The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  Maybe this is what Meret has needed all along. An extra parent to build her up, when she is certain the world is tearing her down.

  “I may not be entirely objective,” Brian says, “but she’s smart, you know? She doesn’t just have a hundred-mile-per-hour serve—”

  “I don’t have a hundred-mile-per-hour serve—”

  “—so she makes up for that with strategy.”

  Meret turns to me. “He hasn’t missed a meet. He even changed his summer session’s final exam time so he could come to the last one.”

  Brian smiles at her. “She’s really something to see.”

  “I bet she is,” Wyatt says.

  There is an uncomfortable silence as we process why Brian is the only one who’s seen Meret play tennis.

  Brian begins to fold his napkin into quarters, then eighths. “I meant to tell you, Meret. I think my perfect track record’s about to get shot down. I can’t make the match on Thursday. I tried, but there’s a tenure review meeting.” He clears his throat. “Maybe your mom and…and Wyatt could go.”

  It is one of the purest, humblest gifts I have ever received.

  When I was a social worker doing my clinical rotations, I was called to a hospital room where all hell had broken loose. A girl who barely looked old enough to be in high school was still in stirrups, having just delivered a premature baby. Beside her was a shell-shocked boy with peach fuzz on his upper lip. The delivery suite was crammed with medical professionals who were performing a full code on their impossibly tiny daughter. I was paged because the teen mother was hysterical, and no one else had time to deal with her. I immediately grasped her shoulders, trying to get her to look at me, and when she wouldn’t I followed her stare to her baby.

  The skin of the newborn was blue and as thin as tissue. With every compression of CPR, it tore, and a new wound started to bleed. The air was ringing with the girl’s shrieks and the terse fugue of lifesaving, but it was clear that the effort was futile. The doctor glanced at me over his shoulder, still pressing down on the tiny rib cage, his hands covered in blood. “Do something,” he ordered.

  I let go of the girl. Instead, I touched the boy’s shoulder. “You have to be the dad,” I said firmly. “They are looking to you to make a decision.”

  His face crumpled. “I thought…I thought we’d have more time.”

  “Everyone thinks they’ll have more time. But a father has to give away his daughter, and you’re doing that today.”

  The boy looked up, his eyes dead. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.”

  Now, Wyatt smiles at Meret. “I would love to come to your match. Tell me your camp colors, so I can paint my face and wear Mardi Gras beads and be obnoxiously loud in my cheering.”

  She laughs, and I think: He is so good at this; at gaining a child.

  But my eyes drift to Brian, who is so gracious at losing one.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DINNER WHEN Wyatt goes back to his hotel, I walk him to the car. We lean against it and Wyatt pulls me close, stroking the uneven sheet of my hair. He is solid and strong and vital, the best argument against death anyone could give. “I wanted to do this when you came in,” he murmurs. “You looked so…crushed.”

  I tighten my arms around him. “I wanted you to do this when I came in,” I reply. “But I know why you didn’t.” He is painted against the night sky, wearing a crown of stars. “I almost died myself, when I saw you at the table with Brian.”

  “I must admit, I wasn’t expecting that invitation.” Wyatt hesitates. “He’s…he’s a good man, Olive. If I couldn’t be with you, I’m glad he was.”

  I know how much it cost Wyatt, with all his casual confidence, to admit this.

  “But not that glad,” he adds, and he kisses me.

  I don’t know how or why it always feels like the first time, when this happens. I press even more close to him, craving him, desperate. It shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it does: after I fill my senses with Wyatt, I am only hungrier.

  He rests his forehead against mine. “Easy, Olive,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to try to crawl under my skin. You’re already there.”

  “I miss sleeping next to you,” I say.

  “I miss waking up to you. This is a bit like some gothic fairy tale, isn’t it, where you’re mine during the day, but he gets you after sundown.” He brightens. “Let’s take a nap tomorrow and break the curse.”

  If only it were that simple. If only it weren’t a curse of my own making.

  I watch him get into his car and drive off. Instead of going inside, I sit on the porch swing. I think about Win, and about Meret, and then—as if I have conjured him—Brian steps outside.

  He doesn’t say a word, just sits down next to me. I can hear the whistle of crickets, and the peepers calling from a pond in the woods. “It’s late for them,” Brian muses. “Almost fall.”

  I wonder if our conversation will be boxed into things like weather and flora and fauna, because it’s safer that way, until there’s virtually nothing we can talk about at all.

  I force myself to look him in the eye. “Thank you for doing that.”

  He knows I am talking about stepping aside, so that Wyatt can go to Meret’s match. One of Brian’s shoulders lifts and falls. “Well. I can’t undo it.” Meaning: Wyatt. “So.”

  He leans forward, clasping his hands together between his knees. “About Win.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it peaceful?”

  “I suppose. Her husband was there when it happened.” I glance at Brian. “I didn’t deliver her letter, just so you know.”

  He looks at me, surprised. We sit in the pool of porch light and watch as one prematurely red leaf lifts in the wind and detaches from a tree, beginning a death spiral.

  “Dawn,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

  I smile a little. “I think we’ve both exceeded our lifetime quota of those two words.”

  He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “I feel like that,” he says, gesturing to the leaf, which looks like a splash of blood on the grass. “There are so many winds pushing me around, but they’re all feelings.” He says this as if it is a curse word. “For a scientist, that’s like kryptonite.”

  I sit very still, giving him the space to finish. “I was mad at you,” he admits. “When you left, I was so angry. I couldn’t wait to tell you off. But then, I almost didn’t get the chance, and that changes everything. It was like I was seeing from a completely different vantage point, from a view I hadn’t considered. We have fifteen years of a foundation. Maybe the hurricane has knocked down the house, but the bones, they’re still there.” Very slowly, so that I have time to draw away if I want, Brian threads his fingers through mine. “We can build on it again, and this time, it’ll be twice as strong because we know where the flaws were, and how to fix them.” His eyes hold me captive. “You can’t discount what we had, Dawn. I know you can’t.”

  Once, when Meret was in elementary school, she came home and burst into tears because she had told a friend about a secret crush she had on a boy, and by the end of recess, everyone knew. I will never trust anyone again, she sobbed. My first instinct was to tell her Yes, you should only trust me, forever and ever. But instead, I asked Meret how she decided if someone was trustworthy. She thought about this for a few moments, counting down her small list of friends. One girl had shared half her Kit Kat. Another slid to the side of her seat at the lunch table when there wasn’t any more room, so Meret could sit with her. Such tiny acts, and so critical. You trust someone who makes space for you in his or her life…so much so that if you leave, they will feel the absence. You give someone your vulnerable, unshelled heart wrapped in a question: What will you do with it?

  “It’s hard not to see this as Fate—you surviving a plane crash, so you can be with him,” Brian muses. �
�But if Fate is the notion that you’re destined for a given outcome, based on who you are and what you were meant to do, then a quantum physicist has to say that’s bullshit, by definition. On the other hand, if Fate means the lack of free will—the idea that you have no control over which timeline you wind up in—then you’re just a pawn experiencing whatever the multiverse throws at you.” He glances up. “In which case the chances of you winding up with him, or you winding up with me, are completely random.”

  “You’re saying this isn’t my fault?”

  He smiles ruefully. “Well. In a quantum sense. That doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

  When Brian leans forward and kisses me, I let him. In that quiet, simple touch of his lips to mine are fifteen years of knowing how he folds his T-shirts, and buying satsumas the one time of year they show up in the grocery store because they are his favorite, and feeling him press a packet of M&M’s that he’s smuggled from home into my hand at the movies. It’s his shoulder against mine while we watch Meret’s back rise and fall in her crib, and the smell of his skin and the way my snow tires magically appear on my car every year without me thinking about it.

  His hands frame my face for another moment. “Tell me that means nothing to you,” Brian says, “and I’ll let you go.”

  But I can’t.

  He leaves me alone on the porch, where I sit for an hour, or maybe a lifetime.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WIN’S OBITUARY is printed in the newspaper, I read it twice. It is a pale imitation of the friend I knew, but words are like that. They never quite capture what you need them to, the way a panoramic photo of a mountain range somehow misses the vibrance and the grandeur.

  I take out the pair of scissors we keep in the kitchen drawer with all the other bits and pieces that don’t fit, and cleanly snip the column of text.

  I put this into an envelope and write down a name and an address in Richmond upon Thames. I do not write down my own return address. I add stamps and slip this into the mailbox.

  I find Brian reading the paper with a big hole in the middle. Somehow, this feels fitting. As if everyone will have to imagine the singular story that once fit into that space.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN YOU LOSE someone you love, there is a tear in the fabric of the universe. It’s the scar you feel for, the flaw you can’t stop seeing. It’s the tender place that won’t bear weight. It’s a void.

  But the universe tends toward Ma’at, toward order, so even though there’s a rip, it gets camouflaged. The edges overlap, and after time, you might even forget that this is the spot where something went missing, the spot where—if you push—you’ll fall through. And then there’s a scent or a thought or a heartbeat and suddenly it’s clear as day: the light behind that ragged tear, so blinding that you cannot imagine how you ever mistakenly believed it had woven itself back together.

  On the fourth day after I arrive home, I attend Win’s funeral. There is red velvet cake and sidecars crafted with excellent cognac. It is held at night, because there are fireworks. People wear a rainbow of colors, and take turns telling stories about her. Wyatt comes with me to the funeral, holding tight to my hand and passing me a handkerchief when I tear up.

  Win will haunt me, even if it’s not in the way she thinks. When you lose someone, you see them everywhere in a hundred different ways. I will think of her when I go to an art museum, or a dog park. On a blank canvas. When I eat a buttermilk biscuit.

  The sky is bruised. Purple in the center, blue at the edges, an unaccountably pretty record of damage. I watch the injury spread, staining the whole sky. Win’s friends and relatives sit on blankets, waiting for the fireworks. Wyatt and I lie down to watch them. I tuck myself beneath his shoulder and pretend that those shooting stars never fall; that they become a whole new constellation with Win at its center.

  Gradually, everyone disperses. I give Felix a strong hug and tell him I will check in on him in a few days. But instead of leaving, I shake out the blanket again, and sit down.

  Wyatt settles beside me. “Making a wish?”

  I reach for his hand. “Looking for the Big Dipper.”

  I scout out the star in the middle of its handle. Along with a second star in the Little Dipper, it revolves around due north. Because they never set, these undying stars were a perfect metaphor for the afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian soul. Just as the deceased wanted to be integrated into the solar cycle with Re, he also wanted to join the circumpolar stars.

  “Those Who Do Not Know Destruction,” Wyatt murmurs, using the Ancient Egyptian term for those stars. “That’s what we are.”

  “I want to believe that.”

  “I want the fifteen years I didn’t have with you,” he says.

  “Only fifteen? Then what?”

  “Then I’ll renegotiate.” I turn to find him looking at me, sober. “How long?”

  I know what he is asking. How long will we be here, in this limbo?

  “It’s only been a few days,” I hedge. “I just need…I need to catch my breath.”

  He rubs his thumb over the back of my hand. “I know. But I lost fifteen years. And then I almost lost forever. I spent so much time thinking that you’d disappeared off the face of the earth that I can’t let you walk away again, and if that makes me a bastard, so be it. You and I, we’re still young. There are plenty of Egyptologists who don’t strike the motherlode until they’re ancient and doddering. There’s a lot we missed out on, Olive. But there’s so much ahead of us.”

  It is easier to dream about the future with him than it is to untangle the messy knot of the present. Maybe that is what’s so appealing: the simplicity. The effortlessness.

  “I don’t want to leave Meret,” I say.

  “Then don’t.”

  “I can’t take her away from Brian.”

  “Then I’ll move. I’ll defect to Harvard.”

  I shake my head. “You were not meant to sit in a classroom, Wyatt. And Harvard doesn’t own the concession in Bersha.”

  He sits back. “You’re having doubts.” He speaks slowly, as if he has never heard those words in his life.

  “Not about you,” I say quickly, because he needs to hear it, and so do I. “About…the logistics of home.”

  Wyatt kisses me so gently it already feels like a memory. “Home isn’t a where, Olive. It’s a who.”

  There’s an ancient text, the story of Sinuhe, who flees his native country. When he leaves Egypt, he says, My heart is not in my body. To the Ancient Egyptians, for whom the heart was the site of intellect and emotion and faith, it was the same as saying: I have lost my mind.

  Whatever happens, whatever I gain, it is going to be tempered by loss.

  My heart is not in my body, I think.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT I dream in blue.

  I imagine Win and Thane, traipsing through Paris to find the perfect pigment.

  I see Meret the moment she entered the world, her skin porcelain until oxygen pinked through her like a sunrise.

  I picture how Brian’s hands shook when he reached across the blue tablecloth and asked me to marry him, as if he still wasn’t sure after a year that I would come home every night to him.

  And I remember Wyatt’s eyes, after the plane crash, when the hospital walls spun and I fell to the floor and couldn’t speak or move. He had leaned over me, filling my field of vision. Although there was only buzzing in my ears, I could read his lips:

  Olive.

  Olive.

  I love.

  “You,” I had gasped, my last word when I thought I was dying.

  * * *

  —

  ONE WEEK AFTER I am back in Boston, Kieran comes over to remove my staples. Wyatt is at his hotel, taking a phone call with Mostafa, the antiquities dire
ctor. Brian is at work. Meret finds me alone in the bathroom after my brother leaves, staring at my scar in the mirror. A misshapen braid of the remaining half of my hair snakes over my shoulder.

  Herodotus wrote that around 499 B.C.E., Histiaeus—the deposed King of Miletus—wanted help revolting against the Persians. He tattooed a note on an enslaved man’s head and sent him to a sympathizer months later, with the instruction to shave the man’s hair and read the message.

  Even after there is hair on this side of my head again, I will know there’s a story hiding beneath it.

  “It’ll grow out,” Meret says, looking at the shadowed stubble of the buzzed section of my head.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “Eventually.”

  Meret grabs my hand and pulls me out of the bathroom. She tugs me down the stairs and snags my purse off the counter before leading me outside.

  “What are we doing?” I ask.

  “Trust me.”

  In Brookline, we are only a few blocks from Coolidge Corner. Meret leads me down the main block, into a salon where I get my highlights done twice a year. My normal hairdresser, Siobhan, turns as the door jingles, takes one look at me and the scar on my head, and her jaw drops.

  “Hi,” Meret announces. “I know we don’t have an appointment but my mom recently nearly died and it would be really cool if you could squeeze her in just this once.”

  Every client in the salon is staring at me. The woman in Siobhan’s chair, whose wet hair is wrapped in a towel, stands up. “You can have my spot,” she says.

  I sink down into the seat, Meret hovering beside me. Siobhan clearly doesn’t know if she should ask me why I have half a shaved head, why I have a scar. “Brain surgery,” I explain.

  “My God,” Siobhan breathes. “What happened?”

  “I was in a plane crash.” I lean back and close my eyes. “I just…Make me look more normal?”

  Her eyes widen. She picks up the scissors and assesses me critically. “We’re going short,” she announces.