Forever in Blue

by Ann Brashares

After the meeting, Julia was inspired. “Let’s go back to the room and get to work.”

  “I don’t think I have anything to work on yet,” Carmen said, falling a little bit behind Julia’s energized stride.

  “I was hoping you would run lines with me,” Julia said.

  Some bodies like change better than others. The rest of Bee’s group was sacked out over the three rows of the old Suburban, one of several large and battered vehicles owned by the Consortium for Classical Archaeology. Bee sat straight as a palm, studying the countryside between Izmir and Priene. Now they were close enough to the coast that you could see the Aegean out the right-hand windows.

  “Ephesus is a few kilometers to the left,” said Bob Something, a graduate student, who was driving the car. “We’ll spend at least a day there this summer.”

  Bridget squinted eastward, remembering the pictures of Ephesus from her archaeology class. The sun had indeed arrived along with her.

  “Also Aphrodisias, Miletus, and Halicarnassus. These are some of the best ruins you’ll ever see.”

  She was glad she was awake, because otherwise Bob would have had no one to tell this to and she wouldn’t have heard it.

  “What about Troy?” she asked, beginning to feel a little breathless. Here she was in this incredible place, farther from home than she’d ever been. There was as much history here in this soil as anywhere on earth.

  “Troy is north, up near the Dardanelles. It’s fascinating to read about, but there isn’t as much to look at. Nobody from our group is making that trip, as far as I know.” He had a faded orange alligator shirt and a round face. She thought he must have recently shaved a beard, because his chin and lower cheeks were pale and the rest of his face was pink.

  “I read the Iliad in school last semester,” Bridget said. “Most of it.” In addition to her ancient archaeology class, she’d taken Greek literature in translation. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but looking back, she considered it by far her most engrossing academic experience. You couldn’t always know what would matter to you.

  When they pulled into the site, Bridget was surprised at how small and basic it was. Two very large tents, several smaller ones, and beyond them, the dusty, roped-off shapes of the excavation. It sat on a high hill overlooking a river plain and, just beyond that, the Aegean.

  She left her bags in one of the tents, which had canvas walls over a wooden platform. It held only four cots and some open shelving, but it seemed quite romantic to her. She was nothing if not a veteran of rustic summer venues.

  The new arrivals groggily gathered for a welcome meeting, and Bridget exercised the bad habit of looking around and deciding who was the best-looking guy in the room. It was a habit that predated her being a girl with a boyfriend, and she hadn’t entirely managed to eradicate it.

  In this case, the room was actually a large, open-sided tent, which would serve as their meeting room, lecture room, and cafeteria. The best view was of the Aegean, but there were a few good faces, too.

  “This is a comparatively remote site, folks. The plumbing is rudimentary. We have four latrines and two showers. That’s all. Make friends with your sweat this summer,” said Alison Somebody, associate director, in her not very welcoming welcome. She had a kind of boot-camp mentality, Bridget decided. She was excited about privation.

  Well, Bridget could get excited about privation too.

  “We’ve got a generator to serve the field laboratory, but the sleeping areas are not wired. I hope nobody brought a hair dryer.”

  Bridget laughed, but a couple of women looked uneasy.

  It was a small and fairly new dig, Bridget gathered. About thirty people altogether, a mix of university and scientist types and a few civilian volunteers. It was hard to tell, amid all the T-shirts and cargo pants and work shirts and Birken-stocks, the professors from the graduate students, from the college students, from the regular citizens. Most of them were American or Canadian; a few were Turkish.

  “There are three parts to this site, and all of us spend some time in each of them. If you are a student and you want credit, you must attend lectures Tuesdays from three to five. We’ll take a total of four trips to other sites. The schedule’s on the board. All trips are mandatory for credit. That’s the school part. That’s it. Otherwise, this is a job and we work as a team. Questions so far?”

  Why were organizational types so joyless? Bridget wondered. Who wouldn’t want to see the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus?

  It was lucky, in a way, that Brown University was situated in a relatively urban setting and not in a tent, because it was difficult to concentrate with the sea winking at you like that. She began to tune Alison out in favor of her habit. There was one good-looking guy who she guessed was also a college student. He had black curly hair and very dark eyes. He was Middle Eastern, she thought. Maybe Turkish, but she heard him speaking English.

  Another one was sort of good-looking. He looked old enough to be a graduate student. He had reddish hair and so much sunscreen on his face it cast a blue tint. That was maybe not so sexy.

  “You’re Bridget, right?” Alison asked, startling her from her habit.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re in mortuary.”

  “Okay.”

  “What does mortuary mean?” Bridget asked a tall girl named Karina Itabashi on their way to the field lab.

  “It means dead people.”

  “Oh.”

  After lunch Bridget settled in for her first lecture and discovered an interesting thing: The best-looking guy was neither the possible Turk nor the sunscreen-slathered redhead. The best-looking guy was the one standing in front of her, lecturing about artifacts.

  “Okay, folks.” The best-looking guy had been holding an object behind his back, and now he presented it to them. “Is this object in my hand a technofact, a sociofact, or an ideofact?” The best-looking guy was looking directly at her, wanting her to answer his question.

  “It’s a tomato,” she said.

  To his credit he laughed rather than throwing the tomato at her. “You have a point, uh…?”

  “Bridget.”

  “Bridget. Any other ideas?” Various hands went up.

  She’d thought he was a graduate student when she’d first seen him eating a sandwich under an olive tree earlier that day. He didn’t look like he could be thirty. But he’d introduced himself as Professor Peter Haven, so unless he lied, he was one. He taught at Indiana University. She tried to picture Indiana on the map.

  At sunset that night after dinner in the big tent, a bunch of people gathered on an embankment on the hilltop to watch the sun go down. Several six-packs of beer were on the ground. Bridget sat next to Karina, who had a beer in her hand.

  “Do you want one?” she asked Bridget, gesturing to the supply.

  Bridget hesitated, and Karina seemed to read her expression. “There’s no drinking age here, as far as I know.”

  Bridget leaned over and took one. She’d been to enough parties over the last year that she’d formed a solid acquaintanceship with beer, if not an actual friendship.

  On Karina’s other side, Bridget recognized one of the directors, and she was struck here, as she had been at dinner, by the mixing of the team. The group wasn’t hierarchical, the way school was. Age-wise, it wasn’t nearly as homogeneous. If anything, people assembled more according to the area of the site where they worked than according to age or professional status. She realized how accustomed she was to looking out for authority figures, but here she wasn’t finding any.

  “Where are you digging?” she asked a woman who sat down next to her. She recognized her as Maxine from her cabin.

  “I’m not. I’m a conservator. I’m working on pottery in the lab. What about you?”

  “Mortuary. For starters, at least.”

  “Ooh. How’s your stomach?”

  “Good, I think.”

  She saw Peter Haven at the other end of the group. He was also drinking and laughing over someth
ing. He had a nice way about him.

  The sun was down. The moon was up. Maxine lifted her beer bottle and Bridget tapped it with hers. “To mortuary,” Maxine said.

  “To pottery,” Bridget added, never having drunk beer with a conservator before. It was good to be an adult. Even the beer tasted better here.

  If Leo had looked at her as planned, Lena wouldn’t have had to think about him several times that night, or tried to figure out his last name so she could Google him.

  She certainly wouldn’t have felt the need to go to the empty studio on a Saturday morning when all self-respecting art students were still in bed. She went there to sneak a look at his painting, secretly hoping that maybe his artistic skills were not all that his reputation promised.

  She checked first on her own painting. It was a standing figure of a thick-thighed woman named Nora. Lena could convince herself of Nora’s beauty only as long as Nora was standing still. As soon as she changed her expression or opened her mouth, the concept crashed to the floor and Lena had to build it again at the start of each pose.

  But those thighs of Nora’s did have their strange grace and, more importantly, presented Lena with an unsubtle view of mass, so hard to re-create in two dimensions. Lena liked how that part of her painting was coming.

  Now, embarrassed even though she was alone, she edged across the scuffed linoleum. She considered the empty model stand, the unmanned easels, the high, creaky casement windows, the fern that nobody watered, the leftover smells. An empty studio reminded Lena of the world at night. It was hard to reconcile that the night world was the same place as the day.

  Lena remembered a summer lightning storm when she was in middle school. She was wide awake at midnight and bravely made her way down the stairs in her nightgown to sit on the front porch and watch. A burst of lightning flashed, midnight became noon, and Lena was jarred to see that all the things in the mysterious night world were exactly the same as they were in the cheery, prosaic day.

  After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.

  But after that she’d started drawing and painting and had to unravel all the convincing she’d done. There was no way to access a visual reality beyond what you saw. Reality was what you saw. “We are trapped in our senses,” her old teacher, Annik, told her once. “They are all we have of the world.”

  And so they are the world, Lena remembered thinking then, and many times since.

  You couldn’t paint a thigh based on how you knew it was, in darkness or in light. You had to paint a thigh based exactly on how the light particles entered your eyes and how you perceived it from that angle, in that room, at that moment.

  Why did she spend so much of her life unlearning? It was so much harder than learning, she mused as she timidly made her way around Leo’s canvas.

  She was almost scared to look—scared of its being worse than it was supposed to be but more scared of its being better.

  She waited until she was fully in front of his painting to take it on.

  After three days in the studio, his painting was really only begun. More suggestion than execution. And yet it was so far beyond hers she felt like crying. Not just because hers looked so amateurish in comparison, but also because his had a gesture and a quality, even at this young stage, that was unaccountably sad and lovely.

  She was devoting her life to art school, and she knew she could learn a lot of things here, but in a flash of recognition, she also knew that this couldn’t be taught. She couldn’t say why this painting struck her so, what was the particular insight into the pathos of Nora, but she felt it. And she felt her own set of standards and ambitions swirling down the toilet. She could practically hear the flush.

  She put her fingers to her eyes, unnerved to feel actual wetness. She had hoped these would be conceptual tears, not wet ones.

  She thought of Leo. His hair and his hand. She tried to reconcile the look of him with this painting.

  And in a rush she felt ashamed of her fatuous games as she realized she was going to be thinking about him whether or when or how he ever looked at her.

  LennyK162: Hellooooo, Tibby. Are you in there? You are not answering calls and your friends are concerned. Bee is writing up the missing person report and I am designated to call Alice. Please advise.

  Tibberon: I am here, O hilarious one.

  “Please call me back before five if you can, Tib,” Brian said.

  Tibby lay on her bed as she listened to the end of his message. She didn’t want to call him back. If she actually spoke to him, rather than leaving him messages when she knew he was at work, she probably wouldn’t be able to be angry at him.

  “It’ll be okay, Tib,” he said in closing.

  Why was he always saying that? What power did he have to make it so? Maybe it wouldn’t be okay. Maybe she really was pregnant.

  Anyway, okay for whom? Maybe it was her body and not his.

  And what if she was pregnant? What would he say then? What if he wanted her to keep the baby? He had talked about babies before. What if he secretly wanted something like this to happen?

  Meta-Tibby had something to say about this, but regular Tibby shut her up fast.

  Brian probably romanticized the notion of having a baby. He probably thought it would be this beautiful thing between them. Well, Tibby had seen the whole process up close and personal, and it wasn’t pretty. She had seen her mother’s gigantic belly, pregnant with Nicky, with all the scary red stretch marks across it. She knew how little you slept and how much babies cried. And in one of the most surreal experiences of her life, she had weathered the whole bloody, bloody thing as Christina’s unwilling labor partner. She knew the power of birth, both for beauty and terror. She was the last girl in the world who could write it off as cute and sexy.

  She couldn’t be. What if she was?

  If her last period had ended on the fifth, say…or maybe it was the sixth? And then you counted twenty-eight days. No, it was twenty-one days, right? From the last day? From the first day?

  Tibby had puzzled over this question at least one hundred times, and still she got confused in all the same places.

  Brian worked as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant in Rockville on Wednesday evenings. She waited until she knew his shift had started to call him back.

  “I don’t think you should come this weekend. I think I’m going up to Providence to hang out with Lena. Okay? Sorry about that.”

  She hung up quickly. She felt her face twisted in an unpleasant shape. She was too preoccupied to feel her own shame at lying or even to do it convincingly.

  If it had been the fifth, then her period—if it was going to come—was going to come by the twenty-sixth. But what if it hadn’t been the fifth? It could easily have been the sixth or seventh. Then she would have to wait until Sunday. How could she wait that long?

  And what if it didn’t come on Sunday? What if it didn’t come at all?

  No. She couldn’t think that thought. She couldn’t bring herself to think it, and yet she couldn’t fully think any other.

  She wasn’t really going to Providence. She didn’t want to see her friends now. Not until she got her period. If she went, she would have to tell them what was going on. They knew her too well to accept her evasions or her lies. She didn’t want to say the feared word out loud to her friends, because that would make it feel true.

  She hated not telling them that she had finally done it. She needed to tell them such an important piece of information. But the aftermath of having done it was too painful to share, and the two things were inextricable.

  She couldn’t see Brian right now. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened. What if he wanted to have sex again? He would, wouldn’t he? What would she do?

  Brian shouldn’t have been so insistent on it, she found herself thinking.
We should have just stayed how we were.

  She didn’t feel like eating, she didn’t feel like sleeping. There was nothing to look forward to, nothing to feel happy about, and nothing she could bring herself to do.

  And yet she had very specific plans for the weekend. She would wait and hope for the one thing she really wanted. She would wait and hope that it would come.

  “Oh, my God. It’s a piece of a skull. Somebody get Bridget.”

  Bridget laughed and turned around.

  Darius, the good-looking Middle Easterner, turned out not to be Turkish, but Iranian by way of San Diego. He was also in mortuary, and at this moment he was pointing to a wall of dirt.

  She moved in. She put down her usual pointy trowel in favor of finer instruments. In a little over a week she had already earned a reputation for fearlessness. In the face of moldering bones, snakes, worms, rodents, spiders, and bugs, no matter how big, she was unperturbed. Not even the stench of the latrines got to her. Though in truth she almost never peed inside.

  At five-thirty in the evening, her dirty, sweaty colleagues were wandering toward camp, but she was still working on the piece of bone. It was actually quite a large piece. It was painstaking work. You couldn’t just dig it out. Every bit of soil had to be cleared and screened with care. Every bit of bone, every fragment of clay or stone had to be sent to the lab. Everything had to be recorded in context by means of a large three-dimensional grid. She had to photograph each thing with a digital camera and number it by basket and lot.

  “The difference between looting and archaeology is preserving context,” Peter had told her. “The object itself, whatever its worth, represents a small fraction of its value to us.”

  By six-thirty, only Peter was still there with her. “You can go,” she said. “I’m almost done.”

  “I don’t feel right, leaving you alone in a grave,” he said.

  She liked him there, with the sun behind him. She’d let him stay.

  “I’ve named him Hector,” she said, coaxing the skull from the dirt.