Chapter 21 — The Merging117 #3
We dressed without speaking. There was a basin of warm water and soft cloths by the door, for after, because of course there was, and we cleaned the oil and the rest of it off in silence with the other glowing pairs, and walked back up to the room in a quiet that had stopped being the comfortable kind somewhere on the stairs.
I thought, the whole way up, that we would get to the room and fall on each other.
That the rite had finally broken the last of it and we would shut the door and finish, properly, the thing the oil had stolen, and that some enormous unspeakable line would be behind us by dark.
I was so sure of it that I was already braced for it, already gone soft and stupid with wanting it, the way you do.
I had it completely wrong.
She got to the room ahead of me and by the time I’d shut the door she had crossed to the far side of it, her back to me, her arms wrapped around herself, and when she turned around the white space where Deb had been all afternoon had something in it now, and it was fear.
“That can’t happen again,” she said.
“Mom.”
“Don’t.” She put a hand up. “Don’t Mom me, not right now, I can’t.
That, today, what we, what nearly.” She couldn’t get a clean sentence out and she kept trying.
“That was not the rite, Sean. Do you understand me. Every other time I could tell myself it was the rite, it was the dark, it was the exercise, it was the clay, it was a thing that happened to us. Today there was no rite. There was an inch of nothing and a rule and we went straight for the rule like we’d been waiting for the excuse. You were inside me.”
“For a second.”
“You were inside me.” Her voice cracked clean down the middle on it. “And I let you. I pulled you in. I have run out of ways to tell myself that wasn’t me.”
“So stop telling yourself it wasn’t.” I crossed toward her and she stepped back, and that stopped me cold, because she had never once in two weeks stepped back from me. “Mom. Look at what this is. We can just say what it is.”
“No.” Fast and frightened. “No, we cannot, because if we say it then it’s real and if it’s real then I am a woman who, with the boy I, with Rainer’s, with you.
I raised you. I packed your lunches. And I cannot stand here in this terrible room and feel what I felt down there and have both of those things be true at once.
I won’t survive it. So it has to have been the rite, it has to, let it have been the rite. ”
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
“It wasn’t the rite.” I said it gently, because I could see what it was doing to her, and I said it anyway, because it was the truest thing I had and she deserved one true thing in this place even if it was the one that broke her. “You know it wasn’t.”
And she looked at me with her whole face open and ruined, and for one second I thought she was going to cross the room and let it be true.
Then she chose the other thing.
I watched her do it, the way I’d watched Fathom press his own chest and call the closing of his throat a lock.
I watched her take all of it, the fear and the wanting and the impossible arithmetic of us, and pour it somewhere it would be safe, somewhere with a frame already built to hold it, somewhere that would tell her she was chosen and clean and rising instead of whatever she was afraid she was.
“Coral said after today there’s only Diver,” she said, and her voice had changed. The white space was filling back up, and not with Deb. “I’m going to make Diver.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have, Sean.” She wouldn’t look at me now.
“I’m going to be so good at this. I’m going to go all the way down.
And you should too, because it’s the only way either of us gets off this rock, and because down there it doesn’t have to mean anything. Down there it’s just the work.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I’m going to. I don’t know how I’ll live with myself after this if I don’t.”
She lay down on her own side of the bed in her clothes with her back to me and the lamp off, and rebuilt in one motion the wall I thought we had finally torn down for good, and left me standing in the middle of the room with the oil still in my hair and the truth still in my mouth and nobody to give it to.
I lay down eventually. On my own side. The cold foot of sheet was back between us, except it wasn’t pretending to be anything now, it was just the distance, and on the far side of it my mother lay very still and very awake, climbing away from me in the dark toward the one thing on the island that would never ask her to admit what she wanted, and I understood that the cult had finally found the one rung high enough to take her all the way out of my reach.
Not the passports. Not the leash. This. It had let us get within an inch of each other and then handed her a reason to run, and she had taken it, because the cult was the only thing on Saltren that hurt less than the truth.
We did not touch.
For the first time since the night the storm tried to drown us, we lay there and did not drift, and I lay awake on my cold scrap of sheet and missed the weight of her from two feet away, which was a new and specialized kind of hell I had not previously been issued.