So many things came easily to me. I’d become inured to loss. And now, when I didn’t know what to do, I fell back into easy. George dropped me off at my apartment, and handed over the thermos without argument. Neither of us wanted it. I kicked it under the bed and left it there, put the battery in my bedside drawer because I didn’t want to reconnect it and reanimate the wren. The constant shuffling would have kept me awake. It would have kept me aware. With the silence, some days I didn’t even remember the thermos and its dead contents until I was on my third cup of coffee. Even then it was a minor mental effort to forget it again. George didn’t remind me. I didn’t hear from him, and refused to consider what that might mean, or who he might have been talking to instead.
Minor as it was, that forgetful effort collapsed in on itself when the Sea Witch sauntered into my office, and settled herself in the chair across from my desk. It was the chair students sat in when they came to query the syllabus; it didn’t take me long to realize that I was the one who should be sitting in it.
“I wish I could say your reaction was a surprise,” said the Sea Witch. “I was hoping for better.” Her skirt was still ragged. Plastic was twisted round her arms, in the braids of her hair, but what struck me most was that she was capable of speech. The last time I’d seen her, she’d cut out her own tongue … yet the woman I saw before me had that tongue firmly rooted inside her mouth.
“It was too much,” said the Sea Witch, after I gaped and stammered through greeting. “I needed to think. I needed to work through thinking. It wasn’t as if speech had done much for me back when I was alive.”
There was too much to work through. The memory of journals under my fingers, yes, the failed warnings of environmental advocacy. It hadn’t been enough, and I couldn’t say I was entirely surprised she’d come to resent the work that hadn’t been enough to keep coral alive. I resented it sometimes too — the repeated arguments that changed so few minds and fewer practices. The endless pained exhaustion of a fight we were never going to win. That small shared sympathy was drowned, though, by the horror and mystery of her presence.
“When you were alive?” I repeated, inelegantly. “You’re not bloody dead.” That at least I was sure of. The Sea Witch sat before me and she wasn’t a robot, or a hologram, or grown in a lab. She was a living being that hadn’t died yet.
“No?” she said. “Watch this.” She’d left the door open, and one of our colleagues walked past. His nose, as always, was buried in a book. “Hi, Sandy!” said the Sea Witch.
He looked up and smiled, and then something happened to that smile. It froze, just slightly — an expression I’d seen on him before, at faculty fundraisers, when he was talking to someone he should have known but couldn’t place. “Hey!” he said. “Great to see you. Sorry I can’t stop to chat. Gotta run.”
“Told you,” said the Sea Witch. “People hear you’ve got Grief and they stop looking. Afraid to see their own futures, I expect.”
“I didn’t stop looking.” The opposite, in fact. I’d kept on looking, kept on visiting, bringing paper and plastic and the remembrance of a friendship that I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore. A friendship that became more burdensome by the day.
“You keep telling yourself that,” said the Sea Witch.
“You think I’m lying?”
“I did appreciate it. The effort. The attempt at empathy. Though let’s not pretend your devotion was the result of anything but a determination to retain a certain level of self-respect in the face of imminent deprivation. You were losing a friend, and good people don’t abandon their friends, or not easily, so you stayed until I gave you the proper opportunity to let go.” She poked her tongue out at me and waggled it, playful. “But good people don’t let go either — not the way you did — so when the chance came again, when a packet of letters arrived in your mailbox … Tell me, was it a chance to paper over what you’d done?”
I sat back in my chair, and kept my gaze locked on hers because the alternative was worse. “Can you watch something die and let it die? Yeah, I got the message, thanks. I could, and I did, and I honestly don’t know how to feel about that. If you give me a few more months I’ll learn to live with it. In a year or two I probably won’t even feel bad.”
The Sea Witch grinned, and it was honest admiration. “I’ve always liked that about you,” she said. “Monstrous self-interest masquerading as emotional stability.”
“Not all of us feel the need to beat our breasts so damn publicly.”
“Resentment, much?”
There was nothing to say to that. Partly because it was true, and mostly because it was awful. For all I’d tried to cling to Marjorie after she’d begun her transformation into the Sea Witch, it was a clinging that came with condescension. Grief had made such a wasteland of society. It was constant reproach — that we hadn’t done enough, and that we weren’t sensitive enough. No one ever wanted mental illness, but deep inside there remained the wondering: why hadn’t I succumbed? What was lacking in me that I could see the world change so profoundly, and with such loss, and do nothing but shrug? Oh, not in my actions. I researched. I was an advocate for biodiversity and climate mitigation. Many of the absences did hurt. Yet those hurts were brief, and I got on. And part of me, the small secret part that I didn’t like very much, looked down on those
