Stone Mad

by Elizabeth Bear

  I looked at the patterns of grit worked into the lines on my hands. I deepened and lilted my voice a little to sound like hers. “Karen, love, you done fucked up pretty good this time?”

  Her eyes was sharp with tears now, bright as diamonds. How she held ’em back I’ll never know. But she laughed a little despite ’em, shook her head, and said, “Karen, love, you done fucked this one up left, right, and center.”

  It was such a creditable imitation of me that I almost smiled. But mostly I just stood there and looked at her and held my breath and hoped it weren’t the last goddamned time we was ever gonna argue.

  A big sigh came out of her. “You know what you did wrong.”

  “I made decisions for you without asking.”

  She nodded.

  “I tried to protect you from a hard thing instead of trusting you to be as smart and tough as I know you to be.”

  She nodded again. “I’m stone mad, Karen. And I am probably going to be mad for a long time. But . . . you’re still my Karen. You’d be my wife if we could marry, and that’s the way of it. You sided with somebody else over me, and that felt terrible, but it’s still just something you did, not something you are. And I’m not leaving you over that.”

  I started to cry with such relief right then, I’m not ashamed to say I got up out of that chair to hug her and then I went down on my knees and clutched her around the trousers so hard she wobbled. My fingers found the seams I’d sewed to fit her and the nails curved into them like I wanted to curve them into my own skin. I sobbed and held on to her and sobbed some more.

  Okay, maybe a little ashamed. But Priya sighed and petted my hair and disentangled me enough to hunker down like an Indian and wrap her arms around me, too. We leaned our heads together, and I looked at her short black hair and my long dark brown hair sort of stirred up together and thought about how I had almost never seen that again, and I started to cry all the harder.

  “You can be angry at me as long as you like,” I choked out between sobs.

  “Tempting,” she said. Then she stopped so sudden that I quit crying and turned my face up.

  She squeezed me tighter and said, “Yes, it is as Mother told me once. I can see why people could enjoy being wounded. Enjoy being the aggrieved party. It is a position of tremendous power over someone else, and I could make you pay court to me or make amends. And the anger is righteous and feels very good, yes.”

  She paused, thinking, choosing her words carefully. Her speech was more formal, the way it had been when I first met her, before my corrupting influence. She said, “And righteous anger gets things done. And in certain quantities this is useful. Anger can drive you to be brave and speak up, to make problems change. But I think it would be easy for me to become addicted to this power, Karen. To want it all the time. To make you feel unworthy so that you would always want to make things up to me. And I think that if I let myself do that”—she gave me a squeeze, and stroked one of the shiny little burn scars on my face; I knowed ’cause I saw her hand move, but I didn’t feel it when she touched me—“I’d be just like Peter Goddamn Bantle, hurting other people to make myself feel powerful.”

  I leaned my head against her shoulder. She had a lot of muscle on that narrow frame these days. Yanking machinery around the way she does ain’t for the faint of heart nor arm.

  She said, “Maybe every marriage faces some kind of temper, and it either fractures, or it anneals.”

  I snuffled. Her shoulder was all over snot where I was leaning on it. I liked it when she talked welding metaphors. It made her seem tough. Well, she was tough, but you know what I mean.

  I said, ”I like to think maybe our weld is going to hold?”

  “You’re still my girl, Karen.”

  “I can’t promise I’m always going to remember to be careful.”

  “Can you promise to remember to try to talk to me first?”

  “I can try.”

  I waited a little and let that sink in before I said, “You can still be angry for a little while. I won’t mind.”

  She petted my hair and said, “I might just take you up on that. But right now, come on over to the table.”

  “And let’s make some hot tea,” I said, because I knew she’d probably be wanting it.

  We walked the length of our own little kitchen, leaning on each other. I refilled the kettle from the tun by the door that she must have brought in and hauled water to yesterday. I put it on the hook and poked up the fire. She found more tea in the crates we hadn’t unpacked yet. We’d been too tired to wash the previous night’s dishes, so those were still in the basin. I reclaimed the pot from where we’d left it and rinsed the cold steeped jasmine tea, and she put the fresh tea in.

  I thought about that letter from Priya’s father. I thought about the look on her face while she read it, and the look on her face while she fed it, page by page, into the fire.

  “You gonna write him back?” I asked her.

  Her shoulders went up on account of she was holding her breath. She didn’t ask me who he was. She let the breath all out with a woosh and said, “I have a duty to my family. And he is hard, sometimes. But that doesn’t mean I wish never to speak with him again.”

  I thought about that. I thought about what I could say to her.

  Finally, I said, “So I’ve been suspecting for a while that part of being a grown-up person is knowing that there’s people as can change, and people as can’t. Or won’t, which amounts to the same thing, so there’s no use fussing over it. And I think maybe a thousand percent, give or take, of the heartbreak in all the world is caused by trying to turn the one kind of person into the other, if you take my meaning.”

  She sniffled, this time, but she listened.

  I was working myself up to a fine speech. “Now, that one kind of folks can sometimes through personal effort or heartbreak convert themselves into the other. But it ain’t common that that happens, and you can’t make it happen, and you can’t hold your breath until it happens, and if you treat them like they is gonna change if you just wish and yell hard enough . . . well, you’re gonna be holding your breath and wishing and yelling for a long time.”

  “I see.” She bit her lip. “So you’re telling me there’s no hope of reconciliation with my father.”

  “Nah.” I went to work on the fire, pretending it was to boil up the water faster but really for something to hide myself in. “I’m saying that if you’ve got one of them people in your life, it’s like horses. You have to decide if you can work with what you’ve got. And if you can, well, you don’t try to teach ’em any tricks that are beyond their capabilities. You bring ’em along gentle and you reward ’em when they ain’t jackasses and you’re damned careful about turning your back on ’em or giving them the chance to kick.”

  I swished the dry tea around in the pot—it was a kind called a Brown Betty, all the way from England, which Madame had given us as a housewarming gift. I liked the warm chocolate color of the glaze and the way the pottery felt in my hand. Priya looked thoughtful, which was so much better than her looking crushed. I put the teapot down and walked over and kissed her soft, on the mouth. She was still stiff about it, but she let me, and even kissed back a little, and I wanted to sniffle with gratitude.

  I turned away quick so she wouldn’t notice. She’d hung all the mugs on hooks over the cookstove while I was fussing, but she’d left the rinsed-out ones down.

  “My father would not be flattered by the comparison,” she said in that sere tone that meant she was making a joke.

  I turned back and winked at her.

  She said, “I think I understand. You are telling me that I cannot dictate what my relationships with other people will be, or . . . who those people will be themselves. I cannot bully my father into being other than my father. So if I want to have a relationship with my father, I will accept who he is, and try to lead him gently into better behavior.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Better yet, let him think it is his own id
ea.”

  We’d owned this place outright for a week, and been moved in a whole two days, and already Priya’d tinkered up the flue on the fireplace so it drew like a blast furnace. I couldn’t have got that fire hot faster with a bellows, once I opened up the draft. The kettle started hissing, so I swung the arm out and wrapped a cloth around my hand while I poured.

  Priya absentmindedly reached over and turned the button on a little timer she’d made out of what used to be my alarm clock. If I want my bits left whole in this love affair, I gotta stick a bit of plaster on them says “please do not take apart.”

  She generally puts ’em back together better than she found them, at least, though you might not recognize the thing after she’s done with it, or how it’s supposed to be used or even what for, for that matter.

  “What you can do,” I said, “is decide what behavior you’re going to accept, though, and not stick around for the bits that aren’t in it. You ain’t gotta turn your back on a pony as you know kicks.”

  “Even if I know he wants the chance to kick me, I do not have to make myself vulnerable?”

  “Well.” I thought about it so long her timer buzzed, and I poured the tea into the mugs so it wouldn’t get stewed the way the last batch had. This was black tea, so Priya got up to fetch the creamer from the cold room, and by the time she got back I was sitting at the board and had an answer.

  I poured cream into my mug and blew across my tea. I was even getting to like the stuff, though it weren’t no coffee. “You ain’t gotta give people everything they ask you for, neither.”

  And then I decided what we needed was some food. Because I was stalling, and I’ll be honest about it. That fussing bought me the time to get my courage up for the next hard conversation.

  * * *

  “So. You going to take up magic?” I asked, as I put a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her and sat down with my own. I was thinking of Priya touring, and me . . . staying behind with the ranch? I wouldn’t want to leave it, and my work was here in Rapid.

  Or would she just leave me? She had her reasons, after all. But surely she wouldn’t leave me, not after she said I was still her girl.

  Not unless her mind had changed between then and breakfast.

  She sighed and poked around in her food. “Well. I already left one family behind, and I’m getting by on letters.”

  She let it hang there long enough to scare me. Then she shook her head. “I’d miss you. Besides, I might be able to get some work here putting new lifts in the Riverside when they rebuild it. And all the modern conveniences. Bidets, Karen!”

  She had read about bidets in one of Beatrice’s French magazines, and was ridiculously excited. I gave it three months before our outhouse had one.

  “You know it’s still supposed to be haunted.”

  She looked me in the eye and I wondered if she was speaking out of my heart, or her own. “I was disappointed to find out that most of that spirit-talking stuff is nonsense, at least according to my grandfather. You want it to be true. You want some proof that the people you love are still with you, and not gone away out of reach forever. You want to be told that the answer you covet in your heart is certain.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s how they do it, right? You buy in, because you want a thing to be true, and then even when the evidence argues against you, you look for different evidence.”

  “It is a thing scientists must defend themselves against,” Priya said.

  I laughed, thinking of the Arcade sisters. “That’s how bunco artists get us. We know it’s too good to be true, but we want it anyway.”

  Priya ate her eggs and wouldn’t look at me.

  I touched her shoulder. “But sometimes the thing that seems too good to be true is real.”

  She looked at me. I dabbed a bit of grease off her forehead onto my handkerchief.

  “Not perfect,” she said.

  I kissed her. “Not perfect.”

  She leaned back, inspected me, and nodded. “That just means it’s not a con job,” she answered, and kissed me back.

  When I leaned back, I said, “So what do you think Old Boston meant by that note, if it weren’t a suicide note?”

  “What did it say?”

  “‘I just don’t want to do this anymore.’”

  She picked her tea up again. “Maybe he really just wanted a change.”

  * * *

  We speak of getting married or having children as giving hostages to fortune. But we’re all so damn self-absorbed that we forget: we’re also taking on the responsibility that every choice we make from that point on affects that other person profoundly. When you’re alone, you ain’t beholden to no one, but you also ain’t got no one beholden to you, and that’s in my mind a bigger duty toward kindness. People come to rely on a body, a body has to do their best to be the sort people can rely on. Or else stay out of positions of confidence. It’s only responsible.

  Priya blew her black-red bangs up. Of course they fell right back where they had started, strands across her forehead, and my heart fit to burst with tenderness. “My mother says that you don’t really know if you love someone until they break your heart and you decide that it’s worth it to keep loving them anyway. Even though maybe they turn out not to be as perfect as you’d thought they were.” She pressed her lips and lowered her head, mulish. “She also says that if you let them get away with breaking your heart out of meanness or disrespect, you’re a fool.”

  My words had to squeeze past a frog in my throat, so it’s no surprise they came out a croak. “What if it’s your own heart you’ve broke?”

  “Then I guess you gotta decide if you did it out of meanness or disdain, and if not you got to decide to keep loving yourself anyway, even if you’re not as perfect as maybe you thought. Or try to be.”

  You get thrown hard and it sometimes kills you outright. But sometimes you just get tangled in the stirrup, dragged and trampled, and then months later you look in a mirror, thinking you’re healed, and you find you can’t recognize what you’ve become.

  They were gone, my ma and da. Maybe they were waiting for me on the other side. If they was, I guessed I’d find out, and not having had the chance to say good-bye to Da would be like not having had the chance to say good-bye to him before he went out to the woodpile for a bit to split some lumber.

  And if they wasn’t, well. Fooling myself wouldn’t make them be there when I followed.

  Priya wasn’t gone, though.

  She was right here in front of me. And neither one of us was going away.

  About the Author

  Photograph by Kyle Cassidy

  ELIZABETH BEAR was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Bear lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with her husband, novelist Scott Lynch.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments and Author’s Note

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Tor Books by Elizabeth Bear

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  STONE MAD

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Micah Epstein

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Beth Meacham

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  ISBN 978-1-250-16382-0 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-250-16383-7 (trade paperback)

  First edition: March 2018

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