A silent Tucker was a strange beast.
In a way, it was refreshing. I still throbbed with the mean pleasure of telling him off as I slid in the window seat and turned toward the glass.
I felt the weight of him settling on the aisle seat beside me, but didn't turn to acknowledge him until I detected a different cologne, and my seat mate called, "Konnichi wa!"
I whipped my head around and spotted Tucker still standing in the aisle with the food bags wrapped around both wrists, eyes wide, before I rotated to stare at the man directly beside me.
He was young. Young enough not to have much of a mustache. But he seemed plenty confident and maybe drunk as he singsonged to me in pseudo Japanese and placed a hand on my left knee.
In that moment, it hit me that a) I'd taken a seat on the right side of the bus, the same side where Mr. Becker had been killed, and b) I was trapped by some douche.
I seized his hand, threw it in his lap, and stood up.
The guy stood up too, laughing as he blocked me. He cupped his hands in the air like he was squeezing a pair of breasts or my rear end.
"Try it and die," I said. "Now get out of my way."
The guy chortled and air-squeezed again. Honk honk.
Tucker growled something at him in Arabic, leaning toward him.
The guy threw up his hands and oozed between me and Tucker, heading further down the aisle. "Sorry, sorry," he said to Tucker in English.
Why should he apologize to Tucker? He hadn't grabbed Tucker's knee.
"Fuck yourself," I told the douche, but not too loud. I didn't want to get tossed into an Egyptian prison.
Tucker dropped into the seat next to me, piling the food in his lap. "You okay? He came out of nowhere."
I rolled my eyes. "My knee will survive. I wish I could smash his face, though."
"Me too," said Tucker. "We okay?"
I shrugged.
"Am I better than that guy?"
"Marginally." I allowed, and when he offered to take my hand, I wrapped my fingers around his.
"Maybe we should spring for a taxi or Uber-Careem next time. The two ride share companies merged," he explained, but that wasn't the crucial part to me.
"What? You're suggesting taking a car?"
"You're allowed, after an IED, an international flight, a toilet spray, and a full ER shift. Sorry, I'm worried about money."
I nodded but remembered the cash he'd spent on food tonight. And the roses.
"Every morning, I wake up and tell myself I'm not going to spend anything. But when I talk to Egyptian people about unemployment, I just … " He shook his head and stared at the bags in his lap.
"I get it. And we have to eat. But I don't want to spend all night joking with your new friends on the street. I have to sleep, and I don't want you to shame me for it."
"Shame you?"
"Yeah. In medicine, you're shamed for eating or sleeping or going to the bathroom. It's crazy that we're supposed to take care of everyone else 24/7, but we're weak if we take a few seconds for ourselves."
Tucker nodded. After a minute, he said, "I've got to think about this."
"Okay." I squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry if I was hard on you. My head does hurt. And you did get rid of that douche bag."
"You're welcome," he said, before he reverted to silence again.
Fear welled in my chest—he's mad at me, he's going to leave me, I already lost Ryan, Tucker and I are fundamentally incompatible—but I breathed in and out and studied his face. He flashed me a quick smile that didn't touch his eyes.
No, we weren't okay yet. Still, I didn't have to deal with a strange guy sing-songing fake Japanese and grabbing my knee.
Part of me wanted to stay awake in case another IED hit.
The other part of me thought, If a bomb hits, I'd better rest up first. And my body will shield Tucker's.
Hope the douche gets it, though.
I nodded off against the window, despite the loud conversations swirling around me. At least they weren't playing music this time.
I jolted awake when the bus hit a bump.
"You okay?" Tucker grabbed the bags and me, in that order.
I blinked. "Are we there?"
"Not yet." He patted my hair. "You can sleep some more."
My mouth and eyes had both dried out, and pain still drummed a steady rhythm in my temples. "I guess I'm up now."
"You want food?"
I shook my head. "I'll eat when we get back."
"You want a story to put you to sleep?"
I smiled. "Kinky. Yes, but first you can tell me if that douche is still around, without making it obvious."
"He got off on the last stop."
"Thank goodness." I yawned and surveyed the bus, pleased by the lack of douche. "Okay. What's your story?"
"I was looking up Serket, the scorpion goddess."
"Why?"
He shrugged and, for no reason, my heart melted. I kissed his cheek.
He kissed mine, still subdued. "I love you."
"I love you too." My eyes told him I wished we could touch more in public, and his eyes gleamed back before he changed the subject.
"I read about Sarquet Industries, and I decided to research the goddess for clues. Did you know she's the goddess of medicine?"
"Oh, that's cool. It also makes more sense why they'd name a medical record system after her."
"And their whole corporation, yeah. Her name literally means 'she who causes the throat to breathe.'"
"Kind of an odd way to phrase it when scorpions can kill you, right?"
He shrugged. "Not usually adults. I looked that up too. There are 1500 scorpion species, but only about 25 are dangerous to us. Breathing problems, arrhythmias, paralysis and death. Kids might die, and anyone who's allergic. Usually it's more painful than anything else."
"Huh. Well, it still seems backward to name the scorpion goddess as the goddess of medicine, but I'm a fan of breathing." I no longer take my respiratory system for granted after people have tried to strangle me.
"They used to paint her with the scorpion on her head, its tail standing erect and ready to sting. They didn't want their goddess to be powerless."
"I'm a fan of power." And I knew what standing erect meant to him.
"I know you are." He winked at me. "She's a good goddess for you."
Well, I could handle being compared to a goddess. Even if—especially if—she did sting. I laughed. "Did you know my astrological sign? I'm a Scorpio." I turned 27 on November seventh.
"See? It's fate. I don't know if Serket ties into Osiris and Isis, though. I didn't have a chance to read about them."
I blinked, still adjusting to the light. "Oh, I can tell you that." I deepened my voice like a movie announcer. "When Set took over the throne with Nephthys as his consort, the desert winds blew. The land turned barren. Brother turned against brother, and the world collapsed into war."
"Brother had already turned against brother." Tucker glanced at me. "Isis wasn’t able to turn it around?"
"No. She was searching for her husband’s body, with the help of Nephthys."
"Ah. The sister felt guilty?"
"Super guilty. Maybe about having sex with her brother/bro-in-law, maybe about triggering Set, maybe both. Either way, interesting tidbit: Isis and Nephthys changed into falcons, or kites, to search for Osiris."
Tucker frowned. "They asked someone to fly them as kites? What if someone let go of the string?"
I giggled. "I thought the same thing. I had to look it up. ‘Kites’ is another word for falcons. Their cries sound like grief. And falcons are associated with Horus—"
"Horus, the other brother that no one cares about?"
"No. Horus, the next generation. Patience, grasshopper." He laughed. He calls me grasshopper all the time. I patted his knee. I'm less sleazy than the douche. "First thing. They found Osiris's casket. It crashed into a tree near Byblos."
Tucker sighed in recognition. "That's the name of a great restaurant in Montreal. Tori wouldn't share any of her chicken. I still remember that it came with tarragon yogurt and saffron."
Tori's a cool cat (not literally; she's a resident doctor like us) and the artist who made us the card with the Egyptian quotes, but I waved him back to my story. "Byblos was an ancient city in what is now Lebanon."
"Yeah, I know."
"Pretty incredible, right?" I showed him a map I'd loaded up on my phone earlier. "The casket would have had to float all the way from the Nile to the Mediterranean Sea, past what is now Israel, up to Byblos, which is north of what’s now Beirut." In other words, a really long way for any bird to fly or casket to float.
Tucker read my mind. "It's a more interesting story that way. So, putting aside probability and p values, Isis found his body."
"Well, first the king and queen of Byblos found the tree that the casket was lodged inside. The tree had taken on the beauty and even the scent of Osiris. The royal couple cut down the tree and used it as a central pillar in the court."
Tucker's nostrils flared. "And that's helpful how?"
"Yeah. Drowned in a casket, crashed into a tree, and cut down as a tree. I thought, Welp, he’s dead x 3. But actually, he was kind of reborn into the tree."
"Osiris was dead, but the tree absorbed his essence."
I nodded.
Tucker shook his head. "Then the king and queen of Byblos cut it down."
"Right, dead x 3—but born x 4. He's still in that tree, whether it's been cut down or not." I yawned. What a day. "Isis disguises herself as an older woman and makes friends with the—Bybliotic?—queen’s handmaidens by the shore. That queen eventually trusts Isis to nursemaid her own sons. Isis decides to make the younger Byblos prince immortal by 'burning away part of his mortality' every night."
"Uh oh."
"Yeah, I don't know what that means, but it must've been bad because the Queen of Byblos catches her and freaks out, whereupon Isis reveals herself as the goddess. The King and Queen beg Isis to spare their lives, and Isis relinquishes them on one condition: she wants that central pillar."
Tucker's mouth twitched between a smile and a frown. "The Osiris tree."
"Exactly. Somehow, that tree gets converted to human form, and Isis and Nephthys embalm his body and carry out funeral rituals. Osiris is considered the very first mummy."
Tucker snapped his fingers. "I read about that!"
"Right. They carry his mummy home and hide it in the marshes of the Nile Delta. Isis needs more ritual herbs, so she sets out, leaving her sister to stand guard—"
"Nuh-uh!"
"Uh huh. Set persuades Nephthys to tell him where Osiris's body is. Then he hacks it up and throws all the pieces into the Nile."