Alice At Heart

by Deborah Smith

  Patience.

  Pearl clutched Barret’s hand and said tearfully, “We saved the only child we could that day.”

  Mara met my gaze with a troubled frown. “The only one we knew about. You do understand that we would have helped you, too?”

  I inclined my head. “I have no doubt you’d have terrorized all the Rileys and taken me.”

  Mara nodded. She drew a little closer to C.A., who had taken a position just behind her, close enough for her to lean back into his embrace, which she did. Her chopped hair fluttered around her face, and there was nothing vain or decorous about her at the moment. She seemed to have landed like a bedraggled butterfly inside C.A.’s arms, and he barely breathed.

  We make a special and beautiful kind of people, I thought, and suddenly I knew what to do. I knelt in front of Griffin and rested my hands atop the gun on his palms. I searched his eyes and saw the understanding there. The people who loved us then and love us now all want us to live in peace and joy.

  He nodded. We stood and walked to the bow of the boat.

  He held the gun up for a moment, then dropped it into the ocean.

  We watched it disappear.

  That night the house at Sainte’s Point mourned with renewed passion. Lilith and Riyad, Pearl and Barret, Mara and C.A., Griffin and me. I woke in the darkness of my suite and listened to the soft songs of redemption, forgiveness, poignant acceptance, and change. The pillow beside me was empty. I rose gingerly on one elbow.

  In the moonlight, I saw the open French doors to the private garden. Griffin leaned there, his somber face turned up to the moonlight. I slid from the big bed and went to him. He welcomed me within the curve of his arm, and we stood together in the moonlight, naked and close.

  “Now we learn how to forgive and forget,” he said.

  “Now we learn how to sing and remember,” I replied.

  He touched my face. We walked outside and through the forest, past the Bonavendier cemetery streaked in pale golden moonshine to the island’s bayside shore, where the marble dais glistened in the ethereal white light. We sat down beside it.

  “I have to forgive him,” he said finally. He let tears come then, and I leaned against him with one hand tucked inside his elbow and the other laid flat on the cool stone, alongside his.

  Sing to your man. Soothe him and be soothed, a soft voice whispered to me, growing fainter as it traveled out beyond the Point Trench, into the abyss, back into fantasy.

  I bowed my head. Yes, Melasine.

  27

  The more pragmatic among Water People insist that no finned ancestors ever existed and certainly don’t exist now, and that variations in our skills and physiology are mere vagaries, easily explained by random intermingling among our kind. I will not get into any wilder claims, here.

  —Lilith

  We sat in the sunroom with Lilith. I read from a book some Bonavendier, long having disappeared into another kind of sea, had written. “It is not necessary,” I recited, “to prove where we Water People began, or whether we owe our origins to beings as gossamer as Angels. No more than a grain of sand can comprehend the earth that birthed it, nor a single drop of water imagine its place in a summer cloud. It is simple enough to cherish the special shore we inhabit and to return the rain as a gift to the land. To celebrate the Belonging of both.”

  Griffin turned his somber gaze from Melasine’s portrait to me. “What would you think of marrying a pirate?”

  I closed the book, got up, took his face between my hands, bent down, and kissed him. “A privateer,” I corrected.

  Lilith smiled.

  Lilith stood on the beach of Sainte’s Point with her sisters, Mara, Pearl, and Alice. Bright, warm sunshine streamed over them, their pale silks rippled in the breeze, their bare feet were sunk into the sand. All gazed at the ocean. “Melasine is out there, somewhere,” Lilith said. “She and the other Old Ones. Their legacy to us is real. There is so much more to tell you about our kind, Alice.”

  Alice faced Lilith and the others. “I’m ready to listen, if you believe in me as much as I believe in you.” Her eyes glowed with tears, and she struggled to say more. Lilith felt every word. Apologies, devotion, regrets. Love.

  “Don’t make me cry,” Mara warned.

  “Hush, you sentimental shark,” Pearl ordered, sniffling.

  Lilith took Alice by the shoulders. “It’s this simple, my dear.” She paused. “Tell us your name.”

  Alice studied her face for a moment, then began to smile through the tears.

  “Ali Bonavendier,” she said.

  The Greeks and Romans were quite enamored with us, Lilith wrote. They filled their temples with shape-shifting water deities, lusty gods and goddesses of the sea, Nereid’s and nymphs. I’m rather fond of their view of our kind. Quite romantic.

  We sailed for several months, Griffin and I. We took the Sea Princess and went exploring down the southern slip of the planet, past palm islands and Latin coasts, across Caribbean inlets and old pirate coves. Days passed in which we spoke few words aloud but said volumes in our quiet language and through the merging of our bodies. A whole lifetime of healing can come in small moments of simple fulfillment, the whisper of a kiss on intimate skin, the promise in a loyal gaze.

  It was late summer when we returned to Sainte’s Point. Lilith and Riyad had gone exploring, too, at last word, somewhere in the Pacific. C.A. and Mara were in the Gulf of Mexico, sipping margaritas. Pearl and Barret had taken a slow boat to Europe. But we had all vowed to return for the autumn solstice, so I expected them soon. We were a family.

  Griffin and I walked the island in quiet contemplation, holding hands, making love in the coves, and sitting quietly beside the marble dais where his father and mother were buried. One day we went to Bellemeade to sip vodkas on the veranda of Water Lilies, looking over the bay. The same little girl who had greeted me when I arrived months earlier saw me and ran up the veranda steps with a gaze of wonder.

  “Oh, your hair is so pretty now,” she said and stroked the auburn locks which curled to my waist. She touched the slender silk sundress I wore and grinned at my bare, bejeweled feet. I wore the emerald ankle bracelet Lilith had given me in the mountains. I also wore a finely woven ankle bracelet of Griffin’s hair. On one of his ankles, hidden beneath his trousers, he wore a bracelet of mine.

  The little girl looked at my feet carefully. “Now, I’m sure you’re a mermaid.”

  I thought for a moment, then cupped my hands around her face. “So are you,” I assured her. “We all are, at heart.”

  She looked at Griffin with wide eyes, studying his bare feet. “Him, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Griffin touched his fingers in a water glass on our table, then smoothed the moisture on the child’s nose, admitting just a little bit of the magic our kind can endow. She smiled widely, a believer.

  After she left, Griffin held out a hand to me, and I took it. We sat there together contentedly, looking out over the bay with quiet wisdom and devotion, the sorrow of hard-earned faith, but much joy. The water called us to keep its secrets, to listen and know, to love and remember. To sing.

  And we answered.

  A Note From Lilith Bonavendier

  Dear Readers:

  Surely you want to believe in us now. Surely you know, deep in your hearts, that Water People have always existed alongside Land People (“Landers”), and that the veil between us is as soft as the sand of a shifting beach. Will you ever look at the great, mysterious oceans with the same casual reverence again? Examine the soft skin between your toes. Hold a deep breath inside the blue cloak of your swimming pool. Sing out to the goldfish in your aquarium. Now you understand. The world floats in a far more fluid reality than you ever imagined.

  We two peoples – Land and Water — must rise from the dark divisions and wild rumors of our past. I believe Melasine sent a message when she appeared in our midst out at the Point Trench on the day of Alice’s rescue. She called for mercy, and for unity.
I intend to promote those ideals by helping other outcast souls discover their true nature, as Alice did. By helping you, dear readers. Let me start by offering the following excerpt from one of the humble records I’ve kept of Water People legend and lore. I pray you will soon cherish the uncharted waters of our shared souls as much as I do.

  Let us begin the long voyage together.

  —Lilith

  The Legend Of Ta-Mera

  Excerpted From Fables of the Water People

  In some ancient time of great honor and noble deeds, some millenium thousands of years before our own, Once Upon A Time, as they say in fairy tales, Melasine and the other Old Ones, male and female, ruled a great empire of extraordinary beings such as themselves, wholly human but also wholly aquatic.

  Whether this mythical empire existed in the blue waters of the Aegean, as is usually coined by fervent fans of the Atlantis legends, or in some totally unconsidered ocean realm, is unknown. Certain scientists among our kind have quietly removed incredible statues of the Old Ones from sunken ports in every ancient coastal city of the world.

  Their findings suggest an amazing civilization existed long before the first Greeks erected temples to sea gods and goddesses. It is quite likely the fabulous worlds of Melasine and her kind had been in ruins for millennia when Neptune began paddling around Grecian male fantasies with his nubile nymphs and phallic trident.

  Water is life, water is love, water is the womb. All the great religions believe so. Water People say the earth formed as an afterthought inside the glorious depths of great seas, hardening like the dull, dry pit of a luscious fruit. At the risk of insulting those Water People who believe Landers cannot possibly share our legacy, I must point out that if the sea is the mother of us all, then we must all be, at heart, both Water People and Land People. Do not all children float first in the womb as female beings? Thus all men begin in fluid, as women. Similarly, all Landers began as Water People. And all Water People began as the Old Ones.

  Mermaids.

  I rarely use that cartoonish term, but it does prove convenient for first impressions. Whether fact or fancy, the portrait of Melasine at Sainte’s Point indicates she is far more surreal and complex than a simple, popular name can surmise. I have no doubt she exists—an ancient, ageless, female being, isolated and reclusive, lonely and yet seductive.

  My own grandmother, Deirdre Bonavendier, told me about meeting Melasine and learning, directly from her, the Water People’s mythological Ta-Mera legend. Deirdre was born in the mid-1800s, not many years after the passing of her grandfather, Simon Sainte Bonavendier, that heroic French Lander who captured Melasine’s heart.

  I must point out that Grandmother Deirdre was the granddaughter of a fully vested “mermaid” and the daughter of a Halfling father who deserted his family. Her life was also shaped by the bittersweet mourning of her lovesick Lander mother (no one should fall in love with a first-generation Halfling—it is useless.)

  “Melasine had long since disappeared from her family’s circle by then,” Grandmother Deirdre said. “She was not a doting grandmother in the traditional sense.”

  Indeed, neither Melasine nor her children were destined to stay at Sainte’s Point. The three Halflings Melasine and Simon birthed together during the late 1700s and early 1800s eventually left to roam the abyss. By nature they were loners, like their mother. (Dear Readers: Please see my addendum about genealogical clans for more information on volatile first-generation Halflings.)

  No doubt Grandmother Deirdre was privy to rather unsettling accounts of her Halfling father’s unusual physical appearance and abilities, as well as enduring a heartsick Lander mother who never recovered from being deserted. I urge you to keep all of her background in mind. I suspect Grandmother Deirdre sought to soften it through her storytelling.

  At any rate, Grandmother Deirdre insisted that as a child (during the Civil War) she met her Grandmother Melasine while attempting to lure a Union gunship into the shallows near Bellemeade Bay. The encounter occurred more than ten years after her Grandfather Simon’s death (he had lived to a manfully gracious Lander age of ninety.)

  “Grandmother Melasine saved me from being captured by the Union navy,” Grandmother Deirdre told me. “I was about to be fired upon in the water when suddenly someone whisked me down deep and held me safely. I turned in those strange arms and gaped. I recognized Grandmother Melasine from her portrait as well as by sheer instinct, of course. Her skin glowed pale white, like the finest creamy silk, and her golden hair floated in trails as long as her body, swirling around her from head to fins. She was terrifying and beautiful; I settled with her on the bay’s bottom and couldn’t move or look away. She stroked my face with her long, webbed hands and sang to me without words. She was crying, still grieving for Grandpapa, though she had always known that he would grow old and die. ‘Such is the curse of my kind when we love Landers,’ she sang to me. ‘But it was not always so.’

  ‘Please tell me your story, Grandmama,’ I sang back.

  ‘Yes, brave child, I will give you that gift,’ she answered.

  “And so Grandmother Melasine shared her memories with me. I saw an ancient alabaster city beneath the bluest water. I saw visions of all that Grandmother Melasine had known and been many centuries before she gave her heart to Grandpapa. And that is how I know that Ta-Mera really existed.”

  Here is what my grandmother, and her grandmother—a mermaid—said about the beginning of our kind. And yours.

  When Melasine and the others like her — both male and female – were young, they called themselves Tamerians, after their greatest city. The Tamerians openly ruled the coasts of the ancient world, creating amazing palaces in the waters, traveling across land via rivers and inlets and fantastically engineered channels which connected the great seas and freshwater lakes. Landers—pathetic, two-legged, short-lived humans—were deemed inferior and treated as servants or were driven to the wild interiors of the continents, where their shuffling, land-trapped ways could be ignored by the elegant and handsomely finned Tamerians.

  Ta-Mera was built more in the water than on the land, with submerged temples and fluid passageways, fine promontories of marble for sunning in the warm air, and broad canals of the most beautiful stonework, allowing Melasine and her kind to travel throughout their empire without ever leaving the water. (Dear Readers: You might want to look for an article from the magazine Strange Science, circa May of 1997, titled “The Mysterious Lost Alleys of the Ancient Coasts.” It’s inaccurate but fascinating, especially to those of us who know why those “alleys” truly existed.) The Tamerians were a far older race than the plodding Landers. They considered themselves a far more brilliant kind, far more talented, far more evolved.

  There is always a “pride goeth before the fall” theme in mythology, and the Ta-Mera story may be just such an instructional tale: Perhaps the Tamerians abused their hold over the Landers, treating them as a lesser tributary of the familial sea, and the Landers finally rebelled. Or the Tamerians worshiped inconstant gods who smote them for frivolous injustices. Or they were doomed by the ordinary afflictions of both Land and Water Kind—greed, envy, lust, and jealousy.

  Whatever the curse that descended upon them, it inspired all the great fables of the world since. Is it not true that in the storytelling traditions of every major culture we find tales of unthinkable disasters, which cleansed the world and restored order? Of course, among Water People these tales have a certain irony. For example, in our version of Noah’s Ark, the world was destroyed by a great drought.

  Be that as it may. Some terrible cataclysm abruptly destroyed Ta-Mera and the vast empire it anchored, along with all the Landers—except three young men — and the Tamerians — except Melasine and two others—young mermaids named Acarinth and Leirdrela.

  In some accounts the three surviving Landers are described by Water People as barbaric and low (typical Landers, some insist) and are assigned names commiserate with such an unpleasant portrayal. A web-foote
d priest writing in fourteenth century England named the Landers Gumaldin, Fray Daval, and Altenhop—names from the classic storytellers’ lexicon of bumbling demons and clownish villains.

  Even modern Water People coax their children to sleep with disparaging comic tales about the three Landers. In many bedtime stories the trio become drooling lechers named Squat, Frag, and Goop, and children are assured that our finned foremothers nobly consorted with them only for purposes of repopulating the ocean with Water People.

  Most Water People, however, prefer a more romantic and sympathetic image of the three legendary Landers — who are, after all, our mythological ancestors. They call the threesome by handsome names that were assigned to them in a classic eighteenth century narrative written by a Bonavendier relative, the infamous Victorian singer and poetess Emilene Merrimac Revere, of Boston, Massachusetts. To quote a verse:

  Stalwart and true, by Ta-Mera’s princesses enslaved

  Devoted lovers, bound to earth yet fulfilled in water,

  We shall whisper their mortal names on shores kissed by eternal tides,

  And forget them not in fluid rhyme:

  Beckrith, Padrian, and Salasime.

  Beckrith, Padrian, and Salasime. The mates of the three Tamerians and the mythological founding fathers of all Water People. They were pureblooded, two-legged, ordinary Landers. After the great cataclysm nothing was left of either Land People or Water People except those three gentlemen and our three ladies. A classic dilemma.

  Even if you were the only man left on Earth . . .

  Melasine, Acarinth, and Leirdrela fell in love with the men. The Tamerians were not yet creatures of determined solitude. That came later, during centuries of loneliness and loss. But after many years their devoted Landers died, and also their Halfling children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – all mortal.