by Jodi Picoult
“You Americans with your size obsession,” he says. “Compact is fine. I’m not compensating for anything.”
The clerk doesn’t even bat an eye. “If your wife is driving, I need her license, too.”
It’s an assumption, but it stops us cold. “I…I’m not driving,” I stammer. I can’t, not for a couple of weeks, but it’s also easier than saying I’m not his wife. It makes me think of Wyatt bellowing his way into my hospital room, because he wasn’t my next of kin. I’m nothing to him—not legally, not practically, not in the way the world recognizes. This hammers home for me, firmly, the gravity of where we are headed.
“Just me, mate,” Wyatt tells the clerk. He hands off his credit card—miraculously, his wallet also stayed in his pocket during the crash—and wraps his arm around me. “Isn’t Boston all about lobsters?”
“Um, yes?”
“I’d like to have one. They’re not exactly prevalent in Egyptian cuisine.”
I am flooded with gratitude for Wyatt, for making this feel normal, instead of unbearable. For pretending, even if it’s only for the next half hour, that I am not about to pull the thread that completely unravels the life I’ve been wrapped in.
“I can make that happen,” I say.
* * *
—
IT IS JUST after 7:00 P.M. when Wyatt drops me off at my house. We have decided that it’s best I do this first part alone. For a moment, we sit with our hands knotted on the gearshift. “Whatever happens, Olive,” he says, “I don’t blame you. I know full well that I’m not exactly a welcome visitor for anyone in that house.” His voice roughens. “And if she isn’t ready to see me right away, well, I’ve waited fifteen years. I can wait some more.”
I nod and open the passenger door, but he doesn’t let go of my hand. “I can’t help thinking that once you walk through that door, you won’t come back out,” Wyatt says softly. He leans forward and stamps a kiss on my lips like a brand. I get out of the car before I can change my mind and walk up the steps. I hesitate at the door, not sure if I should knock, or just walk in. Wyatt is still waiting at the curb, as if he knows I might turn and take refuge again in his car.
Taking a deep breath, I enter my house.
I hear water running in the sink and follow it to the kitchen. Brian stands with his back to me, rinsing dishes and putting them into the dishwasher. I have a sudden, searing flash of memory: the summer that the dishwasher broke and we didn’t have enough money to pay for a new one, so we’d flip a coin each night to see who got kitchen duty. How, when I lost, he would still come into the kitchen and dry the dishes for me, so I didn’t have to do it all alone.
“I’m back,” I say.
Brian knew I was being discharged, but I hadn’t told him when, exactly, I was arriving back in Boston. He might have assumed I’d want to travel by car, which would take another day. I watch his shoulders square, and then he turns off the faucet and pivots, wiping his hands on a dish towel and seeing me upright and healthy, except for the scar in the shape of a question mark. For one glorious, unexpected moment, joy washes over his face, like gilding on a statue. In one step, he is across the room and I am in his arms and he’s crushing me against him. He leans back, running his hands down my arms as if he needs to convince himself that I am real. But then, the space between us solidifies, pushing back at each of our edges, until we are standing a foot apart and no longer touching.
“The doctors say it’s going to take more than a plane crash to get rid of me,” I say, trying for cheer, and realizing too late that the sentence falls flat.
“Good,” Brian says. “That’s good.”
“I have to get my staples removed in a few days. Kieran can do it.”
He nods. We stare at each other. The room is full of the conversation we are not having. He doesn’t say, Where is Wyatt? I don’t say, What happens next?
“Where’s Meret?” I ask finally.
Brian’s eyes flicker toward the staircase. “In her room.”
Every muscle in me wants to avoid the conversation we have to have, to run to her instead.
“Where is he?” Brian asks.
I drag my gaze to his. “At a hotel,” I say.
Brian’s hands ball into fists at his sides; I watch him force his features smooth again.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I say.
“Doing what?”
“Treating me like I’m made of glass.”
“I’m not treating you like anything.”
“Exactly. Because I almost died. But I didn’t.” I take a step forward. “We have to talk, Brian, as if I wasn’t in a plane crash.”
“If you hadn’t run away you wouldn’t have been in a plane crash,” Brian blurts out. He falls back, as if the force of his anger has shoved him.
His voice is hot and low, a match touching tinder. You asked for this, I remind myself. Before the entire house goes up in flames, I reach for his arm, intending to pull him into the backyard for privacy. But the moment I touch him, he jerks like he’s been burned.
Which, I suppose, he has.
“Let’s not do this where Meret can hear us.”
“Oh,” he says. “So now you’re thinking about her?”
My pulse is so loud in my ears that I am sure he can hear it. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I am so sorry, Brian.”
“For what?” he asks, his voice deceptively soft. “For lying to me? For leaving us after that bomb dropped? Making me pick up the pieces for Meret?” His eyes narrow. “For fucking him?”
I flinch. A memory circles the drain of my mind: me, asking Win if she felt she was cheating on Felix. Win’s response: There are times I wonder if my whole marriage has been me cheating on Thane.
“You left your child behind,” Brian accuses. “You abandoned her, when she’d just found out…” He shakes his head, unable to even mention the DNA test. “Do you know how much she’s cried these past three weeks, thinking she lost a father and a mother? Do you have any idea how selfish that was?”
Later, when I replay this, I will realize it was that last adjective that broke a bridge of clay in me, a structure that had remained standing far longer than it ever should have. “Selfish,” I repeat. “Selfish? Do you know how many people I’ve put in front of myself for the past fifteen years? My mother. My brother. My clients. Meret. You. Even Wyatt. Everyone else’s welfare was more important than mine. I am always the last person I think about. So just for a minute—one minute—I did. I know I didn’t do this the right way, if that even exists. I know I should have told you what I was thinking, where I was going. But I had to go, for my own peace of mind. I couldn’t stay here and pretend everything was fine, like usual, and let this eat away at me, wondering what if. Eventually, there would have been nothing left of me.”
When I finish, I am breathing fast, like I’ve run a marathon to reach this conversation.
Maybe I have.
I realize that this white-hot anger is the most undiluted emotion Brian and I have had between us in a long time. I think he realizes it, too. This time, when our eyes meet, the storm between us is gone. It’s just him and me, like it used to be, standing in puddles of regret. “Why wasn’t it enough?” he asks softly. “Why weren’t we enough?”
“I wanted it to be enough. I went to Cairo because I needed to know if this was all in my imagination. You know. If I’d taken a memory and blown it out of proportion.”
“If you felt disconnected, we could have fixed that. Instead you tried to latch on to something new.”
Something old, I correct silently.
“I thought we were a team,” Brian says. “We made it through the deaths of people we loved. We built careers. We were raising a teenager. I thought I leaned on you and you leaned on me and even if it was lopsided sometimes, it always evened out.”
“I thou
ght that, too,” I confess.
“Then…why?”
I do not have an answer for him—why we are drawn to certain people, why some soothe our angles and edges better than others.
Brian closes his eyes. “I keep thinking: I did this to you.”
I realize when he says this that I have not thought about Gita for a long, long time. I wonder if he turned to her, after he came home from the North Carolina hospital. If he cried in her arms.
If I still have the right to feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach when I think about that. If I ever did.
But then I realize that’s not what he’s talking about. “Every night when you were away, I’d lie awake and hope you were miserable. You lie to me for fifteen years…you screw me over and you screw over our kid…and there’s no punishment?” He swallows. “I feel like I manifested that plane crash.”
He’s wrong. The crash wasn’t retribution, but there is a price I have to pay. No matter how happy I am with Wyatt, that joy is poisoned. It comes at the cost of someone else’s happiness.
Brian reaches out, his hand stopping just short of my shaved scalp. “I wanted you to be hurt. But not this like, Dawn,” he says. “Never like this.”
I am stunned that scientific, methodical Brian could believe, even in passing, that his dark private thoughts had anything to do with an airplane malfunction.
“There’s another universe where I got angry, and you were gone forever. So…I don’t know. Maybe it’s superstitious, but I thought if I didn’t yell anymore, you’d…stay.”
I open my mouth, close it. “I’m sorry,” I finally manage. Again.
Brian’s eyes are dark and soft. They move from my own eyes to the curved scar on my scalp to my lips. “I know,” he says. “I am, too.”
Over his shoulder, through the window, I see a flash of light on the road. I imagine it is Wyatt, driving away.
* * *
—
WHEN I OPEN the door, Meret is sitting on her bed with her laptop open. She sits up, yanking out her earbuds, freezing in place. I move gingerly, the way I would approach a wild animal, and sit down on the edge of the bed.
She throws herself at me.
I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her hair. The reality of leaving her—leaving this—feels like a blow to the head. I’m dizzy, sick with the thought that I may never have had the chance to see who she becomes. I know I am hugging her too fiercely, that she can barely breathe, but I can’t seem to relax my arms. I think of how, when she was a baby, I would lean down and nuzzle her neck, blow a raspberry, make her laugh.
“You always smell like bubble bath,” she whispers.
“I…I do?”
“Last week I was at camp and I came out of a classroom and smelled that same soap and I started looking all over the place because I was sure you were there.” She pulls away from me. “You weren’t.”
I try to imagine her, hope rising like yeast, turning in circles and not being able to find me.
She looks at my head. “Does it hurt?”
“A little.” I touch my scalp tentatively. “Very Frankenstein-chic, right?”
“It’s not funny.” Meret wipes a tear away with the back of her hand. “You could have died.”
“Anyone can,” I say gently. “Anytime.”
“But you didn’t even say goodbye,” she blurts out, and I wonder how I haven’t seen it until this moment: the streaks of self-loathing that paint the walls, the stripes of insecurity woven into the bedding where she nests.
I decide to tell her the truth. “If I did,” I admit, “I wouldn’t have had the courage to go.”
“You mean leave,” Meret corrects bitterly. “Leave me.”
I hesitate. “I had to find someone.”
“My biological father.”
I take a deep breath. “That’s why I was in Egypt. I know that your”—I falter, trying to find the right word—“your other father told you.”
“He’s my only father,” Meret says, loyal. “I don’t even know the other person’s name.”
“I could tell you about him,” I gently offer. “Wyatt.”
She is nearly vibrating with—with what? Fear? Rage? Finally, she glances up again. Permission.
So I bring Wyatt, metaphorically, into this house. I tell her the story of the boy I hated at first sight, with his golden hair and sky eyes and swagger. I tell her about how we both jockeyed to be the best in the department at Yale. I tell her about Wyatt’s upbringing in England and his brother’s death and his title. I tell her about the Dig House and how still the desert is before the sun rises and how we were fighting before we found the dipinto. I tell her that when he kissed me, I realized the reason I’d been pushing him away was because if he came close, I wouldn’t be able to ever separate myself from him.
“I didn’t know about you,” I finish. “I didn’t know I was pregnant when I left Egypt.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Meret scowls. “All the talks about being safe and using protection. The minute I got my period I practically had to wear armor to make sure I didn’t end up like—well, like you.”
“I guess I deserve that.”
“So you dumped him and rebounded with Dad?”
I wince. “I guess I deserve that, too. But it wasn’t a rebound. My life had fallen apart, and Br— your dad helped me put it back together. How couldn’t I have fallen for him?” I take a deep breath. “I’m not expecting you to forgive me. I’m not expecting you to even understand. But what I had with Wyatt—I buried it deep on purpose, because I needed to move forward, not backward. I wanted a life with your dad. I wanted our family. When I looked back at Egypt, all I had were questions, because I didn’t have the luxury of being a scholar anymore. I had to be a sister and a mother. When I looked forward, where your dad was waiting, I saw answers.” I clear my throat. “But the feelings I had for Wyatt, somehow, they got dislodged. And took root. And grew. I could cut them down, Meret. But if I did, I’d always be looking at the spot where they bloomed.”
In a very small, cramped voice, Meret asks, “What about me?”
“What about you.” A smile heats the words. “He wants to meet you.”
Her head snaps up. “Now? Here?” I watch as it all crystallizes for her. “He’s the one who was with you at the hospital.”
“He brought me back to you,” I correct. “He’s at a hotel. It’s up to you, whether or not you want to meet him.”
She pulls at her clothes, billowing her shirt away from her curves, the way I’ve seen her do a thousand times when she’s nervous.
“You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to make him part of your life.”
She looks at me curiously, as if she’s just seeing a piece of me she never noticed before—a crooked finger with a story behind it of how it was broken; a tattoo that was previously hidden under layers of clothes. “So what happens to us? To me and you and Dad?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes flash. “God, can’t you ever stop lying?”
“I’m not lying.”
“Oh, okay. So he’s here to say Hi, daughter, nice to meet you, and then he’s going to leave and go back to Egypt and you’re going to stay here and we all pretend nothing’s changed?”
I don’t know how to respond, because there’s no good answer.
“Yeah,” Meret mutters. “I thought so.”
There’s a moment when, as an adult, you realize that the child you are speaking to is no longer a child. With Kieran, it happened when I had to tell him that our mother was dead. I remember looking into his eyes and seeing a shift in him, a realization that the solid foundation he’d been leaning against had turned to dust and he was falling. For Meret, it’s now. When she was a little girl, I’d told her all the fairy tales about love: how it could wake you
from death, how it could triumph over evil, how it could make the poor rich. But today, I am drawing back the curtain, revealing not just pretty stories but facts: that love can also kill you; that for you to triumph, other people have to be hurt; that the wealth love brings comes at a staggering cost. “I don’t know what will happen with your dad. We have a lot to work out. But I’m also not going to tell you that I don’t want to be with Wyatt. I love him in a way that I never thought I’d love someone.”
Truth vibrates when it’s drawn across the bow of pain; Meret hears that note, and listens intently. “Some people never get to feel that way, much less find someone else they love…and I did love your dad. I do. But the greatest love I’ve ever known is you.” I reach for her hand, and she doesn’t pull away. “I lost Wyatt once, and I survived. I may lose your dad, and I will survive. But you?” In her face, I see my eyes, Wyatt’s jaw, strength from us both. “I wouldn’t survive losing you.”
With a sob, Meret throws herself against me again. I hold her close and stroke her hair, the way I used to when she was tiny and monsters took up residence in her room. They may not have been real, but her fear was, and that was all that mattered. “What if he doesn’t like me?” she asks, and I realize she has made a decision.
I frame her face in my palms. “Baby,” I say. “How couldn’t he?”
* * *
—
I TEXT WYATT. But it doesn’t feel fair to ask him into the house, not with Brian there. So instead, Wyatt parks at the curb and waits on the front porch, sitting on a little wooden swing we bought five years ago that we thought we would use more than we ever did. When I open the door, Meret a step behind me, he stands.
And lights up like a candle.
“Hello,” Wyatt says.
She shifts from one foot to the other. “Hi.”
“Would you, um. Would you care to sit down?”
She doesn’t move, so I put my hand on the small of her back and give her a little push. They sit down together on the swing, boxers in opposite corners, sizing each other up.
