And then what? Will he confess to killing her mother, once they interrogate him? Can she bear the thought?
Without the light and her watch and her phone, Sam loses track of time. Her mind, always so pristine, suddenly develops holes. Through them fall bits of her memory, spiraling into oblivion. She falls asleep and then jolts awake an hour later, able to recall every word the police said but unable to remember where she put her copy of the detective’s report. She ends up tearing through the entire apartment for it before she finally recalls that she’d shoved it into a kitchen drawer by the door. She looks through the report until she realizes she can’t remember her mother’s birth name. Then she tries to write it out in Mandarin but can’t get the characters right. At first, she thinks she’s just tired. When it still doesn’t come to her, she goes back through her old text threads with her mother in an attempt to find it. She can’t. The panic in her chest begins to build. Why can’t she remember? She used to have her mother’s official name down so crystal clear that she’d written it out for her teachers before when she needed to help her mother fill out school forms. But it isn’t there on the shelves in her mind, no matter how hard she looks. What is meant to be a brief thought turns into a frantic search, until she finally curls up on her bed and closes her eyes in an attempt to crowd out the fear in her head.
Suddenly, she jumps out of bed and goes to the door to get her purse. She needs another dose of sand. That will help jog her memory. She digs in her purse until she finds a vial, pops one of the pills into her mouth, waits. One isn’t nearly enough, so she opens the bottle again and takes a second dose, then a third.
Soon, she feels the fading of her panic and the heightening of her senses, the rush of clarity and confidence that comes with the philosopher’s stone. On sand, at least, she is powerful. She can find a way out of this darkness. She circles the room once, repeating this to herself, before climbing back into bed.
There, she hallucinates a memory from when she was eight years old. The room around her is no longer her home at the estate but her old bedroom in the apartment she used to share with her mother. She shivers; her body feels cold in the way it does when she has a fever, and maybe she does, because her mother is bending down over her now and holding a hand against her forehead, a concerned furrow to her brow.
Sit up, Sam. Sit up. You have to take this.
Her mother is holding a small mug of awful black liquid up to her lips, and Sam recoils instinctively at the familiar smell. She has asked her mother a dozen times what it’s made of, and her mother always rolls her eyes at her. What does it matter? It contains ginger andCinnamomi ramulusand dried roots ofBupleurumand the worse it tastes, the better it is for you. Sam forces herself to drink the hot tonic, fighting against her gag reflex until she has swallowed it all.
Her mother takes a seat at the other end of the bed, pulling two pillows over to prop herself up. She has been on vigil in this room with Sam for days, and it is now two in the morning, and maybe the exhaustion has worn down her walls. The room is silent; the neon blue from the store sign outside casts a faint glow against her bed. Her mother just stares at her, then away at the sign, as if reading it over and over. Sam’s stomach churns and she’s afraid she’s going to throw up, but there’s nothing in it, and after a minute, the nausea passes.
Why did you have a baby?she asks her mother.When life is already so hard?
Her mother looks at her.Because I didn’t want to be alone.
She says it in a small voice, one that Sam doesn’t recognize, and it sounds strange. When has her mother ever felt alone? She never seemed bothered by staying home on weekend nights or cooking their meals instead of going out to bars or dating around or taking care of Sam when she’s sick.
Sam has never, not once, considered that her mother was lonely. But she thinks of it now that her mother is telling her this, and for the first time, she looks, reallylooks,at her mother and notes all the features that they don’t have in common, her mother’s beauty that once caught the attention of a photographer, her mother’s meticulous and practical ways against Sam’s dreamy ambitions, her mother’s skill at drawing graceful lines and Sam’s lack of any artistic ability. And then she thinks of the thing they do have in common: the fire for something more. She pictures her mother when she used to be alone, before she brought Sam into her life, and sees a young woman sittingprimly against a couch in a nondescript place, yearning for something. Even now, she can see that ache in her mother. Always reaching, always out of reach.
And then Sam isn’t eight anymore, she isn’t sitting in their old apartment but on her bed at the estate, and sunset has come and gone.
Tomorrow.She thinks of Ari, pictures him in her room until she can practically see an apparition of him in the corner, bathed in the darkness of an early evening. He stares at her and says nothing.
Ari. Did you do this?
In the tide of her grief, she feels an undercurrent of anger. Then she realizes the anger is at herself. She thinks about how a butterfly can flap its wings and change the world, how she had once dismissed this theory on a school exam because you can’t know what the future could have been.
But she was wrong. She does know. She could have planned to meet her mother a day earlier, and her mother might still be alive. She could have picked up the phone and spoken to her. She could have done anything,any small thing,differently, and her mother could be on the other end of the phone right now, she could be alive and they could be having a conversation together. Sam could have said she was sorry. She could have told her she loved her.
But she didn’t.
And now here they are.
What, pray, could be more frightening than the vast and endless sea? Water, stretching boundlessly in every direction, a fathomless abyss whose depths dissolve into darkness, with no assurance of a shore. And yet, curiously, the very sound of this great ocean brings a strange solace, a comfort that stirs deep within the marrow—an echo of the primal womb, a call to the soul that seems older than man himself.
Elementalism Theoryby Zosimus, 1879
