So I went to the room where my aunt kept all the journals. How did she fit on the floor in that small a space? I picked up one book and opened it. Eyeball duck reeds. Which meant . . . I worked to remember Dad’s lessons, drilling me over and over.
It meant I hadn’t done hieroglyphics in ages.
I started over again, reading them as phonetics. After a good thirty minutes, I finally connected the dots, letting me pronounce the glyph. “Rsya.”
“Reysha. ‘Dawn.’ Could mean ‘early,’ or ‘hope,’ or ‘tired.’ Could mean a lot of things, depending on what was said around it.” Grace stood in the doorway, her eyes red and swollen. “That’s a later one. Maybe one of the last, but I was wrong.”
I was used to seeing women cry around me, but not after turning me down. “Wrong about what?”
“I have to start with the early ones so I understand how he used constructs. The last ones I can’t make heads or tails from. Your father had developed his own slang, his own meanings at that point. So I can read the words but not make sense out of them.” She reached down, taking the book from my hand. Her fingertips grazed my palm, making me tingle all over.
“Resha k’ta svar eyone. That’s the easy part. He starts in midsentence most times, carrying on from whatever came before.” She handed me the book back. “And they often end in gibberish as well.”
She pushed a set of boxes aside and sat beside me, flipping through pages. She pointed to a string of symbols. “See this? This means ‘son of me.’ I think it’s his name for you. It’s everywhere in these.” She pointed to several stacks. “And less in these. Not at all in these.”
Talking about Dad wasn’t something I wanted to do, but if it would keep Grace Roberts talking to me, I’d talk about my last medical exam. “Divide them. Those with my name and those without.”
She worked through the stacks, quickly moving from book to book, eventually winding up with three piles. The smallest on her left, a medium set in the middle, and a stack three times the others on the right. “These, I’m sure, are from when you were small.” She pointed to the center. “These have your name every so often, but pages and pages between them. The rest of those don’t have your name at all.”
I quelled my anger. It had nothing to do with Grace. “The smallest pile is before Mom died. The medium one is after her death. Everything on the right is after he left me here and ran off.”
She took out a set of sticky notes, labeling each journal by color. “I know you don’t want to talk about it. So answer me this, and I promise I won’t ask again. Why did he leave?”
If anyone but Grace had asked me that, I wouldn’t have answered. Even then, forcing out the words felt like ripping fishhooks from my skin. “He was searching for Mom.”
Sixteen
GRACE
Brynner excused himself on the pretense of needing to use the restroom. I let him go because I couldn’t breathe with him that close. Without a doubt there was more to his story, and for certain I could drag the truth out of him.
But what I wanted was for him to tell me. Willingly. Openly. Of course, I didn’t deserve that after lying to him. Why did he ask me if I liked him? I couldn’t like him. Or at least I wouldn’t admit it.
But he hadn’t run out when he should have. Instead, he’d sat in that dusty room, proving his skills in flirting were a thousand times more effective than his translation abilities.
With the journals divided, I could make progress by brute force if necessary. Friday was payday, and my chance to put to rest the demons calling me by name and cell phone each day.
I took one of the books and started at the beginning. “Nfr saw tks.” Easy enough. The phonic representations n, s, and t didn’t match any concept. While Nfr might mean “sweet” or “pleasant,” the subsequent glyphs didn’t match in count or gender. “Thems goes blue” would be the closest English to this disaster of combinations.
The end of the book was no better. I grabbed another. “Shm wd nfr” made no more sense than the start. Either Heinrich Carson was horrible at writing hieroglyphics, in which case I might never decode them,