Two months after she loses the baby, Janey signs up for an anthropology course at the community college. She studies late at night as her husband sleeps, the sound of his snores as comforting and friendly as his voice used to be. Sometimes when she is tired and the words no longer make sense, she imagines Richard Leakey stepping out of her textbook, his feet awkward over the thin carpet. So used to the dusty plains of Africa, Richard is hesitant, almost shy. His clothes smell of hot rocks, but it is his hands Janey concentrates on the longest: knuckles chapped, nails short, fingers callused from years of sifting through the tired dirt of past lives.
When she thinks of those hands, those very hands which have touched bone and caressed the thick, solid femurs of Homo habilis, she shivers and bites her lips, imagining just how his touches would feel, rough yet with the tender guidance of someone able to read the secrets hidden beneath her skin.
Just a month ago, Janey wouldn’t have recognized Richard Leakey’s name, or that of his fossil-seeking mother and father; Olduvai Gorge would have sounded like someplace men went to rock climb or shoot wild pigs. But now, she throws herself into the past with an energy that bewilders her, reciting dates as she washes the dishes, reading Archaeology magazine while sitting on the toilet, her toes digging into the rug as she learns about the Mayan Empire and the thin, fluted fossil points recently found in Montana. She never realized that rocks could tell stories, that an entire history could be reconstructed by the discovery of one simple bone.
In the evenings, Janey and her husband move around the house with the feigned politeness of strangers. Their smallest movements betray themselves: an arm reaching for a dish towel or a wrist flexes to turn the television channels. Even their embraces feel forced and unnatural, as if their arms and mouths mock the steadier, worthier couples Janey notices everywhere. Sitting at the supper table, that polished wooden table with the carefully arranged placemats, Janey has to hold herself back from hurling bowls of soup at her husband’s smooth, bland face. She can’t forgive him, that’s the thing. She knows how unreasonable she’s being—how could it have possibly been his fault? Nevertheless, she can’t forgive the way he had stood there, mute and helpless as she bled over the bathroom floor, his hands shaking and reaching down between her legs as if he could somehow stop the flow of blood. That’s how she still sees him, her blood over his hands, his eyes raised towards the ceiling as if seeking some type of atonement.
Janey keeps the fetus of her miscarried child in the freezer, pushed towards the back and covered in a Downyflake waffle bag. Often, in those minutes when dusk fills the sky and filters out the last strand of light, she opens the freezer and touches the bag. It soothes her to know that it is still there, surrounded by chicken breasts and Tater Tots and the uniform squares of the ice cube trays. She leans her face against the side of the refrigerator and wonders what secret this child left behind, a small tear in the side of her womb, perhaps, or an etching over her pelvic bone, so faint only practiced hands could find it, there on the left side in direct line with the valves of her heart.
By mid-semester, Janey is failing the section on technical field sites. She can’t force herself to read her textbook, all of those chapters on stratums and layers and rock sediments. It dismays her to realize how slow, how painstakingly meticulous each discovery is. Years are spent at one site, in one spot, and when she thinks of herself on a dig, she imagines kneeling beside her husband, their fingers withered and chapped as they try to make sense of the piles of dirt in front of them.
So when Professor Dunbar corners her after class to warn her about the upcoming midterm, Janey nods and stifles a yawn. What she likes isn’t the discovery of the bones but the reality of them, the way they unfold before her, a mystery waiting to be told. She can run her hand down the bones of a woman dead for hundreds of years and know things: if she had had children, if she had been upper class or a slave. What separates her from this woman? In their bones they are the same, and this is a comfort to Janey, late at night when she wakes to a dried, flat panic against her tongue. She lies beside her husband and imagines a future anthropologist, someone very much like Richard Leakey, digging up her bones and cleaning them off with brushes, his hands careful, his breath whispering across her clavicle like a small promise of rain.
Janey’s husband thinks they should have another baby, but Janey can’t bear it, it’s too sad, the thought of those small bones growing inside of her, the tiny fingers flexing with her every breath. She slips in her diaphragm every Saturday night, forsaking the gel, so he won’t taste it. Lying beneath him, Janey often pictures herself as a hotel, her no-vacancy sign flashing on and off as her husband’s sperm wander the silent streets of her womb, lonely motorists looking for a warm, safe place to rest.
“The Neanderthals were the first to bury their dead,” Janey reads out loud to her husband’s sleeping back, her handwriting so messy she has to squint to make it out.
“Religious significance? Hygienic? Excessive flower pollen at La Chapelleaux-Saints.”
Janey remembers copying the name from the blackboard, where Professor Dunbar had scrawled it in large, block letters, as if they were still in kindergarten. Now she wonders at this early grave site, if someone in the group had gathered a handful of flowers (what kind would they have been? Daises? Red clover? The simple, fragile leaves of a wild rose?) and placed them over this elderly man, perhaps a leader or the father of someone wise. She wonders if people loved each other in those days, if they had the time for such things. After all, love isn’t a necessity, it’s not needed to keep one’s genes flowing. It is, Janey suddenly realizes, a luxury. It’s something to pick flowers for.
Janey’s husband wants to take a trip to Las Vegas or Reno, somewhere with lights and loud music and the shining, yellow-streaked hopes of riches. Janey stares at the travel brochures he brings home, the pages smudged with dirt and smelling of hot asphalt. Everyone is tanned and happy; everyone has perfect teeth and flat, muscular stomachs. The women wear expensive, flowing dresses and swimsuits so small she has to squint to make them out.
“Maybe we could see a show,” he yells from the bathroom. “One of those where women dance with pineapples on their heads.”
Janey sits on the edge of the bed, her hands folded over her knees as she recites the parts of her leg.
“Patella. Femur. Fibula.”
“Maybe we’ll win at the slots,” her husband continues. “Or that bingo game, what’s it called, keno?”
Janey moves down to the ankle: “Talus, calcaneus, navicular.” She finds it amazing that someone might hold her own bones thousands of years from now, noting the slight fracture of her tibia from when she fell off her bike as a child. What would they think, how would they interpret it, what false history will they assign her, there in the dulled light of a future where nothing but her bones will matter?
In class Friday, Professor Dunbar passes around large photographs of important finds, each one so glossy and perfect it might have come from the cover of National Geographic. Janey stares down at the entrance of a cave, the small, roped-off corridors with markers wavering through the dust. She finds the pictures of the remains much more interesting, the skeletons sprawled over the ground with green or black pieces wedged in to make them whole. An enlarged Neanderthal skull is placed next to the scattered debris of a bison hunt, thousands of bleached white bones stacked higher than her hips. She wonders at the sounds of so many dying animals, the flow of blood, the way the meat must have tasted, thick and tough with the lingering of salt.
The last photograph is from Pompeii and shows a mother holding an infant, the child still curved in her arms. The remains look humbled, almost ashamed, as if they are aware of their violation. Janey thinks of her own child, packed away in the freezer like an unwanted cut of meat, and begins to cry. Everyone shuffles and looks away, but Janey can’t stop. Something about that picture, that poor, doomed family has loosened her chest. Her throat feels liquid, her tongue hot with the taste of her own grief.
“Ms. Jennings?” Professor Dunbar says, an Australopithecus afarensis skull clutched in his hands. “Ms. Jennings?”
Janey grabs her books and runs for the door, the edge of her binder a rough comfort against her stomach. It isn’t until she’s safely in the car that she realizes she still has the photograph. She sets it on the empty seat beside her. She’s taking it home.
After her husband leaves for his bowling league, Janey takes the picture out from her underwear drawer. The light from the lamp casts a strange, glittering shadow over the background, giving it an almost science-fiction aura, and Janey feels strangely excited. She stares at the colors, the bareness of a land once covered by ash, and without even realizing it, her fingers reach out and trace the mother’s arm, over and over, as if trying to memorize it’s shape.
The next thing she knows, she’s driving towards the college, pulling into the faculty parking lot and sneaking into the Physical Sciences building. She hurries to the third floor, peeking around the corner so she won’t run into the janitor. Inside the Paleontology Lab, it is so quiet she can hear the squeak of her sneakers against the linoleum. She feels her way to the back cabinets and sucks in her breath, suddenly squeamish about sticking her hand in the dark drawer. It takes her two tries, but she finally finds the skeleton she’s been assigned, a young Indian woman about her age who lived over four hundred years ago. She carries the box carefully to the car and as she drives past the library, she almost sobs in relief.
Once home, she sits on the living room floor and lays the bones out across the floor, each one cool and pale against her fingers. She isn’t sure how to put all the pieces together, but she knows the general layout, placing the cranium and mandible at the top and slowly working her way down to the clavicle and vertebrae and leg bones. When she’s finished, she tucks the extra pieces behind the rib cage and dusts her hands over her hips.
Then she walks to the freezer and retrieves the waffle bag from the top shelf; the weight is reassuring and dense. She lowers the package next to the skeleton’s chest and raises the right humerus until it is cradling the remains of her frozen child. The bright plastic bag is startling next to the solemnness of bone, but Janey isn’t looking for aesthetics. After a few minutes, she folds the skeleton back into the box, wedging the plastic bag (which is dripping a strange, pink liquid over the carpeting) in the middle and covering it with a tee shirt her husband left on the couch. She carries this to the back door.
Outside it is cool, the moon slanted and small, the stars so bright each one is like a watching eye. Janey gets down on her hands and knees and digs through the garden, her fingers unearthing roots and hard, round shapes that could be potatoes or radishes or malformed carrots. She lays the bundle inside, imagining a future anthropologist digging up this gravesite thousands of years from now, pondering the reason for this death, as if anyone could ever justify a death.
She hesitates for a moment before pushing the dirt back over the grave. Shouldn’t she say something, offer a piece of advice or a blessing? But she’s void of offerings, so she opens the package of wild flower seeds her husband was saving for next year and scatters them over the earth. She’ll watch and something will grow from this spot, she isn’t sure what: fireweed, lilac, the faint, surprising color of marsh violets. In a few weeks she’ll see them, small, green leaves pushing up with that hopeful air of expectation.
