Part 7
Someone buried the admiral.
Of course someone buried the admiral – after all, Sarah and Andrew had found him in a carefully prepared and undisturbed grave. But he didn't get there by himself, and the realization someone else must have buried him triggered a cascade of images in Sarah's mind while she was packing up her bags.
The lady is buried by the admiral, who is buried by someone else, who is buried by someone else, who is buried by someone else, who is buried by someone else, who capsizes in the Nile and is eaten by crocodiles. The last part of the image was pure Laura.
Laura was not eaten by a crocodile – or maybe she was. An internal crocodile: one that lay in wait and struck when she and Sarah least expected.
It wasn't fair, Sarah thought as she tidied up. She had had no chance to prepare for a stealth attack at so young an age. Their parents' death had been the result of pilot error. That had been unfair, too, but for entirely different reasons. Flying had inherent risks. So too did life apparently.
At first the doctors had been positive about Laura's prognosis. But when her body refused to respond to treatment, they didn't backtrack or apologize for inflating Laura or Sarah's hopes. One day, Laura was waging a one-woman war on cancer by day and marking first year anthropology papers by night; the next she was told she's terminal and does she have all her affairs [read: Sarah's] in order?
By calendar, the time separating "The Diagnosis" from Sarah's first waiting dream was three months, one week and three days. Sarah trusted the calendar – but only because of its track record. In truth she had trouble remembering any of those three months. For all she knew three months could really have been just one awful, long day. Or perhaps one long awful night. Or a year of awful long days and nights. Time or delineations of time had been irrelevant.
Laura had had to make hard decisions. Sarah remembered making only one.
It started innocuously enough. Rehearsal had been scrapped and she'd taken an extra shift at the restaurant when another waitress called in sick.
It was around midnight. She was brimming with unsung song and a lucrative evening of tips when Laura had ambushed her.
Laura was sitting at the kitchen table, a pile of leaflets stacked neatly in front of her, when Sarah let herself into their apartment.
"Hey, sis. Save me any leftovers?" Sarah had asked as per routine, bursting through the door with her usual high spirits.
"I'm going to be cremated, Sarah. I'd like my ashes scattered some place you feel appropriate."
Sarah's bag had crashed to the floor.
"Don't be silly. You're not dying anytime soon."
Laura had sighed. Then she had amended her will – only Sarah didn't learn that part until later. It brought about the hardest decision she'd ever faced. Actually, it had been the only hard decision she had faced because Laura had beaten her to everything else.
Sarah remembered staring at the lawyer – a friend of Laura's – as they discussed "arrangements". He wasn't unkind, just very, very matter-of-fact.
"In the end, Sarah, it's your decision. This was your sister's wish but you get some say as well."
She'd had to close her eyes when she signed the papers committing her sister's body to cremation.
When she said she would compromise, she felt she'd done the most adult thing she could bring herself to do.
Buying one's first urn definitely seemed like a adult sort of action. She bought the urn because the idea of letting loose those ashes was abhorrent – and frightening. Like being swept overboard into a lonely ocean – miles of sea to the north, to the south, to the east, to the west and miles and miles going down beneath her. The ashes would be free to escape anywhere – and she would be alone.
The dig was over. As Sarah packed her bags (which were always off the scale when she checked them in), she turned the urn in her hand. Traveling with it was a risk she never thought about. She suspected there might be rules about transporting ashes but there was no way she'd go anywhere without the urn.
A number of artifacts collected during the excavation season had been carefully packed into special crates; among the cargo were the admiral and the lady, the ring, the bracelet and the buttons. The bones and teeth would undergo a variety of dating procedures and traces of the metals would be subjected to tests to ascertain element composition and origin (if it could be determined). She grimaced as she prayed the couple wouldn't be unsettled by their move. She was still uneasy about their removal. In this line of work, however, she knew better than to say anything.
Sarah zipped her last bag and dragged it from the tent to the pick-up point. She would strike the tent later. In the meantime she found herself uncertain how to spend her last afternoon on the dig. This evening she'd be flying out of Tanzania, uncertain of the future she faced.
Without thought, she wandered restlessly along the familiar track toward the hilltop. She couldn't define her mood, couldn't isolated it to say if what she was feeling was a good thing or a bad thing. If she had to assign a color to her mood she would have said gray. It wasn't an unfamiliar emotional landscape – she'd felt this way when she turned up at camp several weeks ago – so she knew she could cope with it. Tears burnt the back of her throat though when she realized she wasn't sure she wanted to go on like this, on this relentless merry-go-round of just existing.
She was about to turn back when her ears picked out a sibilant whisper in the grass. She knelt down searching in the scratchy thicket and found what she was looking for in seconds. God knew how loud Andrew played his iPod. Music hissed from the tiny earphones loud enough for her to make out the lyrics.
"Hope is a river that flows from these stone walls into an ocean we have never seen."
A rustle behind her sounded his approach.
"Hey! You found it! No, wait-" Andrew's eyebrows scrunched in thought as he listened. "It can't be mine. I don't know that song."
"It's called River," she said absently, handing over the iPod and thinking little of the exchange. "It is yours. It's got all your dirty marks on it."
She started down the slope.
"Sarah? Sarah, wait!"
She couldn't stop, she couldn't listen; she could hear that terrible, terrible beautiful music. Her pace quicken until she was flying down the hill. She couldn't go back. It was too painful.
