by Jodi Picoult
“Well,” I start. “I’ll just give you two a minute—”
“No,” Meret interrupts, just as Wyatt says, “Please, stay.”
So I lean against the sturdy bones of the house, trying to blend into the shingles.
Wyatt clasps his hands between his knees. Meret folds her arms.
“I hear you’re a scientist.”
“You don’t have to patronize me,” she replies.
“I wasn’t. I just…” He rubs the back of his neck. It is the first time I have ever seen Wyatt in a situation where he isn’t effortlessly comfortable. “Your mother told me a little bit about the camp you went to this summer.”
“I can catch you up on the rest. I’ve always wanted a Bernese mountain dog, I know every word of Hamilton by heart, and I’m terrified to eat fish with bones in it. I can’t cook but I can make nutrient agar. Oh,” she says, too sweetly. “And I’m a Taurus.”
He bursts out laughing. “Well. I can certainly see the resemblance.”
“There’s a DNA test for that, if you want proof.”
To Wyatt’s credit, he doesn’t look to me for help. “I don’t need to see the results.” He keeps his gaze solely on Meret, who isn’t giving an inch. “Look, you should know that…I’m glad. I don’t know how, but I’d like to try to be your father.”
I flinch, because I know that’s exactly what Meret did not want to hear.
“Thanks, but I have one of those,” she says. “You’re just genetic material.”
“Dashing and preternaturally brilliant genetic material, I hope,” he jokes.
“I wouldn’t know,” Meret replies. “We don’t seem to have a lot in common.”
“But that’s where you’re wrong.” He looks up and grins. “We both love your mother.”
Meret’s lips are pressed tightly together.
“And,” Wyatt adds, “I, too, know all the words to Hamilton.”
Meret’s eyes widen. “You do?”
“No. But I can stumble admirably through the first song.” He sobers. “I know you didn’t ask for any of this. I know it must feel like the carpet’s been ripped out from beneath you. Something else I believe we have in common. I also know it would be demeaning to you for me to assume that I could enter your life and be treated as anyone more important to you than a stranger on the street. I have no misconceptions that you think of me as a friend. But I’d like to hope that you’d give me the chance to become one.”
He fumbles in his pocket for his phone. “Oh, and there’s this,” he says.
He scrolls to a photo that has the chromatic richness of old Kodak prints. In it is a boy, with Wyatt’s telltale golden hair and wry smile, sitting beside a Bernese mountain dog on the steps of a stone building.
He means to show her a childhood pet, but both Meret and I are staring at the image of a young Wyatt—a boy who was chubby, husky, with round cheeks and the hint of a double chin.
“I don’t know if a passion for dog breeds is genetic, but—”
“You don’t look like that now,” Meret says, taking the phone from his hand.
He glances at the photo. “No.” Wyatt shrugs. “I suppose not. I was always big for my age, or at least that’s what they called it back then, to be polite. When it became clear that I couldn’t play rugby for shite I had to find a way to hide from the coach. He never went to the library on the school campus—I’m pretty sure he never read a book in his life. But I did. About pyramids and mummies and pharaonic dynasties.”
I stare at him. For all that I always imagined Wyatt to be perfect, there was a time when he felt he wasn’t.
I watch Meret touch her finger to the picture, enlarging it, as if she has to see it better to believe it. She sucks in her breath, and I can see all the answers falling into place: finally. This is where I came from.
“People change,” Wyatt says quietly. He looks at me, still speaking to Meret. “You may not think so right now, but sometimes it’s good to remember who you used to be.”
I feel my eyes sting. With one photograph, Wyatt has not only given Meret a sense of history, he’s also absolved me.
Meret hands him back his phone. “I loved that dog,” Wyatt muses. “I wanted to name him Narmer, after the first king to unify Egypt. But he was my brother’s pet, technically. So his name was Bailey.” His mouth twists. “How pedestrian.”
“Do you ever listen to podcasts?” Meret asks. An olive branch.
“No.”
“There’s one called The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. It’s awesome. There’s an episode about how hair goes white overnight and deer that eat humans and death by molasses. One time they talked about monks who turn themselves into mummies,” she says. “I could send you a link.”
Wyatt nods gravely. “I would very much like that.”
A smile transforms Meret’s face. “I just started playing tennis. The coach says I’m a natural.”
“I’ll bet you are. I was the highest ranked singles player at boarding school when I was your age.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” He hesitates. “I haven’t played in a while. Maybe you could show me a few tricks, one day.”
“Maybe,” she says. “One day.”
I watch them for a little while, trading conversation as if it is a checkers game, one red piece taking one black one and vice versa, until each holds the full measure of the other’s color. An hour passes, and then another. I wonder what Brian is doing. If he is sitting somewhere in his own house, wondering how a stranger might be stealing his daughter’s allegiance.
As if I have conjured him, the door opens, and Brian steps outside. Wyatt immediately stands. I realize that where I am sitting, with my back against the porch wall, I am equidistant between them.
Brian stares at him, his jaw locked. Wyatt doesn’t blink under his regard.
It’s like a pissing contest. Even Meret can’t stop looking from one man to the other.
“It’s getting late,” Brian says to Meret. “You’ll never wake up in the morning.”
She rises from the swing. “I hope we can pick up where we left off,” Wyatt says. I can see her struggling to figure out what to do: shake his hand? Hug him? Neither?
He steps off the porch, off Brian’s property, saving her from making the decision. “Well,” Wyatt says awkwardly. “Good night.”
I take a step toward Wyatt, but Meret grabs my wrist before I can join him. “You’re not leaving again, are you?”
Brian and I have not talked about it: where I will stay, if I will stay. But Meret’s face is so guileless, so fragile. I have just come back to her; how could I leave again?
“No,” I say, as if I never intended anything but this. “Of course not.”
At this, Brian turns and walks into the house. Meret waves to Wyatt, and follows. “Come say good night,” she tells me.
Wyatt stands underneath the field of stars. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I…”
“I know. I get it.” He takes the rental car keys from his pocket and flips them in the air. “Meret needs you tonight more than I do,” Wyatt reasons. “I’m willing to share.”
“You’re terrible at sharing.”
“Okay, that’s true,” Wyatt admits. “I’m willing to share this once. But I’ll be camped out at the curb at first light.”
He starts down the driveway, but turns around.
“She’s remarkable,” Wyatt murmurs, a grin playing over his mouth.
“I told you so.”
“You’ve been dying to say that to me, haven’t you?” He laughs.
I watch the taillights of the rental car disappear down our road, and then turn to the house where I’ve lived for fifteen years. I know every loose plank in the floor and where there is water damage to the ceiling and which rooms have the newest coats of pai
nt, but tonight, it seems unfamiliar. A mausoleum, a crypt.
I find Brian making up the bed in my office. “You…you don’t have to do that,” I say.
He turns around, his cheeks reddening. “I figured you’d want to…I didn’t think…”
Now my face is burning. “I mean, yes. But. I can do it. You can…you can just leave everything.”
He sets the quilt and pillows down on top of the sheet he’s already tucked around the sofa cushions. He’s a foot away from me, and I suddenly remember being on the honeymoon we took with an infant Meret and my brother, to Miami. Kieran had spied a red-spotted newt that darted underneath a hedge before he could get a good look. Brian had spent a half hour laying a minute trail of crumbs and sugar, waiting for the little lizard to inch into the sunlight again.
The difference between him and Wyatt, I realize, is that Wyatt will dig till he finds something. Brian will wait until it comes to him.
“I’m going to say good night to Meret,” I tell him.
“I’ll leave my door open so I can hear you,” Brian replies, just before I cross the threshold. “If you need anything in the middle of the night, just call.”
Wyatt and a nursing staff have been monitoring me at night; this will be my first stretch alone. Brian realized that, even if I didn’t.
I know, without him saying it, that he will wake up like he used to when Meret was little and wheezing with the croup. That he will tiptoe down the hallway, and listen for my even breathing.
* * *
—
IN MERET’S BEDROOM, I lie down on top of the covers beside her, the way I did when she was tiny. Moments before she tumbles into sleep, her voice curls like smoke over her shoulder. “It’s just like it used to be,” she murmurs.
But it isn’t.
When I slip away, the door of the master bedroom is ajar and the lights are off. I go into my office and lie down on the couch. I stare at the ceiling, but I toss and turn, unable to grab sleep every time it darts within reach.
Finally I give up and reach for my phone and FaceTime Wyatt. He looks like he’s been in a deep sleep when his features swim into view. “Dawn? Is everything all right?”
Too late, I realize that when the phone rings this late, it is usually bad news.
“I’m fine,” I say immediately. “How did you know it was me?”
“Who else knows I’m in America?”
I crawl into bed and tuck him into the space beside me.
“So,” Wyatt murmurs. “Are you checking up on me? Making sure I didn’t bring any other nascent Egyptologists back to my room?”
“I just missed you.”
“I wish you were here,” he says, his voice soft.
“I wish I were, too.”
“Why do you look like you’re on the verge of tears?”
Because, I realize, getting what you want isn’t instant gratification. It’s a slow pulling apart, a realignment of bones and sinew. There are aches involved. There is bruising.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t sleep.”
“You can’t sleep without me,” he corrects, so cocky that it makes me smile.
Suddenly I feel guilty, dragging him into my insomnia. “You were tired, and I woke you up. I’m a terrible girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend,” he muses. “Is that what you are?”
Given that he still technically has a fiancée and I still have a husband, I don’t know what else I could be. I feel like I am in seventh grade again, whispering to my crush. I feel my heart hammering, while I try to figure out how to respond. “Co-parent?”
“So clinical.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“Are you.” Wyatt’s voice licks the inside of my ear. “How about my other half, then. My heart. My love.”
I fall back against the pillows, filled with stars. “Those work,” I manage.
“Good. Now, may I go back to sleep if I promise to dream about you?”
“I suppose,” I say, grinning. “Good night.”
“Olive,” he sighs. “You have to hang up.”
“You first.”
“Count of three?”
“One,” I say.
“Two,” he whispers.
I disconnect the call. I feel so buoyant I am barely touching the mattress. I close my eyes, but after a few more minutes, I give up and pad downstairs to the kitchen.
Suddenly I’m grounded again. Brian sits in a small pool of light cast by the hood of the stove. In front of him is a bottle of whiskey. He turns when I stop a few feet away from him, looking at me as if my appearance is inevitable. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his hair is spiky with sleep, or lack thereof. He stands up, immediately alert. “Are you all right? Does something hurt?”
Everything, I think. Just not the way you imagine.
“I’m fine. I just wanted some water.”
As I run the faucet and fill a glass, I hear Brian sink back down at the kitchen table. I turn around and stare at him. “You don’t drink,” I say.
He lifts his glass and drains it. “There’s a lot of stuff I never did before that I’m doing now.”
It is so strange to be here in our kitchen, to see him in the flannel robe I bought him two Christmases ago, to know what it is to be held by him and how our bodies fit together and to think I will likely never do that again. I will never kiss him, I will never taste the salt on his skin, I will never pull his hips to mine.
We’ve sat here dozens of times before in the middle of the night—celebrating a promotion of Brian’s, talking about a client of mine, worrying about a fever Meret has, crunching numbers for a monthly budget. This is familiar ground, and also completely unfamiliar.
How do you undo intimacy? How do you go back to being acquaintances, when the other person knows every inch and groove of you, every irrational fear, every trigger?
He turns, his eyes tracking me. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out. Why were you so mad at me for what happened with Gita?”
Her name, inconceivably, still shivers through me. “I don’t know. Maybe because a part of me felt like I’d given up Wyatt years ago, and it wasn’t fair that you’d get to think about someone else.” I hesitate. “Maybe because you stopped short of…cheating. And I don’t know if I could have.”
At my confession, a shocked laugh bursts out of Brian. “Wow,” he breathes. “Okay.”
We sit in the silence for so long that it presses against my eardrums. “I know it’s not worth much, but I’ll always love you.”
“Just not enough,” he murmurs, and I flinch. When he looks up at me, though, it is with kindness. “You should sleep. One of us should, anyway.”
I nod, setting my glass in the sink.
“I know it’s stupid, but the house feels different with you here. More…right.”
When I turn around again, his hands are curled around his whiskey glass. “It’s not stupid,” I say quietly, and I leave him sitting in the near dark.
* * *
—
I AM SWIMMING in flames. Ash sits on my tongue, my eyelashes, my skin. I roll to my side and see a dragon made of smoke, fire belching from its jaws. I turn the other way, and stare into sightless eyes.
I stagger to my feet, trying to find my voice, but it’s muffled by the cries of others. I am walking on cobblestones made of the dead. I need to find him. I need to find him.
The soles of my feet are bare and pressed to glowing coals. I look down, squinting through a blizzard of cinders, and see a faint line. One blue. And beside it, one black.
I start moving.
Demons scream to me. One in the shape of a child without a face. One is a woman broken over a metal spike, her arms and legs still wheeling. I keep my eyes on my feet, shuffling one foot in front of the other, each ankl
e rocking on two syllables: Wyatt. Wyatt.
In front of me is an inferno. Behind me is an angry ocean. I am supposed to know the answer to something but I cannot remember it.
A monster rears up in my face, bloody and clutching me.
But this one is shouting to me. Dawn! Dawn.
I choke on his name.
“Dawn!”
My eyes open on a gasp. I am sweaty and trembling in Brian’s arms. “You were having a nightmare,” he says. His hand skates down my spine. He seems to realize that he is sitting on the edge of the sofa and that I am wearing a T-shirt and underwear, and he lets go of me as if I really am on fire.
I can still feel the shape of his hands on my skin. “You’re okay,” he whispers, and I believe him.
* * *
—
WHAT SURPRISES ME is how slow the break is. Not a clean cut, not a guillotine, but tugging and pulling and dislocation. So much has to happen before that final separation. I realize that, partly, this is because neither Brian nor Wyatt will force my hand. I can envision my future, but it’s superimposed on my past. When I am with Wyatt, it feels like seeing the world for the first time, in colors so rich they don’t have names. When I am with Meret and Brian, it feels like sifting through every treasured tapestry of memory. Who could ever choose one at the expense of the other?
The day after I get home, Kieran bullies me into going to the hospital for a CT scan to be read by his supervising doctor, the best neurosurgeon in Boston. Although I haven’t had any pain or complications, I know he will not trust my health until he sees me with his own eyes.
Wyatt takes me to the appointment and goes to the cafeteria to get us coffee while I’m in the waiting room. I am skimming an old magazine when my brother comes through the door, still wearing his scrubs from surgery.
He catches me up in a tight embrace. “Goddammit, Dawn,” he murmurs. “You don’t get to leave me like everyone else did.”
“Doing my best not to,” I say. I close my eyes, clutching him. I have been with my brother in Boston for fifteen years. I have been so busy thinking about Meret in this messy equation I have completely forgotten that if I go to Egypt with Wyatt, I’ll be leaving Kieran, too.
