Chapter 15 — Tide-Syncing.79
There was no post that morning.
There had been a post every morning for as long as the brand had existed, my mother’s face arranged over some sentence about abundance and sent out to all of them before either of us had brushed our teeth.
Now there was nothing. Coral had her accounts, and her accounts had been the better part of her, and she moved through the day with her hands gone strange and idle, a smoker three days quit, lifting the phone out of habit and finding every door in it still shut and setting it down again.
So she poured it somewhere else. She poured it into being the best.
That was the plan. We had made it in the corner with the flowers, the only plan the island had left us, which was to climb.
Be the most aligned Tide Pair Tidewell had ever processed, make Diver, earn the passports back, walk onto the next ferry like people.
A good plan. A clean plan. What the plan did not account for was that I am, underneath everything, a competitive person, and a competitive person told to be the best at something forgets, with alarming speed, that the something is a cult he hates.
I want to be honest about how fast it took me.
By the second morning of the new regime I had my hand up first in the gratitude circle.
I thanked the lemon water with what I can only describe as feeling.
I learned the names of the seven locks, in order, and when Coral asked who could recite them I heard my own voice doing it, eager, and I went to catch Don’s eye across the circle to share the horror, and Don was still gone, wherever they’d put him, so I shared the horror with nobody.
My mother was worse, or better. She was magnificent at it.
Fifteen years of performing wellness for a lens turned out to be exactly the transferable skill the situation required, and she stepped into Tidewell’s little theater of devotion like she’d been understudying for it her whole career.
She listened raptly to Coral. She said held without flinching.
Within days she was the most convincing true believer on an island full of the genuine article, and only I knew it was an act, and there were stretches, watching her glow for the room, where I was no longer sure I knew it either.
The bickering started on the path down to the water.
It had been starting on a lot of paths lately. We fought now the way long-settled couples fight, in a low fluent undertone that never broke stride, about nothing, about everything, about the fact that we were good at this and hated that we were good at it.
“You don’t have to be first at it,” she said.
“First at what?”
“Everything. The circle. The breathing. You had your hand up this morning before Coral finished the question. People are noticing.”
“People noticing is the whole plan. They notice us, they give us a gold star, the gold star is shaped like a passport.”
“There’s noticing, and there’s whatever you’re doing. You’re enjoying it.”
“I’m winning. I don’t enjoy it. I’m winning.”
“You’re enjoying winning.”
“That’s a different sentence than the one you said, and I reject it also.”
She made the small noise she made when I’d been technically correct in a way that proved her larger point, and I knew I’d lost something even while winning the exchange, and that was marriage, or whatever we were doing in its place.
“And you,” I said, because the path was long, “you’re flirting with the coaches.”
“I’m being warm.”
“You’re being warm at Maris. You did the laugh.”
“What laugh?”
“The brand laugh. The client one. You aimed it at a grown man named Maris who has the personality of a damp towel, because you want the score.”
“We both want the score, Sean.” She didn’t even slow down. “That’s the plan. Your words.”
Coral was waiting at the tide pool with a wicker basket and a smile, and the smile should have been the warning.
The mats were laid out in pairs along the rock shelf above the pool, each one a careful arm’s length from its partner, and the real tide was coming in below us, filling the basin, which I would later understand was the entire point of the staging.
The cohort settled. Fathom and Calla took the mats beside ours.
Naia and Maris circulated at the edges in the pale robes of the advanced, here to correct our form.
“Today we learn to share a tide,” Coral said. “A true pair doesn’t run on two currents. It runs on one. So today, loves, you’re going to stop managing your own.”
Then she went down the line with the basket.
What came out of the basket, handed to each of us in a little drawstring bag of undyed muslin, with the reverence of a chalice, was sex toys.
I want to be precise, because precision is the only dignity I have left from that morning.
Mine was a sleeve. A ribbed silicone conch in a tasteful seafoam, sized and shaped exactly as the word conch would lead a person to fear, and I held it in both hands in the sun while a serene young woman explained that it was a resonance instrument.
My mother’s was a pearl, a smooth seafoam egg meant to be worn inside, with a fine cord to fetch it back by, and branded, because of course it was branded, with the little Tidewell tide-mark.
“They’re yours to keep,” Coral said, the way a person hands over a present. “We’ll settle it against your accounts later, loves. Don’t let the numbers into the room today. The tide doesn’t deal in numbers.”
Nobody laughed. That was the thing about the island that never stopped frightening me. A dozen grown adults accepted vibrators from a basket like communion and bowed their heads over them, and the only person fighting a giggle was me, and I swallowed it, because I was winning.
Then Coral explained how it worked, and the giggle died on its own.
“You won’t be using your own,” she said, beaming.
“You can’t raise your own tide. Nobody can.
The tide is raised by another.” She held up a small seafoam remote.
“Your partner holds yours. You hold theirs. You give your rising over to the one you trust, and they carry it, and you carry theirs, and two become one current.”
So that was the rite. I would hold the dial to whatever the pearl did to my mother. She would hold the dial to the conch. Neither of us with a hand on our own.
“I’ll be reading how matched you stay,” Coral said warmly. She drifted down the line of mats. “Depth by depth, rising together, until the two of you read as one current. And there’s one rule above all the rest, loves. The only one that matters.”
She said it twice, so the rocks would carry it.
“No one falls. The fall is for the deep ranks. Today we rise, and we hold, and we do not fall. Stay on the crest together as long as the tide asks, and give it back when it recedes.”
Edging. They had built a religion, and the religion’s sacrament for the morning was synchronized edging, scored, in the open air, and I had volunteered to be the best at it.
Across the gap, Fathom and Calla had already folded into it without a flicker of the mortification eating the rest of us alive, his hand loose around her remote and hers around his, easy, because they meant it.
They were drowning in tide-bond debt and they were in love and the love was real even though nothing around it was, and that made them unbeatable.
One current cannot be faked. They had it for free. We were going to have to manufacture it, live, against the clock, and I looked at the two of them being effortlessly one tide and felt the competitive thing in me lock onto them like a missile.
There was a part nobody warns about, which was the getting ready.
We arranged ourselves the way the advanced members showed us, each on our own mat, robes loosened, the instruments worked into place beneath them with as much grace as the situation allowed, which was none.
I got the conch settled with the face of a man assembling flat-pack furniture.
Across the gap my mother fitted the pearl with a brisk competence I found, in the moment, deranged.
Then we traded. She took the little remote that ran the conch. I took the one that ran her pearl.
Naia came down the row checking grips and angles like a flight attendant before takeoff. She crouched and adjusted my hand on the dial.
“Lightly, loves,” she said. “You’re holding someone’s whole tide. Hold it like you love them.”
Which, sitting there with the remote to my mother’s body warm in my palm, was the one instruction on the island I was never going to struggle with.
“First depth,” Coral said. “Gently now, loves.”
I brought my mother up the way the rite asked, one careful notch, and watched it land on her, the small involuntary thing at the corner of her mouth, the flush climbing her throat, her thighs going tight under the robe.
She brought me up to match, and the conch came alive and gripped, the ribbed silicone working me slick and snug, and I was hard inside it before I’d decided to be.
For a moment we were doing it. We were good. We were one current, and Coral drifted past murmuring “yes, look how matched, the new pair,” and the gold star was right there in reach.
Then she did the laugh.
Not at me. At Maris, who had crouched by her mat to correct her form, and she gave him the brand laugh, the client laugh, the flirty laugh, the exact one I’d accused her of on the path, with my dial sitting in her hand, and something competitive and stupid and entirely beneath me took the wheel and I turned her up a notch off-protocol.
Just one. Just past where Coral had called. Punishment.
Her breath caught, and under the robe her hips gave a single jerk she couldn’t catch in time.
Her eyes came off Maris and onto me, wide, and the look in them was pure marriage, the silent across-the-table promise of a reckoning to come, and then, without one millimeter of her serene devoted face moving, she turned the conch up to match.
And there we were.
That was the war, and we fought it in silence, an arm’s length apart, smiling like saints.
She would ease me up a hair and the floor would tilt and I’d ease her up to match and watch her fight it off her face.
I’d hold us level and she’d nudge, testing, daring, and I’d answer.
Neither of us could touch our own dial, which was the genius and the horror of the thing, every mercy I might have shown myself I could only show her, and every cruelty I wanted to do to her I did knowing it bought me nothing but her hand on the same lever, climbing.
Because the trap was airtight. If I pushed her over, if I won, we both lost, the pair failed, both of us falling and disgraced in front of the whole basin and the Keeper at the back.
So I could not win. I could only take her to the brink and hold her there and trust her not to drop me off mine, and she could only do the same.
And it was the hottest thing we had ever done, hotter than the dark, hotter than her hand, because in the dark we got to pretend we were asleep, and here we were wide awake, holding each other an inch from blowing in the full light of day and not allowed to fall.
And somewhere in the holding I stopped fighting her.
I don’t know when. I know that at some point I understood I could read her completely, that I knew the exact place her breath would snag before it snagged, that I was working her the way a man works something he has known with his hands for a long time, and that she was doing the same to me, that her thumb on the dial had stopped being a weapon and become a kind of terrible tenderness, holding me at the edge, not to torture me, only to keep me there with her.
We weren’t sabotaging anymore. We were syncing.
For real, on purpose, in daylight, and I felt it the way a man feels a stair that isn’t there.
From the back of the rite, where the Keeper stood and watched and didn’t blink, I felt her attention settle on the two of us and stay.
Coral called the crest.
“All the way up now, loves, and hold. This is the hard part. Sit on the edge of the tide and do not fall. Breathe each other.”
We were already there. We had been there a while, holding each other on a knife of our own making, both of us shaking with the work of not falling, and I looked at my mother across the arm’s length of rock the rite required, her face finally and completely open, the brand gone, the persona gone, just Deb, wrecked and wide-eyed and looking at me like I was the only fixed thing in the world, and the distance between us became the single stupidest rule on an island built entirely of stupid rules.
I broke it. Or she did. We never did settle who.
We came together over the gap and kissed, and it was not a rite and it was not a performance and it was not deniable.
It was a real kiss, open and starving and nowhere in the script, the kind that cannot be blamed on a basket or the dark, and the whole graded apparatus of the morning fell away and there was only her mouth and the awful relief of the fight being over, and somewhere very far off I was aware that we were being watched, and being seen, and failing to care.
And then the tide went out.
Every device on the shelf died at once. One second the conch was a living thing and the next it was a cool inert piece of silicone, and up and down the mats a dozen people made the same small bereft sound, a whole cohort dropped off the same cliff in the same instant, and Coral lifted her serene hand off whatever master switch lived in the basket and smiled at all of us with her entire heart.
“And let the tide recede, loves. Well held. Well held.”
I have never in my life wanted to commit a crime so badly.
We came off that crest with nowhere for any of it to go, the kiss still wet on my mouth and the rest of me screaming, and that was the point, I understood even then.
They take a soul to the edge and confiscate the fall and tell it that it did well.
The island had found the one thing crueler than denying a person a thing they didn’t want, which was denying them a thing they did.
Blue agony as a sacrament. And the worst part, the part I will carry to the grave, came when Coral worked her way down the line and crouched between our mats and laid her warm hand on my shoulder.
“The two of you were among the highest in the cohort,” she said, soft as a blessing. “Rare oneness, for so new a pair. The tide felt it.”
And a hot stupid bloom of pride went off in my chest like I’d been pinned with a medal.
We had been graded excellent at loving each other. It was the worst thing that had happened to us yet.