CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
Maren did not answer, and Calla took the silence for the listening it partly was, and leaned in closer over the still black water, and her voice dropped to something almost confiding.
"You've nearly found them already. I can see it on you.
The one who walked her down to the water.
" She let that sit. "I won't take it from you by saying the name, child, because it has to be yours, the finding and the answering both.
That is the whole of how the debt gets paid.
But when you have them, when you're standing in front of the one who took her from you, you come back to me, and I will show you how to make it right.
One life given back for the one that was taken.
It is the oldest justice there is, older than this city, older than the Church that pretends to be above it.
You balance the books in blood, and the Mother is satisfied, and your Lark is sealed to you, safe, forever.
" She smiled, warm as a banked fire. "It isn't even a sin, what I'm offering you.
It's only grief, made into a thing that lasts. "
And the mark over Maren's heart, silent since the night with Rowan, woke.
It did not go cold. It did not warn. It warmed, and it pressed forward toward Calla and the still black pool, and it glowed, a slow spreading heat of pleasure across her ribs like a cat arching into a hand, glad, so glad, because this was the thing it had been steering her toward the whole time, down every clue and into the river, this exact garden and this exact offer, and for one second, one whole unforgivable second, sitting by the still water with Lark's stolen coloring smiling at her and Lark's silent weight glowing happy against her heart, Maren wanted it.
Wanted it with the entire seven-year-old core of her that had watched a door close on her mother and sworn never again.
Keep her. She never leaves. You never have to do the goodbye.
The want went through her so total and so sweet that she heard her own breath change, and Calla saw it, and Calla's face opened into something close to joy, because she had her, she could see she had her, the girl was going to say yes.
And in that second Maren saw the whole rest of her life the way Calla was selling it.
The studio reopened or shuttered, it would not matter.
Rowan kept at arm's length or sent away kindly, it would not matter.
Nothing mattering ever again except the warm glad weight on her ribs that would never cool and never leave, Lark on her skin in the dark for forty more years.
A marriage with a held thing in it. And the worst of the want, the part that made it nearly win, was that from the inside it did not look like horror at all.
From the inside it looked like never being left again.
It looked like the one promise her whole life had sworn to her she could never have.
Maren stood up so fast the chair scraped.
Calla did not rise to stop her, and it was the not-rising that followed Maren out the door, worse than any hand on the arm would have been.
The woman simply sat by her still black pool with her hands loose in her lap and her stolen auburn head tipped to one side and watched Maren go with a patience so deep it was almost tenderness, the patience of someone who has set a current running and has only to wait for it to carry the swimmer where the water always carries them.
"Go on home, child," she said to Maren's back, warm, unhurried, certain.
"Sit with it. I'll be here when you're ready, and you will be ready.
The water's coming up high. And grief like yours always comes back to the water in the end. "
She got out of the garden and back through the cool water-colored rooms with the gray woman gliding behind her and out the front door into the loud ordinary heat of Esplanade, the streetcar somewhere and a dog barking and the green oaks moving, the whole living indifferent city, and she stood on the path with her heart slamming and her chest hot, the mark still glowing its slow glad heat, pleased with her, pleased with how close she'd come, and she understood with a cold that had nothing to do with the leash that she had just felt, fully and from the inside, exactly how she was meant to die.
Not dragged. Not forced. Offered. They were going to hand her Lark forever and let her own broken heart walk her into the cup, gladly, saying thank you, the way Calla still believed Lark had.
Rowan was out of the truck and halfway across the avenue before Maren reached the gate, reading her face.
Maren got into the passenger seat and shut the door and sat with both hands pressed flat over her own glowing heart as if she could hold it down, and when she could make words she said the thing that frightened her more than any threat the woman could have made.
"Drive," she said. "Just drive. Rowan, for one second in there I wanted it. I wanted to say yes. And the second I wanted it, she," Maren pressed harder at her own chest, at the warm glad weight of the dead girl who was also the leash, "she was happy."