Alice At Heart

by Deborah Smith

  No, a foreign voice whispered. She is dying for love of you all. Just like her mother. And just like Undiline.

  The sisters went very still. Pearl uttered a cry. She saw a look of frightened wonder come over Mara’s face. Without a word, they dived back into the water and swam for the Calm Meridian.

  Water. Smooth. Life. Flow.

  How do I find it?

  How will I know?

  When you love someone else more than yourself, that love makes you the person you ought to be, and you’ve found the flow of life. Alice had the answer now, but too late. She floated in and out of consciousness inside the mired bow of the Calm Meridian. She could taste her own blood in the dark water. Her head throbbed. She gagged, spit out the mercurial fluid, and drew on her lungs’ deep reserves of air. Dizzy and disoriented, she sang out weakly, then stopped herself. She would not draw Griffin and her sisters to a place that might endanger them, too.

  Moving lethargically, she dug along the sand at the base of the old hull, hoping to find a space like before. When that didn’t work, she felt along the rough interior walls and ribbing with her fingertips until she found the porthole. Alice stroked its thick, smooth glass, wishing she could see through the darkness into the open water of freedom. She flattened her hand on the glass for a moment.

  When she removed it, it left a ghostly negative of itself.

  Alice shut her eyes, waiting for the illusion to vanish. But when she looked again, the ethereal white hand was still there. Alice eased closer. The movement shot pains through her skull, even as wonder filled her. The hand remained, shimmering, the spread fingers merging in phosphorescent arcs, webbings of light.

  A pale, webbed hand.

  Now you believe, a voice whispered.

  Then the hand was gone.

  Alice made a dazed, prayerful gesture, steepling her fingers to her lips, bowing her head. The weight of the ocean seemed to compress her skull. Stars wandered in her vision, and her stomach convulsed. That internal night sky remained when she closed her eyes. She fought the pain in her temple as the darkness veiled her thoughts. I believe in mysteries and miracles. I believe in myself.

  That was her death knell, and she knew it. If she sank into unconsciousness again, she would forget to breathe. But she would never forget to love. Griffin. Lilith. Pearl. Even Mara. Sainte’s Point. My father, my mother. Melasine.

  How I love you all.

  24

  Almost all the stories of Water People are preposterous and insulting. They say we lure people into the sea and steal their souls. What a terrible stereotype. Our souls are in the water, not theirs.

  —Lilith

  “Take the wheel,” Griffin told C.A., as their speedboat skimmed the ocean’s surface beneath a spring sky turning gray with rainclouds. Griffin stripped off his shirt and kicked his shoes aside, then leapt to the boat’s bow. C.A. grabbed the wheel. “Anchor there,” Griffin said and pointed to the waters above the Calm Meridian. “I’ll go get her.”

  “What the—Griffin, you can’t go down to that wreck without help!” C.A. throttled back on the engine, and the speedboat began to slow. “You can’t—without scuba gear, wait—you can’t just dive down there—”

  Griffin turned for just a moment, looking back at C.A. quietly. “I think you know what I’m capable of. And so do I now.” He faced forward and dived straight down. His powerful, aquiline plunge left C.A. staring after him in wonder.

  The water closed around him. He left the light of the surface behind with a few deep strokes. For a moment, he panicked in the black depths, lost. Then the mysterious voice filled his mind with a pulse of sensation. Sing to the water. Listen with your heart. He sang out without a sound, channeling the strange vibrato and reeling inside as images echoed back to him. Suddenly, the ocean was a teeming, visible landscape of shapes. He felt the bow of the Calm Meridian below him and groaned when he realized it now rested farther down the steep slope of the Point Trench.

  What had Ali been hunting that was worth that risk? Why had she come here in secret and alone?

  He plunged downward, sweeping the ocean behind him as his body knifed into the cold darkness. He called out to Alice but heard nothing. When he reached the bow, he flattened both hands on its rough surface and explored swiftly. She’s inside somehow. She’s trapped inside. He pounded the rough surface until his hands were raw. Ali. Breathe.

  No answer.

  Griffin braced his bare feet on the treacherously angled slope, then levered himself against the bow and pushed downhill with all his strength. The bow shifted slightly but refused to topple. He got down on his knees and dug in the sand at its ragged base, then slid his upturned hands beneath the edge and tried to lift it. The bow shifted again, then settled heavily. He tried again, air bursting in bubbles from his lips and nose as he strained. She’ll die in there. Something’s wrong; she would be calling to me if she could. And he did something he’d never thought he would do. He filled the world with a deep, urgent song of need.

  Calling his mother’s kind— and his own.

  Calling Lilith and her sisters.

  Now you know who you are, the voice whispered.

  He lunged at the bow furiously, shoving, clawing, silently cursing it. I’m Ali’s kind, he yelled inside himself, I’m her kind, and she’s mine. Ali. Breathe.

  Suddenly, new hands were around him, touching him lightly on his bare shoulders and back. Griffin, we’re here.

  That was Lilith’s voice, and with her came Mara’s grim song and the frantic hum of Pearl, joining with the strong presence of a man whose name came to Griffin in a quick flash. Riyad. The five of them surrounded the bow. Push.

  This time it tilted, fell away, and Griffin plunged beneath it. He closed his hands around Ali’s shoulders and snatched her limp body into his arms. The bow of the Calm Meridian tumbled down the slope, lifting clouds of sand and silt into the water.

  Up, Lilith cried, and everyone pulled at Griffin, urging him away from the choking sediment. Griffin vaulted upward, kicking with his legs as he cradled Ali to his chest. He shielded her face with one hand.

  When he surfaced he saw Barret steering the Lorelei close to C.A. and the speedboat.

  “Take her to Barret,” Pearl called. “He can pull her out the easiest.”

  Griffin held Alice up to Barret’s strong clasp, and he lifted her aboard the ferryboat’s wide bow deck. Her head lolled, and blood quickly stained her face at the right temple.

  Griffin hoisted himself onto the deck. Lilith, Mara, and Pearl climbed aboard the Lorelei and huddled around Alice with their hands on her limp body.

  Pearl was crying, Mara looked troubled, but Lilith spoke with quiet conviction, “Teach her to breathe again, Griffin.”

  Alice’s simple black maillot hugged her breasts like a thin sheath, and Griffin saw no movement in her chest. He dropped to his knees beside her and laid his hand on her ribcage. He felt her slow heartbeat. Griffin hunched over her, sank his hands into her hair, tilted her head back, and covered her parted lips with his.

  Alice shivered, sighed into his mouth, and kissed him.

  Griffin drew back from her just enough to see her eyes open, wistful but alive, greener than usual, glowing. Victory and sorrow mingled in her. Griffin stroked the hair from her face, then cupped her head roughly in relief. “You could hear me,” he said hoarsely. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I believed I should go away.”

  “Why?” When she didn’t answer, he helped her sit up, then wrapped her in his arms, rocking her a little, cradling her head to his shoulder.

  Alice looked at her sisters, then shut her eyes and turned her face away from both them and Griffin.

  “Ali?” he insisted gruffly. “Just tell me.”

  Lilith moaned. “She feared what she’d found in the wreckage. She didn’t want the truth to hurt any of us. She was willing to risk her own life to protect us all.”

  Griffin took Alice by the chin and gently turned her face to
his. He smoothed a trickle of blood from her temple, then touched his fingertips to his mouth. A blood oath. Tell me.

  Griffin, I don’t know enough. Only pieces of the past.

  He looked at Lilith. “Whatever it is, I don’t want revenge anymore. If this is what it does to her—I don’t want her hurt.”

  C.A. spoke suddenly. He stood in the speedboat, staring at its diving platform. “Who put this here?”

  Everyone turned quickly to look at the platform. Near the waterline lay a rough thing, at first bewildering, a grayish form covered in barnacles and muck, an answer some unseen hand had brought up and placed before them.

  The gun.

  25

  It takes a brave Lander to love one of our kind.

  Member of the British royal family

  1898

  It has been the darkest of years on Sainte’s Point, Lilith wrote in her journal that autumn of 1967. Father’s suicide was still a raw wound, and young Joan Riley, devastated and emotionally ruined, had left under the grim auspices of her stern mountain family, borne a child, and died with that child. Pearl was bedridden, barely coping with grief over Father’s death and her third miscarriage.

  “No more babies,” Barret said, tears on his face. “It kills another part of her heart each time.”

  Mara had returned from New York for Father’s funeral only to have her husband and children die in the plane crash days later. She spent most of her time roaming the island’s wilds and the ocean beyond like a lost soul, keening in the wind and waves.

  Lilith settled in wearily as matriarch of the despairing family. Her own losses lay inside her like stones. She still sang sometimes, but the music was growing dimmer. She no longer spoke of Riyad or their dead son. She prayed as she swam every day, seeking to know why such a spiral of misery, a cycle of converging bad fortune or the mistakes of hubris, sheer fate or bad luck had taken over hers and her sisters’ lives.

  Does even God see us as outside the grace of nature and man? Lilith remembered a frightening story from her childhood, one she would never include in any book. A small cult of fanatical, self-hating Water People bitterly insisted that their kind had defied God’s natural laws and thus been condemned to the shadows between ocean and shore, outside the understanding of humans, never to be accepted in either the realms of earth or water.

  “We’ve been cursed since Undiline married Porter Randolph,” Mara claimed instead, with bitter pragmatism. Lilith feared Mara was right. Undiline’s marriage to Porter Randolph had caused nothing but misery for the Bonavendiers. Despite all of Undiline’s efforts to pass for an ordinary wife and mother, that autumn Porter discovered the truth about her and Griffin.

  It was the eve of the worst storm in decades, not quite a hurricane, yet aimed directly at their section of the Georgia coast. Heavy winds gathered and moved toward the land. Undiline had driven down from Savannah with Griffin the week before, taking one of their sojourns at the cottage at Bellemeade Bay. Porter disliked her visits to her Bonavendier relatives and rarely went to the cottage with her. He ordered her home the moment the storm began brewing in the Caribbean hundreds of miles southward, and she was due to drive herself and Griffin back up the coast that evening.

  “Still time for one last outing in the Sea Princess,” she told her husband over the phone.

  A Coast Guard cutter found the Sea Princess in choppy waters miles from shore but no sign of Undiline or Griffin. Since Undiline was an expert swimmer and could handle the small ketch like a seasoned sailor, Porter feared the worst. He flew into Bellemeade in a small private plane, then sped to the site of the Sea Princess in a fast motorboat. By then, the Coast Guard had abandoned the sailboat’s area to search for Undiline’s and Griffin’s bodies. The Sea Princess rocked like a cradle on the rough Atlantic.

  Porter anchored his motorboat and began yelling Undiline’s and Griffin’s names, knowing such calling was futile and pathetic, but he was helpless to do otherwise. To his amazement, both his wife and son suddenly surfaced. Undiline had taken Griffin on his first deep-water swim. She moaned when she realized they’d been discovered.

  “Porter, my darling,” she called out. “What are you—” The look on his face halted her. He stared incredulously at her and their son in the cold, rolling water. Wild dolphins surrounded them as playfully as pet cats. Both she and Griffin were naked despite the whipping wind and the chill. Neither shivered, though they’d been in the water for hours.

  Griffin smiled up at his father proudly. “I can swim like a fish, Father. Mother says it’s a secret, but she can, too. We went all the way to the bottom of the ocean. I can hold my breath forever.”

  Undiline saw the horror and revulsion on Porter’s face mingle with fear. She moaned again. What he’d discovered about her and their son was unexplainable. Impossible. Beyond the laws of nature. Inhuman. “My love, please, let’s talk,” Undiline hugged a bewildered Griffin to her in the water. Porter remained frozen in place, dazed. He said nothing and made no move at all.

  “Father, it’s all right. I really can swim like a fish,” Griffin called out again. “And I sing to the dolphins, and they sing back. I even know their names. Mother says they’re our family, too. Like the Bonavendiers. We’re Water People.”

  His father flinched.

  “Into the Princess,” Undiline whispered to Griffin. “Your father’s worried about us being gone so long, and we’ll talk to him later.”

  Griffin slid from her arms, dived innocently beneath the water, and reappeared with startling speed beside the nearby ketch. Several wild dolphins gathered around him like protective aunts. “See, Father?” he called again. “I’m a dolphin with legs.”

  His father stared down at him, ashen, then tracked Undiline’s equally swift swim to the ketch. She lifted Griffin to the deck, then climbed up naked after him. Quickly, she dressed him and herself in the white shorts and T-shirts they’d worn before swimming. Tears slid down her face, and she barely took her gaze from her stunned husband, who steadied himself like a sleepwalker in the well of his motorboat. “Porter, I’m taking Griffin to Sainte’s Point. Will you follow, please? Please, my darling. Do no’ look at us that way. We’re flesh and blood, not monsters. Come and talk to me. Come and try to understand.”

  “Stay away from me.” He cranked the speedboat’s engine, gunned it, and left them there.

  The storm drew closer. Rain whipped Sainte’s Point, pouring from the mansion’s slate roofs and turrets into pipes that fed a freshwater storage tank. The ocean surged over the beaches and cast white spray as high as the dunes. Even the sheltered cove beat against the island’s docks. Life-giving water was everywhere, and yet nothing could soothe Undiline. Porter had deserted her.

  “The bastard broke her heart,” Mara said. “I always knew he would. Randolphs are the antithesis of everything our kind represent. Undiline’s known their marriage was doomed all along. She hated hiding her true nature from him.” Mara clasped a locket to her soft white sweater. Her children’s pictures were inside. “She stayed with an unworthy husband for the sake of a child.”

  Didn’t you, as well? Lilith thought, but said nothing.

  “A child is love,” Pearl countered sadly. Then only twenty-seven, she looked like a red-haired teenager playing Ophelia in a school production of Hamlet. Her long hair streamed over a flowing white nightgown. Her face, pale and ethereal, mirrored her agony. “Anyone capable of love knows that pure love is a child.” Her face crumpled. “And when children die . . . when they die, all love dies with them.”

  “Back to bed,” Lilith ordered gently, and Barret, who had been watching with grim misery, carefully picked Pearl up and carried her from the parlor where they had gathered.

  “Say no more,” Lilith told Mara.

  “Nothing’s left worth arguing about,” Mara said dully. “Nothing’s left worth caring about.”

  Lilith went down a hall to the bedroom suite where Undiline paced and sobbed, a long silk robe trailing her, her shoul
der-length hair in matted streams around her swollen face. Griffin played in another part of the rain-swept, old mansion, distracted by adoring Tanglewoods who called him the Griffin.

  “Are we not meant to have husbands and children?” Undiline asked brokenly, as Lilith grasped her hands. “Is it beyond the hope of our kind to be a part of the greater world?”

  “If I say you should have fallen in love with a man made in the image of our own special God, what good does it do? That is no guarantee of happiness, as you can well see in the case of my sisters and me. We have to love whomever we love and accept the consequences. When the weather clears, I’ll go with you to Savannah. We’ll plead your case to Porter. This façade is over, my dear. Either he’ll accept your mysteries and make peace with the knowledge that there are far more unusual people in a world he thinks he knows so well, or he won’t.”

  Undiline bowed her head. “When Griffin was born, Porter ordered the doctor and nurses to tell no one about his webbed feet and to keep his wee toes covered in booties so no Randolph could see them either. I saw the humiliation in Porter’s face. He told me, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as a cleft palate or a clubfoot. It’s just a small deformity. I’ll get a good surgeon to fix him, not like the hack who sliced your feet when you were a baby.’” She groaned. “He thought my own parents had me ‘fixed’ as a child. Freed of a deformity, Lilith. And he clearly could no’ accept even the smallest ‘deformity’ in his son. That’s when I knew I could never tell him the rest about myself. Oh, but he’s such a fine man in other ways, and I love him so!”

  “Undiline, regardless of your love for him, you couldn’t go on hiding your true self from him. Or Griffin’s.”

  “Yes, yes, I could! I wanted my son to be one of his father’s kind, one of ‘Them.’ It’s so much easier that way. Just to be a full and plain human being.”

  Lilith grasped her hands hard, almost shaking her. “We see worlds they can never see. We travel where they can never go; we hear music they only wish they could hear. We are not less human, Undiline. We are more.”