Chapter 35
The next day, ?sterman gives us a ride back to Haro. It’s good of him to help us out, seeing as we don’t have a boat anymore.
What will Dad do now? He has to travel between islands for work. How will Mom get to her work shifts at the clinic on Djuro Island? The ferries are less frequent in winter.
I’m too tired to think. Let someone else figure it out. I go up to my room and immediately fall asleep under a blanket.
In the evening, Mom comes to my room with a tray of fried sausage, ketchup, and macaroni. Her voice is softer than usual, but she sounds completely exhausted.
Mom sits on the chair next to my bed while I eat. Every now and then she pats me on the legs where they stick out from under the blanket.
“How did you know?” I ask when I’ve finished eating.
She doesn’t seem surprised by my question.
“How did you know that I wasn’t your child?”
Mom lets out a little sigh.
“It was your eyes,” she says. “She . . . the other baby . . . she had gray eyes, like mine. Yours were green. Even then.”
I swallow, which still hurts. I don’t want to continue, but I don’t have a choice.
“Why have you never said anything?” I ask with a rasping throat. “Why didn’t you tell me? That I’m not yours?”
Mom’s face reveals contradictory emotions. For a moment I don’t think she’s going to answer, but then she surprises me.
“Your father,” she says hesitantly and looks away. “Your father was convinced that you were . . . you. He wanted so much for it to be true. Where else would you have come from, if you weren’t ours?”
What other answer had I been hoping for?
Her words are more hurtful than I could have possibly imagined. They succeed in doing what the kids at school have tried but never quite managed to do: make me feel small, worthless. Unwanted.
Then comes anger, flaring up like a raging flame. Anger at the fact that I’m not really her daughter. Even worse, not knowing where I belong, where I come from.
Mom takes my hands and squeezes them. “You needed me, Tuva. You needed me to be your mother.”
Her tone of voice makes the hard, sharp feeling in my chest soften. The anger evaporates as quickly as it appeared. I feel the warmth of her fingers against my cold skin.
“Then who am I?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Mom says, but she draws out the words in a way that makes me doubt she’s being entirely honest.
This is too much to take in, it’s all too much. It’s one thing to have suspicions. It’s quite another to actually hear Mom confirm them.
“Am I even human?”
I want her to say yes, of course I am. But she stays silent, so I have to say it myself and practically spit out the words:
“I am human!”
Except I’m not sure whether it’s true. I remember that voice whispering in my mind, deep underwater. The voice that came to me through the green haze.
You don’t have gills anymore.
I haven’t dared to look in the mirror since the accident, haven’t dared to look at my neck, at those thin reddish-pink scars that have always been there behind my jawbone.
Humans don’t have gills.
I tell myself it’s impossible. They’re not gills, they’re just scars. Scars from a boating accident long ago. I must have gotten caught on something sharp when our boat capsized, as Dad has explained many times.
“Your grandmother,” Mom says hesitantly. “She thinks that . . .”
I hold my breath.
Mom has tears in her eyes. She never cries.
She tries to blink back the tears until eventually she gives up and wipes them away with the back of her hand instead. “She thinks she knows . . . where you come from.”
Grandma Gerd.
I think on some level I already knew this. Grandma Gerd has always been suspicious of me.
I’m tired. So tired that my vision is swimming.
“I need to sleep.”
Mom leans forward and tucks me in. She tugs gently on the blanket, strokes my hair, and smooths it behind my ear.
“I don’t know where you came from,” she says softly. “But I’m glad you came to us.”