Running Back (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

The American Academy of Archaeology Conference took
place in the Javits Center in New York, a complex on the Hudson River within
spitting distance of the Leopards’ Stadium, if you were a very excellent
spitter. It had little charm, lots of space, and thousands of archaeologists and
grad students frantically running around.

I arrived with a half-dozen grad school friends. We picked up
our badges on the ground floor, one of the few places flooded with natural
light. I took a moment to admire the blue highlight across my name that marked
me as a panelist, while my friends oohed appreciatively.

Then the panic set in.

Without Jeremy, I’d be carrying this all by myself. I’d never
presented a field report entirely alone before. I wasn’t even sure if anyone
would show up, now that Jeremy wasn’t appearing since Kilkarten had nothing to
do with Ivernis.

We spent the morning wandering around the floor, picking up the
few free pens and bags and hoping and failing to find free food. We broke up to
attend different lectures, but they all promised to come see mine, and at two
o’clock I made my way to a small room hidden off a side hall. I’d almost reached
it when a harried organizer hurried up to me, frowning down at her tablet and
then back at me. “Ms. Sullivan?”

I stopped. “Hi. Yes?”

“We’re moving you to 1C. One of the larger exhibition halls,”
she clarified when I looked at her blankly. “You’re up in twenty.”

“What? Why?”

She shook her head. “More people than we expected want to see
your lecture. There’s a line forming outside right now.”

“Really?” But I was just a grad student with a tiny little site
in Ireland...

We stared at each other, and then recognition bloomed on her
face. “
Oh.
You’re that model dating the football
player.”

“No—I’m not, that was my mother—I mean, yes, I dated—”

She shook her head, not interested in my muddy clarification.
Not, apparently, all that interested in me now that she realized I was the
nightclub singer sidekick.

I followed her to the back entrance, and then waited there
while the current speaker finished up. He walked past me when he left, and I did
a double take, since he’d just wrapped a miniseries on the Olmecs. He grinned.
“Ah, the model. You’re up next?”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“Aren’t you dating the Leopards’ running back?”

I drew up my shoulders. “No, but I am working on the excavation
at Kilkarten.”

He looked confused but nodded genially before continuing on his
way. “Good luck up there.”

I stared after him, and then threw a quick excuse at my guide
before dashing toward the closest bathroom.

I splashed water on my face, the cold liquid sharp against my
hot cheeks. They were here to see a celebrity, not me. That should have made it
better, not worse. Should have taken the pressure off presenting.

Still, I’d expected a crowd of about twenty, and even if most
of those gathered weren’t experts in Iron Age culture or Ireland, it would still
be my first public appearance where I didn’t know the names of ninety percent of
the audience.

Then I straightened my shoulders, and pulled my hair over my
shoulders, half on each side, blown out to that sheen. No makeup other then a
touch of lipstick, but my dress was the same shade as my eyes.

You’re Athena
, I reminded myself.
You’re a strong and intelligent and brave.
You’re the Gray Eyed Goddess.

I took a deep breath, and then walked into the conference
hall.

Two hundred faces turned my way.

I almost stopped. Instead, I pulled up my chin and walked to
the podium.

The first rows were filled with the usual suspects; men and
women whom I knew as professors and peers. My friends from Columbia, who gave me
discrete thumbs up. One held up a tiny “I Heart You!” sign briefly. And then
others I recognized. I’d gone to Dr. Martin’s lectures, I’d co-author a paper
with Shannon Andrews, I’d read Professor Levy’s books.

But in the back, a wall of press filled the space.

Usually, at lectures this large, there was some introduction, a
little patter of noise to give added importance and tout awards and
accomplishments. But I’d been planning on a little lecture, where I walked on,
waved and launched into a speech after clearing my throat once.

Now I closed my eyes, startling by the way my stomach turned
and keeled. I pictured Kilkarten, the green fields, fresh dirt. Smelled the salt
and sea and wind.

Saw Mike.

For a moment, my chest ached, clenching around the broken
pieces of my heart, and then it relaxed as his grin crooked up, his eyes bright,
his warmth steady.

No matter what had happened, he had always believed in me. We
were both lost and confused and broken, but we believed in our passions. He
believed in me. I believed in Kilkarten.

I opened my eyes.

The microphone picked up my voice, and the audience quieted.
“Hi, I’m Natalie Sullivan. Welcome to
Discovering
Kilkarten:
A
Sixth Century Settlement.
”

* * *

I stopped seeing the audience after five minutes. They
blurred out, ceased to exist, and it was just me and my slideshow. Once or
twice, they came through with laughter and I remembered they were there, but
most of the time I just expanded on the site. I explained the process I’d gone
through to locate the section, the geophysical testing, the units. And then I
went further in-depth on what we had discovered, before finishing with our
future plans.

And then I was done.

When I was nineteen years old, I went gorge jumping. I jumped
off a sixty-foot cliff and plummeted into the pools carved out by glaciers
thousands of years ago. I thought my heart would stop. I thought my bones would
break. When I resurfaced from the shocking, freezing water, from the silence and
the dark, I expected the entire world to be different. For the students on
either side of the gorge to be clapping thunderously at my epic leap. No one
was. Life continued as normal. “Why didn’t anyone clap?” I’d asked Cam, and
she’d shoved me lightly. “They did, stupid. But you were underwater, so you
didn’t hear it.”

This was like that. I fell back from the podium, and the lights
turned up, and everyone started clapping. I just stood there, the noise washing
over me, breathing rapidly as I tried to reemerge from that strange, paralyzing
state.

Then I broke through the water and saw the faces, focusing
first on the familiar ones, then the strangers. No one looked blown away, but no
one looked comatose, either. I smiled and leaned back into the microphone,
glancing at the clock. “I think we have about twenty minutes left for questions.
So—”

“Is it true your mother is Tamara Bocharov?”

I tried to make out the person that had shouted from the back,
slightly disappointed. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Are you really dating Michael O’Connor?”

“Also, not relevant.” I took a deep breath, scanning for
someone who didn’t look like they’d harass me about my personal life. A stodgy
academic. Someone in tweed. Someone like—

Like the man standing now.

The press ignored him, still waving for my attention, but my
eyes, like those of every academic in the room, had been captured by Professor
Henry Ceile. He smiled but didn’t wait for me to invite him to speak. “I thought
you were excavating this site looking for Ivernis with Jeremy Anderson. What
happened to that? Why isn’t he here with you?”

Murmurs passed through the room.

I leaned forward until the podium cut into my stomach. “Dr.
Ceile. I would have thought you’d have better things to do then attend a
nightclub singer’s song-and-dance.”

He granted me a slight nod and smile. Point to me. “It turned
out I didn’t. But where’s the professor?”

I sucked in a deep breath. “Dr. Anderson is still in Ireland
working on research.”

“But not about this site, is that right? Because there was
nothing related to Ivernis here.”

Heads swiveled back my way.

I swallowed. I wasn’t ready for a faceoff with Dr. Ceile,
especially not in a room filled with everyone I could possibly want to work with
for the rest of my life, and the press to boot.

And then I saw Mike.

He’d picked a spot near the back of the room, hidden by the
lights, a hat pulled down over his bright curls. But I saw him now as his entire
stance shifted. He’d forgotten he was trying to be nondescript, invisible, and
instead he sat straight, shoulders back as his eyes burned into Ceile. He turned
to look at me, like he would urge me on with just the power of his gaze and his
will.

Our gazes locked. His eyes flared wide, and a flutter started
deep in my belly. And then he smiled, a smile filled with such belief, such
love
, that I felt courage turn my spine to
iron.

“Dr. Ceile.” I spoke slowly, carefully, loudly. “I appreciate
you coming here today and your interest in the site, but I don’t think this is
an appropriate forum to discuss Ivernis.”

“So you’re saying that this is not Ivernis. That there is no
relation to Ivernis.”

My eyes sought Mike’s. “It’s not Ivernis. It’s Kilkarten. But
if the only reason you’re here is to continue your feud with Jeremy, I think you
should leave.”

He looked smug. “I just want the community to recognize that
even Jeremy’s prodigy—the one who secured funding for his latest craze—has left
his side.”

I came around from behind my podium, standing at the edge of
the stage. “You’re talking about this the wrong way, Dr. Ceile. I haven’t left
anything, and I’m not setting out to prove anything. We’ve uncovered an amazing
site. My purpose isn’t to prove a colleague wrong or put my name in the history
books or get a TV deal. It’s to make a positive impact on the people directly
affected by the excavation or the history—whether that’s descendants, or the
local population, or the scholarship of the period.”

Dr. Ceile sat.

I leaned forward and found Mike again. “Thank you for
coming.”

* * *

The press had already swarmed the back door by the time
I exited. Reporters pressed recorders in my face and shouted questions about my
mother and Mike and Jeremy and Kilkarten and Ceile.

And then the clamor hit a feverish pitch and Mike was there,
shouldering his way through the crowd. Then he was by my side, his arm wrapped
around me, and we pushed through the crowd.

“This way,” I said once we’d cleared the worst of it, and we
dashed for the panelist room, set aside for speakers to relax and get a bite to
eat or just, in this case, escape.

We collapsed at one of the large round tables, and Mike fetched
us bags of water and bags of chips and pretzels. “Who knew archaeology fans were
as rabid as football fans?”

I let out a shaky laugh. “I think most of them were media
junkies. I’d be flattered if I thought that many people actually cared about
Kilkarten.”

He was silent, and I wondered if he’d known that when I’d said
It’s not Ivernis.
It’s Kilkarten
, I’d been talking about him. I opened
my mouth to say so, but he beat me to it. “So that was Ceile.”

Oh. Right. I guzzled down the tiny water cup. “In the
flesh.”

“I wanted to punch him.”

That drew a real laugh out of me. “I know. I want to on a
regular basis.

A new voice joined us, and we started guiltily. “Don’t let any
sense of propriety hold you back.”

I pushed to my feet. “Professor Ceile.” We’d been introduced as
previous conferences, but Jeremy had always been between us. I tried to think of
something to say.

But I’d already said everything from the stage, and I didn’t
want to babble. I didn’t want to create meaningless words out of nothing for the
sake of filling an awkward silence. Let him be the uncomfortable one
tonight.

His attention drifted to Mike, and he formed a dry smile. “I’m
a fan.”

Mike didn’t smile back. “Thanks.”

Ceile inspected his hands, then the wall, and then finally
settled on me. “You probably think this is personal.”

“I don’t appreciate you mixing my mother’s background with my
professional life.”

“Jeremy Anderson spent years getting thousands of dollars to
excavate unimportant plots of land. Universities and non-profits sank money into
him because he was young, and charismatic, and supported America’s romantic idea
of Celtic Ireland. They spent money earmarked for the Iron Age, or Ireland, and
none of that money went to actual digs.

“I have artifacts sitting in storage because I can’t afford to
sort them and categorize them. I have evidence for sites that have never been
funded. We all do what we must, one way or the other, Ms. Sullivan. And I must
keep Anderson from sinking our entire discipline. I’m sorry if you felt your
character had been assassinated. But if you weren’t going to leave him, I had to
make sure you weren’t able to suck more money away from projects that really
needed it.”

I couldn’t even breathe.

He shrugged. “But it seems you aren’t as young and naïve as I
thought. You figured out Jeremy was a fool on your own. Good on you, for your
work on Kilkarten.” He extended his hand. “I hope we’ll be able to collaborate
in the future.”

His hand loomed large in my sight, skin tanned and weathered
from long hours outside, fingers blunt and square. I took it, feeling numb. And
then something uncurled inside me, and I met his pale blue eyes straight on.
“Jeremy fostered a love of learning and knowledge in me. He gave me
opportunities and responsibilities, and I respect him and admire him.”

I took a moment to mull over my next words, and they came out
slowly spaced. “I understand acting drastically when you think you have no other
option. But I am still deeply offended by what you said. Still, I am committed
to my work at Kilkarten. I am excited about the future. And I would like to be
civil colleagues.”