Night Tide

by Anna Burke

  Ivy felt like the water below. Lillian was a cliff she’d been dashing herself against for years, and she’d worn patterns into Lillian just as surely as she had parted and reformed around the narrow bulk of Lillian’s body, sliced by rock and barnacle but still whole. They were always going to end up here, she thought as Lillian caught her staring. She was always going to bring her to this place, and what happened next hardly mattered, just as what had happened before mattered only in the grooves it had left in each of them. Ivy didn’t fully understand what that meant yet. What she did know was the grooves were there, and her future was a dark tunnel she did not want to look down, and so she wouldn’t, so long as Lillian occupied her present.

  Darwin barked at a gull off to her right. The sound echoed oddly off the cliffs, and then was lost in the wind and the waves. She didn’t break her gaze. Lillian’s hair blew around her face. Ivy reached out and let it slap against her fingers, aware of how close she stood to Lillian and how cold the air felt on her own cheeks. She smoothed the strands behind Lillian’s ear and touched the curve of her jaw with her thumb. Neither of them spoke. The space between them pulsed with the surf. She wanted to drag them both beneath it to a place where words were little more than bubbles of air floating unheard to the surface.

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

  In her sepulchre there by the sea—

  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

  Unspoken was the understanding they were separate here from their shared past. On this cliff, where the sun had been replaced with shadow and the wind scattered a gust of briny snow over the rocks, they were nameless, and Ivy pressed her lips to Lillian’s with a tenderness that cut her more deeply than any accusation Lillian had ever thrown her way.

  • • •

  Ivy’s lips were cold against her own, as were the tips of Ivy’s gloved fingers where they cupped her face, but her mouth was warm when she parted Ivy’s lips with a soft exhale. There was no ferocity to this kiss, no desire tinged with vengeance. Ivy moved slowly and carefully, each brush of her lips and tongue gentle and deliberate and somehow crueler in its gentleness than the tug of war they’d played out before. She kissed her back with the same slow strokes. Their lips touched briefly, then separated, tongues barely brushing, and the more slowly they moved, the more deliberate the touch of teeth to lower lip or tongue to tongue, the more Lillian felt herself exposed. Around them, the empty shells of crabs littered the rocks, dropped by gulls to break them open.

  She felt like that. Except, unlike the crabs, she would gladly give herself to Ivy. Would offer everything, in this moment, so long as Ivy’s lips remained on hers and the wind tried and failed to gust between them. She held Ivy in her arms. Ivy’s wool jacket was damp with spray, but she could not feel it through her gloves, and Ivy’s hair was a shock of white-blond against the black of her coat and the dark green of her scarf. Her perfume mingled with the smell of the ocean and snow and pine sap. Lillian understood, as Ivy’s hands tangled in the hair at the back of her neck, that she would no longer be able to dissociate any of those smells from the others. She’d smell Ivy every time a breeze blew off the water, and she’d have to get rid of Angie’s favorite pine candles unless she wanted to think of how soft Ivy’s lips were when they weren’t fighting.

  She opened her eyes as Ivy pulled away. Ivy’s irises were as dark as the pines behind her in the overcast light, and they pinned her there at the cliff’s edge, until an emotion she had no name for swelled in her chest and forced her to look away.

  “I want to show you more,” Ivy said, and held out her hand.

  She took it. There was no universe in which she would willingly hold Ivy Holden’s hand. Here, though, in this place where the outside world had no context and they were separated from their world by ocean and sky, she enclosed Ivy’s fingers in her own and drew them into the warmth of her pocket. Ivy smiled, brief and sweet, and something like breaking glass shattered past the edge of Lillian’s hearing.

  Darwin bolted back up the footpath to the sidewalk and waited with a wagging stub of a tail for them to ascend. They moved carefully. It would have been easier going if she released Ivy’s hand, but releasing it would mean acknowledging she held it at all, and she wasn’t ready for that.

  Back on level ground, it was easy to fall into step beside Ivy as they wound along the rocky coast and through a forest dusted with the first of the snow. The moss grew so thick that when she stepped on a patch that had reached out to claim the sidewalk, her boot sank into it without a sound. She stopped and knelt to examine it without relinquishing Ivy’s hand.

  It hadn’t frozen yet, which she found remarkable, given the moisture content, and the tiny fronds that made up the organism bore equally tiny crystals of ice. A few fruiting bodies poked hopefully up through the greater mass of green. She rested a gloved fingertip against one. Life fascinated her. Animals were her livelihood, but there was something about the stubborn frailty of flora that entranced her. This moss was trod upon, frozen, and deluged with rain and wind and drought, and it lived on. Certain grasses thrived when grazed upon, depending on the sharp points of herbivore hooves to aerate the soil and the snip of teeth to encourage growth in both shoot and root. Weeds flourished in the wake of industry. So many of those same weeds were edible—a coincidence she found ironic every time she thought about it. Dandelion, burdock, plantain, chickweed, cattails, pigweed, thistles. All forage humans brought with them in the wake of destruction. What had grown in the spaces left by Ivy’s wake? And how long had she fed on that bitterness?

  She glanced up from the moss to see Ivy crouching beside her, green eyes intent on Lillian’s face.

  “I have a terrarium with that moss,” Ivy said. “You’d probably like it.”

  “Maybe.” They were both speaking in the same hushed tones. Lillian found it hard to breathe this close to Ivy, and she worried that if she kept staring into Ivy’s eyes, she’d fall off a precipice she would not be able to climb back up.

  “Can I show you more?”

  She nodded and rose to her feet.

  The island sloped downward as they left the forest. Houses watched them, but she was more interested in the plants growing along the path. Bay laurel. Faded blueberry. Thorny Rosa rugosa. She periodically paused to examine an unfamiliar leaf.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “I’m not sure, but this is bay laurel. Like the cooking spice.”

  “Really?” Ivy’s fair brows knit together, and she leaned in to stroke the shrub.

  “It’s everywhere here.”

  “I know what blueberries and blackberries look like. That’s about it.”

  Lillian identified a few more of the plants around them. Ivy’s breath tickled her cheek as she looked over her shoulder to follow the lesson.

  “You’re into plants and birds?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s . . .actually kind of cool.” Ivy crushed a bay leaf and inhaled before moving on. Lillian followed her down a sandy path to a rocky beach. Pebbles rolled beneath her feet as she slid down the eroded footpath past the exposed roots of a copse of wind-blasted pines. Waves foamed over boulders and surged through tide pools crusted with ice and dark brown seaweed. Blue gray water stretched out to distant islands and the endless horizon beyond. Beside her, Ivy shivered as the wet wind needled their faces. Lillian looped her arm around her. Ivy didn’t pull away. Her body felt surprisingly small, here by the sea, like she might dissolve into spray if Lillian let her go. Perhaps they both would. The wind stripped pretentions, leaving something elemental in its passing, and the longing to swallow the world stopped her breath. Waves crashed. She’d gladly break apart with Ivy, Aphrodite returning to foam, lashing the coast in loving libation. Anything to feel this keenly alive.

  They were playing at something that could not be maintained off this island. Whatever this was—this sudden tenderness, this affectatio
n toward friendship—it was permeable. Reality would seep through like it always did. Ivy was still the girl she’d hated, and even if that changed, she was still her colleague and the last person on earth Lillian wanted to feel this thorny, budding thing for. But she couldn’t take her arm away.

  “It’s so different in the summer,” Ivy said. “Now, it looks angry.”

  The ocean roared in reply as snow fell on the waves.

  It looks like us.

  Darwin barked and chased the sea foam as it tumbled over the rocks. Ivy called him back and suggested they hike on, launching into a story about a game she used to play with her sister by the water’s edge. Her voice grew increasingly animated. Lillian could picture a tow-headed child and her sister scrambling up rocks and searching for crabs beneath the seaweed draping the tidepools like hair. This picture of Ivy was different from the woman she knew: Wilder, slightly feral in her bare feet and salt-stiff clothes. She tasted the edge of a yearning Ivy’s voice barely contained: the need to be alone sometimes, without society’s eyes. It was more relatable than she liked.

  “You were free here,” she said in a low murmur.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. What kind of shells wash up on these beaches?”

  The island was small enough that they were able to walk the shoreline in a few hours. By the time noon came and went, Lillian was hungry and chilled and ready to rest somewhere out of the wind.

  “I used to think about you when I was here,” Ivy said as turned down a sidewalk. “I never wanted to. But . . .”

  She trailed off, and the wind filled in for the rest of her words.

  “Did you fantasize about pushing me off a cliff?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly I’d think about how much you’d hate it.”

  “What part?”

  “This.” Ivy pointed up at a house. The trees around it had been cleared to give it an unrestricted view of the surrounding islands and the horizon beyond, and the white porch and dark wood shingles commanded the panorama with an architect’s eye.

  “Is this yours?”

  Ivy nodded and drew her toward the steps. She took in the immensity of the cottage as she mounted the stairs to the porch. Arches delineated the sweep of it, framing the view and holding up the house’s second-story balcony. Leaves had gathered in the corners, but she could see, as if someone had set up a projector, how this place would look in summer: rocking chairs filled with people drinking white wine and gin and tonics, perhaps sipping on light beer and talking about politics and stocks or whatever it was that got discussed in places like this. She pictured Ivy in a summer dress, or perhaps in white shorts and a preppy blouse, laughing at a joke that was, more likely than not, borderline racist in some way, and the bubble that had surrounded them all morning popped. Yes. She would have hated this. Did hate it.

  Ivy’s smile was bittersweet when Lillian at last turned back to her.

  “I didn’t realize other people didn’t have summer homes until I was seventeen,” Ivy said. “I get how fucked up that is. I really do.”

  “Do you, though?”

  “I went to private schools. My friends were all like me, and the scholarship kids came with us on vacation, so I never saw their houses. I remember getting my friend Beck drunk on a yacht. He’d never been on a boat before, and as he was throwing up and crying and cursing me out, I finally got it. He hated us.”

  “Poor little Ivy,” said Lillian, unmoved.

  “I thought I was different from my family because I wanted to be a veterinarian instead of a lawyer or a surgeon or a congresswoman. And then I met you.”

  “Just stop.” She didn’t want to hear Ivy’s next words. She wasn’t going to be this woman’s societal awakening—wasn’t going to let Ivy make her into that.

  “What?”

  “Just—I’m not here for your life story.” The words came out harsher than she’d intended, and she’d intended them to wound.

  “Then what are you here for?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “This is me, Lil. I’m privileged. I enjoy it. I like nice clothes and nice cars and nice houses, and I like that doors open for me.”

  “They open for you because they shut on everyone else.”

  “I know.” Ivy set her bag on the ground and opened it, pulling out a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. She uncorked it and drank straight from the bottle before passing it. “My family’s money is from oil; did you know that?”

  Lillian shrugged. She’d googled Ivy, but she wasn’t about to confess to it.

  “They fund the think tanks, which keep the fossil fuel industry pumping, and my cousin has one of those climate change bunkers. He’s on the board of Exxon. I am a product of colonialism and genocide and the actual destruction of this planet, and—” Ivy broke off and raked her hands through her hair. The eyes she fixed on Lillian were wild. “I hate it, and I love this place, and I love—” she broke off again.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say, Ivy.” White guilt was her least favorite brand. She had grown up enjoying the privilege of her own white skin while Daiyu dealt with micro-aggressions and, more than a few times, outright aggression. Ivy had no idea what it was like to watch a parent suffer like that. Lillian had served as a shield when she could, but ultimately it was a divide she never could cross. Daiyu stood on one side, while she, with her white skin, stood on the other. Her anger folded in on itself. She recognized the anguish in Ivy’s voice. She too knew what it was like to resent her privilege. An unnerving thought surfaced: could this be part of why Ivy had always gotten to her? Were the similarities between them greater than she wanted to admit?

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I just want you here. With me.”

  She opened her mouth to shoot Ivy down out of reflex and then hesitated, because the look on Ivy’s face didn’t belong to the girl she knew. It wasn’t haughty or smug or even full of desire. It was raw and vulnerable and wounded.

  “Why?”

  “Hell if I know.” Ivy paced to the railing and stared out at the ocean. Lillian set down her own bag and joined her.

  “Let’s not talk about that,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “This.” She rested her shoulder against Ivy’s.

  “Lil—” Ivy twisted so that her back was to the railing, and the vulnerability parted to reveal a question that Lillian did, at least, have an answer for. She kissed her, not gently this time, but hungrily, angrily, as if she could erase Ivy’s words and the stain of truth they’d left behind. Ivy whimpered and clung to her. Her hands fumbled with the zipper to Lillian’s jacket, and Lillian bit down on Ivy’s lower lip. How can I want sweetness and destruction from the same person? She wanted to break Ivy down into atoms and ether, and she wanted to feel the wholeness of her in her arms.

  She yelped when Ivy’s hands slid beneath her sweater. “Your hands are cold.”

  Ivy pulled her closer. “You’re really, really warm, though.”

  “Not anymore.” She shivered as Ivy slid icy hands over her rib cage, cold and desire fighting for supremacy.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  Ivy shouldered open the door to the house to reveal a large dark room. Dust cloths covered the furniture, but the wide wood planking of the floors gleamed in the dim light let in by the unshuttered windows. Lillian’s gaze was drawn at once to the fireplace. The hearth was huge. Gray stone that looked like it came from the island itself took up most of the wall, and the iron grate was wrought in fanciful curves that cupped a laid fire. Ivy went to it immediately and felt along the mantle for a box of matches. Lillian studied her as she bent to light it.

  “Are you allowed to light a fire in the off season?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Will you get in trouble?”

  “Only if the island manager happens to be walking past, which is highly unlikely.”

  Lillian didn’t press the issue. She wanted to be warm.

  She wandered while
Ivy tended to the fire. The furniture beneath the dust cloths was as ornate as the fire grate and didn’t look particularly comfortable. A massive staircase led to the second floor, and she touched the dark, polished wood as she investigated the dining room, a second smaller living room with a woodstove, the sunroom, and finally the kitchen. She found another staircase toward the back of the house. Servant stairs. Stairs for people like her. She was about to climb them when Ivy caught up with her.

  “Exploring?” Ivy asked. She’d taken off her coat, and while she looked chilled, her windblown hair and cream-colored sweater offset the red of her lips.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all. I’ll give you a tour.”

  She started up the stairs, giving Lillian an unobscured view of her legs and ass. The simmering anger began to bubble into something else.

  “Most of these are guest rooms. My parents sleep in the master suite with the balcony, and my sister and I sleep in the back.” She opened doors into rooms with white sheets draped over all the furniture, but Lillian could easily see how in a different season sunlight would stream in over the fourposter beds. Ivy’s room had a view of trees and sky, as well as water. Waking up in that bed would be like waking up in a dream. She did not want to be awed. And yet she couldn’t be otherwise.

  “Let’s go get warm.” She had to get out of this room. It wasn’t just the promise of power revealed by the unobscured views; the bed was giving her ideas.

  “Sure.”

  • • •

  Ivy watched Lillian turn on her heel with an ache in her stomach. She’d seen the emotions that had flickered over Lillian’s face, and they lingered in the room like ghosts. She wanted her to love it here even though she knew that was impossible. The island was the one place she felt truly herself. She and Madison had run barefoot over these shores while Prudence let her guard down, content to allow her children this modicum of wildness. If Lillian could see that side of her, would some of the ice in her gaze melt?