I TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT’S IN THE ENVELOPE ALL WEEK, BUT UNCLE Randall doesn’t mention it and doesn’t leave it sitting around for me to find. I bring it up twice at dinner, but he changes the subject. So during the day, when he’s at work, I scour Easton Estate. Our house was built in another age, for another time. There are twenty-seven bedrooms, as many baths, three kitchens—though I can’t for the life of me imagine why anyone would need three kitchens—a ballroom that my parents converted to a lab twenty years ago, and two guest houses on the property, though no one has lived in them since Uncle Randall moved back into the main house after my parents died. I look everywhere. The envelope is nowhere.
Saturday rolls around, which happens to be my birthday. Uncle Randall tried to throw me a big party for my sixteenth birthday, but the only celebration I wanted was to have Lucas come over for dinner and to hang out and watch cheesy movies on the Lifetime Network. A few minutes after six, he pulls up and blows the horn just to let us know he’s arrived. It sounds like a bullfrog dying.
“When are you getting your permit, Hannah?” Uncle Randall asks, cringing at the sound of Lucas’s horn. The lines in his forehead crease. Uncle Randall’s not old, only around forty-five, but over the last few years, I’ve noticed a lot more of his forehead showing. My grandfather never went bald, so genetics tells me that there’s a good chance Uncle Randall never will either.
“I’m signing up on Monday,” I say. For the last eleven years, anytime he couldn’t drive me himself, Uncle Randall has insisted on having our driver Devin take me everywhere, refusing to let me take public transportation. The small fact that Lucas has been able to take me places these last six months has been a major relief. Getting my own license will be even better. Even though Devin is pretty chill, being chauffeured around town is like having a permanent babysitter.
For my birthday, Chef Lilly, who’s been with our family forever, makes all my favorites, including vegetarian meatballs, butternut squash soup, and truffle layer cake. By the end of the sixth course, I want to undo the top button of my jeans.
“Did you show Lucas the Georgia O’Keeffe yet?” Uncle Randall says as Lucas is finishing up his third piece of layer cake.
“You do not have a Georgia O’Keeffe,” Lucas says, shoving the last bite into his mouth. He stands awkwardly as he tries to figure out what to do with his dessert plate. One of our maids, Sylvia, spots him and swipes it from his hands before he can take a step.
“We just got it,” I say, trying to act like it’s no big deal. Lucas is convinced he’s somehow related to Georgia O’Keeffe though there are no records to prove it. I’ve been trying to do a DNA test, which would be no problem if I could actually get some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s DNA. Hence the painting. I spent a god-awful amount of money on it. I’m praying there are hairs or something caught under the paint.
“Show me now, woman,” he says.
I laugh, and we head off into the game room where I’ve hung the thing. We stop in the ballroom-turned-lab to pick up my sugar gliders, Castor and Pollux, who, now that it’s night, are awake and active. Castor sits on my left shoulder, tucked under one of my ponytails, and Pollux jumps to the top of my head, like it’s some sort of game.
I show Lucas the painting, and he reaches his hand out, closing his eyes and holding his fingers inches away from the canvas, like somehow he can feel the image. Artists are strange.
“So I guess you like it,” I say when he’s finally finished worshipping the painting.
“Just a little,” Lucas says.
“I was going to give it to you,” I say.
Lucas’s eyes open wide. “There is no way you can—”
I put up a hand to stop him. “Don’t worry. Uncle Randall says we have to give it to a museum.” It was the only way Uncle Randall allowed me to buy it.
Relief seems to flow through Lucas. “Good. Because there is no way I could even afford the insurance on that thing. And you can’t be giving me stuff like that. It’s …”
“… awesome?” I suggest.
“Yeah, something like that. Oh, but speaking of presents, I got you one.”
“I said no presents, remember?”
“How about you buy me a print of the Georgia O’Keeffe, and we call it even?”
“Deal.”
He hands me a small box, maybe only five inches high by seven inches wide. It’s obvious that he wrapped it using whatever he could find around his house, which in this case happens to be the last Chemistry test that he took.
“You got a C?”
“I’m not you, Hannah. Remember? I wasn’t born with the Periodic Table implanted in my head.”
“The Periodic Table is almost like a work of art,” I say. “You’d like it if you gave it a chance.”
“It’s had its chance,” Lucas says. “And I’ve determined that it sucks.”
“Don’t diss the Periodic Table,” I say.
He puts up a hand. “No disrespect meant.”
I tear the paper, ripping it in half so the subpar Chemistry test becomes nothing but a memory. Inside is a picture of an eye. But not just any eye. It’s my left eye, green with two dots of brown mixed in like freckles, one on the bottom and one on the left. There are eyelashes and even my eyebrow, complete with the scar running through it where I cut myself when I was three. It’s printed on metal and surrounded by a black metal frame.
“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” I say.
“It’s a digital painting,” Lucas says.
“It is not!”
“Would I lie?”
I hold it closer, looking for anything that looks computer generated. “You did this on the computer? How is that even possible?”
Lucas tries not to look proud, but he can’t hide his grin. “I’ve been going through a ton of tutorials. Traditional art is great, but I figured since you gave me the computer, I might as well expand my skills.”
I brush my finger over the image. “I’d say you’re off to a good start.”
“You should see some of the other stuff I’m working on,” Lucas says. “It’s unbelievable what you can do with a computer. Some of those software packages are crazy awesome.”
I angle my head at him and wait.
“I know,” Lucas says. “This is where you say ‘I told you so.’”
“I told you so.” I’ve been nagging Lucas to get started with digital art since the beginning of high school. He used the “we can’t afford a computer” excuse so many times that I was sure if I heard it one more time, I would scream.
Uncle Randall pops his head into the game room. “Did you find it?” He has a huge stack of papers tucked under his arm. Given that he’s a workaholic, my guess is that his plans for the rest of the evening involve work. But I swear that on top of the stack is the letter he got delivered during the lecture. The yellowed envelope is hard to miss.
“Find what?” I ask, trying to act like I don’t want to run over and grab the envelope right now.
“Your present, of course.”
Present? It’s like he and Lucas teamed up to completely go against my wishes.
“I thought we said—”
Uncle Randall holds a hand up. “It’s something I’ve been waiting to give you. Something that’s rightfully yours. I left it in Egypt.” Without another word, he leaves the room.
To anyone else, leaving a present in Egypt might sound like a ridiculous thing to do. For Uncle Randall, it’s just another day at Easton Estate.
Egypt at Easton Estate is a room near the south-most corner, just off the ballroom, filled with archaeological treasures that would make the curator of the Field Museum in Chicago consider burglary. I shine my cell phone in front of us as Lucas and I walk into the room because there’s no switch on the wall like most of the other rooms in the estate. Instead there’s a chain attached to a giant chandelier that spans five feet across. I pull the chain, and the room comes to life.
Ahead of us is a golden throne rumored to have belonged to the Pharaoh Thutmose II from the Eighteenth Dynasty. One of my ancestors had gone on a dig around the time of Napoleon and brought it back along with whatever else he could take when he excavated the tomb. It’s crazy to think about now, but back in the day, Egypt was like the Wild West as far as tomb robbery went.
The walls of Egypt are painted with murals of detailed columns, palm trees, and the twisting Nile River, and the floor boards are stained black like onyx. On every shelf, niche, and pedestal sits some random Canopic jar or head bust. But the prize piece of the room is the sarcophagus rumored to have belonged to Pharaoh Ramesses VIII. The inscriptions on the sarcophagus suggest that the pharaoh had murdered his two older brothers in order to take the throne, and because of that, a curse had been placed on his mummy.
Lucas steps close so he can whisper. He’s always been freaked out by the curse. “You and Uncle Randall really want to get rid of all this stuff, Hannah?”
“It shouldn’t be here in the first place,” I say. We’ve been looking for the perfect museum for the last two years. If all goes according to plan, this entire room will be cleaned out and on display to the public within the year.
“But it is here,” Lucas says.
“That doesn’t make it right. It should be in a museum.” I’m not knocking my great-ancestor, but stripping a country of its archaeology is totally not cool.
“You know Egyptian art—” Lucas starts.
I place a hand over his mouth to stop him. Given the chance, Lucas will descend into a twenty minute long dissertation on art across the ages.
Where the two arms of the sarcophagus meet is almost like a shelf. Sitting on top of it is a wrapped present with a small card attached. The card has a bunch of symbols scrolled all over it, which, to the untrained eye, might look like gibberish. I recognize them as my name in ancient Sumerian. Oh, the fun of having a linguistics professor as an uncle.
Castor and Pollux both jump to the top of the sarcophagus and peer down at me, like they’re daring me to tell them to stop. I don’t think that, after all this time, two sugar gliders are going to do much damage. But then Castor jumps to a pedestal next to the wall with a Canopic jar sitting on top of it. He climbs to the top of the jar. Even though he hardly weighs a thing, it’s still enough to make the Canopic jar wobble.
Lucas and I both jump forward as the jar starts to topple. It balances almost perfectly, at an angle, for half a second, then it tips over and falls straight to the wood floor, shattering into a million pieces.
“Oh my god,” Lucas says. “Uncle Randall is going to kill you. That thing had to be worth millions.”
This is my exact thought, too. Uncle Randall is going to completely freak out. Except then I notice the folded piece of paper that’s been hidden inside the Canopic jar. It’s now under a pile of shattered clay.
“You see this?” I say, pulling it from the rubble.
Castor jumps back to my shoulder and peers over as I stare at the paper. It’s rice paper, the kind used to make grave rubbings, and it’s folded in fourths. My breath catches as I see what’s written on the outside.
My mom. She put this here the year before I was born. I don’t think it’s been touched since.
“Dude, that’s your—” Lucas starts.
“I know,” I say and unfold the paper, smoothing it out.
It’s a rubbing of some kind of artifact covered in all sorts of symbols and letters. It only takes me a moment to realize how similar it is to the artifact Uncle Randall had shown earlier in the week at his linguistics lecture. The Deluge Segment. It looks about the same size, same shape. It could be the same piece, or one similar. Which is weird. Uncle Randall had said the Harvard piece got sold to a private collector back in the eighties. If it were the same piece, then how would Mom have been able to make a rubbing of it in 2002?
“That’s really cool,” Lucas says. “What do you think it is?”
I shake my head. “Not sure.” And I tell him about the lecture and the picture Uncle Randall had shown.
“So maybe it’s similar to the Harvard piece but different,” Lucas says. “That wouldn’t be all that unusual. Look at all the tablets the Sumerians carved.”
“True,” I say.
“You should show your uncle.”
I fold the paper back into fourths. I should show Uncle Randall, but I also don’t want to. Mom put this here, maybe for me to find. And it feels like my own mystery that I want to solve.
“I will,” I say. “But not yet.”