by Jodi Picoult
It’s why I can’t stay here.
The most difficult job I have ever had as a death doula was also the shortest. I was hired by a couple who knew that they were having a baby that would be born without a brain. You would think this was a fresh level of hell—having to carry to term a fetus that wasn’t going to survive. But in this case, you’d be wrong. The mom used to love her OB visits, because hearing that heartbeat was the time she got to spend with her daughter. She said that when she had to get up at 2:00 A.M. to pee, she pretended those were her daughter’s ornery teenage years—she was just living through them now.
I told this couple that I didn’t want their birth plan—I wanted their life plan. If the baby survived five minutes, what was most important? Who would be in the delivery room? If the baby survived five hours, who could visit? If the baby survived five days, would they want to bring her home?
They said they wanted to celebrate every major holiday, in the time they had. They wanted her first year, in a matter of moments. So I hired a photographer. We took pictures of the baby in a Santa onesie, and with a Baby New Year sash, and with a little paper Valentine’s heart. We knew when her grandparents could hold her, what music they wanted playing, when their priest should come in to administer last rites. The baby’s name was Felicity. She lived for thirty-seven minutes.
I have told this story to many people who ask me how I can possibly work with those who are dying. There is beauty and grace at the end, I tell them, even for babies like Felicity. She never experienced war, heartbreak, or pain. She never struggled to make ends meet. She didn’t get bullied in school or find out she had been passed over for a promotion or get left at the altar. She knew nothing in her short life but love.
I don’t know why, when it comes to death, we say we lost someone. They’re not missing or misplaced. They’re whisked away from the tightest embrace.
In a world where some parents don’t get the choice to keep their children close, I can’t leave mine just so I can have a second chance with Wyatt.
I turn around, knowing that he is waiting. “You know what’s the hardest part of watching someone die? The people who are left behind.”
“That’s why you should stay, Olive,” Wyatt interrupts. “I love you.”
“I know.” All these years, and here I am repeating myself. Tears stream down my face. “But you’re not the only one I love. Even if I could leave him…I couldn’t leave her.”
“Your daughter.”
“Yes. Meret.” I take a deep breath. “After Meretseger.”
Wyatt is one of the few people I don’t have to explain this to. The cobra-headed goddess of the peak, she was associated with the mountain above the Valley of Kings. The name means She Who Loves Silence, and she was worshipped by the workers from Deir el-Medina who built the royal tombs. She would blind or strike down those who stole or committed a crime, but she could also be merciful.
It had been hard to find an Ancient Egyptian deity who had, at her heart, forgiveness. “People screw up,” I tell Wyatt. “We make mistakes and bad decisions and piss off the people we care about, and if we’re lucky, a goddess like Meretseger takes pity on us.” I meet his gaze, and finally say what I came all this way to say. “That’s why I named our daughter after her.”
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, when I had left Egypt during the neshni, when the roads had flooded and Wyatt drove me to the airport in Cairo, I felt sick. Once or twice I even thought I’d have to ask him to pull over. Now, looking back, I know it wasn’t anxiety.
Wyatt and I had used condoms with the exception of that first night, so what were the odds?
The same odds, I supposed, as those of finding a painted rock inscription in the middle of a desert.
The same odds as those of falling in love with the person you thought you hated.
The same odds as those of finding a soul mate.
I think of the Coffin Texts, Spell 148: Lightning flashes; the gods become afraid. Isis awakens being pregnant.
A spark in the sky, another neshni, another child. It was that simple, and that unexpected.
I am sitting in the bathroom on the closed toilet seat, trying to keep myself from flying apart, when Brian finally comes in. He is not the man who begged me to stay just an hour ago. He is hard, his eyes flat and empty. “Meret’s asleep,” he says. “I managed to find her three studies on the Internet that showed flawed DNA test results due to foreign bodies in the sample.”
I try to nod, but I can’t even do that. I think that if I move an inch, I’m going to shatter. Brian leans against the vanity, the marble surface that has my face lotion and his shaving cream on it, side by side, as if it were that easy. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks finally.
“I didn’t know.”
It is the truth, although now, I wonder if I was just trying to convince myself on some subconscious level. By the time I found out I was pregnant, I’d already lost my mother. I’d had what I thought was a period. I’ve always been irregular, and time had warped in hospice, so my last moments with Wyatt seemed months earlier, rather than weeks. Now, though, I remember how Meret was born two weeks before her due date, as the nurse reassured me she looked just as robust as any full-term baby. I remember holding her, staring at the curve of her ear, and thinking of the shape of Wyatt’s. But then, there was Brian, rocking Meret when she had colic. There was Brian, tossing her in the air until she squealed with delight. There was Brian, teaching her how to jump in from the side of a pool. Eventually, I stopped looking for my past in my future.
Maybe I’d been blind. Or maybe I’d just wanted to be.
“I didn’t know,” I repeat, tears sliding down my face. “I didn’t know.”
Brian’s jaw is so tight that it distorts his face. I barely recognize him. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t actually believe you,” he says. “Can I ask you just one question? Did you pick me as an easy target?”
“No. I fell in love with you.”
He shakes his head. “Guys like me, we live in our grandparents’ basements and collect comic books and eat leftovers for breakfast. We might meet girls who are smart and funny and pretty, girls who don’t have to coach themselves on conversation topics before they walk into a room, girls who see us as more than science nerds—but we never take them home. And we never, ever get lucky enough to marry them.” He looks at me, so cold I shiver. “I should have known.”
“Brian, I swear to you. I didn’t know Meret wasn’t yours.”
“She’s mine, goddammit,” he snarls. “In every way that counts.”
I nod, swallowing. “Yes. Of course.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “So now what do we do?”
“We?” Brian says. “I don’t even know who you are.”
He walks out of the bathroom. I follow him, but at Meret’s door he gives me a look over his shoulder that stops me. I watch him slip inside to spend the night watching over her.
She’s in the best hands, I realize. Far better than mine.
Brian may not know who I am, but I do. I’m a coward.
Which is why I take the overnight bag I was packing before my world fell apart, and slip out of the house.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS ago when I left, I hadn’t been the one at fault. After Brian had missed Meret’s birthday dinner, when he came home swollen with an apology about Gita, I got in my car and started driving.
He’d texted. Please, Dawn, I’m sorry.
Let’s talk.
I made a mistake.
I’m getting worried.
I had watched the messages rise on the GPS screen, ignoring each one.
Until one came in from Meret, who had been in her room as her father and I argued. She knew nothing about Gita; she—I thought at the time—did not realize that I’d even left the house.
Come say good nigh
t?
So less than an hour after I walked out of my house I walked back into it, and Brian apologized. He approached the way you would a feral animal, or someone whose world has gone to pieces around her. He said he thought I was gone forever. I went up to Meret’s room, tucked her in, and pretended I’d never left.
But I had.
All these weeks, I have not told Brian where I was driving to, when I was interrupted by Meret.
The airport.
All these weeks, I have not told Brian why I left. He assumes it is because after he told me about Gita, I was shocked.
I was. But not at Brian.
When he confessed, when he waited for my fury or my absolution or something in between…I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel hurt.
I didn’t feel much of anything.
And that scared the hell out of me—more than infidelity; more than realizing that I might have mistaken comfort for love. So I did what I’ve always done, when nothing makes sense: I ran. Had Meret not texted, had the universe not intervened—I would have gotten on a plane.
Three weeks ago, I thought I was running away from Brian.
But maybe, without even knowing it, I’d been running to someone else.
* * *
—
WHEN I ARRIVE in England, I have lost the entire day. I boarded the flight in the early morning, and by the time I land in London, the sun is just setting, and there is a stream of traffic on the road, people heading home from their workday. The zoom of headlights becomes a glowing snake, like when Meret would wave a sparkler around in the dark, and I tracked her by the firefly trail she left behind.
Meret.
The bus drops me off in the center of Richmond. I have Thane Bernard’s address, thanks to the Internet search company, but I’ve realized too late that I do not have international service on my cellphone. So I stop at a pub, where a group of men and women who look like office mates are drinking pints and playing a trivia game on the television behind the bar. There, I order an ale and a meat pie, and I ask for directions.
I feel like I have jumped timelines. Like this version of Dawn is one who might be friends with the raucous crowd next to me, trying to remember the names of the characters on Three’s Company. Like I might have moved here after grad school and taught at Cambridge. Except that this other me wouldn’t be sitting on a pub stool feeling a hole where her moral core used to be.
“Another, luv?” the bartender asks, nodding at my empty glass.
I could sit here all night and delay the inevitable. But I have a flight back to Boston tomorrow morning, when I have to learn how to be brave, how to face the mess I’ve made.
I walk along the bank of the Thames and through a beautiful park where joggers rush past me, lost in their own music. I stop and pet a dog wearing a bandanna with the British flag on it. At last I find myself in front of the townhouse of Thane Bernard.
It is red brick, with an intricate black Victorian gate. I crane my neck, trying to see all the way up to the third story. It is narrow, rooms built in layers rather than sprawled. Several of the windows spill soft yellow light, like cat’s eyes.
“Win,” I whisper, “this is for you.”
A letter can be a beginning, or so I try to convince myself. In Egypt there are multiple origin myths, and in the Memphite one, Ptah speaks creation, and the hieroglyphs become the world.
I take the scroll from my backpack and open the gate, walking up to the small stoop. There is no mailbox, just a little slit in the door. Before I can slide the scroll through the slot, a movement catches my eye. In the wide double window to the right of the door a woman is carrying a roast chicken on a platter. She sets it on the dining room table.
This, then, would be Win’s other timeline. She might be here, cooking dinner. Calling everyone down for the meal. Healthy. Alive.
The woman is pretty. Taller than Win but less willowy; she has strong shoulders and sound hips and curves. As I watch, a teenage boy skids in, grabs a chicken leg off the plate, and starts eating it. I see her scold him, but he just grins and sits down at the table. A girl follows him, a few years younger, typing on her phone as she slumps down at her seat.
“Can I help you?”
I whirl around to find myself staring at Thane Bernard. He is lanky and lean, wearing the bright spandex of an avid cyclist. He carries a helmet in one hand, and smooths the other over his sweating, bald head. He has a slight accent, the h in help rising like a helium balloon. I try to take a mental snapshot, so that I can tell Win, and then I remember that she may no longer be alive.
For the first time I wonder if it is fair for Win to make dissatisfaction contagious. I had been thinking so much about allowing her to come full circle that I didn’t realize I might be breaking the smooth track of someone else’s life.
“I…I think I have the wrong address,” I sputter, and I push past him back through the gate. I walk without turning around, my heart racing.
Four blocks away, I stop rushing. I sit on the curb and draw deep drafts of air into my lungs. The stars squint, shaming me.
I can’t do it.
I can’t break up two families in less than twenty-four hours.
I walk past the Victorian gate again, hidden in the folds of the darkness. Thane Bernard and his family are deep in a conversation I cannot hear, amidst the ruins of a picked-over chicken and a scraped plate of mashed potatoes.
This story, anyway, is not mine to finish.
* * *
—
I DON’T BOTHER to get a hotel. I take a bus back to Heathrow and stand in front of the giant boards of the British Airways international departures area, trying to figure out where to check in for Boston. I inch forward with my passport in hand, until I am the next in line. The woman in front of me is wearing the sort of sleek white suit I always wish I traveled in, instead of a T-shirt and cargo pants. “Where are you heading today, madam?” the desk agent asks, in her plummy British accent.
“Cairo,” she answers.
The agent scans her passport, types into the computer terminal, checks her two matching pieces of luggage. Then she hands the woman a pass. “That flight’s boarding in thirty minutes.”
The woman moves into the throng headed through security.
“Next?” the gate agent calls, and I step forward. I hand her my passport, and she enters my name on her keyboard. “Ms. Edelstein. You’re going to Boston?”
My fingers tighten on the strap of my backpack. “Is it possible to change my ticket?”
* * *
—
MY MOTHER, WHO lived and died by superstitions, used to make us say together before we went on a trip: We’re not going anywhere. It was meant to trick the Devil. I can’t say I believe in that kind of thing, but then again, I didn’t say it before I left home, and look at where that got me.
Walking outside of the airport in Cairo in August feels like stepping onto the surface of the sun. Even late at night, the heat is a knife on your skin and comes in pressing waves. I can already feel a line of sweat running down my spine; I didn’t come prepared for this. I find myself in the middle of other people’s transitions: a rumpled, dazed group of tourists being herded into their minivan; a teen dragging duct-taped luggage from the back of an open cart to the curb; a woman securing her head scarf as it blows in the breeze.
Suddenly I am surrounded by men. “Taxi?” they bark. “You need taxi?”
There’s no hiding the fact that I’m a Westerner; it’s clear from my red hair to my cargo pants and sneakers. I nod, making eye contact with one of them, a driver with a thick mustache and a long-sleeved striped shirt. The other taxi drivers fall back, seagulls in search of another crumb.
“You have suitcase?”
I shake my head. Everything I have is in the small bag I carry over my shoulder.
�
�American?” the man replies, and I nod. A wide, white grin splits his face. “Welcome to Alaska!”
* * *
—
PLANES AND TRAINS and taxis. It takes me a few hours to get to Middle Egypt. As the driver turns south, bringing me back to Deir el-Bersha, I glance out the window again, struck by the beauty of the sky yawning over the desert. It’s blue and pink and orange, the stripes of a day that’s only beginning. A star winks at me for a moment before it’s swallowed by the sun.
Sothis. Sirius. The star that heralds the inundation festival at the beginning of Akhet, the season of lush crops and rebirth. In ancient times, it would have happened in July. But after so many years of the earth shifting slowly on its axis, the star now rises one morning in early August.
Today, in fact. And it would have looked exactly the same thousands of years ago when the Nile flooded and Ancient Egyptians gathered and celebrated, and one left behind a dipinto painted onto a protected rock face that, thousands of years later, was found by two graduate students.
I stare at the spot where the star has already vanished, a freckle in the rosy cheek of the horizon.
Just like the Ancient Egyptians, I see it as a sign.
MY CALENDAR IS full of dead people.
When my phone alarm chimes, I fish it out from the pocket of my cargo pants. I’ve forgotten, with the time change, to turn off the reminder. I’m still groggy with sleep, but I open the date and read the names: Iris Vale. Eun Ae Kim. Alan Rosenfeldt. Marlon Jensen.
I close my eyes, and do what I do every day at this moment: I remember them.
At one point, they were my clients. Now, they’re my stories to keep.
I wonder if Win is gone by now. I wonder where I will type her name into my calendar.
Everyone in my row is asleep. I slip my phone back into my pocket and carefully crawl over the woman to my right without disturbing her—air traveler’s yoga—to make my way to the bathroom in the rear of the plane. There I blow my nose and look in the mirror. I grab a handful of tissues and open the door, intent on heading back to my seat, but the little galley area is packed with flight attendants. “Ma’am,” one of them says, “could you please take your seat?”
