Chapter 6 #2
Something dark trickles from the side of her mouth.
Shay's mind flashes to the khala's corpse back at the farmhouse.
With flaring panic, she dives into action, but as she gently uncurls the woman's stiff body, the crisp crackle of bones suggests she's too late.
Nevertheless, Shay delivers compressions to her frail chest. She breathes air against her chilling lips.
“What in the seven hells are you doing?” The woman pushes Shay off her with sudden strength. Wheezing, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and glares at Shay.
Their eyes are the same shade of smoky brown. Faded Hazmaggi tattoos scrawl across her cheeks and forehead. Odd, given that Ghita said the detail about Shay's nomadic heritage was fabricated.
“That's funny. You don't exactly look like the sort to break into women's homes and assault them in their sleep.”
She's obviously alive, but no less a thing of horror, and Shay's first impulse is to deny that such a creature could be her mother.
Yet, even in the meager light from the shelter's grime-streaked window, the resemblance is notable.
As her adrenaline dies down, Shay's fingers trace her own slightly crooked nose, her tapered chin.
With a strange sense of detachment, she wonders if everything she thought true is a lie and all the lies are true.
“Devil got yer tongue?” the woman derides. She leaves Shay lumped on the floor and shuffles to the middle of the room. There, she dumps a bucket of hot coals into a pit dug into the ground where it has been left uncovered. Shay watches her hang a dented teapot of water over the fire.
Recovering her voice, she sputters, “Wh-what are you doing?”
“Never seen someone make tea?” the woman grumbles. Despite her mockery, a hint of kindness touches her face, turning pit marks into dimples. She pats a large, round starmia made of tattered leather beside her. “Come sit.”
Shay's tongue adheres to the bottom of her mouth as she crosses the room obediently.
All the cycles she carried this wish inside her, this unspoken yearning for maternal love, she never once stopped to think of what she would say to her mother if given the chance.
Her heart pumps hard under the cotton of her djellaba, gushing all the words she cannot find.
For her part, the woman says nothing more.
She goes about preparing tea, her method similar to Ghita's but different in a way that takes Shay a few moments to pin.
It isn't so much her process as the way she holds herself as she moves.
So unlike Ghita's confident posture. The touched one, old as she looks, has the body language of an unsteady but eager toddler.
She finally hands Shay a glass, accompanied by a tight smile. Shay holds the warm tea in her hands as though she can't recall what to do with it. When she opens her mouth, she has no idea what she means to say until the words tumble out. “Khalti, do you know who I am?”
The touched one taps her dirty nail on her glass and looks at Shay as if she insulted her. Something like pain glistens briefly in her eyes before she blinks it away. “Do you imagine I can't recognize my own flesh and blood?”
Shay's voice freezes in her throat. Time stops, the question hanging between them like a breath cloud on a cold day.
Her mind slowly whirs, repeating the barkeep's revelations.
She doesn't know whether to jump up and scream for joy that her mother is alive or break down and weep for the condition she's in.
Maybe she'd know the correct reaction if she could get past the feeling that none of this seems real.
“It's true, then,” she finally whispers, but inside her ears, her voice is a shout. Could Ghita have made a mistake? Did the midwife leave her mother for dead by accident? No, Ghita is much too thorough. She'd never be so negligent. Besides, she told Shay there was a grave …
“Drink some tea, habibti,” the woman murmurs. “We have a lot to talk about.”
Shay's hand seems to lift the glass to her lips by itself. The tea is good, though the mint is not as fresh as that which she's used to. The warmth of the beverage steadies her. It clears her head a bit.
“Khalti,” she starts, then sips more tea to avoid continuing.
“La,” the touched one corrects her. “Mmi.”
If a heart had ears, Shay's would perk like a cat hearing the lid peeled back on a tin of preserved fish.
But the word, and all it implies, is sacred.
If she never bestowed such a title upon the midwife, whom she lived and worked with and learned from, how can she apply it to a stranger?
Someone she knows nothing about other than that she's an addict? “It's a bit soon for that.”
“Hind, then. You can call me Hind.”
“Hind,” Shay starts again. “I … I'm sorry.”
Hind's forehead creases, adding about a hundred cycles to her age. “Why?”
“If I really am … If you really are …” Shay widens her eyes and clamps her teeth, not wishing to cry and embarrass herself more than she did by trying to resuscitate the woman. “I would have come sooner, if I'd known. I would have offered to help you.”
“What makes you think I need help?” the touched one scoffs.
“I didn't mean to imply—”
“We both know what you meant.” Hind waves a skeletal hand. “You can judge me if you want. I just …” She covers her mouth as she smiles, the gaps between her spindly fingers exposing the sorry state of her teeth. “You're real, aren't you? You're not a ghost …”
Shay raises her arm and inspects it as though she herself isn't sure whether it's made of flesh or spirit. “I could ask you the same question. Ghita told me you died.”
“Ghita!” The touched one scowls, her lips pulling so tight that they almost disappear. She takes a long sip of tea before she speaks again. “She told me the same about you.”
Shay shakes her head as stubborn loyalty rears inside her. There must be more to the story. There has to be. “Why would she do that?”
“S'pose she wanted you for herself.” Hind shrugs one pointy shoulder, her sullen expression burnished in an orange palette by the light of the small fire. “The way I hear it, her own daughter died tragically.”
Shock falls over Shay's mind like a blanket, making shapeless lumps of every thought. “Ghita had a daughter?”
“So they say.” The touched one chews her bottom lip. “But they say a lot of things.”
The idea of Ghita's betrayal doesn't provoke the anger Shay would expect.
Neither does she feel hurt, at least not yet.
Either of those emotions would be something concrete, a thread she could hold on to and make sense of.
All she feels is confusion, her equilibrium thrown headlong into a senseless rift.
More than anything, she wants to understand. “Tell me what happened.”
The touched one arches a thin white eyebrow. “Everything?”
Shay takes a bracing sip of tea. “Everything.”