by Sophie Moss
“Do we have any…nuns on the island?”
“No.” Kelsey shook her head. “But the princess in The Little Mermaid lived in a convent.” Kelsey’s eyes went wide. “Our grandmother is a princess… Do you think Nuala knows where our grandmother is?”
Sorcha,” Sam said, pouring relief into his voice as he glanced at the pretty blond receptionist’s name tag. “Sergeant Fitzgerald said we should ask for you.” He extended a hand over the desk. “I’m John Derringer, and this is my wife Miranda.”
Sorcha stood, flustered. “Sergeant…who?”
“Sergeant Fitzgerald,” Sam repeated. “With the Donnybrook District… He said he would call ahead.” Sam looked bewildered. “You haven’t heard from him?”
Sorcha shook her head slowly.
“He’s been helping us with…our search.” Sam reached for Glenna’s hand, lacing their fingers together. “We’re trying to find our little girl’s grandmother. It’s the only thing that might save her life.”
The man, Glenna thought, had no shame. She glanced around the records department of St. James’s Hospital as Sam spun a story that would pull on every one of Sorcha’s heartstrings. A bank of scanners and copiers whirred in the background where employees fed documents into the massive commercial machines. They didn’t bother to turn; most of them were tuned into their iPods.
Sorcha’s big brown eyes widened in sympathy. “Bone marrow transplant?”
Sam nodded solemnly. “It’s our only hope.” He pulled Glenna down to the chair beside him, tucking her hand in his lap. “We’ve been searching for my birth mother for years, but it was only recently that it became…a matter of life or death.”
In the hallway, Sam had told Glenna to play along. He’d said he wasn’t sure what angle he’d use until he saw who was working at the desk. Now, as Glenna looked around the office, she knew why Sam had chosen it. The receptionist couldn’t be more than twenty-three years old, but there was a picture of a baby girl in a pink frame on the corner of her desk and a small gold band adorned her ring finger.
Sorcha shook her head sadly as she clicked through the files on her computer, pulling up records. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”
No, Glenna thought, glancing up at the florescent lights. You can’t. But Sam was used to finding people’s vulnerabilities and exploiting them to get the information he needed. And though his declaration in the parking lot had left her rattled, who knew what else he might be lying about? For all she knew, he could be using her to find Brigid. He might only be doing this to clear his conscience so he could move on from Seal Island. Hadn’t he told her that he had no intention of putting down roots?
Sam reached for the picture frame on Sorcha’s desk. “How old is she?”
“She’s eight months,” Sorcha answered, her skin flushing with pride. “Brianna. We named her after my husband’s sister.”
“Our little girl’s name is Alice,” Sam said softly, setting the frame back down. “Named after Miranda’s mother. They’re with her now. They feel terrible that they can’t help. But they’re not a match. Neither are we.”
Sam rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve lain awake wishing…” He shook his head. “I keep thinking that if we can find my birth mother—even if she doesn’t want anything to do with us—maybe she’d be willing to save her granddaughter.”
“Of course,” Sorcha murmured. “You said the winter of ’88, right?”
Sam nodded.
“There’s a file for a Jane Doe who was five months pregnant, but the last page is missing so I don’t know where she was discharged.” She tapped her fingers on the desk. “But that’s the only one who was pregnant.” She pushed back from her desk. “Let me see if I can dig up the paper file.”
Glenna leveled her gaze at him when Sorcha disappeared into the back. “Alice?”
Sam reached out, tucking a curl behind her ear and the gesture was so unexpectedly tender, she shivered. “I’ve always loved the name Alice,” he murmured, his fingers lingering on her cheek. “And I imagine a child of yours would be nothing short of a trip through wonderland.”
Glenna felt her heart skip a beat. She wouldn’t be having children with anyone. Not while her mother was still alive. She’d made that decision long ago.
“I found something,” Sorcha said. Glenna straightened, pushing Sam’s hand away. The receptionist walked back to the desk, setting a file down in front of her. “We haven’t sorted all the paperwork for that year, but I found the child’s file. On December 27th, a doctor performed an emergency C-section and he was transferred to the NICU. The child was sustained on breathing tubes for about two months before he was discharged to an orphanage.”
It was true, Glenna realized as the whirr of the copiers and scanners grew deafening. She had hired a man to hack into the hospital’s system and erase the discharge page in Brigid’s file years ago. But he hadn’t said anything about a child.
“Is there anything in the chart about the mother?” Sam asked. “Did she survive?”
“Yes,” Sorcha said slowly.
“What does it say?” Sam pressed.
“There’s a note in the file for the social worker,” Sorcha said, her expression softening in sympathy. “It says she was deemed unfit to care for the child.”
“Unfit?”
“By a psychiatrist,” Sorcha explained. “She was admitted to a mental institution.”
Glenna stood abruptly, backing away from the desk. How? How had she not known Brigid had a third child?
“Which ward?” Sam asked.
“It wasn’t a good place,” Sorcha said. “The city shut it down a few years after it opened.”
Glenna turned, pushing through the door and walking out into the hallway. She leaned against the wall. She should never have let Sam come here tonight. But she never dreamed he would actually find something. He’d told her about Tara’s reaction to the file on his computer yesterday and she’d agreed to look into it with him, only to put Tara’s fears to rest.
“Why was the place shut down?” Sam asked, his voice drifting out to the hallway through the open door. “What happened there?”
Sorcha lowered her voice. “Cruel treatment of the poorest people in this city, the ones locked up at the taxpayers’ expense.”
“What kind of…cruel treatment?”
Glenna closed her eyes, struggling to breathe. She could still hear the scratch of the doctor’s pen on his clipboard, the feel of the nurse’s papery skin as she wrapped the band around her upper arm, the prick of the needle and rush of serum pouring the wretched drugs into her veins—drugs that made her feel helpless and desperate and afraid.
“From what I’ve heard,” Sorcha answered. “A lot of heavy sedation and shock treatments.”
“Does this place still exist?”
“No,” Sorcha said. “There was a protest in the mid-nineties that shut it down. It’s barred up now, but the empty building is still on the corner of Duke and River Street. They haven’t replaced it with anything new.”
“Where did the patients go?”
“I imagine to other mental institutions throughout the country.”
Glenna heard Sam’s plastic chair squeak as he stood.
“I’m sorry,” Sorcha said helplessly. “I wish I had better news.”
NUALA WOKE TO a low rumbling. She blinked her eyes open and the dark waters churned around the mountain. Trapped beneath several large rocks, she tested her back fins as the volcano shook, the reverberations echoing through the sea.
Liquid fire spewed from the opening, and she fought the urge to panic. She would not let Moira kill her. She would not let Moira win. Black rocks broke off the narrow ledge as she twisted and thrashed. She cried out as her back fin tore.
Blind with pain, she swerved away from the ledge. The eels screamed as they chased her, and she clawed at them with her fore-fins. She swam through the murky waters to Moira’s cave, du
cking into the eerie blackness. She found the crown, swallowing mouthfuls of dead minnows as she grabbed it with her teeth.
Lava poured into the cave and she flipped, losing the eels in a tangle of their own tails as she shot out of the opening. She dodged the rolling bands of fire, skirting the thick forest of polyps and garden of black roses. The eels shrieked as they unraveled themselves and raced after her, but she didn’t look back.
She swam, crossing into the selkie boundaries and passing the kingdom far below. Predator fish picked up her trail of blood, snapping at her with angry teeth. She dove, flipping and switching directions until they were twisted in a circle and couldn’t see past the bubbles.
She had lived outside the boundaries long enough to know how to survive.
She swam until the beach and rocks rose up in the distance and she rode the waves to the salty shores of Seal Island. She let out a low whimper as the white sand rubbed into her wounds, but she pulled her broken body onto the beach. She lifted her head, releasing a long howl of distress before she collapsed, the blackthorn crown slipping from her mouth and rolling onto the sand.
SAM CUT THE engine, gazing through the chain-linked fence at the abandoned building. Many of the windows were shattered, and the stark gray exterior made it look more like a prison than a medical facility. Glenna opened the door and stepped out of the car. The wind caught her brown hair, swirling it around her shoulders.
Sam unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, locking the vehicle. He followed her to the fence as tacked-up sheets fluttered like ghosts from the windows of the rundown apartment buildings lining the neighboring street.
Glenna slipped through a narrow opening. Weeds snaked through the cracks in the cement, and Sam stepped over a pile of used syringes as he followed her up to the heavy front doors, bound by a thick rusted chain.
“No one should be kept in a place like this,” Sam murmured, his boots crunching over shards of glass that had fallen from the broken windows.
“No.” Glenna shook her head. “They shouldn’t.”
Sam gazed at the mold creeping up the door frame. “If Brigid was mentally ill, don’t you think Dom and Liam would have picked up on something? I know they were young, but still…”
Glenna pressed a palm to the dirty glass. “There was nothing wrong with Brigid before she came to this place.”
Sam turned toward Glenna. A cold knot of fear coiled inside him when he saw the look on her face.
Glenna stared at her muted reflection in the glass, memories floating in her amber eyes. “There was only one person who made it out of here with a shred of her sanity still intact.”
Sam stepped back from the window, fighting to keep his voice steady. “Tell me you didn’t spend time here.”
Glenna lifted her haunted eyes to his. “That’s how I met my aunt.”
Glenna let Sam into the small one-bedroom flat she kept in the city. He hadn’t said a word as they drove away from the barred-up mental institution, and she welcomed the silence. It gave her time to think. “Go ahead,” she said quietly, setting her keys on the table. “I’ll answer your questions.”
He strode to the tall windows overlooking the River Liffey. A steady flow of people were leaving the large stone office buildings and heading home from work. “You would have only been a child in the mid-nineties. Barely a teenager.”
Glenna closed the door and strolled through the room, switching on the lamps. “They took teenagers.”
“But how did you get there?” Sam gazed down at the arched bridges crisscrossing the murky ribbon of mud and silt. “Who put you there?”
“My first memory of waking up on land was in a hospital—the same one we went to today.” Glenna walked to the window where he stood and pulled the brown velvet curtains aside, draping them over an ornate iron hook. “A fisherman found me washed up on a beach and brought me in. I tried to escape. But they kept grabbing me, hauling me back. I told them I needed to go back to the sea. To go home. They thought I was trying to drown myself.”
Horns honked and brake lights blinked through the darkness as the crush of commuter traffic streamed by on the road below. Glenna turned away from the window. She rented this place because it was easier than staying in a hotel every time she came into the city for an art show. But it had never felt like home.
Not like her cottage on Seal Island. “I fought them for days, but they strapped me to the bed and shot drugs into me so I could hardly think or speak. The police came and tried to identify me. But no one had filed a missing child report for a girl who looked like me, and I refused to tell them my name.”
She picked up her red pillows, fluffing them and setting them back on the plush mocha-colored sofa. “The next thing I knew, I was locked in a windowless room in the building you just saw.”
Sam laid his hands lightly on the window ledge, but she could see the bands of tension straining across the back of his shirt. “Do you remember your childhood?”
“I do.”
“Did you grow up…underwater?”
Glenna selected two crystal wine glasses from the cherry rack over the sink. “I did. Brigid was the only person in the entire facility who made any sense.” She filled the glasses with a rich red Cabernet. “We only saw each other once a week, and even then our time was limited. But they let her come into the common room when she was sedated, and she told stories from the bits of memories she could still piece together—stories about seals and an enchanted kingdom deep under the sea.”
Sam turned, his thick blond hair gleaming burnished bronze in the warm lamplight. “What happened to Brigid after the place shut down?”
“I don’t know.” Glenna set the bottle down. “We were separated.”
“What happened to you?”
“I was transferred to another facility.” She picked up his glass, walking across the room to hand it to him. “But I’d learned how to act by then. How the doctors wanted me to act. I convinced the new staff I was able to take care of myself and wasn’t a threat to society.” He took the glass from her, but didn’t drink. “About a year later, they let me out.”
“Could the same thing have happened to Brigid?”
“I doubt it.” Glenna shook her head, walking back over to retrieve her own glass. “The drugs and the treatments erased most of her memory. She had trouble remembering who she was most of the time. And the other times, when she wasn’t sedated…” Glenna picked up her glass and sipped, letting the wine calm her.
“What?” Sam pressed.
Glenna carried her glass to the sofa, settling onto the arm. “She screamed for her children, for her two boys—Dominic and Liam.” Glenna lifted her eyes to Sam’s. “She’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night for someone to save them. But she didn’t know where they were. And when the nurses came to give her another shot, she wept.”
“But she never said anything about a third child?”
Glenna shook her head.
“Is that why you went to Seal Island? To find Dominic and Liam?”
She nodded.
“But you didn’t tell them.”
“I couldn’t,” Glenna said. “I looked for Brigid. I searched for her for years. I knew she wasn’t crazy. Or, at least she wasn’t before she went into that place. But she wasn’t in any of the other mental institutions. I figured she must have escaped, and I hoped that maybe somehow she found her pelt and was able to return to her home.”
“Is that why you didn’t want me to search for her? Because you didn’t want them to find out about this?”
Glenna looked down at her wine. Swirling the rich red liquid, she watched the streaks form in the glass. “They’ve had so much pain in their lives already.”
“Don’t you think they deserve to know the truth?”
“Maybe,” Glenna said softly, as the surface of her drink shimmered and an image formed. In a small house behind a white chapel, a woman stood by the door. She held a bouquet of purple irises and her gray eyes watched the
road for the headlights of a black Mercedes.
Glenna’s fingers curled around the stem of the glass. How long would Brigid wait for her tonight? How long would she stand by the door?
She closed her eyes. There were too many people watching her now. Too many people following her every move.
Forgive me, my queen.
“OWEN, DON’T YOU like your dinner?” Tara asked across the small kitchen table. “You’ve hardly eaten a thing.”
Owen pushed at the boiled potatoes on his plate. “I’m not hungry.”
Kelsey plucked a piece of fish off his plate. “I’ll eat it,” she said, but she set her fork down when a seal’s song drifted up from the beach. “What was that?”
Owen shot out of his seat. He knew that voice. He’d know it anywhere. His utensils clattered to the floor as he pushed back from the table, racing for the door.
“Owen?” Kelsey said, jumping up after him.
He flung open the door, running out into the night. He heard the chairs scraping back, his parents calling for him to stop. But he couldn’t stop. He had to find Nuala. She was here on the island. Maybe she was still alive!
He made for the cliff path, his hands grasping the mossy wall to keep his balance as he started down the trail. Rocks slipped out from under his sneakers. Dark waves churned over the surface of the sea. They crested and crashed, sea spray exploding over the rocks.
He scanned the beach. Seashells glowed ghostly white in the moonlight. Sand crabs skittered over the sand, chasing the bubbles as the waves retreated. He stumbled to the sand, tripping over the knotted kelp when he spotted the dark shape curled up by the rocks.
“Is that her?” Kelsey asked, running after him. “Is it Nuala?”
Owen nodded, dropping to his knees and pulling the limp seal into his arms. He could feel her heart beating through her pelt. It was faint, but she was still alive. “We have to save her.”
Kelsey knelt beside him, cradling Nuala’s head in her lap. Caitlin and Liam caught up with them and Liam called back to Tara. “It’s a seal. She’s badly injured.”