by Jodi Picoult
I climb back over the dozing woman and buckle my seatbelt. A hand slips over mine, threading our fingers together. I lean against Wyatt’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of him, touching him just because I can. In spite of all that has happened in the past six weeks—from the days spent trying to repair the sieve of my marriage, to Win’s letter and the trip I made to London; from my last-minute decision to go to Egypt, to reuniting with Wyatt and unearthing the coffin—getting to this point feels both monumental and inevitable.
Wyatt blinks awake and smiles slowly. “Where’d you go?” he asks, his voice still rough with sleep, just as the overhead lights blaze and the cabin comes alive.
* * *
—
I HAD THE second hardest conversation of my life in a tomb in Amarna. After I told Wyatt that Meret was his daughter, he just stared at me, as if he had clearly heard the words wrong. And yet, what had I expected? Learning this after fifteen years? When his first assumption—like Brian’s—was that I had hid this from him?
They had, I realized, this one thing in common.
I filled the stunned silence. I told him about my mother’s stay in hospice. About feeling so overwhelmed and how Brian suddenly appeared. I told him that I slept with Brian because I couldn’t remember what joy felt like, because for one night I needed to be the one taken care of, instead of the caretaker. I told him about the pregnancy. I told him how, a year later, we got married.
I also told him about Gita, and the night of Meret’s birthday, when Brian didn’t come home to celebrate with us. I told him how I had driven away and thought I was leaving for good, but didn’t. I told him about Win and her lost love and how I searched for Thane Bernard and found Wyatt. I told him about the moment Meret came into my bedroom with a DNA test; how all the tumblers clicked into place.
I told him how, at the last minute, I changed my return flight to come to Cairo instead to Boston—because he deserved to know about Meret, now that I did.
When I finished, my shirt was sticking to my back with sweat. There was no air in that tomb. I felt frozen inside, an insect in amber. Finally, Wyatt raised his head. His expression was careful, guarded. “You found out you were pregnant, and it never crossed your mind that it could be mine?”
I didn’t know how to explain to Wyatt the weeks that my mother was dying, the strange elasticity where hours bled into days and nothing felt linear. I didn’t know how to explain how I’d felt torn apart from leaving him, and embarrassed because I’d used Brian to stitch myself back together. That I’d been drowning in a future that was uncertain, and grabbed on to someone solid and strong. That when I got pregnant, I truly thought it was Brian’s baby, Fate pointing a giant neon arrow in one direction.
So I said nothing.
A muscle jumped in Wyatt’s jaw. “Was I that easy to forget?” he asked. “Or were you just selfish as hell?” He brushed past me then, his footsteps echoing as he moved through other chambers of the tomb.
Leaving me. Which, frankly, I deserved.
I sank down beneath the scene of parental grief and cried. Nefertiti and Akhenaton had lost one beloved daughter; I had lost nearly everyone I cared about. I couldn’t even blame Wyatt. Through his eyes, this was stupidity at best and betrayal at worst. Either I had set him out of my mind so quickly fifteen years ago that it seemed our relationship meant nothing; or I had made the calculated decision to hide his own daughter from him. I imagined him walking out of the tomb and giving the keys back to the gaffir. Maybe thousands of years from now, tourists would come to see my dessicated body: Here lies the woman who destroyed her own life.
An hour passed before I heard someone walking back toward the chamber. Wyatt sat down beside me, his shoulders against the rock wall. “When you left home the first time,” he asked, “where were you headed?”
Of all the questions he could have posed, this was the one I had not been expecting. “I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan.” I swallowed hard. “But I think I’ve been running in place for a long time, because I knew if I stopped, I’d wind up wherever you are.”
In this tomb, where time stood still, I waited seconds, weeks, a lifetime, until I felt Wyatt’s hand cover mine where it rested on the dirt. “I lost what I loved once, and I don’t plan to do that again,” he said quietly. “I’d like to meet my daughter.”
* * *
—
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” a voice announces, “we have just been informed by the captain that we’re going to have a planned emergency. Please listen to the flight attendants and follow their directions.”
Wyatt had insisted on getting the first flight out of Cairo, in spite of the fact that he was in the breakthrough stage of an excavation (He’s been dead for four thousand years, Olive, he’s not going anywhere…); although I thought he should sleep on his decision. I believed my anxiety had stemmed from the confrontation that would face us in Boston, which would not be easy, even if it was right. But maybe there had been a sixth sense warning me away from this flight.
Shock rolls through the cabin—but no screams, no loud cries. “We’re crashing,” the woman on the aisle whispers. “Oh my God, we’re crashing.”
Fasten your seatbelts. When you hear the word brace, assume the brace position. After the plane comes to a complete stop you’ll hear Release your seatbelts. Get out. Leave everything behind.
I have heard that when you are about to die, your life flashes before your eyes.
But I do not picture Brian or Meret. I do not envision my mother or Kieran.
Instead, I think of Wyatt, only of Wyatt.
I imagine Wyatt in the middle of the Egyptian desert, the sun beating down on his hat, his neck ringed with dirt from the constant wind, his teeth a flash of lightning. A man who hasn’t been part of my life for fifteen years. A place I left behind.
A dissertation I never finished.
A future we’d never get.
I try to imagine Wyatt and Meret and me, a family. I think about how many people we have wounded, just by falling in love fifteen years ago. I think about the feather of Ma’at, and whether I will pass to the afterlife, given all I’ve done.
I fumble for my phone, thinking to turn it on, to send a message—an apology?—even though I know there is no signal, but I can’t seem to open the button on my pants pocket. Wyatt’s hand catches mine and squeezes.
I look down at our fists, squeezed so tight a secret couldn’t slip between our palms. “Dawn,” Wyatt says, his voice breaking through my panic. “Listen to me. This is not how we die. We’re Orpheus and Eurydice. We’re Romeo and Juliet. Catherine and Heathcliff. Our story doesn’t end before it can even start.”
I wonder if he realizes that none of his examples have happy endings.
Wyatt’s nails dig into my skin. “I love you, Olive. Always have. Always will.”
I want always to be more than the next three minutes.
Brace, the flight attendants yell. Brace!
The plane plunges vertically. Bags fly out of the overhead compartments and the oxygen masks drop on their strings like macabre marionettes. Someone screams, and my head whips around. “Look at me,” Wyatt commands, his words lost in the roar of the plane breaking apart. My world narrows down to those fierce blue eyes, which have criticized me, challenged me, surprised me, seduced me, loved me.
As we fall out of the sky, I wonder who will remember me.
* * *
—
I HAVE SUNK into the lake of fire, between the two routes of the Book of Two Ways. It roars around me, smoke billowing, coating the inside of my mouth and underneath my eyelids, making tears burn down my face. Flames grab at my clothes, my shoulders, my hair. I am shouting but no one can hear me.
Knowledge. I need knowledge. That’s what will get me through the gates, past the demons. They are everywhere—a monster with half its body torn off.
A mangled seat with a man strapped to it, shrieking as the fire consumes his fastened seatbelt. A girl with flame where her braids used to be. Their eyes are as wild as mine, and I try to get past, as I scream for Wyatt.
There are two ways out—land and water. I know this viscerally, as if it’s been stamped into my heart. But I am not going without him.
Wyatt, I yell.
The smoke becomes a beast, clouds rolling into the blackened form of a person, coming for me. I stagger backward. Wyatt! Wyatt!
A flight attendant steps out of the smoke like she’s shedding a second skin. She grabs my arm. You need to come with me. I can read her lips, but there’s no sound.
I don’t need to come anywhere. I wrench away from her and dodge through a hoop of fire and fuselage. As I am running I trip and fall flat onto the soft mattress of a man wearing a white shirt; a man, facedown, with yellow hair. Wyatt.
It takes all my strength to turn him over and I am coughing and my lungs are ribbons and his eyes, his sightless eyes, are staring up at the black sky.
But this man is wearing glasses, and has a mustache. This man is not Wyatt.
I start crying so hard that I can’t get to my feet. A fine mist covers my face and my hair. The water route. I turn toward it and mark the distant glint of fire hoses, magical hydras fighting the breath of dragons.
But it also makes the smoke thicker and viscous until I am breathing soup, and I can’t find my way through. The land route is nothing but an inferno. I’m trapped.
The smoke parts like wood split by an ax and another monster stalks toward me. This one has blood covering its face.
This one is shouting my name.
I get to my feet and he pulls me against him, holds the back of my head with his hands, kisses me like he could gift me the oxygen from his own lungs.
That’s when I can see it: a way out. A next life.
WHEN I OPEN my eyes, everything is white, so white and bright that I wince. There are objects, unmoving, unfocused, surrounded by halos.
The first thing I notice is the pain.
My head is too heavy to move and it has its own pulse. My throat is a ribbon of desert. It takes a Herculean effort to open my eyes.
I can’t be dead if there’s pain, can I? But none of us knows what the afterlife holds. Maybe it’s nothing but pain.
Immediately, as if a blanket has muffled all that light, it isn’t quite so blinding. I let my vision adjust, realizing that a curtain has been yanked across a window. The objects become a chair, a sink, the foot of a hospital bed. Then I hear Brian’s voice. “Better?” he asks.
His hand, warm, enfolds mine. His face rises in my field of vision like a blood moon, familiar, but unexpected.
He smiles down at me, and there are tears in his eyes, and I realize he is having the same trouble finding language that I am.
“You were hurt,” he says finally. “You had to have surgery to relieve the pressure on your brain.”
Gingerly I raise my free hand, feeling the edges of a bandage wrapped around my entire head. I try to stay calm, but inside, I am terrified. My brother has told me about some of the neurosurgery cases he’s seen: Workmen who fall off ladders and never wake up. Award-winning professors who have seizures and cannot remember how to dress themselves. The brain, Kieran says, is a fascinating and frivolous organ. You never know what it’s going to do.
The hammering makes sense now. I try to remember what happened, where I am, where I was.
Wyatt.
Egypt.
The plane crash.
I turn my head to the side and see stars, it hurts that much. I roll my eyes from side to side, searching. But there is only Brian, as if he is true north and I am a compass that needs adjustment.
Did I imagine it all?
Was Egypt and the tomb some fever dream? Was my reunion with Wyatt just a synapse firing beneath the probe of a surgeon?
At that thought, my own eyes swim. I close them, and a tear tracks down my cheek.
“It’s okay,” Brian soothes, gripping my hand more tightly. “It’s going to be okay now. I’ve got you.”
I’ve got you.
My lips press together around the one word that bubbles to the surface. “Meret,” I whisper.
“She’s home. With Kieran. She’s fine.” Brian hesitates. “When I got the call…I thought I should see you first.”
To make sure that I was not hooked up to wires or cut into segments or burned beyond recognition. What happened to me?
I try to remember, but my mind is full of vivid textures: the sting of sand, the corona of the sun, the shimmer of the desert. Pictures that do not match the hospital room, with its blue chair and plastic water pitcher and wide, blind mounted television.
The only thing I can recall, other than Egypt, is Meret’s DNA test. I close my eyes. “Sorry,” I exhale. “So…sorry.”
Brian shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter right now. Let’s just get you well enough to go home.”
Home is such a loaded word. Is it still mine, if the last thing I remember is leaving it?
It hurts to move my head, but it also hurts to think. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe, when I drove away from Brian and Meret, I never got to where I was headed.
That tugs a string of pearls: Thane, England, Win.
Lose.
Can you miss something you never truly had?
Or someone?
That thought hurts even more than my skull.
Brian traces his thumb over the back of my hand lightly and exquisitely, like he is touching a butterfly that might take wing at any moment. “I should get a nurse. Tell someone that you’re awake.” A sob catches in his throat, and he bends over, kissing our joined fingers. “I thought you were gone for good,” he says, his voice breaking.
He said that to me once before, too.
I lift my free hand and slowly touch it to the back of Brian’s head. His hair is soft as down. I run my nails over his scalp, let my palm settle against his cheek. My eyes drift shut, entrusting myself to him, like I always have.
There is a commotion in the hallway, a muffled argument. Then the door bursts open, and one voice rises above the others: “I don’t care if I’m not related to her. You can’t bloody keep me out of there.”
Wyatt pushes his way into the room. He stands, wild-eyed, assessing the bandage around my head and the machines I’m hooked up to and my husband, who has gotten to his feet and is still holding on to my hand.
And me. Awake. Alert.
A smile breaks over his face, and it feels like a sunrise inside me. You’re real, and you’re here, I think, and I know that is exactly what is going through his mind, too.
“Thank God,” he breathes. He takes a step forward. “You’re all right? You’re truly all right? Say something,” he demands.
“Wyatt,” I reply. “This is Brian.”
* * *
—
MY MOTHER USED to say that bad luck came in threes, and as usual, she was right.
The results of the DNA test.
The plane crash from Cairo to Boston.
And my heart. There is no way for me to come out of this without it breaking.
I explain to Brian that I flew from London to Cairo; that I found Wyatt; that I told him about Meret; that we were coming back to her on the plane that crashed. I thought I was fine, because I had walked away from the wreckage. I hadn’t even been checked out by a doctor yet, because Wyatt was the one with a cut on his scalp that wouldn’t stop bleeding. I was asking an airline representative about flights to Boston when the whole room spun. After that, I didn’t remember anything.
I watch the two men take each other’s measure. Neither of them speaks. Then Wyatt holds out his hand to Brian.
Brian stares down at it. “Are you fucking kidd
ing?” he says.
My unlikely savior turns out to be a neurosurgery resident, who comes in to check on me and is delighted to find me conscious. Brian and Wyatt retreat to separate corners of the room while the doctor examines me, shining a light in my eyes and asking me questions and pressing down on my toes to test my central nervous system. He explains that I had an emergency craniotomy, after a CT scan showed an epidural hematoma. Surgeons relieved the pressure by removing the blood between the brain and bone in the epidural space. They drilled a burr hole into my skull, elevated a skull flap, evacuated the clot, refastened the skull with tiny titanium plates, and sutured the scalp. I had youth on my side, and the good fortune to collapse at a Level I trauma center, which meant that I’d had immediate care—all of which boded well for a positive outcome. I’d be monitored for two to three days here in North Carolina, but could do follow-up care at a hospital closer to home.
That word again.
By the time he is finished, I am sitting up, the headache is ebbing, and my voice is stronger.
“All in all,” the resident says, “you have a lot to be thankful for.”
He leaves us in happy oblivion, to write notes on my chart at a nurses’ desk somewhere.
I glance at Brian, and then at Wyatt. I swallow. “Wyatt,” I ask. “Can you give us a minute?”
The stricken look on his face nearly breaks me. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says stubbornly. “Just outside the door.” He narrows his eyes at Brian, as if he does not trust him not to hurt me.
When, clearly, it’s been the other way around.
The door snicks shut behind Wyatt. “Brian,” I begin.
