“Two,” he says. “You usually see clients on Saturday and I assumed—”
“You assumed,” I interrupt.
He is genuinely confused. “Do you want to see the octopus? I’m sure I can get another ticket—”
“This isn’t about the octopus,” I say. “Why didn’t you even ask if I wanted to go?”
Brian rubs his forehead. “Can we…not fight?” he sighs. “Can we just…eat?”
I nod. I pick up my knife and fork and start cutting my chicken into tiny pieces. And again. I wonder how small I can get them. I count to one hundred as I do this. I push the tiny bites around on my plate.
“Dawn.”
Brian has been watching me the whole time. His voice is wrapped in batting, so soft I can barely hear it. It is a broken bone of desperation, and it won’t set.
I meet his gaze over a tabletop that is suddenly so vast we might as well be on different continents. We might as well be my mother in Boston, squinting to see the coast of Ireland again.
“Tell me what you want from me,” Brian begs.
I should dive in and start swimming, but I’m already sinking here on dry land.
“I shouldn’t have to,” I say.
TECHNICALLY,WYATT CANNOThire me to work at his dig site. It’s a Yale concession; I have no connection to Yale anymore. The graduate students and colleagues who fall under the umbrella of the university each season have work visas and have been vetted by the Egyptian government for their credentials in the field of antiquities.
I don’t know why I asked Wyatt for a job. I blurted it out, instead of all the things I really want to say. But asking for a job is simpler, and will buy me the time I need for the rest.
“There must be someone you can ask,” I beg. “Someone who can bend the rules.”
Out of the blue I remember that, back when I left, Westerners were not supposed to travel on the Desert Road between Minya and Cairo. Hasib—Harbi’s father—had given Wyatt directions to the airport with this warning to stay off that thoroughfare.Unless,he had said,you are brave of heart. Which meant, when we were stopped at a checkpoint, Wyatt had played dumb, saying he had no idea about the restriction, until we were waved through.
Wyatt sinks down onto the arm of a battered chair. “Forgive me, but I assume that you haven’t been in the field for the past fifteen years?”
I feel a pang, realizing that he has not been keeping tabs on my life, and what became of me, but then why should he have? I was the one who walked away without looking back. I force myself to meet his gaze. “No.”
“Why, Dawn?” he asks quietly. “Why now?”
I hesitate, considering how to tell him the truth without garnering his pity. “Do you know how, if you chop down a tree, you can look at its rings and be able to tell the moments where everything changed? Like, a forest fire. Or a plague of bugs. A year where there was a drought, another year where something fell against the trunk and made it grow in a different direction?” He nods. “This would be one of those moments.”
“You’ve been blown pretty far off course if you landed in Egypt,” Wyatt says.
“Or I was blown pretty far off course when I left.”
His eyes narrow. “Look. I’d like to help you but I can’t just—”
“Wyatt,” I interrupt. “Please.”
“Dawn, are you all right? If you’re in trouble—”
“I just need a job.”
Wyatt sighs. “There’s a chance I can pull strings for next January. This isn’t even our dig season.”
“But you’re here. Working. I mean, that’s a sign, isn’t it? That you’re here, and I’m here…” I swallow. “I know you need the help. You don’t have to pay me. You just have to give me a chance. And then…” I falter. “Then you’ll never have to see me again.”
Wyatt looks at me. His eyes are still the blue of the heart of a flame, the blue of the sky when you have been staring too long and close your eyes and still find it painted there. His fingers tap a tattoo on his thigh. I can almost see ribbons of thought and reason being fed through the machine of his mind. “I know I made you a promise a long time ago,” he begins, and in that instant I realize he is going to tell me what I do not want to hear.
I brace myself, knowing I made a mistake.What ifcannot trumpwhat is.
