Just before I fell asleep in Brian’s arms, I asked, “Do you ever wonder if the reason your grandmother had to die, and my mother got sick, was so that we’d find each other?”
He hugged me closer, speaking against my skin. “I would have found you, no matter what.”
I had fallen asleep on my wedding night wondering what might have brought a physicist to Egypt, had my mother not died, and if Brian had to cross paths with me there. Or what might have made an Egyptologist seek out a physicist to learn more about the past.
Now, in the heat of Egypt, I pull out the burner phone that Wyatt has given me. It is almost 7:00P.M. in Boston. The service is spotty out here in Middle Egypt, but Brian picks up on the first ring.
“Hello?” he says in the flat voice he saves for telemarketers, for phone numbers he does not recognize.
“Brian, it’s me.”
“Dawn,” he breathes. “Dawn?Are you all right? Whereareyou—”
“I texted Meret. I told her to tell you I was okay.” I wince, realizing how stupid this sounds. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Jesus Christ, Dawn. It’s beendays.You said you’d be back soon…I thought you meantright away.”
I swallow. “I thought I meant that, too.”
There is a scuffle, and then quiet, as if Brian has shut himself inside a closet. “I don’t understand,” he says, his voice running the ragged edge of panic. “Please. Come home.”
I rub my temple. “I can’t, yet.”
There are tears pushing behind his words. “Is everything okay?”
My throat feels hot and swollen. If being here is right, then why does it hurt so much to listen to Brian?
There is a soft knock just as I sayYesinto the phone.
The door of my room opens. “Dawn,” Wyatt says, unraveled. “What you said upstairs—” He stops, seeing the phone pressed to my ear, realizing that my response was not to him.
“Who is that?” Brian asks.
I do not take my eyes from Wyatt’s face. From the stiffness of his body, I know he has guessed who I might be talking to.
“It’s nobody,” I whisper, and Wyatt’s expression shutters.
“I have to go,” I say into the phone, but the connection has been lost.
Wyatt and I are frozen in a sick tableau, unsure of what either of us is supposed to say or do now. He came to me because he couldn’t sleep. I called Brian for the same reason.
What does that evenmean?
I slide the phone under my thigh. “I was…calling home,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he says, with a formality that feels like the moat around a castle. He bows his head; the door closes with a click.
I was,I think.
I am.
—
WYATT IS ALREADYgone by 4:30A.M., having left for the site to greet Mostafa and to organize the day’s work. I wonder if he slept at all.
I wonder if, like me, he was running the lines of last night’s conversation through his head.
The atmosphere is silent, but electric. The rest of us rush through our breakfast and pack our gear and hurry to the tomb. Today is the day no one wants to be late.
