in a rainstorm in Cairo, watching the world swim in front of my eyes. I start shaking.
Feeling me tremble, Brian holds my shoulders in his hands. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I tell him. I tell myself. “Yes, yes, fine.”
* * *
—
WIN IS ASLEEP when I arrive, and Felix is working, so I clean up the kitchen and check her medical supplies. Then I go to the desk in the hallway and take the ribboned key out. I enter the locked room with all its canvases.
I know exactly where the painting of Win is, the one that Thane created. I pull it free from its hiding spot behind three other canvases and I look at the secret in her eyes. She’s almost daring the viewer to become complicit with her.
Or maybe I’m just reading into it.
I look at the gentle slope of her breast, the divot of her belly button, her hand between her thighs. I have helped Win dress and undress. I have bathed her. Her body, to me, is a responsibility, and I watch it for signs it is failing her. But this—this is an altar built to Win, to worship what he saw.
I put the canvas back, close and lock the door, and return the key to the desk. By the time I get down the hall to check on Win, she is awake and sitting up in her bed.
“I wrote something down for you,” she says. “It’s in my vanity.”
I mentally note that she is not wearing make
up. She has dark circles under her eyes; Felix has told me she isn’t sleeping well, but she is sleeping more. I cross the room to the little white mirrored table with her jewelry box on it. In a drawer, lying amidst a jumble of eye shadow and lipsticks and face creams, is a list.
THINGS I DO NOT WANT
1. Lilies
2. Religion
3. Pallbearers
4. Mosquitoes
5. Black
6. An open casket
THINGS I DO WANT
1. Red velvet cake
2. Fireworks
3. Sidecars
I pull up a chair beside her. “I’m assuming this is about your funeral,” I say. “Mosquitoes?”
“I don’t want people wishing it was over because they’re getting eaten alive.” Win grins. “Or maybe I should say getting bitten to death.”
“What shouldn’t be black?”
“The clothes. Tell people to come dressed in bright colors.”
“I can do that,” I tell her. “And by sidecars I assume you mean the drink, not the motorcycle attachment?”
“Do I look like a Hells Angel?” She pushes herself up higher on her pillows. “Oh, that’s something else. I don’t want one of those photos of me on an easel that looks like it was airbrushed.”
“We can pick a photo that you like,” I suggest.
“Maybe later,” Win says. “I remember thinking at my wedding that it was the only time, other than my funeral, that all the people I cared about would be together in one room.” She turns to me. “What do you think happens? After?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “But then again, in utero, we probably can’t imagine any other existence. And once we get here, we don’t remember that.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Win asks.
“I believe in the figments of someone’s grief,” I tell her. “I had a client whose wife died, and she still set her a place at the dinner table every day.” I hesitate. “I think people assume death is all or nothing. Someone is here, or they’re not. But that’s not what it’s like, is it? The echo of you is still here—in your children or grandchildren; in the art you made while living; in the memories other people have of you.”