“If I tell her I’m dying, she’ll touch me because she feels guilty. She’ll climb into my bed and spend the rest of her life resentingme for it. I don’t want that. I want her to choose me because she wants to, not because she can’t live with letting me die.”
“You’re being stubborn.”
“I’m being fair to her.”
“You’re being stubborn and calling it fairness because that’s easier to live with.” He finishes his beer and reaches for another from the crate. “But it’s your call. I’ve said my piece.”
“You have.”
He pops the cap and doesn’t push further. We’ve known each other long enough that he can hear when I’m done with a subject, and I’m done with this one.
I shift my arm on the armrest, and the sleeve of my shirt pulls back. The crack on my forearm catches the light from inside the room behind us. It’s a deep fissure, one that’s been widening for weeks. I’ve watched it spread every morning, a little wider each day. However, it looks the same as it did four days ago. The edges haven’t moved. I look at it for a few seconds, then pull my sleeve back down. Calcification doesn’t pause, I tell myself. That’s not how it works. The stone degrades until the organs start failing one by one. It’s only a coincidence that the crack hasn’t worsened, or maybe I’ve been too distracted to monitor it properly as of late.
“We hit something good this week,” Jarrvik says, and I notice the excitement in his voice.
He loves the mine. When we were young, we used to sneak down to the upper shafts to watch the crews work before someone chased us out.
“A vein about a hundred and thirty feet past the last junction. The stone around it is clean, barely any fracture lines, and the deposit is thick. We think we can pull some big pieces of diamond, bigger than anything we’ve extracted before.”
“How deep are you?”
“Deep enough. We extended shaft nine by another forty feet to reach it.”
“That’s a lot of new ground.”
“It’s worth it. You should see the samples we brought up. The crystals are clear all the way through, not a single inclusion. If the rest of the vein is the same, this is the biggest find the mine has had in years.”
“The deeper you dig, the more dangerous it gets,” I say. “You know that.”
“The supports are solid. The crew is experienced, half of them have been working shaft nine since before I took over. We brace every foot before we move forward.”
“Experience doesn’t stop a ceiling from coming down.”
Jarrvik sets his bottle on the ledge and looks at me.
“What happened to your father won’t happen again, I promise. I have this under control.”
I hold his gaze. He means it. He believes it, fully and honestly, but the problem is that I know believing it doesn’t make it true.
“If something happens to you down there, Irrva won’t survive it,” I say. “You know that. And you tend to be reckless, Jarrvik. You always have been, even when we were kids. You go in first and think about it after. So yes, I worry.”
He picks up his bottle and takes a drink. He’s quiet for a moment, then he shakes his head.
“You worry about me,” he says. “Irrva and I worry about you.” He gestures with the bottle, a loose wave that takes in the balcony, the valley, the whole mountain. “Where does it stop? It’s all about worrying.”
I laugh. He laughs too, and the sound carries off into the night. It’s true. The three of us spend our lives worrying about each other, passing it around and around, and the only sensible thing to do with a truth that heavy is to laugh at it.
I finish my beer and stay a while longer. I’m grateful for these two people even if I don’t say it often enough. Irrva, who returns from the garden with dirt under her fingernails and tells me everything is going to be fine because that’s what she needs to believe. Jarrvik, who puts a drink in my hand and tells me the truth even when I don’t want to hear it. They’ve been carrying me through the worst years of my life, and they’ve never once made me feel like a burden for it.
I stay until the bottles are empty and the air turns cold, and when I finally walk back to my quarters, I’m slower than I was two hours ago, my joints stiff from sitting too long.
Chapter Seven
Sorina
I wrap the last bundle of dried chamomile and tie it with string, and Julie slides a row of glass bottles across the counter for me to label.
“Tincture of arnica, tincture of willow bark, and the valerian is the dark one,” she says, already reaching for the next crate. “Don’t mix up the labels again.”
