Anthology - A Thousand Doors Page 8

  I pause, feeling sick. Who is this woman? She’s smiley facing my husband when he’s just told her that I might be on to them. Does she feel remorse? Does she have a soul?

  When can I see you again?

  What about tonight?

  Serious?

  And she has bad grammar. Something Mike hates, usually.

  Serious.

  Fantastic. Where?

  Let me get back to you. I’m going to have to make some arrangements.

  Okay, mystery man.

  Please don’t smiley face me again, please don’t smiley face me again…

  ————

  Over lunch, I can’t stop myself from bringing it up. Not directly—I don’t confess—but I do skirt the topic around to truthfulness, the impact of lying. It’s a natural fit for our case.

  “How do you think it’s going?” Darnell asks. We’ve all ordered salads with steak strips—enough protein to keep us full for the afternoon without the carbs to lull us to sleep.

  “I’m pretty happy with the jury. Seeing the consternation on Chris Top’s face is just an added bonus.”

  “He really seems to hate you.”

  “He’s just… I’ve beaten him in court a few times. He doesn’t take losing well.”

  “Here’s to this being one more time.”

  “Agreed.” I put down the Diet Coke I toasted him with. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m actually feeling better. It was the anticipation that was getting to me.”

  Daniel’s phone rings on the table. The office is calling. He picks it up and stands. “I’ll be right back.”

  We watch him walk away.

  “Do you remember what you told me when we first met?” I ask Darnell. “About your wife.”

  Darnell looks down at his plate. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Have you forgiven her?”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I don’t know, counselor.”

  We exchange a sad-eyed look. The reason Darnell committed plagiarism in the first place, to the extent that there is a reason, was that he was suffering from severe insomnia after learning his wife was having an affair. He’d meant to rewrite it, he said. He was just dumping research into a file like he always did. But then he fell asleep and ran out of time, and the next thing he knew he was saying someone else’s words to twenty million viewers.

  “Do you think forgiveness is possible?” I ask.

  “You probably need to speak to a minister about that.”

  “So, no, then?”

  He smiles. “We’re trying to make it work. She feels terrible, especially because of everything that happened.”

  “You still firm on not using that?”

  “I don’t want to throw her under the bus.”

  “It would help us.”

  “But it wouldn’t help her and me.”

  I choose my next words carefully. “Did you ever think… Did you ever think about revenge?”

  “Against her?”

  “No, the other guy.”

  “Who says I didn’t get revenge?”

  Daniel comes back to the table. “What are we talking about?”

  “Forgiveness,” I say. “And possibilities.”

  ————

  Before we resume court, I text Mikhala again.

  Meet me at Summit Park?

  What time?

  8?

  Sounds good.

  I smile grimly at the phone. Who is this man, this version of my husband that’s so appealing that a woman would agree to meet him in a scary park at night?

  I call my assistant.

  “Mia Jensen’s office.”

  “Hi, Wendy. It’s me.”

  “How’s the trial going?”

  “Jury selection. No surprises,” I say. Though that’s not true. I’m the surprise in jury selection. Is my impulsive decision going to ruin my client’s chances of winning? My chances of partnership? If that happened it would be a justifiable homicide. In the minds of most women, anyway. That’s when the makeup of my jury would be important.

  “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can you get me a burner phone?”

  I imagine Wendy’s face crinkling on the other end of the line. “Like…in The Wire?”

  “Ha. No. I’m not dealing drugs.”

  “I didn’t think…”

  “It’s fine, I was joking. Look, I know it’s an odd request, and I can’t explain why I need it, but can you get to a store and buy me one? Use cash and I’ll pay you back.”

  “I’m not going to get in trouble, am I?”

  “Of course not. Can you bring it to me in time for the afternoon break?”

  “Um…”

  “I promise. It’s nothing bad. Just…personal.”

  And that’s when I know for sure that I’m not going to kill Mike. Or Mike either. I can’t implicate innocent Wendy in that. And I clearly need longer than five hours to turn from a corporate lawyer into a master criminal.

  But I am going to make them pay.

  ————

  Wendy brings me the burner phone during the afternoon break. I take it into the bathroom and quickly set it up. Then I enter Mike’s cell number—my Mike, is he still my Mike?—and text him something similar to what I sent his whore this morning:

  It’s me. I had to get a new phone. Can you meet me tonight?

  Hi, you.

  I raise my hand to my mouth to keep myself from vomiting. It’s starting to feel like a ritual.

  Can you sneak out?

  What time?

  8?

  Might be able to.

  Please? I’ll make it worth your while…

  Oh? How?

  You know how.

  Oh God, now he’s texting smiley faces. What the hell has happened in his life that has led him to this? What the hell did I do to get him here? Was there a moment when I could’ve stopped it? If I hadn’t nagged him about being a more involved dad. Or if I’d given him that blow job he wanted on this birthday. I’m a fixer. I fix things. I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve stopped it.

  You still here?

  Here.

  Where do you want to meet?

  How about Summit Park? It’s nice and…private.

  I’ll see what I can do.

  When will you know?

  Give me a couple secs.

  I don’t have to wonder what he’s doing for long. My phone shudders in my purse. I take it out: There’s a text from Mike.

  I have to work late.

  My hands shake as I answer.

  Okay.

  My mom will watch the girls.

  K.

  Hope your trial’s going well.

  My hands are shaking. I can’t write him back. But it’s not like me to simply leave a text unanswered.

  Then I know what to do.

  ————

  One of the things—one—that’s surprising about Mike’s current situation is that he’s a very private person. He doesn’t want anyone to know his business. If he had to go through what Darnell did, a public shaming, thousands of people writing about him daily online, I think he’d shrivel up and float away.

  That’s what I’ve planned for him. I’ll give them enough time to get cozy up there in the woods, and then I’ll call the cops. At a minimum, they’ll be humiliated. Depending on how bold they’ve been, they might get arrested.

  The real question is: Should there also be video?

  ————

  An additional advantage to my jury selection scenario? We wrap up early, our jury selected. Even though I did almost nothing today
, I feel exhausted. I need some time to myself to recuperate. I need quiet.

  I check in with my mother-in-law; she’s taken the kids to her house, is it okay if they do a sleepover? Of course, I say, knowing that she’s already packed their bags and brought them to her house, the request for permission a formality. Today, this seemed like a good idea to her. Tomorrow morning, my high-energy boys will have drained her.

  I pull into the driveway and look at my house. White clapboards and black shutters—it looks like so many other houses. My life looks like so many other lives. But how can it be? And even if it is, it’s my life. Mine.

  I open the front door and the phone starts to ring. The landline we never had taken out because we have kids and who wants to risk it? I rush to answer it, even though no one but telemarketers call us on this phone.

  “Hello?”

  A breathy sound then a click. The line goes dead.

  “You’re home early.”

  I shriek and drop the phone.

  “Mike! I thought you needed to work late?”

  He’s standing in the kitchen entrance. His eyes are dark, his arms crossed. I know in an instant that I’m busted.

  And he’s furious.

  “Things cleared up.”

  “Oh! Good,” I say, my voice high, fake. I take a step toward him. Why am I scared, standing here in my kitchen, when I’m not the one who’s done anything?

  The phone rings again.

  “Leave it,” he says. “It’s been ringing like that for an hour.”

  “Why didn’t you take it off the hook, then?”

  He shrugs. The phone stops. Its ring seems to hang between us, filling up the space Mike’s rage is creating.

  But why is he angry? I’m the one who has something to be angry about.

  “Is that really what you want to talk about?” Mike asks.

  “I…”

  I didn’t think this through. Because if I had, I would’ve have stopped at the humiliation. I would’ve thought through to Mike’s reaction. What he’d do when he found out that I’d set him up. Mike has a temper. It had been so long since I’d set it off, since I’d really seen it, that I almost forgot. Another sign I’d missed. Mike didn’t care about me enough anymore for me to make him angry.

  Not till today.

  “Did you think I didn’t know what you were doing?” he asks.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Mia. Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on.”

  His fists were clenched, and his voice was shaking.

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “I figured out your little plan,” he says. “Getting us alone up there, filming us.”

  “Why would I want to film you?”

  “To get evidence. You love evidence.”

  He’s right in a way. I do love evidence. I love putting together puzzles and proving my theory of the case. But that’s when the facts involve someone else. Not when they’re about me.

  “I think I had a right.”

  “A right?” he says, taking a step closer. “A right?”

  His face is distorted. I have trouble recognizing him.

  And that’s when I know. I made a mistake here. I’m in danger.

  Mike takes another step toward me.

  The phone rings.

  No one answers.

  The Archaeologist

  Rebecca Drake

  The desert is timeless. It preserves and erases, covering up or wearing away any object that settles on it. Looking at it is like gazing across a vast ocean, wave after wave of rippling sand, stretching endlessly toward the horizon.

  It’s almost three o’clock in the afternoon—that’s hell in the Sahara in June. I’m driving outside of Luxor, away from the far reaches of the Valley of the Kings, and conscious that the SUV is a metal box, absorbing heat. I had to pull my sleeve down to open the door handle to avoid burning my skin. It’s over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The excavation site is behind me, and I can’t help looking back in my rearview mirror, although I know there is no one following. I have the AC on full blast and I can still feel the heat. Nobody travels in the desert in midafternoon at this time of year if they can help it. My hands are clenched on the wheel, my neck is stiff. The knot in my stomach won’t loosen, and my mind won’t stop replaying what happened.

  The day didn’t start like this.

  Nine Hours Earlier...

  I wake, as I do every morning in Egypt, to the azan. It can be hauntingly beautiful, the call to prayer, although not so much when it’s a plethora of voices competing to be heard from multiple minarets. I’ve learned Arabic well enough to follow along. The first call of the day always includes this line: As-salatu khayrun minan-nawm––Prayer is better than sleep.

  “That’s debatable,” Jenny says as we pass each other in the hallway of our rented house. “I’m praying for another hour or two of rest.” But she says it with a smile, moving out of my way so I can take my turn in the cramped bathroom.

  The tile floor is cool under my feet. All the floors are tiled, different colors and patterns—yellow starbursts in the bedroom I share with Jenny and Lenor. We try to keep the house free of the ubiquitous sand, leaving our boots in a dusty pile near the front door, although it’s hard with five of us. Khaled and Patrick share a room and bath across the hall from ours.

  We leave for the excavation site early, like we do every morning, because it’s cooler then, and morning is the only tolerable time of day to be outside. We haul lots of bottled water and sunscreen, and equip ourselves with hats to block the sun, and masks and scarves to keep the dust out of our mouths and eyes. The sun is just beginning to rise as we head out, an ominous orange sliver.

  The excavation is beyond the West Bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, but it might as well be another planet. Luxor is relatively quiet compared to Cairo, but it’s still a city and a tourist mecca. On our way to work we pass the horse-drawn caleches that carry tourists from hotels to Karnak and other famous sites, before we join the traffic crossing the bridge over the great river.

  We leave behind the noise of the city and soon enter a stillness that is broken only by our own conversations and the sound of shovels and trowels.

  When I first came to the desert I found the sameness alarming. Sand as far as the eye could see, everything a bland beige. It was only over time that I noticed the subtle color gradations and learned to spot the rare desert flower or the occasional wind-whipped, wizened tree.

  I’ve come to appreciate the peace of the desert. The silence. Certainly, it’s better than the cacophony of Egypt’s cities. Especially Cairo, with its madness of a million honking horns and crushing hordes of people.

  Dr. Adley met all of us at the airport there, striding across the crowded terminal, instantly recognizable with his shock of silver white hair, hawk-like nose, and craggy, sunbaked skin. “Call me Richard,” he said with his plummy English accent, animated and imposing, well over six feet tall and towering over everyone except Patrick. I’m surprised and almost giddy—the great Egyptologist asked me to call him by his first name! That he hugged all the women, but not the men, didn’t register in the moment.

  We’d barely arrived, but Dr. Adley—Richard—insisted on driving us around the city’s various famous sites, including Khan el-Khalili, the five of us graduate students and postdocs hiking around in cargo pants and work boots, dressed for the field rather than Cairo’s ancient bazaar.

  It’s a wonderful place, with old stone archways and winding passages, and a hundred different shops all piled high with ankhs and hieroglyphic jewelry or papyrus scrolls—the items the tourists buy—as well as more mundane household goods. Shopkeepers in caftans and thobes called from the doorways, speaking broken English along with their Arabic. “Here, lady, best for you,” a man cried,
pointing at the rainbow array of pashminas on the wall behind him. Another shopkeeper waved a blue scarab amulet in my face.

  My gaze jumped from one bright object to the next, my head rang with the noise. It was like trying to take a sip of water from a fast-running hose, the liquid splashing and spilling, impossible to contain. Or being released from a dimly lit room into the hard light of day, so bright that your eyes burn and you have to retreat, blinking and tearing because it’s just too much.

  Now I know that this is exactly how Richard wanted us to feel. He cultivates that off-balance sensation in his subordinates. Ignore our jet lag ostensibly to show us the fun bits of Egypt, but wasn’t it also an early and easy way to establish his superior knowledge and dominance in this unfamiliar country?

  For five of us, coming from the relative quiet of American campuses, it was quite the culture shock. Only Khaled was used to it, working as he had before with Richard. I’d been living in New England, in an orderly college town with Puritan roots and Yankee stoicism. All the noise and brilliance that is Egypt came as a complete surprise.

  But even feeling as overwhelmed as I did that first day couldn’t crush my euphoria. This is where I’d been wanting and waiting to be for years, the place I’d dreamed about ever since first studying the pharaohs in elementary school. It’s taken me a long time to get to here, and I was over the moon to receive this postdoctoral fellowship. I leapt at the chance, and nothing, not even the relative poverty and chaos of Egypt, could persuade me that this experience would be anything less than wondrous.

  After a week spent studying the Cairo Museum’s massive collection of antiquities, as well as visiting the great pyramids at Giza, we flew south to Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes, to begin our fieldwork.

  The guesthouse Richard arranged for us is about a forty-minute ride from the dig. An older woman named Hoda comes to clean for us weekly and doesn’t seem to feel any of the discomfort that I do when I pass her energetically sweeping the rooms, or down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floors. She tut-tuts over the state of our nearly empty fridge, or about the dishes that we leave piled in the sink when we’re too tired to do anything at the end of the day but eat whatever we’ve scrounged before shelling out of our filthy clothing and falling into bed.