The Destined Path of Water Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Necklace

Read chapter 2 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae | Age 10 The first thing I noticed was the quiet. Festival quiet is different from regular quiet. It has a used feeling to it, like a room after a party the absence of noise so complete that you can almost hear the shape of all the noise that came before. The drums were gone. The vendors were gone. The crowd that had been pressing in from every direction was mostly gone too, just a few people moving slowly across the ghat in the low orange light. The second thing I noticed was that my head was in someone's lap. A hand was moving through my hair, slow and steady, the way you pat something you are relieved about. I knew the hand. I knew the particular rhythm of it. "Suzume Aunt," I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected. The hand stopped. Then it started again, slower. "He is awake," she said, not to me. Voices above me. I opened my eyes properly and found the sky had gone the colour of embers, all orange and deep pink at the edges, the hills dark against it. I was lying on the flat stone near the railing where I had sat down after, after. I sat up slowly. Renchi uncle was standing with my father a little ways off, the two of them talking in low voices with the particular posture of men who are pretending to be calm. My father's shirt was untucked on one side. He did not usually let his shirt be untucked. "You gave us a fright," Suzume masi said. She said it lightly but her eyes did not match her voice. "I fell asleep," I said. She looked at me for a moment. "You did," she said finally. Renchi uncle came over and sat on his heels in front of me, studying my face the way adults do when they are checking for something they do not want to name. He had kind eyes, my uncle, the kind that went serious without going hard. "How do you feel," he said. "Fine," I said. "Hungry." He laughed, short and relieved, and looked back at my father. My father let out a breath and ran a hand through his hair and his shirt came untucked on the other side too. I decided not to mention it. The festival had gone quiet around us. A priest was collecting marigolds from the edge of the ghat, putting them in a basket slowly, like he had nowhere to be. The river was still moving below, catching the last of the light, orange on its surface and dark underneath. A bird was saying something complicated from somewhere in the trees. It was the most peaceful I had felt all day. Then my father said, "Who gave you that." I looked up. He was looking at my neck. I looked down. There was a thread around my neck. Black, thin, the kind that looks simple until you look at it for too long. And hanging from it, sitting just below the hollow of my throat, a bead. Round and smooth and the colour of deep water. Blue, but not quite. The colour of the river when you look straight down into it and the bottom is too far to see. I touched it with two fingers. I did not know where it had come from. That was the true answer and also the impossible answer so I sat with both of them for a moment, turning the bead slowly between my fingers, feeling the weight of it, the smoothness, the way it was already warm from sitting against my skin. "Sae," my father said. "Who gave that to you." "I don't know," I said. He looked at Renchi uncle. Renchi uncle looked at Suzume aunt­. She was looking at me with an expression I could not quite read, something between worried and something else that I did not have a word for yet. "Someone must have put it on you while you were sleeping," my father said. But he said it like a question. "Maybe," I said. I kept turning the bead. The thread was soft against the back of my neck, softer than it looked. It did not feel like something that had been placed on me by a stranger while I slept. It felt like something that had always been there and I had only just noticed it. I knew that did not make sense. "Can I keep it," I said. My father opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the necklace, then at my face. I looked back at him steadily. I was not goin