Chapter 38
First Day of the Annual American Paleontology Society Meeting
Standing in the soaring glass lobby of the Sather Conference Center in Berkeley, Ripley doesn’t feel awe so much as a sense of inevitable destiny.
All around, screens enthusiastically direct her to the opening gala of the annual American Paleontology Society meeting.
The sounds of lo-fi music, clinking glassware, and cocktail-hour chatter filter down from the ballroom.
Straight ahead, escalator risers sprout hypnotically from the floor, beckoning her forward.
Possibly to a hot date with local law enforcement officials.
She checks herself one last time, fingers whispering over her flat-ironed hair, silver hoop earrings, too-big handbag, and the short black dress she once wore to catch a sponsor at the most famous auction house in New York.
This time, she’s after bigger fish.
“You okay, Rip?” Cara’s also wearing a black sheath dress. She’s forgone her signature beaded earrings in favor of simple gold studs that won’t catch on the black earpiece hiding under her curtain of dark, shiny hair.
“Yeah, I’m all right. I just swore I’d never come crawling back here, you know?”
“I wouldn’t call this crawling back. More like fucking shit up.”
“Cara.”
Cara shrugs like What did you expect? Behind her, Griffin watches a conference center employee walk by, then dictates a text to the twins. “Black pants, plain black polo shirt, two-way radio on a black belt. ID badge on a conference lanyard.”
The lanyard is a stroke of luck. The twins came from San Francisco with a carful of clothing options, but if the conference staff had special lanyards, those would’ve been near-impossible to source.
It’s still a risky-ass plan, but Ripley will take small victories where she can find them. “We ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Cara says.
“Let’s mosey,” Griff says.
The three of them step onto the escalator. On approach, Ripley texts Matteo, then tucks her phone back into her somewhat lumpy handbag. When they reach the second level, Cara and Griff move to the railing to pretend to admire the view while Ripley goes on alone.
At the entrance to the ballroom, there’s one admin—an older white woman—staffing the registration table.
She’s got a helmet of blond hair, a navy-blue skirt suit, and a pair of black pumps that look like you could run them over with your car and still wear them to dinner.
She gives the impression of having precious few remaining fucks, which is perfect.
The woman pins Ripley with gimlet eyes as she draws closer. “Badge?”
Ripley steps up with a big smile and glances at the woman’s name tag. “Hey, Helen. I need to register for the conference.”
Someone has to give Helen their real name or risk getting charged with identity fraud, according to Cara’s dad.
As an Indigenous woman, Cara’s painfully aware of times when it’s a bad idea for her to engage with legal risk.
Griff, for his part, could get tossed out of the country.
Despite Ripley’s name and face being all over the internet, it makes the most sense for her to step forward.
Helen, thankfully, does not get paid to recognize paleontology’s most infamous public figures. “Ripleyyyy…Adammmms…” she says, pecking at her iPad. “And how are you paying?”
“Credit, please.” Even in the low evening lighting, there’s an obvious ripple in the card where the twins roasted the chip with a woodburning tool. If Helen looks up from her screen even once, this stupid stunt will end right here, right now.
But she doesn’t. “Do you have another card?” she asks, annoyed when Ripley’s won’t scan.
“No, sorry,” Ripley says. “Could it be a problem with your machine?”
Right on schedule, Matteo sticks his head out the ballroom door. “Hey! Professor Adams. You better hurry. The awards ceremony is supposed to start in a few minutes.”
Ripley looks pleadingly at Helen. “Someone I know is getting the Marsh. Would you mind if we go in now and register tomorrow morning?”
The staffer’s expression hardens. “I can’t let you in without badges. Wait here. I’ll see if I can find another machine.”
“Thank you so much,” Ripley simpers. “I really don’t want to miss the speech.”
Griff and Cara roll up the second Helen disappears down the escalator.
Griff leans over the registration table and grabs a handful of badges from the box for preregistered attendees.
He tosses two to Matteo, who’ll slip them to the twins, one each to Ripley and Cara, and slings one around his own neck.
Matteo vanishes into the crowd. “Up we go, straight to the front,” Griff announces. “Ripley, you stay out of sight behind me.”
Conference center ballrooms are all cloned from the same cell, as far as Ripley’s concerned: dark squares of carpet with bright medallion designs, beige wallpaper, industrial-chic sconces.
The attendees—half of whom look like they came here straight from the dig, only some of those with a stop at a wash-and-fold—are munching on cheese cubes and chatting up a storm about what the summer has yielded.
A trio of oversize screens play a slideshow from last year’s conference.
Three years ago, Ripley ran out of a room a lot like this one. James is here somewhere, and if she sees him unexpectedly, she’s not sure she won’t run out all over again.
For a moment, the feeling of déjà vu is vertiginous, like she’s collided with her past self.
Then again, she’s been up for seventeen hours already today, so that might have something to do with the swimming feeling in her head.
Their gang—Ripley, Cara, Griff, and Matteo—piled into the Charger at three a.m. with an unreasonably gigantic stack of plastic food containers, courtesy of Geraldine, and a fifteen-hour playlist, courtesy of Matteo.
The sun rose somewhere over Idaho and didn’t quit until they reached the Pacific.
They sped through endless blue, shouting along with their favorite songs and dragging their fingers through the last of the summer wind.
Ripley pulled James’s letter out of her bag when Cara took a turn at the wheel and Ripley was supposed to be napping in the back seat.
The stationery was thick and creamy, the folds soft where she’d smoothed them flat to read and reread his words.
The scrollwork around James’s monogram reminded her of their intertwined initials carved into a rock and buried somewhere in western Montana.
Ripley, the letter began, her name penned in the same lettering he’d used to caption his sketches. If he meant to make her remember the drawings, remember him, he’d succeeded.
I’m certain you have no wish to hear from me, but accidentally or not, the drawings of Beauty were among my belongings when you shipped them to Berkeley. After much consideration, I concluded I had a duty to return them to their rightful owner.
The attached document gives you the right to print unlimited reproductions in perpetuity.
One day, when the Clever Girl Museum has more visitors than it can handle, perhaps you’ll see fit to display them near Beauty and Beast, or make them into postcards and sell them in the gift shop.
Or perhaps you’ll throw them on the barbecue—they are yours to dispose of as you please.
I wish I had the strength to give you the other drawings too, but I felt reasonably certain you would burn those, and I’m afraid I couldn’t bear the thought. I have, however, removed the captions and stored them securely so your name need never be associated with mine.
Even on the twentieth reread, Ripley had to stop at that point. She couldn’t unsee him carefully cutting his handwriting from the bottom of each page, a nest of long, thin strips gathering on the floor. All of the Ripleys, excised.
I’ve been a coward, Ripley. My whole adult life, I dedicated myself to fulfilling others’ dreams while protecting them from knowing who I really was. If I did that long enough and well enough, I thought, no one need get hurt by my selfish desires ever again.
But you did get hurt, and I am sorrier for that than I can say.
I put what I thought you needed above the principles you held dear.
I held back my true feelings, thinking this was the brave thing to do, when really it was the easy way out.
You had to ask me if I loved you in the middle of a crowded airport at one of the worst moments of your life.
You received no answer, and I do not and will not forgive myself for that.
You are owed the truth, Ripley. If you don’t want to know it, that is your right. Throw the next page of this letter into the fire now, if you wish.
The bottom corner of the paper was ragged where she’d thumbed it, gripped it, let it go, picked it up again, wanting and not wanting to read on.
There was a part of her that couldn’t bear to nurture the newborn spark of hope in case it died too fast. A part that craved the simplicity of blaming everything on him.
In the end, the paleontologist in her couldn’t leave it buried. She’d turned the page to a reproduction of the scrollwork on their rock. It looked exactly the same, except instead of their initials, the center held five words.
I love you, Ripley Adams.
If she held the next page up to the light, she’d see where his pen had carved the imprint of those five words into the page below, like bones left behind and fossilized.
I do not expect you to forgive me. I half expect you will never read this letter. But if I could tell you anything, I would say thank you. Your courage has changed me, Ripley.
The first change I have made was to cancel the agreement with Oxford.
You and Cara should choose how and with whom you will study Beauty and Beast. The Smithson Foundation solicitors also inform me that, should you wish to repay their funds, you need not declare their support on any subsequent publications.
It would be as if I were never there, in a sense.