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The first time Andromeda inspires your devotion, you are nine years old and haven’t had breakfast.
Mum was fighting with someone on the phone, and your plan to grab an apple from the basket on the table was overturned when Mum did just that to the table, scattering apples, and she howled at the phone that she would rather be dead. You’d backed into your tiny bedroom and slid out the window rather than listen to her scream and sob on the phone, and off you crept into the dawn.
Andromeda sits on the tyre swing behind her back garden, drawing shapes in the damp dirt with the toe of her trainers. She sees you break through the hedge and she smiles like the sun peeking through the clouds.
Wordlessly you clamber onto the tyre swing opposite her. The swing rotates a little and then balances.
Andromeda doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. The only sound is the creak of the chain and the scuff of Andromeda’s shoes in the dirt.
“Was she passed out again?” Andromeda asks gently. She doesn’t look up from the shapes she’s tracing in the dirt.
You shrug and swallow down tears. “No,” you say. “Just shouting on the phone.”
Andromeda purses her lips and nods. “I think,” she says very slowly, the way her father does when he’s speaking before the council, “that’s probably a good thing.”
You grip the chain closest to you and don’t say anything. She’s right. Better the shouting than the silence, the puddle of wine from a tipped bottle pooling under the kitchen table, the mess of hair hiding your mother’s face.
Andromeda’s back door opens and Cormac leans out. “Come in for breakfast,” he calls. “You too, Mattie.”
You won’t wonder for a very long time how Cormac always knew when you hadn’t eaten. It will never occur to you that Mum had to be fighting on the phone with someone.
Andromeda slips her hand in yours and leads you to the house.
-
The second time Andromeda inspires your devotion, you are fifteen and sharing a bottle of stolen wine.
“I want to leave,” you confess, on your back in wet grass, watching the cloudy sky whirl above you. “Not all the time. But sometimes.”
Andromeda lies next to you, a silhouette of sacred shadow against the gray sky. She tips the bottle up and hums, prompting you to go on.
“There’s a world out there that doesn’t—” you say, and then stop, and then you reach over for the bottle.
She hands it over with no resistance. “I get it,” she says. “It doesn’t care about you.”
And she’s right — there is a planet of deserts and jungles and cities and villages and towering metropolises and oceans and oceans and oceans that could not give a shivering fuck about you, and the thought makes you want to tear up your roots and leave, and go someplace where no one has ever met you, where no one will ask too gently if you’re all right, where no one has ever seen you cry. “Exactly,” you say. Your mouth is dry and tastes like wine.
Andromeda doesn’t say anything. She always knows when to not say anything. A month ago when she’d come marching into your house, your bedroom, without knocking, white-faced, and pulled the little razor out of your hands and dragged you by the wrist to the tiny bathroom where she’d scrubbed the parallel cuts with antiseptic and let you sob and moan into her shoulder while she patted the ugly cuts dry, and she hadn’t said a single word. She didn’t need to. You didn’t ask how she knew when to come. You didn’t need to.
“It’s not your fault,” you say to her, to the stars peeking through the clouds. “It’s never been your fault. None of it.”
She nudges your hand, and you give her the wine back. After a long and gentle silence, she says, “Isn’t it?”
And your heart drops like a stone, because suddenly nothing matters besides making Andromeda understand that it has never been her fault, how wrong you are, how broken you are. Your mother is right, in her drunk wallowing, when she says you were born broken. “You,” you say, wine on your tongue and hot in your blood and pulsing under the crisscrossing scars all down your forearms, “are the only good thing that has ever happened to me. You’re the only person who’s ever cared about me.”
“That’s not true,” she says, soft as the swirling clouds overhead. “You’re loved here. Dubrach loves you.”
I don’t care what Dubrach thinks, you want to say, but you know it would do more harm than good. If she’d just stopped at you’re loved here, you could have pretended she meant something else. You can lie to yourself. You’re good at it.
My Dad will materialize and want me and fight for custody. He will apologize for taking so long to find me. He will love me.
Mum will hear me crying and come check on me.
Someone will see me smoking and come tell me off for it.
Someone will notice the cuts.
No one will notice the cuts.
Andromeda loves me.
Andromeda loves me like I love her.
I’ll leave here someday.
I will get off this island one day.
I’ll never leave this place where I am loved.
There is only an inch of aching empty space between the two of you. You could just turn your head, just a little, and kiss her. You’re struck with a sudden certainty that if you don’t do it now, you will never get to, not ever again.
You take another drink.
You don’t kiss her.
-
The third time Andromeda inspires your devotion, you are twenty-five and looking for your wife.
You know where she is. There’s only one place Niyathi goes when the two of you fight. You knock at Andromeda’s door, firm but professional, and behind it, you hear the baby start to fuss.
There’s a long stretch of time where nothing happens but Hari’s burbling and halfhearted sobs. You don’t wonder if Andromeda will answer the door. She never turns you away. Not even when she’s angry with you. Not even when she’s ill and can hardly stand. Ever since you were a toddler, Cormac’s door has always opened for you.
Eventually, Andromeda opens it. She doesn’t let you in, just leans on the door frame and gives you a tired smile. The dark circles under her eyes are more pronounced than ever.
“Is she here?” you ask. It’s a formality. You know she is.
“Yes.” Andromeda does not lie to you. She never has and she never will. Or so you hope. So you lie to yourself. You’re good at lying to yourself.
You shuffle a few things in the thin folder and then present it to her. “I, uh. The lawyers need her signature on these. Could—I’d give them to her myself, but. She doesn’t, doesn’t—could you?”
Andromeda takes the folder after a moment of silence. There isn’t much there. Irretrievable breakdown of marriage. No assets to speak of. Weekend custody of Hari. No child support payments or alimony. You keep the boat and your mother’s house. Niyathi keeps primary custody of the baby and her own house. It’s all quick and nearly painless. Like a razor blade splitting skin.
You refuse to entertain that thought.
Andromeda doesn’t open the folder, and you’re grateful and annoyed in equal measures. She’s seen the worst of you for your entire life. What’s a peek at your divorce papers got that she hasn’t seen already?
The baby stops crying, further in the house, and you can hear Niyathi murmur a little, clearly trying to keep quiet. She doesn’t want to see you and you don’t want to see her.
As in everything that happens on this island, Andromeda’s presence fixes it.
She tucks the folder under her arm and steps outside with you, closing the door behind her. She puts a hand on your shoulder and leans on you a little heavily. You set a hand at her elbow to provide a little support. It’s second nature now. Andromeda has spent years looking after you, and now finally, finally, you get to pay her back for it.
“Are you all right?” you both say in unison.
It breaks the tension a little and you share a smile. You go first. “I mean it,” you say. “I know she can be a bit much. She’s a big girl, she has other places to stay. I don’t want—I don’t want my fuckups to put a burden on you.” The shame makes your face burn as you realize you drove Niyathi out of your house, you drove her to Andromeda, who doesn’t need another thing to worry about, she doesn’t need to be looking after your soon-to-be-ex-wife and infant son when she can hardly stay standing long enough to make some tea.
Andromeda gracefully derails your spiraling. “It’s not your fault,” she says. “And Niyathi isn’t a bother. Even the baby is a little sweetheart, barely cries.”
He cries when you hold him.
Born broken, your mother echoes in the dark places of your brain where you keep a razor blade.
“Now my turn.” Andromeda fixes you with dark eyes that puncture your soul. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” you say, and to your surprise, you mean it. “It’s. You know. It’s better this way. We’ve got the particulars sorted out.” You gesture vaguely at the folder under Andromeda’s arm.
When you were seventeen, you’d told Cormac you thought you were in love with Andromeda. You’d been so nervous — not that Cormac would be angry, but that he would reject you for it. It was unfounded, of course, because Cormac was never anything but kind to you, but he’d still been very firm that he thought it wasn’t a good idea.
“Look, Mattie,” he’d said, with a broad hand on your quaking shoulder, “there’s… there’s more out there than this island. I know you care about Andromeda. I know she cares about you too. But…” He’d paused, thinking his words over carefully. “I think,” he finally went on, “that you are young, and there is more than one bird in the sky, yeah? It’s a dangerous thing, to mistake familiarity for comfort. Maybe you ought to spend time on the mainland soon, see what magic you can whip up with the girls out there. I’m not exiling you,” he’d added quickly, seeing your face about to crumple, “just, think it over, aye? Being with Andromeda… it wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be easy. I want you to see what else is out there for you.” He’d squeezed your shoulder hard and let you sleep on the sofa that night rather than make you go back to your own empty house.
You’d gone. The mainland girls hadn’t looked at you twice.
Niyathi was a mistake. And you’ve got the paperwork to prove it.
“I’m all right,” you say to Andromeda again as you gently steer her by the elbow back to her door. Rain clouds are gathering and the last thing she needs is to get soaked trying to comfort you over your own shitty decisions. “I’ll take a week to mope and then I’ll be fine.”
Andromeda quirks her mouth in a cheeky smile. “Cry, drink, wank? The old standby?”
“Hey, now,” you scold her. “I’m a grown man. The drinking comes first these days. Get back inside before you catch pneumonia or something. Kiss the boy for me.”
Andromeda smiles at you like the moon breaking through clouds, and disappears back into the holy shadow of her house.
-
The last time Andromeda inspires your devotion, you are thirty-one and sinking beneath the frigid ocean.
There is just the barest bit of sunlight sprinkling on the surface of the waves as you try to claw your way up. You make no progress. Your limbs are seizing up with the cold and the blood loss, and the water around you turns red in spurts and gushes with every throbbing beat of your heart.
You lose track of the sunlight. You lose track of the surface. You lose track of your arms, too.
And in his final triumph, says Andromeda in your memory, serious in the way her father was when reciting the sacred stories, Dubrach created death and the seas to swallow man when their toil was over.
You care little for Dubrach and the stories. But you love Andromeda, in spite of it all, in spite of Niyathi and her tales. You trust her. You trust her with your life and with whatever comes after.
You close your eyes and let the sea have you.