“Look. I am your mother,” the selkie said.
“I—” the husband started. He slipped a hand around behind his back and wrapped it around the Granny’s thumb. He was very uncomfortable. In his professional life he’d managed to avoid the chimerist work groups, preferring to concentrate on the never-ending interactions between gengineered crops and the human body.
The selkie ignored him; watched the Granny.
“If truth be told,” the Granny said, “she drove me crazy. But I suppose I’d rather be driven crazy or be not talking to her than missing her.” Did she really miss her mother? The house was still trying to tell her something and she could feel the baby trying to get into her head. Now that she’d been born, the baby found it harder to communicate.
The Granny found herself studying the selkie’s huge knuckles.
The house showed the Granny a house schematic as it squeezed the children’s playroom smaller and smaller until they ran out screaming. It generated noise that cancelled out their wailing protests as it shepherded them up the stairs and into the front room. When they tumbled in, the house immediately trapped them in bright, puffy seats it popped up from the floor.
The selkie looked at the children. They froze.
Then the house produced tea, lemonade, Battenburg and sultana cakes, shortbread, ginger snaps, Arbroath smokies. The selkie took the cakes and scones, passed them on. Kept the fish.
“Dear,” she said to the husband. “It’s your house. I suppose you should decide.”
“That’s very kind.” But he thought she was talking about the cakes and took the last piece of shortbread from the tray. “Just like my mother’s, you know,” he muttered. She doubted the house could replicate anything that bland.
The Granny’s mother had always been distant, but everything she’d done could be interpreted as kindness. The selkie was a different beast. Her shoulders were broad; the hard winter fat made her sleek in her dress.
She had finished the smokies.
“I am she and not the dead,” the selkie said. She pointed her big forefinger at the husband.
“He is the dead.”
The world emptied out for the Granny and then rushed back in: this is what the house and the baby had been telling her and trying to tell her and she had been refusing to know.
She remembered waking this morning with the baby near and the wives cooing from the wallpaper. The construct was in the bed next to her as it had been for weeks. A construct she had asked the house to make. And she had asked the house to alter her perceptions until she could feel it beside her and not know it for what it was. It had been real enough to argue with her, drive her crazy the way he used to, and to spend the night in his office if need be. All the wives were grieving but she had been so angry.
“A sister of my other sister’s sister I would not trust told of eating his bones,” the selkie said. “I did not eat. I did not see.”
He had left a long and heartfelt message. He was old, felt alone, could no longer see his place in the world. He had spent a long afternoon searching out and erasing his backups. He was tired.
“I knew when he came into the water. He was a god apart from the gods who made us. But we sisters knew him. We would not eat of him.”
The Dead Mother rose up within the selkie, spoke again, “We are widows in the world. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.”
Outside of her, the baby was crying. The baby: another orphan.
The Granny accessed the house’s backup circuitry, set apart from the house’s mind, and sent a message to Malik. She wanted out, wanted escape, wanted a car—but only for her, not the baby. Malik had been expecting her call. He had known, too. He asked her again to bring her baby but she would not. They came to an understanding and later there would be contracts; later, codicils.
The Granny opened her memories and remembered her insanity when she found he was gone. The wives, the baby, the house, even her mother were grief-stricken. The Granny had ignored them. Before his body was located, when the house could only say that his vital signs had ceased, she had shone a DNA stick over every surface in the house looking for something, anything, she could use to build a new husband.
The husband had walked, simply walked, pockets full of stones, into the ever-rising sea. He had collected rocks and pebbles for as long as she’d known him. There were bowls of them in every room. He wouldn’t let the house move until the farmers had gathered every rock he had marked for collection. She cursed the chips of slate, quartz, granite, soft sandstone, obsidian, basalt, andesite porphyry, foliated granite gneiss, biotite schist. She cursed the memories that persisted and the house sneaked a tranquilizer needle out of her chair. She pushed herself away from it and forced the house to bend to her will.
“Damn you,” she said to the selkie, to the Dear Dead Mother.
The wives had gone into the crib the house had made for the baby, had wrapped her in the Granny’s cape, were rocking her. “Never alone,” they said to her. “One of us,” one said. “Unnameable one,” they whispered.
The house walked the simulacrum of the husband out of the room. The wives tried to show the Granny the funeral she had missed, but she ignored it. The selkie remained quiet.
“Open the box,” the Granny told the house. “Let them do whatever the blue hell they want with my mother’s body. Lenkya’s in charge now.”
She left the room, leaving her new baby (so easy to do: she was her mother’s daughter) and her sister-wives, but the children appeared beside her.
“Ariadne, Perce, Ignored Girl. Poor little mice. Trapped here with no mothers and no one but the house to care. Lenkya will take better care of you. I shall miss you, little hellions.”
“Granny, we want to go with you!” said Perce, and he was knuckling tears from his eyes. The Granny could see Ariadne twisting the skin above his elbow, making him cry.
“A,” she warned. “Come on then, the three of you.”
She led them to the kitchen and told them she would teach them how to make toffee. The smell of burning sugar brought back memories of her own grandmother. Her grandfather had died in the Shortages.
She sent the littlest part of herself to the Hague (she didn’t want to miss a second of the baking) to wrap up what she could, to resign, and to recommend they hire someone from her own house to replace her. She would be on the fence at the best in Malik’s house, maybe even on the other side.
She felt rich and foolish taking time to make this dessert. The house flipped the replicator on and she nudged it off. She knew the children would enjoy the house’s toffee just as much as hers. But this was not about the physical making. This was memories and the future and the children looking at her and their own glassed memories and all of them remembering that the last time they saw the Granny, they had made toffee.
The house showed her an old Alfa Romeo floating outside the front door and Malik stepping out. The Granny was touched he’d come himself. Her ugly dog leapt out after him.
The children, faces smeared with toffee, hardly noticed her leaving. She whispered a good-bye message to the baby and told the house to deliver it later. She promised that her mother, the baby’s Grandmother, would be a better mother than she, the Missing Mother, could ever have been.
The house opened the front door and she let herself out. She spat out the house’s access keys, dropped them through the letterbox. Patted the door as she closed it. She’d miss her old house. She walked toward Malik but had to look back. The selkie was watching her from a window.
The baby was frantically sending her questions but the Granny forwarded them to the selkie. Her mother would be revivified by the day’s end and would see that the Granny had broken. She would bring up the baby and take on the house. Once her mother was sure Malik was satisfied with the deal, she might bring the house back to the island.