The Hatching Page 3

  “But we aren’t talking about cicadas,” Melanie said, realizing that she’d drifted off. “We’re talking about spiders. Even though spiders seem to scare the hell out of people, there’s really almost no reason for that. At least not in North America. Australia’s a different matter. Everything in Australia is dangerous, not just the crocodiles.” She got a low chuckle from the class. In Melanie’s book, a low chuckle near the end of a two-hour morning lecture with fewer than three weeks left in the semester was a victory.

  She looked at her watch. “Okay, so for Wednesday, pages two twelve to two forty-five. Again, please note that this is a change from the syllabus. And to that we say,” Melanie held her arms up and conducted the class as they said it along with her, “don’t let the bedbugs bite.” She watched the undergraduates shuffle out of the auditorium. Some of them looked a little dazed, and she couldn’t tell if it was because of the early start time of the class or if she’d been droning again. She was a world-class researcher, perhaps one of the best at what she did, but even though she’d been working at it, lecturing was not her strong suit. She’d been trying to make her teaching more dynamic, throwing in jokes like the one about Australia, but there was only so much she could do for a three hundred-level course. Mostly she just hunkered down in her lab and dealt with graduate students, but part of the deal she’d struck with American University was that every second year she’d also teach a lecture class for undergraduates. She hated tearing herself away from her research, but if the price of a full lab, research assistants, and a team of funded graduate students working under her direction was that every two years she had to tell a class of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds that the spiders that stowed along in banana shipments were rarely dangerous, she’d live.

  She looked down at the screen of her tablet, which mirrored the pictures on the screen at the front of the room. She had a soft spot for the Heteropoda venatoria, the huntsman spider. Partly it was because she’d had her first huge research breakthrough—the kind that made her what passed for famous in her field and got her this appointment and the subsequent grants and funding that kept the whole thing humming—working with Heteropoda venatoria, but if she was being honest, it was also because the first time she’d encountered a huntsman spider, her first year of college, her professor, in his thick accent, had described the spider as having a “moo-stache.” Melanie liked the fact that there were spiders out there in the world with mustaches. In grad school, she’d dressed as a Heteropoda venatoria for Halloween and it had gone over well with her friends who were also working on their doctorates. Nobody else had gotten the joke, though. Most people thought she was trying to be a tarantula or something and couldn’t figure out the mustache. She’d given up on spider costumes two years ago at a Halloween party, when she’d overheard somebody referring to her as “the black widow.” The joke, if it was a joke, hit home, because the truth was, despite her husband’s job—her ex-husband’s job—she was the one who hadn’t been available to Manny, who had spent so much time in the lab that their marriage foundered.

  She shut off the projector, slipped her tablet into her purse, and headed out of the classroom. As she opened the door she decided to stop on the way back to the lab and pick up a salad. Something fresher than the sandwiches she usually got from the vending machines in the basement of her building. You could taste the preservatives with every bite. Actually, Melanie thought, it was probably just as well that the sandwiches were loaded with preservatives, because she wasn’t sure anybody other than her ever ate them. They needed to last awhile in the machine. Even her most dogged graduate students either brought their meals from home or took the extra five minutes to walk across the quad to get something that didn’t have to be purchased with a fistful of quarters. Speaking of dogged graduate students . . . She came to a halt as the door closed behind her.

  Three of them were standing outside the classroom, waiting for her.

  “Professor Guyer?”

  Melanie raised her eyebrows, trying to indicate something close to annoyance with Bark. His real name was something complicated and Ukrainian, so everybody, including Melanie, called him Bark. Despite his obvious brilliance, he drove Melanie batshit crazy. It was some sort of strange skill he possessed that all the other graduate students did not. It was as though he spent his free time thinking of ways to annoy her. For instance, this: “Professor Guyer?” Just the fact that he called her Professor Guyer when everybody else in the lab called her Melanie made her want to smack him. She had asked him, told him, ordered him to call her Melanie, but not only did he continue to call her Professor Guyer, he said it in such a way that it was always a question, his voice rising at the end as if he was not entirely sure it was her name, like maybe it was something other than Melanie, even after three years of being in her lab.

  Plus, since February, she’d been sleeping with him.

  And that was what drove her the most crazy. He wasn’t just annoying; he was also her lover. No, Melanie thought. Not her lover. She hated that term. Though fuck buddy wasn’t something she liked either. Sex partner? Something. Whatever it was, sleeping with him had not been among her best decisions. The problem, as Melanie saw it, was that even though she wanted to smash a beaker and use the broken glass to slit his throat every time he opened his mouth, when he kept his lips shut—or better yet, glued to her body—he was all she could think about. She’d never thought of herself as shallow, but after the divorce, she’d wanted a little fun. And despite all the ways in which Bark made her barking mad, he wasn’t a little fun in bed—he was a lot of fun in bed. Manny had made her feel all warm and secure when they had sex, but in the wake of her marriage’s dissolution, Bark’s hot and bothered was a nice change of pace.

  So if it hadn’t been the best decision to sleep with him in the first place, in her defense, it was a decision that had been helped by several glasses of something the graduate students had cooked up at the Valentine’s Day party they talked her into going to. They’d called the drink “venom,” and it had packed a punch. When she’d woken up the next morning with Bark in bed beside her, it took her a couple of minutes to figure out who she was, let alone where she was, what she was doing in Bark’s bed with him, and why neither of them was wearing any clothes. She slipped into the bathroom without waking him. By the time she was swishing some of his mouthwash and smoothing her hair in the mirror, she realized she’d already made the sort of practical decision that had worked so poorly in her marriage to Manny: she’d made her bed by sleeping with Bark, so she might as well lie in it. Again and again.

  The Valentine’s Day party was still a blur to her, but she could remember the morning after with stunning clarity. Bark was brilliant, but he was nobody’s idea of what a scientist should look like. He dressed nicely, but even if he’d been rocking a pocket protector and a slide rule, he still would have turned heads. He’d come to American University straight from Cal Tech, one coast to the other, and maybe out in California he fit in, but in Melanie’s lab, in the whole entomology building, he stood out. He was a different species entirely. Melanie was close to six feet tall, and despite being nearly two decades removed from her undergraduate playing days at Yale, she still played basketball at least three times a week and swam four mornings a week. But Bark had another six inches on her and his nickname fit him, because he was as solid as a tree. She knew he didn’t lift weights, and as far as she’d been able to tell, he’d never even set foot in a gym or played a sport, but even with his clothes on he looked as if he were sculpted. If he hadn’t wanted to get his PhD, he could have made a living as an underwear model.

  When she came back from the bathroom, ignoring her clothes, which were crumpled on the floor, she slid into the bed and waited. And waited. And waited. Bark slept like the dead, but when he finally began stirring, when they picked up from where they had evidently left off the night before, it was worth it. Even after two months of hooking up with him three or four times a week, she still couldn’t get over th
e way he looked without a shirt. Melanie couldn’t stop herself from touching his chest, his arms, the muscles on the back of his shoulders. So different from her ex-husband. Manny wasn’t short, but he was shorter than her, and though he could be incredibly intimidating, he wasn’t exactly a slab of muscle. No, Manny was hard on the inside, mean and petty when he thought somebody was fucking him over with work or politics—which, because he was the White House chief of staff, were the same thing for him—and as vicious as a Sydney funnel-web spider when he was being attacked. As aggressive as he was in his professional life, however, Manny was a little too deferential in bed. A beefcake he was not.

  The beefcake in question, Bark, was staring at her. “Professor Guyer?” he tried again.

  “Bark.” She glanced at the other two students. Julie Yoo, who was far too rich to be spending her time studying spiders, and Patrick Mordy, who was in his first year in the graduate program and not anywhere near as smart as his transcript and application materials had indicated, and was, Melanie suspected, profoundly unlikely to finish his degree. “What?” she said. “What’s so important that you guys couldn’t wait for me to get back to the lab?”

  Both Bark and Patrick stared at Julie, who looked down at her shoes. Melanie sighed and tried to keep her temper. She liked Julie, she really did, but for a girl who had everything going for her, Julie could have used a dose of confidence. Her parents had a lot of money. A ton of money. Private jet money. A building on the American University campus named after them money. What the hell was Julie doing in a lab studying spiders money. And Julie was pretty, and not just in the way girls in the sciences could be pretty because there wasn’t a lot of competition. Julie would have been pretty in business school or law school, Melanie thought. Now that’s pretty. She smiled to herself as she thought this. She could think like that because she knew she looked the same way. She looked her age, but she looked good for it, the kind of forty-year-old woman who made men stare at their wives and wonder why they hadn’t made better decisions. She caught Patrick looking at her and starting to smile back and she jerked her mouth into a scowl. They weren’t as careful with their lab work if she wasn’t hard on them.

  “You can tell me while we walk,” she said, brushing past them. “I’m going to stop and buy a salad on the way, and if what you guys have is interesting enough, I’ll buy lunch for you as well. If not, I swear to God, if you’re here because another moron thinks he’s found a poisonous spider in a crate of bananas, I’m making you play hot potato with a brown recluse.”

  She hung her bag off her shoulder and braced herself for the heat she knew would be waiting for her outside the air-conditioned building. It was only five minutes from there to her lab, and she’d be making a stop at the café for her lunch, but it was going to leave her sweaty and red-faced. The Washington heat was not something she enjoyed, and it had come early this year.

  “The brown recluse won’t bite unless—”

  Melanie spun around and Patrick’s mouth snapped shut. She nodded. “That’s what I thought. Now what do you have for me?”

  It was Julie who positioned herself at Melanie’s elbow, Patrick and Bark at her heels as they went down the steps and started crossing the quad. There were soft clouds sleeping above the campus buildings, but no real hope that rain would break the heat. Maybe she’d quit early tonight, crank up the air-conditioning in her apartment, get some takeout, and watch a bad romantic comedy or two by herself. Or maybe she’d have Bark over for a night of activities that required no talking from him. Deep down, though, she knew she wouldn’t leave the lab before she normally did. If she were the kind of woman who quit early, she’d probably still have a husband to go home to. That wasn’t entirely fair, she knew, since it wasn’t as if Manny had ever come home from the White House earlier than she came home from the lab. The difference was that when Manny was home with her, he was actually home with her, while when she was home with him, there was still a large part of her that was at the lab.

  “You were right,” Julie said at last.

  “Of course I was right,” Melanie said. “About what?”

  She walked briskly, not bothering to look behind her to see if the boys were having trouble keeping up. She didn’t worry about Julie. The young woman might have no confidence, but she was maybe the hardest-working scientist Melanie had ever met, and even a pair of two-inch heels—modest for a night on the town, but deeply impractical for the lab—wasn’t going to keep Julie from staying with her faculty advisor.

  “Nazca,” Julie said.

  “Nazca?”

  “Nazca,” Julie repeated, as if it were supposed to mean something to Melanie.

  Melanie didn’t stop walking, but she did glance over at her. Another hundred meters and they’d be inside and cool again, at least for the two minutes it took her to buy herself lunch and have it bagged up so she could finish walking to the lab. “Nazca? What the fuck are you talking about, Julie? Nazca? That’s what you’ve got for me? The three of you waiting outside my classroom like a bunch of freshman, waiting to pounce, and that’s what you’re giving me? That’s what can’t wait for me to get back to the lab? Nazca?” She picked up the pace.

  “Nazca,” Julie said again. “As in Peru?”

  Melanie stopped. “Is that a question or a statement?” She turned to glare at Bark, who didn’t seem to understand why he was being glared at but was smart enough to edge behind Patrick. She wanted to smack him. His habit of ending every sentence with a question had rubbed off on Julie. “Nazca. Peru,” Melanie said. She looked at her three graduate students and they stared back at her, slight smiles on their faces, as though they were waiting for praise. Melanie sighed. “Okay,” she said. “I give up. You’re talking about the Nazca Lines. So what? Can you please tell me what the fuck you’re talking about so I can get myself a salad and head back to the lab?”

  “Don’t you remember the Valentine’s Day party?” Bark asked. She couldn’t tell if his face was already red from the heat or if it flushed with the realization of what he was saying, but he almost tripped over himself to keep going. “You kept talking about Nazca? The lines? The spider?”

  Patrick came to Bark’s rescue. “You said they were there for a reason. The markings on the ground. There are all kinds of markings. Lines and animals and stuff. I’d never heard of it before, but you weren’t really interested in the animals. You were talking about the spider marking. You said you can see the lines from airplanes, and they aren’t that deeply dug, but it would have taken a ton of work, and you were saying you thought the spider had to have been for a reason.”

  Melanie didn’t remember talking to them about the Nazca Lines—though she had no real reason to doubt her students—but the truth was she’d been fascinated by them since the first time she heard of them. And going off on some theory or other sounded like something she would have done when she was drunk. Also, evidently, sleeping with a graduate student was also something she would have done when she was drunk. Which is why she didn’t drink very often.

  She’d been to Peru only once, with Manny, in the death throes of their marriage, a last-chance vacation in the hope of gluing together the pieces of their broken relationship. Manny had suggested Hawaii, Costa Rica, Belize, pale beaches and private huts, but she had wanted to see the Nazca Lines for years, even if he didn’t. Really, if she was being honest, part of the reason she had insisted was simply because Manny hadn’t wanted to go to Peru.

  From the air, they were stunning. White lines in the reddish-brown earth. Glyphs and animals and birds. Shapes she couldn’t understand. And there, the one she’d most wanted to see: the spider.

  There were some scholars—crackpots, Melanie thought—who claimed that the lines were runways for ancient astronauts, or that the Nazca had made the designs with the aid of hot-air balloons, but the general consensus was that the Nazca had used earthly means. Archaeologists found stakes at the end of some of the lines, showing the basic techniques that had been used to m
ake the designs. The Nazca had mapped them out first and then removed the darker colored rocks to the depth of less than half a foot, where the whitish ground stood underneath in stark contrast.

  Even though she’d seen it before in pictures and drawings, the sight of the spider took her breath away. From the height of the single-engine airplane, the spider seemed small, though she knew it was close to one hundred fifty feet long, maybe longer, on the ground. She heard the pilot yell something and saw him circling his finger in the air, asking if she wanted him to stay over the spider for a few circuits, something they’d talked about in her terrible Spanish before taking off. She nodded and felt Manny’s hand on her shoulder. She put her fingers over his and realized she was crying. She hadn’t wanted to visit the spider out of a desire to see in real life what she’d read about. No, it was more than that, and the scientist in her cringed at the thought. She hadn’t told Manny because he would have sighed and they would have had another one of those endless conversations about the limits of science and biology and the question of adoption.

  It was really only at that moment that she realized exactly why she had insisted on going to Peru. Insisted over Manny’s objections. Insisted that if they were going to go anywhere, it was going to be to see the Nazca Lines. She knew it was crazy. The rational, scientific part of her, the woman who had ground her way through her PhD research, who slept in her lab two or three nights a week and chased off graduate students who weren’t willing to work as hard as she was, knew her desire to haul Manny with her to Peru was the last desperate grasping of a woman in her late thirties who thought she could put off having children until she was ready and then discovered that maybe it had never even been an option. The trip was the longest of long shots, but once she’d read the theory put forth by one Nazca academic that the lines were ritual images, the birds and plants and spider symbols for fertility, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that maybe there was a reason she’d always been drawn to the image, that there in the Peruvian foothills, the spider had been waiting just for her.