—
IHAD THEsecond hardest conversation of my life in a tomb in Amarna. After I told Wyatt that Meret was his daughter, he just stared at me, as if he had clearly heard the words wrong. And yet, what had I expected? Learning this after fifteen years? When his first assumption—like Brian’s—was that I had hid this from him?
They had, I realized, this one thing in common.
I filled the stunned silence. I told him about my mother’s stay in hospice. About feeling so overwhelmed and how Brian suddenly appeared. I told him that I slept with Brian because I couldn’t remember what joy felt like, because for one night I needed to be the one taken care of, instead of the caretaker. I told him about the pregnancy. I told him how, a year later, we got married.
I also told him about Gita, and the night of Meret’s birthday, when Brian didn’t come home to celebrate with us. I told him how I had driven away and thought I was leaving for good, but didn’t. I told him about Win and her lost love and how I searched for Thane Bernard and found Wyatt. I told him about the moment Meret came into my bedroom with a DNA test; how all the tumblers clicked into place.
I told him how, at the last minute, I changed my return flight to come to Cairo instead to Boston—because he deserved to know about Meret, now that I did.
When I finished, my shirt was sticking to my back with sweat. There was no air in that tomb. I felt frozen inside, an insect in amber. Finally, Wyatt raised his head. His expression was careful, guarded. “You found out you were pregnant, and it never crossed your mind that it could be mine?”
I didn’t know how to explain to Wyatt the weeks that my mother was dying, the strange elasticity where hours bled into days and nothing felt linear. I didn’t know how to explain how I’d felt torn apart from leaving him, and embarrassed because I’d used Brian to stitch myself back together. That I’d been drowning in a future that was uncertain, and grabbed on to someone solid and strong. That when I got pregnant, I truly thought it was Brian’s baby, Fate pointing a giant neon arrow in one direction.
So I said nothing.
A muscle jumped in Wyatt’s jaw. “Was I that easy to forget?” he asked. “Or wereyoujust selfish as hell?” He brushed past me then, his footsteps echoing as he moved through other chambers of the tomb.
Leaving me. Which, frankly, I deserved.
I sank down beneath the scene of parental grief and cried. Nefertiti and Akhenaton had lost one beloved daughter; I had lost nearly everyone I cared about. I couldn’t even blame Wyatt. Through his eyes, this was stupidity at best and betrayal at worst. Either I had set him out of my mind so quickly fifteen years ago that it seemed our relationship meant nothing; or I had made the calculated decision to hide his own daughter from him. I imagined him walking out of the tomb and giving the keys back to thegaffir.Maybe thousands of years from now, tourists would come to see my dessicated body:Here lies the woman who destroyed her own life.
An hour passed before I heard someone walking back toward the chamber. Wyatt sat down beside me, his shoulders against the rock wall. “When you left home the first time,” he asked, “where were you headed?”
Of all the questions he could have posed, this was the one I had not been expecting. “I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan.” I swallowed hard. “But I think I’ve been running in place for a long time, because I knew if I stopped, I’d wind up wherever you are.”
In this tomb, where time stood still, I waited seconds, weeks, a lifetime, until I felt Wyatt’s hand cover mine where it rested on the dirt. “I lost what I loved once, and I don’t plan to do that again,” he said quietly. “I’d like to meet my daughter.”
—
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,”a voice announces, “we have just been informed by the captain that we’re going to have a planned emergency. Please listen to the flight attendants and follow their directions.”
Wyatt had insisted on getting the first flight out of Cairo, in spite of the fact that he was in the breakthrough stage of an excavation (He’s been dead for four thousand years, Olive, he’s not going anywhere…); although I thought he should sleep on his decision. I believed my anxiety had stemmed from the confrontation that would face us in Boston, which would not be easy, even if it was right. But maybe there had been a sixth sense warning me away from this flight.
Shock rolls through the cabin—but no screams, no loud cries. “We’re crashing,” the woman on the aisle whispers. “Oh my God, we’re crashing.”
Fasten your seatbelts. When you hear the wordbrace,assume the brace position. After the plane comes to a complete stop you’ll hearRelease your seatbelts. Get out. Leave everything behind.
I have heard that when you are about to die, your life flashes before your eyes.
But I do not picture Brian or Meret. I do not envision my mother or Kieran.
Instead, I think of Wyatt, only of Wyatt.
I imagine Wyatt in the middle of the Egyptian desert, the sun beating down on his hat, his neck ringed with dirt from the constant wind, his teeth a flash of lightning. A man who hasn’t been part of my life for fifteen years. A place I left behind.
A dissertation I never finished.
A future we’d never get.
I try to imagine Wyatt and Meret and me, a family. I think about how many people we have wounded, just by falling in love fifteen years ago. I think about the feather of Ma’at, and whether I will pass to the afterlife, given all I’ve done.
I fumble for my phone, thinking to turn it on, to send a message—an apology?—even though I know there is no signal, but I can’t seem to open the button on my pants pocket. Wyatt’s hand catches mine and squeezes.
I look down at our fists, squeezed so tight a secret couldn’t slip between our palms. “Dawn,” Wyatt says, his voice breaking through my panic. “Listen to me. This is not how we die. We’re Orpheus and Eurydice. We’re Romeo and Juliet. Catherine and Heathcliff. Our story doesn’t end before it can even start.”
I wonder if he realizes that none of his examples have happy endings.
