The Icarus Project (2 page)

“Mom!”

“Maya! It’s so good to see you.”

My heart raced. I inched closer to the screen and rested my hand on the monitor. This was our window. Mom once read me a bedtime story all the way from Brazil. She called it our midnight read. Past explorers never experienced the instant thrill of an Internet connection. Their families back home had to wait months to receive letters scribbled in pencil. Graphite was the color of loneliness.

“You look great. How’s the dig going?”

I could hear strange insects screeching from the darkness over Mom’s shoulders.

“Soooo much better than I expected. But how are you? How’s school?” Her smile widened, the whites of her eyes shining in the darkness.

“Good … I guess.” I tapped my pen on the page.

“Studying hard?” She arched an eyebrow. “Especially science? My assistants must love all the sciences.”

“Yes, Mom. We’re studying the ecosystem of the bay, and I did my report on mollusks. Dad and I dug for clams.” I sighed. “Can I hear about the expedition now?”

“I suppose digging is a family trait,” she said with a giggle.

As a respected anthropologist, Mom saved giddiness for special occasions—usually when a shard of bone or bit of broken clay pot had been extracted from the dirt.
Exhumation
was the scientific term, a splinter pulled out of the past. “Tell me,” I begged. “You found something, didn’t you?” I quickly wrote
Mom found something in the rain forest
across my notebook page.

“I can never fool you.”

“Are you going to tell me or what? I’ve heard that keeping a kid in suspense stunts her growth.”

She stood, and now only her tanned arms and muddy cargo pants were visible. “One second,” she said. And then she stepped out of the camera’s view.

All I could see from the glow of the solar-powered light was a wooden platform and ropes tied to the tree trunks. But a bit of the jungle peeked through, and my heart
leaped when I realized that she was in a tree house. The dark night pressed into the lens. I imagined at any second a jaguar would leap from the treetops. Dozens of animal eyes were watching my mother from their perches in the canopy.

I scribbled
jungle, tree house, vines,
and
nighttime.

This was her bedroom. The ropy hammock was her bed. My face was pressed so close to the computer screen, my eyes hurt, and I was getting fingerprints all over the monitor. It felt like our window was closing up. Or that it was too small for me to climb through. I wanted Mom to hurry back to show me her special find. It could be our secret.

She was there to research the indigenous people of the rain forest. Really, I knew she was looking for links: evidence that proved a certain behavior. A rock was just a rock until some scientist found a rock that had an edge chipped away and formed what looked like a knife—the evidence of a cutting tool … like a prehistoric Swiss Army knife dug out of a junk drawer. Links are big in the sciences of the past. They prove stuff.
See, I’m right,
they say. Or
Whoa, I’m wrong
.

Mom’s face peered back through our window. At first, all I saw was the red earthy color of dirt and some kind of bundle. It wasn’t a piece of broken pottery or a stony knife. In her arms, she cradled a tattered cloth that might have been a dress once, a thousand years ago. She loosened the swaddled fabric and held her hands out, palms
up, cupping the
thing
toward the camera. It looked like she was holding a dehydrated mango that had a puckered nose and sunken cheeks. But from the way she cradled that ugly, shriveled
thing
I realized it was precious. The butterflies took flight again, flying up into the sky of my stomach. I swallowed and breathed hard through my nose.

“What is it?” But I had a bad feeling that I already knew.

“You tell me. What do you see?” Her eyes glowed.

Mom was taking necessary scientific precautions, holding the
thing
gingerly and looking at it with warm, adoring eyes. My face flushed hot, but I shrugged the feeling away.
Don’t be immature.

“Think it out. You’ve got to have at least one good guess.” The light flickered in the background. Mom curled her legs up in her chair like a cat, waiting for me to move. She tilted the shriveled mango
thing
toward the camera so I could get a better look.

“Is it a baby?” I asked, my mouth dry as dust. The mango looked like a person, a tiny clay-caked body. Maybe Mom had found an ancient tomb with the remains of a dead baby buried in the ground, and now she was holding it up like a present for me to gawk at.

She smiled triumphantly. “No, it’s not a
real
baby. It’s a doll.”

“Oh.” The more I looked at the
thing
, the more foolish I felt. It didn’t look like a real baby but rather one made of
cloth that was all dried up and puckered, the way a washcloth shrinks up on the side of the tub. “Um … that’s great.”

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Mom rocked her gently back and forth in the cradle of her palms.

“I guess.”

“It belonged to a little girl hundreds of years ago, just like you.”

Stupid, ugly, shriveled doll. I smiled, showing every tooth in my mouth. “Cool.”

She laughed, reading my glued-on expression. “OK. I know you’re too big for dolls. I’m sorry.” She smiled right through the window at me.

Mom had the best laugh and smile in the world. She looked even more beautiful in the jungle with her tangled hair and dirty shirt. She was like a goddess, a mythical woman both good and not so good—because goddesses weren’t perfect. That was one of their trademarks. They were fearless and tough and always stood up for themselves. But they also had one major flaw, like jealousy or arrogance or selfishness. That was their nature. It wasn’t her fault she was in demand and traveled a lot. That’s how goddesses were. I smiled for real now.

“The eye is made of a bead,” Mom said.

Her finger hovered over a tiny black dot on the scrunched-up face. The ugly
thing
only had one eye, yet Mom loved it. That one stupid eye made it all the more valuable. A tiny detail of
seeing
sewed onto the doll’s face.
It was a link. The bead was kind of cool, but I was so far away that I could barely see it through the glass window of the computer between us. I touched the screen. I traced my finger over the ugly face and wrinkled nose. I tapped the beady eye. Dumb doll.

“I miss you,” I said suddenly.

But I didn’t want her to come home. Instead, I wanted to crawl through our window and join her in the tree house. Sleep in a hammock. Dig in the dirt. Find a precious doll to cradle in our palms.

“I miss you too, baby. How’s school? Are you studying hard?” she asked again.

“Yes. Everything’s fine.” If I studied any harder, my head would explode.

“Good girl. I can always count on you when I’m away. I was just telling Sam how mature you are. I’m a lucky mom to have you.”

A layer of guilt settled over me. This was her moment. “I’m glad you found the doll.”

She jerked her head, and the sound of cheering filtered into my room, probably from the rest of the campsite. She looked back at me, a guilty shrug forming in her shoulders. “I should go. Always something.”

“I have to go, too. Dad’s making dinner,” I said.

“Oh, good. That’s nice. Your dad’s a great cook. I always know you’ll be well fed,” she said. “Work hard. I’m proud of you.”

Proud of what? I wondered. I hadn’t done anything important, like find a precious artifact.

“You too. Congratulations.”

She beamed, and the screen went dark.

I was happy for Mom and her discovery. That was what anthropologists lived for—the puzzle pieces of old broken things—and she had one in her own hands. Some day that would be me, on an expedition, discovering a link—but to where or what I could only dream.

There was a myth going around that dads
couldn’t cook. I could verify the blatant wrongness of this terrible stereotype. Dad was a genius with meat loaf, cheeseburgers, and ribs. Meat was a big theme with dads and dinner, and mine was no exception. But that was OK because I wasn’t about to go vegetarian anytime soon—I was more T. rex than brontosaurus.

I raced into the kitchen, my socks sliding across the linoleum. Tonight Dad had made all my favorites. Spaghetti with meat sauce, Caesar salad, and garlic knots crowded the table. I grabbed a roll and pulled it apart. Somehow warm bread made everything even better.

“Load up your plate. I thought we could eat outside.”

A great thing about Dad and dinner was that he didn’t make me sit at the table. He was cool that way. He was wearing a sauce-splattered T-shirt that read “I Dig Mammoths!” His jeans were worn, and so were his tennis shoes. He liked to call himself a “creature of comfort.” My parents had been divorced since I was seven. Now I was thirteen and well adapted to Dad’s cuisine.

As I grabbed my plate, he asked, “How’s the gypsy doing?” He thought Mom had a wandering spirit.

“Good,” I answered. “She’s found an old doll.”

“Cool.” Dad’s mellow voice filled the kitchen. Supportive comments, even about Mom, came naturally to him.

I mentally noted that gypsies were the color of swirling paisley.

After getting my food, I followed Dad out to the backyard. It was early April and perfect sweatshirt weather. He flipped the back-porch light on, and we made our way to the tent. Some people might think it strange that we had a tent set up in our backyard. But why not? Our neighbor had a rickety old shed that leaned to the side at a forty-five-degree angle and had a giant padlock on the door, protecting its precious contents. I could kick the thing down with one foot. A tent was much nicer than a near-death shed, plus we could hang out in it. No one wanted to hang out in a shed.

Our tent wasn’t your typical nylon camping-in-the-woods tent. It was made of sturdy canvas—the kind of tent used at excavation sites. Dad got it from his university back when he was in grad school. It had seen better days and had some holes gnawed in the sides, but it was still cool. It looked like it could have been lifted right off the sands of Egypt.

I’ve always wanted to go to the desert and unearth a mummy or a golden tomb of a newly discovered girl
queen. I would get a big grant from a university and stake my claim right next to the great statue of the cat-bodied Egyptian god the Sphinx and kiss it on its broken nose while I dug beneath its paws.

Dad and I sat in camp chairs and ate our dinner at a card table. The tent was filled with Dad’s old college stuff like camping supplies, crates of books, shovels, and tools. Those were his glory days, he always said. He was a paleontologist, which meant he studied fossils—not
just
dried-up bones and imprints in stone but the animal’s actual bodies captured and preserved in the earth and ice. He was really into bones, especially the bones of one particular favorite animal of his—the woolly mammoth. I always thought of the mammoth as a giant hairy elephant with super-long curled tusks. Mammoths were like prehistoric snowplows making their way across the icy tundra of the Arctic. The majority of mammoth bones have been discovered in Siberia, which is probably one of the loneliest places in the world. The last place I ever wanted to go on an excavation was in the frozen world of the Arctic.

The Arctic was the kind of place that looked pretty in pictures. The snow peaks towered over the landscape like freshly whipped cream, and the ice forges glittered in the reflecting sun against a pure blue sky. I was sure it was fun to play for a while in the snow, building snowmen and making snow angels and igloos. But it was a bad sign when the indigenous mammals wore thick layers of blubber.
Who would want to spend time in a place where the temperature was walk-in-freezer cold?

Luckily, mammoth bones had also been discovered in North America. A huge cache of bones had been found in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and some were recently found in Colorado, which, from a tourist standpoint, was cushy compared with Siberia. Dad was trying to get funding to do fieldwork on Saint Paul Island in Alaska. He spent many sleepless nights writing up his proposal and doing research. I could handle a trip to Alaska—even in winter it wouldn’t be
that
bad.

“Did you hear about the grant?” I asked through a mouthful of spaghetti. I had seen an official-looking letter in the pile of mail by the door and had wanted to rip it open and read it, but instead I had put it on top of the pile and waited.

Dad stared at his plate and twisted his fork around and around, building up a massive ball of spaghetti strands. I swallowed. This was not a good sign. For some reason, Mom had all the luck in our family; grants flowed her way, and she went on expedition after expedition. But not Dad. Science wasn’t fair.

“Not this time,” he finally said. “The economy’s tight.”

“That’s just another excuse. The economy is always bad.”

“What can I say? The grants are fewer and the competition gets fiercer every year.” He tore a piece of bread in half. “We have to adapt.”