First Man (8 page)

S
he 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

T
he 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. The 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.