Chapter 31
Thirty-Six Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
“You need to stop, Ripley. It’s getting dark.” Cara tugs playfully at Ripley’s chisel. “Come on. You haven’t come to games night in a week.”
Ripley pulls the tool out of reach. “ ‘Clue is a mystery game suitable for two to six players,’ ” she says, quoting the packaging she now unfortunately knows by heart. “The crew will survive.”
“Surviving without you isn’t the same as not missing you. Everyone feels weird when you’re down here after hours. It’s screwing up the group dynamic.”
“The dynamic is changing anyway. You and Griff changed it. Me and James changed it some more. Everybody adapted fine.” Ripley sits back on her heels and shakes out her hands.
This doesn’t help the tingling as much as it used to.
It’s carpal tunnel, probably, but she can’t stop working no matter what it is.
“This is different, Rip. The end of summer is in sight. People are worried it’s going to wrap up on a strange note.”
It definitely will, for Ripley. She’ll surrender her lease on Yellowtail in a little over five weeks.
As Ripley drives away, Cara and Griff will stand arm in arm, ready to settle in for a winter and a life together.
They’ll invent new nicknames for each other every few days—currently it’s Grippy and Care Bear, neither of which Ripley wants to dig into too deeply.
Every time Griff walks past, he’ll press his thumb to the knobby bone where Cara’s neck meets her shoulders, and she’ll look up and smile.
Ripley will go back to her dad’s trailer for the winter. Maybe she’ll work remotely as an anatomy TA at the med school in Billings.
James will go to the APS meeting and then back to London.
No one will spread out her hair or mumble incoherent praise into her skin or shiver when she scratches a pattern onto his back that ends with her hands arranged along his shoulder blades like wings.
No one will touch Ripley in a way that holds any secret meaning.
She probably won’t be okay for a while.
“I won’t have to do this for much longer, Cara. Just until we get Beauty in her crate. The chances of finding anything else we’d have time to excavate are basically zero at this point.”
In a way, it’s a relief. Ripley’s already cutting it close with the end-of-August scanner appointment. The late booking maximizes the chances of finding the rest of Beauty, but they’ll have only three weeks to get their results written up and posted before the APS meeting.
Cara sighs. “Ripley…”
Footsteps crunch along the bottom of the canyon. It’s James, of course. Ripley would know the vibrations of his measured heel strikes with her eyes closed and her ears blocked. She’ll be listening for them until the day she dies, she’s pretty sure.
Cara walks up the canyon to meet him. The two of them exchange low, hushed words, then Cara’s steps recede and James’s get closer.
“Ripley.”
It’s just her name. One word. Two syllables. It shouldn’t make her feel the way Cara looks with Griff’s thumb on the back of her neck. It shouldn’t make her feel like crying with care and exasperation and worry and all the other emotions he’s managed to pack into it.
“Yes, James?”
He drops to a crouch, extending an open hand.
She pretends she doesn’t know what he wants. “You’re in my light.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Give me the hammer.”
She sets her chin and keeps working.
“My old cabin has been empty since Mindy left,” he says.
“Why are we talking about that?” Mindy emailed Ripley after her weekend at Clever Girl to invite her to stay in touch. Ripley doubts they will, but it was such a classy move that she replied, I’d like that.
“Because I can move out if it’s too much,” he says. “If what’s happening between us is part of what’s driving you to wreck yourself right in front of me, I will.” He speaks so tenderly, she wants to lie down and die here and have some strange being dig up her bones in another hundred million years.
“Don’t move out, James.”
Living with him is the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to her.
She feels him—feels them—everywhere in that room.
She’s been on top of him, beneath him, on her knees in front of him.
She’s come every possible way, from quick and explosive to tender and drawn out, her body overcome by a long, sweet, sorrowful note.
She wakes up to the sounds of him getting dressed for his early-morning rides, the weight of him settling onto the edge of the bed as he puts on his bike shoes, then lifting away again.
The third day he was there, he hammered two tiny nails into the wall and hung a pair of framed photos.
The first one is him and his sister Daisy.
He’s in his late teens, already over six feet, skinny except for the rounded cheeks that make him look heartbreakingly young.
In the crook of his elbow is a toddler with a tangle of dark curls, her chocolate-covered hands plastered to his face.
They look lit up with love. They shine with it.
In the second, James is maybe six. He’s standing next to a river in Scotland or some green, hilly place, holding up a very modest-size fish and absolutely beaming.
Behind him is a redheaded woman with his same bright eyes and long legs, her hands resting on his shoulders.
He’s young, but it’s obvious that one day, he’ll be at least as tall as she is.
When he’s out on his bike and she’s in the cabin, she takes the photos down, filling her mind’s eye with his knobby knees and gap-toothed, recurved grin, and makes herself sick wanting albums full of pictures like these.
Sometimes he’ll take a call, and she’ll pretend she isn’t listening to him joking with his cousin Sarvesh, his accent suddenly twice as strong, or making dorky dinosaur jokes with colleagues during one of his increasingly frequent conference-planning meetings.
Once, he had a tense, cryptic conversation with his older sister, who seems to be the family fixer.
“No, Marie, I can’t make it this year.” A pause, and then: “Because I can’t, that’s why.
I’ve been at his party for the past thirty-four years.
I can miss one year.” A longer pause; he paced to the window where Ripley’s bed used to be before they pushed the beds together.
“Fine. You may FaceTime me if you absolutely must.”
“FaceTime can get pretty glitchy out here,” Ripley warned him when he’d ended the call, hoping he’d tell her what it had been about.
“I know,” he said. He tossed the phone aside and leaped onto the bed, making her shriek with alarmed delight. “I plan to be shagging the daylights out of you when she calls. Afterward, I shall express the appropriate amount of regret, but it will unfortunately be too late.”
It’s already too late for Ripley. The more she has of him, the more she wants.
The more his laugh opens up with the singular note of joy she’s been hearing lately, the deeper she wants to dig into what makes him happy.
Every beat of her heart marks a moment with him that won’t come again, and it makes her frantic to have something to show for this time, even if it’s only bones.
Ripley puts down her hammer and chisel. She can’t dig when she feels this way.
“What if neither of us gets what we want, James? What if you can’t stop Will, and I can’t get the holotype for Beauty? In a few years, there’d be no evidence we were even here.” She takes a breath. “We’d forget each other.”
He laughs so low and quiet and sweet, her eyes smart.
“I won’t forget you, Ripley,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve tried.
I spoke with you for ninety seconds and couldn’t get you out of my head for three years.
I think this summer will prove more than adequate for me to remember you for the rest of my life. ”
The rest of my life apart from you, he means.
He rummages through her roll of tools, extracts a small chisel, then chooses a roundish rock the size of his palm. Cradling it in one hand, he scratches at it experimentally.
“What are you doing?”
“You want to leave evidence that we were here. So I’m putting us in the fossil record. Well,” he says, a slender recurve touching his lower lip, “in the anthropological record, to be precise. But with enough time, they might be the same thing.”
Her heart shudders and cracks, a fault line opening right down the middle. “Why would you do that?”
“Same reason I do everything, Ripley Adams. For science,” he says, kissing her temple. She’s starting to suspect that phrase doesn’t mean what she’s always thought it did. “Go on, now. Dig your dinosaur, and let me do my art.”
For a while, he scratches along beside her. At one point, he gets up to stretch, then settles in the cliffside hollow where she found him with his sketchbook. He balances the rock on his knees, and she slows down, listening for his tiny, precise scrapes.
When he unfolds himself from his nook, the sun is touching the horizon, which means it must be close to nine o’clock. He stretches, arching like a saber-toothed tiger waking up for a night of hunting, although the idea of James as a Smilodon is silly. He hardly even eats meat.
“For your approval,” he says, holding out the rock so she can admire the white marks in the gray stone.
His carving isn’t perfect. It’s crooked here and there, some of the swirls squared off where he’s run into planes in the stone. It’s definitely ruined the edge on her chisel. But he’s an artist, so he’s still better at it than a first-time sculptor has any right to be.
Fine filigree work surrounds two intertwined letters that look like fancy capitals in a high fantasy novel.
R & J.
She hadn’t thought about their initials until now. She remembers writing those letters joined by an ampersand in a tenth-grade notebook when her English class studied Romeo and Juliet.
“It’s good,” she says, her voice wavering. “It’s really good, James.”
He extends his free hand. “We should hide it so somebody can find it.”
By silent agreement, they head south, away from anyone who might be excavating for Clever Girl. This rock is for the future, not the present.
Down near the creek, there’s a pile of debris from the storm: tree branches, drifts of browning leaves, swatches of tall grass still attached to root balls of crumbling earth.
The course of the creek has changed since the flooding, angling farther south.
The setting sun shines along the cut of the streambed, throwing bright highlights and long shadows on the floor of the canyon.
James hunkers down and squints up at Ripley. “Here?”
Suddenly, the act of burying a rock feels unbearably high stakes. It’s a rock, for God’s sake, Ripley tells herself. So why does her chest hurt like this?
“What are the chances anyone will find it?”
His smile is beautiful and hopeful and heartbreaking all at once.
“What are the chances of anything, Ripley? What are the chances that you would find Beauty or that you and I would find each other here, in this place, at this moment? For every Tyrannosaurus rex that ended up in the fossil record, eighty million did not. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. They were here, just like we’re here.
A very wise woman once told me that’s why people love dinosaurs—because they teach us something about ourselves. ”
Ripley swallows hard. “Okay,” she says on a sigh. “Then I think you chose a good spot.”
He turns to the earth, scrapes dirt aside with his hand.
“You’re going to hurt yourself if you excavate like that,” Ripley says, filling her mouth with inconsequential words so she won’t accidentally tell him she needs his hole to be big enough to fit her heart. “I’ll find you a stick.”
She dusts her hands off on her pants and heads for the storm pile. She’s untangling a branch of pine, thinking about how they always smell sweetest when they’re dying, when a pattern of shadows and highlights catches her unfocused eye.
She inhales very carefully, keeping her eyes pointed exactly where they are, letting them slowly focus.
“James,” she croaks. “James.” She yanks the branch aside, grabs another one, then another. She’s wrestling with a fair-size trunk by the time he hurries to her side.
“Christ, Ripley, stop. You’ve cut yourself. You’re bleeding,” he says, seizing the trunk from her like it weighs nothing.
“Careful!” She places her hand atop his. He slows and looks down.
“Bloody hell,” he says. “Bloody fucking hell, Ripley. It’s…”
It’s a coracoid. It’s wings—two of them—and legs, a pelvis, a skull.
The bones are tangled together like fossils sometimes are, nothing in its right place. But there’s no mistaking what they are together.
“It’s a bird,” she says, not quite believing it.
“It’s your bird,” he says, setting the tree down very, very gently and picking her up the same way.
They don’t tell anyone that night, not even Cara. There will be time for shared joy in the morning, but for now, Ripley wants to hold the secret to her heart.
In violation of all the conservation posters she’s put up around camp, she spends a good twenty minutes under the shower, feeling so light that the hot water might be the only thing stopping her from floating away.
She comes to him damp and reborn. When he starts to slide down her body, she reaches for the box she stashed underneath the bed two weeks ago. Just in case.
James stops moving. In the darkness, his eyes might be the same navy blue as the box. She’s gone as slowly as he wanted to for the past week or so. She’s felt his body shudder with pleasure in her hands, in her mouth, and, one memorable time, between her lubricated breasts.
“I figure we’ve discovered everything but this,” she says. “I mean, if you want to.” She won’t push him, but it feels right. It feels like everything she’s ever wanted is within her grasp if she has the courage to reach for it.
He pops the box open and wordlessly passes her a square of foil. His hand shakes, but hers is steady. The sounds he makes when she rolls it on—a tight, agonized exhalation, a half-uttered curse—are everything.
“You’d better be on top, my darling,” he says, and she loves how he’s already losing the battle for control. “I’m afraid it’s my only hope of a good showing.”
“Shh,” she says, and hovers astride him until he understands what she wants. He nudges at the juncture of her thighs, blunt and hot and big, God, he’s so big, she’s not sure whether—but he’s pushing inside and gasping her name and is she coming already? She is, and it’s so, so sweet.
She’s learned to recognize the sound he makes a few seconds before his orgasm, a soft ah of bliss and certainty. It’s followed by an anguished “Fuck.”
“It’s okay,” she whispers. “I want you to. I’m out of patience, James.”
His eyes go black, then his mouth is on hers as he comes messy and trembling inside her, and watching him is every bit as good as coming herself.