Picture Perfect Read online

  Mrs. Alvarez left with her son just as we finished doing everything we could inside. Tugging on my slicker, I stepped through the sliding doors I had crisscrossed with tape and ran across the beach to Alex. Without speaking, I dragged a heavy sack of sand toward the barricade he had begun. My muscles strained with the effort, and sweat ran down the back of my neck under the pulled hood of my coat. I stacked the bags as high as I could, one placed neatly on top of the other, a series of pillars.

  The rain began to shriek around us, blowing wet sand from the edge of the ocean into our eyes and making the tide surge up to our hips. Overhead, in the condo next door to ours, I heard the shatter of glass.

  I was looking up, trying to note which window had broken and why, when Alex grabbed me by the shoulders. He shook me so hard my neck snapped back. "Jesus!" he screamed, his voice nearly lost in the wind. "Can't you do anything right?" He kicked at the piles of sandbags I'd meticulously made, and when they didn't topple he threw his weight into them, knocking them over into the raging surf. "Notlike these," he bellowed. "Like mine."He pointed to the barrier he'd crafted, a neat overlay like an interlocking wall of bricks. Roughly, he pushed me aside and began to add onto his wall with the drenched sacks of sand he'd knocked down from my piles.

  I shielded my eyes and looked to the left and the right, wondering if my neighbors had heard or seen Alex yelling at me. I stared for a moment at my hour's worth of work, now draining in a heap at the edge of the ocean.

  It was my fault; I hadn't been thinking. A strong gust would easily tear down standing piles, but a staggered wall like Alex's could withstand much more abuse. Soundlessly I stepped up beside Alex, carefully mirroring his movements and his placement and even his stride so that he would find nothing lacking in me. I ignored the sharp ache in my shoulder and the knot in my back, determined, this time, to do it right.

  ALEX STEPPED ONTO THE VERANDA, WATCHING OPHELIA CHECK ME for a fever. "Cool as a cucumber," she said, but she was staring at Alex. She set her hands on her hips. "Cassie isn't feeling great," she said. "Maybe you should leave her home tonight."

  Alex smirked. "And take you instead?"

  Ophelia flushed and looked away. She squeezed my shoulder, a goodbye. "I was just going," she said, and she deliberately pushed past Alex on her way out.

  I watched her go, pretending to see her long after her shape had disappeared through the gauzy curtains of the bedroom. I stared at the patterns in the lace. I didn't want to look at Alex.

  "Did you tell her?"

  "What do you think?" I turned my face to him, noticing the lines of pain that shattered the clear gray of his eyes, and I knew I couldn't hurt him any more than he hurt himself. I swallowed and glanced away.

  Suddenly Alex had me cradled in his arms, the blanket falling away to reveal the red marks on my arm and the swelling near my ribs. He carried me into the bedroom and stretched me gently on the bed, so carefully I did not even stir the comforter. He unbuttoned my blouse.

  He brushed his lips over each spot, each ache, taking the pain and leaving behind a salve of tears. I held his head against my chest, thinking that this tenderness hurt even more. "Shh," I said, stroking his forehead. "It's all right."

  WHAT STRUCK ME FIRST ABOUT THE HAND WAS THAT THE BONES stretched out toward me, as if they meant to pull me back if I happened to have any intention of walking away. I took out a small brush and began to clear away the twigs and loose fragments of dirt, revealing a nearly intact wrist, and five metatarsals still curled around a stone tool. I ran my fingers over the fragments, the tiny chisel, and then I smiled. Maybe it wouldn't have pulled me back. Maybe it would have attacked me.

  The hand was set in sedimentary rock as high as my shoulder, and it was noticeable enough for me to wonder how it had managed to remain undiscovered all these years. The site wasn't a new one in Tanzania; for decades, it had been combed by anthropologists.

  I was dizzy. I knew instinctively that this was Something Big, even before sending samples for dating. My pulse began to race as I realized that this discovery would prove that hominids had the mental capacity to create their own tools, rather than just using those naturally shaped by water or fossilization. I would go home a hero. I would tell Archibald Custer to go fuck himself. I would be as famous as Alex.

  I was dying to tell him. Since the base camp didn't have a phone, I would drive into town tonight and call home. I had not liked the idea of being away from him for a full month, but I was doing my field study during intercession at the university, and Alex was filming twelve hours a day anyway. I spoke to him on Sundays and Wednesdays, sitting on the dirt floor of the all-purpose store in town. I'd tuck the receiver into my ear and scratch his name in the red earth with a twig; store up the sound of his voice so that I could draw it out late at night and pretend that he was lying beside me.

  I squinted into the hot midday sun, touching the striated gray areas to the left of the hand. In the distance I could hear the ting of picks and the sound of laughter tripping on the wind. There were several graduate students working with me, one of whom had found a mandible the other day, but there had been no other startling discoveries. I smiled and stepped around the corner of the cliff, where I could be seen by them. "Wally," I called. "Bring a tarp."

  The rest of the day was spent in painstaking excavation, because it was so rare to find something as fragile as a fossilized hand that risking even the tiniest digit of a finger would be unthinkable. I worked with two of my students, one helping me do the removal and the cleaning, one labeling the bones with India ink for later reconstruction. Another student was sent into town to wire UCLA of our preliminary findings and to bring a packed sample to the general post office to be sent out for dating. Dinner, a celebration, consisted of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and three bottles of local wine.

  I watched the students build up the campfire and weave scenarios in which I became the most highly touted guru in physical anthropology and they became my disciples. When one of their ploys involved burying Professor Custer alive so that some poor graduate student could dig him up millennia from now, I laughed with them, but mostly I watched the flames leap in time to the blood inside me. I came alive on excavation. It wasn't just the discovery of the hand, although that had my senses singing. It was the joy of looking for the unknown, like you were onto a buried treasure, or sifting through the Christmas presents to find the one you'd been hoping for. When Alex's movie had come out, the one we'd met on, that was the strongest personality trait his character had shown. I could remember watching the dailies, and telling Alex how impressed I was, and Alex saying that he had taken that from me.

  It took the operator ten minutes to get a line to the States, and even then I only had a marginal chance of catching Alex at the house. When he answered himself, his voice groggy with sleep, I realized that it must be the middle of the night. "Guess what?" I said, listening to my own voice in a tinny echo at the edges of the line.

  "Cassie? Is everything all right?"

  I could almost see him sitting up, switching on the light. "I found something. I found a hand, and a tool." Without letting him interrupt to ask questions, I launched into a monologue about the odds of a discovery like this, and what it was going to mean to my career. "It's like an Oscar, for you," I said. "This is going to put me over the top."

  When Alex didn't say anything at first, I thought maybe I had lost the connection and had been too busy talking to hear. "Alex?"

  "I'm here." The resignation and the stillness in his voice made my breath catch. Maybe he was worried that this was going to take me away from him even more. Maybe he thought I would actually put my career first, instead of him. Which was an entirely ridiculous idea, and if anyone should understand that, it was Alex. They were on equal footing in my life. I needed them both; I couldn't live without both.

  Belatedly I rememberedAntony and Cleopatra.The film seemed to be cursed. Although they'd replaced Brianne Nolan with another actress, last Sunday Alex had mentioned someth