Mary Sullivan - Always Emily

She held on to her father, breathing in his familiar scent and taking in his strength. Oh, Daddy. She was a girl again, protected and cherished. Nothing bad could happen to her here.

She was safe.

The tug of that mummy wrap tying her to the past, to dusty old digs and dried relics, to pain and betrayal, tugged her to the past, but she resisted. She’d stayed in the land of the dead too long.

These people were vital. Alive.

Laura handed her a glass of cold water and she downed it in two gulps, giving it back for a refill. Only after she drank three glasses could she answer questions.

Yes, this time she was home for good. No, she wasn’t going back. Yes, she was ecstatic to be here. Yes, she had missed everyone. No, she was no longer with...him. Silence fell over the group that surrounded her.

Laura broke it. “You need food.”

Ah, yes, the answer to everything. A plate of food. A bowl of soup. As though any of that were going to fix what was so badly broken in Emily’s life.

“We started early and a lot of the buffet food is eaten, but I’ve got one of your favorites here,” Laura chattered. Nerves. Laura was so seldom affected by them; Emily must look really bad.

Laura handed her a cup of tea and one of her bakery’s cinnamon buns. Emily’s first bite buried her cynicism, and she sighed. Yes, maybe food was the answer.

She ate half the bun, but she’d put so little into her stomach in the past few days it had shrunk. She handed the rest to her little brother, Cody, though little was a misnomer. At eighteen and six feet tall, he might better be described more accurately as simply younger.

Cody finished the bun in two mouthfuls. Where Pearl’s features were delicate, Cody’s were strong, his jaw square, his trademark Jordan dark brown eyes beneath dark eyebrows and hair a replica of their father’s. Cody was well on his way to being a good-looking man, like their dad, and Uncle Gabe, and Uncle Tyler, all of whom converged on Emily for hugs. So did their wives. And their children.

Oh, those Jordan men could hug, could administer love and support and affection like no one else on earth.

It suffocated her, the bosom of her family too accepting of her at a time when she knew she shouldn’t take it.

Perceptive Pearl saw through her shaky smile, took Emily’s hand and led her down the hallway toward the stairs. She picked up Emily’s knapsack from the bottom step.

Emily retrieved her violin case and followed Pearl up two flights of stairs, to her small, private apartment under the eaves on the third floor. Dad had designed it for Emily when he’d built the house nineteen years ago just after Pearl’s birth.

It ran the full length, with the roof’s slanting edges cutting off height on the two long sides, and white wainscoting running under soft mauve walls.

Emily set her violin on a chair and glanced around. In the sitting area overlooking the garden, sketchpads and pencils were strewn over the sofa and coffee table and chintz armchair.

She picked up one of Pearl’s sketchbooks and thumbed through it. Her sister was good—very good—the scenes of small-town life accurate, unsentimental, and yet attractive. Pearl had also sketched life around Accord, the forests, farms and ranches of Colorado.

Emily turned the page...and there it was. The Cathedral. Her name for the Native American Heritage Center, because it seemed beautiful and holy to her. Salem’s Cathedral. Emily had first named it the Cathedral after it was built, and the name had stuck with everyone. Most people in town called it either the Cathedral or the Heritage Center.

Pearl had captured perfectly the lighting of a dying sunset as it glinted from glass walls. Longing expanded Emily’s chest, but Salem had told her to stay away, and so sadness replaced her yearning.

“I’m sorry. I spend too much time up here.” Pearl started to gather up her work, but Emily stopped her.

“This should be your room now. You’re old enough to have your own space.”

“Where would you stay when you come home?” Pearl dropped what she’d gathered onto the table.

Emily shrugged. Her head hurt too much for thinking right now. She took a tissue from a box on the bedside table and wiped sweat from her forehead. “How’s school?”

“Good. You know me. I’m keen. I like school. I like learning. I’m a nerd.”

A pretty nerd who the boys liked, no doubt.

“How’s the art going?”

Pearl’s face lit up. Even as the tiniest child, art had made her happy. “Great. I’ve had interest from a couple of advertising firms.”

“Finish school first,” Emily warned.

“I will.”

Dreams shone in Pearl’s eyes. Emily used to have dreams, too.

Pearl placed one of the pillows on the bed up against the headboard and leaned against it, curling her legs into the half-lotus yoga pose and laying another pillow across her knees.

She smiled and patted the pillow. Emily couldn’t help but return that serene smile. As a child, Pearl had spent many hours up here visiting Emily with her head in her sister’s lap.

Laura would come upstairs to find Pearl asleep and Emily reading a book while she stroked her baby sister’s hair.

Emily laid her head into the dip in the center of the pillow, where it rested on Pearl’s calves. The pupil had become the teacher.

Pearl touched her cheek. “Your skin is clammy. Are you cold?”

“Cold and hot.”

“You’re pale, but your cheeks are bright red.”

“I have fever and chills.”

“How long will it last?”

“Another day or so.”

“Tell me what’s wrong, Emily.”

Pearl didn’t mean the malaria. She was right. That was a surface thing. What was wrong with Emily went bone deep. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost herself.

“Everything.” She sighed.

Pearl stroked her hair. “You should sleep.”

“I wish I could.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

Emily thought about it. Solitude? Was that what she needed? She’d give it a try. “Yes.”

Pearl struggled out from beneath Emily, stood and kissed her forehead. “Love you, sis. See you in the morning.”

But Pearl had only just closed the door at the bottom of the stairs when Emily missed her already. So...solitude wasn’t the answer.

Neither was rest. As exhausted as she was, she knew she wouldn’t sleep, not with the problem of the prayer book turning her inside out. She retrieved her laptop from its pocket in her backpack and set it up on her desk.

A moment later, she had her email open. It exploded with messages from the past two days, the tone of all of them, from friends and colleagues, frantic.

Where are you?

What have you done?

You stole an artifact??? That is so not you!

No one believes what Jean-Marc is saying.

What was Jean-Marc saying? She could only imagine.

She opened her Twitter account, and that’s when it sank in—how much Jean-Marc wanted to hurt her and exactly how much he’d succeeded.

The whole archeological world thought she had been stealing artifacts from the dig. He hinted that there had been a series of objects that had gone missing. There had? Whether or not it was true, Jean-Marc had succeeded in implicating her, in tarnishing her reputation. He’d done it with just the right amount of innuendo, with no real accusation she could take as slander and use against him in court.

Furious that she hadn’t been caught at the airport, he’d pulled out all of the stops in social media. Bully. Traitor.

The wash of shame that heated her chest was old, familiar, an enemy she’d fought before in a battle she had never wanted to revisit. She had thought she’d gotten over those old demons. Hadn’t she worked her butt off to leave all of that behind, including leaving her home literally to travel the world? Now this. Jean-Marc brought it back to the surface with a few strokes of a keyboard and an enter key. She’d traded one set of bullies for another.