Always Emily

“Finish school first,” Emily warned.

“I will.”

Dreams shone in Pearl’s eyes. Emily used to have dreams, too.

Pearl placed one of the pillows on the bed up against the headboard and leaned against it, curling her legs into the half-lotus yoga pose and laying another pillow across her knees.

She smiled and patted the pillow. Emily couldn’t help but return that serene smile. As a child, Pearl had spent many hours up here visiting Emily with her head in her sister’s lap.

Laura would come upstairs to find Pearl asleep and Emily reading a book while she stroked her baby sister’s hair.

Emily laid her head into the dip in the center of the pillow, where it rested on Pearl’s calves. The pupil had become the teacher.

Pearl touched her cheek. “Your skin is clammy. Are you cold?”

“Cold and hot.”

“You’re pale, but your cheeks are bright red.”

“I have fever and chills.”

“How long will it last?”

“Another day or so.”

“Tell me what’s wrong, Emily.”

Pearl didn’t mean the malaria. She was right. That was a surface thing. What was wrong with Emily went bone deep. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost herself.

“Everything.” She sighed.

Pearl stroked her hair. “You should sleep.”

“I wish I could.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

Emily thought about it. Solitude? Was that what she needed? She’d give it a try. “Yes.”

Pearl struggled out from beneath Emily, stood and kissed her forehead. “Love you, sis. See you in the morning.”

But Pearl had only just closed the door at the bottom of the stairs when Emily missed her already. So...solitude wasn’t the answer.

Neither was rest. As exhausted as she was, she knew she wouldn’t sleep, not with the problem of the prayer book turning her inside out. She retrieved her laptop from its pocket in her backpack and set it up on her desk.

A moment later, she had her email open. It exploded with messages from the past two days, the tone of all of them, from friends and colleagues, frantic.

Where are you?

What have you done?

You stole an artifact??? That is so not you!

No one believes what Jean-Marc is saying.

What was Jean-Marc saying? She could only imagine.

She opened her Twitter account, and that’s when it sank in—how much Jean-Marc wanted to hurt her and exactly how much he’d succeeded.

The whole archeological world thought she had been stealing artifacts from the dig. He hinted that there had been a series of objects that had gone missing. There had? Whether or not it was true, Jean-Marc had succeeded in implicating her, in tarnishing her reputation. He’d done it with just the right amount of innuendo, with no real accusation she could take as slander and use against him in court.

Furious that she hadn’t been caught at the airport, he’d pulled out all of the stops in social media. Bully. Traitor.

The wash of shame that heated her chest was old, familiar, an enemy she’d fought before in a battle she had never wanted to revisit. She had thought she’d gotten over those old demons. Hadn’t she worked her butt off to leave all of that behind, including leaving her home literally to travel the world? Now this. Jean-Marc brought it back to the surface with a few strokes of a keyboard and an enter key. She’d traded one set of bullies for another.

No. She wouldn’t let him destroy her. People had tried in the past. She’d been too young to know how to fight back then, but now she did. With maturity came perspective and strength. Maybe not enough, though. This bloody malaria was killing her.

She, and only she, knew who the real culprit was. The question was, would they come after her? And who would they be? Her own government? Would they come here and search her father’s home?

No way was she going to wait to get caught. She’d done nothing wrong. She wouldn’t give Jean-Marc the satisfaction of seeing her hurt. But how could she protect herself? And her family?

Where could she go? What could she do? She shouldn’t have come here. She would only bring them pain.

Her panicked glance fell on Pearl’s sketchbook, on the exquisite drawing of the Cathedral. She wanted to be there, in that place that brought her peace.

She had to get there, but she couldn’t leave through the front or back doors. Too many people downstairs. They wouldn’t let her go. They would worry, and rightly so.

Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she worried, too. She looked like hell, her hair a mass of tangled curls. Pearl was right. In spite of her deathly pallor, two red spots rode her cheekbones like clown’s paint, the look unnatural. Unhealthy.

Even so, now that she’d thought of the Cathedral, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, stop herself.

She had rejected Jean-Marc’s ultimatum. Stay or I’ll ruin you. And she had accepted Salem’s. Don’t contact me. Leave me alone. That didn’t mean she couldn’t visit the Cathedral.

She took the prayer book out of the baggy and wrapped it tightly in plastic she found in the wastebasket. It looked as if it came from Pearl’s sketchbook. She put the wrapped artifact back into the baggy and made sure it was zipped firmly against moisture, and then tucked the whole thing into her bra.

Grabbing her jacket, she buttoned it to protect the book before opening the door to the tiny back balcony. She closed it behind her and peered over the railing. Her father had never trimmed the maple tree she used to climb down to sneak out during high school.

She slung a leg over the railing to reach the nearest limb. Dizziness swamped her. She hung over the gap, robbed of breath, the ground far below wavering in her vision. She gripped the slippery wood until the nausea passed. Heights. She hated heights. But she could do this.

When her head felt steady enough, and her pulse had calmed, she grasped the branch and pulled herself into the tree. She climbed down, branch by branch, a trip that should have taken five minutes taking ten in her weakened state.

Or maybe it was age. She felt old these days when she should feel young and vibrant. She worked hard on the digs. She was in good shape.

On the ground, she rummaged through the garden shed until she found what she needed. A trowel. She crept around the side of the house and out onto the road.

A brisk wind gusted. A Roman legion of rain clouds advanced on the horizon, heavy with menace.

Maybe a heavier jacket would have been a good idea.