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Chapter Sixty-Five

LUNA

“Serafina,” I say softly, “do you understand that I can fuck you up? Like seriously fuck with?—”

“Don’t be a worthless coward.” My friend is trying to shame me into doing what she wants. Silly. The champion of Luna-shaming is Luna. I am a worthless coward who’s not brave enough to see her fall apart again.

“Unhook the anxiety,” Mom says, “but leave the fear. It’s easy to mix things up when you’re in. I’ll help you.”

“I have to relax, right?” Serafina leans back and closes her eyes. “Like this?”

It’s obvious I’m going to do this.

“I hate you both.” I refocus my emotional vision, directing my lines of valence toward her in the way I have before, but without the same ignorance. I am one with my intentions, my tingling fingertips, the linear vibrations in the space between us.

“I should have trusted you,” Serafina says.

“You’re trusting me now.”

“I am. So get it right, Americana.”

“I will.”

With that, my lines hook up with hers, and I’m in the space where I can rewrite her.

I have never been in this space without bringing fear or anger to it. I have never been here with consent.

It is beautiful. An underwater kingdom, lit with sparkling colors and moving shots of darkness.

It is a whoosh and hum. I am weightless, shapeless, everywhere.

The emotions are my own, yet they are disconnected from consequences, so they’re a movie, a book, a story that elicits a response.

It would be too easy to get lost here, but I didn’t come to observe passively. I came to help a friend, so I focus.

Serafina’s emotions are a knot of hope and fear and hope and love and hope, hope, hope. This isn’t what I expected. I force myself past her strands of confidence in me.

“If it gets too uncomfortable,” I say from so far away, “let me know and I’ll stop.”

“Never.”

That’s the hope talking from the other side of a mile-long tunnel.

“Don’t fight your way in,” Mom’s voice whispers in my ear. “Go with the flow.”

Past the knot of the obvious, the momentary, the situational, I find Serafina’s deepest emotions in a sea of waving kelp. I breathe the thick salt water of wasted feeling, exhaling back into the brine. The strands floating upward wave with my passing, except for one spinning like a boat rotor.

This is the grief. The wind it’s whipping blows in my face so hard, a tingling pressure gathers behind my eyes. I want to cry. I hate that she has to feel this.

“You feel like you disappointed him.” I squeeze my eyes shut. The whirl-whipping grief is everything. The most noise. The most turbulence. It’s blocking everything else. “This isn’t what’s keeping you inside.”

There’s no answer.

“Serafina? Did you hear me? It’s not the grief that’s making you afraid. It’s something else and I don’t think I should fuck with both.”

No reply. Am I too deep to hear the answer or too deep for her to hear the question?

If I bounce out, I want to be sure I can describe the problem, and I don’t know half of it.

I brush past the waving reeds. It’s dark, so dark, yet I can see everything.

I know the fear of heights, tethered to the perception of time, and I know the fear of the dark with its thick unknowns, but the deepest, thickest one is being away from help, alone in the unknown, without the skills to fight.

“I’m too deep,” I croak, still somehow connected to my body.

“Find the valence.” Mom’s voice comes from… somewhere. I can’t think about it right now.

“There’s a lot. They’re all over. I never actually figured that out,” I say.

“Give yourself some credit.”

“Ma, you spent my whole life telling me I was stupid. Now you want me to give myself some credit.”

She sighs. “I wasn’t my whole self.”

“Sure.” I’m surrounded by every terror imaginable. “So much fear.”

“Not yours. Don’t make it yours.”

The rolling steppes. A woman. I know this is her mother, but she is not. There is shame between them. More than I could ever unhook.

The moon sings, drawing Serafina to the bright eye of the night sky.

Outside.

Far from the house.

The full moon has the most beautiful song.

Serafina is lost at night. Outside. Her mother snarls, saliva dripping from sharp teeth. It is not the mother she recognizes. Not the mother who loves her.

Her fear of going outside is here, not Domenico.

This is exactly where I can make a mess, but also, I can visualize what to do. It’s almost easy.

“Luna. I see your ambition.”

“Just a push.”

The fear of her mother and the unknowns of the outside can be nudged closer to the bright, shining hope. I won’t do more, but I can barely play the harmonica. I shouldn’t try to conduct an orchestra.

Like a diver who spent too long underwater, I gasp at the surface. Mom is crouching at my feet, holding my hand. Serafina lies back with her eyes open.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “I didn’t do any damage?”

Serafina picks up her head. “I feel okay. Not bad. Sad. Angry.” She looks around, orienting herself and lands her gaze out the window. “Did you do anything?”

“A little. The grief, it was too big and loud.”

She walks to the door that leads to the terrace and slides it open, stepping to the edge.

“You tried,” she says. “It’s fine.” She closes the door.

I go toward her, but before I get there, she runs out of the room and up the stairs. A door slams.

I tried and failed.