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By Root 474 0

days. They had not found Joe until he had already been dead for three hours, and during those two days in her room Iris replayed in her mind everything she had done while he was already gone. She had done her homework. She had listened to the radio. She had eaten dinner with her mother. She tried to tell herself that now everything she did would be like that: she would be doing it while he was no longer alive. If she could go back to not knowing that he was not alive everything might be okay. This was when her fifteen-year-old brain began to blame her mother for having ever picked up the phone. It was several years later that she would find in her father’s file cabinets her original birth certificate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Honor and Milo

They were driving very fast now. Signs sped past in an imaginary window: Bon Vivant Diner, Used Books, Open Twenty-four Hours. Then they drove straight through the city out onto the road. They were giving themselves over to the highway. Honor had an image of herself and Milo at that moment and they looked to her like a soldier and an angel making love in the backseat of a speeding car. The angel’s wings brushed the inside roof of the car and one feathery white tip, gray with soot and exhaust, stuck out the window. The soldier’s boots pressed one against the door and the other against the seat and made a rip in the worn vinyl. In this image of herself and Milo, Honor could not tell which one of them was the angel and which one of them was the soldier.

Pearl

Pearl struggled through the blowing sand and occasionally reached for Anna’s arm to steady herself. She was absorbed by the task of walking through the desert and could not yet take in her surroundings. Later, when she thought about the last time she had seen her granddaughter and great-grandchild she wished that she had spent more time looking at the girls’ faces and less time looking at the sand. The experience of being with Anna in that place again had been overwhelming and unreal and she sometimes wondered if she had actually been there.

The wind had died down and the sand had settled. They reached the top of the dune, where there were two beach chairs waiting for them. Pearl gingerly lowered herself into one of the tiny chairs. She felt a chill although the air was blisteringly hot; she remembered this hot dry weather. The desert stretched out before them but instead of a blank expanse it was strewn with people working and equipment and what looked to her like debris but which in fact was an array of artifacts. A different kind of debris, she thought to herself. She sat atop this mound of sand and was put in mind of generals looking down on a battlefield. Or a director overseeing a film set, she thought, and smiled. She remembered Mr. DeMille and the way he had screeched into his megaphone and stood there silhouetted against the sun like some kind of exotic desert cactus that made noise. If she closed her eyes she could see the Gate of Ramses II and her small self walking under its enormous archway.

She opened her eyes. There stood the very same archway, in the distance, chipped and broken and slanted but standing up in the desert. And all around were vestiges of The Ten Commandments: goblets, chariots, artificial stones. When Anna had told her that her boyfriend was an archaeologist Pearl had imagined the uncovering of ancient tombs and undiscovered hieroglyphs. It seemed like a vaguely noble line of work. But this.

She had been polite about it, and genuinely amazed by the coincidence. Anna hadn’t known that her grandmother had worked in film, let alone on the set of this film, and so when she told Pearl that Rob was on a dig in California unearthing an old film set and then said what film it was she had been stunned to hear her grandmother burst out laughing. Pearl was not someone who regularly burst out laughing. It was a short burst. And then Anna had spontaneously suggested that they go out west together to visit the dig. She had never traveled with Pearl and it seemed an unlikely thing to do, but Anna was at that