Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  When she put them on the world turned to water, and she saw it, washed with moonlight and foam: the stairway down into the sea.

  She woke up. She was tangled in sheets; Jonah was gone. Then she realized he hadn’t been there. It was still night, and he had never come home. She pulled herself across the bed to peer at the luminous dial on the clock. Five minutes to three in the morning. She dropped back, her eyes wide in the dark, remembering. He had left his scrambled eggs on the counter, gone out abruptly. She had scarcely noticed; all her attention had been on Adam, lying in the surf on the kitchen floor. Maybe, she had thought after a while, Jonah had gone for butter. She got up finally, scraped cold eggs into the garbage, and made a tuna sandwich with the toast.

  She had fallen asleep listening for him.

  She put her glasses on, turned on the lamp. She went into the kitchen to see if he had left a trace of himself: a beer bottle, a fossil. Then she looked among his rocks to see if he had left a note. She flicked on the bathroom light: no message on the mirror. She sat down on the bed, hugging herself, feeling a hollowness in her bones, as if she were blown out of glass and the blow falling at her out of the dark would shatter her.

  She whispered, “Jonah.”

  She heard his key in the lock then. The door opened. She went out to meet him, found him standing in the doorway, blinking at all the lights. He held the doorknob with one hand, and the door frame with the other; seeing her, he swayed in surprise and would have sat down on the floor if he hadn’t been hanging on.

  “It’s you,” he said.

  “I live here,” she said a trifle crossly. “I’m Megan. If you’re looking for someone else, you got the wrong apartment.”

  “How did you know?”

  “How did I know what?”

  “That I’m looking for her?”

  She felt herself grow rigid with shock. Her mouth shaped words; no words came for a moment.

  “Who?”

  “Who?”

  “Who her?”

  “What?”

  “What her are you looking for?” It came out, to her ears, all in one word. He blinked, swaying again, then deciphered it.

  “Her.”

  Her voice rose. “Her who?”

  “The singer.”

  “You met a singer?” She covered her mouth with her hands. “You met a singer with that band that night?”

  “No.” He shook his head so emphatically his glasses nearly fell off. “I haven’t met her yet. I can’t find her.”

  She felt an absurd urge to laugh and cry and throw a brachiopod at his head at the same time. “Jonah, what the hell are you talking about? You have a crush on some singer in a band? Is that where you’ve been? Listening to her?”

  He blinked at her again, his eyes round and heavy behind his glasses. “It’s not a crush. It’s an obsession.”

  “For a woman you haven’t met?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “What,” she said tightly. “Don’t. I. Understand.”

  “Obsessions. They don’t have anything to do with what’s real. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Jonah, it’s three in the morning and you’re shitfaced! Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with me. You’re obsessed with rocks and you leave them all over the house—”

  “Fossils.”

  “Don’t tell me that has nothing to do with me when I step on a worm tube getting out of the bathtub! Where are you going to put this obsession? On the kitchen counter?”

  “In my head,” he said, and she made a sound she had never made before. He let go of the doorknob, raised a hand, and lurched a half step. “Now,” he said. “Now. Now.”

  “Don’t ‘now’ me.”

  “She’s a dream—”

  “I gather.”

  “I mean in my head. I think. That’s where she sings. In my head.”

  Megan closed her eyes, wondering if she were dreaming Jonah. But he was still there, breathing fumes and gazing at her hopefully. “Jonah.”

  “Megan.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, she sang at the bar, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And then in the cave.”

  “What’s that? Some jazz club?”

  “The cave,” he said patiently. “Around where I was looking for fossils. She sang. And whales sang. Maybe they sang because she drew them there—”

  “Did you dream this?” she asked sharply. He shook his head again, top-heavy.

  “I thought yes. Then no. That’s why I have to find Adam Fin.”

  She felt her throat close; her hands closed over her arms. “Adam,” she whispered, and heard the sound of water, running into dark, secret places. “What does this have to do with Adam?”

  “Adam,” he mocked. “Adam. You keep saying his name. I don’t even know her name. The old oyster wouldn’t tell me. ‘Ask her,’ she said. ‘Ask her. She’ll tell you the price of her name.’ So I have to find Adam Fin. I was just out asking people.”

  “Why?” Her voice jerked. “Why Adam?”

  “Because he knows where she is. When she walks on land. He knows her.”

  She felt the blood run cold and thin under her skin. The stairway, she thought, out of the sea. She went to Jonah, took his arm very gently away from the door frame, and locked the door behind him, though she knew that in the end, no door would keep out the sea.

  Jonah, bleary-eyed and stubbled, sat behind the shop counter the next morning, his eyes on the Compend, which was written in some troublesome language of which he only understood a word or two here and there. The conch shells and big cowries and the chambered nautiluses on the shelves sang faintly to the rhythm of the waves. Their music, delicate as notes played on a glass, kept drifting between his eyes and the page. He listened as intently to the bell on the door, to the quality of voices, though they all spoke the obscure language of the Compend. Jenny, cheerful and efficient, only disturbed him when she had to; she seemed to sense how he needed to seep, fossil-like, into the wall, while he waited for Adam Fin’s pale, calm face, his mocking eyes.

  Finally, after hours of listening for a voice that never spoke, he despaired, snapped the Compend shut with a sound that made Jenny start.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “I’m just about to leave for lunch, Jonah. You seem a little under the weather. Have you caught a bug?”

  He smiled a little, crookedly. “Some kind of a bug, yeah. Megan’s upstairs. Call her and she’ll cover your lunch break. I have to get out of here.”

  “Well,” she said, her voice mild, innocent of subterfuge, “I hope you feel better soon.” She reached for the phone. She had never heard the music of the chambered nautilus, Jonah guessed. She had never wept over a darkly glittering shadow, a scent of brine. For a moment he envied her.

  He drove the truck to the cove again, knowing he would find nothing. He wanted to stand at the mouth of the cave, just stand there, in the place where she had been, not hoping she would be there, but to feed his heart with memories. The tide was coming in, but he climbed along the side of the cliff anyway, then around its face. Tide licked at his heels, as he made his way across the long bones of rock. Ruthless afternoon sunlight scoured the cave clean of shadows; the rough, exuberant waves shouted but refused to sing. Still he stood there, staring at the sea life along the cave walls and trying to find the mystery behind the barnacles.

  The sea poured around him suddenly, hit the back wall; it echoed laughter as the wave withdrew. He grabbed at rock, cut his palm on a crusty barnacle. He waited for the powerful drag on his body to end, then slogged back over the whale bones between waves, wet to the crotch. Hugging the cliff above the deep water, where the lip of rock was narrowest, he came face-to-face with Adam Fin.

  He was laughing the deep booming laughter in the cave. He didn’t cling to the cliff, he leaned gracefully into it, so finely balanced that Jonah might have knocked him off with a peb
ble, except that he had no desire to see what Adam Fin would do in water. Dissolve, grow a fish’s tail, turn a seal’s face up at Jonah, or worse—whatever it was, he might not be found easily again. His teeth seemed even sharper in the sunlight.

  “Got a little wet,” he commented. “Didn’t you.” He reached out suddenly, caught Jonah’s wrist. Jonah, hanging on by one hand, nearly fell. He pushed himself back against the cliff, panting, and found Adam looking at his hand. “Cave bite?”

  “Barnacle,” Jonah said tersely. There was another wrench at his precarious balance; Adam twisted his hand back, held it over the water. Three drops of blood fell. Jonah turned his face into the cliff, swallowed a taste like iron in his throat. He forced himself to speak.

  “She said—Dory said—there is a price. Is this part of it?”

  “No. I’m just being perverse.” He laughed without sound at Jonah’s stare; his eyes were cold as rime. “What is it you want, Jonah?”

  “I want—” He stopped at the edge of saying, drew breath. He said to the barren cliff, “You know what I want. You knew before you laid eyes on me. She’s your sister. That’s all I know. But she’s nothing like you. She’s timeless, and she is the face of the sea, all its beautiful shapes and colors and all its songs. I don’t even know her name. She haunts me and she won’t let me find her. Help me. Tell me her name.”

  “Storm,” Adam said. “Undertow. Rapture of the deep.” Still he held Jonah’s hand over the sea, where green water weltered against stone. “You know her. She has shown her face before, rising in the wake of wrecked ships, singing to the doomed. Turn your face to land again, where you are loved. You could never pay her price. And the price you will pay will be too high.”

  “What price?”

  “Megan.”

  Jonah blinked at the word. It seemed incongruous, irrelevant, like an apple tree growing placidly out of the middle of the sea. “Megan. This has nothing to do with her. She’ll understand. And she can take care of herself.”

  The grip on his wrist tightened; he wrenched at it, then caught wildly at Adam’s wrist to keep from falling. They stood poised like dancers on the fine edge between land and sea. A high wave spun against the cliff’s edge; brine fanned into the air, flecked their hands, Adam’s eyes, Jonah’s mouth with bitterness.

  “You don’t know her,” Adam said.

  “I don’t know who? Megan? Of course I know her.” He stopped, blinking at another flick of water; his eyes narrowed, searching the pale, sea-washed face for a hint of expression. “You.” He tasted brine again, and spat. “You follow her. She lets you watch her draw. She talks to you. It’s you she wants, not me. So why are you throwing her name at me? You take care of her. Until this is over.”

  “You think you can walk on water to return to land.” Still his face held no more expression than a clam.

  “I am walking on water,” Jonah said tightly. “That’s all I can see, all I can hear. Tide and her voice, calling. Tell me where I can find her.”

  “What if I offer you something instead of her?”

  “There is nothing.” He swallowed, his throat tight. “Nothing instead of. Nothing without.”

  “What if I offer you freedom?”

  “Freedom?”

  “From her.”

  His eyes widened; his hold tightened, as if the cliff had shifted beneath him at the words. “No.”

  “Look at yourself,” Adam said softly. “You can’t even see out of your own eyes; you can’t remember your own past. You are already adrift in the sea, without enough sense to be afraid. You’re a stranger in your own life. The only voice you hear is hers, and she’s not even human. I’ll tell you how to stop that voice in your brain, in your blood. I’ll show you how to return to land before she pulls you underneath the waves.”

  “No.”

  “I warn you.” He spoke softly but very clearly through the tide spilling around them and the gulls crying overhead. “You will find her price too high.”

  “She can have whatever she wants,” Jonah said wearily. “Just tell me. Tell me where to find her. I’ll give you what you want for that. Anything.”

  The familiar cold, mocking smile surfaced finally in Adam’s eyes, like a shark fin cutting the calm surface of the sea. “You are so reckless with your promises, you humans. Don’t you pay attention to your own tales?”

  “I can’t pay attention to anything,” Jonah whispered. “I can’t see words anymore. I can’t even think. You offer me something I can’t refuse, then you laugh at me because I can’t refuse it. Just tell me where I can find her.”

  “You can find her where land touches sea, where lost ships founder against the siren’s song, where the last light of the sun and the first light of the moon touch the sea.” He dropped Jonah’s hand, and added, as Jonah groped wildly for him, “Or you can find her at the Ancient Mariner Friday night. She’ll be singing then.”

  He slid out of Jonah’s grip like a fish. Jonah turned his face to the cliff. He heard the splash a moment later; the sea reached up to touch his cheek.

  Megan, haunted by the dreams and shadows of memory cast up out of forgotten places in her brain, spent a frantic hour or two in Mike’s bookstore after Jenny came back from lunch.

  “They,” she demanded of Mike. “Who are they? Where do they live?”

  Mike wrapped his book around a thumb, sank his head onto one fist, and tapped a tooth meditatively with a forefinger. He removed the finger finally and said, “If you want names, names are in mythology.”

  “Mythology. But that’s not real. This is real.”

  He gazed at her so long she wondered if he, too, were about to change into something unexpected: answer her with a sea lion’s bark, or show her the webs between his fingers. He said finally, “There is the Kingdom of Ys, the beautiful, drowned city haunted by its princess, who sings to mortals and drags them down under the sea when they come to her. Someday, it is said, Ys will rise again. There is Sorcha, the sea kingdom of the selkies, the enchanted children of the king, who can live in the sea and on land, and who are tormented by their longing for both. There is Tir na n’Og, Land of the Forever Young, one of the Isles of the Blest, which appear out of the sea mists floating on the waves just long enough for mortals to see their unattainable richness and magic before they sink back down beneath the waves. There is the Island of Glass, with its castles of light and crystal that you might glimpse within the weaving strands of sunlight on the sea, if you don’t look directly at it. There is the realm up north, ruled by Sedna, whose temper is terrible and whose looks can kill, who watches with her single eye over the mammals of the ocean. There is Fata Morgana, the dream palace made of clouds that appears in the first misty light of morning, or in the last light over the sea before night. But.” He shrugged a little. “None of that will do you any good.”

  A couple of browsers, who had never heard him speak more than dollars and cents, gave him scattered applause among the shelves. Megan, entranced by glimpses of the hidden realms in Mike’s head, pleaded, “Why not?”

  “You said it. Mythology is what was real. What’s real now is for you to see. For you to say. That’s why it’s nowhere in here.” He opened his book. “But go ahead and look.”

  So she did, and found water kingdoms everywhere under the sea, but all safely bound between the lines of language, all belonging to someone else. She found the seals who walked ashore in human form and the sea goddess named Doris, who had fifty children, and the sirens who sang so sweetly on rocks that they lured sailors to their deaths in the sea. But the sailors were trapped in the amber of tales, safe and unchangeable. None walked around now, drunk on secret music; none felt pain or gave it. Jonah, she thought, and felt the nick at her heart of fear and betrayal. Would he wreck his boat on the rocks or could she rescue him? Did he want to be rescued? Would she bother? And the sorrow in Adam Fin’s eyes was not a yearning for human love, but grief for something else. He had not filled her pockets with pearls, but with the broken piece
s of the world she knew.

  But what was his world? A glint of light in a wave? In a bottle? Or was it more accessible? She closed the books and went out to where the true sea blew spindrift at her glasses and flowed over her feet, drowning her footprints as she passed. Mike had found a piece of it; there must be other pieces she could puzzle together, as they might puzzle, trying to fit together a jump-rope handle and a vacuum-cleaner nozzle and a bicycle chain. This time she ignored her own world; she let the garbage lie, and the agates and even the perfect sand dollars. Her pockets empty, she looked for nameless things to put in them.

  The long walk wearied her; her thoughts drifted, unmoored. The warm late afternoon light worked its odd magic on familiar things in her path. Her eye, persistent in its quest, transformed them. The sand dollar, whole and white as bone, was distinct as a moon on the wet sand; the world was upside down. Great ropy tangles of kelp with their dark, scaly leaves were mermaids, their thick golden hair coiled around them as they slept. Agates and sea glass shone like jewels; horses, white as foam, rode the waves, manes streaming behind them as they raced along the border between worlds, then vanished back into their own. Song drifted endlessly from the waves, luring, coaxing, pleading, in some forgotten language. The dead jellyfish had been a tiny, delicate floating kingdom of glass; the purple mussel shell a flake of dark castle wall; the white seal lying just beyond the surf was a man.

  She stopped, seeing the seal again, long, pale, and graceful. And then Adam. He turned seal’s eyes to look at her. And then they were sea eyes, foamy green. He was sunbathing. He was pale everywhere, sleek and muscled, a swimmer. He wore bathing trunks, but the way he looked at her, he might as well have worn nothing.

  She swallowed. Light lay between them, a curl of water. She took a step back. He was on his feet then, a movement too quick for the mortal eye. He stood in front of her, wordless, insistent, his skin speaking, luring, coaxing. His eyes promised knowledge, promised gentleness.

  She drew breath, loosed it slowly. She put the back of her hand to her mouth, and took another step away from him. She whispered, “Jonah.”