The bar was about eighteen inches long and had spikes on one end. I couldn’t imagine where she’d gotten it.
She took the spiked bar from me, her lips curled back over her teeth in a way I’d never seen a human do. There was something wolfish about it. And something of a lioness defending her cubs.
She raised her arm high and brought the bar down hard on the gremhahn. The harsh thwack of the blow made me wince.
“I,” she said calmly, bringing the steel bar down.
“Want.” Mother hit him again.
“My.” Another blow.
“Son,” she screamed, and hit him so hard I didn’t know if the goblin could survive it. A red stain spread along the side of the burlap bag.
“Stop. Stop,” he cried, “and I will do what you ask.”
A gremhahn, I had read, was a sneaky creature, prone to lies, but Mother had pronounced the binding spell. He had to speak the truth.
“Let him out,” I said softly, putting my hand gently on her shoulder. “It’ll be all right. He can’t lie to us. Let him out.”
Mother stood back, breathing hard, her hands on her hips, the steel bar held tightly in her right hand. She nodded her head, and I undid the rope around his feet and then the rope around his chest and arms. He sloughed the sack off like a disgusting skin. Blood seeped down his arms from the blows Mother had dealt him.
“Give me back my son,” Mother said again, her voice as hard and unbending as the steel pipe.
“Your boy is right here,” he said, much too lightly for my comfort, and reached into one of the large, loose pockets of his trousers. He pulled out a seashell that was white and bumpy on the outside, with long white spines protruding here and there, the inside smooth as oil and apple-blossom pink.
Murex ramosus. I knew it because we’d had a course on the sea and seashells my junior year in High School. I knew, too, that it didn’t belong around here. It was a South Seas shell, not one for the California coast.
Mother looked at the shell a moment, her mouth hanging open, her breath coming fast and hard. Then she hit him again on the side of the head with her fist.
“What lie is this?” she demanded, even though a bound sea goblin had to tell the truth. Did the binding spell not work? Had she gotten the words wrong?
“No lie,” he said, rubbing the spot where she’d hit him with his free hand. “Call him if you don’t believe me.”
Mother gritted her teeth and let no words pass them.
“Jimmy,” I said. “Are you there?”
A small voice came out of the shell. “Here, Cassie. I’m in a little pink room and I can’t get out.”
Mother sucked in a deep, shocked breath, then hit the gremhahn with her fist again and said, “Return him to where he belongs. Return him right this second or I will beat you with the steel bar until you are nothing but little pieces and I will feed those pieces to the seagulls.”
The goblin bowed low, and then straightened. “As you command,” he said, and cocked back his arm and threw the shell into the ocean with all his might.
I watched the shell arc through the air, flying over the sand and past the foaming waves to drop into deep water.
“What have you done?” Mother screamed, and grabbed the gremhahn, shaking him so that his head bobbled back and forth.
“What you bade me do, Madam,” he managed to say. “Returned the shell to where it belongs.”
Mother drew her hand back to hit him again, but the sea goblin twisted away and scrambled free.
And began to grow.
Taller and wider he grew, until he was much too big for Mother to hit or control in any way. He looked down on us from his great height.
I could see his anger before he even spoke—the clenched fists, the bulging eyes. When he did speak, his voice was like rusty pieces of metal scraping one against the other.
“You, Madam,” he said, “will never see your son again.”
He looked down at me. “But you might, little one. And, oh! I have some special things for you.”
“No,” Mother cried out. “You’ve taken my son. Don’t curse my daughter as well.”
“The boy is mine,” the gremhahn said. “I will do what I will with him. The girl is yours, but I am not cruel. I will give her a gift: one tiny star shall light in her hair for every month she lives from this day forward. A tiny star to remind her of the day she was cruel herself, and her mother more cruel to this poor gremhahn who wanted only what was his by rights.”
He turned and bolted toward the sea, his form growing smaller and changing with each step until he was more fish than man, running on his tail fin. He reached the water’s edge and turned back to us, calling out, “I nearly forgot. Girl, you shall never know marriage or motherhood. Why? Because if you should ever know a man, the moment he enters you, you will dry up and become dust.”
The sea goblin was all fish now, a grayish-brown color, the scales dry but somehow glittering even though it had become night and the light on the beach was dim and watery. An ugly, ugly fish standing on its fins as if they were feet, its wet, glassy eyes staring at Mother and me, the two of us staring back, my heart pounding in my chest.
He leapt into the sea and was gone.
Seven
Hermosa Beach, California
September 1923
I started my senior year not at my regular school in Los Angeles but at the high school in Redondo Beach, the next town over, since Hermosa didn’t have one of its own. My old school had shut down during the Spanish flu while the school at the beach hadn’t. As a consequence, I was older than everyone else. Some people said I was older because I was stupid and was held back. My grades put shut to that story in a hurry. There was a funny rumor that I was even older than I looked, that I was the film star Bessie Love, doing research for a new movie. People often said I resembled her. It was the hair, I thought—long and wavy. Except these days I mostly wore it pinned in a bun or tucked under a hat, to hide the two stars that gleamed there.
Thanks to Mr. Moses Sherman—who’d developed the Red Car trolleys that ran absolutely everywhere—five days a week, my arms laden with books and a sack lunch I made for myself, I was able to ride to school and back rather than walk. I didn’t know very many of my fellow students, and that was good, because I sped straight home every day and didn’t want anyone inviting me to their house. It simply wasn’t possible. I couldn’t leave Mother home alone all afternoon and into the evening, and how could I explain to a friend wanting to come to my house that ever since the gremhahn had cast my brother into the sea, my mother mostly stared out at the ocean. That even as she cooked dinner, her eyes would stray away, her mind far from where she stood. That my father had left us. That he only occasionally stopped by to bring us some money and ask how we were doing, then left again. That I worried about them both. That they’d each grown gaunt and seemed much older than they had at the beginning of summer. I went to school and studied hard and worried about Mother. Life had narrowed down to that.
*
The day was wet and blustery for November. Mother didn’t seem to notice the drizzle or the wind. She stood on the porch in front of our house, staring out to sea, no different this day than any other in the months since the goblin had thrown Jimmy’s shell into the ocean. Except that autumn had come, and rain with it, but Mother didn’t pay it any more attention than she did much of anything these days. Throughout the waning days of summer, beachgoers had occasionally given her looks as they passed by, Mother standing still as a statue or sitting just as still in one of the two wicker chairs I’d put on the porch for her. I sighed and got her coat from the closet and took it to her.
“Thank you, Cassie,” she said as she slipped it on.
“What do you expect to see out here?” I asked, finally broaching the question that had rattled in my head for a while, though I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
She turned her head slowly to look at me. “Your brother, of course. He’s a clever boy. He’ll
escape the kidnappers and come home to us any day now. I want to be here, waiting for him when he arrives.”
This wasn’t the answer I’d expected. Looking for the gremhahn, looking for another chance to make him give Jimmy back—that’s what I’d thought had been consuming her these past months, eating her up inside, devouring her mind. Molly had died while we’d been on our quest, and that had devastated Mother as well. Neither of us had ever properly grieved her death, and I think that ate at Mother, too. I knew it ate at me, a second hole burning next to the one reserved for Jimmy. There was a hole where Father had been as well, but at least he was still alive and well.
“You know Jimmy is in the shell, and the shell is in the ocean,” I said softly.
She blinked and gave her head a small, fast shake. “What are you talking about? What shell?”
“Nothing.” The rain started falling in earnest. “Why don’t you come inside now? We’ll leave the front door unlocked. Jimmy can come right in when he gets back.”
She shook her head again, meaning No this time.
“It’s not right, Cassie. Jimmy will have worked hard to escape and return. He shouldn’t come home to find us drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen as though everything were fine. He needs to know we’ve been waiting.”
“I’ll bring an umbrella, then,” I said, and went back to fetch it. Out front again, I opened it and handed it to her. She took it and held it over her head.
“Go inside,” she said. “No point both of us standing out here.”
Later, when I looked out the window, Mother had let the umbrella fall to her side and stood in the rain, her sopping dress clinging to her skin, staring at the sea.
*
“Papa,” I said tentatively, holding the handset of the phone in my hand as though it were made of spun sugar and might disintegrate at any moment, “I’m worried about Mother. She has a terrible cough and feels weak, but she won’t let the doctor come.”
There was a long bit of silence on the line before Father spoke.
“Why?” he said. I hadn’t heard his voice in a while and his calm, never-ruffled physician tone felt soothing in my ear.
“She says she doesn’t trust doctors anymore. That they are evil in disguise.” A thought struck me. “Not all doctors. Not you. Just the local ones here at the beach.”
Another silence, this one longer. “No. Why did you call me about this?”
It was my turn to go silent, to realize what I heard in his voice wasn’t really calm—it was detachment.
“You’re a doctor and her husband,” I said, matching his demeanor. “She’ll see you. She’ll listen to you. I’m very worried. You must come.”
Father’s long sigh was audible over the crackling line. “All right. Tomorrow evening.”
“Not sooner?”
“Tomorrow evening,” he said again. “I can’t come tonight.”
“All right. Thank you,” I said and hung up, only partially relieved. I put on the kettle for tea, hoping the hot liquid and steam might relieve some of Mother’s congestion.
*
Father didn’t appear until a little after eight the following night. He looked the same, but not the same—tighter-wound, as if he hadn’t laughed in years. I wanted to put my arms around him, but this Father was not the same one who’d bounced me on his knee when I was a child, not the one who’d driven me to school every morning for years, private time for just the two of us to talk or sometimes sing silly songs. This was not a father I could hug or ask about his obvious unhappiness. This was Dr. Goodlight attending a not-favorite patient.
Mother had again insisted on sitting on the porch all day, but she’d let me bundle her in blankets and would drink the hot tea I brought her every hour. She was in bed under a white goose-down comforter when Father arrived. He strode toward her room, his bag in hand, that “professional” look on his face where I had hoped for some kindness and care.
“Good God, Audrey,” he said when he opened the room door and saw her lying there, this once-robust woman now tiny and bird-like, barely making a bump under the comforter, and heard the wet, rasping wheeze that passed for her breathing these days. He rushed over, felt her forehead and took her pulse.
“You should be in the hospital,” he told her. “I’m taking you, right now.” He turned to me. “Get her coat and put a small bag together for her. She likely will be there a while.”
I did as he said while he got her sitting up and listened to her heart and lungs with his stethoscope. That was just motions—him doing what a doctor did, when he’d already determined how very sick she was and likely had named the ailment in his mind, if not out loud.
Mother didn’t fight or complain as we helped her to Father’s car—he had a new one, I noticed, a pea-green Lincoln sedan—and got her settled in the passenger seat. I opened the back door to get in, but Father said, “There’s no reason for you to go, Cassie. You can’t help and I would rather have only one woman to worry about there.”
His words stung. I shut the door and then opened the passenger door again, kissed Mother’s burning cheek and said, “I’ll come tomorrow to visit you.”
He waited impatiently for me to shut the door, and then a thought seemed to hit him.
“Where’s the dog? Where’s Molly?”
I swallowed hard. “She died a while back. I thought Mother wrote to tell you.”
“No,” he said. “She didn't.”
If you’d called, I thought, asked to speak to me, I would have told you. But you didn’t. Not once. Mother and I found the gremhahn but lost Jimmy a second time. When we went to fetch Molly home, Mrs. Lou said she’d died while we were gone. She felt terrible about it. I cried for days for Jimmy, for Molly. My heart was ripped up and thrown to the winds, Father, and you never called.
He switched on the ignition. “Well, then—”
“Is Mother going to be all right?” I asked, dropping my voice low.
Father’s voice boomed out. “With proper care, she’ll be fine.”
He drove away without another word.
*
Mother got lots of proper care in the hospital—nurses bustling in and out of her private room, a luxury afforded us because of who Father was, bringing liquids to help with the cough and to let her sleep, and pills for the infection—but she wasn’t fine a week later, or a week after that.
I rode the trolley downtown to the hospital every day. It was a long ride, rumbling along the tracks, with cars and pedestrians jostling for space on the street. Often I was the only passenger boarding at the Hermosa Beach stop, with more passengers coming on as the Red Car traveled north along the coast to Santa Monica. At Santa Monica I changed trolleys to go east into downtown, this car filling up the closer into the heart of town we came. I didn’t like the quiet of the seashore ride. It gave me too much time to think and worry. A crowded trolley was better, the noise and the crush of people a welcome distraction.
When I arrived on the fifteenth day, Father was in Mother’s room when I came to her door. I saw him through the little glass window. He sat in the same ladderback chair I always drew up next to her bed during my visits. His bag was at his feet and he was holding her hand.
I slowly, quietly pushed the door open, took a step inside and stopped. Father didn’t seem to notice me. There was no tensing of his muscles to betray an awareness of my presence. I took a few more steps. He didn’t turn. The room was private but small. A few steps more brought me next to him. He turned his head then and gestured with his eyes to a second chair and then to the spot next to him. Without a word, I picked up the other chair, set it beside his and sat down. Father still held Mother’s hand. His gaze had returned to her face. He reached out to take my hand in his free one. Tears sprung to my eyes and I blinked them back. I’d missed him so much.
“How is she?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“The same,” he said, his voice as quiet as mine had been.
The same. Which likely meant t
hat he’d been visiting her all along. He wouldn’t tend her; he’d leave that to another doctor, one he trusted. Father always said that a physician should never doctor anyone he cared about—that emotion got in the way of best medicine.
“Why the same?” I asked, my voice inching to normal. “She’s been here weeks and getting good treatment. Why isn’t she getting better?”
Father’s voice creaked when he answered. “I don’t know, Cassie. Sometimes with pleurisy . . .” He turned my hand loose and ran his hand over his tired face. “Maybe we caught it too late.”
My breath caught in my throat. He cared about her. He loved her still. That woman he had at the big house was nothing to him, not in the way Mother was his heart. All that needed to happen now was for Mother to get well and we could go back to being a family again.
Almost a family. A family with a piece missing—a hole that could not be filled.
But a family still—if only Mother would get better.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Not medicine’s fault, either.”
“What do you mean?”
Unconsciously I reached up under my hat and touched one of the stars in my hair. It lay on a strand that fell right behind my ear. There were four now, as hard and cold as diamonds, their glow faint but enough that I kept them hidden.
I shook my head at Father to say I couldn't explain what I’d meant. He would never believe what I’d come to accept—the sea goblin was draining Mother’s life force. The gremhahn had said she would never see her son again. If she died in the hospital, then his curse would be true.
Father said, “I’ve convinced Dr. Johnson to send to Boston for a new drug. They’ve had some good results with it. It’s being flown here especially for your mother. We’ll have it in a few days.”
“You broke your own rule,” I said, half teasing, needing to see him smile. “You interfered in the care of a family member.”
His eyes narrowed and his jaw hardened. “Perhaps you would have preferred I left your mother in your capable care—where she most certainly would have died.”
The Girl with Stars in her Hair Page 6