The Tides (30 page)

Faye was starting to lose patience. She did not like challenges. Things should be easy and come to her as her due. She began to frown, then thought better of it and
instead formed a pretty little
moue
with her lips and made a grand dismissive motion with one hand, careful to keep her wrists gracefully bent so as to show off her long glossy nails to their best advantage. An image of herself came to her that the rather liked, so she turned both palms upward, cupped them slightly, and wiggled all her fingers toward Rebecca in a lovely, playful, insistent beckoning. 'Oh, but I'm your
real
mother. Come here!'

'You're not very real to me?'

Now Faye allowed tears to trickle from her eyes, her voice to wail and crack a little. Why was this girl being so stubborn? 'How can you treat me this way, Becky? Your own mother! After all this time . . .'

'I didn't even know you existed until Dad started talking about you, just lately.'

Faye nodded. She wasn't surprised. 'They had no right to hide us from each other! My own flesh and blood! It wasn't their secret.' Faye was weeping in earnest now, but softly, no ugly sobbing, facial contortions limited to a puckering of the mouth that she knew made her look childishly pouty and endearing but that could be easily reversed.

'Dad keeps calling you,' Rebecca said accusingly, as if that meant something. 'Since he's had Alzheimer's, he says your name and talks about you a lot. Talks to you.'

'Marshall's such a dear,' Faye cooed, smug through the trailing off of her tears. 'He always did love me so much.'

'He's been married to my mother for a long time,' Rebecca objected.

'She's not your mother! I'm your mother! Do you hear me?
I'm
your mother!' Thoroughly exasperated, Faye darted forward and managed to catch Rebecca's wrist.

'She raised me. Sh
e was there when I needed her.'

'Oh, honey, I'm not any good with kids. Really. Trust me, you were better off. But now you're all grown up, and you and I can have such
fun
together.' She rested her free hand against Rebecca's cheek, having learned a long time ago that people would allow you all sorts of liberties if you just acted as if you had the right, and that made them your accomplices.

The lake rose around them. The sky lowered. Rebecca felt no moisture, but the sensation of tides coming in and going out at split-second intervals made her skin crawl and her thoughts elide. The touch on her cheek widened and deepened to take in the entire side of her face, then pressed lightly against her mouth so that she could kiss the tender palm, for an instant stopping her breath.

Billie turned her ankle and went down hard.

Marshall was riding through Faye, the force of his trajectory spreading Faye apart, shoving aside one manifestation of Faye after another. Much of the time he couldn't exactly see or hear his daughter, but his mental image of her was a clear and steady stick figure in the miasma that was Faye, and he kept himself focused on that, headed for her, sometimes forgetting why, sometimes knowing better than he'd ever known anything who he was at this moment in his life and what he was doing here. Faye was under his wheels, turning them and keeping them from turning, propelling him forward and trying to tip him over. Faye was in his face. Faye was dancing in his mind, jumbling his thoughts like a child's blocks, mixing up his thoughts one with the others like fingerpaint. But he couldn't stop now. He was almost there.

Rebecca made a slight but definite movement into rather than away from the cradle of Faye's palm. Faye had been alert for just such an opportunity. She stepped in
and took her daughter in her arms.

Faye's substantialit
y was both surprising and primal
ly familiar. Rebecca didn't know what she'd expected
—
she wouldn't have said she'd expected anything
—
but she allowed, then went into, then returned the embrace as if she had no choice, and the shock of Faye's undeniable presence was shot through with relief. There was something profoundly comforting and profoundly unsettling about being pressed like this against Faye's small body, so like her own; about the intimate fall of blonde curls among her own blonde curls; about the sensation of being identified and filled in ways she hadn't even known she was missing. Rose fragrance adhered to the hollow of her neck and the insides of her wrists, taking on slightly personal qualities as it interacted with her own chemistry but still fundamentally roses, fundamentally Faye's. Silver-pink lipstick smeared onto both corners of her mouth.

Faye whispered, 'Come away with me. Let's go someplace fun.'

'I can't.'

'Sure you can. Who'd miss you here? Your boyfriend? Your boss? Your dad?' Faye laughed.

Turning, swimming in the fog and wind, spun by the cloud of minute particles off the surface of the waxing and waning lake, Rebecca looked back at The Tides. A wash of colors and shapes, one indistinguishable from the next and in no real pattern, it hovered without either foundation or roofline between the waves of ground and sky. From every blurred doorway, Faye beckoned. She lolled in every bed. The skirt and wide sleeves of her gown frothed at every opening and closing window. The stench of roses whipped in the laughter of the storm.

Hobbling on her twiste
d ankle, which hurt quite a bit
but so far supported her weight, Billie kept after her husband and, through him, her daughter. It didn't look to her as if anything was really going to come from this storm; there wasn't any wind to speak of, no rain or snow, and neither the fog nor the cloud cover was very dark. But it was chilly, and Marshall shouldn't be out here. He'd catch his death. Rebecca shouldn't be out here, either, for reasons not as clear in Billie's mind but equally compelling. She didn't guess she could do much about either one of them, or about Faye, either, but here she was.

After a long moment Rebecca said, 'I can't leave Mom,' astonished that she was actually considering whether she could.

'Your father's wife.' Faye said deliberately, derisively, 'is all wrapped up in your father. She won't even notice.'

'She needs me.'

Faye shook her a little. This was almost not fun anymore. 'She's got all these nurses and aides and people to help her. She doesn't need you. Why should you stay here where everything's so ugly when you could come away with me and have a good time?'

To Faye, this seemed an irresistible invitation, but Rebecca was not letting her in. She pulled away, flounced, maybe overplaying her hand but she didn't think so.

'She doesn't need you. I need you.' Every time she'd said, 'I need you' to somebody, she'd meant it, for the moment, with all her heart. She meant it now.

'What for?'

'What?' Faye had had it. 'What are you talking about?'

'What do you want with me?'

This was ridiculous. Faye wasn't about to be talked to this way. 'You want me, too,' she said petulantly. 'You do,' and then got very quiet. The silent treatment. Usually that worked. People thought they couldn't live with her, but they couldn't stand the threat of living without her, either.

Inside the building, Sandy stopped Diane as they passed each other in the hall, each on another errand for the Health Department. In a stage whisper, she remarked, 'Have you looked outside? My goodness, I don't believe I've ever seen fog like that around here. It's kind of spooky, you know?'

Petra sprinted down the hall and threw herself at Sandy from behind, wrapping her hard thin arms around the bookkeeper's neck and her hard thin thighs around her pelvis, clamping her ankles in front. Sandy staggered. Diane stepped forward to intervene. Petra's screams were gravelly and staccato, but what she was saying was clear: 'They're gone! They drowned! They washed away!'

Rebecca was descending, strata rising around her. Tides had left sediments. A scrap of brown paper from a grocery sack. A repeated refrain as if from birdsong but bluesy, woodwind. A green bottle, more than half-full of thick purple wine. Rebecca sank. A car in the woods, pretending to be hidden but not really hidden for she saw it; the acrid and strangely luscious taste of gasoline in the air as the car pulled away, and the taste of her own frantic tears.

Faye whispered, 'We can be together now.'

The smell of oilcloth warmed by hotter sun than this, through a kitchen window. The smell of roses, up very close; the taste of roses.

Faye murmured, 'That's right.'

As her feet parted the gauzy weeds and her hands the crumbling strata in which they were embedded, Rebecca thought: I have noplace else to go. Nobody expects me anywhere. Why not go with her?

Faye breathed, 'Oh, my darling, why not?'

Rebecca thought: I'm not the administrator of The Tides anymore. I'm not anybody's lover. I'm not the same person to my father from one minute to the next. I'm not my mother's daughter.

'I'll show you who you are!' Faye shrieked in delight, and pink and lavender spangles puffed toward Rebecca from all directions like a pretty mushroom cloud.

Rebecca said, 'No,' and freed herself.

'What? What did you say?'

'Go away. Nobody wants you here.'

The cloud burst apart in fury, and Faye screamed, 'You little fool! You little bitch! You'll be sorry! You'll regret this for the rest of your boring little life!'

'Leave me alone. Leave us all alone.'

Faye was beside herself, a dervish, crisscrossing streaks and stars. 'Nobody is going to keep me from what's mine. Not even you.' A bottle broke against Rebecca's shoulder, shards skittering across her skin and scratching, drawing blood, but not embedding. A long branch, just budding at half a dozen places along its shaft, flung up her skirt and whipped across the back of her leg.

'Go away!'

'Sure, Becky,' Faye hissed. 'Fine. Whatever you say,' and then, swelling, giddy and full of herself, she started toward Rebecca again.

Teetering on the viscous, shifting edge of the pit, strobed by its wild tides, Marshall reached for his daughter and caught her arm. The wind raved, and the fog spat and clawed, and Marshall tugged at his child until she stumbled backward into his lap. He wrapped his arms around her there, bent his head over her, was whispering not her name now, which he couldn't say, but wordless connectives.

Faye threw herself on them both, howling. Billie lumbered up to them, ashen-faced and dizzy, as Naomi burst out of the angry fog and cried, ''I am Faye! I am Rebecca! Let me!' and flung herself in Faye's path.

Curled in her father's lap and with her mother's sweaty hands on her back, Rebecca heard, then turned and saw the shiny bits of Faye shoot up in a sparkling fountain and then organize around Naomi as if they couldn't help themselves. Naomi spread her legs, opened her mouth, pried open her own clenched fists, and Faye went in. Glittering opaquely, Naomi's eyes rolled back in ecstasy, and the suffering coming out of her mouth, on breath stinking of roses, in words upon words upon words, was at last her own.

Faye had made a mistake.

She had expected to be in and out of Naomi on her own terms, as always, taking what she needed with no fuss or price. But she had underestimated the strength of Naomi's imagination and will. Naomi wouldn't let her go.

Faye pushed against the confines of Naomi's mind, the prison that had masqueraded as playground and feast. Naomi seized, clawed at soil that had not been nourishing or supportive in the first place and now had been further disturbed, broke apart strata to make new strata. But she would not let her go.

Faye cajoled, threatened, pleaded, sang riffs of desperate wantonness. Naomi screamed and babbled and keened. But she would not let her go.

Faye danced and fought. Faye threw herself off high places and burrowed into deep ones. Faye rose and fell with the tides. But Naomi had been waiting all her life for habitation like this, for possession and martyrdom like this, and she would never let Faye go.

Melanie Tem's novels are
Prodigal
(recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement, First Novel),
Blood Moon
,
Wilding
,
Revenant
,
Desmodus
,
The Tides
,
i
, and in collaboration with Nancy Holder,
Making Love
and
Witch-Light
.

Several dozen of her short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines. She has published numerous non-fiction articles.

Tem also was awarded the 1991 British Fantasy Award, the Icarus for Best Newcomer.

A former social worker, she lives in Denver with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem. They have four children and two granddaughters.