Whatever happens, whatever I gain, it is going to be tempered by loss.
My heart is not in my body, I think.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I dream in blue.
I imagine Win and Thane, traipsing through Paris to find the perfect pigment.
I see Meret the moment she entered the world, her skin porcelain until oxygen pinked through her like a sunrise.
I picture how Brian’s hands shook when he reached across the blue tablecloth and asked me to marry him, as if he still wasn’t sure after a year that I would come home every night to him.
And I remember Wyatt’s eyes, after the plane crash, when the hospital walls spun and I fell to the floor and couldn’t speak or move. He had leaned over me, filling my field of vision. Although there was only buzzing in my ears, I could read his lips:
Olive.
Olive.
I love.
“You,” I had gasped, my last word when I thought I was dying.
* * *
—
ONE WEEK AFTER I am back in Boston, Kieran comes over to remove my staples. Wyatt is at his hotel, taking a phone call with Mostafa, the antiquities director. Brian is at work. Meret finds me alone in the bathroom after my brother leaves, staring at my scar in the mirror. A misshapen braid of the remaining half of my hair snakes over my shoulder.
Herodotus wrote that around 499 B.C.E., Histiaeus—the deposed King of Miletus—wanted help revolting against the Persians. He tattooed a note on an enslaved man’s head and sent him to a sympathizer months later, with the instruction to shave the man’s hair and read the message.
Even after there is hair on this side of my head again, I will know there’s a story hiding beneath it.
“It’ll grow out,” Meret says, looking at the shadowed stubble of the buzzed section of my head.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Eventually.”
Meret grabs my hand and pulls me out of the bathroom. She tugs me down the stairs and snags my purse off the counter before leading me outside.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Trust me.”
In Brookline, we are only a few blocks from Coolidge Corner. Meret leads me down the main block, into a salon where I get my highlights done twice a year. My normal hairdresser, Siobhan, turns as the door jingles, takes one look at me and the scar on my head, and her jaw drops.
“Hi,” Meret announces. “I know we don’t have an appointment but my mom recently nearly died and it would be really cool if you could squeeze her in just this once.”
Every client in the salon is staring at me. The woman in Siobhan’s chair, whose wet hair is wrapped in a towel, stands up. “You can have my spot,” she says.
I sink down into the seat, Meret hovering beside me. Siobhan clearly doesn’t know if she should ask me why I have half a shaved head, why I have a scar. “Brain surgery,” I explain.
“My God,” Siobhan breathes. “What happened?”
“I was in a plane crash.” I lean back and close my eyes. “I just…Make me look more normal?”
Her eyes widen. She picks up the scissors and assesses me critically. “We’re going short,” she announces.
A moment later, the rope of my braid falls to the floor.
She spins the chair so that I am not looking in the mirror as she works. She uses a clipper to buzz the fine hairs at the back of my neck and to blend where my scalp has been shaved with the parts that haven’t. Twenty minutes later, she pivots the chair so that I can see.
If you approached me from the right, you might mistake me for an Ancient Egyptian. My hair ends just above my jawline, hanging in a sleek bob. But if you approach me from the left, I am buzzed, punk, cyborg. I am history and I am the future, all at once, depending on where you look.
“What do you think?” Siobhan asks, holding her breath.
I burst into tears.
It is not that I look ridiculous, because I don’t. Somehow, as a haircut, it works. It’s that I am split into halves and I don’t know how to put myself back together.
Before Siobhan can react or soothe me, Meret grabs the electric razor from the table and swoops it over the side of her head, clearing a path that matches the one I was given in surgery. “Do me next,” she says, plunking down in the empty chair beside Siobhan’s. When the hairdresser doesn’t move, she challenges her with a look. “You’re not going to let me walk out of here like this, are you?”
While Siobhan cuts Meret’s hair into a bob on the right, and buzzes the left side of her scalp, I watch, speechless. Meret’s hand snakes out from beneath the plastic cape they’ve settled over her to catch the curls that slip to the floor. “It’s only hair, Mom,” she says softly, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “I know it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. But just in case, it’s nice to know you match someone, isn’t it?”
* * *
—
WE TAKE THE long way home, my brave daughter and I. We walk around the reservoir, like we did before I left for Egypt. There are leaves floating on its surface like small, jeweled boats.
I feel lighter without the bulk of my hair, like the wind exists just to touch me. Meret and I fall into step with each other. I realize that she is taller than I am now. Not by much, maybe a quarter of an inch, but it’s unsettling. I think of her, fierce as a Valkyrie in that salon.
“I love you,” I say.
She glances at me. “Okay, boomer.”
I laugh. “I just thought I should say it out loud.”
We take a few more steps in silence.
“I like him,” Meret says finally. “I didn’t think I would.”
I stop walking and take a deep breath. “Love is messy,” I tell her. “Sometimes you hurt the people you love. And sometimes you love the people who hurt you.”
This is how I want her to remember me: as someone who told her the truth, even when it was a razor. As someone who learned the hard way, so she would not have to.
I can see Wyatt in her features, and Brian in her mannerisms. I blink, and Meret is no longer just my daughter. She’s someone who is on the edge of becoming a woman, who one day will be subject to the same gravitational pulls on her heart.
“So,” Meret asks. “What are you going to do?”
Maybe this is all love is: twin routes of pain and pleasure. Maybe the miracle isn’t where we wind up, but that we get there at all.
I open my mouth, and I answer.
FOR FRANKIE RAMOS
Welcome to the family (and my endless research questions about medicine)!
AND FOR KYLE FERREIRA VAN LEER
Who first mentioned the Book of Two Ways and got me thinking