Living in Threes

by Judith Tarr

  The sandals made me like her in spite of the cheekbones. “Meredith,” Dad said with a funny little upward tilt in his voice, “this is Kelly.”

  I’d expected her to be called Ute or Gretchen. She stood up and shook my hand and said in perfectly normal American, “Hello, Meredith. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  I couldn’t say the same. I smiled and said polite things, and waited for Dad to explain.

  Dad didn’t take off because he was sick of Mom. He just couldn’t stay in one place for more than a few months at a time before his feet got so itchy he couldn’t stand it. It was Mom who filed for divorce.

  I’d been expecting him to show up with someone else eventually, but it never quite got around to happening, and I’d got used to things being the way they were. This caught me completely off guard. I sat down because it was better than falling down, and ordered something, I hardly noticed what.

  Dad and Kelly were sitting carefully apart, not holding hands or kissing or doing anything that might be expected to upset me. It was too careful; they would barely even look at each other. They were trying too hard. That just made it more awkward.

  The explanation was no surprise. “We met on the Greenpeace cruise,” Kelly said, “then we took off on our own for an eco-tour of the Indian Ocean. Now I’m headed back to Chicago, and Mark’s decided to come with me.”

  She smiled at him, not sappy at all, and then turned back to me. She had a way of looking at a person straight on that made me feel as if I really did matter to her—not because she felt obligated to be nice to the boyfriend’s kid, but because I was a human being, and she was interested in who and what I was.

  She was good. She didn’t even make me want to hate her.

  I could see why Dad liked her so much. What I couldn’t see was him going anywhere for someone else. “Chicago?” I said.

  I must have sounded totally shocked, because Dad laughed. “Why not?” he said. “It’s a great city. Lots going on. Plenty of water, even, in Lake Michigan, if I get the urge to go out in a boat again.”

  “What will you do?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a job doing tech support for the main office of the eco-tours company,” he said. “It’s right near the hospital where Kelly is finishing up her residency, so it’s all working out.”

  My eyebrows went up. “You’re a doctor?” I said.

  Kelly nodded. “One more year,” she said, “then I’m loose upon the world.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Doctors Without Borders.”

  She had a great smile, wide and a little crooked. “Eventually. There’s so much work to do inside the country, right in Chicago. I’ll start there and see where it takes me.”

  It’s hard to know what to say when you’re a normal selfish human and the person you’re talking to is a saint. Lucky for me, our salads came right then, and we were too busy eating to talk much.

  Dad dropped the other half of the bomb in the middle of dessert. “We’ll be here for a few days,” he said, “then we’re off to Florida.”

  I sat with my spoonful of crème brûlée halfway to my mouth. “I thought you said Chicago.”

  “We’ll end up in Chicago,” he said. “We’re stopping to see your mother first.”

  I lowered the spoon into the bowl. “Does she know that?”

  “I talked to her,” said Dad. “I told her about Kelly; they’re anxious to meet each other.”

  “When did you do that?”

  “A couple of days ago,” Dad said.

  I bit my lip. Mom hadn’t told Dad about the cancer. She didn’t want him fluttering around her, as she put it. Now she was in remission, I guess she figured it was all right.

  And here was Dad coming to visit with his girlfriend the doctor.

  Sometimes things do just happen.

  True. And sometimes they don’t.

  I picked at what was left of the brûlée now I’d eaten most of the crème from underneath it, making it pop and crackle. “What kind of doctor are you?” I asked.

  Dad and Kelly looked at each other. He’d stopped smiling.

  Kelly looked away a little too quickly, straight at me. “I’m an oncologist,” she said. “A cancer specialist.”

  “Of course you are.”

  That slipped out. I didn’t mean for anyone to think Dad would get interested in somebody just so he could get free medical advice. It just happened that this really cool, really unspeakably nice person would know exactly what she was looking at the minute she met Mom.

  Mom had to know. She could get your entire life history in the first five minutes after she met you, on the phone or off.

  If she wasn’t worried, I shouldn’t be, either. That didn’t stop me. “You know,” I said.

  Dad nodded. The way he breathed in and then out, I knew he’d been holding his breath.

  “All along?”

  He nodded again. “She asked me not to come,” he said. “Then she went into remission. So it all came out right in the end.”

  “But now?”

  “We’re just stopping to visit,” he said. “I do that every few years. We’re still friends. You know that.”

  I did know it. I also knew that if I were Dad, it would be just like me to want Mom to meet the new girlfriend. I might not break up with her if Mom didn’t like her, but it would matter. Mom mattered.

  I pushed the long-dead bowl of crème brûlée away. I don’t know why I felt like crying. “I’d like to go back to the house now,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

  They didn’t mind at all. They were probably as glad to drop me off at Luxor House as I was to escape.

  I couldn’t escape myself. My other selves, or whatever they were—I couldn’t get away from them, either. Asleep or awake, wherever I looked, there I was.

  Chapter 14

  As soon as the sun sprang into the sky, Meritre knew that she had dreamed true. The plague had come back in the night and seized the king’s daughter.

  When Meritre and her mother came to the temple in the morning, the mistress of the chorus stood with the high priest and a man in a massive wig and a collar of honor so heavy with gold that it bowed his narrow shoulders. “The king needs your voices,” he said.

  All of the singers bowed to the king’s will. Neither the hymn nor the festival of the plague’s ending would matter if the king’s daughter died.

  Meritre had never been inside the palace before. She had seen it from the outside, of course, and she had seen the king in the temple or passing in procession through the streets, carried high on the shoulders of strong men. The sheen of divinity surrounded her; her face was a painted mask beneath the lofty height of the double crown. Because she was king, she wore the false beard strapped to her chin, and carried her head high with her eyes fixed far above mere mortal things.

  Led by the king’s messenger, the singers went by ways that must be familiar to servants, past the palace wall into a maze of courts and corridors. They were not all wide, high, or splendidly ornamented; some, except for the length and the elaborateness of the painted walls, might have belonged to any ordinary house. Meritre had half expected the floors to be paved with gold, but those inside were tiled in colors that matched the walls, red and white and green and blue, and the pavements outside were broad smoothed stones, just as in the temple.

  She had heard that people who came to the palace had to wait, sometimes for days, until the royal personage would deign to see them. That would be difficult, she thought, with Father and the boys—and what of Djehuti? How could she work the spell she meant to work, if she was trapped in the palace?

  She shut off that thought before it made her do anything foolish. The queen’s messenger walked so fast that Meritre was breathless, which helped to distract her. So did her mother, who neither faltered nor complained, but her face had a still, set look that Meritre did not like.

  Just as Meritre made up her mind to call on their guide to slow down, he stopped. The door in front of him boaste
d a pair of guards with tall spears.

  Beyond the door was, at last, the sort of place that Meritre imagined when she thought of palaces. Tall golden columns marched around the edges of a courtyard bursting with greenery and wild with flowers. In the center gleamed a pool, mirroring the clear blue of the sky.

  Beside the pool, shaded by a gold-embroidered canopy, lay a bed supported on backs of carved and gilded falcons with their wings outspread. The figure that lay on it seemed terribly small and slight.

  A crowd of people surrounded the bed, but Meritre saw only one: a woman in a plain linen gown and simple wig, who sat on a stool and held the princess’ hand. She could have been a nurse or a servant, but the way the people around her stood, giving her more space than they gave anyone else, told Meritre she was more than that.

  One glance, one turn of that deceptively humble head, and the crowd all but disappeared. A handful of women stayed, doing useful things: fanning the princess, moistening her cracked lips with water and sweet oil, bathing her body with cool cloths. For the racking coughs they could do nothing, except pray.

  The king turned her gaze on the singers from the temple. Her eyes were long and dark, painted with kohl and malachite as everyone’s eyes were. Her face was neither beautiful nor ugly. She could have been anyone: a servant, a shopkeeper, a sculptor’s wife. And yet there was no doubt in the world that she was the king.

  “The gods are not listening to me,” she said. Her voice was low and clear; unlike her face, it was beautiful. “Maybe they will hear you. Sing for her. Pray to the gods that she may live.”

  The singers glanced at one another. Aweret had recovered from the speed of her arrival: she stood straight, breathing only a little quickly. She raised her chin and sang the first pure note of the hymn to Isis, mother and healer.

  Meritre caught the note and carried it. One by one the rest followed.

  In this garden of the palace, with so many green things growing and breathing around them, the quality of the hymn was distinctly different than in the stone court of the temple. Parts of it were softer, sinking into the leaves and the water. Parts rose even higher and clearer. They surrounded the princess with a web of sweet sound.

  As the choir of Amon sang, the king ordered sacrifices in every temple and prayer in every house and palace. The princess’ name would be on every tongue in Egypt, and every worker of magic, from the greatest to the least, was commanded to call up his power.

  As hymn after hymn flowed through Meritre’s throat, her ears and mind recorded the king’s words and her commands. She was storming heaven, raising every force she had against the gods, while physicians jostled sorcerers at the princess’ bedside. This was her heir, her beloved. She must live. She must not die.

  That was a mother’s love for her child. It was fierce; it knew no reason.

  Meritre had no child yet, but she loved her mother. She had loved her sister Iry, whom the plague had taken. She could understand, at least a little.

  She sang the hymns and prayers with all her heart. She did her best to hope. But even in the bright sunlight, shadows crowded close.

  In her heart she saw the princess dead on a bier, and the king bowed down in mourning. She saw the plague ended at last, gone away out of Egypt, now that it had taken that final sacrifice.

  It was as clear as the sunlight that she saw every day, the streets she lived in and the temple in which she served. She saw grief, and she saw hope. She saw so much of everything that was or would be that it surged up over her and drowned her.

  The hymn had ended, but no one had moved to begin another. The sun was much lower than it had been when Meritre last looked.

  The princess tossed in her fever dream. Her breathing had thickened; there was a rattle in it.

  Meritre knew that sound. So did anyone who was still alive in this part of the world. That was death closing the doors of the lungs.

  “There is no hope?” the king demanded. “None whatever?”

  Her eyes were on Meritre. The force of her desperation was like a hot wind out of the desert, blowing from the land of the dead.

  Meritre must have spoken her visions aloud. She felt cold and sick inside. Still, the king had asked a question. She had to answer. “There is always hope,” she said. Her voice shook a little, because she was mortal and this was a goddess on Earth. “This is the end; the plague is gone. It will be long years before Egypt suffers another.”

  “You know this?” said the king.

  Meritre would happily have crawled into a hole at the foot of the nearest palm tree, but now she had begun, she had to finish. “I see it. The gods make you a promise: once this price is paid and this sacrifice made, there will be no more while you live.”

  “What if I refuse?” the king said. “What if I will not give her up?”

  Meritre set her lips together. There was no answer she could give that would not enrage the king. Silence would not please her, either, but it might be a fraction less dangerous.

  The king bent over her daughter. The child still breathed, but the rattle was louder. Her face was grey and sunken, as if death had already taken her.

  There were no hymns left to sing that would not seem to mock the king’s grief. It hardly mattered. If the gods were listening, none was inclined to answer.

  The sun hung just above the wall. A breath of wind played through the garden, ruffling the fronds of the palms and making the flowers sway. Meritre breathed in their sweetness.

  She braced for another vision, but nothing came to her except fragments that made no sense: a white animal like a huge dog or an impossibly strange and gigantic gazelle; a broken wall beneath a sky full of stars; a shadow with wings.

  The king’s sorcerers raised their smokes and stinks and chanted their spells. With a small but potent shock, Meritre recognized the one she had been going to try with Djehuti.

  It was not nearly as impressive as she had hoped. Her hand rose to the amulet that hung around her neck. For an instant it felt strange, as if it had come alive. But when she touched it, it was the same as always.

  The princess’ breathing stopped. So, for a long count of heartbeats, did the wind.

  One of the maids began to wail. The others took up the chorus, with the priests and sorcerers, and even a handful of the temple singers.

  Meritre had no voice left. Nor, it seemed, did Aweret, or the king.

  Aweret’s knees gave way. Meritre went down with her to the smooth warmth of the paving. Aweret’s eyes were open; she was conscious, but the strength had run out of her.

  No one cared for one commoner among the silenced chorus. There was water in a jar near enough for Meritre to reach, with a dipper beside it. Probably she should beg someone’s leave, but who would listen?

  She dipped a ladleful and coaxed it into Aweret. It seemed to help a little. Aweret sighed and leaned her head against Meritre’s shoulder.

  Everyone else was lost to reason. People ran without sense or direction, shrilling and keening.

  The king did nothing to stop or direct them. She sat on her stool with the princess’ hand still in hers. For her, the world had stopped.

  The king was a god and Meritre most surely was not, but that deep and terrible stillness she did understand. That was death, which was stronger than gods.

  The sun set on them all, leaving them in twilight rent with weeping, as word of the plague’s last victim spread through the city. The singers of Amon stayed in the garden, hungry and thirsty, until a servant who was both wise and kind brought them bread and beer and a basket of dates.

  Meritre made sure that her mother had a fair share. Aweret ate slowly and without appetite, but she was wise enough to know that she had to keep herself and the baby fed.

  At last one of the priests found the presence of mind to dismiss the singers. They left gratefully, making their way through a palace in uproar and a city that seemed unlikely to sleep tonight.

  When hundreds of common people and even nobles died, there had bee
n mourning enough. Now that the king’s heir was dead, the world’s foundations were shaken. The best Meritre could think of to do was get her mother home, hope Father and the boys had managed to feed themselves, and then hope any of them could manage to rest.

  It was slow going. Torches blazed on roofs and in doorways. The streets were full of people who had let go all restraint. All the grief, all the anger and sorrow that the plague had brought, burst out on this terrible night.

  Meritre clung to the edges as much as she could, shielded Aweret with her body and held firm against jostling and outright blows. Someone’s elbow caught her lip and split it; before she was halfway home, she was covered in lesser bruises. But Aweret was safe, and that was all that mattered.

  The market near their house had closed before sunset, but it was full of people. The air reeked of beer. Meritre set her teeth, held tight to Aweret, and dived into the crowd.

  She rocked like a boat in a flood. Her mother’s arms were firm around her, as if somehow she had found new strength. It would not last, but it might get them through this last and worst ordeal before they were safe inside their own walls.

  A mob of men lurched past in a haze of beer. They knocked Meritre half off her feet and sent her staggering against a shuttered booth. Someone else was there already; he grunted as Meritre collided with him, and staggered back but did not fall.

  She looked up startled in the fitful torchlight, into Djehuti’s face. He looked less surprised than she: he must have seen her coming. “You waited all this time?” she said, forgetting for an instant that her mother was between them.

  “It seemed safer than trying to leave,” he said. He sounded the same as always, calm and unruffled, though his cheek was dark with bruising and his kilt was torn.

  “Come home with us,” Aweret said, too tired or too wise to ask questions. “The sooner we’re all in the house, the better we’ll be.”

  Meritre agreed with that wholeheartedly. So did Djehuti. With Aweret between them, doubly safe now, they braved the torrent of people for one last time.