Chapter 8 — Turning Day.38
@solena.rising
“I’ve spent my whole life apologizing for wanting to be seen. Treating it like a flaw to manage. But what if the wanting isn’t ego? What if it’s just the tide in me, asking to go somewhere? I don’t have the answer yet, loves. I’m only asking the question out loud for the first time. Sit with me.”
We did not talk about the grove.
We came back, showered in shifts, ate dinner being radiant at strangers, and went up to bed like two people who had silently agreed that I had not, a few hours earlier, finished in my trousers in a crowded clearing while grinding on my own mother.
We were treating it as a posture correction.
We were treating it the way you treat a fart in an elevator, with eye contact aimed elsewhere and a firm shared commitment to the weather.
The blanket was her move. She mentioned to Coral at dinner, brightly, that our room ran cold at night, and by the time we came up there was a second duvet folded at the foot of the bed, thick and white and diplomatic.
She took it and the far third of the mattress and built a continent over there, and wished me goodnight in a voice with a door in it.
So I got what I had been asking for since the first night. My own blanket. My own border, honored at last. A whole demilitarized foot of cool sheet between her body and mine.
I lay there in the dark on my side of the peace I’d negotiated, and I was disappointed.
It took me a while to even name it, because it made no sense, and the moment I named it I was furious.
Disappointed. About a duvet. About not being illegally wrapped around the woman who raised me, who lay a foot away under her own duvet, breathing the long even breaths of someone who had no such problem.
I ran the tape looking for a single frame in which this was an acceptable thing to feel and could not find one, so I did the thing I had gotten good at, which was find someone else to bill.
This place did it. This stupid, beautiful, engineered place, with its breathing and its gazing and its grinding, built start to finish to take ordinary people and rub them together until the wiring crossed.
None of it was me. The only thing that was me was the yes, the single idiot yes back in the kitchen that had put me in this bed, and I could carry that one.
Everything downstream of it belonged to Tidewell.
It was a very comfortable theory. I held it like a third blanket and did not sleep.
Morning was frost.
“Sleep okay?”
“Great.”
“Great.”
She filmed the light coming off the water. I made coffee badly. We were professionals.
A card stood propped by the coffee in the seafoam ink they used for everything. Turning, it said. Midday. All tides expected. Whatever that meant.
The Turning came at midday, and the whole basin came with it.
They gathered us on the great lawn above the sea, strings of those seafoam flags lifting in the wind, and there was a feeling in the crowd I hadn’t met yet here, a leaning-forward, a hunger with good posture.
Coral worked the front in white, glowing, and behind her on a low dais stood the gray woman from the grove. Watching. Counting the till.
Coral lifted both hands and the lawn went quiet.
“This season,” she called, “one tide reached farther than any tide before it. One of you opened the water and let the whole surface world look in.”
A number rose on a screen at the back of the dais. Large. The kind that ends in a comfortable run of zeros. The crowd made a sound like surf on rock, and Coral read a name off her own folded hands.
“Brooke.”
A girl came up through the crowd. Twenty-three, maybe, lacquered and luminous, the kind of pretty that already had a ring light at home, and the people she passed reached to touch her shoulders and her hair like she was something that might rub off.
She let them. She was weeping, beautifully, and filming the whole walk on her own phone, held out at arm’s length, not missing a step.
Coral met her at the front and shook open a robe, long and pale, that blazed white in the noon sun, and laid it over Brooke’s shoulders the way you’d knight someone.
“The tide names you Diver,” she said, and the lawn lost its mind.
Brooke turned to face us in the new silk, two clean tracks of mascara down her cheeks, both hands pressed to her chest.
“I gave this place everything,” she said.
She had to stop, pressed her lips together, made herself go on. “I gave it my followers. I gave it my whole feed. I gave it the password to the account my ex made me. And it gave me back to myself.”
She laughed, wet and radiant. “Do you know I had four hundred thousand people and I never once felt like this? Not once?”
She lifted her phone and turned it on the crowd, panning us slowly so we could all see ourselves being seen. “Every single sunrise for the rest of my life, I am tagging you people. I love you. Tides.”
“Tides,” the lawn said back, four hundred mouths at once, and meant it.
I leaned over to Don. “What did she do?”
“She posted,” he said.
That was it. That was the sainthood. A girl had aimed the firehose of the world’s attention at this place harder than any human alive, and they’d put her in silk for it while the basin wept, and beside me my mother went very still and very warm in the face, and I knew the stillness.
I’d seen it across a negotiating table and in the Reader’s hut.
She wanted it. She wanted the robe and the lawn and the weeping.
She was watching a younger, hungrier, less careful version of herself get crowned for the one thing she’d built her whole life around, and you could have warmed your hands on the wanting coming off her.
“So how’s it work?” Don said, pleasant, to Coral, who had drifted near. “Climbing. How’s a person get up there?”
“You deepen,” Coral said, radiant. “You give the tide more of yourself, and it carries you higher.”
“And the things you surrender at intake. Passports, the documents a person needs to leave a country. When do those come back?” Don asked it the way you’d ask whether they validate parking, eyes on the new Diver the whole time, never once on Coral.
“Everything you surrender comes back to you as you rise.” She smiled like she was handing him a gift. “The tide returns what you’re ready to carry.”
Which meant, when you scraped the seafoam off it, that the only way to get your passport back was to climb. Deepen, rise, give them more of yourself, and they would hand back the one document that let you leave.
I made myself think the word. The one I’d thrown at her in the dark two nights ago and taken back every morning since.
Cult. The robe, the weeping, four hundred mouths saying one syllable at once, your way home sold back to you a rank at a time.
If that wasn’t the dictionary illustration, I didn’t know what was.
Except it couldn’t be. I knew it couldn’t be, with the bone certainty of a man holding no evidence at all, because cults happened to other people.
To the lonely and the lost, the ones with a hole in them you could pour a doctrine into.
Not me. I was the most skeptical man on the island.
I’d resisted the lemon water and the breathing and, for the most part, the grove.
You did not wander into one of these by accident, and I was careful, I was nothing if not careful, and I stood there in the bright noon completely unable to build the rest of the sentence.
The part where careful was supposed to keep you out.
I got my mother alone by the drinks table.
She read my face before I opened my mouth. She always could, it ran one direction that way. “Okay, what?” she said. “You’ve got a whole face happening.”
“You want it.”
“Want what?”
“The robe. The lawn. All of it. You watched that girl get crowned for posting and you lit up like a slot machine. Don’t tell me you didn’t, I was right beside you.”
She didn’t deny it. She looked past me at the crowd, and something settled in her jaw, and when she spoke she was quieter than denial. “Would it be so terrible? To want to be good at the thing I’m already good at?”
“Here? Yes.” I kept my voice down and my smile up, for the lawn.
“Your people follow a woman who has her life handled. You start plotting your own coronation, posting robe ceremonies and a man on a giant screen, and they are going to think someone got to you. That you’ve been, I don’t know.
Converted. You’ll look like a woman who came back from a retreat different. ”
“Maybe I want to come back different.”
“Not that kind of different.”
She looked at me a second with something I couldn’t read, then put the brand back on over it like a coat.
“You worry so much,” she said, fond and distant and already a little gone.
She drifted back toward the lawn, where the silk was still bright in the sun.
She showed me Caspian’s account over lunch, on the terrace above the water, leaning across the table because she couldn’t not.
“Have you even looked at him? Properly?” She turned the screen to me, and I had to cup a hand against the noon glare to see it at all. “Nearly a million, Sean. A million people. He barely posts and they wait for it like rain.”
I looked. The videos were the man from the wall, lit from inside, saying gorgeous nothings to a camera that loved him. And I watched him the way film school had taught me to watch footage, close, for the second a face slips and shows the work.
“Watch his eyes,” I said.
“What about them?”
“They don’t. He’s talking for ninety seconds and look, watch, he blinks twice and it’s the same blink. The exact same blink. And the light in them is wrong, it’s a different room than the one the rest of him is in.”
“That’s compression.” She took the phone back. “You, of all people, getting weird about a video.”
“I’m telling you, something is off...”
“You’re tired,” she said, gently.
She turned the screen back to herself and her thumb started moving, and she sat there in the bright noon scrolling through a dead man over a bowl of grains, and I sat across the table with the alarm going off in a building only I could hear.
Before the plates were even cleared she’d posted a shot of the lawn where Brooke had been crowned, the Tidewell account tagged small in the corner, deniable, a single discreet barnacle on her brand. Then another.
I watched her find the light by sonar the way she did, watched Coral drift over to murmur something approving and tweak the frame, the two of them building it together now, and I understood that the foot of cold sheet I’d won that morning was the smaller of the two distances opening up between us.
The smaller one, and the one I’d wasted all my worry on.