Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The two hulls of the ferry spun around their spiral towards the Earth, where the wingscoop waited in orbit. There was no couch on board this time, nor would there be one on the wingscoop. In the passenger's cabin, Sand sat on the bed where he had slept before.

"When I came to Backdoor," he recalled, running his fingers over the blanket, "I slept so well here. I hadn't been in a real bed since I left home, years ago."

Sitting next to him, Tarni said nothing for a while, trying to imagine Sand's experience, to have slept on a simultron for so many years. "I used to sleep," she said, "sometimes with just a blanket on the ground, at Grandpa's farm. Each summer, when my parents took me there, it was so...peaceful. The year that Grandpa jumped, I was just eight years old. I moved back there to stay. My parents were already on the couch. They never even came to visit. You're lucky you still have a mother," Tarni paused, "I mean, a mother who is free from the addiction."

"I know," said Sand, with strange sadness, to think that only these circumstances should bring him back to Mara. "But she's been wounded by it all, and I'm afraid I haven't helped. You know, I left home with Peter." This guilt had followed him so closely that he barely noticed. But sharing it with Tarni soothed him like a sigh.

"It isn't all your fault," said Tarni. "It isn't even Mara's fault." She paused, thinking of her own parents. "What do you remember of your family?"

"Before the couch?" Sand noticed Tarni's hand was resting on his knee, and he put his own hand on hers. "My family?" he thought back. "Good things. I used to roughhouse with my father. My mother always tucked me in at night."

"Did you have any brothers or sisters?" asked Tarni.

Sand shook his head.

"Me neither," Tarni said.

"Not that I missed them," Sand was quick to add. "I had a good family."

"Me too," Tarni agreed, "until the couch."

For a moment Sand felt that she was blaming him, for being Mara's son, for having been an addict once himself. But instead she was sharing her own deep guilt.

"You know, addicts are people," Tarni declared, as if just now discovering it. "If I had managed to stop the Pinta's self-destruct command, and if it had jumped near the Earth, my own parents might have been killed. And even now, that doesn't bother me. It's as if they were already dead."

Sand would have asked Tarni more about her parents, but he knew the answer. They were just addicts. Gratitude for understanding glistened in her eyes, and Sand felt happy. He put his arms around her and kissed her, gently leaning her head back to rest upon the pillow. Tarni reached up to touch his lips and smiled. Then she pulled the blanket over them.

What had been lost, the soothing welcome of a home, was theirs again. To lie holding each other, to touch from head to toe, it healed their solitude. And in the sleep that followed, the warmth of their embrace enveloped their two hearts together.

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