Erased From Memory Read Free Page A

do with an adolescent girl. We went to Cairo and Thebes and Luxor and to the Valley of the Kings. He would be down at the bottom of a hole sending up shovelfuls of rocks or baskets of dirt or slings containing pottery figures along with occasional other finds—stone carvings, beads, bits of clay tablet. I would collect these, list them in a notebook, put them in a box. Until he found the coffin lid, which changed his future and his reputation, Daddy never discovered anything exciting.
    The coffin lid was important not because it was a coffin lid—there are a great many of those in Egypt—but because it had on it some hieroglyphs that were repetitions of the ones on the tomb wall, and by comparing the two versions, Daddy was able to settle several major disputes in Egyptian scholarly circles.
    After our first time in Egypt, Daddy took our next-door neighbor’s son along on our explorations. This was a boy named Rob, who was three years older than I. I was frantically in love with Rob. It’s hard not to be in love with someone you have been to Egypt with, and sat under the stars there with, and discovered archaeological firsts with. Later we lived together in Santa Cruz and still later we loused things up between us pretty thoroughly. But we still see each other all the time and have a mutual reliance system in crises.
    It’s Rob whom I am trying to summon now by punching angrily at my cell phone.
    Rob is a doctor and works in a hospital twenty miles from here. I can hear the hospital intercom intoning, “One—four, one—four.” That’s Rob’s number; he chose it because it was our campsite number at the tourist camp in Thebes.
    “Carla?” he says now. “Hey. How. What gives?”
    When I have partly explained, he cuts right to the jugular with “My God, my God, your dad, in jail? What’re you doing, who’ve you called . . .”
    I don’t say I haven’t called anybody because what I’ve done is to commit mayhem on a sheriff ’s deputy. But Rob deduces some of what my silence means. He says, “Honey, oh Jesus, ohmigawd, I’ll be right over; I’ll meet you at your dad’s place; hold on there, chin up, okay?”
    One of the big troubles between me and Rob was that each of us thinks of him/herself as the caretaking one.
    Now I am waiting for Rob in Daddy’s apartment in Green Beach Manor. My father, of course, is not here. He is off at wherever Sheriff Munro has taken him.
    Daddy has lived in this elegant retirement colony for a year. Green Beach Manor has everything—romantic Victorian architecture, assiduous staff, fairly decent food, seacoast climate, a capable director who is a friend of mine. I know all about the Manor, all its ins and outs; I live here, too. I am the assistant director. I didn’t intend to do that, become the assistant director of a retirement colony; it just happened. It keeps me close to my dad; it gives me housing and a salary. And it makes me feel that I’m wasting my life. I want a different job; I’m ready for something new.
    I’m twenty-six years old. I want an occupation that will Make a Difference.
    And my father, who is eighty-six, also has aspirations. He wants to feel needed. He does not feel needed here at the Manor, but he feels that way at the museum. And so we visit Egypt Regained at least twice a month, where he looks at his coffin lid while Director Egon Rothskellar, who likes superlatives, says “Wonderful” at him. The museum is Daddy’s lodestar of the ideal place where he is truly needed.
    Rob bursts into the apartment now in a gust of warm air from the hall; his trench coat flares out behind him. He grabs me by the shoulders and kisses me. He says, “You’ve been crying.”
    “That was half an hour ago.”
    “Tell me everything, how in hell did this happen?” And then when I’m halfway into my chaotic story, he stops me with, “Oh, God, I forgot. I brought Susie, she’s on her way in; she stopped to make a phone call.”
    Susie is Rob’s mother,