Chapter 18 — The Talent Show.96
@solena.rising
“I spent fifteen years performing for a number, loves. A little counter that was never going to climb high enough to fill the hole it was measuring. Tonight I stand up in front of a room that already loves me and sing. No counter. No strangers to win. I don’t even know who I am if I’m not performing for strangers, and I think I’m about to find out.
The tide gives and the tide takes. Lately it has only given. ”
(draft)
I came out of the bathroom in a towel and a cloud of my own steam, and my mother was halfway into her clothes.
She’d stepped out of what she slept in and not yet into the next thing, and when the door went she turned, all the way, caught, and instead of doing the decent fast thing she just stopped, for a beat, and let me see her.
The whole bare front of my mother in the grey morning, breasts and hips and the dark below, neither of us moving, and it was the not-rushing that did it, the held half-second where she could have covered up and chose to let it land first. Then the clean shirt came down over all of it and she was decent again.
It can’t have been three seconds. I was going to be paying interest on it for a week.
I went to the little mirror to not look at her, a good plan ruined at once by the mirror having a clean view of the whole room.
So I stood there pretending to do something to my wet hair and watched her dress in the glass instead, the underwear, the bra, the body I’d just had wholesale going back under cloth piece by piece, slower than it needed to go, because she knew I was watching and she was letting me watch.
At some point her eyes lifted and found mine in the reflection and stayed there, and neither of us looked away, and the looking ran past a beat, past two, until it stopped being an accident and turned into a thing we were doing on purpose, with our clothes on, at eight in the morning.
The towel was not going to survive that.
There is a particular and total humiliation in standing in a small bright room, stone sober, no rite to blame and no dark to hide in, gone hard under a square of Tidewell terrycloth two feet from the woman it is about, and being watched do it.
Because she watched. Her eyes dropped, frank and unhurried, and came back up, and the corner of her mouth did the smallest thing, and that was worse and better than any word, the two of us just standing there in daylight agreeing on the plain fact of me.
We had to trade places, her to the sink, me to the clothes, and the room was too small to do it without touching.
I went to angle past her and got it wrong, or got it right, and ended up at her back, close, my bare chest a breath off her shoulder blades, the heat coming off her skin and into mine, and I felt her go still and felt her breathing change.
For a second I had both hands lifted and hovering at her hips without ever deciding to lift them, near enough to feel the warmth of her through the inch of air between us, and neither of us moved, and the whole morning hung on whether I closed it.
Then she stepped back and picked her brand voice up off the floor and put it on.
“We’ll be late,” she said. “For breakfast.”
“Of course.” I looked at the wall. “Can’t be late.”
And we went down with all of it still in the room behind us, unspent, the door clicking shut on one more thing we weren’t going to talk about.
Don was at breakfast.
I hadn’t seen him since the night he stopped existing, the night Coral’s people walked him off to wherever they walked people, and here he was at the long table with a bowl of the grey grains and a face I didn’t quite recognize on a head I did.
Don, who had sat next to me in a sweat lodge and called this place a racket with his whole chest. Don, my one ally, the only other man on the island whose eyes had stayed his own.
He looked up when I sat down and smiled at me, and the smile was the wrong smile.
It went warm and it went empty and it went all the way to the teeth and nowhere near the eyes.
“Sean.” Like my name was a lovely surprise. “Good morning. Isn’t it a good morning.”
“Don.” I kept it low and fast, the old register, the conspirators’ one. “Where’ve you been? What did they do to you? Are you alright?”
“I’ve never been better. Truly.” He spooned grains. “I went somewhere I needed to go.”
“It’s me. You can drop it.” Low and fast. “You called this place a racket. I see it now. I’m trying to get out of here.”
“You’re carrying so much fear.” He looked at me with a tenderness that made my skin crawl.
“I was just like you. Gripping. Always casing the door. And then one day I stopped looking for the door, Sean, and do you know what was on the other side of it? Nothing. There was never anything out there. It was all in here the whole time.”
He patted his own chest, over the heart, and went back to his breakfast, and I sat there with my escape plan dying in my mouth and understood that the conversation I needed to have could not be had.
Not with him. Not anymore. They hadn’t locked Don up.
They’d done something quieter and worse. They’d talked him out of himself.
I tried twice more, smaller, and got the same soft nothing both times, and then I stopped, because there is a specific grief in watching a clever man be happy.
The one thing I kept, and only kept because of where it landed later, was this. When I asked him, half pleading, whether he ever thought about home, he paused. Just a flicker.
“Home’s still there, Sean,” he said. “It’ll keep.”
And then the empty smile came back down over it like a tide over a footprint, and at the time I filed it under more of the same.
Coral stood up at the head of the room before the bowls were cleared and clapped her hands together like a camp counselor.
“Beautiful news, beautiful souls. Tonight we share. The Offering.” She glowed.
“Every pair brings something to the basin. A song, a dance, a talent, whatever the tide moves through the two of you, and we give it to each other freely, because a thing kept private starts to rot, doesn’t it.
No performing. Just offering. Find your gift today, loves. I cannot wait to receive you.”
So that was the day ruined a second way. We were going to have to stand up in front of a hundred people and offer.
My mother decided within the hour that she would sing.
Of course she would sing. The Offering was a stage and a microphone and a room that wanted to love her, which was the only drug she had ever truly been hooked on, and the lockout had her starved for it.
She didn’t ask whether she should. She asked what she should, out loud, trying lyrics under her breath all afternoon, and somewhere in there she decided I was playing keyboard.
“You played in school,” she said, which was true, badly, a long time ago.
“I played recorder. In year six.”
“There’s a keyboard in the activity room with the chords printed on a card. You’ll be fine. I need a body up there with me and I’m not standing next to Whitecap.”
So that was settled, the way things got settled with her, which was that she settled them.
The Offering happened that night in the big room, the chairs turned to a low stage built out of pallets and good intentions, candles everywhere now that the power had developed a habit of flinching. Coral hosted. Of course Coral hosted.
The early acts went the way I’d feared and hoped.
The linen couple read a poem they’d written together, alternating lines, about being a wave.
A woman did an interpretive movement piece to the sound of her own breathing.
A man performed the seven locks as a slam poem and got a standing ovation.
I sat with the chord card sweating in my hand and my mother serene beside me and thought, not for the first time, that I would have given a great deal to be anywhere else.
And then the fire pair got up, and the floor went out of the evening.
It was a fire piece. Two of them, a couple I knew only by sight, had decided that the way to honor the tide was with its opposite, and they came out in matching wraps carrying actual lit torches, real flame, onto a stage made of pallets, under a ceiling hung with dry seafoam bunting, in a building the storm had already proven the wiring of was a rumor.
It started well. That was the worst part.
They did a slow, genuinely pretty thing, passing the flames between them, the room going soft and ooh-ing, Coral clasping her hands at the front, and for about ninety seconds I believed Tidewell might actually pull off a fire dance.
Then the man went for a flourish, a big overhead sweep, and the torch met the bunting, and the bunting turned out to be treated for nothing at all, and a line of cheerful blue flame ran up the wall and along the ceiling faster than anyone could decide how to feel about it.
For one second nobody moved, because nobody at Tidewell had a script for fire.
It was not in the program. And then the smoke alarm went off, the one piece of the surface world they had never managed to woo away, a flat ugly electronic shriek that did not care about the tide in the slightest, and the sprinklers that everyone had been assured were decorative turned out to be very much functional, and the entire Offering, a hundred deepening souls and their candles and their poem about being a wave, got rained on indoors by the building’s own panic.
It was, without question, the best thing I had seen on the island.
They put it out fast. They were nothing if not competent at damage.
And here is the thing I will never get past. It took Coral maybe four minutes to have the room breathing again, the wet smoking bunting hauled down, the chairs wiped, the whole near-catastrophe rebranded in front of our eyes into a gift, the tide testing our presence, the Deep reminding us we were alive, wasn’t it glorious, and people nodded, dripping, and believed her.
The Offering went on. With wet hair. Because nothing here was permitted to just be a fire.
Don offered next.
Don hoofed it.
I am not exaggerating, and I am not being unkind.
The man who had called this place a racket to my face, the investigative journalist with the notebook and the eyes that missed nothing, got up on the wet pallet stage in a borrowed waistcoat and tap-danced his gratitude to a tinny backing track somebody cued off a phone.
He was not good at it. That was somehow the worst part.
He clattered through a shuffle-ball-change with the deep beaming concentration of a man who had found God somewhere in the footwork, and between the steps he called his testimony out in breathless little bursts.
Came here a skeptic, shuffle. Came to take the whole thing apart, ball change.
And what I found, a small game kick, was that I’d been asking the wrong question my entire life.
The room clapped along in time. Coral was openly weeping.
He finished on a flourish, arms thrown wide, chest heaving, radiant, and got a standing ovation for the worst tap routine I have ever witnessed, and I stood and clapped with everyone else because the only other option was screaming.
Because I could have survived Don converted and eloquent.
A clever speech I could have hated cleanly.
But Don converted and clumsy and overjoyed, Don who used to be the sharpest man in any room now happily clattering for the thing that had scooped him hollow and left the grin, that was the one that got all the way in.
They hadn’t just taken his eyes. They’d left him thrilled about the loss.
And then it was us.
We climbed up onto the still-dripping pallets, and I found the keyboard and the card, and my mother took the microphone, and I will not pretend I went up there with an open heart.
I went up there with three chords and a grudge.
I found them on the card and played them in roughly the right order, quietly, a man doing the washing-up, and my mother stood in the candlelight and lifted the mic and began to sing “Angel,” the Sarah McLachlan one, and my first honest reaction, God forgive me, was to roll my eyes.
Because of course. Of course she picked that one.
The mom-rock cry-along, the song from every montage of every sad woman finding herself, the dead center of the entire bell curve of human feeling, and she was going to stand here and wring it out for a room of cultists, and I plinked my three chords and braced to be embarrassed for her.
And then she sang it, and she was good, and I stopped bracing.
She was not performing it. That was the thing I could not roll my eyes past. Fifteen years of selling things with her face, and this was the first time I had ever watched her not sell anything at all, just stand there and mean every gorgeous stupid word of it.
In the arms of the angel, fly away from here.
The cult heard a hymn to the Deep. I heard something else.
I heard a woman who had spent her whole life almost good enough, almost chosen, almost it, asking out loud and in front of everyone to be carried somewhere the almost could not follow her.
And I got it. That was the unbearable part.
Up there clunking chords off a laminated card, I finally got the thing the storm could not make me get, and the rescue could not, and her confession in the boat shed could not.
She was not a fool. She was starving. She had been starving the whole time I had known her, quietly, beautifully, behind the brand, and this place was simply the first thing in her life to ever set down a full plate in front of her, and who was I, who had never once in my life been that hungry, to keep telling her not to eat.
I found the last chord. I have no idea how.
She held the final note and the room was on its feet before it finished, and she stood up there lit and wet-eyed and finally, completely fed, and I was on my feet too, clapping, meaning it.
And that was the moment I stopped being a man trying to drag her off this island and became, without ever deciding to, a man who understood exactly why she was probably going to stay.