“I didn’t believe it when Harbi told me,” he says.
I get to my feet, still holding his dissertation. Between us, I feel a shifting wall, as if we are magnets with like poles that keep us at a fixed distance. And I also feel what it could be like if one of those poles flipped.
Wyatt isn’t smiling, and neither am I. I lift my chin. “You once told me you’d do anything for me,” I say.
“Dawn—”
“I want to work here,” I interrupt. “I want to finish what I started.”
Life asked death, “Why do people love me but hate you?”
Death responded, “Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.”
—Unknown
WHEN I GET home, Brian is waiting. He stares at me as if I am a hallucination, and then he approaches me cautiously—the way you would move toward a feral animal or someone whose world has gone to pieces around her. He folds me tightly into his arms. “Jesus Christ, Dawn,” he says, his voice shaking. “I thought you were gone for good.”
Slowly, my arms come up to embrace him. My eyes drift closed. I actively shove away the memories that rise, and force myself to only see forward.
What if it’s that easy to start fresh? I remember how, when Meret was little, she had a toy that was an enclosed tablet of tiny metal filings that could be moved with a magnetic pencil. After drawing whatever it was she wanted to draw, she could pull a lever and all the filings fell to the bottom of the tablet, making a blank slate. But after a few months of use, there were hazy black shadows of former pictures she’d drawn caught in the very fibers of the toy. Even as she created pictures over them, I could see the ghosts of her imagination.
“Dawn,” Brian says. An apology, a beginning.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” It’s too raw. Maybe one day, but this is not that day.
He nods, slipping his hands into his pockets. It’s something he does when he is nervous. “Are you…all right?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I try to say this lightly, but the reply sinks like fog, making it harder to see.
“This is my fault.”
I don’t correct him. If it wasn’t for what he did, or didn’t do, I would never have left in the first place.
“Is Meret—”
“She’s in her room.” I head to the staircase, but Brian’s voice tugs at me. “She doesn’t know. I didn’t want to scare her.”
I pivot. This, I suppose, was either meant to protect Meret, or meant to protect Brian. No matter what, it’s an unexpected gift right now.
Meret’s bedroom always surprises me. Although it has been years since we decorated it for a baby girl, I still expect to see it in pinks and yellows, with a wallpaper border of dancing hippos. Sometimes when I am sorting through the laundry now and see her brightly colored bras, I am startled by them, because just yesterday I was folding onesies printed with ladybugs, cotton dresses with tutus built in.
Although she’s a teenager now, her walls aren’t covered with Sia or 21 Savage. She has a vintage Adolphe Millot insect graphic and overblown photos of microscopic onion epidermal cells and elodea root. Meret has wanted to be a scientist like her father since he helped her make her first baking soda volcano in the kitchen sink at age four.
The lights are on in her room, and she is asleep on top of the covers. A book—Lab Girl—is on the floor, where it’s tumbled out of her hands. I set it on the nightstand and go to turn off the lamp, but she stirs, blinking up at me. “You’re back,” she whispers. I wonder what Brian did tell her. If she heard us arguing, before I left.
I pull back the covers so she can crawl into bed. Her pajama top rides up, exposing a plump roll at the waistband of the bottoms. I bite my lip—she hates how she looks, which is a function not just of being fourteen but also of being the daughter of two parents who are thin. I spy something purple balled up in the trash can—it’s the shirt that I bought her for her birthday. When she unwrapped it, Meret had plastered a smile on her face, but I saw her finger the label, Junior XXL. Mom, she had said, I’m not that huge. I felt terrible. But wouldn’t it have been worse if I’d gotten her a size down, and it was too small?
At least I remembered her birthday, I think.
“Stay with me till I fall asleep?” Meret asks.
In another universe, I wouldn’t be able to say yes.
I stroke her hair and take this as a boon—the mood swing that puts me in her favor again; the fact that I’ve been forgiven for my birthday gift; the mixture of grief and relief in Brian’s eyes for something that nearly happened but didn’t.
I think about the fact that even though I walked out of this house, I’ve somehow wound up right back where I started.
* * *
—
WHEN I WAS little, I used to read the obituaries, and one day I asked my mother why people die in alphabetical order. My mother didn’t answer. She spit on the floor, because to talk about death was to invite it into the household. She was Irish and superstitious—a double dose of stubbornness—she put safety pins in my clothing to ward off the evil eye, she taught us never to whistle indoors and if we left the house and had to come back in, we were to look in a mirror or our luck would turn. I never heard my mother talk about death, in fact, which is why it’s so ironic that she is the reason I am a death doula.
I was a graduate student on my third dig season in Egypt when I found out she was dying. She had Stage 4 ovarian cancer that she had chosen to hide from me and my brother. Kieran had only been thirteen, and she hadn’t wanted to worry him. I was pursuing my passion, and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt that. My father, a U.S. Army captain, had died in a helicopter crash when my mother was pregnant with Kieran, which meant that I suddenly had to take charge. I was furious that my mother hadn’t told me she was sick. I sat by her side in the residential hospice, leaving only to be home in time for Kieran when he returned from school. I watched her fade into the sheets, more a memory than a mother. Then one day near the end, my mother squeezed my hand. “Your father died alone,” she said. “I always wondered if he was scared. If there was something he wanted to say.” Are you scared? I wanted to ask. Is there something you want to say? But before I could, my mother smiled. “At least I have you,” she had said.
I thought about my father, halfway around the world by himself when he took his last breath. I thought of my mother, hiding an illness that had eaten away at her until she was only a shell of the woman I remembered. Death is scary and confusing and painful, and facing it alone shouldn’t be the norm.