The Find (3 page)

‘I'll get things started,' she said. ‘Next summer, we'll be here.' She took Colin's arm, as they set off, not looking anymore, just walking fast. They were all three laughing and talking as they went, though at the same time, in her head, she was bargaining, in a way she tried very hard to avoid, but periodically gave in to: ‘If I get this one out — and described — it'll be enough.'

Could there ever be enough?

She went to her room while Mike and Colin arranged their extra night and called home, leaving a message for her mother and Janice. Her brother Vik was out too. She set her laptop and cell to charge, showered, dried her hair with the hotel dryer, which seemed to double its volume. Moisturiser, fresh clothes… She leaned into the dimly lit mirror to apply some lipstick, then picked up her jacket and went to the lobby to meet the other two.

♦ ♦ ♦

‘What do you want, Scott?' Dr Hoffman had asked Scott in the ‘chat' they had before she last renewed his prescription. She was the plainest woman on earth: grey hair, papery skin, grey eyes, thin all over. She was a total pain, but Scott could tell that she meant well — that she wanted him out of the hole he was in, almost more than he did.

‘Something big,' he said. ‘Different. Exciting. Out of this world.'

‘Yes,' she said, smiling for a moment, and then growing serious again. ‘Of course.'

♦ ♦ ♦

The mountain that loomed to the west of the town blocked the sun, but indirect light suffused the sky and the air was still warm. They walked the length of the little main street of Big Crow, noting the odd selection of stores that somehow managed to survive: an outdoor activities outfitters cum sports cum general clothing store, a bakery, a tiny library open three days a week. There was a proud, hand-carved sign at the main intersection and a few new buildings but these were outnumbered by the unpainted older ones, many of which looked empty, or, on second glance as if they ought to have been empty, but were not. First the coal mines had closed, and now, it seemed from the protest posters stapled to the hydro poles, the mill had gone too. The setting was spectacular, so there'd be some tourism: outdoor pursuits in summer, good skiing in the winter. Not much else.

Houses began at the town end of the side streets and then petered out as they became country roads. On the way in they had passed a small mall with a gas station, grocery store and hamburger place; they all wanted to avoid that, and were glad to push into a dilapidated restaurant that claimed to be genuine Italian.

Now they talked of anything but the find, and thought of nothing else. They had beer, and then a bottle of red wine.

‘So,' Mike said at the end of the meal. ‘Let's have some dessert between us and another half to go with it.' But Colin got up and put some bills on the table.

‘Early start tomorrow. Old man must rest,' he said. Anna hugged him before he left, and then she and Mike were silent for a while. He offered wine; she nodded to accept. The dessert arrived, a layered confection of sponge cake, alcohol-soaked cherries, custard and cream so rich that they could do no more than taste it from the tips of their spoons.

His family were all well, Mike said. Lily was pregnant with their third. It was tough on her that he was away so much. Tough on him too: they couldn't have proper summer holidays and, one way or another, he wasn't there for most birthdays and family events. There was a great deal that went on which he just didn't know about. Sometimes, he said, rubbing his face briskly with his hands — a gesture she found familiar — he felt like a stranger when he arrived back home, like an important guest of some kind… It wore off soon enough, but then it happened again. Life in two halves wasn't ideal. Still, what is? You had to live with it. He leaned back in his chair, cracked his finger joints and smiled. The waitress brought their bill.

It was thoroughly night when they left. A three-quarter moon hung low in the sky to the east and a scrap of sea, miles away, reflected the light. Away from the streetlights, everything was grey, silver or black. She was thinking about the specimen, what exactly it might turn out to be. How much of the skull would be there? How much of it could they get out unbroken? What a huge undertaking the preparation would be. She was thinking that it would be wonderful if finally the debate over the way the large flying reptiles became airborne could be resolved. If that was something she might do. She was thinking how she must get hold of Rivers, who was writing up the tarsal bones Colin had referred to, and see exactly what he thought those were from. She was thinking about the National Geographic, the Natural Science Foundation, the lesser in-house sources. What the competition for grants might be this year, who to ask to referee, who else it might be beneficial to bring in.

Mike cleared his throat. ‘Look,' he said, in a clipped, businesslike tone as they turned into the hotel driveway. The sign:
Mountain View Hotel
was lit with a single lamp; the ugly, low-slung building was set back, beyond some landscaping and a carpark. ‘Look, I've got a proposal to make. Let's sit here a minute.' He gestured towards one of the picnic tables set beneath a clump of immature fir trees, and then sat on it. Anna remained standing. She assumed that his thoughts were running on the same lines as hers.

‘It's this—' he said. ‘I'm still trying to work you out. I used to think you must have gone gay, didn't like men. But it certainly looked to me like you had something on with that Brazilian at the conference last year—.'

What?
She almost asked him to say it again to be sure she had heard correctly. Didn't they have other far more important things to talk about? What on earth was he doing, and now of all times? Could he not give up?

‘Look, Mike,' she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could, ‘let's not go there.' He ignored her, smiled, even.

‘It's commitment you don't want, is that it?'

He was right, though she would never tell him so. She stood there, astounded. ‘I can't give it,' he continued, ‘so, we have a fit. What I think, you see, is why don't you and I have some fun when we meet up like this?' He reached out and ran his hand down her arm from shoulder to wrist, then slipped off the bench and pulled her towards him. ‘I've always—' His hands gripped her waist; his erection pressed into the layers of thin fabric that separated their skins and it was odd, very odd, to have her mouth open itself to his and her skin ignite and at least half of her rush to greet the experience, even as another part pulled back, waiting for an opportunity to speak, which clearly was not going to exist unless she made it.

Anna could have said: Okay, Professor Swenson, on your head be it. He was an attractive man offering a simple thing. But leave aside Lily, the kids — he was too close; even as things were, she saw him fairly often and now she'd be working with him on this dig, for heaven's sake! Whatever he thought or said, it would get out of hand and when it ended, he would very likely make a fuss. She pulled away.

‘Believe me, this really won't work.'

He grabbed her arm.

‘What
is
the matter with you?' he said, and she did half admire him for knowing somehow that he was not getting the whole truth. But it was not as if he had a right to it: since when was there a law that said a person should give a detailed explanation if they decided against fucking someone?

‘I thought you were
asking
,' she said. ‘Mike, that's my
answer
. No. I want to go in. Let me go!' He did not release her but yanked her closer, grabbed some of her hair with his other hand, and it was then that she hit him. Without thinking, she punched him with her right hand, in the face. His nose buckled, her fist slid into his cheekbone: a noise that was hard and wet at the same time. Pain shot up her arm. He gasped, let go of her. She burst into tears.

‘Sorry! Sorry!' she said. Blood was running over his lips and chin. Maybe, Anna thought later, she should have stayed to look after him, found an icepack, wrapped it in a cloth? But at the time, it didn't occur to her: she had never done such a thing before and he was furious — she just wanted to get away.

She pushed into the hotel and the brightness of the lobby and the busy pattern of the carpeting seemed extraordinary, surreal in its vividness after the ghostly moonlight outside, and everything she saw shimmered, because the tears, once started, would not stop.

The flickering of a television set showed through the frosted glass of the partition behind the desk, but thankfully, the receptionist was asleep. A sign next to him said
Scott
. His head rested on his folded arms; all Anna could see of him was a thatch of dark brown hair. His sleep was thick and inert, in all ways oblivious and she took the stairs, let herself into the room, locked the door, and then kicked at it until her toes hurt. Why the hell could Mike not leave well alone? Why must he have everything? Why could he not respect her, even if he thought she was wrong? Why fight? Why now?

—
♦ —

ANNA LIKED MEN, EMOTIONALLY AND PHYSICALLY;
she liked the differences, their being in so many ways unlike her. She did not always agree with where it led, but even so, she admired their matter-of-fact single-mindedness, their capacity for work. She liked the way they lived in their skins and — apparently at least — knew who they were without too much introspection or peering into mirrors. She liked their anatomy, their muscle tone, the shoulders, hips, and the textures of their skin — from the velvet of their cocks to the roughness of yesterday's shave. She savoured the animal smell lurking beneath the soap and shampoo, she liked sex very much and as well as that she admired the whole idea of sexual reproduction, the fitting together of sexual parts which, though of common origin had become each other's opposite, in and out, yin and yang. And even though it had served her so very poorly, the scrambling together of two sets of selfish genetic material: the infinite newness that it created, the sheer enormity of its potential, still excited her.

Her life would have been easier if she had
not
liked men, if she had been a nun, or gay. Or both. It would have been easier, too, she sometimes thought (not understanding, or perhaps preferring not to know, how her unavailability made her desirable), if the men she'd met were as eager to avoid ongoing relationships as they are supposed to be... Sex, love, reproduction: none of it was simple. But she had a system: rules that more or less worked, most of the time. Worked
for her
. And the way she approached sex and love, she insisted, was
different
, not lesser, and in any case she was not foisting it on anyone else. Vik had always wanted her to do things the way he did or would do in her position. Perhaps he still felt that way, but he had, thank God, finally stopped saying so.

The rules: theatre, movie, dinner, skiing, etc., yes. Sex, quite likely. Secrets, no. Domesticity, no. As little grief and mess as possible. Absolutely no trying to tell her what to do.
Yes
to people who appreciated the here and now. Who didn't make judgments, or insist upon answers or see their time together as a kind of investment.

No
to anyone insistent, greedy or domineering.
No
to anyone too needy, or who might make too much fuss at the end (and the end would come along quickly enough, unless there were very long intervals between meetings).
No
to close colleagues.

No
, sadly but absolutely, to anyone who wanted children, or even looked as if they might without knowing it yet: the hardest part. She did want love,
to
love, especially, but the form this took had to be shaped by her circumstances.

And regarding Mike Swenson, despite his obvious attractions, it had always been, and still was,
No
.

Years ago, they had worked together at the university. At a departmental reception once, he'd leaned in, his lips almost touching her ear and said:
Why don't we two leave this idiotic dinner right now and go somewhere where we can take off our clothes?

A nice thought
, she'd said, smiling,
but I just don't have time for affairs. Let's keep things simple, okay?

Bullshit
, he'd replied. He had promised that he wouldn't want to
domesticate
her. That was the word he had used. She noticed, enjoyed even, that he was implying — without irony — the animal in her, the human in him. He was right about
bullshit
, however, and she felt bad about that, but it would have been far worse to explain things properly.

After this Mike had sulked, made life difficult: it clearly rankled him that she'd been given the full professorship and in every discussion thereafter he had taken contrary positions over the smallest things, wrestled every possible point. Having to put up with that had been a factor in her making the sideways move to the post at the museum: wonderful in itself, but also a kind of glorious dead end. It had entailed a shift away from her interest in flight towards a more general focus on the Cretaceous reptiles, and eventually a specialty in the Marine.

So
No
. This went way beyond the rules.

How would Mike explain his injury to Lily?
she thought as she splashed water over her own face — but perhaps he had a fair bit of experience with excuses? He probably messed her around no end. Didn't he know how lucky he was? That was almost as upsetting as the rest.

She threw herself on the bed, worked at breathing steadily and calming down. It was important, she told herself, very important not to get an incident like this out of perspective and not to leap to conclusions — and that of course was another reason why she was so very angry with Mike Swenson: perspective was something she worked extremely hard for.

If only she had not called out to Mike and Colin! She'd done it without thinking, because they could so easily have been there, and because in any case she wanted someone to share the discovery with. Perfectly natural, but if she hadn't called them back, Mike Swenson would be home by now.

And now the scar on her forehead, a small crescent of hard white tissue invisible beneath her hair, began to throb. She refused to touch it, but all the same it would not let her ignore it. She did not at all want to think of that particular day, she did not want to think of her father as he was then — a thin man standing in front of her, jerking and muttering as he tried to fasten the buckle on his binoculars case.

Until that moment she had been Daddy's girl — even when, as his symptoms grew worse, he had given up work, things were still good for a while. His books had come home with him, a microscope too, and he would be waiting in the kitchen for her and Vik when they returned from school. He tipped cookies onto a plate, poured them milk. Sometimes he had to concentrate to do it; his arm jerked and white splatters suddenly decorated the waxed wooden table, Jackson Pollock–style — but he'd ignore them, finish the job, and set the bottle down, staring at it as if it were something alive.

‘Half out or half in?' he'd joke, sponging the table. He directed, Vik collected, Anna wielded the scalpel. She sliced and stained onion flesh and plant stems blue or pink, prepared slides: hairs, insect wings, their own skin. Peering through the eyepiece, they saw the different kinds of cells, identified their nuclei. They discovered the organisms that swam in even clean-looking river water, a whole other kingdom of creatures who devoured each other, grew, and reproduced.

‘Now,' he'd say, ‘try this.'

Once Anna brought home from a school field trip a scorpion fossilised in limestone, which he told her was four hundred million years old. She had already seen dinosaur skeletons in the museum, but it was the simple scorpion, its plated body just like that of today's arthropod, that made prehistory real: there in the sunny kitchen with Daddy smiling at her and Vivaldi playing on the radio, she knew for sure that there had been other worlds, as vivid and as complete as the one she herself inhabited; she knew it for sure now, because they had contained not just storybook monsters, but shellfish, plants, insects and tiny organisms completely invisible to the naked eye, just like, but also completely different to, the ones she'd seen with a microscope. All the time, the world was changing into whatever would come next, a thought that was frightening, yet at the same time wonderful. When she looked into her father's face and tried to tell him this, she saw his smile, and she saw two of herself in the pupils of his eyes.

She preferred to remember
that
moment, the smile on her father's face, the two tiny images of herself in the pupils of his eyes.
Not
how the old-fashioned binoculars in their stiff, heavy, leather-clad case had struck her, hard on the temple,
not
blood in her eyes, tinting the world red. Her mother and Vik had gone on ahead and she ran, calling for them, her sleeve pressed into the wound. Her father had vanished when they all returned to the car.

‘Daddy didn't do this,' her mother said as she dabbed at Anna's forehead with antiseptic, and then pressed hard with Vik's shirt to staunch the flow. ‘He can't help it. He'll say sorry to you tonight.'

Though he never did. He took medicine that made him even less like himself, and then went to live in The Meadows.

Daddy had been forty-five, only six years older than she was now, when his movements started to show and he gave up work. He was fifty, perhaps, when the irrational outbursts and violence began. Because it happened gradually, it was harder to say when his speech began to slur.

There was a fifty percent chance it would happen to her.

Symptoms could present in any order.

How dare Mike Swenson force her — reduce her — to thinking of things like this? Yet, Anna told herself, she must not blame him for something he had not knowingly done; she simply could not afford to think that way.

Perhaps, in the morning, it could all be forgotten.

Despite the late hour, she called Vik again. Lesley picked up: in bed, she said, but not asleep. Reading
Vogue
and drinking a glass of white wine, as it happened. Vik had missed his plane, was away until sometime tomorrow. The kids were fast asleep.

‘Are you all right?' she asked, her voice warm and slow. ‘I'll tell him you called. Come for lunch. Next weekend? The one after?' Lesley knew things Anna wished she did not know. She knew that Anna loved her and Vik's two children even more than she naturally would, as their aunt; she knew that there was a longstanding difference between Vik and Anna concerning genetic testing. And Lesley had once said to Anna that she thought Anna expected too much of her brother now that he was married. But that was in the past, and over the years they had grown close.

‘Is everything okay?' Lesley asked again, and Anna, very glad of her sister-in-law being there, calm, sitting in a pool of lamplight in the big bedroom of her and Vik's latest house, with her magazine and glass of wine beside her, told her that it was. Lesley stifled a yawn. ‘Call again in the morning. Take care, now, and sleep well.'

Anna did not sleep. She downloaded the pictures from her camera, attached a shot of the find to an email and copied it to Maiko and Akira at the Tokyo Institute, and to colleagues at the museum:
Found today. Late Cretaceous, nodular preservation, wingspan circa 10 metres...
They would all know what it meant to find something like this. And since it seemed impossible to record a day that came in two such irreconcilable halves, she did not open
Personal Notes
, the journal file she kept. She got up and stood on the small balcony, gazed at the stars, wished that she smoked.

Scott slept on. He lay in the cot in the windowless room behind the reception area, the alarm on his watch set for five-thirty, when he would wake, switch on the coffee maker in the breakfast room and collect the baked goods from the freezer, the yoghurts, butters and jams from the fridge. He'd pour cream, juice and two kinds of milk into their respective jugs, and then, as Lauren emerged from her Subaru, set off home.