CHAPTER FOURTEEN #2
“What? How do you…” Valentin asks, tearing away from the bowl. I can sense when she puts it together. “Oh, my god. She told me about you. You went to the…”
I can’t look at Valentin as she starts connecting the dots. Around us, everyone’s mumbling with confusion.
Only Everest quietly asks, “Who is she?”
I smile as Novalie hands her granddaughter an art easel.
“My best friend.”
I find Valentin at the bottom of the foothills, lying flat on her back in the snow.
“You should put this under you,” I tell her, tossing a blanket down. The only sign that she hears me is a twitch of her finger as it grazes the blanket. Otherwise, she remains fixated on the aurora, the hints of green dancing across her face.
I lay down the blanket myself, then sit, shivering as the snow molds to my weight.
“I’m okay,” Valentin says after a second. “I mean, I’m not completely okay, but I’m better than I thought I would be. The last hour, as everything came back to me…that was tough. I feel like I’ve gone through the five stages of grief five hundred times through.”
“Relatable.”
She pulls away from the night sky to look at me. I can see the string of questions sparkling silver on her tongue, but she bites them back one by one. “Do you miss it?”
The answer is immediate. “Yes. Everyday.”
Valentin’s brow furrows. “Have you tried to go back?”
This time I hesitate. “Every day.”
A look of understanding sweeps over her. “Do you think me being here…as in, me specifically, has something to do with you? You know, with mom…”
Mom.
I’ve had an hour to process it, but I don’t think I’ve even come close to wrapping my head around it.
Novalie has a daughter, a granddaughter, a whole lineage that I would undoubtedly have been a part of.
I wonder what gifts I would have showered on baby Val, whether Nova had given birth at our hospital.
I study Valentin for similarities, and it’s jarring how many there are now that I know the truth.
Before, she just looked familiar, but reckoning with that would mean that the centuries have swept away the sharp edges of my memories.
How many faces from my past could now belong to anyone else?
“She told you about me,” I say, unsure how to continue.
“Of course she did,” she says. “I knew your name before I even knew my own. She told me she owed you her life. I didn’t know all the details until I was older, but I have to confess, I thought she was making it all up.
The fair part, I mean. I thought maybe you’d had a horrible accident, and the trauma had led her to create this narrative in her head. ”
“I would probably have thought the same. I don’t think I believed this place existed until it showed up in front of me.”
“You didn’t go looking for it?”
I run my fingers through the snow, wondering if that feels different here too.
“God, no. We loved the myth, but I never thought it was real. The fair found me, not the other way around. Your mother…she wasn’t getting better; nothing was working.
I had been at the hospital for a week straight, no sleep.
I’m not sure I was in the right state of mind when I left for a run. ”
My voice is grated with grief. Even though this happened centuries ago, the terror of nearly losing a loved one is not something that fully goes away.
“We’d grown up together and planned our lives out, side by side.
We had worked through every obstacle, and all of a sudden none of it mattered.
I couldn’t lose her. That’s all I was thinking.
It’s surreal, what happens to your brain when you’re desperate beyond belief, and thinking back on it, it was clear something supernatural was at play. ”
Back then, I didn’t know what the carousel felt like, but now I’d recognize its radiant touch anywhere.
“I was on a trail, searching for some sort of reprieve that wasn’t humanly possible to obtain, and then the fair showed up.
There was a bright, silver light, so blinding I covered my eyes, convinced I’d hit my head too hard, and then Geneva stood in front of me. ”
I jerk as Valentin’s hand reaches for mine, but I don’t pull away. The memory of that cold, Bay Area night is my own personal ghost, clinging to my back with its arm pressing down on the fragile bone of my throat.
“Thank you,” she says quietly. “It’s not nearly enough to just thank you. But thank you.”
I close my fingers around hers. “It means a lot to know that it was all worth it.”
And it is. I’ve been left to wonder all these years about the other end of this bargain I’d unsuspectingly struck, the Faustian reward that I’d never gotten to confirm for myself. Until she showed up at the foot of the carousel.
“As for your question,” I say. “I don’t know if it has to do with me, but I have to imagine we’re connected in some way.
We’ll have to figure that out with Quill, but this is a promising first step.
We pulled off scrying, we got back your memories, and she’s going to work on the spell to take us back to your home. Through a portal, like I’d mentioned.”
“Would you stay?” Valentin asks after a pause. “If you could, that is.”
It’s the question I’ve been asking myself.
The possibility is suddenly threatening, looming, more convoluted than it’s ever been.
On the one hand, this is all I’ve wanted since learning about my indenture as keeper.
On the other hand, I’d always imagined returning to my time, back in my early residency years with Novalie by my side.
What would it look like to go back to Valentin’s adulthood, still around the people I love, but so far removed from the fatigued twenty-seven-year-old who had each milestone laid out in her mind’s eye?
“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “Tell me more about her though, about all of them.”
And Valentin does. She tells me about Nova, who followed our plan to the T.
First Black female cardiothoracic surgeon at San Francisco Hospital, residency coordinator and department chair later in her career.
She met Valentin’s dad at our karaoke bar while delivering her iconic rendition of Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is”.
Poor guy didn’t stand a chance. He’s a real estate developer, quiet and mild-mannered, the calm to Novalie’s storm and the wind beneath her wings.
They have two children, Valentin and her younger brother, Zion, who’s currently regretting his decision to follow in his sister’s footsteps at the trauma ward.
“He loves it, though,” she laughs, and I do too, because I remember that feeling, the exhilaration that came with the late nights, the intense feeling of purpose behind my existence that’s palpable after a successful surgery.
She tells me about her wife and their daughter, and I’m crying all over again.
Valentin watches me quietly, like she understands everything I’m feeling, even though she can’t.
No one possibly can. I’m being torn apart by joy and love, by grief and envy.
It’s ugly and vicious and so wholly human in a way I’ve forgotten.
“This might be a long shot, but do you know how my parents are doing?” I ask.
They’ve been on my mind ever since I saw that little girl on her grandfather’s lap.
Right now, I’d do anything to hug my mom, to feel the press of her gold bangles as she holds me tight.
I’d give everything up to sit across the table from my dad and help him solve the crossword, laughing as he shakes his head at references he doesn’t understand.
Valentin stills. “Yes, of course. Mom’s always kept in touch with them, and I’ve known them as long as my own grandparents. They downsized. Left Palo Alto and moved into an apartment in the Outer Sunset, so it’s easier for us to visit.”
My heart twinges. Mom always said the house was too big for her, and it must have felt cavernous after I left.
“Your dad retired a couple years ago,” Valentin continues. “It took a lot of convincing from your mom, my mom, and me, honestly. You know how he is.”
“Stubborn as ever.” My dad loved teaching, and he always said he’d only resign when he wasn’t able to work anymore. “Wait. Why did you all want him to stop?”
Mental math has never been my strong suit; add in adjusting for time travel and now generations of family members…I’m in a tizzy.
When Valentin’s expression shutters, my stomach turns on itself. “Your dad…he developed a bad heart condition a few years ago. He passed in his sleep last year.”
The world sways dangerously around me. It’s shattering, the moment you realize that the most time you’ve spent with your parents is in the past, that you can scramble to find more but it won’t be enough.
But I never got to have that gradual realization.
I never got to experience their infrequent appearances at my shoebox, one-bedroom apartment, the last-minute trips squeezed in over rare long weekends, the absentminded visits where I’m half home and half caught up in the brutal pace of my present, aged up and aged down in the house that’s seen it all. I never even got to try for more.
“I’m sorry, Ryka,” Valentin says, squeezing my hand. My pulse pushes against the warmth of her fingers, blazing hot, threatening to burst through my skin.
“And mom?”
“She’s alive,” she says, but I can tell that’s not the whole story. “She’s been ill, though. I was checking on her before all of this happened, and she’s been deteriorating. Hasn’t been the same since your dad.”
My nails dig into my skin. This shouldn’t be shocking. My mom must be in her eighties by now – eighties and living by herself. It should be me by her side, but I left her. I’m being sawed in half by a dull blade, but there isn’t enough of me for it to go through.
“Thank you for talking to me,” I tell Valentin. I retreat to my tent in blaring silence.