Marked By Tide

Chapter 9 - The Mother

Nerida's POV

I wake up alone again.

It is morning — different morning, *next* morning, the morning after the morning I gave Paloma my name. The light is doing the same gold-at-the-edges thing through the window and the wood ceiling is doing the honey-brown thing and the herb smell is still in the air, but there is something new in the room with me this morning, something I cannot place for the first few seconds because I have not had it in five years and my brain does not have it stored where the brain stores things it can identify quickly.

I figure out what it is after a long moment of lying still and listening.

It is *rest*.

I have rested. Not just slept — *rested*. The bed is the same bed and the herbs are the same herbs but my body underneath the blanket is different than it was twenty-four hours ago. The wound at my side is still wide-awake but the rest of me has settled into the bed in a way I have not let my body settle in five years. Sleep, with Jareth in the house, has not been *rest*. Sleep has been the part of the day where I was most defenseless and the part of the day where my body kept the most of its alertness running anyway, because the alertness was what kept me alive while I was unconscious.

Last night I slept. Actually slept. Through the night. In a bed in a strange room in a place I have been told I am safe in.

I lie still and let myself notice it. The not-static is louder than the static was. The absence of the constant low fear-hum is — I do not know what to do with the space it has left behind. The space is *me*. There is a *me* in here without the fear filling the rest of the room. I have not had a chance to find out what that me is.

I do not have time to find out this morning either.

Paloma's voice, from the back room: "Nerida. Are you awake."

I say: "Yes."

"Someone is going to come see you this morning. She is here now. She will come in when you are ready. There is no rush. Tell me when you are ready."

I sit with the *she is here now*.

The first thing my body wants to do is the old thing — the *prepare* thing, the *check what version of yourself you are going to put on* thing, the *who is asking and what do they want and what do I owe them* thing. My body has done this every morning of my life for five years and my body is doing it again now, because my body does not yet know the rules have changed, and my body is going to take time to learn the new rules.

I let my body do the prepare. I do not fight it. I roll the question through — *who is going to come see me, what are they going to want, what am I willing to give them* — and I am most of the way through it when I realize the answer to the first question is *I don't know*, and the answer to the second question is *I don't know*, and the answer to the third question is *I will find out when I see her*, and the not-knowing is allowed to be the answer this morning, because I have been told it is allowed.

I take a breath. The wound pulls. I let it pull.

I say: "I am ready."

---

Paloma comes in first. She crosses to the chair beside the bed and sits — the chair the first man was in two nights ago, the chair Paloma was in yesterday — and she settles, easy and slow, the way she has been settling.

She says: "I want to tell you who is here before she comes in. Is that all right."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Her name is Juno. She is — she is the mother of the men who found you. She is also the wife of the man who runs this community. She has asked to introduce herself in the first capacity, not the second one, because the second one would be a lot to put on you this morning. She is one of my oldest friends. She is going to be very kind to you. She is also going to be careful. Do you have any questions before I let her in."

I have a lot of questions. I ask none of them. I have learned, over the last day, that Paloma will tell me what I need to know when I need to know it, and that asking her to tell me more than what she has offered is not the way the rules of this room work. The rules of this room are *Paloma tells me what is safe to tell me, and I trust the timing*. I am still testing the rules. They have not failed me yet.

I say: "How old is she."

Paloma considers. She says: "Fifty-one."

I say: "All right."

Paloma stands up. She crosses to the door. She opens it. She says, into the next room: "Juno. She is ready."

The woman who comes in is tall.

That is the first thing. Taller than Paloma. Taller than I expected. She is in a long wool dress the color of sand, and her hair is dark with silver running through it, and she is — she has the kind of presence I have only ever seen on women in the movies my mother used to watch, the kind of woman who can be in a room and have the room rearrange itself around her without her having to do anything to make it happen. She is not posturing. She is just *present*, completely, in a way I have not seen since my mother was alive.

She stops a few feet from the bed.

She does not come closer. She does not sit. She gives me — I notice this without thinking about it — the same arm's length of space Paloma has been giving me, and I notice that I have stopped having to ask people for the space and they are giving it to me anyway, and the noticing is one more small thing to file with the other small things I have been filing since I woke up yesterday.

She says: "Nerida."

Her voice is — not what I expected. I expected the voice of a woman in charge of things, which she clearly is. I get instead the voice of a woman who has been a mother for a long time. The voice is warm and slightly low and is doing the thing my own mother's voice used to do when she was trying not to wake me up.

She says: "May I sit."

I say: "Yes."

She comes to the chair beside the bed and sits — the chair Paloma was in five minutes ago, the chair the first man was in two nights ago, the chair that is becoming the chair *that is sat in by people I am letting be near me*, which is a category I have not had in five years. She settles into it the way Paloma settles into it — body easy, hands folded, no pretending to be smaller than she is and no taking up more space than she needs.

She says: "I am Juno. I am — I want to introduce myself, this morning, as the mother of the men who carried you here. There is more to say about who I am, and we will say it later when you are stronger. But this morning, the part of me that is going to be in the room with you is the mother of those two men. Is that all right."

I say: "Yes."

She nods.

She says: "Before I ask you anything, I want to tell you something. You are safe. You are going to stay safe. Paloma has told you that. I am telling you the same thing again because I know it has not been true for you in a long time and one telling is not going to be enough."

I do not respond. My throat does not have a response in it. The sentence — *I know it has not been true for you in a long time* — has just done something to my chest that I am going to need a minute to recover from. She has said it the way you say a thing you *know*. Not the way you say a thing you have guessed. She knows. I do not know how she knows. I do not have the energy to ask her how she knows. I sit with the knowing and let it land where it is going to land.

She waits.

She does not look at me while I do not respond. She looks at the foot of the bed instead, at her own folded hands, at the window. She is giving me the room to recover without making me feel watched while I do.

I find my voice eventually. I say: "Thank you."

Juno says: "You are welcome."

---

She asks her first question.

She says: "What do you need from us today, Nerida. Anything at all. I will give you what I can give you. The things I cannot give you, I will tell you why I cannot."

I sit with the question.

It is — *not* the question I expected. I expected the question to be *what happened*. I expected the question to be *who did this*. I expected the question to be *what is your full story*. I had been preparing answers for those questions while my body was doing the prepare-thing earlier, layered in the order I usually layer them, and I had been getting ready to hand her the version of myself that would be safest to hand a stranger.

She is not asking me for that.

She is asking me what I need.

I say, after a long beat: "I do not know."

She says: "That is allowed. You do not have to know. I am asking because it is a thing I want you to know I asked. We can come back to it."

I say: "I — water would be good."

Paloma is already moving. The cup is in Juno's hand a second after I have said it, and Juno holds it for me at the angle that lets me drink it at my own pace, and she is good at this too — the same not-comment, the same not-making-it-mean-anything. I drink. I cry, just a little this time, less than yesterday, the kind of crying that happens because someone has given you water without asking anything for it and your body cannot yet not-cry about that.

Juno does the same thing Paloma did. She does not comment. She lets me drink. She takes the cup back when I am done and sets it on the table beside the bed and sits back in her chair.

She says: "Anything else."

I say: "I — I do not know what is going to happen next."

Juno nods slowly. She says: "I can tell you what is going to happen next, if you would like. There are pieces I do not know yet. I will tell you what I know."

I say: "Please."

She tells me.

She tells me that I am going to stay in this room with Paloma for several more days, possibly longer, until Paloma is satisfied I am healed enough to move. She tells me that food will come, and water, and that I will be left to rest unless I ask for company. She tells me that a few people will come see me in the meantime — herself, this morning. Tamsin, who I have been told about. Eventually the two men who carried me in, *when I am ready*, *only when I am ready*, *not before*. She tells me that her husband — the man who runs this place — will not come see me himself unless I ask, because they have decided as a family that I should not have to meet him until I have chosen to, and she tells me that the *as a family* is the part she wants me to hear and that I do not have to do anything with it yet.

She says: "Beyond that, the next weeks will be your weeks. We will be careful with you. We will be honest with you about anything you ask us about. There are things we will ask you, in time, when you are stronger. None of those things will be asked today. Are we clear."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Good. I have one question for today, and it is not the question you have been preparing answers for. Is that all right."

I look at her.

The look is its own response. She has seen me preparing. She has seen me layering. She has seen the work I have been doing in my body for the last five minutes while she has been talking to me, and she has not commented on it, and she is now telling me she has seen it the way you tell someone something you have been seeing for a long time without making it a problem.

I say: "Yes."

She says: "The person who hurt you. Will you tell me his relationship to you."

I sit with the question.

It is — small enough. She is not asking for the name. She is not asking for the story. She is asking for the *category*, which is the smallest possible thing I could give her, and she has framed it that way on purpose.

I say: "My brother."

I add, because she has been so careful and I want to give her one more piece: "He has been my legal guardian since I was thirteen."

She absorbs both pieces. Her face does not change. Her hands do not move on her lap. But something in the room does the thing the room did yesterday with Paloma — the *settling*, the *I have the information, I am going to do something with it later, you do not need to watch me do it* shape of a woman who is going to handle the pieces I have given her.

She says: "Thank you for telling me."

I say: "There is more. I cannot say more this morning. I will say more when I can."

She says: "There is no rush. I want to ask one thing about what you have already told me. May I."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Are you afraid of him."

I open my mouth.

I close it.

The truthful answer is *yes*. The truthful answer is *yes, I am afraid of him, I have been afraid of him for five years, I am afraid of him now in a different room with the door closed because somewhere on the other side of the line in the trees he is walking around in his house deciding what he is going to do about the fact that I am gone*. The truthful answer is *yes* and it is going to come out of my mouth and Juno is going to take it back to her husband and her husband is going to make decisions based on the fact that I am afraid of my brother, and I —

I say, without deciding to say it: "Please don't tell him I'm afraid."

Juno does not ask me to clarify.

She does not say *don't tell who*. She knows. She has been listening. She knows the *him* I mean is her husband, the man who runs this place, the one she is going to be reporting to about this conversation. She has known that *him* was the question even before I opened my mouth to refuse to answer it.

She says: "I will not."

I say: "He doesn't need to know."

Juno says, with the very smallest amount of dry that her voice has had since she came in: "He won't need to be told."

I almost smile. I do not. But the corner of my mouth does the small thing it did yesterday with Paloma, and Juno sees it and does not comment, and she has now learned the same thing Paloma learned about not commenting on the small things, and the not-commenting is once again the kindest thing she could do.

---

She is quiet for a long beat.

Then she says: "One more thing, Nerida. The same kind of question as the last one. May I."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Is there anything you want to know from me, this morning."

I think about it.

There are a hundred things I want to know. I want to know what *the people who live here* are. I want to know what *we have agreed to help you while you heal* actually means — what *we* is, what *agreed* meant, who agreed and who decided. I want to know what *pack* is, the word Paloma used yesterday that has not been used by anyone in the room with me since. I want to know what the men last night were *for*. I want to know what is going to happen when Jareth comes for me, which he will, and what they are planning to do about it, and what they want from me in return for whatever they are going to do.

I do not ask any of those questions.

I ask the smallest possible question, the one I have been holding since I woke up the first time, the question my body has been wanting to ask before any of the bigger ones:

"The man who carried me in. What is his name."

Juno's face does something.

She is, I see, *moved*. She is moved in a way that surprises her. Her hand goes briefly to the edge of her own jaw and then back down to her lap, and her eyes do a small wet thing she does not let move further than her eyes, and she has the look of a woman whose son has just been asked about by a girl in a way that means more to the woman than the girl yet understands.

She says: "His name is Cassian."

She lets me have it.

She does not give me the rest. She does not give me the second name. She does not give me — she gives me the one name I asked for, and she gives it to me clean.

I say it back to myself, internally. *Cassian.* The man whose hand was almost-touching me through the blanket. The man whose chair I asked to look at one more time before I closed my eyes. The man whose name I have been making decisions about for two nights without having.

Cassian.

Juno waits.

I say: "And the other one."

Juno says: "Soren. They are twins. They are my sons. They are the people who found you."

I say the names again, internally. *Cassian. Soren. Cassian. Soren.* The first one is the warm one. The second one is the one who came around the bed and crouched beside my face and said two things I could not hear. I do not know which name belongs to which yet — I will find out when I see them again. But I have the names now. The names are real. The men are real. They have *names*.

I say: "Thank you."

Juno says: "You are welcome."

She stands.

She says: "I am going to go now. You are going to sleep again — I can see it on your face. Paloma will come check on you. I will come back tomorrow, if you would like me to. Or the day after. Or in a week. Tell Paloma when you want to see me, and I will come."

I say: "Tomorrow is fine."

She nods.

She says: "One more thing. I know I said one more thing already. This is genuinely the last one." Her voice has gone, again, the very slightly dry. "My sons are going to ask me, when I leave here, what we talked about. I am not going to tell them. The conversation between you and me is the conversation between you and me. The conversation between you and them is going to be the conversation between you and them. I have raised both of them to understand the difference, and they will understand it, even if Cassian sulks. Is that all right."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Good."

She crosses to the door. She stops with her hand on the frame, the way Soren did the night before, in the same chair, in the same pose. She looks back. She says: "Nerida."

I say: "Yes."

She says: "Welcome."

She goes.

---

I lie in the bed for a long time after she leaves.

I have given a woman the category of who hurt me. I have given her the framework — *brother*, *legal guardian since thirteen*. I have asked her not to tell her husband I am afraid, and she has agreed. I have asked her the names of the men who carried me in, and she has given me both. I have learned that the family has decided, *as a family*, that I should not have to meet her husband until I have chosen to. I have learned the word *family* applied to a group of people who have been making decisions about me with my own preferences as the deciding factor, which is a use of the word *family* I have not experienced in five years.

I close my eyes.

I think — for one second only, because the thought is going to be too big for me to think about today and I will set it aside before it can take root — I think: *I do not know what I have walked into. I know it is not what I left.*

I sleep.

The chair beside my bed is empty.

The cushion still has the indent.