Maybe that was the answer to the riddle that was Matt Casey: he thought he’d lose his gift of music if he gave his heart to another. Maybe he’d even written that song himself, for she’d surely never heard it before. Picked it up in Morocco, he’d told her once, from one of the Wild Geese, the many Irish-in-exile, but she wasn’t so sure.
Did you write it? she was ready to ask him right now, but then they were at The Harp and there was old Joe Breen flinging open the door to welcome them in and the opportunity was gone.
* * *
Lucia put on a pot of tea when she and Katrina returned to the apartment. While they waited for it to steep, they sat on the legless sofa pushed up against one wall of the long open loft that took up the majority of the apartment’s floor space.
There was a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom off this main room. The kitchen area was in one corner—a battered fridge, its paint peeling, a sink and a counter with a hot plate on it, storage cupboards underneath, and a small wooden table with five mismatched chairs around it.
A low coffee table made of a plank of wood set on two apple crates crouched before the couch, laden with magazines and ashtrays. Along a far wall, three tall old mirrors had been fastened to the wall with a twelve-foot long support bar set out in front of them. The other walls were adorned with posters of the various shows in which Lucia had performed. In two, she had headlined—one a traditional ballet, while the other had been a very outré multimedia event written and choreographed by a friend of hers.
When the tea was ready, Lucia brought the pot and two cups over to the coffee table and set them on a stack of magazines. She poured Katrina a cup, then another for herself.
“So you found him,” Lucia said as she returned to her seat on the sofa.
Katrina nodded happily.
He’s just the way I remember him, she signed.
“Where did you meet him?” Lucia asked.
Katrina gave a shy smile in response, then added, Near my home. He was playing music.
The bright blue fire of her eyes grew unfocused as she looked across the room, seeing not plaster walls and the dance posters upon them, but the rough rocky shore of a coastline that lay east of the city by the mouth of the Dulfer River. She went into the past, and the past was like a dream.
She’d been underlake when the sound of his voice drew her up from the cold and the dark, neither of which she felt except as a kind of malaise in her spirit; up into the moonlight, bobbing in the white-capped waves; listening, swallowing that golden sound of strings and voice, and he so handsome and all alone on the shore. And sad. She could hear it in his song, feel the timbre of his loneliness in his voice.
Always intrigued with the strange folk who moved on the shore with their odd stumpy legs, this time she was utterly smitten. She swam closer and laid her arms on a stone by the shore, her head on her arms, to watch and listen.
It was his music that initially won her, for music had been her first love. Each of her four sisters was prettier than the next, and each had a voice that could charm moonlight from a stone, milk from a virgin, a ghost from the cold dark depths below, but her voice was better still, as golden as her hair and as rich and pure as the first larksong at dawn.
But if it was his music that first enchanted her, then he himself completed the spell. She longed to join her voice to his, to hold him and be held, but she never moved from her hiding place. One look at her and he would be driven away, for he’d see only that which was scaled, and she had no soul, not as did those who walked ashore.
No soul, no soul. A heart that broke for want of him, but no immortal soul. That was the curse of the lake-born.
When he finally put away his instrument and walked farther inland, up under the pines where she couldn’t follow, she let the waves close over her head and returned to her home underlake.
For three nights she returned to the shore and for two of them he was there, his voice like honey against the beat of the waves that the wind pushed shoreward and she only loved him more. But on the fourth night, he didn’t come, nor on the fifth night, nor the sixth, and she despaired, knowing he was gone, away in the wide world, lost to her forever.
Her family couldn’t help her; there was no one to help her. She yearned to be rid of scales, to walk on shore, no matter the cost, just so that she could be with him, but as well ask the sun not to rise, or the wind to cease its endless motion.
“No matter the cost,” she whispered. Tears trailed down her cheek, a sorrowful tide that would not ebb.
“Maraghreen,” the lake replied as the wind lifted one of its waves to break upon the land.
She lifted her head, looked over the white caps to where the lake grew darker still as it crept under the cliffs into the hidden cave where the lake witch lived.
She was afraid, but she went. To Maraghreen. Who took her scales and gave her legs with a bitter potion that tasted of witch blood; satisfied her impossible need, but took Katrina’s voice in payment.
“A week and a day,” the lake witch told her before she took Katrina’s voice. “You have only so long to win him and your immortal soul, or to foam you will return.”
“But without my voice…” It was through song she’d thought to win him, voices joined in a harmony so pure how could he help but love her? “Without it…”
“He must speak of his love first, or your soul will be forfeit.”
“But without my voice…”
“You will have your body; that will need be enough.”
So she drank the blood, bitter on her tongue; gained legs, and each step she took was fiery pain and would be so until she’d gained a soul; went in search of he who held her love, for whose love she had paid such a dear price. Surely he would speak the words to her before the seven days were past and gone?
“Penny for your thoughts,” Lucia said.
Katrina only smiled and shook her head. She could tell no one. The words must come unbidden from him or all would be undone.
* * *
Matt was late picking Katrina up on Sunday. It was partly his own fault—he’d gotten caught up with a new song that he was learning from a tape a friend had sent him from Co. Cork and lost track of the time—and partly from trying to follow the Byzantine directions that Lucia had used to describe the route to her Upper Foxville apartment.
Katrina didn’t seem to mind at all; she was just happy to see him, her hands said, moving as gracefully in speech as the whole of her did when she danced.
You didn’t bring your guitar, she signed.
“I’ve been playing it all day. I thought I’d leave it at home.”
Your voice…your music. They are a gift.
“Yeah, well…”
He looked around the loft, recognizing a couple of the posters from having seen them around town before, pasted on subway walls or stuck in amongst the clutter of dozens of other ads in the front of restaurants and record stores. He’d never gone to any of the shows. Dance wasn’t his thing, especially not modern dance or the performance art that Lucia was into. He’d seen a show of hers once. She’d spent fifteen minutes rolling back and forth across the stage, wrapped head to toe in old brown paper shopping bags to a soundtrack that consisted of water dripping for its rhythm, the hypnotic drone only occasionally broken by the sound of footsteps walking through broken glass.
Definitely not his thing.
Lucia was not his idea of what being creative was all about. In his head, he filed her type of artist under the general heading of lunatic fringe. Happily, she was out for the day.
“So,” he said, “do you want to head out to the island?”
Katrina nodded. But not just yet, her hands added.
She smiled at him, long hair clouding down her back. She was wearing clothes borrowed from Lucia—cotton pants a touch too big and tied closed with a scarf through the belt loops, a T-shirt advertising a band that he’d never heard of and the same black Chinese slippers she’d been wearing last night.
&nbs
p; “So what do you want—” he began.
Katrina took his hands before he could finish and placed them on her breasts. They were small and firm against his palms, her heartbeat echoing through the thin fabric, fluttering against his skin. Her own hands dropped to his groin, one gently cupping him through his jeans, the other pulling down the zipper.
She was gentle and loving, each motion innocent of artifice and certainly welcome, but she’d caught Matt off-guard.
“Look,” he said, “are you sure you…?”
She raised a hand, laying a finger against his lips. No words. Just touch. He grew hard, his penis uncomfortably bent in the confines of his jeans until she popped the top button and pulled it out. She put her small hand around it, fingers tight, hand moving slowly up and down. Speaking without words, her emotions laid bare before him.
Matt took his hands from her breasts and lifted the T-shirt over her head. He let it drop behind her as he enfolded her in an embrace. She was like liquid against him, a shimmer of movement and soft touches.
No words, he thought.
She was right. There was no need for words.
He let her lead him into Lucia’s bedroom.
* * *
Afterward, he felt so still inside it was though the world had stopped moving, time stalled, no one left but the two of them, wrapped up together, here in the dusky shadows that licked across the bed. He raised himself up on one elbow and looked down at her.
She seemed to be made of light. An unearthly radiance lay upon her pale skin like an angelic nimbus, except he doubted that any angel in heaven knew how to give and accept pleasure as she did. Not unless heaven was a very different place from the one he’d heard about in Sunday school.
There was a look in her eyes that promised him everything—not just bodily pleasures, but heart and soul—and for a moment he wanted to open up to her, to give to her what he gave his music, but then he felt something close up thick inside him. He found himself remembering a parting conversation he’d had with another woman. Darlene Flatt, born Darlene Johnston. Belying her stage name, she was an extraordinarily well-endowed singer in one of the local country bands. Partial to slow dancing on sawdusted floors, bolo ties, fringed jackets and, for the longest time, to him.
“You’re just a hollow man,” she told him finally. “A sham. The only place you’re alive is on stage, but let me tell you something, Matt, the whole world’s a stage if you’d just open your eyes and see.”
Maybe in Shakespeare’s day, he’d thought, but not now, not here, not in this world. Here you only get hurt.
“If you gave a fraction of your commitment to music to another person, you’d be…”
He didn’t know what Darlene thought he’d be because he tuned her out. Stepped behind the wall and followed the intricate turns of a song he was working on at the time until she finally got up and left his apartment.
Got up and left.
He swung his feet to the floor and looked for his clothes. Katrina caught his arm.
What’s wrong? she signed. What have I done?
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not you. It’s not anything. It’s just…I’ve just got to go, okay?”
Please, she signed. Just tell me…
But he turned away so that he couldn’t see her words. Got dressed. Paused in the doorway of the bedroom, choking on words that tried to slip through the wall. Turned finally, and left. The room. The apartment. Her, crying.
* * *
Lucia found Katrina when she came home later, red-eyed and sitting on the sofa in just a T-shirt, staring out the window, unable or unwilling to explain what was wrong. So Lucia thought the worst.
“That sonuvabitch,” she started. “He never even showed up, did he? I should have warned you about what a prick he can be.”
But Katrina’s hands said, No. It wasn’t his fault. I want too much.
“He was here?” Lucia asked.
She nodded.
“And you had a fight?”
The shrug that came in response said, sort of, and then Katrina began to cry again. Lucia enfolded her in her arms. It was small, cold comfort, she knew, for she’d had her own time in that lonely place in which Katrina now found herself, but it was all Lucia had to offer.
* * *
Matt found himself on the ferry crossing from the city over to Wolf Island, as though by doing so, he was completing some unfinished ritual to which neither he nor Katrina had quite set the parameters. He stood at the rail on the upper deck with the wind in his face and let the words to long-dead ballads run through his mind so that he wouldn’t have to think about people, about relationships, about complications, about Katrina.
But in the dusking sky and in the wake that trailed behind the ferry, and later on the island, in the shadows that crept across the lawn and in the tangle that branches made against the sky, he could see only her face. Not all the words to all the songs he knew could free him from the burden of guilt that clung to him like burrs gathered on a sweater while crossing an autumn field.
He stopped at the statue of the little mermaid, and of course even she had Katrina’s face.
“I didn’t ask to start anything,” he told the statue, saying now what he should have said in Lucia’s bedroom. “So why the hell do I have to feel so guilty?”
It was the old story, he realized. Everything, everybody, wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt.
“I’m not a hollow man,” he told the statue, saying what he should have said to Darlene. “I just don’t have what you want me to give.”
The statue just looked out across the lake. The dusk stretched for long, impossible moments, then the sun dropped completely behind the horizon and the lamps lit up along the island’s pathways. Matt turned and walked back to where the ferry waited to return him to Newford.
He didn’t see Katrina again for two days.
* * *
I’m sorry, was the first thing she said to him, her hands moving quickly before he could speak.
He stood in the hallway leading into Lucia’s apartment, late on a Wednesday afternoon, not even sure what he was doing here. Apologizing. Explaining. Maybe just trying to understand.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It’s just…everything happened too fast.”
She nodded. Do you want to come in?
Matt regarded her. She was barefoot, framed by the doorway. The light behind her turned the flowered dress she was wearing into gossamer, highlighting the shape of her body under it. Her hair was the colour of soft gold. He remembered her lying on the bed, radiant in the afterglow of their lovemaking.
“Could we go out instead?” he said. “Just for a walk or something?”
Let me get my shoes.
He took her to the lakefront and they walked the length of the boardwalk and the Pier, and when the jostle of the crowds became too much, they made their way down to the sand and sat near the shoreline. For the most part, his voice, her hands, were still. When they did talk, it was to make up stories about the more colourful characters with whom they shared the beach, both using their hands to speak so that they wouldn’t be overheard, laughing as each tried to outdo the other with an outrageous background for one person or another.
Where did you learn sign language? she asked him at one point.
My cousin’s deaf, he replied, his hands growing more deft, remembering old patterns, the longer they spoke. Our parents were pretty close and we all saw a lot of each other, so everybody in the family learned.
They had dinner at Kathryn’s Café. Afterward, they went to the Owlnight, another of Newford’s folk clubs, but this one was on the Butler University campus itself, in the Student Center. Garve MacCauley was doing a solo act, just guitar and gravely voice, mostly his own material.
You’re much better, Katrina signed to Matt after the first few songs.
“Just different,” he said.
Katrina only smi
led and shook her head.
After the last set, he took her back to Upper Foxville and left her at Lucia’s door with a chaste kiss.
* * *
Thursday evening they took in a play at the Standish, a small concert hall that divided its evenings between repertory theatre and music concerts. Katrina was entranced. She’d never seen live actors before, but then there was so much she didn’t know about this new world in which she found herself and still more that she hadn’t experienced in his company.
It was just past eleven by the time they got back to the apartment. Lucia had gone out so they could have the place to themselves, but when Katrina invited Matt in, he begged off. His confused mumble of an explanation made little sense. All Katrina knew was that the days were slipping away. Saturday night, the lake witch’s deadline, was blurring all too close, all too fast.
When he bent to kiss her on the forehead as he had the night before, she lifted her head so that their lips met. The kiss lasted a long time, a tangle of tongues. She pressed in close to him, hands stroking his back, but he pulled away with a confused panic fluttering in his eyes.
Why do I frighten you? she wanted to ask, but she had already guessed that it wasn’t just her. It was any close relationship. Responsibility frightened him, and perhaps more to the point, he just didn’t love her. Maybe he would, given time, but by then it would be too late. Days went by quickly; hours were simply a rush, one tumbling into the other.
She gave him a sad smile and let him go, listened to his footsteps in the stairwell, then slowly went into the apartment and closed the door behind her. Each step she took, as it always did since she stepped onto the land, was like small knives cutting through her feet. She remembered the freedom of the waves, of movement without pain, but she had turned her back on scales and water. For better or worse, she belonged on the land now.
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