Alice At Heart

by Deborah Smith

  Her hands unfurled against his chest, then slid up to cup his face. Griffin gave up all control and wound one arm around her waist. She bent willingly, and with a measured tug he fitted her to him, hard against soft, a couching intimacy. The ketch turned into the wind, slowed, and stopped of its own accord.

  Alice looked up at him, her eyes clear and calm. “You are more like a Bonavendier than you think. How else can you explain what happens between us?”

  He should have said something sardonic in his own defense, but the song she and he shared was a miraculous thing, a gift, and now that he’d accepted it for whatever it was, he wouldn’t desecrate it. “There are very few things I’m willing to take on faith,” he said quietly, “but what happens between you and me is a blessing, no matter where it comes from.”

  The wind curled her hair around her face, hiding and then revealing her poignant, searching gaze. “I’ll take you on faith, too,” she said softly. She slipped from his arms, then stepped up on the ketch’s narrow side deck and gazed out over the water. Suddenly, she sank her hands into the flowing dress she wore. With one graceful swoop, she pulled it over her head and let it drop behind her. She wore only pale silk panties beneath it.

  Griffin caught his breath at the sight of her. Her bare back was a fluid river of soft flesh and muscle pooling in taut, heart-shaped hips. She turned her head, her auburn hair fanning out along the perfect line of her strong shoulders, that mane seeming to grow longer even as he looked at her. Long strands curtained over her right eye as she looked back at him. The unplanned allure was staggering.

  “Follow me,” she whispered. She dived over the side in a smooth bow of motion, piercing the ocean’s surface with one of her nearly soundless entrances into the world he feared so much.

  Griffin swayed as he stepped up on the deck.

  She surfaced a few yards out, and looked up at him. “You’re with me now. Not alone out here. Come into my world.”

  His hands shook. He pulled his sweater over his head, kicked off his shoes, then halted, standing there in only his trousers, looking at the water, looking at her. The fear sang through him along with desire and courage and sheer pride. And trust. Alice would either destroy him gently or save his soul. It was now or never.

  He swung his arms over his head, then, springing off the balls of his feet, plunged into the ocean. At first immersion, his ribs seemed to squeeze his lungs into airless fists, and his heart convulsed. As he shot down into the dark depths above the Calm Meridian, he was a child again, lost and terrified, broken and searching.

  Alice touched him. In the darkness, her warm hands met his outstretched fingers. She linked her fingers through his, and he righted himself. They faced each other, treading water a dozen feet below the surface, holding hands as if dancing slowly, rising. Sunlight began to cascade around them, pale green and gold.

  Feel me all around you, she whispered in his mind. I’m holding you in my arms, and you’re floating inside me.

  Take me up, Ali.

  She pulled him to her, and he put his arms around her. His thighs moved in sync with hers, an erotic rhythm. When he and she reached the surface, he realized dimly they were right beside the ketch’s keel. A forgotten mooring line dangled in the water. He reached up and wrapped his hands around it, then looked at her. I’ll hold on and you hold onto me.

  She nodded, her expression somber and flushed, her eyes worried, glowing, aroused, tender. She put her hands on his shoulders, then drew them down his chest, stroking, exploring. She kissed him, slid close, ran her hands around his waist and up his back, and for the first time since the accident in Spain he began to feel healed, as if her touch could loosen the scars on his skin.

  Looking into his eyes, she pressed herself to him. Her breasts, high and firm, fit softly against his chest, and the treading motion of her legs stroked him. He forced himself to stop fighting the water, to hold onto the line and the look in her eyes. His legs relaxed, parted a little, and her thighs pressed into the center of his body, massaging him with each languid undulation.

  She took his face between her hands and sank her mouth onto his. He showed her what he could, and then she practiced and made his hands flex and tighten on the anchor line above them. She looked at him while she slipped her hands down his torso again and fitted her fingers into the waist of his trousers. Her eyes never leaving his, she unfastened the last of his clothing, curled her hands inside them and then inside the waist of his briefs, and slowly eased the clothing down his legs—sinking with it. Her upturned eyes were poignant and mischievous one instant before the water covered them, and then she was at his thighs, and at his knees, and at his ankles, and the trousers and the briefs slid away.

  Griffin shut his eyes as her hands explored upwards on his bare legs and groaned when she touched her lips to first one thigh and then the other, and then, very gently, on the tip of the hard erection thrusting helplessly out from his body.

  She crested the surface with a deep blush and a look of uncertain pride on her face. “I’ve never,” she whispered.

  “Neither have I. Not like this. Not the way it is right now, with you.”

  The last vestige of her shyness vanished. A moment later, she let her pale panties float to the surface, making a strange, pretty flower riding the ocean’s currents. She enfolded him, wrapping him in the cloak of her naked body, and with her eyes on his, watched him move just so, and then she moved, too, and he found her.

  She kissed him. “I don’t know who I am or who you’ve turned me into, but don’t stop.”

  “You’re not alone,” he answered.

  They moved together like waves on the shore.

  18

  And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

  To hear the sea-maid’s music.

  —Shakespeare

  Golden sunrises over Pacific palms. The glimmer of an ancient Grecian coin. The taste of curried fruit aboard an Indian freighter filled with Hindu pilgrims. I lay in Griffin’s arms in the dark of his bed at Randolph Cottage, hearing the images of his life on the sea, the song he shared to let me know him. Rain slipped down the night sky in a steady wash of silver, hiding Sainte’s Point across the bay, raising cool fog, filling the darkness. We were warm and cocooned; he’d built a fire in the room’s fireplace. Its light was the only lamp in the room, flickering on our naked bodies. We lay facing each other, still dancers, legs and arms lightly entwined. We looked into each other’s eyes, speaking in metaphors and symbols, flashes of emotion, the quiet lull between the irresistible desires, all our silent songs. I shared mine in return.

  The sweet coo of birds in the Riley Pet Shoppe. The cold beauty of my mountain lake. The safe solitude in my cabin. Loneliness. How odd I am. Taste the butter I mound on my chintz saucers. I eat butter like a pudding. Like ice cream. In big bowls. Embarrassing.

  He touches one of my nipples with the back of his fingers. I like butter that way, too. Damn strange. I don’t eat it in front of people.

  Astonishment. Delight. A purr of appreciation. I’m not the only one.

  The smooth cream of small secrets becomes my fingers tracing his lips in wonder, becomes his hand caressing my breasts, becomes my thigh easing over his, becomes his hand sliding down my side, curving over and then behind the crest of my hip, reaching between my legs from back there, finally coming to rest where his forefinger can stroke soft folds of skin and the silky opening that welcomes him.

  And we make love again.

  Whatever I should have done, should have thought, should have worried over or resisted has been washed away along with thirty-four years of virginity.

  As I fall asleep for a few minutes with his head cradled on my stomach, I call out to Lilith. Did you expect this?

  Of course, she answers.

  He is a good man. Whatever worries you, I’ll make it right. I need to tell him that he’s one of our kind. Help him believe somehow.

  My dear Alice. You can’t tell him yet. You don’t quite believe
in our kind yourself. When you truly know who you are, he’ll see your soul and have no doubt you exist.

  What should I do for now?

  Just do what you’re doing. Love him. Let him love you. Keep singing.

  Easy, I hummed.

  “She’s with him,” Lilith told her sisters that night. “It’s meant to be.”

  Pearl clasped her heart in hopeful support, but Mara turned away, shaking her head. “We’re doomed.”

  I knew Griffin had taken me to the open ocean for a reason other than swimming lessons, that he wanted something far less innocent from me, that seducing me, or being seduced by me, furthered his goals.

  The next morning I admitted a heavy weight of adulation and sorrow. I left him sleeping and slipped from the cottage in brightly washed spring sunshine. I glanced around the cottage’s isolated sand dunes and pine forest, then walked naked to the dock and dully studied a sinister, dark barge tethered there next to a sleek speedboat and the classic Sea Princess. I noted the barge’s wenches and scoops, diving gear and buckets. I went into the cabin and gazed at a large console of electronics and computer screens. This was a vessel for hunting beneath the water, for clawing up the ocean’s secrets, Bonavendier secrets.

  The Calm Meridian. Something about my sisters.

  My family, I thought for the first time.

  Oh, Griffin. I could not bear to wait for the explanation of my use in his larger plan. I dived into the bay, met up with my dolphin friends a few minutes later, and swam for the open Atlantic.

  Griffin could find me when he awoke.

  He wouldn’t need help for that.

  I clasped the bow of the ruined yacht again, spreading my arms out along it, trying to hug the memories it stored, the truth it could confess. How could such a terrible accident have taken Porter Randolph—an experienced yachtsman—and Undiline, who was, to say the least, at home in the sea. A sense of prescient horror suddenly washed over me. My right hand curled spasmodically, gripping an invisible item, wanting to form an outline around a mystery hinted at but only shadowed in my senses.

  There was something important inside the bow.

  I slid down on my stomach and felt along the bottom, where for more than three decades the current had pushed sand high around the bow’s broken end. When I reached the area where the slope of the Point Trench began, I found a washed-out place. There, the water had tunneled beneath the nose of the yacht. I got close to that small black maw, that aperture into the heart of the trapped world inside the old bow. I measured the opening with my hands. Big enough for me to slither through.

  The thought curdled my nerves. Go into the bow of the yacht where Griffin’s parents had died? Their bodies had never been recovered. I thought of bones. I began to shake. I crept closer, my heart pounding. With a rush of conviction, I shoved both arms inside the opening, pawed away a hummock of sand, and began to squirm through into the grotesque void. I sang nervously, a vibrato of silent sound, and many small shapes came back to me.

  My hand closed around one of them, just as it had instinctively imagined the outline before. I froze. Encrusted with sediment, bulky and no longer sleek, the shape still carried a meaning, a history, a song. My mind filled with the storm of that autumn day in 1967. Wind, rain, the crash of thunder, the bellow of waves breaking over the Calm Meridian’s sleek bow. The yacht tilted wildly, everything in chaos. And then, unmistakably, I heard a sharp crack, and then another.

  The sound of gunshots.

  I had a pistol in my hand. Oh, no, no. What? Tell me. What does this mean? Who was the last person to touch this weapon before me? Why was it fired?

  At that moment, behind me in the open water, the softest of hands stroked my bare feet.

  I dropped the pistol, jerked my arms from inside the bow, then twisted wildly and drew my legs up. I strained to see in water too dark for even a glimmer of light. I sang out loudly, but no sonic shapes echoed back to me. Whoever—or whatever—had glided away—or had only existed in my overwrought mind.

  Sing to me, Ali.

  Griffin’s voice. Not behind me but up there, in the bright, ordinary world.

  I’m here. I’m down here. I rose to the surface, making myself move slowly, having more dignity than sense. The water paled and warmed. Bright spring sunlight streaked it. I sent out songs but marked nothing except fish and dolphins, which swirled around me with urgent or perhaps excited noises. Had they seen someone down there with me, or were they just reacting to my panic? I had imagined it.

  But not the gun. That had been very real.

  I propelled myself to the border between water and sky and raised my face into the air. Instantly, my ears filled with the rumble of an engine. I pirouetted in the water as Griffin brought a speedboat to an idle not more than a few yards from me. He looked harried, tousled, but infinitely competent above the water. Salt spray had splashed his khaki trousers and the soft brown sweater he wore. The air was cool; just the slightest steam rose from his body.

  With a great swoop of one strong arm, he threw an anchor over the side. He expertly flipped a soft ladder over the diving platform protruding from the boat’s stern. Then he knelt on the boat’s stern and thrust out one hand to me. “Out of the water. Right now. Come here.” His expression was a mixture of tense emotions. I felt his fear—fear for me—and his relief at finding me. And his anger.

  I shook my head. I was sad and tired, shaken and despondent. “Tell me why you brought me here yesterday. Tell me what you really want from me.”

  “I want you to stay away from this wreckage. It’s dangerous.”

  “Most of our deepest memories and strongest passions are dangerous.” I gave him a sad look, which he returned. “If I intended to avoid all danger in my new life, I wouldn’t have been with you yesterday and last night.”

  “You know I’d never hurt you.”

  “I know you want something from me, and you’re tearing yourself apart inside because of it.”

  “I want you . . . ” he paused, his throat working, his face grim. He calmed himself and went on with a rueful smile, “I want you to teach me not to fear the goddamned water. So I can bring up every piece of the Calm Meridian by myself.”

  My blood chilled. “What do you hope to find?”

  He lowered the hand he had continued to hold out to me, as if knowing I wouldn’t touch him after he spoke. “I’m looking for proof,” he said, “that your sisters killed my parents.”

  “I don’t remember much about that day on the Calm Meridian,” Griffin admitted to Ali. She sat in the well of the speedboat, wearing his long sweater and nothing else, her green eyes tragic, her hands bunching the hem of the sweater in her lap. Griffin stood on the bow, bare-chested, staring out at the ocean to avoid looking at her eyes. “I was only four years old. I know what I’ve been told and what I’ve pieced together. And I know what I feel.”

  “Small evidence for such a terrible accusation,” she said quietly.

  “Lilith and her sisters have never offered anything to dispute it.”

  “I see,” she said in a small voice.

  “I don’t know why my parents were at Sainte’s Point that day. My father never went to the island. He didn’t like the Bonavendiers, and they didn’t like him. Everyone knew Lilith and her sisters always tried to lure Mother away from him. Lilith told the police he and my mother brought me there for a polite visit. That doesn’t make sense. Not just because of the storm. Not anytime.”

  “You’ve asked your cousin C.A. to tell you what he knows?”

  “C.A. accepts the police report: An accident caused by weather. He doesn’t deal well with Bonavendiers. He won’t talk about them if he can help it.”

  “You were so afraid that day. And so confused. I feel that memory.”

  “Something must have happened at Sainte’s Point—something that made my father so angry he’d put Mother and me on that sailboat and leave in the middle of a storm. He was an expert sailor. It makes no sense. The ocean was a roller
coaster. I remember Mother locking me in the cabin. She went up on deck to help Father. The yacht started to buck. I got tossed around. I screamed. I heard the sound of the mast snapping—two sharp cracks—and then the yacht capsized.”

  Ali stood up. “Two noises like gunshots.” Her face paled.

  “Yeah. The mast snapping. Then the yacht rolled. I remember being trapped upside down in the dark, and I remember the cabin filling with water as the yacht sank. When it hit the ocean floor, the hull broke in two. I got hurt pretty badly. I was drowning.”

  He stopped, breathing hard, and looked at Alice for a long time. She kept her eyes riveted to his, hypnotizing him with her concern, her ethereal face just as he’d imagined it as he floated after the explosion, redeeming the ocean with its sorrows, her gray-green eyes a window into the soul of the sea as he’d never imagined it—loving, and redemptive. “I remember being pulled out and carried to the surface by your sisters,” he said slowly.

  “My sisters?”

  “Before I met you, I always told myself it was impossible. No human beings could have survived in open water during that storm, diving without any scuba gear, without any help. But now I’m convinced they were there.” He paused. “They know more about my parents’ deaths than they’ve ever admitted. They’ve got something to hide.”

  Alice bowed her head. He watched her struggle with her arguments and doubts, and he struggled along with her. “I have to find out the truth, Ali. And you do, too. You don’t know them very well. You can’t be sure. You’re asking yourself if they’re capable of murder. You’re telling yourself they are.”

  “I have to go,” she said. Before he could stop her, she dived over the side. She surfaced a few feet away from the boat and looked up at him as if he’d broken her heart. “I have to be alone and think.”