The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  “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. “What do flies 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.”

  “Your…brother,” Wyatt says, pulling at a thread of memory.

  “Yeah. He became a doctor,” I answer proudly. “A neurosurgeon.”

  Wyatt shifts, so that he is looking at me. “And meanwhile…you…”

  “Became a death doula,” I finish. “You know that already.”

  But we both know that wasn’t what he was asking. His real question is about what I didn’t become. A doctor, myself. An Egyptologist.

  His.

  For years I told myself that this was about Brian, because of Brian. I told myself I was too ashamed to admit to Wyatt that I had turned to someone else so quickly. But this was never about Brian. It was about me.

  “If you had gotten my letters,” Wyatt asks softly, “would you have come back?”

  I face him, staring into those bright blue eyes that have always been the pilot light inside me. “I couldn’t.”

  “Then I would have come to you.”

  There was a world, maybe, where this worked. Where Wyatt finished his degree and got a job at a university and went off on digs a couple of times a year, thriving in a career I couldn’t have. In that world, I might have come to resent him for something that was never his fault.

  In that world, I had not turned to another man—a good, kind man who made everything feel easier, rather than more tangled. In that world, I was not pregnant with that man’s baby.

  In the real world, I chose safety and security over Wyatt.

  My throat is throbbing, I try to explain all this, but I can’t. “You asked me why I’m here: because I thought this would be my life, and it wasn’t, and I needed to know what it would have been like. You, me, a dig site. A discovery. I know it was my choice to give it up. But I wanted to see, just once, what I was missing.”

  I don’t even realize I’m crying until I feel Wyatt’s touch on my cheek, wiping away a tear. He rubs together his thumb and forefinger, as if my sadness could seep into his skin. “Maybe we did take the same path, in spite of it all,” Wyatt says. “You get close to people who inevitably leave you. The difference is that you call it work. I call it love.”

  He walks downstairs into the Dig House. I don’t know how long I stand on the balcony, beneath the stars in a feverish sky. Long enough to stop crying, to be able to draw in a breath without feeling like I’m breaking apart.

  The Dig House is still and silent. The only light in the main workroom comes from Alberto’s computer, a geometric screen saver that twists like a Möbius strip in the throes of pain.

  I sit down at his desk and open a new browser tab. It takes a few minutes for my Gmail to load, and another ten seconds to filter out the messages in the mailbox I reserve for family.

  Because I am a coward, I read Kieran’s first.

  Dawn, Brian won’t tell me where you are. What the fuck?

  It makes me smile; he doesn’t beat around the bush.

  Dawn. Everyone’s freaking out.

  Dawn. If you’re in trouble, just tell me.

  When I open Meret’s messages, I start crying again.

  Mom, Dad swore you’re okay but if you were really okay why wouldn’t you have come home by now?

  Mom, if you’re really visiting your aunt in France like Dad says you are then send me a postcard because I think he’s lying. Also, I texted you a hundred times, why aren’t you writing me back?

  Mommy. Did I do something wrong?

  At that, I lose it. I bend over the keyboard, thinking that my sobs will probably short-circuit all of Alberto’s fancy software and that I don’t give a damn. I imagine Meret typing this on her laptop, the glow reflecting on her face.

  I can’t remember the last time she called me “Mommy,” but I do remember the first time she called me “Mom.” I had picked her up from school in fourth grade, and she was bringing home a friend. Up until that point, she would reach for my hand every time we crossed the street, as if she didn’t know how to move forward without me. But that day when I reached for her hand to cross the parking lot, she tugged away, embarrassed. Mom, she said. I’m not a baby.

  Except it doesn’t work that way. She will always be my baby, even when she has children of her own. I will never stop wanting to keep her safe. But I can’t do that when I’m half a world away.

  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. I still would.

  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 of me is us. Please, Dawn. Come home.

  I curl my ha
nds so that they are poised over the keyboard.

  The first person I write back is Meret.

  I miss you like 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.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I LEFT in 2003, it was in the middle of a desert storm, which Ancient Egyptians called a neshni. 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 into before and after; 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.

  In spite of the fact that the universe seemed to be conspiring to keep me in Egypt, we finally pulled up to the airport curbside drop-off. Neither of us made a move to get out of the car. In front of the windshield, a man in a hazard-yellow vest gesticulated wildly and angrily; we were taking up space and blocking the flow of cars.

  I looked Wyatt in the eye. “I’ll be fine,” I said preemptively.

  “Olive. If you need anything…ever. Dammit. I will do anything for you.” He caught my hand with his own. “Anything. Anytime. No expiration date.”

  The truck began to fill up with words we hadn’t had time to say, fogging the windows and raising the temperature. I could feel myself being pulled toward Wyatt, and toward Boston simultaneously.

  He raised my palm to his lips, kissed it, folded my fingers tight. “I love you,” Wyatt said.

  I knew if I said it, I would never be able to leave: the transaction would be sealed, a vow given and a vow received. So instead I opened my hand like a star and let his words drift away, instead of keeping them. “I know,” I whispered, and I left without turning back.

  * * *

  —

  WYATT DOESN’T SLEEP with his door locked. When I slip inside, he is flung across his bed, the sheet tangled at his waist, his chest bare. The moon has painted him gold, as if he is her favorite model. I stare for a moment. Of course I’ve seen the gray threaded into his hair and noticed the fine lines at his eyes, but there’s something about seeing him like this that hammers home how many years have passed since I last saw him undressed. How he’s changed. How I have.

  He bolts upright with a start. “Dawn? What’s wrong?”

  “I love you,” I blurt out, and realize that it also accurately answers his question.

  Wyatt seems to realize that he’s not wearing clothes, that someone who might as well be a stranger is standing in his bedroom. He gathers the sheets more tightly against his middle and looks up at me. “I know,” he says, and he narrows his eyes. “That’s the next line, isn’t it?”

  “I should have told you fifteen years ago. But I thought if I did, I’d never be able to leave.”

  “Why tell me now?”

  I hesitate. “Because I don’t want to get to the end of my life and be sorry I never did.”

  His eyes fly to mine. “Are you well?”

  “I’m not dying anytime soon,” I say. “At least not that I know of.”

  Wyatt relaxes. “Well. At least there’s that.” He pats the bed beside him, and I sit down. His words come slowly. “Fifteen years is a long time, Olive.”

  “Yes,” I agree.

  I stare down at the white sheet, where our hands are inches apart. His fingers brush mine, and I feel myself shiver.

  Wyatt has touched me in the weeks I’ve been here. He’s passed me instruments and directed me with a tap on my shoulder and even helped me down the rope ladder. But this is the first time we have touched in a more deliberate way. I feel him looking at my face, asking what he cannot put into words.

  Before I can think myself out of it, I kiss him.

  It’s quick. And startling. A press of lips that is a prelude, an overture. He still tastes like butterscotch. I pull back before he can.

  “You have another life,” Wyatt says.

  I hesitate. “What if, for a night, I want this one?”

  His palm curves around my hip. “Then I’m the luckiest mayfly ever.” Wyatt shifts, pulling me closer, and still giving me time to change my mind. Then his mouth touches mine.

  All it takes is a brush of a match in the right environment to start an inferno. That is what I think when I taste him, and I am whisked backward through time, to another twin mattress and another stolen moment and the same arms around me. Wyatt is everywhere at once, setting fires. Unlike with Brian, this isn’t comfortable—it’s the wild plunge of the roller coaster, rather than the hand that holds yours as you go.

  “Olive,” Wyatt scrapes against my throat. “Jesus.” We are a tangle of arms and lips and buttons and sleeves. But when he is about to pull off the last of my clothing, I grab the edges of my shirt together. Immediately, he goes still. “Second thoughts?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t look like I used to, Wyatt.”

  “You look magnificent,” he says.

  “You’re saying that because you want to get into my pants.”

  “That, too.” Wyatt grins. “But it happens to be true.”

  “I’ve had a baby. I’m old—”

  “I’m three years older than you.” He cups my face in his hands. “Dawn. If it will make you feel better, I could show you my appendix scar, and where I think I’m going bald, and you could point out your stretch marks and wrinkles. But I’d much rather pay attention to all the bits of you that are glorious.”

  I pull on his hair. “I don’t have wrinkles. And you’re not going bald.”

  “Thank God,” Wyatt says, and he peels off my shirt. His hand skims up my side, beneath the lace of my bra. My heart beats under his palm.

  I pull away the sheet and grab hold of him, stroking, watching the tendons in his neck stretch as he arches back. “Not yet,” Wyatt murmurs, and he flips me onto my back. He kisses me, long and slow and lovely. “Entirely as a god have you come into being,” Wyatt quotes. “Your head is Re. Your face is the Opener of Ways, your nose is the divine Jackal…”

  He brushes a kiss over my closed eyes. “Your two eyes are the two children of Re-Atum. Your tongue is Thoth. Your throat is N
ut. Your neck is Geb.”

  His hands close over my arms; his tongue circles my breast. “Your two shoulders are Horus. Your breast is He Who Pleases the ka-spirit of Re.” He glances up. “Side note: It also pleases me a good deal.”

  I feel him sliding his palms up my thighs. “Your two sides are Divine Utterance and the Divine Scarab…your stomach is the Dual Lion…” He spreads me wide, bending my legs so that he can settle between them. “Your bottom is Isis and Nephthys,” he whispers. “No part of you lacks in divinity.” His mouth closes over me.

  In that moment, I feel every second I’ve missed with him. He breathes life into me. When Wyatt lifts his head and moves up and slides into me, I wrap my arms and my legs around him, as if that is all it would take to keep him there.

  After, I lie on my side, with Wyatt curled behind me, and he laughs when I yawn. “We used to do that three times a night,” I say.

  “Maybe we are old,” he concedes.

  I test myself, poking through my thoughts for regrets—but I don’t find any. There is no guilt in me, no rush of shame.

  But what happens, now that it’s done?

  Wyatt spreads his hand over the round of my belly, the five pounds I cannot ever lose. “I would have liked to see it, you know.”

  “Me getting fatter?”

  “You having a baby,” he says.

  I press his hand flat and close my eyes so tight that it hurts. Then I turn in his arms, so that we are face-to-face. “I want you to think of me when,” I say. “The second before a kiss, when you’re so close you can’t see clearly and you can feel your pulse in the air. Then.”

  Wyatt leans in by inches. “Now?” he whispers.

  “Now.” I nod.

  I kiss him until I feel him stirring against me, until I smell him on my skin, until I can see him when my eyes are closed. When we finally break apart, Wyatt is smiling at me, lazy. He tucks my hair behind my ear. “Where are you off to, that I’ll have to remember you?”

  I kiss him again, so that I can swallow my answer.

  * * *