Chapter 10 — Cold50
@solena.rising
“Got in the cold water this morning before my brain could file its objection, loves. Everything in me said don’t.
I did it anyway. That’s the whole practice, I’m starting to think.
You don’t wait until you feel ready, because ready is a story we tell ourselves to stay dry.
You gasp, you shake, you stay. And something old rinses off you. Come stay in the cold with me.”
We did not talk about the clay.
That was holding up about as well as you’d expect.
The not-talking had been load-bearing since the grove, but the clay had put a crack in it the silence couldn’t span anymore, because the grove I could half-file under things that happen to a body, accidents of friction and crowd.
The clay had been her hand, on purpose, on me, with a decision behind it.
There was no unmaking a decision like that.
We could only decline to bring it up over breakfast, which we did, beautifully.
She was up before me, filming the light, the brand back on like a coat she’d slept in.
“Morning,” she said, pitched for a room that wasn’t there.
She slid a card across the little table without quite looking at me. The card said The Tempering in the seafoam ink. Nine o’clock. Come thirsty for the cold.
“What’s the cold?” I said.
“You’ll feel it,” she said, which was the island’s answer to everything, and which a week ago she’d have said as a joke. She handed it to me straight.
The Tempering happened at a row of stone tanks sunk below the bath house, fed cold straight off the sea and colder, somehow, than the sea had any right to be. Coral stood among them already glowing, gesturing us toward the water like a host seating us at a table that was going to hurt.
“The cold is the most honest teacher we have,” she said. “It doesn’t care about your story. You get in with your pair, you stay to the neck, and you breathe through the part where everything in you wants to climb out. You hold each other in it. Nobody tempers alone.”
So that was the morning. Get into freezing water, to the neck, and hold the woman whose hand I was busy not discussing.
We stripped to swimsuits at the lip of the tanks, which felt like undressing at a public pool, if the pool were ringed with strangers in white taking attendance.
My mother had on a plain black one-piece I hadn’t seen before, and after the clay, and after a week of waking up where I shouldn’t, I found I now had opinions about the backs of her knees, which is not a sentence I ever planned to think.
I aimed my eyes at the water instead. It sat there flat and black and freezing, promising to fix exactly this.
We got in. I would like to report dignity.
There is no dignity available at the temperature in question.
The cold went in like a thrown switch and the breath left me in a sound I had not authorized, and then there was the separate problem of my mother climbing into the same tank, gasping, swearing under her breath in the un-branded voice, and arranging herself against me because the exercise said to and the cold said to and there was, suddenly, nowhere on either of us that wasn’t pressed to the other for warmth.
It should have been charged. The cold ate the charge.
That was almost the worst of it, that the one time we were wrapped around each other on purpose, fully sanctioned, neither of us could feel a thing but our own bones filing complaints.
She had her face in my neck and her arms locked around me and we were shaking too hard to be anything to each other but a heat source, and I thought, this is the safest she’s been in my arms all week, and then I thought about why that was, and then Coral told us to breathe.
Don was two tanks over with his husband, submerged to the chin, wearing the face of a man auditing his own choices.
“How’s the tide?” I called.
“Bracing,” said Don, through his teeth.
Coral worked the rim of the tanks telling us the cold couldn’t lie to us, that it stripped the ego clean off, and Don found my eye across the steam rising off our own shivering and held it a flat second, the look of the only other man in the room running subtitles on the place.
He’d had a week to turn us in, ever since he’d guessed at breakfast that we weren’t the couple we were pretending to be, and he hadn’t.
I’d spent the same week noticing he hadn’t.
Neither of us had ever said a word about it, which on this island was as close to trust as anyone got.
Then he went under, because it was very cold, and trust has its limits.
After, wrapped in the rough towels they doled out, blue-lipped and rattled, I caught Don up the path doing something furtive with his phone, thumbs going, shoulders hunched around it like a man hiding a cigarette.
“You’re not supposed to have signal,” I said.
“I don’t.” He didn’t stop typing. “That’s the interesting part. Walk with me. Slowly. Like we’re discussing our feelings.”
We walked.
“Your phone works,” he said, low. “Everyone’s phone works.
They don’t take them because they don’t need to.
You installed their little app at intake.
The one that does your schedule and your tide readings and your messages.
It’s a wall. Everything you send goes into it and a person decides what comes out the other side.
Your texts home, your DMs, your small cries for help.
Someone reads them and chooses, and most of them never go anywhere. ”
I thought about Andre. Three texts, green, sitting there since the first day. The silence I’d filed under Andre being Andre.
“How do you know that?” I said.
“Because I’m not here for my chakras.” He gave me a flat look, the driest I’d had off anyone on the island, kin to my own.
“I write for a living. The unflattering kind. People come to places like this and some of them don’t go home, and their families get lovely messages from accounts that sound just like them. I’d like to know who’s typing.”
“And you’re telling me because.”
“Because you see this place the way I do, and I could use a second set of eyes that still work.” He pocketed the phone.
“You can’t help it, you’ve been running the subtitles since you landed, same as me.
So keep running them. When something strikes you as off, and it will, more and more, don’t talk yourself out of it. Remember it, and bring it to me.”
“Bring you what?”
“Whatever doesn’t add up. Someone who was here last week and isn’t.
A door locked that shouldn’t be. The face a person makes the second they think the camera’s off.
You’ll see things I can’t get near, because nobody bothers watching the bored plus-one.
” He let it sit a second. “I’ve kept your secret a week without being asked, and just now you caught me red-handed and didn’t run to Coral.
That’s the most trust either of us is going to find on this rock.
Eyes open, mouth shut, and stop telling the app anything you’d mind a stranger reading. Pleasant tides.”
I came back to a look from my mother, one eyebrow up, the where-were-you she wasn’t going to ask out loud in a crowd. I gave her nothing, and she filed it.
The lodge was the other half of it. The Tempering ran cold then fire, the body thrown between two extremes until it gave up whatever it had been clutching, and once the tanks had wrung the cold through us they walked us down the beach to be cooked.
It was a low dark dome at the waterline, black and close inside and hot enough to take the breath clean out of me.
In the dark you couldn’t see who you were sweating next to, which was the point.
The point, it turned out, was confession.
Somewhere by the coals one of the advanced ones told us, low, that the dark didn’t judge, that we should give it the thing we’d been carrying and let the heat draw it off, and one by one people did, voices lifting disembodied out of the black.
This, I understood about a minute too late, was the actual machinery of the place.
Not the lemon water. This. Get people hot and blind and shut in together, and they hand over everything they’ve got.
The weathered man beside me went when it came to him, the one I’d watched at dinner the first night turn to the tiny ringed woman like she was the only broadcast on earth. He didn’t testify the way the others had, weepy and grateful. He just talked, low, like he was already halfway into a thought.
“Sixty-one when I came,” he said, to the dark.
“Widower. Angry about it. Came to prove the place was rubbish so I could go home and be angry in peace. Then they sat me next to Calla at a Sitting, and that was the end of being angry.” A warm sound in the black.
“I’d had a wife forty years, God rest her, and never once felt the floor go the way it went in that tent. ”
“Tell them the good part, Fathom,” said the tiny voice past him, fond.
“This is the good part. I gave them the lot. The house, the savings, every bond they put in front of me. Signed every one.” A pause, the coals ticking.
“My daughter says they robbed me. Said as much down the phone, and when I wouldn’t agree she stopped calling.
Maybe she’s right. I don’t much care, is the honest answer.
I was an old man on my own waiting to die, and now I’m not. That’ll do me.”
I sat with that and couldn’t find the joke, which was new, because I can almost always find the joke.
He’d been robbed and he’d been saved in the same motion, and he’d do it again before breakfast. Two bodies over, in the dark, my mother was breathing the slow soaked breaths of a woman taking it all the way in, and I was glad I couldn’t see her face, because I was fairly sure it was doing sums of its own.
Coming out of the lodge into the murderous afternoon light, wrung out, I half walked into the gray woman.