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 make 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.
Up in the plane, she’d wanted Manny with an urgency that had long been missing from their relationship. As much as she wanted to stay in the air, flying circuits over the image of the spider, she also couldn’t wait to be on the ground again, in the privacy of their tent, doing what she hoped would finally lead to the baby she thought might save their marriage.