by Gin Phillips
He frowned. “Or just someone who happened to have one of her bowls passed on to him.”
She did not feel like the push and pull of an intellectual argument. She wanted to feel this, not think it. She was tired of thinking. She moved to the bowl over the head of the toddler, briefly touching the turquoise stone before she lifted the ceramic pieces away from the bones. It was a simple bowl with an unending circle. A single, gently curving line spiraled down to the center of the bowl, where the line thinned until Ren could not see its ending point.
“This one’s also hers,” she said.
“You’re sure,” said Silas. He was not asking.
“It has the polished slip,” she said. “Two bowls of hers, buried together, with a young adult male and two babies. A family.”
“A potential family unit without a mother and wife, you mean.”
She leaned in closer to him, her knees starting to ache from crouching. “That actually is exactly what I mean,” she said.
He refused to continue her train of thought, though he nodded. He stood, taking off his gloves and boosting himself up to the edge of the pit. His feet dangled. She stood as well.
“Let’s say I go along with you, for the sake of argument, and say that these people are part of the artist’s family,” he said. “They could be any members of her family. This guy could be a father or a brother or a cousin.”
“If it were her father and he died that young, she wouldn’t have been able to paint a bowl,” Ren said. “It must be a contemporary—brother, husband, cousin, brother-in-law—could be any of the above. But why a parrot on his burial bowl?”
“The woman liked parrots,” he said.
She shrugged that off, returning to what interested her more. “Back to your point—this is a family missing a wife and mother.”
“Was that my point or your point?”
“Her family,” she said. “This is her family. Her husband. Her babies.”
“That’s a huge leap,” he said, climbing out of the hole altogether.
“The man and the babies are so close together,” she said, following him. “The same level exactly, and grouped a little apart from the older man and older woman. The adult male and the babies must have died around the same time.”
“What about other burials on the site?” he asked. “Did your other excavation turn up any signs of mass deaths—epidemics or violence? Malnutrition? An odd number of juvenile deaths?”
“Not at all. There were actually fewer juvenile remains than we would have expected. Whatever killed these people, I don’t think it was on a mass scale.”
“So maybe the artist had a brother and a couple of nieces,” he said. “And they all ate the same bad meat and died. And she provided bowls for their burial. Or maybe she did that for her next-door neighbors. The bonds of this community could have been as strong as family bonds. You can’t identify these bodies based on her bowls.”
“Listen to me—this makes sense,” she said. She drummed her fingers on her thighs, unable to keep still. “Assume that if Lynay was this man’s partner, his wife, that she was around his age—not much older, at least. So she was still young when she lost them all. Late teens, early twenties? And her whole family is gone. Maybe that’s her mother and father against the wall over there. So she’s got no one. What better time to leave, to pull up and try another beginning?”
“She could have had other children,” he said.
“She could have. But I don’t think she did.”
“Why not?”
“Because she left. She picked up and went to the Cañada Rosa. We know that. And you’re quicker to leave if you have nothing left.”
He was standing now, pacing along the edge of the cliff. “Why does it have to be so personal? So specific? Why not look at the more logical possibilities—weather, drought, hunger, sickness or fear of sickness. Her moving as part of a larger migration. These are reasonable explanations, and you’re dismissing them outright.”
She gritted her teeth, clamping down hard enough that it almost hurt. He saw only what he wanted to see. He stood there, watching the bones, and he refused to see what they really meant. The two of them had been steered here, led here, and even the rains and floods had helped them. He was looking so hard, focusing so intently, that he couldn’t see the truth of it all.
“I know you want bigger patterns, a bigger piece of the puzzle to fall into place for your canyon,” she said. “You want to connect some of the dots. But what I’m looking at, what I’ve held in my hands, is personal. It’s one woman. This bowl sat in her lap, and she stared at it while she painted these scenes on it. That’s not the big story you want, but it’s important. To make one woman’s story real—to flesh out the life of someone dead for centuries—that’s worth something. Even if it doesn’t tell you about social networks and large-scale abandonments.”
He exhaled loudly. “It’s a story. That’s what you’re telling me: A story. A fantasy. No more than that. You’re not pointing to clay composition or slips or even parrot feathers now—you’re not reading the information. You’re spinning a story.”
“And so are you,” she said, her words nearly overlapping with his. “That’s what we do all day long.”
“You are not making her real,” he said. “You’re making her up.”
She was silent then. The frustration ebbed, and a kind of shame took its place. He had lied. “You never believed me,” she said quietly.
“That is not what I meant,” he said, exasperated. “I think you’re brilliant. I think you’re incredibly empathic and you can read sites like no one else. It’s a kind of creative intelligence I’ve never seen. And yes, I believe you can see something. I have no idea what that means, but I believe you can see this girl. But I do not believe you can create some entire life story for her based on looking at unmarked graves. You’re overreaching. We need to get back to the data and listen to what it tells us.”
She felt something shut down inside of her, and her insides went cold and blank. He had not believed her, not really. She had handed over not just Scott but herself, and he had turned away.
“Okay, let’s talk about the data,” she said.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“What?”
“Turn off.”
She thought of her mother banging on her bedroom door, the hard sound of her mother’s palm striking wood. She called Ren’s name, sounding tired. Hurt. “Rennie, don’t do this,” she had said. “Talk to me. Please talk to me. Come downstairs.”
When had that been? After Scott? Ren could see her purple toenails hanging off the edge of the bed as she waited for her mother to go away, could see the poster of a sky-high British castle on the back of her door. She must have been a teenager. But that didn’t make sense, because her mother was the one who shut herself in her bedroom. Her mother was the one who had turned herself off. Her mother never wanted to talk. She was remembering wrong.
“It’s fine,” Ren said to Silas. “It’s really fine. I understand what you mean. I see your point.”
“You do not see my fucking point,” he said, quietly and with careful pronunciation. “You do not see it at all. But you’ve decided to end this conversation, and on top of that, you’re going to try to make me feel guilty for trying to address something that is a very big deal.”
“You haven’t talked to me for the past two days,” she said. “And you want to talk about ending a conversation? You say this is personal for me when you’re the one who’s so pissed off? You’re pissed off because of our personal relationship. Don’t let it carry over to the site.”
“Even if we didn’t have a personal relationship,” he said, “we would still have a disagreement over this professional point.”
She did not like the sound of the phrase “if we didn’t have a pers
onal relationship.” She chose to ignore it.
“You don’t get to set the rules,” she said. “Talk when you want to talk. Keep quiet when you want to keep quiet. Make up your mind. You get in one of your moods where everything is so terrible and awful, and you stew over things and make yourself miserable and expect everyone to just put up with it. I’m not going to this time. I’m not playing along.”
He frowned. “This isn’t about a bad mood.”
She considered walking away, but then she would also have to walk away from the site. She had no intention of quitting work for the day. They stood awkwardly, and Ren imagined they were both assessing whether to continue the argument or, if not, how to get back to work as smoothly as possible.
“Maybe this would be a good time to keep quiet,” she said. “Finish the work, deal with this later.”
“I prefer to deal with it now.”
“I don’t even know what you want! You want me to focus on the evidence? Okay. You want me to keep my thoughts on Lynay and Non to myself? Okay.”
“I don’t want you to keep your thoughts to yourself,” he said. He winced, and Ren wondered if his head was hurting. “I think I’ve made it clear that I want the opposite of that. But I want you to look at the evidence and acknowledge that there are many different ways to connect the dots. Many possible outcomes, many possible scenarios. You could be right. But don’t limit us to only one possible answer.”
For the first time, it occurred to her that maybe this was how she would lose him—he would force her to choose Lynay or him. He would ask impossible things of her, and then he would leave.
She smoothed the loose bits of hair back from her face, took her time answering. She tried to make her voice calm. “I just want to tell their story. They deserve that.”
“What if it’s the wrong one? What if you tell the wrong story because you’re so eager to fill in the gaps? What if there is no right story? What if we can’t know it?”
She could not believe that. She could not believe that there was no right answer, not when the right one had been tagging along after them from her kitchen to their campsite.
Her voice wasn’t calm anymore. “What if you won’t see the right story because you enjoy the puzzle so much? Because you like the possibilities more than the reality?”
“That’s idiotic.”
“Yes, it is.”
It was not a good way to end. But they were upset and exhausted, and neither one of them enjoyed fighting with each other, not when it felt more personal than professional. They went back to documenting the site, tense but trying. More photos, then covering the remains with a few inches of dirt for the night, then cleaning the sherds for better, high-resolution close-ups. They did not touch at all, even as they bent and reached across the narrow pit. Ren considered the string she had felt stretched between her and Silas—even through the cool blankness that filled her head as she worked, she could still feel the string, twisting unpleasantly somewhere around her kidneys.
Late in the afternoon, she heard the high grating sound of a spade hitting rock, and, almost simultaneously, she heard Silas grunt. He had been tidying up the edges of the walls. She turned just as he turned to her, still only a foot away from each other, even after all the distance of the day, and there was a gray shard of rock embedded at the end point of his eyebrow, jutting from the soft skin just above his eyelid. He was blinking blood out of his eye already.
He cursed and ripped off his gloves, then reached for the bloody shard. She batted his hand away.
“I can see it,” she said. “You can’t.”
The rock hadn’t penetrated deeply—it fell away with the lightest of pulls. But as soon as she removed it, the blood flowed freely. He was trying to pull his T-shirt off, looking for something to wipe the blood.
“Keep your head back,” she said. “At least keep the blood out of your eye.”
He looked toward the sky, and the blood ran down his temple and into his hair. She shrugged out of her linen shirt, handing it to him. She considered handing him her T-shirt as well, but with a swipe or two at his face, he looked much better.
“I hit the rock just wrong with the blade,” he said. “Like a truck throwing a rock into your windshield. I never saw it.”
“It missed your eye by maybe an inch,” she said.
They didn’t work much longer. He wanted to rinse the blood out of his hair, so she pulled out cans of soup while he was down at the creek. The sun was setting when he returned, and they ate quietly. It was not exactly uncomfortable. At one point, she touched his thigh, but she could not read his reaction, so she withdrew her hand. It was hard to tell in the firelight, but she thought his cut had scabbed over already.
For a little while after dinner, Ren tried to read by firelight, but soon she put down her book and watched the flames instead. Silas was asleep, propped on his elbows with his head dropping forward, when Lynay appeared with her basket of luminous flowers. They looked like moonflowers, but they were the wrong color, too yellow. She approached and pulled out a single flower, holding it between her thumb and forefinger.
Silas stirred, smacking his lips, and the girl and her flowers were gone.
“I’m going to stretch a little,” said Ren, not sure if he heard her. “Just loosen up my legs before we go to bed.”
She walked away from the campfire, into the small copse of trees. She had no idea how to ask Lynay to reappear. She didn’t know her rhythms or preferences, unlike with Scott. She could feel him nearby at times, could anticipate his snatches of song just a second before he started singing them.
He used to sing in the bathtub, actually under the water—she could hear the gurgling from her bedroom. She would press her ear to the door, and the wood was cold but she could hear the wet melody very clearly. He told her it was how mermaids sang. His hair was dripping down his forehead and his collarbone poked sharp through his skin and he held a towel around his waist with one hand. And she called him a mermaid and he got flustered and said only girls were mermaids. But he was not happy when she called him a merman, either.
It had been weeks now since she’d seen him. She missed him. It was not a slow ache of missing but a sudden stab in the gut. She wondered if she’d ever said aloud that she missed him, that she wanted him back. That it sucked to have him gone. Did she ever say that to her parents? Did they say it to her? Did she whine or beg or scream with the unfairness of it, and did they nod like they agreed? She didn’t remember it happening, but maybe it had. She tried harder to remember, tried to summon images that were obscured. She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of the night—the woody smell of the fire drifting, the slight scent of freshwater, the deep, cool smell of trees and decomposing leaves. She began humming about Lily and the Jack of Hearts, about girls playing a game of poker backstage. Her thoughts drifted, and when she opened her eyes, Lynay was sitting cross-legged with a half-empty basket of glowing flowers next to her. Her hands were clean, not a trace of clay on them.
“What are the flowers for?” Ren said. She thought they were beyond polite greetings.
Lynay was moving the bright blooms, one by one, to her lap.
“These are the best flowers to use,” she said, and Ren was proud that she didn’t even flinch at the sound of the girl’s voice. It was an unexpectedly high voice, more child’s than woman’s. It had never occurred to Ren that the girl would actually answer her.
Lynay lowered her chin, looking up at Ren so that the whites of her eyes reflected in the moonlight. “You must pick them at the right time—they only open at night so that the right moths will find them. And they close as soon as the sun hits them. But it will be dark on the climb into the next world, and in the dark, these flowers will open and light the way. You put them on his eyes so he will see clearly. They will shield him from creatures we are not meant to see. The petals over
his mouth keep him from speaking and drawing any attention to himself. He’ll want to move swiftly and silently into the next world.”
“They’re for a burial,” said Ren. She wanted to move back to safer ground, away from talk of other worlds.
The girl went on. “Cover his ears with them, too, so that he will keep your voice in his ears and take it with him. Take more flowers and thread them through his fingers—bind his hands with the stems to keep him still until the time is right for him to climb up out of the darkness. And the flowers will be a remembrance. He may bring them with him and plant them and remember you always.”
“No,” said Ren, dirt and dry air catching in her throat. “That will not happen. That is not going to happen. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. But leave him alone.”
“I do not want him.”
Ren sat on the ground in one collapsing motion, knees bent to the side. “Then why are you here?”
The girl was still looking at the flowers. “Because you will lose him.”
“What can I do?” Ren asked. The words repeated themselves in her head over and over. She could smell the flowers now, a thick, sweet scent like magnolia or honeysuckle. These were some version of moonflowers she had never seen.
“I thought my fingers would smell like death,” Lynay said. She had emptied the basket, and now her lap was full of flowers. “Like sickness. His skin smelled of damp and sweet rot at the end. But, do you know, my fingers smelled of starflowers. They bring the guides to you, the ones who will show you the way onward and upward.”
Ren watched the sky and listened to the girl’s voice.
“He was the first,” said Lynay. “My man. Then my boy died. Then my girl. The only girl ever of mine. I filled them full of flowers, wrapped around their wrists and knees, around their throats, the little holes in their bellies like vases. Toes wound with vines. I covered them with flowers until they would have lit the dark like small moons. Listen to me: It’s very important that you treat the dead correctly, that you prepare them to climb up. You must use the right flowers or they won’t find their way.”