by Sarah Porter
Around Luce the other voices babbled in agreement. She couldn't make out words, but she could feel a chorus of eager emotions, all nagging and wheedling with the urge to drive her away. Luce began to feel a little less frightened. There was something pitiful about the voices, sick and uncanny as they were.
“I've got as much right to be here as you do,” Luce snapped, then tried to think up some reason they would have to accept. There was one thing they definitely seemed to know about her. “Proteus gave his children the oceans. I have the right to stay wherever I want as long as I don't leave the water!” Luce didn't actually know if this was true or not, but the voices reacted instantly. She could hear them bubbling over with consternation, squeaking and hissing to one another like a litter of blind puppies that someone was poking with a stick. “You don't want to make Proteus angry,” Luce added, then stopped abruptly, afraid she'd gone too far.
The voices had retreated a few feet up the beach, and suddenly Luce caught the thread of a different voice: not at all the gruff, crumbling voice that had spoken to her earlier, but a woman's, relaxed and sweet and confident. Luce knew from the first instant that she'd heard it many times before, long ago but also perhaps more recently. “If we get a little girl,” the voice said clearly, “what would you think about calling her Lucette? Carly told me it means ‘little light’ and that’s just what she’s going to be for us. Our own little light in a world that ... isn’t necessarily the brightest place.”
Luce felt a painful stillness seize hold of her heart, and all her efforts at self-control gave way as hot tears welled in her eyes. She understood at once what she was hearing. It was her mother. Actually, she realized, it was her father's memory of her mother talking to him before Luce was even born. This was what her father meant when he'd said that the voices had been “feeding on his brains,” what the voices themselves meant when they told her that they had his memories ... Luce went stone still, yearning only to hear more, to forget the world around her completely. “Oh, now, that’s real pretty,” her father's voice answered out of the invisible swarm. “I’m not as crazy about Lucy, though. Had a probation officer called Lucy once, and she was a serious nutjob. So if were gonna call the little one something for short...”
“Luce," Alyssa Gray said, and Luce jumped with the longing to answer her. In the next instant, though, she realized that her mother wouldn't hear her no matter how she called. The voice she'd heard was trapped in the past, but now the past was all Luce wanted. She waited in frozen silence for the conversation to continue, but it seemed to be breaking up, sinking back into senseless mutterings, scattered half-words. The whirl of voices was sliding closer to her again, but this time Luce was eager to let it come. Her lost mother was in there somewhere, the mother she barely remembered, sweet but also unexpectedly cynical. Even if Alyssa was no more than a memory, an empty wraith, Luce might finally get to know her in the only way she still could.
It wasn't Alyssa's voice that emerged from the swarm. “Child of Proteus,” the old, laborious voice hissed. “Leave." Now its tone was high-pitched and questioning and maybe, Luce thought, just a little scared. It was begging her to go.
Luce wanted to scream from sheer disappointment. She wanted to yell, Bring my mother back! But there was some subtle impulse that restrained her, some insight that she couldn't quite put words to. She knew only that asking the voices to repeat the past for her was the wrong thing to do. No matter how much she wanted to hear Alyssa again, it would be a terrible mistake.
It took a powerful effort of will for Luce to ignore her longing and concentrate on the present. If she was going to win her father back from the voices she had to understand them much better than she did now.
“Tell me what you are,” Luce insisted. “I want to know.”
The old voice moaned, and a dried leaf lying on the beach not far away abruptly crumpled as if crushed in an invisible fist. The other voices clacked with agitation, and bits of dead grass ripped with peculiarly sharp movements up and down the beach. The voices obviously thought she was being unreasonable, but apparently they couldn't actually force her to go.
“We are your lost hopes,” the voice explained at last. It sounded as if each word was something painfully carved from old bones. Luce suddenly understood how hard it was for the voices to do anything except repeat the past. Creating new sentences seemed to be a form of torture for them. “We are the ring rolled away down the drain, the words you should have said, and should have said, but that you left instead under the water...”
The voice gave out, its final words trailing away in exhaustion. Luce was momentarily distracted by the mention of the ring. Someone had told her a story like that once. It had been an old wedding ring that rolled away, the only memento of someone's grandmother ... Alyssa's grandmother. Her father had dropped the ring as he and Alyssa were on their way to get married in Vegas, and Alyssa probably could have lunged and caught the ring in time if only she hadn't been holding their new baby in her arms...
“Leave now?” the voice breathed hopefully.
Once again Luce had to fight her way back to the present. What the voice had told her wasn't enough, and she couldn't afford to stop asking questions. “Why do you want the man?” Luce demanded. “Can he leave?”
That upset the voices again. They rushed at Luce, gabbling and tugging at her, but for some reason they seemed wary of actually forcing their way inside her head again. Instead they only lashed her cheeks with fronds of breath, squeaked and gibbered to her. “And how ’bout for a boy?” Luce suddenly heard her father's voice asking, but it was immediately swallowed by the chaos of random whisperings.
A few seconds of choked, scrambled syllables followed, then Luce's heart stopped as she heard her mother speak again. “Oh, we’ll definitely call him Peter,” Alyssa announced, deadpan, and there was a shocked pause before her father cracked up laughing. “You think anybody but me knows what a sharp edge you’ve got behind that sweet face, babe? You know Peter’s nowhere close to being over you...” The laughter spun around Luce's head, ruffling her hair, before it fell apart into a series of disconnected bleating sounds. Again longing stabbed through Luce; she was consumed by desire to know exactly how her mother had replied. Her words would be playful but also acerbic. And smart, and quick, and full of life...
“The man,” the crackling voice said then paused. It sounded wounded, as if Luce had deliberately said the cruelest thing possible. “He has lost much.” The words were becoming slurred. Luce realized that the voice wouldn't be able to sustain the discussion much longer. It was sapped by the effort of forming new words, new thoughts. “We have no need of you,’’ it added, but now its words were so drafty and misshapen that Luce could barely make them out. The snarl of speaking winds around her head was dissolving, leaking away up the beach.
Then she was left alone again in her narrow cove, stone walls rising on both sides of her, green waves cresting in at the opening. Clouds were pouring across the sky, blotting out the fresh golden sunlight she'd seen earlier that day, and the now-voiceless wind blew a few spatters of cold rain into her face.
Rain, Luce realized after a second. Not snow.
Spring might be coming faster than she'd thought. And she wasn't any closer to rescuing her father from this nightmare of an island, this place where all his sweetest and most heartbreaking memories were constantly dragged from his mind and then flung back at him. Where he had to lose everything—his wife and his daughter and his hopes—over and over again...
There was something important in what the gruff spirit-voice had told her, Luce realized. It hadn't told her much, but somewhere in its jumbled words there was a hint, an unwitting clue to how she could finally get through to her father. If she could only put her finger on exactly what that hint had been, she'd know how to convince Andrew Korchak that she was real. The real, actual Luce and not just some haunting memory.
The daylight lasted for a long time.
In the days that follow
ed things reverted to the way they'd been before, but with one important difference: Andrew Korchak still avoided his daughter, but now Luce did her best to keep out of his way, too. She hadn't forgotten his threat to starve himself to death, and she didn't want to do anything that might upset him before she figured out a plan. She slept in the most inaccessible crooks of the island and spent more of her time underwater.
A raft, Luce realized. They'd need a raft. The water would be much too cold for a human, especially once they were away from the volcanic vents that warmed certain areas around the island. A raft would help keep her father from getting hypothermia as long as he wasn't swamped in a storm. Even with a solidly built raft their escape would be extremely risky. Luce wasn't sure if she could swim all the way back to land, even by herself, without sinking from sheer exhaustion. Towing her father would just make it that much harder.
Still Luce began to collect likely-looking driftwood, especially planks, and heap them behind a rock on the beach where she'd first arrived. She was careful to do this work only at night. She didn't want him to see her. As the sun arched higher in the sky each day, as the air warmed and the sustained dusk began to yield to occasional clear skies, Luce slowly managed to accumulate a fair amount of useful-looking wood, planks and strong straight logs. Some of the planks even had rusty nails sticking out of them, and Luce tugged the nails free and then carefully straightened them by banging with a rock. The mists were receding, and Luce stared into the distance in all directions, looking for that narrow ribbon of what she'd hoped was land. It seemed to have melted with the clouds.
Getting materials for the raft together helped to take her mind off her bigger problems. She still wasn't sure how to persuade her father that she was the real Luce. And she couldn't help noticing that there were fewer ice floes in the water now. Maybe back in her home territory the first cracks were appearing in the ice along the shore. Maybe Dorian was starting to walk down to their beach every evening and look for her...
It hurt her to think of how worried he would be, how long the days of waiting might become. But she just couldn't help it.
***
Luce was sleeping in her little cove when the dream came to her.
Even as she slept she was faintly conscious of the rocking water, the stones beneath her head, and at the same time she was walking with her father through a ramshackle amusement park. The sky was dark and only a handful of colored lights still blinked randomly in odd locations. One of her father's hands held hers and in the other he clutched a long strip of paper tickets, but no matter how far they walked they couldn't find a single ride that was running. Everything was out of order, even disassembled into ungainly heaps of rusty metal parts, and Luce began to get the impression that everyone else had gone home long ago.
“Forget,” a barker called out to them. Luce looked over at her: a slim woman in a red and silver striped vest with her scarlet cap pulled down to hide her face. Long, dark hair trailed out at the sides. Her voice was peculiar, crumbling and wheezy like snarled winds. “Forget, forget. Forget right here!”
The barker was standing next to a contraption that Luce couldn't identify, something tall and skinny and skeletal. But as they drew closer Luce clearly saw the word “Forget” winking in pink neon at its base.
“You want to play, don't you, Luce?” her father asked. He sounded inexplicably sarcastic, even bitter. “We've still got all these tickets. Might as well use them up. Every last one of 'em. God knows there won't be any more soon enough.”
Luce glanced at him shyly. She didn't know why he was in such a foul mood, and she was afraid he'd get mad at her if she lost the game. And she would surely lose, one way or another. But it would be even worse if she refused to try. “Okay.”
Her father tore off one ticket for the barker, and a huge glittery mallet slipped into Luce's hand. It was too heavy for her, and she staggered as she approached the machine. It had a tall column of light bulbs like grayish vertebrae and a big red button at the bottom, just above the blinking FORGET. Luce looked around for her father, but he wasn't there anymore. Only the barker still stood behind her, and she was much taller than she'd been before and oddly spiny-looking.
“Forget right here!” the barker breathed mournfully. She didn't sound encouraging. “Forget me. At least forget me enough, just enough ... my Lucette, my little light...”
I don’t want to forget you, though! Luce thought, but she couldn't say it. Instead she swung the mallet. It thudded down awkwardly, just grazing the side of the red button. Only two of the light bulbs flashed a feeble yellow before going out again. Again she glanced around. Now in place of the barker there was a fizzling, hissing, dead tree. The strip of tickets dangled from its naked branches, high up, and Luce could hear the moaning of seals.
“Do you think I can try again?” Luce asked nervously.
The tree didn't answer, but the pink paper tickets gusted back and forth. Luce decided to take that as a yes, and she brought the mallet up. It almost flew out of her hands as if some unexpected force was aggressively tugging it skyward, and Luce jerked back. She was determined to keep her grip on the mallet, determined to bring it smashing down...
“Forget,” the lights winked. “Forget.” There was a clang as the mallet hurled down onto the button, and a chain of golden lights shot up. Just for an instant Luce saw two more words illuminated in the darkness far above her.
TO REMEMBER! the machine flashed out at her in scarlet letters. The letters glowed and vanished so quickly that they were hardly more than a momentary burn on Luce's retinas, but she was sure she'd seen them. The park around her went black, engulfed by a swirl of midnight water, and Luce began to run frantically away. Cold water gripped her legs. She had to find her father before he drowned...
Luce woke panting. The sky was soft with amber dawn, and a pod of seals was playing in the waves just beyond her cove. She could see their sleek, brown bodies dipping and the curious gleam of black glass eyes watching her. One of them swam closer and snuffled gently at her tail.
“With you here,” the old, broken voice had told her, “the man forgets sometimes to remember.”
She finally knew what she had to do.
22. Being Human
Ryan's parents were away. It was a perfect opportunity to practice as much as they wanted with no one complaining, so Dorian was annoyed to see that Steve and Ryan seemed more interested in bullshitting, then eating everything in sight, then playing video games. The band was always going to suck at this rate, and Dorian finally stalked into the kitchen and leaned irritably on the counter, staring out the window at the lashing rain. He couldn't even return home until Steve decided he was ready to drive back. He couldn't sit on the beach getting soaked, jumping at every flicker of light on the water, constantly imagining that each shifting reflection was a long silvery green tail or a pale reaching hand just about to break through. The shore was almost completely free of clinging ice now, and still Luce didn't come. Maybe she was dead or maybe she just didn't care anymore...
“Heya.” It was Zoe, of course. She'd come up behind him and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Dorian? Are you okay?”
Dorian felt like snapping at her and almost instantly realized that he wanted to lash out because he was mad at Luce. It wasn't Zoe's fault that his crazy mermaid girlfriend had either abandoned him or else gone and gotten herself killed. Dorian glanced over his shoulder. Zoe's sleeve had slipped back, and just for an instant Dorian could see her bare arm for the first time, blotched here and there with little round white scars. They might have been left by the tip of a burning cigarette.
Maybe she was one of those girls who maimed themselves to prove how punk they were? Zoe caught his look and jerked her hand away, and the huge fuzzy sweater flopped back into place. She was staring down now, but the tension on her face seemed like a warning not to say anything. After a moment's hesitation Dorian decided to ignore the warning. Zoe was so close that her body grazed against his as he turned to f
ace her. She wouldn't look at him, but she didn't step back either.
“Did you do that to yourself?” Dorian asked. “Your arm?”
“Did you like to throw yourself down the stairs as a kid?” Zoe's voice was hostile, and she was glaring off to the side. But she was standing even closer now, tipped so that her cheek was less than an inch from Dorian's shoulder. Dorian thought of putting his arms around her—just as a friend, of course—but then he stayed where he was.
“I wasn't trying to be a jerk, Zoe...” He'd said the wrong thing, Dorian realized. And the fact that it was wrong carried implications he was barely willing to think about.
“Well, if you didn't have some serious brain damage, you wouldn't ask me that!” Zoe sounded furious, but even so she suddenly pressed in and hugged him, nestling her face against his chest. Her body felt almost feverish compared to Luce's sleek chill. “If you're going to keep asking me stupid questions, we should really go somewhere else. I don't want Steve and Ryan to hear this...”
Dorian considered this. His brain was humming with disbelief at how horrible life could be, with vague boiling anger at whoever had hurt her and at the relentless emptiness of the world where he somehow kept on living. But for all Zoe's aggressive tone, he thought, she obviously wanted to talk in privacy. “Okay.”
She caught his hand and towed him toward the little back foyer then up the stairs. It was a small house with a bedroom at each end of a narrow hallway: the one Ryan shared with his little brother to the right, their parents' room on the left. Zoe headed left and Dorian followed, feeling a little awkward now. She shut the door behind them and Dorian stared around the wood-paneled room. It was crowded with oversized furniture and knickknacks. He stood to one side as Zoe unlaced her paint-spattered boots, tossing them across the floor, and then scooted to the center of the big double bed. After a moment he sat down, trying to strike the right balance: far enough back that she wouldn't think he was hitting on her, close enough that it wouldn't seem cold. The bedspread under them was avocado green with sprouting tufts of yarn. Zoe was looking down, her freshly pink-dyed hair dragging in front of her eyes. She was twisting the tufts a little nervously. “So. What other fucked-up things do you want to ask me?”