The Other Cold

The figure takes its step, and Aza knows the cold before he knows the shape.

He has been wrong about a great many things tonight, the door, the count, the seam in his own voice, but he is never wrong about a cold. It is the one thing the work has left him sure of. Ten thousand years of standing where the temperature drops, and he can read a cold the way the living read a face, knows its hour and its manner and the exact place in the order of the dead it belongs. So when the soaked figure moves, and the cold off it moves too, comes a half-step nearer across the grey, he reads it without meaning to, the way you flinch at a sound.

And it is closed to him. Still closed. The one cold in all the held country he cannot open, sealed the way the inside of an envelope is sealed, and now that it is nearer he can feel the shape of the seal itself, and the shape of the seal is a thing he carried.

He has carried a great many. He does not let himself say so. He stands beside Senna in the lapping grey and he does not finish the law that closes a cold to the reaper who should know it, because to finish it is to know which one, and there are entries it is kinder not to balance until you must. He has been telling himself that for two years. He is very tired, suddenly, of how long a thing can be put off and still arrive.

The dog whines again, the home-sound, and Aza understands that whatever he refuses to know, the dog knows it, and the boy with his small soaked back to Senna knows it, and the whole gathered crowd of the un-crossed knows it, and the only two in the room who do not know it are the woman it belongs to and the reaper who carried it.

·

I follow the dog's eyes out into the grey, and I look at the thing I have spent two years not looking at, and the cold reaches me first.

It is the fourth cold, the one from the river, the sad one, the near one. I have felt its edge a hundred times and called it weather. I felt it the night I walked out of the water with my sister still in it. I have felt it every time I have stood on the estuary road since and made myself turn the car around. It is not Aza's worn old cold and it is not the boy's hundred-year chill and it is not the tidy folded cold that came through the bell. It is a cold I would know in the dark, blind, at the bottom of the sea, because it is the cold of the one person whose temperature I knew before I knew my own, the person who used to put her cold feet on me in the bed we shared as girls and laugh while I yelped.

The figure takes another step, and the light that gives out before the face does not give out this time. This time it comes on, slow, the way the four o'clock light comes back when a cloud moves off the mudflats, and I see her.

I see Mara.

She is soaked to the skin the way she was the last time, her dark hair flat to her skull, the good coat she wore to our mother's funeral hanging heavy with estuary water that runs off the hem and does not pool, because there is no floor in the grey for it to pool on. She is thirty-one forever. She is bowed a little, the way you bow under a long cold, and she is looking at me with our mother's eyes, which are my eyes, and she has been standing in the deep of the held tide out past my own front door for two years, and I have known, I have always known, I have spent two years building a wall out of the not-knowing because the knowing is the thing that ends me.

I do not decide to move. There is no decision in it. I am across the wet floor before the want has finished being a want, my arms already opening, my mouth already making the start of her name, every careful thing I have learned since the river burned off me in a single breath, and I am going to her, I am going to hold my sister, I am going out the door into the grey to bring her in out of the cold.

A hand closes on my arm. Aza's cold, the worn one, the known one, and his grip is gentle and it does not let go.

"Senna." Just my name, the flat all gone out of it. "Do not go through the door."

"That's my sister." I do not know my own voice. It has come up out of a place I bricked over. "Let go of me. That is Mara. That is Mara, Aza, she's been out there the whole time, she's cold, let go."

"I know who it is." And the way he says it, low and ruined, the seam in him torn all the way to the bottom, stops me more than the hand does. Because he does. He knows who it is. He has known longer than I have. The cold off her was closed to him, he said, sealed against the reaper who should know it, and I did not understand what that meant an hour ago and I understand it now, all at once, the way you understand the bottom stair is not there only after you have already stepped.

I turn and look at him. He is looking at Mara across the grey with a face I have never seen on him, a face that is doing a thing ten thousand years should have worn smooth, and he is not looking at her the way you look at a stray. He is looking at her the way you look at someone you have met.

"You know her." It is not a question. The floor of me has already gone. "How do you know her."

And out past the door, Mara, my Mara, who has not spoken, who has stood soaked and silent in the deep of the tide for two years, lifts her bowed head and looks at the man holding my arm, and she does not look at him like a stranger either. She looks at him the way you look at the last face you saw.

Aza does not answer me. He cannot. I watch him not be able to, watch the word build in him and stop, and the not-answering is the whole answer, the way the closed cold was, the way the seam in his voice was, every clue laid down on the open floor of tonight where I can finally count them.

He came that night. He told me on the first night. He came for the other one.

I let go of the breath I have been holding for two years.

"You came for her," I say. "Not for me. Corin came for me. You came for Mara." The grey is at the turn around my ankles and the crowd is at the turn behind me and my dead sister is one step from my door with the river still running off her, and I am looking at the man I have made tea for, the man I would not send away, the man I have let stand in my mother's shop and learn what a mug is for. "You're the one who took her."

"Senna." His hand tightens, not to hold me back now, to hold himself up, I think, the cold of him shaking in a way cold should not shake. "Let me. Please. Let me say it the right way. Not like this."

"There isn't a right way." My eyes have gone hot and the heat is the one warm thing in the room. "You carried my sister to the ferry. You let go of her. And then you stood in her shop for two years and you never told me."

He does not deny a word of it. That is the worst part, that he will not even lie to me to make it softer. He stands in the grey with the cold of him shaking and he says, "I was forbidden to know her. After. A reaper does not get to keep the ones he carries, Senna, he is not allowed to. I was sent for a name and I opened the door for it and I let go of it on the shore, and the law took her from me the way it takes all of them, and I was not permitted to wonder where she went or whether she was cold or whether the sister she died for ever forgave herself. I have stood in this shop two years feeling a thing I have no name for, drawn to an absence I could not read, and I did not let myself finish the thought, because the thought was her, and she was out there in the grey the whole time, and I am the one who put her on the path she would not walk."

And I understand, in the clear hard light of him saying it, the shape of the thing nobody has let me see for two years. Mara did not drown by accident while I swam free. Mara is not lost in the grey by some cruelty of the tide. She is out there soaked and silent and bowed because she chose it, chose the cold so I could keep the warm, and the man in front of me carried her to the door she gave up her rest to refuse, and every ordinary morning I have hated myself for stealing was not stolen at all. It was given. It was given to me by the person standing one step from my door, and I have spent two years spitting on the gift.

Behind me the dog whines the home-sound one more time, and out past the open door, Mara, who chose the cold so I could keep the warm, who has watched over me from the grey while I hated myself for living, opens her mouth to speak across two years and the whole dark width of the held tide.

And the bell over the door rings, though no one has touched it, the tidy folded cold coming in clean behind us, and a courteous voice I have heard only once, in the boy's small mouth, says, from the doorway of my own shop, "There you are. All three. How tidy. I have been looking for the one of you who was missing, and you have gone and gathered yourselves for me."