Chapter 60

There is no always. No forever. There is now, and there is what was, and the river feels cool against my naked flesh. The breeze plays with my hair, snow white and long. It’s fashionable for an old woman to cut hair short for ease of care, but I have never forgotten those days when he ran his fingers through my hair and smiled, and I could never bring myself to cut it.

I feel no urge to look behind me now. Paranoia is gone; no one followed me to the river. No one watches this old woman. What would they see, anyway? I am old. My breasts are no longer honey-globes to tempt men into my bed. They are old, near flat against my chest and belly, which sags in unlovely folds. My legs are strong, still, but ropy with age and covered with blue varicose veins.

That wedge of flesh, the one that so drove most of my life, is only wet from the river. Years have passed since last I felt any surge of desire, physical desire. I have longed for the touch of a hand, the quick press of lips to my forehead, the cheerful voices of my grandchildren, for whom I have always looked like this, who look at pictures from my youth with polite disinterest, to whom that black-haired, sloe-eyed beauty is no one they’ve ever known.

Is no one I ever knew.

I was aged and near to the end before I ever knew who I was. Stranger to myself, unknown and unknowable. And that knowing, once I had it, was useful. I don’t speak of it. I wouldn’t have listened to me when I was my daughter’s age, nor my granddaughters’, nor those absently kind, professional caregivers. They wouldn’t hear my words, and so I don’t speak them.

The water. Somewhere, I remember the dim morning, so many years ago, when the water surged around me and took me under, closed me in its fey embrace. Does he remember? Did I mean anything to him, that one brilliant day, so long ago? We don’t meet much, the real and the fey, but I am told their memory is long, and that if anyone remembered that black-haired, sloe-eyed beauty, it would be the one who gave it to me, the one who touched me and brought me to life inside myself, that shell of me that walked in the city, that shell of a human who knew nothing of magic and heresy. He brought me awake, brought me to life with a single kiss, the touch of his hand, the gleam of his smile.

The water closes over my head.

It is dark beneath the river’s current. If there is anything living here in this dirty river, I cannot see it, though my eyes are open and I strain to hold my breath. Pointless, meaningless, but this body know nothing of love or hope, it only knows the golden, searing pain and the weariness that accompanies it.

I walk deeper, my hands held out blindly.

Where are you? Where, my love, my life, the only one who ever knew me at all?

You gave me such a gift, such a beloved gift, my daughter who knows not at all. Who was her father, she asked me when she was young, and I told her that he was a man of the sea. It was not a lie, but we live in a town of sailors and she thinks she knows the truth. That lovely, golden-green girl who has gone on to have daughters of her own. I wish you had seen her, even just once. We came to the water many times, and she never knew that she was born knowing how to swim, that she can hold her breath for many minutes without strain. She doesn’t know why she can race through the meadows without tiring. For her, these things are no magic, no miracle. They are simply part of who she is.

And she thinks she knows who that is.

She knows nothing.

The water swirls around me, warmer, somehow. I feel him, hot and eager and he spreads my legs beneath the waves. Golden eyes drink in the sight of me as if I’d aged not a day, been gone not a moment, and everything is what once it was.

I open my arms to him and take in the river god, embrace my lover with hands growing weak. I taste his lips as he pushes his phallus into me, one last time. I have forgotten this, but I remember the dance so well. My legs encircle his hips, pulling him into me, into the watery depths. I feel him touching me everywhere. He is the water and he is the mud at the base of the river and the beasts and fish that dwell in his domain. He knows everything, and for that moment, joined with him, bliss-blind and dying, I know everything.