The Tides

by Melanie Tem

  Wind was picking up. The fog floated and whipped to meet Rebecca, laying a cushion between her feet and the field she was crossing, then tugging it away so that she stumbled. Swaddling her like a baby's receiving blanket, soft and warm, then swishing like a cold veil across her exposed flesh.

  Inside The Tides, the lights flickered more and more harsh and bright as the light outside dimmed, and the ambience of the place took on qualities suggestive of a winter afternoon although it was an early morning in spring. Sandy, pouring coffee for one of the Health Department team, remarked on what peculiar weather they were having today, teased that it must be some sort of sign, but he, irritated at having to be out here monitoring the routine activities of this facility when he had work of his own to do at the office and the damn place wasn't going to be shut down anyway, everybody knew that, didn't respond to any of Sandy's conversational gambits. Sandy thought that was rude, and her feelings were a little hurt.

  Billie had dozed off beside her husband in his narrow bed. Shirley found her there and, smiling fondly, sadly, didn't disturb her. No harm in leaving her there for a few minutes; she'd have to face reality soon enough. Shirley turned off the overhead light and shut the door most of the way, rendering Marshall's room dim and nearly hidden from casual view.

  Wide awake, Marshall lay still a while longer, listening, getting ready. Sometimes he knew precisely what he was preparing for. Sometimes he knew only the preparation. Finally, he eased himself over the siderails without making much noise or jarring his sleeping wife enough to alert her to his intent.

  He knew he wouldn't accomplish his mission on his own two feet. He might very well not anyway, but at the moment he was calm and clear-headed, and he would use any means at his disposal to increase his odds of success.

  A wheelchair sat beside the bed. One corner of the privacy curtain draped across the back of it, and Marshall understood how easy it would be not to recognize what this thing was. How easy it would be, too, to be afraid.

  But the bewilderment and the possibility of fear faded. Grasping the bedrail with both hands, he shuffled in sideways strides as long and smooth as he could make them, two, three, four, and Billie stirred but didn't wake to stop or confuse him. He leaned on the chair. It rolled, and his choice was either to resist it or to go along. Like bringing a car out of an icy spin, he acted counter-intuitively and went into the dangerous motion instead of against it, wrested his other hand off the relatively stable bedrail and for a few long seconds was moorless in space and time, then got himself turned around and sank into the slung seat.

  He needed to pause then, to take some deep breaths and reorient himself as much as possible. But there was no time for that. He was missing some information about his environment, to be sure, but he had enough to go on.

  Walking his feet between the front wheels of the chair and pushing at the big back wheels with the heels of his hands, he took himself out of the room into the glare of the hall. Feeling and smelling fresh air, he maneuvered toward its source. Petra, coming in, held the door open for him. She was talking, but he thought not to him. He had no wish for an actual conversation with her, but he did intend to nod a thank you at her. He might not, however, have done so, since it was necessary for him to focus his entire attention on the task at hand.

  Which was monumental. Whose stakes could not have been higher. The instant he entered the fog, he saw Faye's face in it, eyes shimmering, lips stretched wide in mocking laughter. The instant the door behind him was shut and latched, he no longer lived at The Tides.

  Faye could hardly control herself, but she had to, for a little while longer. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this excited. To think this was happening now, now, when she'd almost come to believe her days of having real fun were gone for good. She should have known better.

  Here was her daughter, here was Rebecca, coming of her own free will across the cold weedy expanse toward her. She was virtually a stranger, of course. Faye couldn't tolerate knowing very much about people; the details of other lives were so boring. All she knew about Rebecca, which was more than enough, was what she'd picked up from observation—close observation, mind you—these last few months, grafted onto bits and pieces of memories from the indignity of the pregnancy culminating in the outrage of the birth and from the first two or three days of her life which was all it had taken for Faye to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was not for her.

  Rebecca looked a little the worse for wear, Faye thought. Her makeup was a disaster, and that was a terribly unflattering hairdo even when it was combed, which it wasn't at the moment. Faye could hardly wait to get her hands on that hair. Rebecca's clothes, sort of frumpy in the first place, looked as if she'd slept in them; at the very least, it was the same outfit she'd been wearing yesterday, which was disgusting.

  But Rebecca was a pretty girl, her mother's daughter no matter what. This afforded Faye one of those bright, mean little spurts of triumph every bit as satisfying and addictive as a shot of whiskey had ever been. She was petite, which was useful with men. Good features. Not bad posture, and nothing wrong with the way she carried herself that a little motherly instruction couldn't fix.

  Faye clasped her hands over her heart, then held out her arms. 'Ah, my darling, they can't keep us apart any longer! The sacred bond between mother and child is simply too strong!' That was lovely.

  Many of the weeds in the field were higher than Rebecca's shoulders now, tangling in her hair, brushing her cheeks and under her chin, working themselves inside her clothes, inside her head. It must have been longer than she'd thought since she'd been down here; this must be spring growth. Fog made it hard to think. Fog blurred sky, ground, lake-bed, lake. The lake was full. Overflowing.

  Rebecca squinted, stared. The lake was full of a substance with the consistency and rippled sheen of water but streaked with wild color and pulsing with tides of surprising strength and rapidity. There had been rain recently, but hardly this much, and the ground she was crossing to get to the lake wasn't wet; it must be some drainage oddity, or maybe only some trick of the foggy light.

  The substance undulated and splashed over the edge of the depression, tongued at her. In it was a woman in a flowing gown, lavender and pink, with streaming hair the colors of the fog. Faye. Rebecca took a step backward. The woman's face was animated, pretty: enormous blue eyes with lashes thickened and curled, artfully heightened color in the cheeks, rosebud lips parted in a dazzling smile. In the silver sky above her was her face again, again and again, and in the tree, just budding like an admirer's bouquet, that was bending and tossing over the lake as if it would break, and in the surface of the lake tilting now so Rebecca could see her own face and the woman's face in it and then dipping flirtatiously away.

  Billie woke up. Marshall was gone. Ponderously she struggled off the bed and scrambled for the call button on the cord, then didn't wait for help. As she hurried out into the hall, out into the fog, to catch Marshall herself, the awful suspicion nagged at her that she hadn't really been sleeping hard, that she'd known somewhere in her mind when Marshall went to Faye and she'd been just too tired and too defeated to care.

  The field behind the nursing home was ugly as usual, colorless, weedy and bare, littered, generally unkempt. Somebody ought to do something with it. Billie didn't know who, now that Rebecca didn't work here anymore.

  But Rebecca was out here. Billie saw her moving toward the hollow in the middle of the field where they said a lake used to be, and wondered what in the world she was doing. At almost the same time she saw Marshall careening after Rebecca in his wheelchair. As far as she could tell through the wisps of fog here and there on the ground like dust mites, the field was practically level, no slope steep enough for him to build up that much momentum, and he certainly didn't have enough strength to be pushing himself that fast. But he was speeding, hell-bent for leather through the blowing litter and scraggly weeds in pursuit of Rebecca, in pursuit of Faye.

  Billie had no hope
of catching up to him. Yet she had no choice but to try. She called to him, but of course he paid her no mind. She took a deep breath, stepped off the sidewalk, and started out across the field, already panting. Dust spat into her face, smelling oddly of roses, making her breath hurt in her chest. The sky was gray and lemon-yellow now, mean-looking. In a few places, an individual cloud was outlined in purple like a glimpsed breast.The wind shoved at her. A storm was coming up. Billie could taste the dangerous energy in the air.

  Faye twirled. Lavender and pink billowed around Rebecca, and now the wind brought rain - perhaps not rain, for it blew horizontally off the surface of the lake. Faye cried happily, 'I've come back for you! Isn't that wonderful?'

  'Who do you think you are?'

  Faye let her laughter peal in delight. Her laugh was one of her best natural assets, enhanced by the ways she'd learned to use it in the years since she'd last seen Rebecca. 'Yes, yes, because of you I know who I am at last, and I am in your debt.' She'd said that more than a few times, to quite a range of people, in the distant and recent past, editing it each time until it was perfect. For instance, she used to say, 'And I thank you for that,' but 'in your debt' was more elegant.The declaration was so effective that it had become part of her standard repertoire. This time, though, she could add, 'I'm your mother!'

  'I already have a mother.'

  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. She 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 substantiality was both surprising and primally 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 twisted 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 d
o,' 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.