* * *
Emera woke to find the sun already high above the horizon, and still felt fuzzy from the tea the night before. She reached up to rub her eye, and instead found a strip of linen wrapped tight around her head, covering it. Someone had dressed her in clean clothes and she made her way out to the kitchen, none too steady. Her parents were sitting at the kitchen table with Taine and his father, Mr. Nilge.
Emera’s father was the first to speak. “How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts,” she said. “Will my eye heal?” she asked.
Everyone looked away but Mr. Nilge. “Emera, I had to remove the eye,” Mr. Nilge said. “There was no way to save it.”
Taine’s father had always been kind, but Emera heard stone in his voice. She knew that the surgeon would not have removed the eye unless it was absolutely necessary. Even though her rational mind was able to accept it, the rest of her was not, and in shock, Emera walked outside. There was a bench in front of the house, but Emera didn’t want to sit, she kept on walking.
She tried to picture herself with an eye patch, and couldn’t. She had seen sailors with them, at the port in Kuopi, and she had seen the rich sons of merchants wearing them as a fashion statement, but had never seen one on a woman not old enough to be her great grandmother. Even if women did wear them, Emera wasn’t sure that she had the necessary swagger to pull it off. The more she thought about it, the worse it got, and she had to stop walking when her remaining eye filled with tears that tasted like the sea.
Taine found her sitting with her back against one of her father’s tea trees. He sat down next to her, and put his hand on her forearm, his dark skin contrasting against her white shirt.
“Emera, I’m so sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault, even if you had been there, there was nothing you could have done,” she said.
“What happened?” he asked.
Emera began to tell him the story that she had told her parents, but stopped. He would know that she was lying, know that she never would have fallen off like that. He looked at her, and she felt her stomach clench.
“You know the crack that we were working on?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well, I climbed down without any problems, found a beach loaded with mussels. But on the way back up, at the start of the crack, there was a scorpion in one of the pockets. It stung my hand and I fell.”
“We are talking about the same crack, right?” he asked. “The one that starts out as a chimney and ends up as a fingerline?”
“That’s the one,” she said.
“But that’s over a hundred meters down,” he said, sounding like he was about to drag her by the ear and hang her over that same cliff to get the truth out of her.
“I know,” she said.
“Then how did you survive?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” she said.
He just stared at her with disappointment. A part of her wanted to believe that if she just stared back long enough and didn’t back off, he would give in and accept the story. Of course that wasn’t true, he knew her too well. A couple of tense moments later, she broke.
“When I was falling, I panicked, you know?” he nodded, smiling with obvious pleasure that he had won the contest of wills. “And in my mind, I called out for something, anything, to help me,” she said. His smile faded as he realized what was coming.
“And something helped you,” he said. He stood up and started pacing, like he always did when he worried.
“Yes. I woke up beat to splinters on the beach with the mussels. I waited a day, and then climbed back up.”
“That isn’t all there is to it,” he said.
“No,” she said. There was no point in hiding any of it from him. “When I woke up, there was a scorpion sitting on my chest, an Amekt.”
“Tell me you killed it,” he said. “Please tell me you severed your link to it.”
Emera shook her head no and his face transformed from shock to sadness. His disappointment hurt more than the fall, hurt more than the lost eye. She had hoped that he would hear about the scorpion and accept it, accept her, maybe even begin to look at her as more than a friend.
“What are you going to do, then?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Emera said after a few seconds, as though she would come up with an answer in that short span. She had hoped that Taine would be there for her, have some sort of suggestion.
“You have to figure something out soon, the Ceremony is next week.”
Emera had been trying hard not to think of the Ceremony, but now its approach was palpable. She didn’t say anything, didn’t get up, just sat there and dropped her head into her arms. When Taine spoke again, she didn’t look up, but she could hear the fractures in his voice.
“Goodbye Emera.”