Chapter 3 — Beloved.13
@solena.rising
“Tonight we cooked our own dinner. Over open fire. With our own hands. Beside people who were strangers twelve hours ago and are already the family I’d have chosen if anyone had asked me.
No menus. No small talk. Just salt and smoke and the kind of eye contact that reorganizes your nervous system.
I cried twice and I’m not sorry. If your dinner tonight didn’t change you, loves, you’re eating at the wrong table. I love you. Go feed someone.”
Here is the thing nobody tells you about a wellness retreat. The first night, the food is incredible.
They didn’t serve us. There was no buffet, no staff in vests.
There were eight long fire pits down by the water and a mountain of things that had been alive that morning, and there was a weathered man handing me a knife and asking, with the unbothered warmth of someone who’d already decided I’d say yes, if I knew my way around a fish.
I did. I know my way around a fish the way I know my way around a camera, which is to say it is one of two things my hands remember how to do without asking the rest of me for permission.
My dad taught me on the back step with a radio going, and Mom taught me the part he got bored of, the patience, the salt, the not-rushing.
For about forty minutes by that fire I forgot to be suspicious of anything.
I scaled and I salted and somebody passed me lemons, of course they did, and the smoke got in my eyes and I let it, and the food when it was done tasted like I had been a part of it, because I had.
Dad would have loved this.
The thought arrived fully formed and warm and I didn’t flinch from it in time.
He’d have been first to the fire. He’d have been the guy weeping over a vegetable.
He’d have signed whatever they put in front of him and called me from a beach to tell me I had to come, that this was it, that this was finally the real one.
I put the thought down carefully, the way you put down a knife, and went looking for my mother.
She had been recognized.
I knew it from across the firelight, from the specific way she was holding her shoulders, like a woman trying to look surprised by an award. A girl had her by both hands. Early twenties, wet-eyed, the kind of pretty that hasn’t cost anything yet.
“It’s you,” the girl was saying. “It’s actually you. Solena Rising. Your morning practice got me through my divorce. I did the lemon thing every single day.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Solena said.
“I have your voice in my ears more than my own mother’s.”
And there it was, the thing she’d flown across an ocean for and would never have admitted to wanting.
Not the suite, not the comp, not the content.
This. Somebody who had crossed a sea and found her here and called her family before the soup was cold.
I watched it go into her like warmth into someone who hadn’t known how cold she was, and for one second, against everything, I was glad we’d come.
“Your girlfriend appears to be famous,” said a voice at my shoulder. Don. He had a bottle of the beer they’d been handing out and the expression of a man at a funeral for someone he didn’t like.
“She’s not famous. She’s mid.”
“Nothing’s mid here.” He nodded at the fire, where a large bearded man was crying openly into a pan. “Everything is the best thing that’s ever happened to everybody, all day, on a loop. That man met that pan tonight.”
“Just one thing after another,” I muttered.
He nodded and took a swig of the bottle. “I’m keeping a list.”
I decided, again, that I liked Don.
They sat us to eat in pairs, which was the first time all night the seams showed. A couple across the fire, older, leaned in with the friendly aggression of people who have decided you’re going to be friends.
“So how did you two find each other?” the woman asked.
I felt my mother’s whole body commit to the lie before she opened her mouth.
“A gallery,” she said. “He was showing photographs.”
“Of the ocean,” I said.
“And I bought one.”
“She felt seen,” I said, at the exact moment she said, “I felt seen,” and the couple made the sound people make at puppies, and I understood we had somehow passed.
Then my mother, riding it, drunk on getting away with something, reached over without looking and laid her hand on my thigh.
Couples do it constantly. It’s furniture.
It’s punctuation. Her palm was warm through the fabric and she left it there, easy, settled, her thumb moving once like it had thoughts of its own.
She was selling the story, and I knew she was selling the story, and I had options.
I could have shifted my leg. I did not shift my leg.
“What a nice story,” said the older woman, dabbing her eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out wrong. I looked very hard at my fish.
She took her hand back eventually. The warmth stayed where it was.
What the evening schedule called, capital T, the Transmission came after the plates were cleared.
They walked us up to a hall where one wall was a single enormous screen, except up close you could see it wasn’t one screen, it was hundreds of small ones edge to edge, and the room had filled with a cool sweet fog from machines along the floor, so the light from the wall came at you soft and broken, like sun through water.
It was beautiful. All of it, the whole night.
I kept waiting to stop being impressed, and the night kept not letting me.
Then the wall woke, and a man was on it, and the room stopped breathing.
He was an ordinary-looking man made enormous, lit from inside, silver at the temples, a face built to be trusted.
“Caspian,” my mother breathed beside me, like a name she’d been saving. “The founder.”
When he spoke the fog seemed to move with his voice.
“Above the waterline,” he said, “there is only weather. Below the tide swim the creatures of your heart and mind, and they have always known the way down.”
It meant nothing. I want that on the record. It was a sentence assembled from beautiful parts that touched at no point, and a few dozen people received it like rain after a drought, and my mother, beside me, exhaled like she’d been holding something for a year.
I watched him because everyone was watching him, and somewhere in it a small thing snagged at me.
It was his eyes. I’d spent two years in editing bays learning to feel when a take is wrong before I could say why, and that old eye kept catching on him the way a fingernail catches on a thread.
It took me most of the speech to find it.
He didn’t blink enough. A man spoke about the creatures of our hearts for four minutes, glowing, intimate, enormous, and blinked maybe twice, and both times it was the same blink.
I told myself it was the screen. Compression does strange things to faces. I used to know that for a living.
I leaned toward Solena to say something about it. I don’t know what. Probably nothing good.
I didn’t get the chance, because the Transmission ended, and the room answered.
All of it. At once. A few dozen people drew the same breath at the same instant and spoke the same words back to the dark screen in one voice, low and certain and rehearsed down to the vowel, “we receive the tide, we return to the tide,” and the warmth of the cook-fire, the fish, the girl who’d crossed a sea, all of it reorganized in front of me into a single animal turning to face the same wall, and I was the only mouth in the room not moving, and my mother’s lips were moving.
She didn’t know the words. She was mouthing along anyway, half a beat behind, the way you fake a hymn in a church you’ve wandered into, wanting so badly to belong to the singing.
Something in me went cold for a second. Then my mother leaned into my arm, warm, still trying to catch up to the words, and I told myself it was a chant. People had chants. Sports had chants. I’d felt stranger things at a concert. It mostly worked.
They walked us to our room after, because we were a pair, and pairs are held together.
It was the kind of room I would have killed to shoot in.
Whitewashed walls gone gold at the edges from a pair of salt lamps somebody had already switched on, doors standing open to a small terrace and the dark water past it, the moon laying one long stripe across the bay like it had been paid to.
Gauze curtains breathed in and out with the night air.
There was a bottle on ice with two glasses, which turned out to be water, and a card on the pillow in seafoam ink that said Solena & Squid.
And there was a bed. Wide and white and banked like a cloud under a canopy of netting, turned down at both corners by somebody who believed in us.
One of them.
We stood and looked at it.
“Floor’s fine,” I said.
“Don’t be a martyr.”
“I’m not being a martyr, I’m being a gentleman, there’s a difference, look it up.
” I was already pulling the spare blanket off the foot of it, already not looking at her, already aware that my leg still held the warm print of her hand and planned on holding it, helpfully, all night, on a floor, ten feet from where she slept.
“Sean.”
“Mother.”
“Solena.”
“Even in here?”
She was quiet a second. The brand had gone off her face. It was just Deb standing there in the most beautiful room she’d ever won her way into, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something real, something about the day, about the singing, about mouthing along to words she didn’t know.
“The fish was really good,” she said instead.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”
I lay down on the floor of the most beautiful room I’d ever been kept out of a bed in, and I did not sleep, and it had nothing to do with the floor.