by Holly Rayner
She had a deadline, if she was to finish this year, but she was running out of time. Already, the undergrads were getting into crunch time on their classes and heading for exams, and the other postgrads were worrying about editing and final dissertation organization. The air was a mix of the excitement of spring and the desperation of approaching deadlines.
Lucie wanted to finish her essay. She needed to. Not just because of her own inner need to achieve, but also because, having tasted the life of exploration that would hopefully come after it, she felt like another year spent arguing with herself over the proper placement of paragraphs would kill her.
Then there was the fact that, as soon as she finished her dissertation and went through her dissertation defense, she would be done with Al-Brehoni for good. If she wanted to, she could just step away from having anything more to do with the country. If she did so, she thought, maybe she would stand a chance of forgetting about what had happened that magical and ill-fated night.
In her quest to be free of Al-Brehoni and its king, Lucie had to sift through a constant barrage of reminders of the man she was trying desperately to forget. Every time she wrote the words “Al-Brehoni”, she found it got a little harder to accept what had happened there.
And, quite besides that, Lucie also knew that her dissertation was in trouble.
Now that Al-Brehoni was open to new work, and even had an active dig site in the very place she was asserting was once a central hub of pottery creation, well, she had no excuse. She had to have a thorough investigation of the quarters of the ancient town her study was focused on. Without that, all her theories meant nothing.
She had begun to have nightmares in which she finished her dissertation, and was standing in front of the panel. Everything was going well until the end, when they hit her with one simple question:
“And why didn’t you go and see?”
And the worst part of it all was knowing that she was going to have exactly what she needed, right up until the moment when the sandstorm sauntered through and effectively destroyed her dissertation.
In the end, she had to face one simple fact: she had to return to Al-Brehoni.
Aside from the fact that Lucie would have preferred to stay as far away from there as possible, there was one major problem with this: money. While Harvard had been quite willing to sponsor them to begin with, her and Zach’s initial trip to the Middle East had emptied out the funding set aside for them. And appealing to the Al-Brehoni Research Assistance Fund for another chance was unthinkable, given whose ears that request would inevitably reach.
But as she thought about her time in Al-Brehoni, and all the little annoyances and victories, the answer came to her.
She had to talk to Zach.
His parents had the resources, and would likely be willing to shell out if it meant that their son would finally make some progress towards completing his PhD. And he would be able to convince them, she knew, if he tried. For all she found him distasteful, she knew that he only got that way through always being given what he wanted. And, at the moment, she could use that to her advantage.
But when she went to talk to him, he laughed in her face.
“What I’m proposing helps both of us,” she insisted, trying to get through to him.
But he didn’t seem to care. She knew his ill-formed mess of a dissertation well enough to know that the sandstorm had ruined his work as much as it had her own, but he held her greater zest for completion over her head.
He made her ask again. He made her suffer the indignity of his laughter, again. And then, he made her beg.
It felt like, with every word, Lucie was going further in debt to him. She was very careful never to imply in the slightest that she would be personally indebted to him, although she could tell he was trying his best to spin it that way.
In the end, the only way she would be able to get him to agree to go along with the plan and beg his parents to use part of their funding to send the two of them back for a return visit was if she also put in all she could afford.
He asked her what she had in savings, and, foolishly, she told him.
He insisted that she spend every cent.
By the time all was said and done, Zach had convinced his parents, and they had made arrangements to go back to Al-Brehoni in a week’s time, Lucie was broke, exhausted, and felt emotionally compromised.
This was how PhD candidates were supposed to feel when they were finishing up their dissertations, she just kept thinking to herself. This was what the horror stories were all about. She was normal, and everything was fine. Everything was going to be fine. She’d solved her problem, and all that was left was to stay the course, keep her head down in Al-Brehoni and soon she would be free.
But even as she tried to calm her nerves for the upcoming trip, she felt that something was different.
She was used to stress, and a life in academia had made her more than capable of managing it. She knew the signs when she was loading herself with too much, and she followed them.
But this time, her normal strategies didn’t work. No matter how much she tried to use her most effective relaxation techniques, and how much time and space she gave herself to recover, it didn’t get better. She still felt off.
It was like her body was rebelling against her. She was constantly tired in a way she never was. She’d always been good for a final push through to finish whatever work needed to be done. Year after year she had always made it through without ever feeling like this.
Still, she tried to push it aside, and it wasn’t until she was in the cab on the way to Logan International to catch the flight back to the place she’d been trying so hard to forget that she began to really think about her symptoms.
Nausea. Exhaustion. That was the beginning of it. She tried to avoid confirmation bias, but once the thought entered her mind, she found she couldn’t let it go. She ran through the other symptoms in her mind, and realized that she had, in the last few weeks, exhibited nearly all of them.
She gasped out loud in the back of the car, waving off questions from the cabbie as he pulled up to the airport and she paid the fare.
Walking into the terminal, she checked her luggage and was relieved that she didn’t see Zach anywhere; she had a mission to accomplish before she could get on board.
She thanked her lucky stars that the airport pharmacy stocked pregnancy tests, nestled on crowded shelves between earplugs and cold medicines. She bought two and rushed to the bathroom, taking up a family stall. She needed privacy for what she was about to do.
She took the test and waited, staring dolefully at her phone as the timer counted down.
When it was finally time to look, she hesitated.
The next few seconds would determine her future. And as much as she had felt like her life had been on hold while she was doing her PhD, the idea of her future coming to meet her so quickly was suddenly terrifying.
“Get it together, Lucie,” she whispered over the muffled sounds of announcements in the terminal outside.
She took a deep breath and she looked.
Two lines. Pregnant.
She did the other test, but she knew it would make no difference. At this point, she was just being thorough to try and stave off the part of her brain that was panicking. What was done was done.
She would never be free of Al-Brehoni. She would never be free of the Sheikh.
She wanted to cry. If she could just release it, it would be easier. But there, in family bathroom at the airport, she had too much at stake. There was too much she had to do. So, instead, she threw the tests away, composed herself, and headed towards her gate.
She was pregnant, broke, with a PhD dissertation that was hanging by a thread, and heading back to the country of the man who had rejected her and got her pregnant. At this point, what else could she do?
TWELVE
As before, she and Zach needed to take a chartered plane out to the dig site—no other transport could take them as far
as the remote location of the ancient town.
Unlike before, they didn’t have a budget for a plush, shiny light aircraft; the only private plane they could afford looked like it would barely hold them in the sky. Lucie could have sworn that if she looked close enough, she would see duct tape holding on the wings.
She tried not to look too closely.
The ride wasn’t nearly as smooth as it had been the last time, and there hadn’t been money for a night in a hotel to rest up and recover for the day of digging ahead. Lucie was scared, tired, and, suddenly nauseous.
And Zach noticed as much, adding one more entry to her ledger of misfortune.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked her.
Leave it to Zach to make even an expression of concern sound like an accusation. The fact that the cabin was so badly sound-insulated that they had to practically shout at each other to be heard didn’t make it any better.
“It’s just motion sickness. I’ll be fine.”
Lucie had never been a good liar, and judging by Zach’s face, he hadn’t been fooled. She wished he’d accept her explanation and move on, but he kept up the conversation.
“You were fine last time,” he shouted.
Lucie shook her head, annoyed at being reminded of anything about the last time they’d been here.
“Last time the plane was a little bit different!”
That shut him up. He left her alone, and for that she was glad. She looked out the window for a long while at the endless desert, trying to calm both her stomach and her nerves.
She was glad the flight path wouldn’t take them over the palace. That, she wouldn’t have been able to stand. Already, being back in Al-Brehoni had a way of calling up so many memories—so many details of her time with the Sheikh that she had been trying to forget.
But then the hour-long trip was over, and they were there, again, at the little airport. The pilot got out and wandered off, leaving the plane on the runway.
Their wait for a ride was a little longer this time, but before too long Lucie was able to make out the dust trail of the jeep heading for them.
Calista, the French archeologist from the party that greeted them before, was behind the wheel, this time summoned by an email Lucie had sent her the week before. Lucie had expected a welcome, but not the big hug and abundant cheek-kisses that she got.
“The site looks so much better now! You won’t recognize it. We’ve made so much progress,” Calista said, jumping back in the jeep and motioning for them to do the same.
“That’s what counts as a hello, apparently,” Zach mumbled under his breath.
But Lucie only smiled to herself as she tossed her bag inside and swung into the back. It was her kind of hello.
Calista hadn’t been exaggerating. When they arrived at the dig site, it was obvious how much progress the group had made since Lucie had last seen it, weeks before. She was a little taken aback, actually, and asked Calista how they’d managed to get so much done.
“More of your lot, really,” she replied. “Americans here through the exchange program.”
So the program had gone on. Good for Abdul, Lucie thought. Though some little part of her that wished that it hadn’t. If nothing else, it would have been an indication that what had happened between them had meant something to him.
To Lucie’s surprise, Zach got right to work. Or rather, he got back to something like work. He began going around with his expensive camera, taking pictures. They’d spent the last trip actively helping, carefully digging out grids and documenting everything they found in exhaustive detail. But this time, Zach seemed determined to do as little as possible to get what he needed to close out his dissertation—or at least to advance it enough to get everyone off his back for another year.
“Come,” Calista said, pulling her attention away from Zach. “I have something to show you.”
She brought Lucie to the spot that she’d wanted to focus on. It was a little bit removed from the rest of the site, and would only have been excavated by her own special request. But they’d done so. Thinking about the amount of work it would have required—especially when the rest of the team all doubtlessly had their own priorities for excavation—Lucie was truly touched. She couldn’t help but feel that this was a single bright spot in the grey sky of her trip.
But that sentimentality was only putting off the big reveal. This was an unveiling she had waited for four years for. She needed to see what they’d found.
Every object the team had found was laid out on sheltered tables, clearly marked for the grids they’d been uncovered in.
Slowly, over the course of a few hours, Lucie looked over everything carefully. And then, when she had finished, she did it again.
Finally, she walked back to camp, and found Calista, who had gone back to work.
“It’s a stable,” she said, trying hard to keep the disappointment from creeping into her voice, and failing.
“Yes,” Calista replied. “I’m sorry. But now you know, one way or another. And there’s still the other area you proposed.”
She wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t very encouraging. The other area was a possibility, sure, but a less promising one. If Lucie was honest with herself, she’d only really proposed it so that she hadn’t seemed like she was putting all her eggs in one basket.
With the amount of work Calista and the others had done in her absence to further her research, Lucie thought it was best not to look too obviously disappointed.
So, after a brief break to get her head together, she began to assist in the excavation of the second potential site. It wasn’t looking promising, but then, she had to remember to manage her expectations. They had a week there, and if anything was going to be discovered, it probably wouldn’t be straight away.
Still, Lucie couldn’t help but wonder, as the heat began to swell with the onset of early summer, if she might be putting her baby at risk by working out here this way.
Baby. The word sent shockwaves through her body. She’d carefully avoided thinking about it on the plane, trying to set the thought aside so that Zach wouldn’t notice. But how long could she put off considering the ramifications of what she’d just learned?
Now she was broke, overheating, and trying to hold in her panic that the basis of her dissertation had most probably been disproved. She’d thought her position at the airport had been the worst things would get. She’d been wrong.
She was beginning to get lost in a vicious cycle of self-pity when she heard a disturbance at the front of the camp. Shielding her eyes against the unrelenting sun, she squinted, trying to make out what everyone was talking about.
When she saw what it was, her heart stopped.
Five luxury all-terrain vehicles had pulled up by the entrance to the dig site. They couldn’t have come from the capital—the road there had been damaged and closed off, following the storm.
There was only one place they could have come from.
THIRTEEN
Lucie felt the tools that she’d been working with drop from her hands and started to walk towards the motorcade, as though pulled by an invisible string. The other members of the team seemed to be coming along, too, though they seemed a lot more excited about it. She was terrified.
When she got to where the cars were parked, she found that everyone was lining up. Of course, she thought. It was a royal audience. She took her place in line, and braced herself. The tears she had stifled in the bathroom at the airport were trying again to fight their way out, and Lucie could imagine nothing worse than breaking down in front of him when he finally saw her again.
The Sheikh got out of his car, and as much as Lucie tried to avert her eyes, she couldn’t help but sneak a look. Again, he was wearing traditional clothing, and he looked good. Better than Lucie wanted to admit.
He went along the line, greeting everyone. She heard the Arabic rolling off his tongue and remembered how foolish she had been, thinking that she should work hard at improving her A
rabic so that when they spoke together she would be treated to hearing his voice in his native tongue.
When he got to her, he shook her hand, as he had the others.
At his touch, she felt a fire ignite within her. She’d tried for so long to put it all on herself. She’d been foolish, she thought. But now that he was in front of her, and she knew she was pregnant with his child, all that self-blame was gone.
He had misled her.
He had never acted as though the connection between them were so disposable. He had not presented it as a casual fling that they would both walk away from, without a single word spoken between them to say so. He’d made it seem as though it was the beginning of something—not the whole of it.
