She’d been wrong about both the baby and saving the marriage.
After she and Manny divorced, she still remembered the trip fondly. While they circled in the air she’d hastily drawn her own rendition of the Nazca spider:
After the divorce was finalized, she’d torn the page from her notebook, trimmed it neatly, and framed it. It was on the wall near her desk at the lab. It didn’t take her breath away as the actual lines carved into the earth had. There was something about the scale, the permanence, the way the lack of rain and wind had left the lines undisturbed for more than two thousand years that both rattled her and filled her with happiness. She liked thinking there might have been a woman like her, hoping desperately for a baby, pulling rocks from the ground nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.
Or longer.
“Ten thousand years,” Julie said. “Not twenty-five hundred.”
Melanie pulled at the collar of her shirt, but she wasn’t really thinking about the heat anymore. She recognized the first stirrings of intellectual engagement, the way that she could become consumed with curiosity. The fact that it was the Nazca Lines made it easier for her to get engaged, but the truth was that it had never been difficult to pique her interest. She’d gotten better about remembering to do things like eat meals, shower, and change her clothes—having a private bathroom in her office helped—but at heart, she was still the same research geek who was happiest in her lab trying to find the answer to a question. “Who?” she said. “Who’s telling you that the lines were made ten thousand years ago?”
“Not all of them,” Julie said. “Uh, and it’s a friend of mine, a guy I went to undergrad with.” Normally there’d be a little part of Melanie that would be interested in the gossip, would pry until Julie admitted he was somebody she’d slept with when she was nineteen or twenty, a guy she still carried a torch for, but she was starting to get impatient with these three graduate students. “He’s a grad student too, and he’s working on the site. Archaeology.”
“Of course.”
“Right,” Julie said, “so we e-mail back and forth kind of regularly, and I mentioned your theory to him.”
Melanie started walking again. This was getting tiresome. “What theory?”
“About the spider,” Bark said. He started to say something else, but Julie cut him off.
“One of the things they’re trying to figure out with the dig is if the lines were made in a compressed period of time all together—over years or a few decades—or spread out over a few hundred years. How long did they take to make? They’ve been able to find wooden stakes near most of the lines that they think might have been used almost like surveyor’s stakes by the Nazca when they were doing the designs. But he was working on the spider site and, sure enough, he found stakes. They had one dated.”
“And?”
“The spider isn’t a Nazca Line.”
Melanie realized she was walking more quickly than was comfortable, but the café was in sight, and the thought of the temporary respite from the heat helped her to keep up the pace. “It sure looks like a Nazca Line,” she said.
“No,” Julie said. “The Nazca Lines look like the spider. All the other lines are about twenty-five hundred years old, as you said, but the spider’s older. A lot older. It’s ten thousand years old, give or take a little. It was there well before the other lines.”
Melanie slowed down as she reached the café steps. “So what does that have to do with us?” She glanced over her shoulder and realized that all three students had stopped walking. Patrick, Bark, and Julie were standing on the ground, three steps below her, looking up expectantly. “Well?”
Julie glanced at the two young men and they nodded at her. “It wasn’t just the stakes,” Julie said. “When he was doing the dig, he found something underneath the stakes, buried in a wooden box. He had some of that wood dated, and it’s the same age as the stakes. Ten thousand years. You’ll never guess what was in the box.”
Julie paused, and Melanie found herself getting frustrated. Pausing for dramatic effect, she thought, was overrated, and in the case of a gaggle of graduate students, annoying. But despite herself, she was fully curious and couldn’t stop from blurting out, “What?”
“An egg sac. At first, none of them realized what it was, but when he did, he suggested to his faculty advisor that they send it to our lab to see if we could identify it. They thought it was fossilized or petrified, or whatever it is you call it when something like that is preserved. Since the wooden box is ten thousand years old, and the egg sac was inside the box, the sac is probably at least that old too.”