They all stared at me as if I were a stranger. And they surely had to be strangers, too, even though they did look and sound almost exactly like the women who collectively between them had told me ten thousand times or so that I was a sad burden to my saint of a mother. Everyone who lived here had a reason, something that had driven them to shut themselves away from the rest of the world. Mum had come to live here because she wasn’t willing to compromise with selfishness, but these three women, and a lot of the other people here, they hadn’t come here to do good, they’d come here to have good done for them. And they’d looked at me and saw a perfectly healthy child, with this magical being lavishing love and attention and energy upon her, and they all knew what it would have meant to them to have that same unbounded gift, and here I was, apparently sullen and ungrateful, soaking it up to no good end at all that they could see.
Which wasn’t an excuse for being nasty to a miserable lonely kid, and just because I understood their reasons didn’t mean I was ready to forgive them. I should’ve enjoyed it so much, I should’ve spoken to them with contempt: That’s right, I’m back, and I’ve grown; have any of you accomplished anything in the last four years besides horrible gossip? Mum would have sighed when she heard about it, and I wouldn’t have cared. I’d have floated out of the bathhouse on a cloud of mean greedy pleasure.
But I couldn’t do it. Apparently, if I wasn’t going to be angry at Orion, I couldn’t be angry at anyone.
I didn’t say anything to them, and they didn’t say anything to me, or to each other. I turned and dried off with their silence behind my back and put on the clothes Mum had left for me on the hook next to my shower stall: actual new cotton knickers fresh from the cellophane, and a linen shift with a drawstring at the neck, big and loose enough to fit me; one of the people in the commune made them for medieval reenactors. A pair of handmade sandals from one of our other neighbors, just a flat sole cut out of wood with a leather cord. I hadn’t worn anything this clean in four years, except the day I’d first put on Orion’s shirt. The last clothes I’d grudgingly bought were a couple of pairs of lightly used underwear off a senior at the start of my junior year, when there just wasn’t enough left of my last pair to cast make-and-mend on them. New underwear went for insanely exorbitant prices inside: you could’ve bought an all-round antidote potion for a pair of unworn pants, and now here I was with untold riches.
I couldn’t enjoy them any more than I could enjoy a round of delicious payback. I put them on, because it would have been stupid not to, and of course it felt better, it felt wonderful, but I looked at the ragged filthy ruin of Orion’s shirt, which wasn’t fit for anything but the bin, and feeling better felt worse. I tried to make myself chuck it along with the rest of my old things, but I couldn’t. I folded it up and put it into one of my pockets—it was so worn thin, half made of magic at this point, that I could get it to the thickness of a handkerchief. I cleaned my teeth—new toothbrush, fresh minty paste—and walked out. It was dark outside by then. Mum had a small fire going outside the yurt. I sat down on one of the logs next to the pit and after a bit, I cried some more. It wasn’t original or anything, I realize. Mum came round and put an arm around my shoulders again, and Precious climbed into my lap.
* * *
I spent the next day sitting blankly by the dead firepit. I was clean, I was fed, I was sitting outside in sunshine and a brief shower—I didn’t move—and sunshine again. Mum puttered around me quietly, handed me food to eat and tea to drink, and left me alone to process. I wasn’t processing. I was trying very hard not to process, because there wasn’t anything to process except the raw horrible truth that Orion was somewhere off in the void screaming. I could almost hear him, if I thought about it too long: I could almost hear him saying, El, El, help me, please. El.
Then I looked over, because it wasn’t just in my head anymore. There was a small odd bird standing on the log right next to me: purple-black, with an orange beak and bright-yellow marks around its head, and a big round beady black eye it tilted up towards me. “El?” it said to me again. I stared down at it. It stretched its head out long and made a sound like a person coughing, then straightened up again. “El?” it said again. “El? El, are you okay?” and it was Liu’s voice: not exactly the same sound maybe, but the accent and the way she’d have said the words; if it had spoken from behind me, I’d have thought she was there.