The Chaos of Stars (22 page)

Ry’s hand is still in mine, and something about the skin contact and the completely irrational and inexplicable electric current it’s sending buzzing through my body makes me feel buoyant and invincible. I was supposed to drift on the edges tonight, but it’s still my night, and I’ll own it.

“I can do it.”

A little over an hour later, and the bravado I felt volunteering has collapsed and sits sour and flopping like a dying fish in my stomach. I’m in the hall corner outside of the still-closed room, leaning against the wall, looking at all the
people
. There are so many people. Why are they here? They shouldn’t be here. This is going to be a disaster. Why do I even need to talk? Surely the room speaks for itself.

I wish Michelle hadn’t told all the bartenders that Ry, Tyler, and I were too young for drinks. I hate wine, but anything sounds like a good idea right now.

“Hey,” Ry says, and I startle, unaware he’d made his way through the crowds to stand next to me. “Nervous?”

“No,” I say, but it comes out a whisper.

“You’ll be brilliant. I know it. I’ve got a present for you.”

I raise an eyebrow, glad to have something to focus on other than my impending embarrassment. “Oh?”

“I didn’t have time to wrap it, but . . .” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gold cuff bracelet, open on a nearly invisible hinge. It’s been etched with a design—scarab beetles, pushing the sun around the edges—and an oval jade stone in the center has raised gold around it to make it into the body of a scarab. He takes my hand and slips it over my wrist, closing it with a tiny snap. It fits like it was made for me.

“Scarabs,” I say, unable to take my eyes off it.

“Yeah, I know they’re bugs and that’s weird, but I thought because of what they symbolize—”

“Hope and rebirth.” I trace my finger along the smooth, cool jade, then look up into his eyes. “It’s perfect.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His smile is sunshine, and he reaches up and traces his fingers along my green stripe. “Plus it goes with your hair.”

“You thought of everything.”

“You’re pretty much everything I’ve thought of for a while now.”

My heart flutters and I have no idea how to respond to that, or to this gift. That same giddy current has resumed its path of havoc through my veins. “Orion, I—”

Michelle taps a glass and croaks that the room will open now with a special tour from the designer and daughter of the collectors. She gives a slightly painful preamble about ancient Egypt and its invaluable place in history, and the Egyptians’ science and culture. And then she stops and I realize it’s my turn.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I go up on my tiptoes and kiss Ry’s cheek, then dart past him so I can’t see his reaction.

I stand in front of the still-closed doors. “We can learn the most about a culture by studying what was important to them. And in the world of ancient Egypt, they worshipped life and death in equal parts. Isis and Osiris, the focal points of our exhibit, represented those opposite”—I pause, realizing I mean what I’m about to say—“but equally beautiful and necessary parts of the human existence.” I open the doors and walk in.

Everyone follows, crowding the doorway, the silence either awed or bored. I really, really hope it’s awe. Standing in front of the first item, a remarkably well-preserved sculpture of my mother with the Pharaoh Thutmose II as a baby on her lap, I say, “I give you Isis, Mother of the Gods, Light Giver of Heaven, Mistress of the House of Life, Lady of the Words of Power. Goddess of Motherhood, Magic, and Fertility. First daughter of the Earth and Sky. Protector of beginnings.” I pause, then smile. “Perhaps the greatest evidence of Isis’s magic, however, was her breasts’ ability to remain so round and perky after nursing hundreds of pharaohs.”

There’s a pause, then Scott, standing in the front row, bursts out in raucous laughter, which quickly spreads through the room, and I know I have them. Thank you, maternal nudity. Who knew you’d save me? Sirus, near the back with Deena, rolls his eyes at me with a grin.

I move to the next exhibit, a statue of my father, with the atef crown and his crook and staff, sitting in his throne. It gives me an odd pang of homesickness. “Isis isn’t complete without her husband and counterpart, Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, Lord of the Dead, Lord of Silence, Lord of Love. Osiris was the god of the underworld and afterlife, but unlike many cultures’ underworld deities who lorded over damned and trapped spirits, Osiris was also celebrated as the god of reincarnation. His domain was one that was carefully planned for and optimistically anticipated.”

I move to a large vase depicting both of them, my mother with the cow-horn headdress and huge, outstretched wings, my father with green skin, the color of rebirth. “Isis’s motherhood and fertility ushers in life, and Osiris rules over the transition of that life to a new one. They are birth and death and rebirth, an eternal cycle, each incomplete without the other.” I smile. “Of course, like all couples, they had speed bumps: arguments over whose turn it was to wash the pottery; Osiris leaving his crook and staff by the foot of the bed where Isis was constantly tripping on them; that time Osiris sired Anubis with Isis’s sister Nephthys, the wife of Set. Families are complicated, and ancient Egyptian deities were no exception.”

I gesture to a fresco on the wall of my mother, again with the cow-horn headdress, standing next to Whore-us in all his falcon-headed glory and the sun god Amun-Re. The fresco is covered with elaborate hieroglyphs. I realize with a start that they are in my mother’s own hand, her secret writing. She made this one herself. It’s all I can do not to reach up and trace the words.

Idiot gods help me, I
miss
her.

“Horus, a miracle child conceived after Isis brought Osiris back from the dead, took his father’s place as the god-king of Egypt. He was his mother’s pride and joy. She even went so far as to poison the sun god to trick him into revealing his name to her, forever giving herself and her son power over the most powerful god. It takes the concept of an overcompetitive soccer mom to a whole new level.”

I smile and wait for the laughter to stop. “So imagine her despair, after everything she did to get Horus here and then secure his place among the gods, when he married Hathor, the goddess of sex and beer. You thought your daughter-in-law was hard to get along with. . . .”

It continues like that, as I detail the story of my family, mixing mythology with the personalities the audience has no idea these gods have. I even use dear old Thoth’s story of how he added extra days to the calendar to trick the Sun into letting the Sky have her children. By the end I am both exhausted and elated. As I discuss the murder of Osiris and make a joke about the rather overwhelming depiction of the vital manparts Isis magically made out of clay for the resurrected Osiris, I feel a strange sense of tenderness toward my parents. As screwed up as they are, I can’t deny the impact they had on an entire culture. It’s an impact that even thousands of years haven’t been able to erase entirely. Somehow, talking about their dual roles has helped me reconcile my parents with their godly attributes.

And then I’m done, and everyone is applauding and breaking off into groups to look at the exhibits, and I watch it all with glowing pride, knowing that I made this room, but my parents made the stories that filled it. Even if I won’t last forever, I’m still a part of this because it’s a part of me.

Sirus and Deena walk up. “It’s like you really know them!” Deena says.

Sirus and I laugh. She gives us a strange look, then sways on her feet.

“You look pale. Go home. Ry can give me a ride when everything’s done.” I hug them both and send them on their way.

Speaking of Ry . . . I look around the room, grateful yet again that being tall gives me a good vantage point. How do short people ever find anyone in a crowd?

I see him in the corner, talking with a couple. The man is hard-looking, all blocky features like he was clumsily and carelessly carved out of rough limestone. It isn’t until he walks toward me and I see his limp that I realize he’s Ry’s father. Which makes the woman his mother. She turns and I stare, slack-jawed. Scott and Tyler weren’t kidding—she is the single most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She has Ry’s same dark hair; it trails down her back in thick, luxurious curls. All the parts of her that should be curvy are soft and perfect, and the parts that should be small are almost exaggeratedly so. Her bust in their entryway couldn’t even begin to do her features justice.

I feel ragingly inadequate being in the same room as her. But then she takes her husband’s arm in her own and smiles at him, and it’s so obvious that she loves him—completely—and somehow that makes me feel better. They walk up to me and I have no idea what to say to them. What do I say to them?

“This is lovely,” Ry’s mom says, smiling. She is why the Greeks wrote poetry.

“I couldn’t have done it without Ry. Thanks for letting me steal his time this last week.”

She laughs, and Ry’s dad twists his features into a smile. He’s not handsome, but he’s so solid, and there’s something about his face that is both powerful and kind. I like him already. There’s something familiar, comforting about both of them. Maybe just because I’ve been in their home and now it makes more sense.

“He’s never been happier,” she says.

“Oh, hey.” Ry stands to the side of us, fidgeting, like he doesn’t want me to be talking to his parents. “Umm, Mom, Dad, didn’t you have that thing to get to?”

They laugh, then hug Ry, and we exchange good-byes. As they leave, his mom turns and makes eye contact with me, giving me a secret smile. That must be where he gets it. Curse those secretive dimpled genes!

Everyone gradually filters out, with many handshakes and congratulations, and even a business card from a real estate agent and an offer to dress houses she’s trying to sell. Tyler and Scott head into the hall with Michelle to supervise the table cleanup, and I look across the starry eternity room to see Ry there, beaming at me.

We walk toward each other, meeting in the middle. Screw it all. I want this. I want him.

“You did it,” he says.

“We did it,” I answer.

I throw my arms around his neck and press my lips against his, and they are warm and soft and answer mine immediately. A thousand feelings burst through me, feelings I never wanted or even knew existed, and I am floating in the stars with Orion, my Orion, and I want more more more of him, I want to map out a new chart of stars in my soul, stars that let him in.

I kiss him, and I am reborn.

Finally we pull apart, arms wrapped around each other. “Orion,” I whisper, his name a love song and a hopeful prayer.

“Isadora,” he says, “I have been waiting to do that for years.”

“What do you mean, years? We just barely—,” I start, and it’s only then that I realize he said every word of that sentence in a different, obscure language. Languages he couldn’t possibly know, languages that no normal person would even know existed, much less be able to speak. Unless . . .

Chaos take us all.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Osiris was murdered. Horus was poisoned by a scorpion. Amun-Re was fatally bit by a snake. The gods could die. The gods did die.

But Isis, the Great Lady of Magic, was always around to fix it.

Without Isis, even a god could die forever.

“NO,” I WHISPER, BACKING A STEP AWAY FROM
Ry.

“I’ve wanted to tell you! And now—well, here. I have something to read to you.” He pulls out a thin sheaf of folded paper from his pocket, face flush with excitement. And he’s saying all of this, everything, in ancient Egyptian. The language my mother used to sing me to sleep. The language
no one
knows how to speak.

Floods.
My family aren’t the only gods
. The world has shifted, tilting on its axis. This changes everything I thought I knew. And if he can speak in tongues . . .

Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no. Ry is a god.
He’s a god.
It can’t be possible. There aren’t any others. My mother would have told me. She always said the other mythologies, the other stories . . . she said they were cheap copies. Does she know there are other gods out there?

Not out there. Right here. And he knows who I am.

“How long?” I whisper.

He looks up from his papers. “What?”

“How long have you known? Did you find me on purpose?” I remember with icy clarity what he said to me after I got my hair cut—that he recognized me. He was looking for me.

His smile finally drops off as he notices my expression. “No, I—”

I laugh bitterly. “Gods. Just can’t help yourselves, can’t ever leave me alone. You set me up.” Then I remember what little I know about the Orion from Greek mythology.

He’s known as the Hunter.