Taking a deep breath, Coralline knocked on the door to the back office.
“Enter,” called an imperious voice.
Coralline slipped inside the back office. It had a low ceiling and two tiny windows that formed circular tears in the abraded walls. It was intended to be a supplies room, but it was not used as such, nor was it quite furnished as an office. Its minimal windows made it almost as dark as a cave, yet only two luciferin orbs traveled the ceiling.
Rhodomela frowned at Coralline from a high stool behind a tall slate desk. Coralline perched on the stool across from Rhodomela, feeling as though she’d been summoned to the school principal’s office for misbehavior.
Her elbows resting on the desk, Rhodomela leaned forward, her snake-like eyes peering at Coralline. “You’re diligent and hard-working,” she said. “You arrive early, and you leave late. But, other than yesterday, during Agarum’s heart attack, have you ever prepared medication without relying on a textbook? Have you ever devised anything of your own?”
“No.” This was not how Coralline had expected her probationary review to begin.
“Precisely. That’s because you rely on your intellect, but you reject your intuition.”
“What does intuition have to do with anything?” Coralline asked, pronouncing the word “intuition” like it was the name of an algae she was encountering for the first time.
“Everything. It was my intuition rather than my intellect that led me to save Agarum during his heart attack. Intuition thrives in the presence of courage and conviction but falters in the face of fear—fear, such as that of blood.”
Coralline flinched. How long had Rhodomela known?
“I noticed your fear of blood in your first week here. I didn’t say anything, because I hoped you would rid yourself of it. But you didn’t. You don’t understand that in order to heal others, you have to first heal yourself. You don’t understand that fear and success cannot co-exist any more than can day and night. The reason you consult your medical textbooks endlessly is that you fear being wrong or looking foolish. You think that by doing what other healers have done, you will become as good as them. But success is an outcome not of imitation but of authenticity—of not abiding by the rules but changing them. The questions are more important than the answers.”
“What does this mean for my future at The Irregular Remedy?”
“The Irregular Remedy is a place for those who think irregularly. You don’t. As such, I’m sorry to say that you have no future here.”
Just yesterday, Coralline had been snipping algae in the remedial garden and treating patients at her counter. How could it all end so suddenly? “I rejected offers from other clinics to work for you,” she stammered. “I rejected jobs that paid twice what you offered me.”
“I’m sure other clinics would still be happy to have you. I believe your style and personality would be most suited to The Conventional Cure. I’d be happy to refer you.”
It was a slap to the face, Rhodomela’s recommendation to refer Coralline to the clinic she reviled.
“You never told me why you hired me,” Coralline said, tears pricking her pupils, “when you’d never hired anyone else.”
“You never asked.”
“I’m asking now.”
“Your father was an extraordinary coral connoisseur. Even though he’s now retired, he continues to know coral reefs better than anyone else in Urchin Grove.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I hired you because I was hoping you’d be your father’s daughter. I’ve discovered, however, that you are your mother’s.”
Red, blue, and yellow flashed before Coralline’s eyes—primary colors that reflected her primary emotions. How dare Rhodomela speak to her as such? How dare Rhodomela look down on Abalone?
“My mother is right about you!” Coralline snapped. “You truly are a Bitter Spinster. Your meanness drives everyone away. Everyone in Urchin Grove hates you!”
“I know.”
Coralline’s cheeks flamed at her own vitriol, and tears trickled from her eyes, water meeting water, salt meeting salt. She erupted out of her stool and whirled around to leave. Her hand was on the doorknob, when Rhodomela called quietly, “Coralline.”
She turned. She hoped Rhodomela would apologize, then Coralline would also apologize. She admired Rhodomela; she didn’t care what anyone else said about her; she owed Rhodomela a lifetime of gratitude for having saved her father—these were the things Coralline would say, and then Rhodomela would say that she wanted Coralline to continue to work at The Irregular Remedy, that there’d been some horrible misunderstanding.
“Your medical badge, please.”
Coralline glanced down at the sand-dollar badge pinned to her corset just above her heart. The shell was a smooth white circle engraved with the words, in small black letters: Coralline Costaria, Apprentice Apothecary. With trembling fingers, she unpinned the badge from her corset, turned it over, and read the words on its back: Association of Apothecaries. Printed and provided by the Association, it was this badge that gave Coralline license to practice. She was required to wear it anytime she was treating anyone other than herself.
As she handed the badge to Rhodomela, she felt as though she were handing over part of her own palpitating heart.
Izar did not know what had compelled him to Mira on this day specifically, but he had canceled his meetings, boarded a cabin cruiser, and steered himself to the one place Antares had warned him to always avoid: the island of his birth. The ghosts of your past will only haunt you, Antares had said.
And so, as Izar disembarked on the brittle sands of Mira, he could not help feeling he was betraying Antares. But he swallowed his guilt and, hands on his hips, looked about him. His nose wrinkled—there was a powerful stink of rotting fish and a sense of death and decay among the flaking palm trees. Children emerged out of doorways and stared at him, their knees knobby and faces sweaty, their arms dirt stained. Izar must have looked just like them before Antares had adopted him.
Mira had been flooded some years ago—Ocean Protection had decried the flood as a symptom of climate change—and the paltry population of fishermen had plummeted. Fewer than a hundred families lived on the scrappy sands today, compared to three hundred families a decade ago. And so, as Izar strode on the sands, he had the sense that he was walking in the shadow of a place rather than the place itself. Spotting a fisherman on the shore, he stopped to ask the bedraggled old man, “Where can I find the home of Heze and Capella Virgo?”
The man squinted suspiciously at Izar’s sunglasses, cleanly shaven face, and collared shirt. But his gnarled hand pointed, and Izar followed. When he reached the house in question, he identified it by a sign on its door: The Virgo Residence.
The formality of the sign seemed an attempt at self-deprecating humor, for the place was a hovel that had rusted upon itself. Its tin roof was dented in the center, and its doorway was so low that Izar had to bend his neck to fit through. He came to stand in what he supposed was the living room, but it was the size of his childhood basement storage closet. The floorboards squished beneath his feet, spongy and frayed like limp asparagus.
Izar fell to the floorboards on his knees, in order to be closer to the eye level of the toddler he once had been. He stared at the fissures in the walls and ran his hands over the scabs on the floor. He hoped to recognize something, anything, that would tell him that this hovel had been his home until the age of three. Often during the last twenty-five years, he had felt hollow and unmoored, like an empty shell, and he’d longed for some memories to clam onto when tossed about by the currents of life, but he’d had nothing. He’d hoped desperately to find something here, in his childhood home, but it could just as well have been a stranger’s home—no recollections flew forth in his mind.