by Jodi Picoult
Wyatt stands next to Anya, near the shelf where the canopic jars had originally been set. His arm is around her. At the last minute, just as I take the picture, she turns and presses her lips to his cheek.
I give back her phone, hoping I’ve accidentally lopped off their heads in the photo.
“So how many tombs are in this necropolis?” Anya asks.
“There were thirty-nine,” Wyatt says. “This is the fortieth.”
“Do they all look the same?”
“Pretty much. Some have more than one burial chamber, for a wife and husband.”
“How cozy.” Anya touches the wall of the burial chamber. “I wonder how many slaves it took to build a necropolis. At least as many as built the pyramids, I’m sure.”
“Shockingly, it was the exact same number of slaves,” I say. “Zero.” I fold my arms. “I’m sure your grandfather told you this, but the pyramids were built by workers who were paid a wage, or who were paying off their taxes. There is absolutely no evidence of foreign captives working on the pyramids. Also, the pyramids were feats of engineering and detail, like how the corners line up to point to the Benben stone that was the focus of solar worship in Heliopolis. For that level of skill, you wanted an expert. I mean, isn’t that why you picked Wyatt?”
“Dawn—” he murmurs, a warning.
“Oh. Sorry. I mean Dr. Armstrong.” I turn to Wyatt. “Hold your own damn flashlight.” I thrust my headlamp into his hands and climb up the rope ladder, running out of the tomb before anyone can watch me fall apart.
* * *
—
I RACE SO fast into the wadi that the wind screams in my ears, and I cannot hear Wyatt calling my name until he catches up to me. He is stronger and faster than I am; I can’t outdistance him—and even if I could, where would I go? So when he grasps my arm, I stop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“I thought you knew.” He lets go, falling back a step. “You knew her name.”
“I thought she was a he.”
“Why does it matter?” Wyatt counters. “You’re married.”
“I know that,” I snap.
“Then you also know I don’t owe you an explanation about what I’ve been doing for the past fifteen bloody years,” he yells.
I want to hit him. I want to embrace him. “But you let me think that—” I swallow the rest of my sentence, kicking the sand at my feet.
Wyatt’s fingers curl under my chin, lifting my face so that he can see my expression. “Think what?” he says, so gently it breaks me.
“Think that I meant something to you.”
“You did,” Wyatt replies. “You do, Olive.”
His mouth crashes down on mine, and even as I grab his arms hard enough to hurt, I am pulling him closer. His hands spear into my hair, knocking off my hat, loosening my braid. The wind whirls in a frenzy, like we have manifested the weather.
When we draw away from each other, breathless and charged, Wyatt touches his forehead against mine. “You vanished,” he says, raw. “When you didn’t write me back, I tried to find you. But it was like you had dropped off the face of the earth.”
Dawn McDowell had. She became Mrs. Brian Edelstein.
“Do you know why I was so determined to find Djehutynakht’s tomb?”
“Yes,” I say, and he laughs.
“Okay, fair point. But also because I thought if the discovery was big enough, you’d hear about it.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know.” He meets my gaze. “Did you tell him about me?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
I do not know how to put this into words. Possibly because I love Brian enough to protect him. If you don’t tell a man that you came to him with a missing piece, he will never know to look for it.
But there is another reason: because if I kept Wyatt to myself, he was mine and mine alone. To tell Brian about him would be to give him up.
I touch his cheek with my palm, feeling the stubble of his jaw. He didn’t have time to shave this morning, before Anya arrived. I know he’s thinking about that, too, because he says, “I’ll tell her everything, if you want me to.”
“You’ll lose your funding,” I reply.
“I’ll find more.”
I feel my eyes sting. “I can’t let you do that.”
Because, it remains unsaid, I still belong to someone else.
Wyatt takes my hand from his cheek and kisses the palm. “We were destined for each other,” he says ruefully. “Two people who live in the past.”
I throw my arms around him for just one more moment. He smells like cedar, like summer. He always has. The button of his shirt presses against my temple and I push a little harder, wishing it would leave a mark.
We head back to the necropolis. I wonder what he will tell Anya; if she will be smart enough not to ask why he ran after me.
At first, as we walk, we hold hands. But as we leave the privacy of the wadi, we let go.
Alberto and Anya are waiting for us outside Djehutynakht’s tomb. Wyatt immediately bounds up the stone steps and says, “Seen enough?”
“And then some,” she replies.
We both freeze, but Wyatt recovers faster than I do. He leans down and whispers something that makes her laugh and turn in to his arms. The sun catches the diamond in her engagement ring, making light dance on the limestone pillars behind them.
Over Anya’s shoulder, his eyes are locked on me.
* * *
—
ANYA ASKS FOR dinner to be served in Wyatt’s bedroom, which is all I need to lose my appetite. I work in the magazine, carefully copying images onto my iPad, until I cannot see clearly. Then I go to my own room, but it is so stifling that I feel caged.
I find myself wandering to a closet that has a padlock on it, in which Wyatt keeps a crate of very good, very expensive French brandy. Harbi and his family do not drink; the lock is for the rest of the team. I decide that Wyatt owes me this, at the very least.
I haven’t picked a lock since I was a grad student and we were opening this same closet to steal some of Dumphries’s liquor, but it comes back quickly. I use two paper clips, making one a tension bar and the other a pick. The cylinder turns, the lock pops open. There is a case of Tesseron cognac, and on top of it, a padded box that contains a crystal bottle of Louis XIII de Rémy Martin. Taped on it is a note from Richard Levin, former president of Yale, congratulating Wyatt on his appointment as the director of graduate Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
I take that bottle.
The Dig House is quiet, too quiet. I find myself straining to hear a woman’s laughter, or Wyatt’s voice. I imagine him lying in bed with Anya and wonder if he changed the sheets. I wonder if he is thinking of me and then wonder why I am allowed to even ask that question when I spent years lying in bed with Brian.
I don’t want to go back to my room, so I wander into the communal work space, where laptops and iPads are plugged in and charging.
I sit down in Alberto’s chair, open the cognac, and drink straight from the bottle.
Alberto’s computer screen saver is the Sphinx. It’s probably a photo he took: human head and lion body, tail on the right side, the Dream Stele between its paws. I’ve read that Dream Stele—every Egyptology student has. It states that Thutmose IV, the father of Amenhotep III and grandfather of Akhenaton, was riding his chariot around the Giza necropolis and he fell asleep in the shadow of the head of the buried Sphinx. The Sphinx came to him in a dream, and said that if Thutmose IV removed the sand that covered him, he’d become king. And he did.
I don’t know how long I sit swilling cognac before Alberto comes in, but he is fuzzy around the edges.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I would think,” I say, lifting the bottle, “that�
�s obvious.”
“You’re sitting at my desk.”
“This is true.” I don’t make any attempt to move.
He sighs and pulls up another rolling chair. He reaches for a coffee mug and holds it out; I pour some cognac in it. We clink, ceramic to crystal. “I have a Sphinx riddle for you,” I say.
“Man.”
“What?”
“That’s the answer,” Alberto says.
“But I haven’t even asked it yet…”
He shrugs. “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? Spoiler alert: Oedipus figured it out.”
“No, I have a different one,” I tell him. “Why is the tail of a Sphinx always on the right side?”
Alberto laughs. “You actually do have a Sphinx riddle.”
“Because it matches the hieroglyph,” I answer, and then my throat closes tight. “Wyatt taught me that.”
“Fuck,” Alberto says. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“What difference does it make? You already hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
I take a long drink. “Really. Since the first day I got here, you’ve been standoffish.”
“Of course I was.” He rolls his eyes. “You showed up here and it was like steak on a hot plate.”
“Thanks?”
“The minute I saw the way he looked at you, I realized our funding was screwed. He knew better. We have been working for five years on this tomb. To jeopardize that, especially during the season when we were going to actually finally excavate…” He doesn’t finish; he doesn’t have to.
“Does he love her?” I ask.
Alberto looks at me for a long moment, and then holds out his mug. I pour another splash of cognac into it. “I don’t know. I think he loves the thought of her.”
I consider what Wyatt told me earlier, about wanting to make this discovery so that wherever I was in the world, I would see it. I think about Anya’s long legs and her creamy skin and concede that if Wyatt sacrificed himself on the altar of Egyptology, it couldn’t have been all that much of a hardship.
“Did you come here to find him?” Alberto asks.
I can feel the heat of his eyes on my face, waiting. His own livelihood may hang on my response. And it’s a good question—one I would never have truly let myself weigh if I wasn’t three-quarters of the way through a bottle of excellent brandy.
“I came here to find me,” I say softly. “I just don’t know if I like what I discovered.”
What has my endgame been? To see Wyatt, yes. But then what? Was I planning to speak my truth and then walk away, as if my words wouldn’t cause a ripple in the pond of his life? “I have to go home,” I realize. “To my daughter, and my husband.”
Alberto doesn’t even flinch; I realize Wyatt has shared the fact that I’m married. “So you came here to hurt Wyatt?”
“No,” I say immediately. “Why would you think that?”
“Because why else would you remind him he loves you, and then leave him. Again.”
I haven’t thought of it that way, but it is exactly what I will be doing. “I thought you were mad at him, not me,” I mutter.
“I think I’ll be mad at you both, now.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking. Then Alberto glances up. “You know that the Greeks used to believe that people were made up of two heads and two bodies. But Zeus was afraid of how powerful that could be, so he split people in two. That way, instead of causing trouble for him, they spent the rest of their lives trying to find their other half.”
“A soul mate,” I say.
“Do you believe that there’s only one for each of us, and that we have to sift through seven billion people to find it?”
“No. I think that you can love more than one person in a lifetime. There’s the one who teaches you what love is, even if it doesn’t last.” Wyatt. “And then there’s the one who makes you a better human than you were, even as you do the same for him.” Brian.
“And then there’s the last one,” Alberto adds. “The one that you never get enough time with. But who sees you through to the end.”
Given the caretakers I have seen at deathbeds, it’s a valid description. Your last soul mate might be your spouse, or it might be your child. It could be a best friend, or maybe even a death doula. It’s who is holding your hand when you finally have to let go.
He sets his empty mug down. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’ve been doing all this time. But I’ve seen how you finish his sentences, and how he knows what you’re about to say before you say it: like you’re twins with a secret language. I see the way you look at each other—not like you want to get under each other’s clothes, but like you want to get under each other’s skin. I think it’s really pretty simple, Dawn: who do you want with you, when your time runs out?”
Alberto stands up. “I’m going to bed. Don’t fuck with my computer.” At the doorway, he turns. “I think he was a dick for not telling you about her,” he says. “Just for the record.”
* * *
—
MY MOTHER USED to say that if there was bad energy in the house, you could put a glass of water on top of the fridge to absorb it, and when you poured it down the sink the next day, your troubles would be gone, too. Hedging my bets, I stumble into Harbi’s kitchen and fill a plastic cup with water, set it on top of the dingy old fridge. I pour a second cup to take back to my room.
I stop in the magazine first. It’s dark, so I turn on a single work lamp, which blinks down at the exterior coffin on its trusses. I can so easily imagine Wyatt bent over it, his shirt shifting across his shoulders as he leans down to better see the text at the bottom. The shaft of light illuminates the peret kheru painted on the coffin, the invocation offering. There’s such a beautiful simplicity in believing that by speaking a wish, you can make it happen.
“Dawn,” I whisper. “Wyatt.”
But this isn’t Ancient Egypt, and I am alone and drunk.
I pad down the hall, holding my breath at the silence. The last thing I want is to hear them together. I let myself into my bedroom and sit down on the bed and see it—a limestone flake on my pillow, with a hieroglyphic message scrawled in Sharpie:
Neheh djet. Forever and ever.
I don’t really know how to start this. Hello seems too formal, and Remember me? seems ridiculous. Besides, I know you remember me, because I remember you. That was never going to be in question. The bigger challenge was whether we’d ever be able to forget.
I imagine that it’s a shock to get this letter. I mean, it’s been years. Maybe I’m being presumptuous to think you would welcome hearing from me. Maybe you’ve done a better job than I ever did at taking the past and plastering over it. Now that I’ve made the decision to have this conversation, one-sided as it is, I am struggling to figure out what I want to say.
I guess I will start here: I haven’t thought of you every day. But I haven’t never thought of you, either. When I do, it isn’t the kind of recollection that feels wispy or comforting. It is visceral, the clean cut of a sword. One moment you are not in my mind and the next, you are so sharp and intense that all my attention is focused there.
So you see, even after all these years, you take my breath away.
* * *
—
THIS IS HOW a body dies: it’s very intelligent, so it conserves the heart and the lungs and the brain. It starts to dump the things that aren’t important. The first thing to go is peripheral perfusion, the blood to your hands and feet. If you press on the nail beds, color doesn’t rush back in. Then the kidneys shut down. Bowel sounds disappear. Blood pressure drops. The heart rate increases. Body temperature lowers. Breathing becomes labored. And then you fall unconscious.
Win is actively dying now.
As she requested, I will be with her more and more. Some days, we do not have a single conversation; others, she is lucid. When she can, we write her letter. Because she is too weak to hold a pen, I print her words in careful small letters on the back of her painting. In the middle of a sentence, she sometimes stops and drifts away for moments, hours.
Before my mother died, even when she was unresponsive, I found myself touching her, like I was the one tethering her to existence. I would hold her hand. I would rub her arm. I would curl up next to her. I was doing it because I knew that once she died, once the funeral home came and carted her off, I was never going to be able to touch her again.
I am spending so much time away from home with Win that by the time I get back at night, the household is asleep. I always tiptoe into Meret’s room and kiss her forehead as she sleeps. Then I slough off my clothes in the bathroom and crawl into bed beside Brian.
We have maintained a fragile peace, in spite of our argument about Wyatt. I don’t know if this is because we have so few hours together right now that we are making the best of it, or because we are afraid to reopen a wound. Even though he sleeps through it, I curl my body around him or wind my arm with his or tangle our fingers together. There’s nothing sexual about it, just a desperation, like when my mother was dying.
I wonder if I touch Brian because I know my time with him, too, is coming to an end.
* * *
—
Do you remember the day we tried to find the perfect blue? Some of the details are fuzzy, but I know it was raining. We were in the good studio, the one with better light where the radiator didn’t belch like an old man. I couldn’t mix my paints to match what was in my mind, and I was trying to explain it to you, but I failed in English and in French. I was sniping at you and you were snarling at me, and finally, you grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the studio, out of the building, to the metro. First we went to the Louvre, and you dragged me through hallways from one painting to another: from Lady in Blue by Corot with its steely cadet silk highlighted against the orange fan tip to Colin Nouailher’s Melchizedek and Abraham, vibrant and cobalt, to the Salle Henri II with Georges Braque’s The Birds on the ceiling, rich midnight that bled into royal purples. Like that? you asked at each stop, but I shook my head. So you took me to the Musée d’Orsay, where we bathed in the teal of Monet’s Water Lilies, and drifted in Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhône. Finally, we stood in front of The Church at Auvers, beneath the cool azure blanket of its sky. Closer, I told you, but not quite.