CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“If you want to incinerate me today, you can go ahead,” I tell Calliope, stumbling down the path towards the riverbank.
She barely lifts her head, only lets one large, golden eye trail me as I walk towards my rock and plop down on it.
I needed to get away from everyone else, if only for a few minutes.
Everest is with Valentin at the archives, working through our plan for the next trip, which means the river is the only place where I can find any sort of peace.
I kick off my shoes and dip my feet into the water, hissing at its ice-cold embrace.
It’s like manacles that click over my ankles, pinning me down, but after the first wave of pain, the river’s memories lap over my toes.
They feel warm, little reminders of who I am and where I come from.
I study the foam for hints, and I don’t know if it’s the recent state of affairs or confirmation bias, but I see Novalie, Valentin, images of my old home, my ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars.
I see my early days in medical school, evenings spent at the local bar, drunk on whiskey and bellowing the lyrics to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” during karaoke.
I see my dad.
My heart crumples. I learned centuries ago that, contrary to what human folklore and stories would have you believe, immortality doesn’t mean the loss of humanity so much as the transformation of it.
I’m not free of pain, sadness, and love; but my perspective on all of it has taken on a grand scale that I wouldn’t have access to as someone who only lived a few decades.
I’ve mourned my parents already – several times, in fact.
First, when I understood I was stuck here, then when enough years had passed that I knew that they were no longer alive.
Then the trip to Bangalore happened, and they resurrected.
The hope in my chest was more painful than any other form of grief.
In some ways, though, I started mourning them before the fair.
When I was in my early twenties, my mother sent me a text message, saying something happened to dad.
It had all been okay – he had twisted his ankle on a run – but I stared at the words on the screen for a full ten minutes, and then waited another twenty minutes, shuffling around my apartment pretending to clean, before calling her back.
I didn’t want to know what happened. I was in medical school, I had seen children turn into caretakers, I’d watched my friends mourn their parents, but I wasn’t ready for it to be me.
I’d been guilt-ridden for the rest of the day – what if it had been really serious?
What if mom needed me and I’d willfully ignored her?
An aspiring healthcare professional, and I couldn’t be depended upon by my own blood.
I’ve carried that guilt with me since, and I never let down someone I love again.
But that was the beginning of a grief that’s stretched across centuries, and I’m only just beginning to understand that it’ll never let go.
When I learned what the river was, I’d wanted to see what it would show me, but it was too painful.
All I could think of is how I’d left it all behind.
Now, I wonder, what would I have done had I known the cost?
Would I have memorized the graffiti on the walls of the karaoke bar we frequented more carefully?
Strung the chords of my favorite songs into the instruments of my mind, so the melody would stay with me forever?
Would I have bid my family and friends a sweeter goodbye?
Or would I have stayed?
“How has every other keeper done this?” I ask Calliope.
“The same way you have,” says a voice behind me. Geneva drifts to my side, looking uncharacteristically solemn. “Everest noticed you were gone. I had a feeling you’d be here. I spent many a day at the river, reminiscing about the past.”
“He can’t give me a moment of peace.”
“He told me to leave you alone for a while,” Geneva says, standing in front of me. “I’m the one who wanted to come see what it would take to pull your head out of your ass.”
Calliope snorts, repositioning her head over her front paw so she has a better view of her entertainment.
Unfortunately for her, I’m not in the mood. “Go away, Geneva. Let me wallow.”
A cold gust penetrates my brain as she thrusts her hand into my skull. “What exactly are you wallowing about?”
“Did you just whack my head?” I ask, gasping for air to thaw the brain freeze.
“You deserve more than that for being this melodramatic.”
My jaw drops. “You’re calling me melodramatic?”
“I’ve watched you feel sorry for yourself for centuries now.” Geneva scolds. “How much longer will you let this go on?”
Irritation turns into anger. “For as long as I want!”
I get to my feet and blood rushes to my head, blotting ink across my vision.
“How much longer will you try telling me how to feel? I understand that you and I don’t see eye to eye on many things, but I don’t bash your perspective every opportunity I get.
I respect your opinions, even if I disagree. ”
“Oh?” Geneva asks archly. She’s cool and composed, while I’m heaving like an elephant in labor. Somehow, she still makes me feel like a child, and I resent it more and more each second. “Do you remember our conversation the night of your first eclipse?”
The question catches me off guard. There’s a lot I’ve tried to erase from my memory when it comes to that first eclipse, but frankly, there’s a lot that’s escaped me without intent.
“No?”
Geneva looks deeply satisfied. “I know. You were drunk out of your mind and upset about whatever happened with Everest. But I came after you. We sat right here and talked.”
It returns to me, the image of a solid Geneva in a crimson gown that fanned across the riverbank like a pool of rubies. Her voice was coaxing and soft, but it was drowned out by my emotion.
“You were so young,” Geneva says. “My heart broke for you. I wanted to talk to you about everything, offer you a shoulder to lean on. You spat in my face.”
“I would never–”
“You might as well have.” Geneva smooths the creases on her form-fitting dress.
“And I forgave you. But I never stopped trying to reach out, maybe not with the tone or approach you’d prefer, but frankly, I grew tired of coddling you when you weren’t receptive to it.
And you insisted I leave you alone, because I, the keeper before you, could never understand what you were feeling. ”
Her sarcasm stings like a nest of wasps, disturbed by an unforgivable force.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But it is,” Geneva says firmly. “So do not tell me you respect my opinions, Ryka. Because you’ve never even given me a chance.”
I want to defend myself, want to tell her that it’s not as she thinks, that I know she left a life behind as well, but her broken expression leaves me speechless.
“I remember when I realized that I’d never see my little girl again,” Geneva says quietly. “I remember understanding that my quest to come here to give her a better life meant that I wouldn’t be around to see it. It fucking sucked.”
I’ve never heard Geneva like this before, her barbed-wire tongue aimed inwards, not out.
She’s never talked about her daughter to me – I heard about the reason for her trip to the fair through the other ghosts, the ones who bore witness to her grief.
Her husband had died shortly before the fair found her.
Geneva wasn’t a working woman, but she did her best as a single mother, finding odd jobs to pay the bills.
But if I know anything about Geneva, it’s that she wasn’t satisfied with anything but the best for her only child, and at her most desperate, the fair appeared to her.
Geneva, like me, had someone she was ready to give anything up for.
“I’m sorry,” I say, knowing it’s not enough. No one but past keepers understand the sacrifice this place demands. Still, Geneva and I have never found ourselves on the same footing – what with her worship of the place, and my resentment of it.
“Don’t be.” Geneva wipes her cheeks angrily.
“You know why? Because I can grieve the consequences of my decision, but it was my decision. No one forced me to come here; it was an opportunity, a gift. And yes, it would have been nice to have the details of this deal with the devil that so many of us make over and over again. But that’s life, Ryka.
There’s a reason people out there can’t see the carousel. ”
I stare at the water near my feet. The images of my family morph: my mom ages before me, and my parents, grey-haired, sit on the porch of our old house.
They turn young the next moment: my dad, skin tight around his sharp bones, proudly leads a lecture on differential equations at Stanford.
My mom, hair glossy and long, gently caresses her swollen belly.
Geneva’s hand ghosts over the water and the images freeze. My parents are mid-smile, in the middle of a spirited conversation, but as each second passes, the sight becomes haunting.
“They can’t see where the threads of their lives fray and fall apart, where their paths may lead if they chose a different fork in the road,” Geneva adds.
“What matters, though, is that we make choices. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not, but we live with them.
Tell me, after seeing Novalie in the bowl, after getting to know her family, would you go back and change what you did? ”
It’s the same question I was asking myself earlier. The answer crystallizes on my tongue as the pictures of my parents fade into the pale, blue waters.
“No.” I may not have known the price of her life, but I’d been prepared to pay anything back then, hadn’t I? “I just… this isn’t what I envisioned for myself, and every time I step into the carousel, I’m reminded of what I walked away from.”
“You get to live a thousand lives every day, Ryka,” Geneva says sadly. “And you’re so busy clinging to the idea of what you think you should have had, that you don’t see what you have right now. Very rarely does a person end up precisely where they think they will be. It doesn’t make it wrong.”
Calliope lets out a trail of smoke that weaves between Geneva and me. “Your dreams are allowed to change,” Geneva says. “And if you wake up, you’ll see that they already have.”