“I have no choice; I have no choice,” said Aurora. And both children smiled with their butterfly eyes.

◆◆◆

Before the Beaux Arts dome of the Natural History Museum, rose bushes—planted in clumps of pink, orange, yellow, red, and white—flanked the entrance path to the Science Center, where a large shallow fountain sent an obelisk of copper-green water toward the overcast sky. At the sight of the water, the baby on her chest kicked his legs in the carrier, and Aurora wrapped her fingers around his thighs and lightly squeezed, bent her face to inhale the scent of his downy-black crown—as sweet as when he was born, when the bones hadn’t yet closed so that his soul could filter all the way into him.

She’d heard the expression that being a parent is like having your heart walk around outside your body. But her baby had given her a heart where once, she realized now, there might have been only a chasm in her chest. And with that new heart, her child had also given her fears she could not have imagined.

Common parental fears. But, also: fear that he would grow up and be brutalized and blinded, just as the myth predicted, the myth that had ruled Aurora’s life, the myth she was trying to forget.

The myth stirred something in her—her fear, but also her truth. And she must face it all. Especially now that she had Jack, too. Jack, the child on her back. Cyrus’s child.

There had been a dis-membering. To counteract what had occurred she knew she must force herself to re-member.

Which was why she’d come with the children to the King Tut exhibit.

◆◆◆

Aurora and the babies stood in line and were then ushered into the Science Center. The visitors took the escalator upstairs to the exhibit. Waiting in the dark to enter, Aurora wanted to turn and leave. But Keaton made his little-bird sounds and continued to kick his legs and dimple-ankleted feet with delight. Jack remained quiet and still.

King Tutankhamun’s tomb had been discovered, fully intact, in 1922 by an Egyptian water boy during an archaeological dig led by Howard Carter. Carter peered inside and reportedly announced he saw, “Many wonderful things.” There, within, surrounded by more than five thousand ceremonial objects, rested the lithe, young vampiric king with the large incisors. His two stillborn daughters lay buried with him. Aurora thought of the baby she’d lost—she could understand King Tut’s choice.