“Was Mother okay?” I ask. “Was she losing her mind? My last conversations with her were…”
“What?” For a moment, she looks at me curiously.
I’m wearing a dread of liquid gold that burns like the sun.
“Strange,” I whisper. “I felt like something was happening to her.”
“What was happening to her was that she was becoming her Most Magnificent Self.” She sighs like isn’t that the loveliest thing?
“Her Most Magnificent Self,” I repeat.
“Definitely. Perhaps you saw.”
A flash of the last time I saw Mother. A FaceTime call about a month ago. Hey there, stranger, she said slowly, her voice terribly dreamy and serene. So nice to see your face. But I could tell by her eyes that she was staring at her own face. Lost in the dream of it. I was too. She looked shockingly pale. So smooth and flawless, she took my breath away. And empty. Empty was the other word her face was.
What’s your secret these days, Mother? I asked her, though I told myself I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to go down this road, whatever it was.
If I told you, it wouldn’t be secret, now, would it?
A feeling crept into me then. Dark and sharp. Bitter as poison. Terribly familiar. I hadn’t felt it in a long time. Mother saw it in my eyes and smiled a little.
You don’t need my secrets, Sunshine. You never did.
Now I nod, and the impossible girl-woman meets my eye and nods too.
“She’d peeled away all the regrets, all the mind shadows from the past. Such persistent wounds, don’t you agree?”
“Yes.” We’re still gliding around the tank in this strange dance, me moving backward, her moving forward.
“To become one’s Most Magnificent Self. To strip away the dark cobwebs in the mind. Basement boxes full of moldy memories. Chests under lock and key.” She stares at me. “Get rid of all that, right?” Her hands are still on my face, grazing my forehead scar now. I feel a shiver in the pit of me. Something opening in spite of myself.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Daughter of Noelle?” she whispers. Coming close.
“Yes.” Even as a voice says, No. You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t.
She looks deep into my eyes and smiles. And inside, I feel myself opening, opening. An electricity singing along my skin. The scar on my forehead tingling beneath her fingertips.
“I fly back home in a couple of days,” I say.
“Do you? What a shame.” She looks amused. Amused by my feet still walking myself backward, even as I’m so transfixed by her touch, her face. I can’t stop staring at her eyes, her cheeks, her forehead, her lips, the fucking glow of her. Glowing just like Mother did. Tears, real tears, gather behind my eyes. She looks tenderly at me.
“I want to show you something.”
She leads me away from the tank, and I follow her. I can follow her now. We walk hand in hand toward a small black pool in the corner of the room. She takes a seat on the pool’s black marble edge, patting the space next to her. When I sit, she reaches out for my hand. I give it to her and she smiles. That awful symmetry again. She turns my hand, palm up, then lowers it into the black water. All the while looking at me with her cold, knowing eyes. The water is cool, opaque, velvety against my hand.
“What is this?” I ask, my hand in the water. “What are we doing?”
She puts a finger to her lips. Shhh. Her eyes are on my face.
And then I feel something in my palm. Light and slippery as a wish. Almost weightless.
She raises my arm from the pool. And there it is. Beating like a heart in my hand. A small white jellyfish. Translucent as a ghost. A whisper of a creature.
“Look at that,” she says. She’s smiling widely now. “It found you.”
“It found me.”
“It loves you.”
“It loves me?”
“Can’t you tell?”
I look at the creature undulating softly in my palm.
“You’re going to go on quite a journey together,” she says.
“We are?”
“Oh yes. A marvelous journey. Un voyage merveilleux. I can feel it.”
Whenever I hear the word journey, I think of Marva. Her many skin journeys that I follow on her vlogs, step-by-step. Her brightening journey. Her retinoid journey. Her post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation journey. Her skin barrier recovery journey. So many journeys I’ve been on with her in my bedroom dark. I stare at the tiny white creature in my hand. “What sort of journey?” I ask.