by Neil Clarke
She saw a still of Collin’s hand over a delicate formation, and then another of him looking up, startled. “Mara?” he asked. “Is that you?”
His voice cracked when he spoke, sliding from low to high. It hadn’t been doing that before.
“Hi, Collin,” she said.
“Your avatar looks weird.” She could imagine Collin squinting to investigate her image, but the television continued to show his initial look of surprise.
She was using a video skin capture from the last time Mara had logged in, months ago. Without a motion reader, it was probably just standing there, breathing and blinking occasionally, with no expression on its face.
“I’m on a weird connection,” Ruth said.
“Is it because you’re sick?” Collin’s expression of concern flashed onscreen. “Can I see what you really like? It’s okay. I’ve seen videos. I won’t be grossed out or anything. I missed you. I thought—we weren’t sure you were coming back. We were working on a video to say good-bye.”
Ruth shifted uncomfortably. She’d wanted to go the attic so she could get on with living, not to be bogged down in dying. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
The next visual showed a flash of Colin’s hand, blurred with motion as he raised it to his face. “We did some stuff with non-Newtonian fluids,” he said tentatively. “You’d have liked it. We got all gross.”
“Did you throw them around?” she asked.
“Goo fight,” Collin agreed. He hesitated. “Are you coming back? Are you better?”
“Well—” Ruth began.
“Everyone will want to know you’re here. Let me ping them.” “No. I just want to talk to you.”
A new picture: Collin moving closer to her avatar, his face now crowding the narrow rectangle of her vision.
“I looked up osteosarcoma. They said you had lung nodules. Mara, are you really better? Are you really coming back?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But everyone will want to know.”
Suddenly, Ruth wanted to be anywhere but attic space. Abba was right. She couldn’t go back. Not because someone might find out but because everyone was going to want to know, what about Mara? They were going to want to know about Mara all the time. They were going to want to drag Ruth back into that sick bed, with her world narrowing toward death, when all she wanted was to move on.
And it was even worse now than it would have been half an hour ago, before she’d gone into Mara’s room and seen her raw, tender hand, and thought about what it would be like to grasp it.
“I have to go,” Ruth said.
“At least let me ping Violet,” Collin said.
“I’ll be back,” Ruth answered. “I’ll see you later.”
On the television: Collin’s skeptical face, brows drawn, the shine in his eyes that showed he thought she was lying.
“I promise,” she said, hesitating only a moment before she tore the attic space box out of her jury-rigged web of wires.
Tears were filling her eyes and she couldn’t help the sob. She threw the box. It skittered across the wooden floor until it smacked into the mirror. The thing was so old and knocked about that any hard collision might kill it, but what did that matter now? She wasn’t going back.
She heard a sound from the doorway and looked up. She saw abba, standing behind the cracked door. Ruth’s anger flashed to a new target. “Why are you spying on me?” “I came to check on Mara,” abba said.
He didn’t have to finish for his meaning to be clear. He’d heard someone in the studio and hoped it could still be his Marale.
He made a small gesture toward the attic space box. “It did not go well,” he said quietly, statement rather than question.
Ruth turned her head away. He’d been right, about everything he’d said, all the explicit things she’d heard, and all the implicit things she hadn’t wanted to.
She pulled her knees toward her chest. “I can’t go back,” she said.
Abba stroked her hair. “I know.”
The loss of attic space hurt less than she’d thought it would. Mara had sealed off those tender spaces, and those farewells had a final ring. She’d said good-bye to Collin a long time ago.
What bothered her more was the lesson it forced; her life was never going to be the same, and there was no way to deny it. Mara would die and be gone, and Ruth had to learn to be Ruth, whoever Ruth was. That was what had scared Mara about Ruth in the first place.
The restlessness that had driven her into attic space still itched her. She started taking walks in the snow with Abel. Abba didn’t try to stop her.
She stopped reading Jewish poetry and started picking up books on music theory. She practiced sight reading and toe-tapped the beats, imagining choreographies.
Wednesdays, when abba planned the menu for Shabbat, Ruth sat with him as he wrote out the list he would take to Gerry’s on Thursday. As he imagined dishes, he talked about how Mara would like the honey he planned to infuse in the carrots, or the raisins and figs he would cook with the rice. He wondered what they should talk about—poetry, physics, international politics—changing his mind as new topics occurred to him.
Ruth wondered how he kept hoping. As Mara, she’d always known her boundaries before abba realized them. As Ruth, she knew, as clearly as Mara must, that Mara would not eat with them.
Perhaps it was cruel not to tell him, but to say it felt even crueler.
On a Thursday while abba was taking the truck to town, Ruth was looking through ima’s collection of sheet music in the parlor when she heard the click of crutches down the hall. She turned to find Mara was behind her, breathing heavily.
“Oh,” said Ruth. She tried to hide the surprise in her voice but failed.
“You didn’t think I could get up on my own.” Mara’s voice was thin.
“I . . . “ Ruth began before catching the angry look of resolution on Mara’s face. “No. I didn’t.”
“Of course not,” Mara said bitterly. She began another sentence, but was interrupted by a ragged exhalation as she started to collapse against the wall. Ruth rushed to support her. Mara accepted her assistance without acknowledging it, as if it were beneath notice.
“Are you going to throw up?” Ruth asked quietly.
“I’m off the chemo.”
Mara’s weight fell heavily on Ruth’s shoulder. She shifted her balance, determined not to let Mara slip. “Let me take you back to bed,” Ruth said. Mara answered, “I wanted to see you again.” “I’ll take you. We can talk in there.”
Ruth took Mara’s silence as assent. Abandoning the crutches, she supported Mara’s weight as they headed back into the bedroom. In daylight, the room looked too bright, its creams and whites unsullied.
Mara’s heaving eased as Ruth helped her into the bed, but her lungs were still working hard. Ruth waited until her breathing came evenly.
Ruth knelt by the bed, the way abba always had, and then wondered if that was a mistake. Mara might see Ruth as trying to establish power over her. She ducked her gaze for a moment, the way Abel might if he were ashamed, hoping Mara would see she didn’t mean to challenge her.
“What did you want to say to me?” Ruth asked. “It’s okay if you want to yell.”
“Be glad,” Mara said. “That you didn’t have to go this far.”
Mara’s gaze slid down Ruth’s face. It slowly took in her smooth skin and pink cheeks.
Ruth opened her mouth to respond, but Mara continued.
“It’s a black hole. It takes everything in. You can see yourself falling. The universe doesn’t look like it used to. Everything’s blacker. So much blacker. And you know when you’ve hit the moment when you can’t escape. You’ll never do anything but fall.”
Ruth extended her hand toward Mara’s, the way she’d wanted to the other night, but stopped before touching her. She fumbled for something to say.
Flatly, Mara said, “I am glad at least someone will get away.”
/> With great effort, she turned toward the window.
“Go away now.”
She shouldn’t have, but Ruth stood at the door that night when abba went in to check on Mara. She watched him kneel by the bed and take her hand. Mara barely moved in response, still staring out the window, but her fingers tensed around his, clutching him. Ruth remembered the way abba’s hand had felt when she was sleepless and in pain, a solid anchor in a fading world.
She thought of what abba had said to her when she was still Mara, and made silent promises to the other girl. I will keep you and hold you. I will protect you. I will always have your hand in mine.
In the morning, when Ruth came back upstairs, she peeked through the open door to see abba still there beside Mara, lying down instead of kneeling, his head pillowed on the side of her mattress.
She walked back down the hallway and to the head of the stairs. Drumming on her knees, she called for Abel. He lumbered toward her, the thump of his tail reassuringly familiar. She ruffled his fur and led him into the parlor where she slipped on his leash.
Wind chill took the outside temperature substantially below freezing, but she hesitated before putting on her coat. She ran her hand across the “skin” of her arm. It was robotic skin, not human skin. She’d looked at some of the schematics that abba had left around downstairs and started to wonder about how different she really was from a human. He’d programmed her to feel vulnerable to cold, but was she really?
She put the coat back on its hook and led Abel out the door. Immediately, she started shivering, but she ignored the bite. She wanted to know what she could do.
She trudged across the yard to the big, bony oak. She snapped off a branch, made Abel sit while she unhooked his leash, and threw the branch as far as she could. Abel’s dash left dents in the snow. He came back to her, breath a warm relief on her hand, the branch slippery with slobber.
She threw it again and wondered what she could achieve if abba hadn’t programmed her body to think it was Mara’s. He’d given her all of Mara’s limits. She could run as fast as Mara, but not faster. Calculate as accurately as Mara, but no more so.
Someday, she and abba would have to talk about that.
She tossed the stick again, and Abel ran, and again, and again, until he was too tired to continue. He watched the branch fly away as he leaned against Mara’s leg for support.
She gave his head a deep scratch. He shivered and he bit at the air near her hand. She realized her cold fingers were hurting him. For her, the cold had ceased to be painful, though she was still shivering now and then.
“Sorry, boy, sorry,” she said. She reattached his leash, and watched how, despite the temperature, her fingers moved without any stiffness at all.
She headed back to the house, Abel making pleased whuffing noises to indicate that he approved of their direction. She stopped on the porch to stamp the snow off of her feet. Abel shook himself, likewise, and Ruth quickly dusted off what he’d missed.
She opened the door and Abel bounded in first, Ruth laughing and trying to keep her footing as he yanked on the leash. He was old and much weaker than he had been, but an excited burst of doggy energy could still make her rock. She stumbled in after him, the house dim after her cold hour outside.
Abba was in the parlor, standing by the window from which he’d have been able to see them play. He must have heard them come in, but he didn’t look toward her until she tentatively called his name.
He turned and looked her over, surveying her bare arms and hands, but he gave no reaction. She could see from his face that it was over.
He wanted to bury her alone. She didn’t argue.
He would plant Mara in the yard, perhaps under the bony tree, but more likely somewhere else in the lonely acreage, unmarked. She didn’t know how he planned to dig in the frozen ground, but he was a man of many contraptions. Mara would always be out there, lost in the snow.
When he came back, he clutched her hand as he had clutched Mara’s. It was her turn to be what abba had been for Mara, the anchor that kept him away from the lip of the black hole, the one steady thing in a dissolving world.
They packed the house without discussing it. Ruth understood what was happening as soon as she saw abba filling the first box with books. Probably she’d known for some time, on the fringe of her consciousness, that they would have to do this. As they wrapped dishes in tissue paper, and sorted through old papers, they shared silent grief at leaving the yellow house that abba had built with Meryem, and that both Mara and Ruth had lived in all their lives.
Abba had enough money that he didn’t need to sell the property. The house would remain owned and abandoned in the coming years.
It was terrible to go, but it also felt like a necessary marker, a border bisecting her life. It was one more way in which she was becoming Ruth.
They stayed in town for one last Shabbat. The process of packing the house had altered their sense of time, making the hours seem foreshortened and stretched at turns.
Thursday passed without their noticing, leaving them to buy their groceries on Friday. Abba wanted to drive into town on his own, but Ruth didn’t want him to be alone yet.
Reluctantly, she agreed to stay in the truck when they got there. Though abba had begun to tell people that she was recovering, it would be best if no one got a chance to look at her up close. They might realize something was wrong. It would be easier wherever they moved next; strangers wouldn’t always be comparing her to a ghost.
Abba was barely out of the truck before Gerry caught sight of them through the window and came barreling out of the door. Abba tried to get in his way. Rapidly, he stumbled out the excuse that he and Ruth had agreed on, that it was good for her to get out of the house, but she was still too tired to see anyone.
“A minute won’t hurt,” said Gerry. He pushed past abba. With a huge grin, he knocked on Ruth’s window.
Hesitantly, she rolled it down. Gerry crossed his arms on the sill, leaning his head into the vehicle. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “Your daddy said you were getting better, but just look at you!”
Ruth couldn’t help but grin. Abel’s tail began to thump as he pushed himself into the front seat to get a better look at his favorite snack provider.
“I have to say, after you didn’t come the last few weeks . . . “ Gerry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m just glad to see you, Mara, I really am.”
At the sound of the name, Ruth looked with involuntary shock at abba, who gave a sad little smile that Gerry couldn’t see. He took a step forward. “Please, Gerry. She needs to rest.”
Gerry looked back at him, opened his mouth to argue, and then looked back at Ruth and nodded. “Okay then. But next week, I expect some free cashier work!” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. He smelled of beef and rosemary. “You get yourself back here, Mara. And you keep kicking that cancer in the rear end.”
With a glance back at the truck to check that Mara was okay, abba followed Gerry into the store. Twenty minutes later, he returned with two bags of groceries, which he put in the bed of the truck. As he started the engine, he said, “Gerry is a good man. I will miss him.” He paused. “But it is better to have you, Mara.”
Ruth looked at him with icy surprise, breath caught in her throat.
Her name was her own again. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
The sky was bronzing when they arrived home.
On the stove, cholent simmered, filling the house with its scent. Abba went to check on it before the sun set, and Ruth followed him into the kitchen, preparing to pull out the dishes and the silverware and the table cloth.
He waved her away. “Next time. This week, let me.”
Ruth went into ima’s studio. She’d hadn’t gone inside since the disaster it attic space, and her gaze lingered on the attic box, still lying dead on the floor.
“I’d like to access a DVD of ima’s performances,” she told the AI. “Coppelia, please.”
It whirred.
The audience’s rumblings began and she instructed the AI to fast-forward until Coppelia was onstage. She held her eyes closed and tipped her head down until it was the moment to snap into life, to let her body flow, fluid and graceful, mimicking the dancer on the screen.
She’d thought it would be cathartic to dance the part of the doll, and in a way it was, but once the moment was over, she surprised herself by selecting another disc instead of continuing. She tried to think of a comedy that she wanted to dance, and surprised herself further by realizing that she wanted to dance a tragedy instead. Mara had needed the comedies, but Ruth needed to feel the ache of grace and sorrow; she needed to feel the pull of the black hole even as she defied its gravity and danced, en pointe, on its edge.
When the light turned violet, abba came to the door, and she followed him into the kitchen. Abba lit the candles, and she waited for him to begin the prayers, but instead he stood aside.
It took her a moment to understand what he wanted.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Please, Marale,” he answered.
Slowly, she moved into the space where he should have been standing. The candles burned on the table beneath her. She waved her hands through the heat and thickness of the smoke, and then lifted them to cover her eyes.
She said, “Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam, asher kid’Shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu, l’had’lik neir shel Shabbat.”
She breathed deeply, inhaling the scents of honey and figs and smoke.
“Amein.”
She opened her eyes again. Behind her, she heard abba’s breathing, and somewhere in the dark of the house, Abel’s snoring as he napped in preparation for after-dinner begging. The candles filled her vision as if she’d never seen them before. Bright white and gold flames trembled, shining against the black of the outside sky, so fragile they could be extinguished by a breath.
She blew them out, and Sabbath began.
Adam Christopher’s debut novel Empire State was SciFiNow’s Book of the Year and a Financial Times Book of the Year. The author of Made To Kill, Standard Hollywood Depravity, and Killing Is My Business, Adam’s other novels include Seven Wonders, The Age Atomic, and The Burning Dark. Adam has also written the official tie-in novels for the hit CBS television show Elementary, and the award-winning Dishonored video game franchise, and with Chuck Wendig, wrote The Shield for Dark Circle/Archie Comics. Adam is also a contributor to the Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View 40th anniversary anthology. Born in New Zealand, Adam now lives in the United Kingdom.