Waking

I surfaced sometimes after that.

I did not know the order of it, or if it was night or day, or how much time had passed. I surfaced the way you surface from deep water, in flashes, in fragments, just enough to register the world before it pulled me back down.

Once, I opened my eyes and the room was dark and she was on the floor beside the bed, not in the chair, on the floor, with her back against the frame and her head turned toward me on the mattress, and she was watching me sleep with an expression I had never seen on her face. Her eyes were red. Her cheeks were wet. She was not bothering to hide it. She may not have known I could see her. I could not move or speak. I blinked once, slow, and she did not seem to notice, and the dark took me back.

Once, I felt her hand on my face. Not holding. Not controlling. Just resting there, her cold palm against my cheek, her thumb tracing the hollow under my eye, and I heard her breathing, uneven, ragged, and I heard her whisper something I could not quite make out, and then I heard her say foolish, foolish, you foolish girl, and I did not think she was talking to me.

Once, I woke to voices. Low. Arguing. Hers and another, the calm one, the one that had stopped her. I could not catch the words, only the shape of it, Elena's voice rising and breaking and the other voice steady and sad, and I heard Elena say he is dying and the other voice say no, he is healing, slowly, the way they heal, you must let him and Elena say something back that I could not hear, and then silence, and then the sound of something small breaking, glass maybe, against a wall.

Once, I felt her forehead against my chest. Just resting there. I felt the weight of her, slight and cold, and I felt the damp of tears or rain or both soaking through the thin sheet, and I felt her hand find mine and hold it, and her fingers were shaking, and I tried to squeeze back but my hand would not close, and she felt me try and she made a sound against my chest that I will hear for the rest of my life.

I do not know how many days it was.

When I finally woke for real, fully, the way you wake when the fever has truly broken, the room was dim. The candles were lit. The sheets were clean. My body ached in every joint and muscle, a deep boneless ache, the kind that means healing, not dying, and I could feel it, the slow stubborn knitting of myself back together, cell by cell, the patient animal work of a body that has been emptied and is slowly, stubbornly refilling.

The thirst came first.

It was enormous. It was the only thing in the world. My throat was cracked leather, my tongue thick and dry, and the need for water was so total, so consuming, that I could not think past it, could not move for it, could only lie there and feel it like a fire in the center of me.

I made a sound. Not a word. A rasp. A dry click that was all my throat could manage. It was not loud enough for anyone to hear and I did not expect it to be heard and I did not try to make it louder because I had not been given permission to want things.

She was there.

I do not know where she came from or if she had been there all along. She was beside the bed and her hand was on the back of my neck, lifting, and a glass was at my lips, and the water touched my mouth and I drank and the relief was so vast and so immediate that my eyes burned and a sound came out of me that was closer to a sob than anything else.

She held me. She had to, to help me drink. Her arm was behind my shoulders, her hand cupping the back of my head, and she tilted the glass with her other hand, slow and careful, watching the level of the water against my lips, and she did not let me drink too fast. She was murmuring something I could not hear. Her face was close to mine, close enough that I could feel the cold of her cheek near my temple, and she held the glass steady and she held me steady and her body was curved around mine in the bed in a way that had nothing careful or controlled about it.

She was taking care of me. Not using me. Not holding me down. Not walking me to a wall or pressing me to my knees. She was holding me against her, gently, and helping me drink water, and her hand on the back of my head was soft, and I could feel her breath against my hair, and she was not shaking, she was steady, and the steadiness was worse than the shaking because the steadiness meant she had stopped pretending and was just here, just present, just holding me because I needed holding.

I drained the glass. I let my head fall back against her arm. I lay there in the cradle of her and breathed and felt the water cool the fire in my throat and felt her cold against my side and I did not move because moving would end it and I did not want it to end.

She caught herself.

I felt it happen. The small tightening. The arm behind my shoulders going from soft to structured. The hand on the back of my head lifting, resituating, becoming a grip instead of a touch. She drew back, slow, controlled, and set the glass on the table, and when she straightened her face was smooth and her jaw was set and there was nothing in her eyes at all.

"You should not have been left to reach that point," she said. Clinical. Flat. As though she had not just held me against her body and helped me drink like something she could not bear to lose. "That was a failure of the room."

I lay there. I still felt her arm behind my shoulders, the ghost of it, the cold press of her cheek against my temple. I watched her compose herself and I did not say anything and I did not let my face show what I was thinking because I did not know what I was thinking.

She moved to the chair by the window. Her legs crossed. Her posture perfect. She picked up a book, or pretended to. She did not look at me.

When she finally spoke, her voice was flat and measured and carried no warmth at all.

"You were careless."

I looked at her.

"You allowed yourself to become depleted. You said nothing. You stood where I put you and you let them take too much and you did not speak. That was your failing. You were given a body to maintain and you failed to maintain it and you nearly cost me," she paused, very briefly, "a great deal of inconvenience."

Inconvenience. I turned the word over. It should have stung. It did sting, a little, the cold efficiency of it, the way she made my near death a matter of poor management on my part. But beneath the sting there was something else, something I did not want to look at, because looking at it would mean admitting that the word had been chosen, that she had reached for the coldest, flattest thing she could find, and that the reaching was the tell.

"Yes, Elena," I said. "I was careless."

"You will not let it happen again."

"No."

She turned a page she had not been reading. Her hand was steady. Her face was smooth. There was no trace in her of the woman who had cradled me to drink, or who had pressed her forehead to my chest in the dark, or who had said he is dying in a voice that broke on the second word. She had sealed it all away, every crack, every fragment, every unguarded moment, and what was left was Elena, composed and ancient and untouchable.

I should have believed her.

I wanted to believe her. I wanted the flat voice and the turned page and the perfect posture to be the truth, because the truth was simple and survivable, and the alternative was not. The alternative was the thing I had felt in her arms when she held me to drink, the thing I had heard in he is dying, the thing I had seen on the floor in the dark with her wet face and her hand on my cheek, and that thing was not simple and it was not survivable because it could not be real.

She did not care about me. She could not. I was food. I had always been food. The fragments I had gathered from the dark were not love, they were the distress of a woman whose favorite possession had nearly broken. That was all. I had been a good toy. Obedient. Willing. I gave when she pointed and I never fought and I looked at her the way she needed to be looked at and that was a thing she valued, not me, the thing I did, the function I served. Replacing that would be effort. Finding another warm body that opened the way I opened and said her name the way I said it and knelt without being asked would take time, and she was too graceful, too efficient, too old to bother with the effort when the current model could simply be repaired.

That was the answer. That was the only answer that made sense. She was not weeping for me. She was weeping for the inconvenience of loss, the way you weep for a broken thing you were fond of using.

I settled on it. I held it in my mind like a stone, smooth and heavy, and I pressed it down over every fragment I had gathered, the hand on my face, the forehead on my chest, the sound she had made when I could not squeeze her hand back, and I told myself they meant what I needed them to mean, which was nothing, which was ownership, which was the fondness of a collector for a piece that had nearly been lost.

It was my fault. She had said so. I had been careless. I had let them take too much. I had failed to maintain the body she had been given and she had been forced to sit in a chair for days watching it fail and that was the extent of it, the whole of it, and anything I thought I had seen in her face was hunger and habit and the irritation of interrupted routine.

"Soup," she said, still not looking up. "You will eat. You will rest. You will stay in this room until I say otherwise."

"Yes, Elena."

She stood. She set the book down. She crossed to the door and paused there, one hand on the frame, and she did not look back, and her shoulders were very straight and very still.

She stood there a moment longer. I watched her hand tighten on the door frame, the knuckles going white, the tremor she could not quite suppress running through her fingers. She did not look back. But she did not leave right away either. She stood in the doorway with her hand white on the frame and her face turned toward the hall, and I saw her shoulders rise and fall once, a breath she did not need, and I saw her jaw work around something she was not going to say.

Then she left, and the door closed, and I was alone.

I lay in her bed, in her room, in the deep windowless dark, and I felt my body knitting itself back together one slow cell at a time. I told myself again what I was. Food. A convenience. A well-trained thing whose only value was its willingness to be used. I told myself that the water had been practicality, that the cradle of her arm had been logistics, that the softness in her hand had been nothing.

I told myself, and I almost believed it, and the part of me that did not believe it I pressed down deep and I left it there, because believing it would mean that everything I had survived, every mark and every mouth and every night on my knees, had been something other than what I thought, and I could not survive that, not yet, not lying broken in her bed with her blood still drying on my lips.

So I healed. Slowly. The human way.

And I did not let myself think about her hand on the back of my head, or the cold of her cheek against my temple, or the way she had held the glass steady while I drank, or the softness in her voice when she murmured the words I could not hear.

I did not let myself think about any of it.

I thought about it anyway.