“Priests would remove the organs—and put them in canopic jars that got buried with the body. There were gods who watched over them—Qebehsenuf, the falcon, guarded the intestines; Hapy, the baboon, had the lungs; Imsety, a person, protected the liver; and Duamutef, the jackal, had the stomach. The brain was taken out through the nose. The heart was left in place, because to the Ancient Egyptians, it was the seat of all personality and intelligence. Then the body was packed with natron, a kind of salt, and padded with linen, before getting wrapped in hundreds of yards of the stuff. Sometimes amulets and prayers and spells were tucked inside or written on the bandages. The wrappings were coated with resin, and wrapped again, and the last layer was a shroud. The whole thing took seventy days.”

“To dry out?”

“Yeah, but also because of a star, Sothis, which disappeared from the sky for that amount of time before coming back during the annual flooding of the Nile. Death, rebirth, you get it. Then a sem priest—usually the eldest son—performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, which let the deceased eat and drink and speak and have sex in the afterlife. The mummy was put in a coffin or coffins, and the burial chamber was sealed shut. That is, until some archaeologist decided thousands of years later to move it to a museum.”

The mummy room in the Cairo Museum is always the most crowded. There are tons of pharaohs there—from Ramesses II, to Hatshepsut, to Seti I, whose body is in such good shape that he looks like he’s taking a nap. There’s a mummified king who died in battle, who has a hole above his eye that matches a foreign ax blade. The whole thing always felt creepy to me—a stream of tourists who were basically Peeping Toms. “So much about Egyptian tombs was meant for people to explore and to celebrate their lives—but they never intended for us to see their mummified bodies,” I say. “That was private.”

When I finish, I realize that Win’s been listening to my diatribe with increasing wonder. “What came first? Death or Egypt?”

I blink. “What?”

“That’s your thing,” she says softly.

“My what?”

“Your thing. Egypt. That’s what made your heart beat. Mine was art.” She leans back against the couch. “Do you know who Marina Abramovi? is?”

I shake my head.

“She’s a performance artist. She and her partner, a man named Ulay, worked together. For one installation, they crashed into each other over and over again for an entire hour. They braided their hair together and faced away from each other for seventeen hours. In 1977 they inhaled and exhaled the same square of air until they passed out. In the 1980s, when I was an art history student, they did a piece where they sat across from each other and stared in silence for seven hours.”

“I’ve never understood why that’s considered art.”

Win looks surprised. “What’s love, if not art?” she asks. “In 1988, Abramovi? and Ulay came up with the performance to end all performances. They were going to start walking from opposite sides of the Great Wall of China and meet in the middle, and get married. They called the piece The Lovers. But while they were planning it, Ulay told her that he was having an affair with another woman. They broke up, but they decided to still do the Great Wall walk. Their relationship hadn’t turned out the way they expected, and what was more real than that? So they started, almost six thousand kilometers apart from each other, with Abramovi? still holding out hope they might get back together. Three months later, they met up. But he wasn’t walking toward her the way they had planned. He’d stopped and waited at a spot between two temples, because it was a perfect photo opportunity for when they reunited. That’s when she realized she didn’t want him back.” Win shook her head. “Relationships aren’t about photo ops. They’re about scaling mountains and crossing deserts, about getting to where you think you belong, about having your partner’s arms around you, and realizing that you don’t fit into them. That’s why it was art.”

“Wow,” I say, breathless. “You’ve convinced me.”

I stare at her, thinking that there is so much more of this woman I need to know, and so little time in which to do it. I wonder what will happen, when we meet in the middle.

“Some pair we are,” Win muses. “Love and death.”

Felix walks in at that moment, holding the cup of coffee I hadn’t really wanted. “What did I miss?” he asks.

* * *

—

WHEN YOU ARE waiting for someone to die, time is unrecognizable. Hours bleed into days; days are suddenly weeks. You might go several days without realizing you have not showered; you forget to eat. You sleep and worry and sit vigil in a world with no circadian rhythm.

After my mother died, I was so sick that I could not keep food down and couldn’t sleep. I thought that I had grieved myself into some kind of autoimmune disease until I had blood drawn and a doctor told me I was pregnant. That’s when I realized that while my mother was in hospice, when I had given myself permission to find mindless peace with Brian, I had not been using birth control with any regularity.

I thought about how to tell Brian I was pregnant, until I was knotted up so tight I could barely function. Every time I practiced what I would say, I could see my mother crossing herself superstitiously. Go to a funeral pregnant, she warned me, and you’ll raise sadness right inside of you.

In the end, when I told Brian I had something important to talk to him about, I took him out to Boston Harbor, and we sat side by side throwing bits of Italian cookies we’d bought from Mike’s Pastry to the seagulls. I said I was pregnant.

I didn’t know, back then, how he would react. It’s one thing to find comfort in someone else’s body when you are both grieving. It’s another thing to have a baby.

But Brian was incandescent. I watched the knowledge settle in him, the wheels turning in his mind.

For one awful, terrifying moment, I thought he was going to ask me to marry him.

I still thought about Wyatt, of course. And I had betrayed him, for sure, no matter that he didn’t know it; no matter that I could justify my behavior as physical release and escape and a Band-Aid slapped over a deep sorrow. Yet with Brian, there was respect. And like, if not love.

But when I thought about Wyatt, he was further and further away, like an island with no bridges leading to it. Even if I’d entertained the thought of reaching out to him, finding out I was pregnant decimated that intention. I honestly had no words to describe what I had done. Why I had needed to do it.

“Dawn,” Brian said soberly. “We’re good together, don’t you think? If anything positive could come out of losing your mother and my grandmother…maybe it’s this.” He reached for my hands. “Move in with me.”

I let out the breath I had been holding. Brian was providing me with a way out. Blinders, so that I could see only forward, and not back.

“I already have a place you can stay. And I can help you take care of Kieran.”

A practical arrangement, then. This would start slow. There were eight more months, after all, to figure this out.

I did not realize at that time that when you plant seeds, you also get roots.

He looked down at my abdomen with wonder. “Are you sure? Are we really going to…”

I had entertained the thought of going back to finish my Ph.D. Maybe not right away—maybe not for years—but in the back of my mind, it was still how I defined myself: as an Egyptologist, albeit on hiatus.

But Brian said we.

He was offering me a lifeline before I even realized I was in way over my head. So I grabbed on with both hands. I wrote Yale and officially withdrew from the Egyptology program.

I had not written Wyatt. He would have been back on campus by then. I needed you, I imagined saying, but you were not here. Never mind the detail that he might have wanted to be; that I hadn’t asked. There was no way to explain my actions without hating myself; there was no way the consequences would not involve Wyatt hating me. So every day, I put off composing that letter. And every day, it got easier to do just that, until I stopped thinking about composing it at all.

I moved Kieran and me into Brian’s house. I bought a bassinet at a garage sale.

The next day I saw blood in my underwear when I went to the bathroom.

Not even a week had passed, and I was stunned at how fast an unsurmountable problem had transformed into something I wanted viscerally. When the radiologist at Brigham and Women’s shrugged and told me that spotting was normal, I stacked the odds. I told myself my good fortune would not come at the expense of any bad fortune. I apologized to my baby for equivocating, even for a hot second. I slipped a newly minted penny in each shoe. I slept with a knife under my mattress, to keep away evil spirits.

I went into labor two weeks early, but all my superstitious behavior paid off. Meret was born plump and perfect. Her lungs were fully developed, and even when I stayed awake for hours to watch the rise and fall of the tiny cage of her chest, it was steady and infallible. You see, Brian told me, already in love with his daughter. You had nothing to worry about.

* * *

—