by Jodi Picoult
Desperate to avoid this runnel of conversation, I clutch the iPad to my chest. “Sounds like all the work’s going well. Do you really think you’ll get to the burial chamber by the end of today?”
He nods. “We may even get some of the men to dislodge the stone blocks at the bottom. Although then I have to technically wait for Mostafa to get here before I can go inside and see what’s what, and that may very well kill me.”
“Technically,” I repeat, and I know that Wyatt is thinking exactly what I am thinking—of another discovery, another inspector. Of rules that were broken.
“Have you found anything in the debris?” I ask.
He beams at me. “Nope.”
All the sand and dirt that is cleared from the shaft has been sifted by the workers, in case an amulet was dropped, or if there is a discarded floral collar or a broken shabti. The fewer funerary finds in the rubble, the more likely it is that this tomb has an intact burial—a coffin with a mummy that was never violated by grave robbers.
“Wyatt,” I say quietly. “That’s…”
“Fucking amazing. I know.”
I imagine how quickly his academic profile will rise, if this discovery pans out. I wait for jealousy to wash over me, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the life I chose to lead.
I find Wyatt staring at me like I am a crossword he cannot finish, even though he’s read all the clues three times over. I glance toward the tomb, where a line of local men are back to excavating buckets of sand, the white sails of their galabeyas like the sails of a fleet crossing an ocean.
“You know,” Wyatt muses. “To anyone else, the mystery would be the mummy eighteen feet under the ground. Not the woman who showed up in Egypt fifteen years late.”
I swallow. “I better get back to work.”
“No,” Wyatt says, the word striking like flint. Then he takes off his hat and grins. “I mean, I’ll put in a good word with your boss.”
Unsure of what he wants me to do, I sink down to the ground, cross-legged. He is sitting on a little folding stool, as if he’s the teacher and I’m the preschooler. “I guess this isn’t quite your usual workday,” Wyatt says.
“Yeah. And no,” I reply. “I mean, it’s not that different. The whole point of all this”—I wave toward the notched rock of the tomb—“was to prepare for a good death, right?”
“Amazing to think that’s become a cottage industry.”
“Why?” I ask. “Think of all the people who were employed building this tomb.”
“So you build twenty-first-century tombs,” Wyatt says. “They’re just not made out of rock.”
“Yeah. I suppose they’re made out of stories and conversations and relaxation techniques and wills. Obituaries. Social media passwords. Did you know that you can designate someone to cancel your social media accounts when you die so they don’t just keep telling everyone when it’s your birthday year after year?”
“This is why I’m not on Facebook.”
“I noticed,” I say, and then clap my hand over my mouth as if I could stuff the words back inside.
A smile plays along the edge of Wyatt’s mouth. “Did you,” he murmurs.
“Everyone knows how to die,” I say, shrugging. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a little support.”
Wyatt glances toward the tomb again. “Let me play Devil’s advocate, though. You don’t need a death coach—”
“Doula.”
“Doula. Not any more than you need a rock-cut tomb to become one of the blessed dead. If you couldn’t afford to have texts painted in your coffin, you could borrow papyri. Did you know that I found dozens of soul houses in Middle Kingdom cemeteries, right next to graves of the poor that are basically pits in the ground—a little model of a house and a few offering vessels, maybe with an onion or a loaf of bread. The point is that anyone could reach the afterlife, too. All you really needed to do was live morally.”
“Nothing’s changed in four thousand years,” I tell him. “The way to have a good death is to have a good life.”
“So, Olive?” he asks quietly. “Did you?”
My mouth seems filled with ash. “I’d like to think it’s not over yet,” I say lightly.
Wyatt looks away, so that his eyes aren’t pinning me anymore. “Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.” I think of the names on the calendar in my phone—the phone that doesn’t work here. The litany of the dead I run through, daily, recalling one tiny detail of each of their lives: her perfect French manicure, his collection of foreign stamps, a beloved dachshund for whom she sewed bow ties. “Djehutynakht probably started building this tomb the minute he became nomarch,” Wyatt says. “He’s lucky it was ready by the time he took his last bow.”
“Every beginning is already the start of the end,” I reply. “I sound like a fortune cookie.”
“You always did see the big picture.”
“Wyatt Armstrong. Is that a compliment?”
He slaps his hat against his thigh. A tiny cloud of dust rises between us. “You were right. About the coffin, being a microcosm of the universe.”
“I know you finally realized that. I read your dissertation.” I lean down and pick up a flat piece of rock. “But still, could you etch that in stone for me?”
Wyatt laughs. “What you were saying all those years ago—it’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He stands, reaching out his hand to pull me up. “It’s crazy to think about, isn’t it? What might have happened if you and I had been working together back then, instead of against each other?”
I let myself go there, for the span of one breath: a perfect translation of the Book of Two Ways, with imagery and text interwoven. An understanding that the way to get to the afterlife wasn’t just about the inscriptions, but also about where they were placed in relation to the deceased.
A map with two paths; a key we both crafted.
“Let me walk you back,” Wyatt says. “We’re not being paid to drink tea.”
“Who is paying?” I ask. “Yale?”
He shakes his head. “They cut off my funding years ago. We’ve got a private benefactor now. Rich as fuck,” he admits, “but that’s sort of the way it’s always been, all the way back to Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon.”
We walk out of the tent into the heat; it feels like stepping into someone else’s mouth. “Aren’t you sort of Lord Carnarvon in this equation?”
“Not if you’re going by a bank statement,” he admits. “The one thing that the Athertons have excelled at is gradually squandering the family fortune.”
“Good thing you have Dailey,” I say. The benefactor’s name. When Wyatt looks at me in surprise, I shrug. “Joe talks a lot.”
He sees one of the workers flagging him down, and his eyes flicker over my iPad. “Back to it, then.”
I watch him disappear into a knot of workers, crouching down to look at something in a sieve. Instead of heading into the tomb, I double back, walking into the wadi. In the desert, this is the best you can do for privacy when you need to use the bathroom. I shimmy my borrowed pants down my legs, squat, and finish. I’m pulling them back up when my phone falls out of my pocket.
I pick it up and notice that, in this vast wasteland, there is a faint roaming signal.
I think of all the times I’ve told Meret to stop texting at the dinner table. I imagine her phone vibrating beside a bowl of mashed potatoes and her water glass.
Home soon, I type. I love you.
Tell dad I will be back soon.
I start toward the tomb, hesitating in the last shadow of the wadi. I think of what I’ve been tracing all morning. The last message left by a nobleman, who is now no more than dust.
I add: Forgive me.
* * *
—
THE DAY AFTER Wyatt kissed me was a Friday, and the reason
I remember this is because we always had Fridays off. Dumphries was taking Bette to the airport in Cairo, and the other graduate students were driving to Tell el-Amarna to see the tombs of Akhenaton and Nefertiti. Normally, I would have gone with them—part of the joy of a dig season was using our few moments of freedom to explore other parts of Egypt—but Wyatt had announced at breakfast that he had to catch up on work. And no matter how much I wanted to see Amarna, I wanted to talk to Wyatt more. I wanted to tell him that whatever last night had been, it was never going to happen again.
He worked alone in his room all morning. I sat at the table in the common area, trying to figure out the three blank spots on a crossword someone else had already attempted, but mostly just waiting for Wyatt. When he did emerge from his room, it was shortly before noon, and he completely bypassed the common room. Instead, he banged out the front door.
By the time I got to the front steps of the Dig House, he was gone. I walked down the path that led to the Nile, passing small raised patches of barley and broad beans, but there was no sign of him. The other direction headed west into the desert, where we went when we were working. I frowned—he wasn’t allowed to visit the site alone, on a day off—but jogged lightly into the ripple of sand and heat.
By the time I got a glimpse of Wyatt’s white shirt in the distance, I was sweating and red-faced, cursing the fact that I hadn’t grabbed a hat. I called his name, but the syllables were snatched by the wind.
“Hey,” I yelled, as he tracked into a dry valley east of the necropolis. “Hey!”
Wyatt whipped around to face me. His eyes darkened, as if I were the last person he had hoped to see. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“Taking a walk,” Wyatt said. “I wasn’t being productive.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He smirked. “As charming as your faith is in my efficiency, I was falling asleep over the text. I needed some fresh air.”
It was high noon in the desert; this was not fresh air. “I want to talk about last night,” I said.
“Well, I don’t.” Wyatt spun on his heel and started off into the wadi again.
“I don’t want you touching me again,” I called out.
“Perfect.” Wyatt tossed back over his shoulder. “Since I don’t want to touch you.”
I stood, watching him stride deeper into the desert. “Where are you going?”
“Wherever you aren’t,” Wyatt said.
His words set a fire in me; I immediately remembered what an arrogant dick he was. I didn’t have to worry about what had happened between us last night because I was never going to get close enough to him for it to happen again.
Suddenly Wyatt stopped moving. He pivoted, his hands in his pockets. “I apologize for taking the liberty of kissing you,” he said, so formal. “I could blame it on the alcohol, or I could say that spending all this time in tombs makes me atypically horny, or I could just chalk it up to an egregious mistake. Take your pick.”
I didn’t disagree with him, but I didn’t particularly like being called an egregious mistake, either. Yet I’d wanted to get him to admit to that, didn’t I?
And if he had, why was I still standing here?
“But right now, Olive, I have a hangover the size of Russia with a side order of self-loathing, and I’d appreciate being left to my own devices. Run along home.”
For a moment I just stared as Wyatt turned and walked deeper into the crevice of the wadi.
Run along home.
Like I was a child, not a Ph.D. student. Like I was not equally as qualified to be hiking through this goddamned parched desert as he was.
“Fuck you,” I said, fuming. “Fuck you, you entitled, condescending asshole.” I ran until I had caught up to him, furious, hating that last night, for even a millisecond, I’d been fooled into thinking that he deserved compassion, that we were a team instead of rivals.
Wyatt turned, stumbling backward as my rage rose over him like an angry djinn spinning out of the sand.
I poked one finger at his chest, driving him deeper beneath a rock ledge. “I am just as smart as you are. I am just as capable as you. And I am—” My voice broke off, and I fell forward, brushing my fingertips against the granulated limestone beside his left shoulder. “Wyatt,” I breathed. “Look.”
In the little worn groove of the wadi, beneath a natural rock shelter that was shielding us from the punishment of the sun, there was a dipinto—faded ink on stone.
My heart thumped, out of beat. I thanked God for the class we’d taken on Middle Kingdom papyri—and all the Twelfth Dynasty hieratic we’d had to translate as part of the course. Unlike hieroglyphs, which could be read in either direction, hieratic was always read right to left. Wyatt spun around, his arms braced over me as I crouched, reciting the transliteration. He translated haltingly over my shoulder. “Regnal year 7, fourth month of Peret, day 14 under the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Kha-kau-re, living forever and ever…”
I knew that the nomarchs of Deir el-Bersha had left commemorative inscriptions at quarries to the north of the necropolis at Hatnub. They’d been used by scholars to reconstruct family histories. It wasn’t unlikely that, thousands of years ago, nomarchs might have stopped here, beneath this rock ledge, to celebrate something.
I scanned the next part of the dipinto, but it was fainter than the words at the beginning.
“On this day, the count, hereditary noble, and nomarch of the Hare nome…” I murmured.
“…Djehutyhotep,” we said in unison, having seen those signs dozens of times in the tomb where we worked.
This was the ancient equivalent of Kilroy was here. Except it was the nomarch whose tomb we had been copying meticulously for the past three dig seasons.
Wyatt rubbed his jaw. “4pd.t,” he said, pointing. “He came to this mountain to see the rising of Sothis.”
Other words jumped out at me: Peret, day 15. Priests. Tomb.
“I’m missing a few bits,” Wyatt said, “but I’m pretty sure the gist of it is that he came here to party and stayed overnight in the necropolis, in someone’s tomb.”
“Djehuty…nakht?” I translated, touching my fingertip to the name of the tomb owner. “The ones from the Boston MFA?”
“No. A different Djehutynakht. Born of Teti.” He read carefully. “We spent the night in the forecourt of the tomb of Djehutynakht, born of Teti, which is…cubits from…” Wyatt rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “There used to be a measurement here.”
We couldn’t read the numbers, the damage of four thousand years was too severe. I turned to Wyatt. “Still. A tomb in the necropolis…”
“…that hasn’t been found yet.”
The gravity of this—not just the discovery of a painted rock inscription but one that might point to a new, undiscovered tomb—knocked the breath out of me. Suddenly, my feet flew off the ground as Wyatt wrapped his arms around me and spun me around. “Oh my God,” he cried, as I laughed. Then, just as quickly, he dropped me. “We can’t tell anyone,” Wyatt said.
“What?”
“It’s illegal to be here without an inspector. We have to figure out a way to bring Dumphries here and pretend to discover this all over again.” His eyes pinned me. “Are you with me?”
It would have been far easier for Wyatt to throw me under the bus—tell Dumphries I’d been off exploring where I shouldn’t be, and take all the credit. Instead, he was offering me a partnership.
“I thought you hated me,” I said carefully.
Wyatt ducked his head. “I wanted to. I tried to,” he admitted, his words slick with frustration. “You waltz in here from U Chicago, and of all the things you could be studying, it’s my thing.”
I bristled. “You don’t hold the monopoly on the Book of Two Ways.”
“I know that,” he said. “But still. Hardly anyone focuses on Middle Egypt.”
“That’s why I like it.”
“That’s why I like it, too,” Wyatt snapped. “And I was good at it. The best, even. It was like being the only child, the golden boy. But then you arrive with your crazy microcosm ideas and suddenly Dumphries decides he wants two TAs that year, instead of one. He invites you to come on the dig, even though first-year grad students never come. Fast-forward to now, when he’s grooming you to be his little protégée—”
“What are you talking about?” I exploded. “You’re so far up his ass you’ve probably built a condo.”
“Because I can’t risk ceding any more ground to you,” he argued.
I was roiling with the shock of learning that Wyatt was just as jealous of me as I was of him.
“Haven’t you noticed that when visitors come to the dig site, you’re the one he asks to give them a tour? Or he asks me to haul maqtafs while you get to trace inscriptions? He notices you, when he’s supposed to be noticing me. And fuck it, Olive,” he said angrily. “I can’t help but notice you, too.”
As aggravated as Wyatt’s words were, his touch was the opposite. His hand came up to my hair, rubbing a strand between his fingers. His eyes were the sea. This is how people drown, I thought.
This time, when he kissed me, I kissed him back.
* * *
—
IT WAS A rare feeling, being allied with Wyatt instead of being at each other’s throats. We walked together to Djehutyhotep’s tomb, trading whispers, trying to come up with a way to rediscover the dipinto and make it look completely happenstance and net us equal credit for the find. We tossed out a variety of scenarios, but ultimately decided the best way was to replicate exactly what had happened: Wyatt wandering off, me spotting the ink on stone.
The next morning we worked in the outer chamber, tracing on Mylar in uncharacteristic silence. At one point, Wyatt snuck up behind me. “That’s not right,” he announced.
