First Man Read online

  On the third day, she begged me to take her into the tombs. It took an hour on the phone, calling in favors and selectively dropping my father’s name, but I managed to secure us entrance to one of the lesser viewed tombs.

  Our guide walked a few paces ahead, the wide beam of his flashlight cutting through the inky darkness. He offered scattered commentary, drawing our attention to carvings and hieroglyphs, but, for the most part, he remained silent.

  The constant chatter that Lily had been bubbling with since we arrived dried up the moment she stepped across the threshold of the tomb. The heavy stone blocks had a way of swallowing your voice. Even a whisper sounded too loud with countless tons of stone surrounding you.

  Lily stopped to examine one of the walls, the stone worn smooth by time. “It’s just like you said,” she whispered, sounding more like she was talking to herself than for my benefit.

  The walls pressed against us, the stone worn by the touch of two millennia of slaves and priests, grave-robbers and scholars. So far underground, the air was cool, but it was far from being a refreshing respite from the relentless sun. The air tasted stale, like dust and death and all the things I’d spent the last year trying to forget.

  I wanted to grab Lily’s arm and drag her back up the path, back out into the heat and light and life. Instead, I followed silently as the walked along the narrow corridor, shining her flashlight on the carvings in the walls, my presence all but forgotten.

  We had been living out of a hotel room for seventeen days when I discovered her secret, though if I really wanted to admit the truth, some part of me had known for months. History had a way of repeating itself on the unwary, and, however my unconscious mind might have been trying to jar me to awareness, it wasn’t enough to keep the realization from stunning me.

  I came back to the room earlier than expected from having lunch with a former classmate of mine. Lucas had followed the academic track I’d been bound for when I left and had a comfortable professorship teaching Art History. Lucas had caught the travel bug himself and he’d been spending his summers hopping around the world to wherever he could afford a flight to.

  I unlocked the door to the suite we had rented, expecting to see Lily waiting, but the room was empty. A hasty note was left on the bed - “At the market, back by two!” it read in Lily’s neat hand.

  With an hour to kill, I settled down on the bed, reaching blindly for the book resting on the nightstand and knocking Lily’s makeup bag to the floor.

  “Dammit,” I growled as I hurried to pick up the various bottles and potions that seemed to go hand in hand with womanhood these days. Most of the bag had spilled, but when I went to shove the mascaras and eyeshadows back into its depths, I noticed two bright red pill bottles.

  Pandora’s undoing was a box, and mine was inside two little red bottles inside a bag covered in sunflowers.

  With trembling hands, I turned them over and stared at the labels. Tramadol. Hydromorphone.

  And as abruptly as it had stopped, I could hear the tap tap tap of that typewriter start up again.

  I sat there, staring uncomprehendingly at the bottles in my hand, turning over every moment we’d had together again and again. Bit by bit, the pieces began to fall into place.

  The trip. I’d been so eager to finally have the chance to show Lily my world that I hadn’t questioned her insistence that we trade in our return tickets for an open-ended fare.

  “We’ll come back when we get bored with the old world,” she had said. “Or maybe we won’t come back at all!” She had laughed, and I had written it off as her usual exuberance for life.

  Then we arrived, and, from the moment the plane touched down, Lily was a whirlwind of activity. Every moment from dawn to dusk was planned as Lily raced through the city, trying to cram every sight and experience into our time here. “Slow down,” I’d told her, pulling her back into bed when she tried to start our day at 6AM, “This city has been around for thousands of years. It will wait a few more hours.”

  She had tensed in my arms for a moment before extricating herself from the bed. “Egypt might be able to wait, but I can’t.” And we were off for another day.

  It was almost laughable. The historian didn’t notice history repeating itself right under his nose. I thought I had escaped this time. The endless tapping of the typewriter keys rang in my ears.

  Just like before, I loved someone who was running from death. And I knew how that race ended.

  Lily walked in with a bag of figs in her hands and a smile on her face. The smile faded when she saw the bottles in my hands.

  “How long?” I demanded, my voice cracking on the words.

  Calmly, Lily put the fruit down on the table and sat own next to me.

  “Since you left,” she answered. She didn’t try to hide the bitterness from her voice.

  “Six months? You kept this from me for that long?”

  Lily continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “I wanted to hate you for leaving me to deal with it all alone, but then you came back, and I just wanted things to be like they were before.” She wasn’t crying. I wished she was. Even hysteria would have been better than this. . . resignation.

  I sat, frozen into speechlessness. “I don’t know if I can go through this again,” I whispered, almost to myself.

  “You promised you wouldn’t leave.”

  I nodded. “I know. I won’t.”

  Lily rose from the bed and crossed the room to retrieve her suitcase. I watched as she pulled out the battered metal box that held my old journal and the bottles of oil. We had long since emptied the Frankincense, so there was only one bottle remaining.

  Lily opened the box, unwinding the length of black silk that hid the bottle. Slowly, she unscrewed the lid, releasing the bitter scent of the oil.

  “I know why you didn’t tell me what it was used for, but you forgot how good a researcher I am,” she said softly. “What I can’t understand is why you have it in the first place.” She poured a puddle of the sand colored oil into her palm. “What the desert tribes did with this wasn’t quite as pretty as the Frankincense.”

  “I wrote a paper of the funeral rites of the tribes of rural Egypt when I was an undergraduate.” I sank onto the bed beside her. “I bought a bottle every year after that to pour over my father’s grave. It’s stupid, but he would have liked it.”

  “It’s not stupid.” Lily’s voice was little more than breath. “Will you do that for me?”

  “Lily.” Something in her eyes that night terrified me, and with the mask of denial finally torn from my eyes, I saw the lost weight and dizzy spells as far more than jet leg and over-exertion. “Don’t.”

  “We’ve been carefully not talking about what’s becoming more and more obvious each day. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to spend my last months living, not dying.”

  “How long?” I asked again.

  “Six months,” Lily said, echoing my earlier words. “I’m right at the expiration date,” she added, chuckling darkly at her own gallows humor. “It could be any time.”

  It had all been there if I had looked, but I had liked the blindness. After so long of being sick of the world, I had found someone who wouldn’t let me wallow in cynicism, and I didn’t want to face the world without her.

  I took the bottle from her and slowly removed the flimsy white dress she had been wearing. I poured the oil into my hands, longing for the warm spice of Frankincense and only smelling the bitterness of Myrrh. I massaged the oil into her skin, trying to think of anything but its true purpose.

  “Tell me about the tombs, Adam.” Her voice was a bare whisper, but I heard it just the same.

  Her quiet plea hung in the air until I finally spoke, trying and failing to keep the strain from my voice. “My shoes echoed on the stone steps. Even after studying ancient history for years, it was hard to believe that the steps I was walking on had been cut into the rock three millennia ago. Nothing could prepare me for the dampness of the air, the closeness
of the walls. The hieroglyphs were beautiful.” The tenseness had drained out of Lily’s muscles, and her breathing had slowed as an exhausted sleep claimed her. “I don’t even remember what they said, just that they were ancient and I loved them for it.”

  Ten minutes of scrubbing with scalding water and sandalwood soap, and I could still smell the Myrrh on my fingers. Using a force of will I had stopped believing I possessed years ago, I looked at my reflection. Squinting in the too-bright florescent light was a man staring down thirty, a man who would soon be seeing the first strands of grey in his dark hair, a man who spent half of his life running from nothing.

  After University, I had never lived in the same city for longer than three months until I came to Egypt. Even here, it had barely taken a year for my perpetual urge to move on to overpower my love of the city. Then I met Lily, and I lost myself in her normalcy, her easy smile, her grey eyes. She believed there was a man behind the sarcasm, and she had wanted to understand him.

  So did I.

  ENDING

  She died in El Salam International Hospital twenty-three days later. It was almost as if once the pretense of appearing healthy was over, Lily’s weakened body gave up trying.

  Lily fought until the last. We had been sitting on a bench in an outdoor café, sharing a pot of tea and avoiding the afternoon heat a scant week after her confession. “Promise me,” she had demanded, grabbing my hand with an urgency that made me willing to agree to anything she asked. “Promise me that you won’t try to force me into a hospital until there’s no other choice.”

  The pain had been growing worse. The levels of pills in both the bottles grew lower with each passing day. Both of us knew that “no other choice” would be soon.

  With no other options, I had nodded my head and murmured my assent. As someone used to researching every detail, the tiny scraps of knowledge I had about Lily’s illness was maddening. When I had questioned her as to just what her diagnosis had been, she had bitterly spat the words, “Cancer, stage four” without elaborating. I pressed her further, and she snapped, “What does it matter? Everyone knows there’s no stage five.”

  She collapsed in the square. I wanted to blame it on the heat, but the look in her eyes made the lie die in my throat.

  No matter how fast you run, death will always catch you.

  The hospital was quiet. Lily had been given a private room, and the ward was silent at night.

  I crawled into that thin hospital bed beside her, ignoring the admonishing looks of the nurses as I wrapped my arms around her thin frame and whispered the mantra of “I love you. Thank you. Don’t leave me.” into her hair.

  I’ve never been a religious man. I studied the gods and rituals of half the cultures in the world, and I never saw the proof I needed to believe that we did anything more than turn back into the dust we came from when we died. But I’ll believe until my last breath that I felt the moment her. . . soul or spirit. . . whatever spark that made her Lily, slipped away that night.

  She had gotten her wish. She’d barely spent two days in the hospital.

  I left the hospital, carrying nothing with me beyond a small bag of her personal effects. I opened the door of the room we’d shared for the better part of a month and was hit with a wall of memories. Her makeup was spread across the bathroom, the bright colored dresses she favored hung in the wardrobe. The trinkets she’s bought from the yelling street vendors lined the windowsills.

  Alone, I sunk down onto the bed.

  She was gone, and I was alone again.

  It was summertime, and I flew to Greece. Santorini wasn’t Cairo, but it was quiet and there was still sand.

  Edwin was waiting for me when I got off the plane. Elene was hanging back, a dark haired boy clinging to each hand, and an older, doe-eyed girl hiding behind her leg.

  “Don’t you remember your Uncle Adam, Chara?” Edwin asked. The small girl’s face broke into a smile, and she nodded vigorously.

  Edwin wrapped his arm around my shoulder and lead me to the car, speaking over the chatter of children. “I wish I could have met her, Adam.”

  “So do I.”

  I loved her. That much was true. Whether that love would have lasted, I’ll never know. Memories have a way of creating perfection. I had never put much stock in psychology, but I would have been a fool to not notice that faint resemblance between Lily and the mother who’d abandoned me. I thought I’d managed to rewrite history this time. How wrong I was.

  I wanted to be angry at her for making the choice she had, but I couldn’t hate her anymore than I could hate my father. They made their choices, but I was the one left having to live with them.

  In that golden year we had together, Lily forced me to give up the identity of the wanderer. Now that she was dead, it was everything I could do to not let that new and improved Adam she had created die with her.

  I never went back to Atlanta, to the tiny apartment where I coated her with Frankincense and made her mine in the laws of the ancient world. I paid an acquaintance to pack up my belongings and ship them to Greece.

  An eternal wanderer, I was frozen in place with no idea of where to go or what to do with the rest of my life. So for now, I stayed put in Greece, with Edwin and Elene and the children, the only family I’ve had for years.

  Every evening I watched the sun sink down behind the Panagia Episkopi, and I thought of my regrets and the bare semblance of a life I lived for so long. The air smelled of salt, and the breeze blowing across my face was cool, so different from the hot winds of the desert. When the sun finally surrendered to the night and the island was plunged into darkness, I rose from my seat on the cliffs and walked back home.

  PART TWO

  SECOND CHANCES

  Adam

  The coat was one of the few things I carried with me from place to place that, until recently, had little practicality and no usefulness. There wasn’t much need for the heavy grey wool trenchcoat in the scorching heat of Cairo or the humidity of Atlanta, but I carried it with me anyway, shoving it in the back of my closet and forgetting its existence until the next inevitable move.

  I had bought the coat in University, paid some obscene sum for it in London no doubt, but that trifling piece of trivia had long since been forgotten. I had worn it on rainy English nights spent in the pubs with Edwin and wrapped myself in the warm folds of it on the way back to my flat from this museum or that lecture. That coat had become as much a part of me as the stack of books on my desk back then.

  The coat had deep pockets that accumulated scraps of my life, the same types of artifacts that I studied with such care - napkins with thoughts scrawled on them that had seemed far too brilliant to be lost at that particular moment, receipts from endless cups of coffee, phone numbers. It all ended up in my right pocket, until it was lost or thrown away a few weeks later.

  The left pocket was an entirely different story. Inside that pocket I kept the one gift that had ever really mattered to me from my mother. I was seven when she gave it to me, and already well on my way to becoming the scholar that my father so wanted me to be. Life had been simpler for us all back then, before divorce and disease tore us asunder.

  My mother hadn’t understood my fascination with the ancients any more than she had understood her husband’s, but at that time she still accepted it. She was in a museum shop in Rome, one of those touristy places that sells scraps of antiquity to travelers for inflated prices. She was well aware that most of what they were selling was junk, the knowledge having been absorbed from living surrounded by history addicts, but something that day caught her eye.

  The object was a small bronze ring sat in a display case, flanked by beads and coins and broken jewelry. A small card underneath it read “1st Century AD - Carthage.” She caught the merchant’s attention, and eager for a sale, he handed over the ring to the well-dressed Englishwoman. The ring was tiny, made for a child or a woman with very slender fingers. Two millennia had left the bronze oxidized to a shade of rich soil. T
he ring itself was simple, no stones and only one continuous piece, the metal overlapping at the ends in a way that looked like a pair of clasped hands. She had smiled and bought it, knowing somehow that her son would like it, if only because it was old and strangely beautiful.

  The ring had made its way into the pocket. A small silk bag in shades of emerald green kept the ring safe, and it never left the coat. I never stopped to wonder why that was. It was simply what I did, and when I finished at Oxford and went on to graduate study and then the wide world, the coat and the ring followed me, and when the life I had built crumbled to pieces around me, the coat and the ring followed me. Tucked in a box with photographs, journals, and the few things I cared enough to drag across continents, months would pass before I would even look at the coat, and years went by before I would touch the ring, but it was always there.

  I didn’t think about my mother. Didn’t idly wonder where she was or what she was doing. If I wanted to be truly honest, I had to struggle to recall the exact sound of her voice, but I kept the ring because, for that one moment at that stall in Rome she had understood me and loved the things I loved.

  The coat had a new life now, just like its owner. We were both a bit worse for wear, our youthful shine long since worn off, but we had survived without too many tears.

  I liked to believe I was not a superstitious man, but in truth, it was impossible to immerse yourself in the legends and cultures of a dozen civilizations, living and dead, as I had for so many years and not find yourself carrying them with you. I was not quite to the point of consulting the auguries over my morning coffee, but, like every person, I guarded my talismans and carried them with me.

  In my younger years, I had never anticipated that at 33 I would be in my third year of teaching twelfth grade English at a public high school in New Hampshire. Most of my peers at Oxford would have been horrified. I’m shamed to admit, in the beginning I had scoffed at the idea of teaching teenagers. University students were one thing, but American high school students?