Picture Perfect (14 page)

I
'
M
going to tell you the truth.

But the story starts long before I'd ever met you, long before anyone had ever heard of Alex Rivers. It begins on the day that Connor Murtaugh moved into the house next door—the same day I went home to dinner and told my mother that when I grew up, I planned to be a boy.

I was five years old, a prim and proper little girl in training to be a southern lady. The fact that we lived in Maine hadn't kept my mother from schooling me to become the finest Georgia peach. I could read a little, and out of necessity I could even cook simple things like soup and grilled cheese and, of course, strong black coffee. I had mastered the art of tossing my hair over my shoulder and lowering my lashes to get what I wanted. I smiled without showing my teeth. Most adults found me charming, but I had no friends my own age. Bringing them home to play was unthinkable, you see, which made most of the kids in school think I was strange or stuck-up. And then Connor's family moved from an apartment across the lake to the house beside mine.

I spent that first day helping him carry boxes and lamps, answering his questions about my birth date, my most hated food, and where you could find fat worms for bait. He overwhelmed me, and for the first time I began to see there was more to living than keeping your knees pressed together when you sat on a chair, and brushing your hair one hundred strokes each night. So I traded my Mary Janes for an old pair of Connor's sneakers that fit when I jammed rolled-up socks into the toes. I learned the fine arts of sprinkling salt on slugs to dry them out and skidding belly-first across mud puddles.

I credit Connor for many reasons in my decision to become an anthropologist, but especially because he was the first person to show me how wonderful the earth feels when you squeeze it through your fingers. These days my hands are almost always dirty, and although Connor has been dead for seventeen years, he's still on my mind.

I don't believe in UFOs, or reincarnation, or ghosts, but I do believe in Connor. All I can say is that from time to time, I feel him. He shows up whenever things are going wrong. I think it is probably my fault that he never got to fly off to heaven, or wherever old souls go, since he spent his childhood taking care of me and apparently still feels compelled to do so.

So, you see, I was expecting him that hot Monday in August when I was pacing the halls of the anthropology department, waiting to hear about tenure. I had been an assistant professor at UCLA for two years now, after having received my B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. there. I wanted tenure. People who had been there less time than I had made associate prof. I had finally threatened Archibald Custer, the head of the department, with a bald-faced lie about alternative options at an eastern college.

I wasn't really expecting to receive tenure, because at twenty-seven I was still younger than even the adjunct profs and the lecturers. But it wasn't my fault it had taken them longer to get to the same place I was. I was proud of the fact that I had decided thirteen years earlier what I was going to do with my life, and then stuck fast to my original plan.

I was leaning against the water cooler that stood outside the departmental secretary's office when I felt the light pressure on my spine that I knew meant Connor was watching. If he was here, I reasoned, the news couldn't be good. “They're going to pass me over,” I whispered. There—I had said it, and as I admitted to my lack of success, the words fell to the floor in front of me, heavy and sluggish like failure always is.

“I hate being affiliated with a university,” I said quietly, running my hand down the wall.

It was not the truth. I hated the political bullshit, but I fully embraced the money and the grants. I loved the way the red tape magically disappeared when I tried to open an excavation in another country. And I knew that in a week I'd forgive Custer, and all the people who received promotions. I'd forgive the whole board that voted me down. This year, I'd have to figure out what it was that I was doing wrong, and work a little harder.

“You know what I wish,” I said, “I wish the good things in life weren't all clustered together when you were little.”

They weren't, for most people. When was the last time I'd walked across the campus barefoot? Or missed a class because I had overslept? When was the last time I had gotten dead drunk or awakened in a stranger's bed or come up short of cash at the supermarket?

Never
. I didn't let myself live on the edge, although I didn't really think I was missing anything. Spontaneity made me uncomfortable. My single-mindedness was what was going to get me a promotion.

Someday.

But I had this sense that if Connor could come back to life, he would be disgusted with me. He'd want me to do the things we used to talk about: live on Tahiti for a couple of months, take up bonsai or rock climbing.

I tried to push Connor out of my mind in preparation for my meeting with Archibald Custer. He was standing in the open doorway of his office, monolithic, as if he expected to conjure whomever he wanted to see by the sheer force of his position. He was argumentative, pigheaded, and sexist. I didn't much like him, but I knew how to play by his rules.

“Ah, Miss Barrett,” he said. He spoke by holding a transmitter to a box built into his throat, his own vocal cords having been severed due to throat cancer a few years back. The undergraduates thought he was creepy, and I had to agree. Except for his height, he always reminded me a little of the sketches done of
Homo habilis
, and I had to applaud him for choosing such a form-fitting profession.

He didn't like me either, not only because I happened to be female and young, but also because I was a physical anthropologist. He was a cultural anthropologist—made his name by squatting right down with the Y
nomamö years ago. There had always been a friendly rivalry between the two camps of anthropology, but I couldn't forgive him for what he'd done after I'd defended my dissertation. I had written a piece about whether violence was innate or learned, an age-old debate between physical and cultural anthropologists. The popular belief tended toward a cultural approach, saying that although aggression was innate, planned aggression—such as war—was brought about by the pressure of living in societies, not by our evolutionary history. I argued back, saying that this might be true, but society itself wouldn't have come about unless the territorial nature bred into our genes required man to make rules.

All in all, it was a decent rebuttal to the cultural anthropologists, and this had Custer fuming. My first year as a lecturer he'd assigned me to courses that all ranked under cultural anthropology, and when I complained and asked to go on a field site, he had simply raised his eyebrows and said he thought it might do me some good to become more well-rounded.

Now he waved me into his office and motioned me toward the chair that faced his tremendous desk. He was grinning, goddamn him, as he started to speak. “I'm sorry to tell you—”

I jumped up from the chair, unable to hear any more. “Then don't tell me at all,” I said, smiling tightly. “I assume I've been passed over, thank you very much, and I'll just save you the trouble.” I took a step toward the door.

“Miss Barrett.”

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob and turned.

“Sit down.”

I slipped into the chair again, wondering how many points this had set me back in Custer's mind.

“You'll be on an unusual assignment this first quarter,” he continued. “Indeed, you're always pining away about going on location.”

I leaned forward in the chair. Were they starting some new field class during the fall semester? My mind raced through the possible sites: Kenya, Sudan, the Isles of Scilly. Would I be heading the group, or working with someone else?

“Now, I'm afraid the associate professorship isn't going to be a possibility this term,” Custer said. “Instead, we've recommended you for a sabbatical.”

I tightened my fingers around the armrests of the chair. I hadn't
applied
for a sabbatical. “If you'll excuse me, Archibald, I have to say in my own defense that for the past three years—”

“You've been exemplary. Yes, I know. We all do. But sometimes”—he winced here—“sometimes that just isn't enough.”

Tell me about it
, I thought.

“We've chosen you to reopen the old UCLA site at Olduvai Gorge. Get it ready for a freshman field expedition,” Custer said, sitting back in his chair.

I set my jaw. They wanted me to be a gofer—to set up for a class I wasn't worthy enough to teach. It was a job any graduate student could do. It was not what I had worked so hard for, what I had written my dissertation for. It was not what I had planned as a step up on the steady climb of my career. “Surely I'm not the best-trained person for this job,” I hedged.

Custer shrugged. “You're the only faculty member who hasn't been…scheduled…for classes next semester,” he said.

I listened to the words he spoke, but clearly heard the truth. He was telling me I was the only one who was expendable.

 

L
ESS THAN THIRTY
-
SIX HOURS LATER
, I
WAS IN
T
ANZANIA
,
SITTING
under the cool linen shade of a makeshift awning on the tiny piece of Olduvai Gorge that UCLA had requisitioned for its field classes. I was still angry at being banished, but I hadn't argued with Custer. It would have been a mistake. After all, I'd have to come back in ten weeks and beg for a teaching assignment.

I'd tried to convince myself that this little sojourn would be better than I expected. After all, Olduvai Gorge had been Louis Leakey's first site in East Africa. Maybe I'd hit it big too: discover the missing link, or something else that would set my colleagues on their collective ears and change the current outlook on human evolution. The odds were against it, but I was still young and there were millions of years of history left to unearth.

However, the scouting I'd done in the morning had convinced me that like the other anthropologists who scoured the site for decades after Leakey's discoveries, I wasn't going to turn up anything new. I had no idea how I was going to keep myself busy for ten weeks. Setting up the site for the field class meant pinpointing the spots where an excavation would be likely to yield fossils, but it seemed the class could dig in the basement of Fowler Hall and have just as much luck as they would here.

As the sun climbed higher, I walked casually across the site, rummaging in my big straw bag for the book I'd begun to read on the plane. I glanced up, making sure that I was alone before I pulled it out.

Ridiculous. My heart was pounding, as if I were about to be discovered with a gram of cocaine. It was only a dime-store romance novel, my one vice. I didn't smoke, I rarely drank, I'd never done drugs, but I was completely addicted to those stupid books on whose covers an overripe woman lounged in the arms of a drifter. I was so embarrassed that I wrapped them in brown parcel paper, like I used to do with textbooks in elementary school. I would read them on public buses and on the benches outside at UCLA, pretending they were anthropological treatises or Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction.

I couldn't help myself. I knew the psychological explanation for this had something to do with what was lacking in my own life, but I told myself it didn't matter. I had started a few years ago after my roommate, Ophelia, had posed for a book cover in the arms of some glorious man. I had read that first paperback, and then I couldn't stop. There was solace in knowing that never in any tribe or any ancient race had people existed like this. It made me feel, well, more normal.

But that didn't keep me from hoping, I suppose. Still, if a romance novel was going to spring to life, it would be with someone like Ophelia in its title role. She was beautiful and statuesque and sexy—not simple and practical, like me. It would have been nice to be the kind of woman for whom wars were started, but I was not holding my breath. To date, no knight was wearing my colors, no adventurers had come to find me across time and distance. Then again, I lived by choice in L.A., where beautiful women were the norm, not the exception. On the other hand, in these books there was no plastic surgery, no concealing cosmetics, no step aerobics classes. I thought of Helen of Troy, of Petrarch's Laura, and I wondered if they really had looked so different from me.

“Excuse me,” a voice said. “Your tent is in my viewfinder.”

I started at the unfamiliar sound and instinctively buried the paperback in the soft red sand. My head snapped up to see two men, their faces silhouetted against the high sun. “Pardon me?” I said, coming to my feet.

The men were clearly not natives; their foreheads were sunburnt and peeling and they hadn't the good sense to be wearing hats. “My viewfinder,” the taller man said. “You're going to have to move.”