by Sonya Blake
“That’s Joni Mitchell,” Sam said. “She likes to sing. As best as she can, anyway. Which is nowhere near as good as you.”
Kaia blushed as he turned to give her a slow, burning kiss, leaving off just before she could take him in like she wanted to.
Pleasantly ruffled, she set down the small overnight bag she’d packed with a change of clothes and rudimentary toiletries as he bent to light another lantern. “No electricity, huh?”
“Not for lights, no,” Sam said. “I’ve got a generator going for the refrigerator and the water pump, but that’s it.”
The lantern light revealed the cottage’s knotty pine walls and wide plank floors, the small, tidy kitchen, and the contrastingly chaotic living area over the counter. Kaia gravitated toward paintings propped on a table against the far wall.
“Storms at sea, misty mainland mornings, the moving lights I see on the insides of my eyelids when I close them on a dark night,” Sam explained.
“Holy smokes, you’re good.”
The pleasant post-orgasmic heaviness still lingering in her body made her instinctively sink into the couch in the center of the room as she continued admiring Sam’s work. His current work in progress stood on an easel, a world of black and deep sea-green, smattered with scarlet and turquoise, glowing with the faint, faraway moon as seen through water.
“That’s, ah, that one’s the night I almost drowned. The night you saved me,” he explained as he knelt to pile wood in the cast iron stove. “There’s still something missing from it. I want it to be a little less Pollock, a little more Monet.”
Kaia snorted. “Well I think it’s damn perfect just like it is.”
Sam smiled at her. His weird mood seemed to have lifted, but the strange suddenness of it hadn’t quite left her. Still, she didn’t want to prod him about whatever had made him change tack so abruptly back at the point. She was just glad to be with him, to see where he lived and worked. She pointed to a whitish painting with a gray smudge of land and the lines of a familiar house emerging from the fog.
“That’s my favorite,” she said.
“You should have it. It’ll be your little piece of Foley’s Point after the house sells,” he said.
Kaia sat up straighter, feeling like she’d just been smacked in the face. “Whew! I’ve gotta admit, I sure don’t like the sound of that—selling the house. Makes my heart flop around somethin’ crazy.”
Sam smiled as he closed the woodstove door and left it open a crack for the fire to take. “I know what you mean. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to leave this place.”
“But doesn’t it get lonely?” Kaia asked, taking in the impenetrable quiet surrounding the cottage.
“I like to be alone,” Sam said, “though I guess sometimes I wish there was someone to talk to, to eat with, you know. Someone to blame for the dishes. Someone to bring me toilet paper when I run out and I’m stuck on the shitter.”
Shittah.
Kaia laughed. “Someone—like a woman? I don’t imagine you’d have too much of a hard time getting yourself one of those, Sam Lowell, if you tried.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Jesus. Way to sound pushy, she thought.
“I mean, this woman you’ve been seeing, what’s up with that?” she added, trying for a casual, fraternal tone.
Stop while you’re ahead!
Sam lifted a shoulder. “It’s nothin’ serious,” he said. “I have a hard time trusting people, I guess,” he went on, pensively. “A hard time getting close.”
Kaia nodded. “I know what you mean,” she said.
He sat on the couch beside her, at arm’s length. “Do you? You seem like you make friends easily. Like you’d… find a lover easily.” His eyes lingered on hers.
Kaia gave a little laugh, wishing he was closer to her, wishing they were still by her fire, tangled in each other’s arms. “Growing up without my mom was tough,” she explained. She gave a half-hearted shrug. “I think it made me strong in some ways, weak in others. I’m not as outgoing as you seem to think I am.”
“What was the hardest part, growing up without her?” he asked.
Kaia felt like she’d just been punched in the guts, and let out a breath. “Damn,” she said. “You want to get right to the meat of things, don’t you? First the selling of my house, now my dead mother…”
Sam shook his head and leaned back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I can be so fucking stupid sometimes—”
“No. Stop that,” Kaia said, and touched his arm.
He fussed under her touch in a moment of childlike frustration, then leaned closer and pressed his forehead against hers. He shut his eyes. His beard was thick and soft under her fingertips. He kissed her softly, but pulled back immediately, like he was uncertain of what her reaction might be.
“Sam… I’m glad you asked about her,” Kaia told him, meeting his doubtful gaze, wishing he hadn’t drawn away again.
Sam chewed on his lower lip and knitted his brows.
“Most people are afraid to look right at another person and see them for everything they are,” she said, “you know, their flaws and their hurts. Most people see whatever they want to see, and they don’t care too much if that’s the truth, or not.” Kaia drew in a long breath. “You asked what the hardest part was, growing up with out my mom, and the hardest part was and still is how my grief is kind of like a flower—just when I think I know what it is, it goes and opens itself up more to me. It takes on a new shape, a new perfume, and it affects me in a new way. Like, now that I’m here in Maine, I’m thinking of that house as some relic of my mother’s spirit, and it’s going to be hard as hell to let it go. I don’t remember much about my mom, so whatever I can hang onto ends up meaning a lot more to me than it should. Like, if I were to find even a scrap of paper with her handwriting on it, I’d have to keep it. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Not crazy,” Sam said solemnly.
In his eyes, Kaia saw sadness, humor, the ocean. A good man. She leaned back onto the cushions and reached for his hand.
“I’m really glad you asked me to come here, and I’m glad you asked about my mom,” she assured him. “I need to talk more about her, about her death. Pretending she didn’t exist, pretending it didn’t happen—that’s not good for me.”
“It was a sailing accident, right?” Sam asked quietly. “My dad told me about it.”
Kaia nodded. “She tripped on rigging, fell over the side, hit her head.” She found her throat constricting, her eyes filling with tears. “They were traveling fast, and by the time my dad got back to her, well… He thought she’d be able to swim on her own. Save herself. But she’d hit too hard. He thinks she might’ve broken her neck in the fall. He blames himself to this day. And that’s what I was thinking of when I jumped into the water to save you.”
Sam leaned his head back against the couch and stared up at the ceiling contemplatively, his hand warm but loose in hers.
“I feel like I can tell you anything,” she said, testing the ground, wondering why he was acting so distant.
“You can.” His eyes rested on hers.
Kaia smiled, curling her fingers around his. “Will you tell me about how you started painting?”
Chapter Twenty-One
At first, it was hard for Samuel Lowell, a sixth-generation Maine fisherman, to tell if the boy he’d found on the shore was a selkie or not. He had heard of the legendary creatures plenty while he was growing up in Quolobit Harbor—back when it was a rugged fishing community, before all the tourists got wind of it. But he had never believed in those legends.
He thought at first that the kid could have some kind of neurological condition—that would explain the lack of speech, the atypical behavior. Or, the boy could’ve been out on a boat for a family tour when he fell into the water and got banged up. Only that scenario didn’t make much sense, given that it was November—long past tourist season—and Samuel would’ve heard about an incident like that over the r
adio.
No, Samuel thought the boy was indeed likelier to be something from the whispered tales passed from generation to generation, tales of another kind of people who lived in the ocean.
“Now don’t do that.” Samuel snatched a fish out of the boy’s hands. They were out on the boat, bringing in the day’s catch to the wharf. “You can’t eat it raw. Not anymore. The bones’ll hurt you.”
The boy looked confused and disappointed, but not angry. His large, beautiful eyes drifted once more to the bucket of fish, but he tucked his hands between his thick wool sweater and the bib of the orange coveralls Samuel had given him. The boy sighed, resigned, his cheeks flushed from the cold.
“I know you’re hungry,” Samuel said as he steered the boat to the pier. “You’ve been a good sternman. You’re stronger than you look, you know. Skinny now, but I ‘spect you’ll fill out good. We’ll boil up a couple bugs soon as we get home, have ‘em with some taters.”
“Home,” the boy said, trying the word. He pointed out to Thursday Island. “Home?”
“Home,” Samuel repeated, and laughed for joy. The boy laughed, too.
It had been four weeks since Samuel had pulled his bloody body off the shore, and this was the kid’s first word. The boy pointed questioningly to the bucket of bait fish.
“Fish,” Samuel told him.
“Vish. Vish.”
“Fffish,” Samuel said, pointing to the way his upper teeth rested on his lower lip when he formed the word.
“Fish,” the boy said.
They weighed in their catch at the pier and on the way home they covered boat, water, sky, man, you, me, lobster, trap, rope, net, and bird. When they approached Thursday Island, the sleek, rounded head of a harbor seal came into view in the turquoise break of the surf, finishing its fishing for the evening. The boy nearly dove into the water, but Samuel grabbed him by the back of the coveralls, fighting with all his strength to keep his lanky but strong charge from going overboard. The two of them ended up slipping on the wet decking and nearly colliding with the dock.
Samuel managed to get the boat tethered up while still hanging on to the kid, then dragged him over to the side of the boat.
“Seal.” Samuel pointed to the animal in the waves and then pointed to himself. “Man.”
“Seal! Seal!” the boy shouted hoarsely, his voice cracking as he struggled against Samuel’s grip with tears streaming down his wind-burned cheeks. Pounding his fists into his own chest, he cried over and over again, “Seal! Seal!”
“Not anymore you aren’t! Man!” Samuel stabbed a finger into the kid’s chest, his suspicions about the boy’s nature confirmed. “You’re a man now.” Samuel prodded him again. “Seal.” He pointed out to the water, looking to see if the kid understood. “You are not a seal. You are a man.”
The boy cried for hours after that.
If he came to accept the permanence of his circumstances, he was not at any point enthusiastic about learning words, not like he had been that first time. He seemed to view understanding human conventions as a dull but necessary means to survival.
“Man. Thirsty,” the boy said one evening in January beside the woodstove after eating a bowl of mussels.
Samuel looked up from his own bowl. “Get a drink. You know where the water is.”
“No water.” The boy pointed to Samuel’s beer bottle.
“Beer?”
“I want beer, man.”
Samuel shook his head. “Samuel. My name is Samuel. And you can’t have beer. Not for a few years yet.” Samuel didn’t think the boy could be more than fourteen at most.
The boy’s brows shot up and his mouth bowed downward. He learned human expressions fast enough, that was for sure. “Why?” he asked, wailing frightfully. “Why, man?”
“Samuel!” Samuel raised his voice and smacked a hand to his own chest. “I am Samuel.”
The boy began to cry. He looked down into the empty bowl in his lap and shook his head back and forth, another gesture he had picked up recently––one that seemed to suit his stubborn, reticent personality all too well.
“My name is Samuel,” Samuel said, more softly.
“Name?” The boy looked up at him with bleary eyes.
“Stop crying. You want a beer that bad? Go ahead, but only one. You won’t like it—bet you a hundred bucks.” Samuel took a slug of his own beer and then pointed the bottle toward the kitchen.
“I want name.” The boy wiped his face with the cuff of the flannel shirt Samuel had given him. “I want beer. I want name.”
Samuel set his beer down on the small table beside the chair. He was touched by the boy wanting a name, and felt suddenly guilty for not already seeing to that human rite of passage.
“I’m sorry,” Samuel said.
“Sorry?” the boy parroted, his lips swollen from his tears. “No Samuel?”
“No. Jesus!” Samuel stood and shook his head.
“Jesus?”
“Stop it, will you?!” Samuel nearly shouted.
The boy cowered against the couch cushions, spilling his bowl of shells and brine.
“Goddammit.” Samuel snatched up the bowl from the boy’s feet. “You’re going to stink up the whole house now. Come on.”
The boy began to cry harder, though his sobs were silent. Samuel put the bowl on top of the side table and sat beside the boy, resting his hand on his shoulder. He was not a nurturing, gentle man by nature, but he would have to try harder for the child. “You want a name?” he asked.
The boy’s large, black eyes met Samuel’s. He nodded.
“I’ll call you Samuel, like me.” He was not a creative individual, and it was the first thing he could think of. Samuel ran a hand roughly over the boy’s thick hair. “Samuel.”
“Samuel?” The boy repeated it slowly. “Your name Samuel.”
“It’s your name now, too,” Samuel said, and the unfamiliar threat of tears stung his eyes. “I’ll call you Sam for short.”
“Sam,” the boy said, warily. “Why Sam? Why not seal?”
“Never were a seal,” Samuel said between his teeth, uncertain about what he was getting himself into. “You are a selkie. Means you’re both seal and man. And you can’t be in the water anymore because someone stole your sealskin the day you came to land.”
“Who?” young Sam asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
Samuel heaved a sigh, sorry not to have answers for the kid. “I don’t know.”
The drawing began not long after the boy learned to string words together, when Samuel was trying to explain something or other to him. The exchange of money for labor, maybe. Samuel drew pictures of himself and the boy fishing, working all day, then giving their findings to another man in return for money, which they could then take to the store and give to the people there in exchange for goods.
The boy loved drawing and was inclined to draw more than talk when it came to telling Samuel anything, so much so that at a certain point Samuel had to take away the paper and the pencil to get him to use his mouth to speak. He never became much of a talker, and for that Samuel was frankly grateful, though he did learn to speak in a normal enough way. Eventually Samuel let him have his paper and pencils back, and then the kid drew all the time.
Young Sam drew seals, mostly, and even drew images of himself being cut out of his sealskin. These drawings were dark and disturbing, and Samuel eventually told the boy he had to stop making them. “You need to forget about that now, Sam,” Samuel said. “Forget about the sealskin.”
“Who has my sealskin?” the boy asked, as if Samuel had all the answers. “Where is it?”
“I really don’t know, but you need to move on.”
When Samuel got him a set of paints for Christmas he began to paint the ocean: not from above and outside the water but from inside, from within. The paintings were obscure and vacant to Samuel’s eyes. He told the boy as much.
“I can’t tell what’s going on in the dam
n painting,” he admitted. Samuel had no great knowledge of art, and it was difficult for him to offer an objective critique. “It’s all just black and green, Sam. It’s, ah, it’s empty.”
“Yes!” Sam agreed, and nodded emphatically.
“That what you’re going for, then?”
“Yes. Empty!”
“Okay, buddy.” Samuel ruffled his hair. “I don’t get it, but that’s fine.”
Sam seemed disconcerted. “Why don’t you get it, Dad?” he asked.
Samuel had instructed the boy to call him his father if anyone asked about their relationship, but he hadn’t anticipated Sam thinking of him that way. It still caught him off guard when Sam called him Dad, but he liked it, too. It made him feel like, for once, he belonged to someone.
“I—I—maybe because I never lived in the ocean, the way you have,” Samuel said, trying for a better response to the boy’s painting. “Maybe we see with different eyes. Maybe when you paint… Oh, Christ, I don’t fuckin’ know… maybe you need to be more, ah, explicit—”
“Mebbie. What’s mebbie?”
“Maybe,” Samuel clarified. “Forget about it. It’s a stupid word. Not worth using, ever.”
“Okay. What is ex—explicit?”
Samuel was getting himself in too deep now, he thought. “Detail,” he said to Sam. “Here.” Samuel grabbed the pencil and paper from the table where they left it for moments like these and drew a sloppy circle, then a neat and accurate one beside it. Then he wrote the words ambiguous and explicit under each, respectively. He added unclear and clear to the page, inaccurate and accurate, specific and vague, and, for good measure, wrong and right.
“You get it?” Samuel asked.
Sam nodded. “Explicit,” he said. “Accurate. Sp—spe-ci-fic. I need to show your eyes what my eyes see.”
Young Sam’s astuteness impressed Samuel. After that, the boy made paintings that still remained abstract to Samuel’s eye, but which used more varied nuance and gave him a distinct—if unnameable—feeling when he looked at them.
“I understand now. Painting is a language,” the boy said to Samuel, several weeks later. “Like the alphabet. Symbol. Symbol for thing, idea, place. Makes my idea your idea.”