The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  He sits down on the edge of the bed. “Dawn, you have a head injury. This conversation…it doesn’t have to happen now.” He pulls out his phone. “But I know someone who’d really like to talk to you.”

  He hits a few buttons and before I can protest Meret’s beautiful face blooms on the little screen. “Mom!” she screams. Her smile is a galaxy.

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Are you okay? What happened to your head? Do you still have hair?”

  I fight a grin. “I’m going to be okay,” I tell her, and I realize that I will fight anyone and anything to keep this promise to her. “They drilled a hole in me. And I have no idea if I have hair.”

  “For real?”

  “I could look like a bowling ball under all this gauze,” I say. “Do you think you could stand to be seen in public with me?”

  “When are you coming home?”

  I flick a glance toward Brian. “In a few days. When the doctors let me.”

  The image on the phone tips and whirls and suddenly Kieran’s face swims into view. “Hey,” he says, peering at me through Meret’s computer screen. “Brian said it was an epidural hematoma with mass effect. Sexy.”

  “This is why you’re single,” I say, and he laughs.

  “You are okay,” Kieran replies. Then he sobers. “Look. I don’t have enough family for you to be disposable.”

  I feel my throat swell. For so long, it was just the two of us. “I know.”

  I hear Meret’s voice scrambling with his as she tries to wrestle her computer back. I have so much to tell her, but now isn’t the time. Not when Brian is standing here; not when I don’t know what the next five minutes will bring, much less the future.

  For a few moments, I just stare at her on the screen, drink in the sight of her again. Her face transforms with the ghosts of emotions: fear, anger, relief. She seems to be weighing her words, and I wonder what conversation Brian had with her before I woke up; what conversations Brian had with her when I was in Egypt. I remember her email to me, asking if it was her fault that I’d left.

  I wanted Wyatt to build a relationship with his daughter, but maybe he’s not the only one who needs to do that.

  “Mom?” she says quietly, finally. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you more.”

  In the dark her eyes are stars. “Don’t die, okay?” Meret whispers.

  “It’s a deal,” I answer.

  She hangs up, and I hand Brian back his phone. He slips it into his pocket. I have tears in my eyes, and when I wipe them with the back of my hand, Brian brings me a tissue. “I didn’t realize…” I begin, and the words evaporate like snow under sun.

  Brian looks down at his feet. “I guess it’s harder to think about what’s not in front of you,” he says quietly, and then shakes himself, as if he’s trying to recalibrate.

  “Does she know the truth?” I ask.

  He hesitates. “You need to rest—”

  “Brian.”

  “Yes,” he says. “She figured most of it out herself. I mean, you went to Egypt. That would seem pretty random, unless…” His voice trails off. “You shouldn’t be thinking about this right now.”

  “Brian,” I say, “we can’t pretend it away.”

  “You almost died,” he says, his voice so soft I can barely hear it.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “It changes everything.”

  I wait for him to meet my gaze. “Does it?”

  Just because I am lying in a hospital bed and he feels sorry for me doesn’t mean all the emotions he felt yesterday aren’t still roiling beneath that plastered equanimity.

  He clears his throat. “Did you sleep with him?”

  Of all the things I expected him to say, this wasn’t it.

  “Did you?”

  I swallow. “Yes.”

  The pain in Brian’s eyes makes me feel like I’m going to be sick. I did this to him; me. His silence hurts more than any of his yelling. He sinks into the chair beside the hospital bed, his elbows on his knees. “Did you fall in love with him?”

  The kindest blow is the cleanest one. “I never fell out of it,” I whisper.

  Brian nods, studiously avoiding my gaze. “You know, when you’re at a physics conference, physicists are always posing theoretical situations. Like, say you’re a passenger on a plane whose engines fail and you’re about to crash and die, should you take solace in the fact that there are other versions of you out there somewhere, that will live on? Or the inverse: should you feel worse knowing that there’s a version of you whose life is a disaster—a you that flunked out of school or became a criminal or got bitterly dumped and divorced. These are honestly the things quantum physicists talk about.” Finally, he looks at me. “They’re supposed to be hypothetical.”

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I falter, and at that, Brian smiles a little.

  “Well,” he says. “You’re preaching to the choir there.”

  In an ideal world, the plane wouldn’t have crashed. I wouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed with a hole in my skull. I would have had time to introduce Wyatt to Brian, and to Meret.

  In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have had to.

  “I’m going home to Meret,” Brian says, and my jaw drops.

  “What?”

  He nods, scooting closer to the bed. He reaches for my hand. “There was no way I wasn’t flying here to make sure you were all right,” Brian says. “And I’ll confirm with the doctors. But the prognosis is good. Meret needs one of us. And I assume he’ll bring you to Boston when you’re discharged.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Dawn. You want to be with him.”

  He says this so evenly that I hold my breath, certain that there is a but.

  He stands up, his green eyes crinkled at the corners, even if the smile does not reach them. “All I’ve ever hoped for is to give you what you want.”

  Brian leans down and so gently, so tenderly kisses my forehead, framing my face in his hands. “You were coming back to me, when the plane crashed,” he says. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  He slips out of the room without looking back.

  * * *

  —

  WYATT REFUSES TO leave my room and charms the nurses with his accent and his dimples so that he can camp out overnight, even though he isn’t supposed to. He contacts Yale and talks at length to the dean of the faculty. The neurosurgeon comes by twice to tell me I’m doing better than expected. I nap, and when I wake, I feel like myself. We do a crossword puzzle and watch a few episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Wyatt eats the Jell-O from my tray. He tells me what I don’t remember: how there were thirty-six survivors. How we were brought to this hospital; how I became woozy watching him get stitched up and slipped out of the room to get some air; how he heard the commotion and ran out to find me on the floor, surrounded by medical personnel. “Couldn’t you have been less competitive?” he asks drily. “I was the one with the bleeding head wound, but you had to win the plane crash.”

  He is joking, because it is easier than facing the truth: had I been sitting in a different seat, had I struck the ground in a different way, I would not be here. Our story, which has just begun again, would be over. Somewhere, in a parallel timeline, there is another me at my own funeral.

  That makes me think about Win. Is she still alive? If I’d died, would she have been waiting for me?

  This, even more than the bandage around my head, makes me realize how close I have come to death. I start to shiver and can’t stop. Wyatt crawls into bed beside me. “Hey,” he says, holding me close. “Hey, Olive. It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right.” I can barely breathe; it is as if I’ve only just seen the odds of my survival and I am crushed beneath the weight of them.

  “It’s going to be,” h
e announces, and I have never been more grateful for his arrogance.

  “What if the doctor’s wrong?” I whisper. “What if I close my eyes and don’t wake up?”

  Wyatt stares down at me, fierce. “You do not get to die. Period.”

  I smile a little at that. “You know, if it came down to it, I think you could strike a bargain with Osiris himself.”

  “If you’re afraid to close your eyes, I’ll keep you awake. If you don’t believe the doctors, I’ll find a hundred more to convince you.” He grins ruefully. “Plus, you have to stay alive if only for my own safety. If you die on my watch, your husband will kill me.”

  “I didn’t want you to meet him that way,” I say.

  “Hematoma aside, I don’t imagine there was any scenario where that would have been less awkward.” He hesitates. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wouldn’t have left you.”

  I don’t know how to explain that the reason Brian went home was about not how little he cares for me, but how much.

  I wonder, had the roles been reversed, if Wyatt would have given me the space to make a choice.

  He takes my hand and places it over his heart, which beats steady and strong.

  “Do you think anyone ever makes love in a hospital bed?” he muses.

  I muffle a laugh. “I think if you’re in a hospital, you’re supposed to be too sick for that.”

  “What do they know?” His hand slips around my waist, coming to rest. “It’s like this spot was made for me,” Wyatt says. “Like we were carved from the same block of limestone.”

  I think about the statue of Ramesses II at Luxor, hewed from the same stone as his wife, Nefertari, who is depicted at a fraction of his massive image and nestled between his legs.

  “Except when they build a temple for us,” Wyatt says, “your statue gets to be the same size as mine.”

  “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

  He glances down at me. “Because I’ve been trying to get in your head for fifteen years, maybe.” He reaches for my hand, tangling our fingers together. “I used to have a fantasy that you wrote me and told me you weren’t happy.”

  “That was your fantasy?”

  “One of the tame ones. I’d dream it, and then realize it was a dream, and then throw myself even harder into my work.”

  “Did you write me back?” I ask. “In the dream?”

  He nods. “I told you to fix it. But in general terms. To get on a plane and travel. To stay up all night. To kiss a stranger. But I really wanted to tell you to travel to me. Stay up all night with me. Kiss me.”

  So I do. I press my lips to the rough edge of his chin. “What happened to that fantasy?”

  “It pales next to reality,” Wyatt says.

  But reality is a plane crash, and a head injury, and a Gordian knot of relationships that is no less tangled than it was when I left Boston.

  There is a literary text in Ancient Egyptian that says the gods made magic so that people could ward off misfortune. And yet, although you might be able to diminish something bad, you still couldn’t prevent it from happening.

  I look at Wyatt’s hand, scarred from working in the field. I look at mine, still wearing a wedding band. “Where do we go from here?”

  I am well aware that although we boarded a plane together and although Wyatt wants to meet his daughter, we haven’t really discussed our own future. We haven’t talked about Anya. In a way, I don’t mind. I’m afraid to hear what Wyatt wants.

  I’m afraid to hear what I want.

  “As far from this hospital as humanly possible. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”

  “I meant figuratively.”

  “Maybe this is presumptuous,” Wyatt says, “but I hope you’ll go wherever I go.”

  “You have a fiancée.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve been too busy surviving a plane crash to actually call that off.” When I don’t laugh, he brushes a kiss across my lips. “I know we both made commitments to other people. I think we meant to love those people for the rest of our lives. But things don’t always work out the way we’ve planned. We know that better than anyone.”

  “I’m scared,” I whisper.

  “You’ve a hole in your head,” he murmurs, kissing my bandaged temple. “You’re badass.”

  “That’s not the same,” I say. “I have so much to lose.”

  “So do I…and I’ve never even met her.”

  “I want her to like you.”

  “How couldn’t she?” He grins, his usual cocky self. But in his eyes I can see it: that flicker of fear, that discomfort of being thrust into a role he hasn’t prepared for. For two people who are obsessed with history, we are doing a lousy job of confronting our own.

  I think of Meret, of her face when she saw mine on her screen, of all the work I have to do to fix what I’ve broken. “I can’t just move overseas.”

  “Then I’ll commute.”

  “To Egypt?”

  “To bloody Mars, if I have to.” He smiles at me, and light fills all my darkness. “Don’t you get it, Olive?” Wyatt says quietly. “That’s the easy part.”

  He wraps his arm around me. Any minute now, the nurse is going to come in and yell at us. But until then, I’m not budging.

  “The other fantasies,” I ask. “The less tame ones…?”

  I feel Wyatt’s grin against my neck. “I had a particularly racy one about painting spells from the Book of Going Forth by Day.”

  “That’s a terrible fantasy.”

  “Your naked body was my papyrus.”

  I laugh. “Tell me more,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE SECOND day, I have another CT scan. There’s no reaccumulation of the clot, and no intracranial air. All in all, the doctor says, it looks like I will make a complete recovery. I stay under observation for another day.

  Miraculously, my phone survived the crash, with only a cracked screen—which means I’ve been able to talk with Meret. Brian told her I needed to stay in the hospital for a few days, and I have a friend taking care of me. That, I realize, is so generous Meret doesn’t even question it. She is FaceTiming with me the first time I sit up on my own in bed, and when I take a walk around the floor, pointing out the patient lounge with the television stuck permanently on Boomerang en Español, and the nurse that looks like Alec Baldwin. She is with me when the doctor unwinds the bandage and I first scrutinize the neat little scar in the shape of a question mark, held fast by glue and staples. My hair has been shorn on one side only, which she says makes me look like Natalie Dormer in Mockingjay, and she googles it to show me. She wins her first singles match on the tennis team and phones me on the ride home because she is so excited.

  Whenever Meret calls, Wyatt steps out of the room. I know it is to give me privacy, but also because he is terrified to have his first interaction with her be over a screen. Or maybe he is just terrified to have his first interaction with her, period.

  I am always careful to smile and to be upbeat, even if my head hurts or I’m tired. Meret is always careful to talk about superficial things. When the conversation begins to get strained, we can both feel it, like when you move over a frozen pond and edge back from the spots where the ice is too thin.

  Each time, before we hang up, Brian asks to speak to me.

  He scrutinizes me, and tells me I’m looking better. I relay what the doctors have said. We run out of words, because I will not mention Wyatt to him, and he doesn’t seem willing to volunteer information about how he’s spending his days. It’s familiar but just a little off, like when you are watching a movie on TV and the sound doesn’t quite match the mouths of the actors. He isn’t angry and he isn’t sad; I can’t quite put my finger on what he is. Studiously even, maybe. Waiting.

  On the thir
d day that I’m in the hospital, Meret doesn’t mention Brian. “So,” I say. “I guess I should talk to…”

  I don’t know what to say. Your dad?

  “Oh,” Meret interrupts. “He’s not here.”

  “Okay,” I say. It isn’t surprising that he’s at his lab, and yet, somehow, it is. Somehow, I expected him to be there, just because I was asking.

  After we hang up, I stare at the phone in my lap, thinking of Brian’s brilliant mind. I wonder if he learned this lesson from me: that something has to leave before you realize it is missing.

  * * *

  —

  FOUR DAYS AFTER I nearly died in a plane crash I board an aircraft again.

  Because there was no air in my follow-up CT scan, the doctors give me a cautious thumbs-up to fly, since it’s a short flight and there are neurosurgeons in Boston who can take care of any complications. Wyatt buys a silk scarf from the gift shop for me to wrap around my head, although it doesn’t really conceal the fact that half my head is shaved and the other half is not. I think I will never be able to make myself step onto that jet bridge, yet I turn out to be less anxiety-ridden than I expect. I find myself looking at the other passengers as they stow their carry-ons and buckle their seatbelts. Do you know how lucky you are to be flying with me? I want to say. The worst has already happened; what are the odds it will ever happen again?

  When we land, though, I grip Wyatt’s hand so hard that my nails leave marks in his skin.

  How many times have I come through Logan Airport—back from a trip to Orlando with Meret, or a conference in London with Brian—yet this is the first time I’ve been here with Wyatt. It’s the first time I’ve been anywhere with Wyatt, really, other than Yale or Egypt. Having him in the spatial dimension of the city I call home is jarring.

  It makes the most sense for Wyatt to check in to a hotel. We decide to rent a car, because when I had emailed Brian from Cairo, I had told him where mine was parked at the airport, so that he could reclaim it.

  At the Avis counter, a clerk with a Boston accent as thick as soup asks Wyatt if he wants a full-size, a compact, or a subcompact.