She’d trudged through the icy wind, thinking that she wouldn’t last long here, believing that, like her mother, she was a warm-weather creature, bred for desert heat, not a New England winter. When she’d arrived to take the job, it had been March and she’d been a stranger to these streets. Rain clouds had given way to splashes of sunshine, and the sidewalks sparkled, fresh and clean. She stared out the window at a neighborhood she’d grown attached to. Tonight Maura was merely part of the awestruck audience, drawn here for the same reason the reporters had converged like frenzied groupies outside the hospital on a warm Sunday night. This patient was a media star whose newfound fame far outshone any mere medical examiner’s. The van’s rear doors swung open and a lightning storm of camera flashes lit up the night as the celebrity patient was gently lifted out of the van and placed onto a hospital gurney. Instead, the dozen reporters were fully focused on a white van that had just pulled up at the hospital’s lobby entrance to unload its famous passenger. As yet no one had noticed Maura’s arrival, and not a single camera was turned in her direction. She had no wish to be spotted, and most local reporters would recognize the striking woman whose pale face and bluntly cut black hair had earned her the nickname Queen of the Dead. She lingered in the shadows of the Pilgrim Hospital parking lot, well beyond the glare of the klieg lights, beyond the circle of TV cameras.
Certainly it was not an adventure that a quiet girl from Indio, California, ever expected to live. It seemed to me then, when I stood in that desert fifteen years ago, as if I were an actress in a film about someone else’s adventure. I still hear the thuds of pickaxes and the scrape of shovels, can picture the army of Egyptian diggers, busy as ants as they swarmed the excavation site, hauling their gufa baskets filled with soil. The wind moaned like a woman when it swept down the wadi. Fifteen years have passed since I walked that desert, but when I close my eyes, in an instant I am there again, standing at the edge of the tent camp, looking toward the Libyan border, and the sunset.
These are the smells of Egypt’s western desert, and they are still vivid to me, although that country is nearly half a globe away from the dark bedroom where I now lie.
I sniff it in the air, as recognizable as the scent of hot sand and savory spices and the sweat of a hundred men toiling in the sun.
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