The last email from her doesn’t have any text. It’s a photograph she has scanned of the two of us. I don’t even know where she’s found it—some album, I suppose, up in a box in the attic. Meret is maybe two, standing next to me on the beach. She is holding a starfish in her palm and looking up at the sky.Did it fall?she asked, just before Brian took the picture. I remember feeling my mother there, and if you look carefully in the photograph, there is a halo of spray that looks a little like the profile of a ghost.
It is not impossible that Meret was right about that starfish. I would have given her the heavens and the earth. Istillwould.
Finally, I take a deep breath and I open Brian’s messages, from oldest to newest.
Where are you?
Seriously, Dawn.
You probably think it’s enough to send some cryptic bullshit about you being fine and needing space and time and whatever but honestly, Dawn, this isn’t only about you anymore.
A day later:I didn’t mean that. I was angry. I take it back.
Then:I’ve been thinking that maybe you’re waiting for something, and that if you’re waiting for something, it’s probably for me to say I’m sorry. So, I’m sorry. But also, I’m sad. I’m confused. I’m scared.
Did you lie when you told me you love me?
There are several days with no messages, and then the last one:
I know you think I don’t listen to you half the time, that I’m in my own world, but you’re wrong. I do listen. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said before you left—that sometimes the past matters more than the present. Assuming that’s the hypothesis—it still can’t matter more than the future. Because otherwise, scientifically, we’d regress instead of evolving. Look. I’m not good with words. Or with noticing that things aren’t right. But I do know this: your state and my state are entangled. |me> = |us> The quantum state ofmeisus. Please, Dawn. Come home.
I curl my hands so that they are poised over the keyboard.
The first person I write back is Meret.
I miss youlike crazy,I type.
I hesitate.I didn’t leave because of you, Meret, but you’re why I’m coming home.
Then I write Kieran just three simple words:I am fine.
I send another email to a social worker from the hospice, asking about a client.
Finally, I start an email to Brian. I type:I’m sorry,but then erase it. I’m not sorry.
I type:I didn’t mean to hurt you.
That sounds like a goodbye, so I backspace until the page is blank again.
I don’t know what to say, so I answer the question he asked me.
I never lied when I told you I love you.
I press send, watch the words fly from the screen. And I think:I just never told you the whole truth.
—
WHENILEFTin 2003, it was in the middle of a desert storm, which Ancient Egyptians called aneshni. Wyatt drove me all the way to Cairo through the insane bumper-to-bumper traffic. Puddles on the highways became wading pools, and cars swam through them beside braying donkeys struggling to yank their carts through the mud. Vehicles were abandoned; drivers got out of their cars to shout at each other in the driving rain. I was sick to my stomach with grief and fear and had to keep the window open a crack. “I should be going with you,” Wyatt muttered, as he squinted through the downpour.
But we both knew that this was too new, too raw. That to put value on the connection between us instead of the actual timeline that we had been a couple—several weeks—was insane. What had happened between us was intense and unexpected, much like the weather.
My mind had already begun to separate intobeforeandafter;even sitting close enough to Wyatt to see the stubble of his beard, I was thinking of my mother lying in a bed that wasn’t her own, of the hands of strangers wiping down her skin and washing her hair. I was thinking of how odd it was that the things our parents do for us when we are young are what we do for them when they are old.
“Jesus,” Wyatt said. “Another roadblock?”
The sheer number of motor vehicle accidents had left us a circuitous, lengthy route to the airport. “I may miss my flight,” I murmured, checking my watch.
“Inshallah,”Wyatt murmured.God willing.
