“Life and death are just flip sides of the same coin,” I say, and I turn to find him staring at me. “What?”
“I was just thinking that maybe you never really stopped your studies after all.”
We pass by the giant El Minya sign, wedged incongruously into the rock cliffs like the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. As Wyatt tries to find a parking spot, I watch two men holding hands, walking down the street. It doesn’t mean what it does back home. Here, it’s just a sign of friendship. Legally, in Egypt you cannot be gay.
Wyatt finds a spot in front of a small shop selling ice cream. “Hungry?” he asks. “My treat.”
I am starving, in spite of the meal Harbi fed me. I walk up to the glass case, frost delicately etching the window. Strawberry, chocolate, orange blossom, coconut. I point to the Norio flavor—the Egyptian cookie knockoff of Oreo. Wyatt orders for me, the Arabic flowing easily off his tongue. The round hums and soft els make the words sound as if they are made of honey.
He hands me a cone, and suddenly I am back in my tiny bedroom at the Dig House, fifteen years ago. Wyatt had snuck inside when everyone else was asleep, brandishing a pack of Norios. “Where did these come from?” I asked, already tearing into the packaging.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said, and he kissed me. “Sweets for my sweet.”
I rolled my eyes, intent on separating the cookie from the cream. I looked up to find him biting into a cookie, intact.
“Who does that?” I asked, truly shocked. “You’re supposed to split them apart.”
“Says who? The cookie Gestapo?” He popped another cookie, whole, into his mouth.
“That’s pathological,” I said. “Downright sociopathic.”
“Yes, I eat my Norios like a caveman, and I also am sewing a skin suit made out of undergrads I’ve murdered.”
“I don’t know if I can love you anymore,” I told him.
He stilled, a smile spreading, morning chasing night. “You love me?” he asked.
Now, I blink to find him holding out a napkin. “You’re dripping.”
“Thanks,” I say, and wrap my cone.
“I miss real Oreos,” Wyatt opines, starting down the street. “And having ice in my drink. And baths. Damn, it’s British as hell, but I miss baths.”
I fall into place beside him.I miss this,I think.
—
THERE IS Asign on the door of the antiquities office stating that the director is temporarily indisposed—which can mean he is out touring sites, helping curate museum collections, or doing general cultural heritage work—but that he will return,inshallah.The note does not, however, give a return time.
“Now what?” I ask.
“We wait,” Wyatt says. He steps into the shade thrown by the lintel of the doorway and squats down, tucking himself out of the sun and leaning his back against the locked door. He gestures to the spot beside him.
I rub the back of my neck. “Wyatt, no. You have a thousand things to do. You can’t just spend an afternoon sitting here till God knows when. We don’t even know if this guy is coming back.” I force myself to exhale. It’s one thing to ask Wyatt to try to get me clearance. It’s another to waste his time. “You tried, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. But—”
“Dawn.” He extends a hand to me, shading his eyes with the other. I look down and have a crippling moment of déjà vu. “Stop talking.”
I reach for him, his fingers sliding around mine, dry and strong and so familiar that my chest squeezes. How can you go for over a decade without holding someone’s hand, and still have the feeling of it imprinted on you so firmly?
He tugs me down to a sitting position, shoulder to shoulder. “Firstly…” Wyatt winces. “Who saysfirstly? God, I sound like a complete wanker.” I smother a laugh, and he shakes his head. “Idohave a thousand things to do. But I’ve been working around the clock and I’m the director and if I decide I need an afternoon’s break, so be it. Second”—he hesitates—“-ly: I don’t consider this a waste.” He traces a crack in the pavement with his thumb. “I owe you, Dawn. I would not have discovered this new tomb without you. So believe me when I say that if showing you my thanks means sitting on my arse for a few hours in downtown Minya, it is a small price to pay.”
I think about the citation he left me in his thesis. “I’m pretty confident you would have eventually found it whether or not you’d ever met me.”
“Wrong. It all started with that dipinto.”
I remember that afternoon. It had been so still that the world seemed to be in suspended animation, and we had been standing in a shaded hollow beneath a rock wall of thewadiwhere we did not have permission to be. I remember dusting the stone gently, and Wyatt running his finger beneath the hieratic, translating the bits of the inscription that he could read—including the mention of a tomb that had never been found at the Bersha site, in hundreds of years of excavation.
I remember Wyatt’s hand catching mine, squeezing so tight that it hurt, and me squeezing back just as hard.
