She was still talking, recounting the chemo that had not worked, explaining why she hadn’t told me earlier, insisting that I not interrupt my life for her death. “I’m coming home,” I announced. I stood, letting go of Wyatt.
—
THE TEXTS THATWyatt and I have found in the interior coffin are all about morality—namely, being able to stand up to the gods after death and say with honesty that you haven’t done anything wrong. But what does it really mean to be good? Is it finding a calling that helps other people? Is it running to the bedside of someone who is dying? Is it putting someone else’s needs before your own? You could argue, I suppose, that any of those actions are about not selflessness, but martyrdom. Driven not by ethics, but guilt.
For that matter, what does it mean to beimmoral? Is it pursuing your own dreams at all costs? Is it lying to others, or lying to yourself? Is it falling in love with a person when you are supposed to be in love with someone else? Does it matter if you only have the feelings, and tamp them down?
I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it’s not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.
Wyatt misses dinner because he is on the phone with the dean of graduate studies at Yale, and then with their communications department, working through the messaging that will be sent out tomorrow morning after the Ministry of Antiquities puts out the initial press release. It’s not nearly as thorough as what will be revealed when he publishes the coffin, but because that is months away, this will give him—and Yale—a bump of recognition in the academic archaeological community.
When everyone in the Dig House has turned in for the night, I stay on the roof balcony, too keyed up to fall asleep. I know Wyatt will put my name on the paper he publishes. Long after I’ve left, my work will remain in the canon for future Egyptologists. It is what I told Wyatt I wanted, the reason I gave him for coming here.
I watch a mayfly hop along the balustrade before it is joined by two others.
“There you are,” Wyatt says. “I thought I’d lost you.”
I thought I’d lost you.
I turn, a bright smile pasted on my face. “Finished with your calls?”
“For now,” he says.
“Did you get in touch with Dailey?”
He frowns a little. “Why do you ask?”
“I just assume that the benefactor would want to know about a major discovery.”
“I don’t really want to talk about Dailey,” Wyatt says, leaning against the balcony. He swats at one of the flies.
“No, don’t,” I tell him.
“Please tell me you haven’t become one of those people who carries a spider outside in a paper cup so it can live out the rest of its life…”
“Mayflies have the shortest life span on earth. Like, twenty-four hours. Wouldn’t you feel terrible if you caused an even more untimely death?”
Wyatt looks at the fly. “What rotten luck. Well, mate, I hope you’ve had the best of days.”
I did,I think.
He pauses. “Whatdoflies do?”
“Dance in groups and get it on with each other.”
“Clearly more evolved than we are, then,” Wyatt replies. “If you only have a little time, make the most of it.”
I cannot even meet his eyes.
“Olive,” Wyatt says quietly, balancing his elbows on the balustrade. “What really happened?”
There is no point in pretending I don’t know what he’s referring to. I lean back against the railing, so that we are facing in opposite directions. Which, I realize with a sad, smothered laugh, is just right. “I didn’t have a choice. My mother had cancer, and she’d kept it from me as long as she could. She was going into hospice.”
“I know why you left,” Wyatt says. “I want to know why you never came back.”
So this is what it feels like, a reckoning. When you have to push at the scar you try to keep hidden under scarves and coats and layers, and in doing so, you remember exactly what it felt like at the moment of injury. I feel gently along the fissure, the crack that separated my life from what I thought it would be to what it would become.What if, what if, what if.
“I had to be there for my mother.” My words ring with conviction, and I think again of Djehutynakht in the Hall of Two Truths, justifying the acts of his life. “And then I had to be there for Kieran.”
