by Jodi Picoult
—
NEHEH DJET. Time in a circle, time in a line. Ancient Egyptians believed the world was structured both ways. Lying in the arms of the man I used to love, and maybe never stopped loving, I am painfully aware that ages have passed—and at the same time, it feels like yesterday.
I wonder what will happen to me now, if I have to stand in the Hall of Two Truths and defend my actions. If I’ll qualify as akhu, the blessed dead, or if I’ll just be damned, mut, gone. If I’ve done something unforgivable, or if I’ve moved closer to the person I was meant to be with.
In the Netherworld, the blessed dead and the damned share the same space. In the New Kingdom’s Book of Gates—a later funerary text—there is a lake, which is cool water for the blessed dead but feels like a lake of fire for the damned.
I fall asleep fitfully, thinking of fire and drowning, and wake up when the door to Wyatt’s room bursts open. I jackknife up, forgetting where I am for a moment, and Wyatt has the grace to throw the sheet over me. Sunlight floods the tiny room, and I think maybe we have overslept, but then I remember it is Friday, our day off. Alberto is standing in the doorway, and my stomach flips, thinking that I have finally given him a reason to hold me in contempt. But he doesn’t even seem to notice me. “Dailey’s here,” he bites out.
“Fuck.” Wyatt leaps out of bed, grabbing clothes from where they’ve been draped on his desk chair, hopping into his boots. He scrubs his hands through his hair, trying to rake it into a semblance of order. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters, streaking through the hallway and leaving me behind.
Alberto blinks at me in Wyatt’s bed. “You’d better get dressed.”
I wonder if Wyatt has told his benefactor that I asked to work at the site, if he is going to be in trouble for hiring me without getting approval first. “Is Dailey going to be upset to find me here?”
“Yeah,” Alberto replies. “You could say that.”
I gesture to the door, rolling my eyes so that he’ll close it, and then hop up and throw on my clothing from last night. I’m still tying off the bottom of my braid when I burst into the kitchen area, determined to make sure that Wyatt doesn’t take the fall for something I asked him to do.
Sitting at the kitchen table is a woman with raven-black hair piled onto her head, wearing a light linen shirt and the kind of torn jeans that are so artfully ripped you know they cost hundreds of dollars to look ragged. She is facing Wyatt, and they both hold cups of tea.
“Is he gone already?” I ask breathlessly.
The woman turns. She wears crimson lipstick and has amber eyes and perfect posture and is quite possibly the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen. Wyatt, on the other hand, has gone bright red, and is pulling at his collar, which is already unbuttoned. “Anya,” he introduces, “this is Dawn. She’s working under me.”
I hear a snort, and realize Alberto is standing behind me.
Wyatt pushes up from the table. “Dawn, this is Anya Dailey. She’s footing the bill for the expedition. She came to see the coffin.”
Anya rises and slides her arm into Wyatt’s. “Among other things,” she says, smiling.
I look down at her hand, resting in the crook of his elbow. At the vintage diamond solitaire on her finger, put there by the fiancé who leads her past me and out of the room.
ABIGAIL BEAUREGARD TREMBLEY got interested in the business of death when she was visiting Indonesia the summer of her college sophomore year and ran out of money. She was hired, by the hour, to cry at funerals. On those days she would put on the only black dress in her suitcase and walk through the streets behind a funeral procession, wailing and weeping with a throng of others. “It didn’t feel dishonest,” she told me years later, when we both were hospice social workers. “For some religions, the louder your funeral is, the easier it is to get to the afterlife. Some people just have fewer mourners. Some people outlive their friends or family. Shouldn’t they get to have a good send-off, too?”
Abigail had been working at the hospice when my mother died. I became a social worker because of her. There was no one I trusted more when I had a professional question, or needed to process a client’s death. Today, when she comes into Perkatory—the coffee shop where we try to meet at least once a month just to catch up—I am already on my second pour-over and a slice of banana bread. “I know, I know…I’m late,” she says, sliding into a chair across from me and dumping her giant purse on the ground. “Professional hazard.”
I laugh. “Did you order yet?”
“Girl, I called my soy chai latte in from the road.” As if she has channeled it, the barista sets it down in front of her. “It’ll do, but what I really need is straight vodka.”
“I’ve had a few of those days myself.”
“Yeah, I heard you were with Thalia when she died. Sweet lady.”
“She was,” I agree, and we both sit in the memory for a moment. “So what’s making you wish you were drinking?”
“I have a patient whose wife couldn’t handle his death.”
“Sudden diagnosis?”
“No, believe it or not. ALS. It’s been a long time coming; reality just sort of hit her like a ton of bricks. I am not exaggerating when I say that I’ve spent more time preparing her for the inevitable than I have him. Today I go for my visit and I find them curled up together on the bed, OD’d with morphine. She dosed him and then dosed herself. Goddamn Nicholas Sparks and his goddamned Notebook.” Abigail sighs. “Here’s the kicker. She died. He didn’t. So now I have an ALS patient with no caregiver.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I know.” She looks at me over the lip of her mug. “So. What did you call the emergency powwow for?”
“I have a client who wants to make a deathbed confession.”
“Okay,” Abigail says.
“It’s one that could hurt people who are left behind.” When I have a confession like Win’s, which could rock the world of someone else in her orbit, I think hard about what should be revealed, what my responsibility is.
“I once had a thirty-eight-year-old patient tell me that he had killed his best friend,” Abigail says. “It had happened twenty-five years earlier. His friend had been drunk, on a bridge, when he slipped and fell. He thought his buddy would swim, so he didn’t jump in after him—but actually the kid had hit his head on the beam as he fell, and he drowned. My patient never told anyone, because he was afraid he’d get in trouble for underage drinking.”
“What did you do?”
“After my patient died, I traced down the kid’s family and I told them the truth. I had to, so that I could sleep at night.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I tell her. “Sleeping at night.”
“Is your client a serial killer or something?”
“No. Nothing illegal.” I look up at Abigail. “She wants me to do something for her. Something that might hurt her husband pretty badly after she’s gone.”
“Client trumps caregiver.”
“I know. The thing is…helping her makes me think about things I buried a long time ago.”
“Things?” Abigail says. “Or people?”
I look at her and raise my brows.
“Buried literally,” she asks, “or figuratively?”
“Figuratively,” I reply, smiling faintly.
“Dawn. What’s the first rule of hospice work?”
It’s not about you.
I pick at the banana bread, and a random thought pops into my head. Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United Kingdom, when someone died, a piece of bread would be placed on their chest to soak up their sins. Then, the village sin-eater was paid to consume it—taking on the guilt and the shame and the lies, leaving the soul of the deceased light enough to go to heaven.
“What are you going to do?” Abigail asks.
I take a bite of banana bread and think of Win Morse and her missing lover. I wonder what happened to sin-eaters when they died, when there was no one left to absolve them. I wonder if, with every bite, they tasted poison.
* * *
—
BEFORE WE LEAVE, Abigail asks how Brian is doing.
This morning, when he came downstairs smelling like fresh shampoo and soap, his hair still slicked back, I handed him his travel mug of coffee. This is a scene so common for the two of us that by now, it should have caused a repetitive motion injury. But today, instead of distractedly taking the mug and collecting all the things he needs to bring to the lab and leaving without saying goodbye, he stopped in front of me. “My grandmother used to say that cooking was love,” he said. “I don’t know if coffee counts as food, but still…thanks. For the cup of love.”
He blushed when he said it, and the tips of his ears went red. It was so un-Brian I almost laughed, but something held me in check. Maybe this would be the new us: appreciating what we have, instead of expecting it. “You’re welcome,” I said.
“Brian’s great,” I tell Abigail.
* * *
—
SINCE MERET REFUSES to go back to STEM camp, I find a new summer program. This one isn’t just science-oriented, but takes a Renaissance approach to gifted-and-talented education, marrying technology and the classics and Latin and phys ed. Meret is cautiously excited about the idea, about beginning fresh. We picked out an outfit last night, a top whose color turned her eyes an otherworldly blue.
At the end of the day I drive to the school where the program is housed and wait near the front entrance. When I see her exit the building, I wave. The girl she is walking with says something and smiles. Meret is a mirror, reflecting that same smile back at her. Okay, I think, letting out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. So far, so good.
“How did it go?” I ask, as she slides into the passenger seat.
Meret’s hair covers her face as she ducks away from me. “Fine.”
“How are the other kids?”
She shrugs. “They’re okay. I sat with three girls who’ll be in the same high school as me this fall.”
“That’s great.” I wonder if the girl she walked out with is one of them. “Any interesting teachers?”
Meret glances away, and I realize that her chin is trembling.
“Hey,” I say, touching her arm. “What’s going on?”
The tears start. “Nothing. It’s stupid. Everyone’s nice. Everyone’s really nice.” She wipes her cheeks. “Everything was good, you know? Like, I thought I looked decent. And no one was saying anything terrible about me. But it turns out they didn’t have to. I sat at lunch with people, but I didn’t actually eat, because none of them did. Someone was talking about a kid who has alopecia and how terrible it would be to look like that, and I laughed. I laughed because I was so glad it wasn’t me they were ragging on. Even though they’re awful, I’d rather be like them than like me.”
“Meret—”
“Then I had gym. Today we just got a tour of the locker room from Ms. Thibodeau—the tennis coach. She showed us the showers and the lockers and then she looked over at me and said there’s a changing room, too, with a curtain, if you don’t want everyone looking. I thought she was saying I need to be hidden. But—”
I am barely aware of getting out of the parked car, but I do. I jog behind the school to the tennis courts, where a woman in a track suit is carrying a wire basket filled with bright yellow balls. “Excuse me,” I say, boiling. “Are you Ms. Thibodeau?”
She turns, smiling. “Yes, hi.”
“I’m Meret Edelstein’s mother.”
“Meret,” she repeats, as if she is shuffling a deck in her mind. I can see when she remembers my daughter.
“She told me what you said to her today during gym class.”
The coach looks puzzled. “That she should try out for tennis?”
“Mom.” Behind me, I hear Meret’s mortified voice. “She did ask me to join the tennis team. I didn’t get a chance to finish.”
The coach puts down the bucket of balls. “I started playing in ninth grade,” she explains. She takes out her phone and scrolls through photos until she holds one up to me. There is a younger, chubbier version of the woman with a bad haircut, a racket balanced in one hand. “I wasn’t fast or strong but I was really good at videogames. That’s the same kind of hand-eye coordination you get when you work in a science lab, like Meret has.” She looks at Meret. “I hope you’re still thinking about it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Meret says. She grasps my arm and yanks, hard. “We, um, have to go.”
I stare at the coach, then thank her for looking out for my child. We walk back to the front of the school. Just before we reach the car, Meret wraps her arms around me—in full view of other students.
“I’m sorry. I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” Meret says, smiling a little. “It was lit.”
We get into the car and I turn over the ignition. “So she wasn’t saying that about the changing room to be mean.”
“No. She’s pretty awesome, actually. She’s the first person who ever thought I’d be good at something with my body instead of my brain. Everyone else thinks I’m lazy because I’m fat.”
“You have fat. You aren’t fat. You have fingernails, too, but you aren’t fingernails.”
Meret looks at me from the corner of her eye. “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever admitted that I’m…” She corrects herself. “That I have fat.”
Talking about this, instead of dancing around it, feels right. “There isn’t only one type of body. Anyone who makes you feel that way is only trying to make themselves feel better by finding someone to pick on.”
“Yeah, but when you stand up, people listen. When I stand up, people notice my size. I’m literally the elephant in the room.” She shrugs. “It’s so weird. They can’t not see me. But also, I’m invisible. I can walk down a hallway and see everyone looking away.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
She looks surprised. “For ambushing Coach Thibodeau?”
“Well, maybe,” I admit. “But mostly for not letting you talk about this with me. I figured if I did, it was like I was admitting that I agreed with you about how you look.” I glance up. “And for the record I do not.”
“Noted,” Meret says.
“It doesn’t matter how perfect I think you are, if you don’t.” I hesitate. “Are you going to start playing tennis?”
“Do you think I’d lose weight?”
“I couldn’t care less,” I say. “And that shouldn’t be the reason why you do it. Our bodies are just what hold us together, you know. They’re not who we really are. Everyone leaves them behind, eventually.”
“Yeah, but I’d rather die skinny,” Meret replies.
I roll my eyes. “Trust me. People who are thin aren’t happier.”
“Well, you’d know,” Meret says. “When I was little, I used to think I was switched at birth.”
“When I was little,” I tell her, “people used to ask my mother if she ever fed me. I cut the tags out of my jean jacket so no one would know I was a 00. Literally, less than nothing.”
“I don’t think I was even a 00 when I was born.”
“You were.” I smile at her, and pull away from the curb. “I was there.”
* * *
—
BRIAN SENDS ME a text just before 5:00 P.M. I hear the ping on my phone, wondering what’s going to make him late for dinner this time; forcing myself to not assume the worst.
Thinking of you, so I thought I’d tell you.
When he comes home, he brings me flowers: peonies and roses.
The smell takes me back to the perfume on his clothes, to Gita. But he l
ooks so proud of himself, as if he’s slayed dragons and reached through thickets to bring this to me.
Even though I’ve eaten, I sit at the table while he does. I put the bouquet in a vase. I tell him it’s beautiful.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, WHEN Brian goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, I roll to his side of the bed to turn out the light and accidentally upset the book he is reading.
With a groan, I lever myself down so that I can grab the spine. It’s some god-awful tome about the mathematics of uncertainty. But when I pick it up, a piece of paper tucked inside it flutters to the floor.
It is a printout from a women’s magazine. In the photo, a woman leans back in the circle of a man’s arms, laughing. Then I notice the headline: 19 Ways to Tell Your S.O. You Care!
My heart squeezes as I try to imagine Brian searching for an article like this. I glance down at the bullet points: 1. Don’t talk, listen! 2. Say thank you. 3. A few blooms brighten anyone’s day. 4. Text when you’re thinking of them. 5. Hold hands…
Next to the first four items are methodical little check marks.
With a smile, I slip the article back into the book and set it on his dresser. I reach for my phone and text him.
I can hear the ding in the bathroom; a moment later, he comes out in a towel, holding up the screen.
Hi.
“Hi,” he says.
“I missed you,” I tell him.
“I was twenty feet away.”
I grab the edge of the towel and pull. “Too far,” I say.
* * *
—
MY BROTHER GETS a day off maybe once a month, so when he asks to meet me for lunch, I immediately say yes. I pack chicken salad sandwiches and meet him in the Public Garden—his only requirement was that we eat somewhere outside. We sit underneath the arms of a gnarled tree, watching the ducks at the water’s edge. “Are ducks the ones that mate for life?” Kieran asks.
“Pretty sure that’s geese,” I tell him.
