by Karen Healey
“Thanks, Joph,” Tegan told her, somewhat breathlessly.
“Anytime, Teeg!” She embraced me next, and I grunted with the force. “Hanad filled me in. Did the plan work?”
“Yes,” I said, and then remembered the choice I’d had to make. “Partially, I suppose. We’ll see.”
“Good luck.” She looked mournful. “I’m really going to miss you.”
My insides lurched. “But aren’t you coming?” I said.
“I… what?”
“We talked about it, in Bendigo. I said I could use another sister, and you said that sounded nice.”
“Abdi,” she said, and stopped, perhaps the first time I’d ever seen Joph Montgomery at a loss for words. I could feel my stomach crunching into a tight ball. “I… That’s sweet, and I love you for it. But I didn’t know you were serious. I’m a lesbian who was born male-bodied. It’s fine here; no one cares. But in your country… am I wrong in thinking that people like me aren’t so welcome?”
“Not always,” I admitted. “I mean, you being a girl, people will get that, but you being a girl who still likes girls… people have these ideas about what men and women should be. But it’s legal.”
She shook her head. “Legal isn’t the same as comfortable.”
“You could help change that?” I suggested, knowing it was a stupid hope.
“I wouldn’t even know how. And I bet there are people already working for change. They don’t need me coming in and telling them what to do.” Joph looked at my face and added, “Australia isn’t always on the wrong side, you know.”
“I know.” I somehow managed to smile. “One of my best friends is Australian.”
She laughed and kissed my cheek. “We’ll talk,” she said. “I’m going to make things better here, and you… you’re going to change the world. We’re going to be amazing, just wait.”
“You’re already amazing,” I said, and had to let go of her. Hanad was walking up to us, and I didn’t want to cry in front of him.
“Ah, good,” he said, looking more pleased to see us than I’d expected. “If we leave now, we can just catch the tide.”
“Right now?” Tegan asked.
“Yes,” he said, and flicked his hand at me in a question.
“She’s coming,” I said firmly. “And Dr. Carmen, too.”
“Just these two?”
“Yes. I’ll pay you back, somehow.”
He sighed. “No charge.”
“Thank you,” Tegan said, very sincerely. I suspected her of irony, but she managed to keep it out of her voice.
“I’m getting sentimental in my old age. Call it my contribution to your little revolution.” He pointed at me. “I still don’t like politics,” he warned, and then cocked his head at Zaneisha.
“I have to see these two home safely,” she said, indicating Joph and Bethari, and I felt disappointment stab me. When had I come to like her? I wasn’t sure, but I was sorry to see her go. “You may see me again,” she added, looking at Tegan. “I have one or two things to take care of, but then a change of scenery might be an excellent idea.”
“The job offer stays open,” Hanad said genially. “Not forever. But for some time.”
“I don’t think I’d care for your current line of work,” she told him.
His teeth flashed. “Oh, I suspect new opportunities will shortly be opening for me.” He turned to look at Joph and Bethari, Tegan and me. “Make your good-byes,” he said. “I’ll wait, but not for long.” He walked down to the small yellow inflatable boat that would take us out to the ship and stood with his arms folded, looking out at the sea.
I did cry then, hugging Joph again. Zaneisha shook hands with me and Marie, very solemnly, and squeezed Tegan tightly, whispering something in her ear that made Tegan smile tremulously through her tears.
Bethari and I looked at each other. I opened my arms.
“Why not?” she said, and hugged me before she moved on to Tegan. The two girls clung to each other so long I was worried that Hanad would come back to hurry us on. Then Joph caught my hand and dragged me toward them, and we became a tangle of limbs, the four of us holding one another up.
We made promises we might not be able to keep, promises about visiting and keeping in touch and always being friends. But we meant those promises, that was the important thing, and we all knew we’d do our best to keep them.
It was Zaneisha who broke us apart with a quiet remark and Marie’s gentle encouragement that got me and Tegan to the boat. The sea wind tumbled Tegan’s hair into a dark tornado and whipped Marie’s across her face in straight lines as Hanad and I rowed. Facing backward, I could watch Joph, hand in hand with Bethari, with Zaneisha standing behind them.
The ship was beautiful, with solar panels incorporated into her sleek lines, and, I was relieved to note, a highly illegal diesel motor mounted under her stern. We’d be using wind power most of the way, but that motor would get us out of Australian reach much faster. I helped Hanad winch up the inflatable, there was a shout from the side as Thulani weighed anchor, and the engine chuckled as we got under way. Tegan and Marie sat at the stern, looking out over the waves to the dwindling cliffs of the Australian coast and the three figures standing lonely on the beach.
They faded into the dimming light, and then the cliffs faded with them until there was the barest outline of black against the midnight blue twilight sky, and then we could see no land at all.
Still the women watched where the shore had been, as the stars came out and the breeze died down, and we moved on through the deep waters.
At last, Tegan let out a breath and turned around. There were fresh tear tracks down her cheeks, but her smile was wide as she reached out her hand. I took it in both of mine.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“For what?”
“The next chapter. Another beginning.”
“Do you know what I’ve realized?” Tegan asked. “I just keep getting beginnings. I think that’s what life is, one beginning after another. But it’s really the middles that count—all the things we do with the middles of our lives.”
“I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble keeping ourselves busy with this middle,” I said.
“We have a lot to do,” she agreed.
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “How do you keep going?” It was a question I’d wanted to ask her for a long time. “No matter how hard it is, you never seem to lose hope.”
She glanced up at me. “I lose hope all the time. And then I find it again. How about you?”
“I lost it for a while,” I said. It was hard to remember how, with Tegan warm beside me and the wide sea open around us. “But I’m hopeful now. I’m happy now.”
Tegan kissed me, slow and sweet. “Abdi,” she said, when she pulled away. “Would you sing me something?”
I smiled. “Requests?”
Her eyes were shaded, but her voice was clear. “Here Comes the Sun.”
It wasn’t a performance, and it wasn’t a pretense. No one was making me sing or her listen. It was a choice we made between us. And because she asked me to, and because I wanted to, I sang the song I’d once hated for the girl I loved.
It’s nearly time for this story to be told. We have all but one boatload of the refugee children in hand, and the Resolution was officially signed over to Djibouti last week. Bethari is ready to distribute the truth about the revival process as soon as I’ve finished writing it.
Tegan was right. We get lots of beginnings and lots of middles, twisted together and piled on top of each other, until we’re confused about which goes where. And we get a lot of endings, too, which in a way are all practice for the final ending we can’t anticipate.
I hope that final ending is a long way off, for Tegan and me, for Bethari and Joph and Zaneisha and Marie, and for the children we managed to save from selfishness and greed.
But I’ll leave you with this: the two of us sailing into the night, Tegan thinking about the f
uture, and me singing about hope.
As endings go, I think it’s a good one.
Acknowledgments
My first sequel! So exciting. Sincere thanks go to the lovely Alvina Ling for giving me the chance to write this book, to my awesome editors, Connie Hsu and Allison Moore for pushing me that extra bit on every draft (MORE FEELINGS), and to my excellent agent Barry Goldblatt for his generosity and general willingness to let me rave at him over IM.
Support, encouragement, and excellent advice were provided by the stalwart Robyn Fleming, Melanie Reese, Carla Lee, Willow, Chally Kacelnik, Kirti Kamboj, Matt Powell, Sumayyah Daud, Sarah Rees Brennan, Katie Scott, and almost certainly other people that I am shamefully forgetting. Thank you all, so much.
This is my fourth book; it is long past time for me to thank my readers for making that possible. Thank you; I am truly grateful to you for enabling me to do this work I love.
And finally, I owe a great deal of this book’s existence to my parents, who let me live with them for the year during which I wrote most of it. They never asked for rent and only occasionally complained about the way I cluttered up the place. Thanks, Mum and Dad, for that and for everything else.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One: Sanguinante
Chapter Two: Tremolo
Chapter Three: Elegy
Chapter Four: Cadenza
Chapter Five: Volante
Chapter Six: Glissando
Chapter Seven: Chorus
Chapter Eight: Fugue
Chapter Nine: Semplicemente
Chapter Ten: Andante
Chapter Eleven: Con Fuoco
Chapter Twelve: Poco a poco
Chapter Thirteen: Divisi
Chapter Fourteen: Furioso
Chapter Fifteen: Tutte le corde
Chapter Sixteen: Con sordino
Chapter Seventeen: Sotto
Chapter Eighteen: Tenuto
Chapter Nineteen: Accelerando
Chapter Twenty: Dolce
Chapter Twenty-One: Finale
Chapter Twenty-Two: Coda
Acknowledgments
