Chapter 13 — Repentance68
@solena.rising
“Spent today with my hands in the earth and my knees on the rock, loves, doing the humblest work there is. And I want to say the thing I spent years too proud to say. There is a freedom in being corrected. In letting someone who can see the whole shore tell you no, not that way, this way. The ego howls about it. Let it howl. Underneath the howling is just a person who’s been holding herself up alone too long and would give anything to be held to a shape. I’m letting myself be shaped. Tides.”
We woke on opposite sides of the bed, and the foot of cold sheet between us had held all night.
There had been distance before. She’d built a wall of spare duvets down the middle once and I’d sulked on my side of it.
But the bed had a way of overruling us in the dark, the bodies migrating back to the middle while we slept, so that however we’d gone down we tended to wake tangled, my arm thrown across her, the two of us one warm country again with no memory of the border.
This morning we’d held the line. Both of us, awake and furious on our own cold edges all night, and we woke that way, a careful demilitarized foot of sheet between us, and the not-touching was the most conspicuous thing in the room.
“Morning,” she said, to the ceiling.
“Morning,” I said, to mine.
We were professionals.
I proved it by lying on my cold edge of the mattress and watching my mother get ready without appearing to watch my mother get ready, which is a skill.
She did the morning on camera, the way she did every morning.
She filmed the light on the water. She let the robe go and stood at the mirror in the shell-colored underwear and took the day’s first photographs of herself, chin found, the honest angle found, her whole face arranging into something soft and sure for an audience that wasn’t in the room, while the only audience that was lay six feet off pretending to be furniture.
I did not look at the long line of her back, or the way the cold light sat on her, or the small unconscious thing she did to fix the underwear clean across her hip.
I looked at the ceiling and catalogued, professionally, how unfair the entire arrangement was, and filed no complaint, because there was nobody to file it with and nothing to put in it but the truth.
The card came with the coffee, and for once it did not promise a sunrise or a sitting or a gazing. It said one word. Reckoning. Under it a time, and an instruction to wear what we wouldn’t mind ruining, which on that island I had learned to read as a threat.
Coral came for us without the smile.
It was the first time I’d seen her without it, and it landed harder than any lecture.
“This is a Reckoning,” she said, walking us down.
Her voice was level and cool, no cruelty in it and none of the warmth.
“You broke the trust of the basin. You tried to take yourselves out of the tide. So you’ll put it back by hand, the two of you, until the debt is square.
A Reckoning is private. A pair settles its own. ”
For once I caught a look at the thing that lived under all the brightness, the part that actually kept forty grown adults standing in a line.
The Reckoning was a hole.
A wide shallow tide pool up in the rocks above the beach, drained at low water, its old stone lining cracked and slumped, and our task, Coral explained with shining eyes, was to lift out every stone, clean the bed beneath, and lay them all back by hand, in the sun, to learn the patience of water.
No gloves. A laminated tide chart staked at the rim, because of course there was, telling us we had until the water came back, and the water, it did not need to add, did not make mistakes.
Then she left us up there alone, which on an island whose only boat had already gone over the horizon was as good as a locked door.
So we lifted stones. And, with no one left to perform for, we fought.
We were alone together all the time, in the room, in the dark, but there’d always been something to hide behind there, the performance, the phones, the mercy of pretending to sleep.
Out here there was nothing to hide behind at all.
Just the two of us and a pointless job and a whole day of sun to do it in, and it turned out what we did with that was take pieces out of each other.
“You could try lifting from the legs,” she said, not looking up.
“You could try not coaching me.”
“I’m helping.”
“You’re managing me. You manage everyone. It’s a reflex.”
“Someone has to. Left to you we’d be on the bottom of the Atlantic, and you’d have called it a plan.”
The sun came up over the rocks and got serious about us.
She knotted her shirt up out of the way and went at the stones with the grim competence she brought to everything, and the heat did what heat does.
Inside an hour she was soaked through, hair stuck to her neck, a shine coming up on her chest and her stomach and the small of her back every time she bent for a stone, and I hated, on top of everything else I hated that morning, that I noticed.
We were at war. I was furious with her. And I still kept having to find new places to put my eyes, because it turns out a man can want to throttle a woman and want her in the same minute, and the Reckoning had thoughtfully arranged for me to do both in direct sunlight.
“Stop looking at me,” she said, to the pool.
“I’m looking at the pool.”
“You’re looking at me looking at the pool.”
“It’s a compelling pool.”
“This is your fault, you know.” She slung a stone down harder than the stone required. “All of it. I was having the best month of my career.”
“You were being love-bombed into a second mortgage.”
“I was being SEEN, Sean. Do you remember being seen? You aim a camera at other people’s weddings and come home and finish nothing and call the not-finishing depth.”
That one landed. I let it. I set my stone down clean on the scrubbed bed where it belonged and said, “At least I still know which one of us I’m supposed to be pretending to be.”
That one landed too.
We worked in silence after that, both of us bleeding quietly from the places we’d reached into, which was, in its way, the most honest the two of us had been in days.
By the time the tide turned and came back in over the far lip and started lifting out the morning’s stones one by careful one and setting them down wherever it pleased, we’d stopped fighting and started, despite ourselves, working together, because the one thing more pointless than re-lining a tide pool by hand is doing it angry.
We didn’t talk. We passed stones. When Coral came back and found the far third of our morning already undone by the sea, she called it beautiful, the surrender, and I understood the pointlessness had been the whole curriculum.
They had never wanted the pool fixed. They had wanted us up in the sun until we had nothing left to fight with and only each other to hand stones to.
Don wasn’t at dinner.
His place at the long table sat empty, and his husband’s beside it, two clean settings nobody else seemed to see.
“Where’s Don?” I asked Coral.
“Don and his husband went deeper,” she said, warm, like it was the best news she’d had all week. “A private intensive. Some tides need the quiet.”
And I spiraled, quietly, over the lamb. Because Don was the man who’d come here chasing the disappeared, the man who’d told me people walked into this place and their families got lovely messages home in their voice, the man who’d asked me once, dry, whether anyone had ever shown me a single soul who finished the program, and now Don had walked into the quiet, and there was a lovely sentence ready to explain it.
I knew they’d taken him. I knew it the way I knew my own name.
I also could not have said, right then, the difference between knowing it and needing it to be true, because if they had disappeared Don for getting close, then I wasn’t a paranoid man running on no sleep and one failed escape, I was right, and being right was the only dignity I had left on that rock.
On the walk back I tried it on her, low and fast.
“Don was skeptical, like me. And now he’s gone, and I don’t think it’s a fucking coincidence.”
“Sean.” She put her hand on my arm, careful, like I was something that might bolt. “You haven’t slept. You tried to paddle to a cruise ship in the dark. Listen to yourself.”
“I sound like the only one here still paying attention.”
“You sound like a man who needs to sleep.” She was probably correct, and that was the worst of it. Everything I’d worked out was true and I was also, visibly, coming unglued, and the two facts sat down together and made me impossible to believe, including to myself.
That night the wall went up before it came down.
We went to bed cold and on purpose, each on our own edge after the day we’d had, the foot of sheet between us by treaty.
And then it came down the way it always came down, the two of us traveling back to the middle of the bed in the dark against our own better judgment, and this time neither of us woke up to fix it.
That was the new arrangement, apparently. We were asleep. We were both extremely busy being asleep.
Her back fit into my chest the way it always fit, and I told myself, asleep, that I was asleep.
My arm had come over her, asleep. My hand had found the bare stretch of her stomach where her shirt rode up and settled there, asleep, while I breathed slow and even and fraudulent against the back of her neck and she breathed slow and even and fraudulent back, and neither of us moved, and the not-moving was the loudest thing either of us had ever done.
Then her foot slid back along my shin. An inch, maybe. The kind of thing a sleeping person’s foot might do. I answered it the only way I knew, which was to do nothing at all, mid-stride, one foot in the air, while every wrong want I owned stood up in the dark and started unbuttoning its coat.