CHAPTER FOURTEEN #2
She went back out to the edges she had worked before.
She went down to the Bywater waterfront, to the dock bar where she had first heard the Slackwater named, and she sat with a drink she did not touch and turned the talk, hard and clumsy, toward the red water and the old families out east, and she watched faces close like doors.
Once, pushing too hard, she got an answer for it.
A man she did not know sat down on the next stool, an ordinary man, sunburned, soft-spoken, the kind you would not look at twice, and he did not threaten her, did not raise his voice, only set his beer down beside hers and said, pleasant as weather, that she was asking after water that did not care to be asked after, and that the people who lived by it had a long memory and a short way with curiosity, and that a woman on her own, grieving, not sleeping, ought to mind where she put her feet.
Then he picked his beer back up and was gone, and left her with her heart going and the cold new knowledge that the watching ran both ways now.
Somewhere out in the still red country they knew her name and knew her grief, and they were not, any longer, only waiting for her to ripen.
They had begun to keep an eye on the fruit.
She drove herself out the Chef in the white afternoon heat, alone, with no Rowan to read the road and no flannel courage left in the little packet at her hip, and she sat in the truck at the turn for the marsh settlements with the engine running and the heat-shimmer coming off the shells, daring herself, and could not make her hands take the wheel down that road, and hated herself for the cowardice and blessed it at the same time.
She was working at the thing with both hands now and no plan and no one at her back, and she knew it was reckless, knew it the way you know a tooth is going bad and keep pressing it with your tongue.
And the closer she pushed, the worse the mark got.
Not warmer now. Hungrier. On the Chef, at that turn, with the marsh laid out flat and waiting in front of her, it had come up so hot and so eager, leaning her whole body forward against the wheel toward the road she would not take, that she had had to grip the door to stay in her seat.
It wanted to go. Whatever it was, Lark or the other thing or both of them braided past separating, it wanted to go down to the still water, and it was getting stronger, and she was getting tireder, and somewhere in those uncounted days the arithmetic of that quietly turned against her and she did not notice it turn.
?
She did not, afterward, remember leaving the studio.
That was the thing she could never make fit, going back over it.
She remembered the long evening light gone amber on Lark's empty chair.
She remembered sitting down on the floor of the shop with her back against the front counter because the chairs were both too full of meaning to bear.
She remembered the mark warm against her ribs, and the missing of Lark coming up so total and so drowning that she had, for once, simply let it, had stopped holding the line against it, had let herself go down into it because she was too tired not to.
She remembered thinking, with the last clear corner of her mind, that it felt like being carried.
And then she was standing at the river.
She came back into herself all at once, between one breath and the next, the way you surface from deep sleep into a strange room.
It was full dark. She was past the floodwall, down on the batture, the wild strip of mud and willow between the wall and the river below the Bywater wharves, where the city's noise fell away and there was only the wide black moving water and the lights of the far bank smeared across it.
Her boots were in the wet. The Mississippi went by in front of her, vast and quiet and pulling, the deep moving dread-water she had spent her whole life keeping to the far side of every path from, and she was standing in the edge of it with the silt sucking at her feet and no memory, none, not one second of it, of getting up off that floor and walking out the door and down through the dark to the one place in the world she would never, ever choose to go.
She made a sound she did not know for her own and lurched back out of the wet, up the muddy slope, her boots sliding, her hands going down into the cold silt, scrambling off the river's edge like it had teeth.
A good way up the batture she stopped and stood shaking, soaked to the shin, and made herself turn and look at the water she had nearly walked down into, and then made herself look down at her own chest.
Over her heart the mark was hot. Hot and eager and glad, pressed forward toward the water like a dog that has finally been let off the rope, and as Maren stood there with the river licking cold over her boots and its stink coming up around her, mud and diesel and the green rot of slack water, and her own pulse only now catching up to where her feet had already taken her, she understood, fully and for the first time, in her body and not just in Vesper's words, what she was carrying.
It had walked her here. While she grieved, it had taken her feet and walked her body down to deep water in the dark, and it had very nearly walked her in.
She stood on the batture a long time, shaking, soaked, while the river went by enormous and indifferent, and she made herself do the sum she had spent six days refusing.
She had sent Rowan away to keep her safe.
She had stayed clear of Odette to keep from losing Lark.
She had shut herself alone in a room with the one thing in the world she could not trust and called it protecting herself, and it had walked her to the lip of deep water inside a week.
The solitude she had pulled around herself like armour was the precise condition the thing had been waiting for.
Whatever she did next, she understood, climbing back up the slope toward the floodwall with her boots full of the river and the cold coming into her now in earnest, she was not going to be able to do it alone.
That was the meanest trick it had played on her yet, and she could not even be certain the bitterness she felt at it was her own.