Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I’m saying that people don’t change who they are, at base, for other people—not healthily. People, instead, learn to accommodate their differences. While still maintaining healthy boundaries and senses of self.”

  “By that definition, the Tenants are not people. We take them on; they make us happy. Give us purpose. Resolve our existential angst.”

  “Devour us from the inside out.”

  I laugh. “What doesn’t?”

  * * *

  This time, Robin comes inside for me instead of waiting to pick me up outside. That makes me nervous, honestly. Robin is not an overly solicitous human being. Maybe they noticed the protestors and didn’t want me to have to walk past them alone?

  That hope sustains me until we’re in the car together, side by side, and Robin says the four worst words in the English language. “We need to talk.”

  “Okay,” I say, in flat hopelessness.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Robin says. “It isn’t working out for me.”

  You’d think after the third or fourth bayonet they’d stop hurting so much, going in. They’d have an established path.

  Not so.

  * * *

  So now I’m single. Nobody, it turns out, can handle the depth of what I’m feeling about losing Tamar. Not Tamar, not Robin.

  Not me.

  Evangeline can, though. Evangeline can because of proper professional distance. Because she’s not invested.

  Because the only person putting the weight of their emotional needs on the relationship is me.

  * * *

  From the edge of the brocade armchair, I speak between the fingers I’ve lowered my face into. “This is a way for me to be with them forever.”

  “I can see how it would feel that way to you,” Evangeline answers.

  “I need someone to tell me that I am more than merely tolerated. I need to be valued,” I say.

  “You’re valuable to them. To the Tenants.”

  “You begin to understand,” I say. “Maybe I shouldn’t need this. But I can’t survive these feelings without help. It’s not just that I want to be with Tamar. It’s that I need to not be in so much pain.”

  She nods. I’m already on six kinds of pills. Are they helping? They are not helping.

  I’m already trying to change myself so somebody will love me better.

  So that I will love me better.

  Evangeline says, “We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future.”

  “What if we make an irrevocable decision to get that hug and that cookie?”

  Evangeline lifts her shoulders, lets them fall. “My job is to make sure that you’re making an educated decision about the costs and benefits of the cookie. Not to tell you how much you should be willing to pay for it.”

  * * *

  I pace the house. I rattle pots in the kitchen but don’t cook anything. I take an extra anxiety pill.

  When it’s kicked in, I pull out my phone and text Atticus with trembling hands. Sorry about the delay. I needed to get my head on straighter.

  I understand. This is hard on all of us.

  You have to make Tamar talk to me!

  Tamar doesn’t want you to do this. I have to honor their wishes.

  Even after they’re dead?

  Especially after they’re dead.

  I can’t do this alone.

  We love you, the cancer says. We will always love you.

  Tell Tamar I stopped taking the oxy, I type, desperate. Tell them I did what they asked. Tell them to please just let me come say goodbye.

  * * *

  I’m talking to the bloated mass that disfigures Tamar’s strong, lithe body. It isn’t them.

  Except it is them.

  And Atticus is dying, too, and Atticus is taking the time out to comfort somebody it’s leaving behind. It’s funny, because we never had a lot to say to each other in life. Maybe that was denial on my part as much as anything. But now, it is Tamar.

  The only part of them that will still talk to me.

  And I want it to be me as well.

  I will tell them, Atticus types. I will tell them when they wake.

  * * *

  They that are not busy being born are busy dying.

  What’s the value of an individual? What is the impact of their choices? What is our responsibility for the impact of our choices on others? What is our responsibility to deal with our own feelings?

  We’re responsible for what we consume, right? And the repercussions of that consumption, too. If the Big Melt taught us anything, as a species, it taught us the relentless ethics of accountability.

  So from a certain point of view, the Tenants owe me.

  * * *

  We love you.

  * * *

  Tamar is gone. The call came in the morning. The Tenants will be handling the arrangements, in accordance with Tamar’s wishes.

  Atticus, of course, is also gone.

  I don’t know if Tamar woke up after I talked to Atticus. I don’t know if Atticus got a chance to tell them.

  The house belongs to me now.

  I should find some energy to clean it.

  * * *

  To Evangeline, I say, “What if you knew that if you changed yourself—let someone else change you, I suppose—you would be loved and valuable?”

  “I’d say you are lovable and valuable the way you are. Changing yourself to be what someone else wants won’t heal you, Marq.”

  I shake my head. “I’d say that people do it all the time. And without the guarantee the Tenants offer. Boob job, guitar lessons, fix your teeth, dye your hair, try to make a pile of money, answer a penis enlargement ad, lose weight, gain weight, lift weights, run a fucking marathon. They fix themselves and expect it will win them love.”

  “Or they find love and expect it to fix them,” Evangeline offers gently. “Or sometimes they give love, and expect it to fix the beloved. If love doesn’t fix you, it’s not true love, is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “No. That only works if you’re one of them.”

  She laughs. She has a good laugh, throaty and pealing but still somehow light.

  “I had true love,” I say more slowly. “It didn’t fix me. But it made me lovable for the first time.”

  “You were always lovable. Maybe Tamar helped you feel it?”

  “When you grow up being told over and over that you’re unlovable, and then somebody perfect and joyous loves you … it changes the way you feel about yourself.”

  “It’s healing?” she suggests.

  “It made me happy for a while.”

  “Did it?”

  “So happy,” I say.

  She nibbles on the cap of her pen. She still uses old-fashioned notebooks. “And now?”

  “I can never go back,” I tell her. “I can only go forward from here.”

  * * *

  Robin still picks me up after my sessions. They said they still cared about me. Still wanted to be friends. They expressed concern about when I’m coming back to the university and whether they would like me to facilitate the bereavement leave.

  They’re in HR; that’s how we met in the first place.

  I want to shove their superciliousness down their throat. But I also do not want to be alone. Especially today, when we are going to the funeral.

  Without Robin, I think I would be. Alone. Completely.

  I don’t have a lot of the kind of friends you can rely on for emotional support. Maybe that’s one reason I leaned so hard on Tamar. I didn’t have enough outside supports. And I’ve eroded the ones I did have by being so broken about Tamar dying.

  Don’t I get to be broken about this? The worst thing that’s ever happened to me?

  When we’re in the car, though, Robin turns to me and says, “I need to confess to something.”

  I don’t respond. I just sit, stunned already, w
aiting for the next blow.

  “Marq?”

  From a million miles away, I manage to raise and wave a hand. Continue.

  “I wrote to the Tenant’s candidate review board about you. I suggested that you were recently bereaved and they should consider your application in that light.”

  I can’t actually believe it. I turn slowly and blink at them.

  “You what?”

  “It’s for your own good—”

  I stomp right over their words. “You know what’s for my own good? Respecting my fucking autonomy.”

  “Even if it gets you killed?”

  “It’s my life to spend as I please, isn’t it?”

  Silence.

  I open the car door. The motor stops humming—a safety cutoff. We hadn’t started rolling yet, which is the only reason the door will open.

  “If it meant I wouldn’t go, would you come back to me?”

  That asshole turns their face aside.

  “Right,” I say. “I’ll find my own way home, I guess. Don’t worry about coming to the funeral.”

  * * *

  It’s a lovely service. I wear black. I sit in the front row. I used an autocar to get here. I don’t turn around to see if Robin showed up. I stand in the receiving line with Tamar’s siblings and the people who are Hosting Atticus’s closest friends. Robin is there. They don’t come up to me. Nobody makes me talk very much.

  I drink too much wine. Tamar’s older sib puts me in an autocar and the autocar brings me home.

  I can’t face our bedroom. The Tenants made sure the hospital bed was removed weeks ago, when Tamar went into hospice and we knew they were not coming home. So there’s nothing in our sunny bedroom except our own bedroom furniture.

  I can’t face it alone.

  I put the box with Tamar’s ashes on the floor beside the door, and I lie down on the sofa we picked out together, and I cry until the alcohol takes me away.

  Tomorrow, which is now today

  It’s still dark out when I wake up on the couch. Alone. I fell asleep so early that I’ve already slept eleven hours. I’m so rested I’m not even hungover. No point in trying to sleep more, although I want to seek that peace so fiercely the desire aches inside me.

  There are other paths to peace.

  I stand up, and suddenly standing is easy. I’m light; I’m full of energy. Awareness.

  Purpose.

  I pick up my phone by reflex. I don’t need it.

  There’s a message light blinking on the curve.

  A blue light.

  Tamar’s favorite color. The color I used especially for them.

  I’ve never been big on denial. But standing there in the dark, in the empty house, I have a moment when I think—This was all a nightmare, it was all a terrible dream. My hand shakes and a spike of pure blinding hope is the bayonet that transfixes me this time.

  Hope may be the thing with feathers. It is also the cruelest pain of all.

  Tamar’s ashes are still there in the beautiful little salvaged-wood box by the door.

  The hope is gone before it has finished deceiving me. Gone so fast I haven’t yet finished inhaling to gasp in relief when my diaphragm cramps and seizes and I cannot breathe at all.

  I should put the phone down. I should walk out the door and follow the plan I woke up with. The plan that filled me with joy and relief. I shouldn’t care what Tamar has to say to me now when they didn’t care what I needed to say to them then.

  I put my right thumb on the reader and the phone recognizes my pheromones.

  Marq, I love you.

  I’m sorry I had to go and I’m sorry I had to go alone.

  You were the best thing that happened to me, along with Atticus. You were my heart. You always talked about my joy, and how you loved it. But I never seemed able to make you understand that you were the source of so much of that joy.

  I know you will miss me.

  I know it’s not fair I had to go first.

  But it comforts me to know you’ll still be here, that somebody will remember me for a while. Somebody who saw me for myself, and not just through the lens of Atticus.

  I lied when I said I didn’t love you anymore, and it was a terrible, cruel thing to do. I felt awful and I did an awful thing. I do love you. I am so sorry that we needed different things.

  I am so sorry I sent you away.

  Atticus is arranging things so that this will be sent after we’re gone. I’m sorry for that, too, but it hurts too much to say goodbye.

  Do something for me, beloved?

  Don’t make any hasty choices right now. If you can, forgive me for leaving you and being selfish about how I did it. Live a long time and be well.

  Love (at least until the next Ice Age),

  Tamar

  I stare at the phone, ebullience flattened. Hasty choices? Did Tamar know I was applying for a Tenant? Had Atticus found out somehow?

  Or had they anticipated my other plan?

  I had a plan and it was a good plan—no. Dammit, concrete nouns and concrete verbs, especially now.

  I had been going to commit suicide. And now, Tamar—with this last unfair request.

  Forgive them.

  Forgive them.

  Had they forgiven me?

  Fuck, maybe I can forgive them on the way down.

  * * *

  The hike up to the gorge is easier in autumn. The vines have dropped their leaves and I can see to push them aside and find the path beyond. The earth underfoot is rocky and red, mossy where it isn’t compacted. I kick through leaves wet with a recent rain. I am wearing the wrong shoes.

  I am still wearing my funeral shoes.

  It is gray morning at the bottom of the trail. Birds are rousing, calling, singing their counterpoints and harmonies. Dawn breaks rose and gray along the horizon and my feet hurt from sliding inside the dress shoes by the time I reach the bridge. I pause by its footing, catching my breath, leaning one hand on the weathered post. The cables are extruded and still seem strong. A few of the slats have come loose, and I imagine them tumbling into the curling water and rocks far below.

  The water sings from behind a veil of morning mist. I can’t see the creek down there, but I feel its presence in the vibration of the bridge, and I sense the long fall it would take to get there. The bridge rocks under my weight as I step out. I could swear I feel the cables stretching under my weight.

  How long since I’ve been here?

  Too long.

  Well, that neglect is being remedied now.

  I achieve the middle of the bridge, careful in my slippery, thoughtless shoes. The sky is definitely golden at the east edge now, and the pink fades higher. I turn toward the waterfall. I wondered if there will be rainbows today.

  I unzip my jacket and bring out the box I’d tucked inside it when I left the house, the box of Tamar’s—and Atticus’s—mortal remains.

  I clear my throat and try to find the right thing to say, knowing I don’t have to say anything. Knowing I am talking to myself.

  “I wanted to keep you forever, you know. I don’t want to think about this—about you—becoming something that happened to me once. I don’t want to be a person who doesn’t know how to love themself again. And then I thought, maybe if I made myself like you, I would love myself the way I loved you. And Robin’s not going to let me do that either, I guess …

  “And you would be unhappy with me anyway, if I did.”

  I sniffle, and then I get mad at myself for self-pity.

  Then I laugh at myself, because I am talking to a box full of cremains, with a little plaque on the front, while standing on a rickety vintage home-brew suspension bridge over the arch of a forgotten waterfall. Yeah, there’s a lot here to pity, all right.

  “So I don’t know what to do, Tamar. I don’t know who to be without you. I don’t know if I exist outside of your perception of me. I liked the me I saw you seeing. I never liked myself before. And now you’re gone. So who am I?

  �
�And okay, maybe that’s unfair to put on somebody. But I did, and you’re stuck with it now.”

  I sniffle again.

  “You asked me to do something for you. Something hard. God am I glad nobody is here to see this. But I guess this is a thing I have, a thing I am that’s nobody else’s. This place here.”

  The sunrise is gaining on the birdsong. Pretty soon it will be bright enough for flying, and they won’t have so much to cheep about because they’ll be busy getting on with their day.

  In the end, everything falls away.

  Whatever else I have to say is just stalling.

  I say, “Welcome home, Atticus. Welcome home, Tamar.”

  I kiss the box.

  I hold it close to my chest for a moment, steeling myself. And then fast, without thinking about it, I shove my arms out straight in front of me, over the cable, over the plunge.

  I let go.

  Tamar falls fast.

  I don’t see where they land, and I don’t hear a splash.

  The damn shoes are even worse on the way back down.

  * * *

  There’s no wireless service until you’re halfway down the mountain. I’ve actually forgotten that I brought the damn phone with me. I jump six inches on sore feet when it pings.

  I resist the urge to look at it until I get back to the sharecar. The morning is mine and the birds are still singing. I cry a lot on the way down and trip over things in my funeral shoes. I swear I’m throwing these things away when I get home.

  I’d parked the little soap box of a vehicle where it could get a charge when the sun was up. I walk over the small, grassy, ignored parking lot and lean my rump against the warm resin of its fender. The phone screen is easier to read once I shade it with my head.

  The ping is a priority email, which makes me feel exactly the way priority emails and four a.m. phone calls always do.

  It says:

  Congratulations!

  Dear Mx. Marq Tames,

  On the advice of your transition specialist, you have been selected for expedited compassionate entrance into the Tenancy program, if you so desire. Of course, such entrance is entirely voluntary, and your consent is revocable until such time as the Tenancy is initiated.

  Benefits of the program for you include …

  … and then there was a lot of legalese.

  Huh.

  Evangeline came through.