The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

SID

I AM IN MY MOTHER’Sbedchamber. Her bed is neatly made, the counterpane a quilted blue, thick with down. The gray curtains glow in the dying light. The sunset cannot be seen from this suite, only the sunrise, but I know the sun is slipping down the other side of the world. A light dusting of snow swirls against the windows. My mother does not wear perfume, but I can smell the familiar scent of her skin: the soap she uses, the cream she rubs into her hands. The muffled sound of her piano floats up from downstairs. She is playing a nocturne, something watery and slow. It is beautiful and difficult, which is exactly how my mother likes it. The Senest Nocturne, I think. Sleepily, I think there must be some mistake—either I have dreamed of going to the realm of the gods, or I have lost my way, since if the gods were correct I was not meant to come home, but rather to Ethin, where my body is kept. Yet now that I am here, I do not want to leave. I want to lie down. I want to close my eyes, and listen to the pure notes of my mother’s music, and the wind trying to get inside.

“Sid,” my mother says, and I turn to see her lying in the bed I just saw empty and perfectly made. Her hair, unbound, is a river of silver. I have never seen her like this. She is frail. Old. My mother reminds me of dandelions when they have turned into a ghost of their golden selves, and are ready to be blown away at a puff of wind.

This may be my home, but it is not my time.

I stare, uncertain, grief tearing at my heart simply to see her like this. She cannot recover from what ails her now, for it is obvious that nothing more ails her than a long life coming to its end. The notes of the nocturne continue to float up from below. There are so many questions I could ask, but the first one that springs from my lips is: “Who is playing?”

“I am playing.”

“But you are here, not downstairs in the music room.”

“Yes. But when I am gone, you will remember the sound of me playing. You will remember this moment, and you will not wonder how it is possible to see me lying here, hands still, and hear the nocturne’s melody. Memories of the dead come on their own time, in their own patterns.”

“Amma.” Anything else I would say is caught in my throat. I kneel beside her bed as I once saw my father do, as I swore then I would not do. I feel her hand on my hair. This is the future, I realize.

“Yes,” my mother says. “Even if it will not happen exactly like this, it will happen. Do you remember when I was sick? When I had been poisoned, and you worked so hard to save me?” She speaks as though this were decades ago. I nod, unable to speak. “You were so angry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It wasn’t just because of the misunderstandings between us, or because I had made the mistake of not saying the right things that would let you know that, more than anyone, you matter most to me. You were also angry because you were afraid I would die.”

Like a child, I press my face against the blanket, and nod.

“You were angry,” my mother says, “because I am your mother, and I am always supposed to be here for you, and one day I won’t be.”

She is right. I am angry even now, and guilty for blaming her for her own death. I cannot look at her.

“Don’t feel guilty,” my mother says. “I would be angry, too, that I have to leave you, if I were not grateful to have had a daughter like you. My tadpole, you have made me so happy.”

I remember the speckled yellow feather in my pocket. I take it out. It blurs before my eyes. My mother wipes my cheek. The piano music comes more slowly—a silver trickle of sound. Her face is changed, but her eyes are the same color they have always been: a brown so light it looks like honey. The feather is bedraggled and no longer looks beautiful. But it is beautiful to me, its quill unbroken.

“You have kept it all this time,” she says.

I place it in her hand, and for a moment I think she will refuse it, but then she seems to understand that I need to give it to her, for precisely the same reason she gave it to me. “It is precious to me,” I say, “simply because it was yours.”

“I know,” she says, and smiles, fingers closing around the feather. Her eyes slide shut.

There are a few final notes, then silence fills the room.

I walk down the steps of my home, searching for the piano, thinking that maybe I will find my mother seated, shuffling through sheet music, looking for something new to play, but the bench is empty.

Still, I hear a voice singing softly—a child’s voice—and when I turn, I see a skinny, brown-haired boy. He has a serious face, his eyes an ordinary gray—yet pure, even beautiful amid his features, which seem too large for such a small child.

“Will you forgive me?” he says.

“I have done nothing to you. I don’t even know you.”

“Of course you do.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh,” my father agrees.

“I don’t understand any of this. I don’t like it.”

“Come home, Sid.”

“I’m trying. But you don’t know how this feels. To see Amma as she will be. You as you were.”

He looks at his hands. They, too, are too large for his body, and I can see, in this scrawny boy, his future self—so large that when I was a child I felt he could protect me from anything. I wonder if this is why he asked my forgiveness—because he can’t protect me.

“No,” he says. “I want you to forgive me for being so afraid of you.”

“Of me?”

“Of what it would mean to lose you.” The boy looks around the music room, and I notice that it is not decorated, not quite, in the way I recognize. The curtains are an old-fashioned color, and I do not know the furniture. The piano, I realize, is gone. “It meant so much to me to have a family. Kestrel. You. We were enough, the three of us. All I could want. At the same time, I was terrified. You were so small. Fragile. The slightest thing could kill a baby. And then you lived and grew and were strong. Bold … yet boldness could kill a child. I sought ways to check you, to keep you in line as you grew, out of fear that one day something horrible would befall you that I could not prevent.”

The boy looks so worried.

“Arin!” a woman calls from a faraway room. “Where are you?”

“Do you forgive me?” he asks.

I say, “Isn’t what you’ve described the way all parents feel?”

Tentatively, he smiles. “One day you will know,” he says, then laughs at my expression.

“Is this for you?” I offer him the Elysium feather, but he shakes his head. “You don’t need to give that to me,” he says, “any more than you needed to give the yellow feather to Kestrel. She accepted it for your sake, not her own. She accepted it because you felt you needed to give it. But you don’t need to pay a fee to come home. Home is always free.”

“Arin?” the woman calls again.

“Is that your mother?”

He nods. “She promised to tell me a story.”

My heart wells with pity. I cannot bring myself to tell him that his mother will be murdered when he is nine years old. Then I look into his gray eyes, and see that he already knows. I place my palm against his cheek. He startles and looks like he will object, but when he does, I am surprised that the reason has nothing to do with me, or with me being a woman. “I am too young for that,” he says. “I am not a man yet.”

“Does it matter?”

“No,” he says softly, and places his palm against my cheek.

“If you won’t take the feather, I have nothing else to give you.”

“Sid,” my father says, “you are yourself a gift.”