“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 studiedRomeo 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 ofanything,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 everyTyrannosaurus rexthat 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,” Ripleysays, 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.
