Lies Beneath

by Anne Greenwood Brown

  Hatred boiled black and molten in my heart. I chewed the ropes, getting a mouthful of sand. I ground the grains between my teeth, creating white-hot sparks that snapped on my tongue.

  “You were never his,” Tallulah said. “Never. But now you are MINE.”

  With that last word, my mind exploded with fury. A blue flash of electricity shot from my eyes and my heart. The sheer energy of my revolt raced down my arms to my fingertips, slashing through the ropes that bound my wrists, and shredding the net into a thousand pieces that shot, blazing, across the sky.

  I didn’t know whether I was swimming or flying. Water trilled like piano keys as it streamed past my ears. The smoldering tatters of my prison fell back to earth. Fish scattered.

  And then there was blood.

  Far in the distance, Maris’s laughter faded to an eerie thin note. Tallulah shut her eyes. And Lily was no more.

  39

  SILVER RING

  I’d never known Tallulah to break the skin, but this was not the Tallulah I knew. The image of Lily’s broken body fueled my rage and pushed me faster. I would kill my sister. Tallulah would know my pain. I bent my body toward the surface, the metallic scent of blood flooding my senses, and prepared myself for what I would see. But I had made all the wrong assumptions.

  High atop the cliff, Jack Pettit stood at the rocky edge, the scope of a hunting rifle pressed to his eye. He pointed the barrel at Tallulah, whose lifeless arms floated an inch below the surface. Her silver tail hung low while a dark red line spiraled out of her body, then dissipated in the churning water. Tallulah’s blood filtered through the water, across my lips, coppery on my tongue: her macabre parting kiss.

  My shoulders tensed and my muscles hummed with adrenaline. I suddenly couldn’t remember if Tallulah was to be hated or mourned. Despite everything, I felt only pity and wondered if Maris had encouraged Lulah’s misguided affections for me, used them, like any other tool in her box of manipulations. I could not abandon my sister’s body to the carrion birds. Or worse, to Jack Pettit. Most importantly, I could not allow Tallulah’s body to be discovered.

  Jack lowered the rifle, and his eyes locked on mine. “All mermaids ever do is hurt people,” he shouted. “Not anymore.” Then he raised the rifle again, centering me in his scope.

  Before he pulled the trigger, another voice yelled, “Stop!” and Jason Hancock collided with Jack’s shoulder. There was a grunt and a clatter as the rifle slipped from Jack’s fingers, hit the rock, and fell into the lake. Jack ran away before the splash.

  Hancock and I spotted Lily at the same time. Waves had pushed her against the face of the cliff—arms splayed wide, palms pressed back against the precipice. Her heart slogged out a lazy rhythm I could feel in the water. Her pale face tipped back against the onslaught of waves, like a battered water lily. “D-don’t,” she said.

  Hancock swayed, and his legs trembled. He bent his knees in preparation for a jump his mind could not force his body to make.

  “Jason!” I called up to him. “I’ve got her.”

  Why I said it, I will never know. If I thought my words would be reassuring, I was wrong. I’d forgotten how different I was—that I was not human, that my presence would not provide him comfort.

  When Hancock saw my tail twitching and slapping at the waves, he yelled, “Stay away from my daughter!” and searched reflexively for the spot where the gun had gone in.

  I held up my hands, palms out. “I won’t hurt her. I would never hurt her.”

  “She’s gone!” he cried. “Oh, Christ, she’s gone!”

  I dove.

  And I dove.

  Down.

  Deep.

  Lily hung in suspended animation, her arms extended softly in front of her. The last blip of air—a thin line of bubbles—trailed from her nose to the surface. The lake was as silent as a grave.

  Fifty feet separated us. It would take mere seconds to reach her. My fingers tingled with a new flow of electricity as I prepared to reach out and reinvigorate her, not really knowing if it would work. Another part of me wondered if it was better to let her die. Was a martyr’s death really so much worse than the life of a mermaid? Was it selfish of me to save her? Could I condemn her to the life I hated, and could she still love me once the damage was done?

  All these questions melded together until they were a jumbled patchwork of hopes and fears. I reached for her, closing the last few feet. My fingertips charged with a brilliant blue light.

  There was a splash from above: Jason Hancock, submerged for the first time in his life, swimming with powerful, purposeful strokes to save his dying daughter. The man had no tail, but it was only a matter of time. I’d witnessed thousands of transformations, and I knew the signs. A silver ring already shimmered around Hancock’s throat, and his eyes glowed with an unnatural fire. He showed no awareness of his impending change. Only I bore witness.

  My confusion caught me up short, if only for a second. Just enough time for a stone to skip across the surface. Really no time at all. But in my hesitation, two arms wrapped around Lily’s chest and pulled her to safety.

  And they weren’t mine.

  40

  NIGHTMARES

  Lily’s lips parted silently, and her head dropped backward over someone’s arm. With the jerk of her head, I woke from the dream, gasping beneath a canopy of trees, calling “Lily!” I tried to pretend it was only a dream, but I’d never felt such an all-consuming rage. I’d been shunned, set up, betrayed, and now left alone to die, brokenhearted. I begged anyone, anything who would listen, to rewind time, to put things back the way they were before. I’d do anything.

  But who was I kidding? There was no response, and I sank deeper.

  It had been twelve hours since Hancock pulled Lily from the water. Twelve hours since I’d witnessed his glowing eyes and the silver ring around his throat. Eleven hours since I’d reasoned out the truth. Tom Hancock hadn’t promised to sacrifice his son in exchange for his own life. He’d promised to return Mother’s son—their son—to her at the end of his first year.

  Jason Hancock was my brother. It explained his yearning to return to the lake all these years. It explained his inability to break his promise to his father. It answered everything except why Mother had allowed us to grow up with a lie. What did she think we would do? She couldn’t have wanted us to kill her son. But Maris … Maris should have known the truth. These questions would have to wait for later. My mind was too tired, my heart too sick to think it through.

  I was now lying in the thickest part of the forest, covered in a blanket of wet and decomposing leaves, preserving myself from the heat of the sun. I breathed in the smell of last year’s rot and let the little gray beetles climb over my body.

  This was my penance for being such a worthless hero. There was no point to any of it. Why couldn’t Tallulah have just talked to me? Told me how she felt? I could have made her see reason. It didn’t have to end this way.

  Each time I closed my eyes, the dreams returned: Hancock plunging into the water. Hancock pulling Lily from my fingertips. Hancock pumping her chest and blowing saving air into her lungs.

  I heard myself pleading from the water, “Please, Lily, Please.” I measured each heavy second, counted along with Hancock as he pushed blood around her body, exhaled with him as he blew oxygen into her wasted lungs.

  The sound of Lily coughing and sputtering against her father’s knee was the only reprieve from this nightmare, but it plunged me into the next:

  Me, dragging Tallulah into the depths of the lake, searching for a place to hide her body, digging a hole under a sunken pallet. Me, wedging her into the chasm and repositioning the pallet over her, closing my eyes to the shameful burial. Me, tucking in her arm, which—even in death—reached for me. Me, squeezing her hand before letting her fingers slip away.

  Then Lily’s head jerked back, and I was awake again, gasping—Lily! This continued for three days. Hour sixty-one. A new record.

  From the cool
shadows of the forest, I watched her bedroom window. There was no movement. No flip of the lights. No brushing against the curtains. I wanted to go to town to see if there was any talk. I doubted Hancock would have told anyone the truth, but even a lie would be worth knowing.

  But I couldn’t have made it to town even if I’d tried. My body grew weaker with each minute of my self-imposed exile from the water. My skin pulled tight across my cheeks. My tendons thinned and turned brittle. My muscles cramped and sent stabbing pain from my thighs to my toes.

  Defeated, all I could do was watch from the trees. I whispered Tennyson through cracked lips. When my skin split in long, thin lines across my cheeks and shoulder blades, I wondered how long it would take to completely mummify, and as my body dried, my mind slipped into hallucinations.

  At first I thought the trees were watching me—or at least, one thin, pale birch, which leaned forward with the breeze as if getting ready to speak, or wanting to speak but wondering if it should. A glimmer of reason reminded me that birch trees didn’t talk—even in my nightmares. I pushed myself to allow my mind to clear and my eyes to focus, but in retrospect, I should have left my hallucination alone. It didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t a talking tree. The thin, pale figure was Maris. And she was coming closer.

  “Stay away from me,” I croaked through my cracking larynx.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Maris said. “Obviously Tallulah wasn’t going to keep you in the net forever. Where is she?” She scanned the woods. “Why are you out here?”

  I narrowed my eyes. She didn’t know? Of course she didn’t. Tallulah hadn’t seen the danger at the top of the cliff. She hadn’t seen Jack Pettit pull the trigger. Tallulah hadn’t had time to alert Maris or even project her own fear or pain. The secret was mine to bear alone. For better or worse.

  “You need serious help, Maris.” My voice was like chalk.

  She picked at the bark on a tree, and the corners of her mouth twitched into a sad kind of acknowledgment. “I assumed you and Lulah would be riding off into the sunset by now,” she said.

  “I won’t be riding off into any sunsets with Tallulah. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

  She rolled her lips inward and nodded knowingly. “I guess that’s why I’m here. Isn’t there something you want to ask me?”

  “Me?” I coughed.

  “Yes, you. We struck a bargain. The deal is complete. I assume you want to collect on my promise.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Our bargain …?”

  “Okay. I get it if you want me to say this out loud. Will that make up for the lump on your head?” She almost sounded sorry. “We asked you to seduce the girl. I admit you accomplished the seduction, although”—she nudged my shoulder with her foot and appraised me—“you’re not much to look at now. But I digress. We asked you to get Hancock out on the water so we could take him down.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, although I wasn’t sure what.

  She leaned one hand against a tree. “Yes, yes, I know, it ended up being a different Hancock, but it’s not your fault Tallulah changed my mind. As I think Pavati told you, one dead Hancock satisfies the debt as well as any.”

  I stared at her, afraid to blink. It was too good to be true. Was Maris really unaware Lily had been rescued? Had my own thoughts been so addled she hadn’t seen any of it? Or—I dared not think it—did she know something I didn’t? Had Lily not survived after all? Surreptitiously I glanced at the dark house, the darker window.

  Maris didn’t notice. “Damn it, Calder. You know I don’t have any choice in this. A promise is a promise.” She sighed. “Although I don’t see what good your independence will do you. I’ve never known a loner who survived for long, and if you keep up this landlocked melodrama, you won’t have much time left. Still, it’s not my place to judge.”

  She shredded a sheet of birch bark in her fingers, then dropped it like confetti onto the ground. “You made good on your end. I’ll make good on mine. From this point on, you get your wish.” She locked her eyes on mine and said, “We are no longer family.”

  With her words, I felt the click in my mind—as easy as flipping a switch—the breaking of the cord that bound me to the family White. I wondered how she did it. There was barely a flinch of her shoulders. But she wasn’t ready to leave me yet.

  “She was just a girl, Calder.” Maris looked down at me with a combination of irritation, pity, and incomprehension.

  “The truth,” I said.

  She chewed on the insides of her mouth and debated her words. “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “About me. Hancock. The whole story. I want to know the truth before I die.” I did my best to glare at her, though my eyes creaked in their sockets.

  She crouched beside me, her skin still glistening with water droplets. She snaked a wet fingertip down my arm, leaving a trail of temporary relief.

  “Why the lies, Maris?”

  “Hancock confessed?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Tom Hancock promised to give the baby back to Mother as soon as he was walking. He broke that promise.”

  “How is that Jason Hancock’s fault?”

  “He grew up, didn’t he?” she snapped, her eyes flashing. “Years passed, Calder. Decades. He could have come home at any time. He had to feel the pull. He had to know where he belonged.”

  “He did.”

  Maris looked smug. “Of course he did. You have no idea what it was like to watch Mother die. Slowly. Slipping away from us every day. I was twelve. Pavati, Tallulah, you—you were all too young to understand. I shouldered this. Me. On my own.”

  “Mother died in the nets,” I reminded her. “I saw it.”

  “She died of a broken heart. It was no accident.”

  “But I saw.”

  “You saw the memory I planted there for you, Calder. For all of you. She hoped, by making you, she could replace the son she lost.”

  “She was wrong,” I said, barely a whisper. Every inadequacy I’d ever felt multiplied in that second. I hadn’t saved Lily. I hadn’t saved Tallulah. I hadn’t been enough to save my mother. I stared up at the night sky, flat and matte without any stars. “But why kill Jason Hancock?” I asked. “He was your brother. Even more than me.”

  Maris chuckled.

  I used every bit of strength I had to roll over and look at her more closely. “What was my part in this, Maris?”

  She drew her fingernail across the palm of my hand, slicing it like a scalpel. The brittle skin split neatly in a hairline of red that thickened and filled every crevice. “Neither the truth nor the lie really matters,” she said. “Brother or not, Hancock is the reason Mother is dead. He needed to pay. I wanted you to feel useful. I hoped helping us execute his murder would draw you closer to us.

  “Then, when we discovered you’d fallen for the girl, Tallulah suggested it was a family debt and any member could pay it. The girl’s suicide would torture Hancock more than his own murder ever could. Let him feel the loss of a child—just like Mother did. And it had the bonus of getting the girl out of the way so you and Tallulah could …”

  Maris turned and looked at the lake in confusion. The night breeze dried the ends of her hair. When she looked back at me, she clicked her tongue as the blood from my hand seeped into the wet leaves and stained the tips of her toes. “Pavati was harder for Tallulah to convince than I was.… I don’t understand. Where is she? We can’t hear Tallulah anywhere. What did you say to her?”

  I closed my eyes. Despite the deceit and treachery, the loss of Tallulah still gnawed at my heart. Until recently, she had been my closest confidante, my dearest friend. The memory of her lifeless body was too raw for me to lie to Maris with any confidence. But I need not have worried. When I opened my eyes again, Maris was gone. No goodbye. No love lost there.

  41

  THE MERMAN

  I would kiss them often under the sea,

  And kiss them again till they kiss’
d me

  Laughingly, laughingly;

  And then we would wander away, away

  To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high,

  Chasing each other merrily.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  I crept out of the woods. Not because I was suddenly brave, but because I could be a self-pitying idiot for only so long without disgusting myself. And Lily deserved better.

  The motion detectors on the floodlights were disabled; the lights were left on permanently now, illuminating the water. I crept down to the Hancock dock, dragging myself when I couldn’t stand, and lay prone at the end. Raking my fingers through the ripples, I yanked them back before the temptation grew impossible to resist. I wasn’t ready yet.

  I didn’t doubt that my thoughts were safely my own. I didn’t doubt that I could hide Tallulah’s fate from Maris and Pavati. The radio frequencies of our minds were no longer the same. I could feel it, even on land. There was no one in my head but me.

  But I couldn’t leave without knowing what had become of Lily. The house behind me was just as dark, just as quiet as before. My mind reached back to my last night in the hammock, Lily tracing my chest with a light touch, her calling my name.

  “Calder,” she whispered.

  I smiled to myself. My body might be withering, but my imagination was as sharp as ever. Her voice was as clear as if she were right behind me.

  “Calder, are you out there?”

  I jerked around. There was a light in Lily’s room and her familiar shape leaned through the open window.

  “Lily.” I staggered to my feet and limped up the dock to the house, my legs stiff, not responding as they should. “I’m here.”

  Exhaling, I released the tension caused by our separation, not really feeling its intensity until I began to let it go, bit by bit. “Are you okay?” I asked the question, dreading the answer.

  “Better. Were you worried? You look worried.”