The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  She must come home.

  She is, for better or for worse, very strong. As strong as Fand was, though the time has not yet come to speak of Fand. Strong enough to will herself into frigid water when she knows that it is water she needs. Strong enough to resist the pull of immersion because immersion means death. Trapped, then, by her own strength, between the water and the land.

  All the others gave in long before. Kathleen is older already than her mother, Moira, was when she left her husband and her baby daughter sleeping and walked into the sea. She drowned standing up, only a few yards from the shore.

  We heard her coming, and we watched, for we could do no more: the small, slender woman clambering barefoot over a rocky stretch of shoreline to reach the sea. She staggered, off balance because of the stones in her pockets, catching herself on one rock as she moved to grip the next with her toes. She had red hair like a cloud or a puff of seaweed. It floated around her all the way to her waist. Tears ran down her cheeks but she made no sound until she reached the water, and then she let her breath out in a whimper. Her feet hurt so much. The cold, lapping touch of the water eased the pain. She walked out into the sea and the stones in her pockets helped her to keep walking until the water was over her head. Everything around her was cloudy, her hair floating into her face and the light from above yellow-green. She walked forward into darker water and waited, immersed.

  We cast a gleaming green net for her and brought her down to the bottom. Her eyes were still open, her lips parted to let the water in. We took her fine, soft hair that curled and rippled in the deep currents. We wove her youth into it, and her clear, high voice that was like the sound of a flute, and also her despair. Then we let her go. Black silt rose up and settled, and the sea lettuce enclosed her.

  Moira would have said that the sea called to her, but the sea calls no one. At its depths where it is blackest and coldest and truest in its nature, the water is neither hungry nor needy for life or warmth or quick-moving creatures like ourselves. The water just is, like the implacable old mountains Above, against which people fling themselves and up which they crawl, as though the mountain itself must tremble under their fumbling feet. The mountain does not care. Nor does the sea. What Moira felt was her own need, the same need that has driven them all, first Fand, who knew what she had done, and then those who followed her, who were not so fortunate: Victoria, Muirin, Ceara, Caolinn, Deirdre, Moira.

  And now Kathleen.

  We have a chance to reach her now such as we have not had in a long time. She will be swimming in clear water, amidst shells leached so utterly of life and color that a finely honed spell of summoning might run through them like a current. We shall not overreach our power. We shall not try to do too much. All she need do is listen, and hear us.

  Come home, Kathleen. You do not know your own story, nor that you have a choice in it. Come home so we can give you the knife, still as sharp as when we forged it, sharp as the choices it offers. Come home.

  KATHLEEN

  Aria for Soprano with Choral Intrusion

  We cross the Sanibel Causeway in late afternoon and I lean out the window, yearning toward the water. The bridge skims so close that I imagine that I could reach out and touch the rippling surface as we speed past. The smell in the car is sweet and wet, cut flowers and rain, and sunlight flashes back up from the water, broken into splinters of color. My eyes tear up but I can’t stop staring. It’s been so long since I’ve been this close to the ocean, nearly a year. How did I stay away so long?

  I am crying. I don’t realize it until Harry touches my face to blot a tear.

  “I should shut the window,” I say, but Harry stops me.

  “Leave it open,” she says. “The air feels good.”

  I can feel it on my skin, in my hair, which is tangling in the sticky air and starting to cling to my cheeks and neck. And I can almost taste the water if I breathe in deeply and then close my mouth. The flavor on my tongue is salty, the taste of the sea.

  “Good Lord,” Harry says, and I wrench my eyes from the water to follow her gaze to the road ahead. The entrance to the resort is banked with hibiscus on either side, with the name carved into a stucco sign in elegant script. Once through the gates we wind past palm trees, golf courses, swimming pools, ornamental gardens, and tennis courts on our way to the main building to pick up our key. Harry leans into me, her breath stirring my hair.

  “Wow,” she murmurs. “This place goes on forever. And the flowers . . . Toto, I don’t think we’re in Boston anymore.”

  “You need a flower in your hair,” I tell her, “and then you’ll forget all this nonsense you’re spouting about this place—what do you call it?—‘Boston.’ It sounds very grim and depressing and I’m sure you’re making it up.”

  Harry laughs. “Do I get to put flowers in your hair too?”

  “Only white ones. Everything else will clash.”

  At the front desk, waiting for our key, I am like a child. I can smell the ocean, hear the ocean. I even caught a glimpse of it around the corner of the building when the car dropped us off. I bounce on my toes, spin around in little circles; I cannot keep still.

  Harry shakes her head at me. “You’re adorable,” she says. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re so excited. I mean, I knew about you and water—I thought I knew about you and water—but now I see that I had no idea.”

  “You make it sound like we’re having an affair.”

  “What, you and the ocean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well . . .” She turns her back to the counter and leans on it, grinning at me. “Are you?”

  A family—mom, dad, three kids, inflatable swimming toys, towels—invades the front lobby on their way out to the pool. I shudder at the thought. Why, especially with the sea so close, would anyone deliberately subject themselves to water leached of its softness and smell? At some point when I was in elementary school, Robin signed me up for swim lessons at an indoor pool. My therapist at the time had suggested that any water would satisfy me. After the first lesson, I hid in a locker in the ladies’ room and wouldn’t come out until the teacher sent Robin in to talk to me. I made him promise not to bring me back. I’ve avoided swimming pools ever since, but even now the merest whiff of chlorine makes me gag.

  Still, this family has the right idea: they are all barefoot. I kick off my ballet flats. Better. I stuff the shoes in the outside pocket of my carry-on.

  “I can fit yours in the other pocket,” I offer to Harry.

  “I’ll leave mine on for now,” she says. “Somebody has to be the adult here.”

  I stick my tongue out at her and she laughs at me again. Then the woman returns with our key and paperwork and points to a motorized cart, already loaded with our bags, waiting for us in the driveway. We loop around the cul-de-sac in front of the main building and head down a smaller road toward the beach. The driver points out our block of condos on the right, but straight ahead is the water. It’s a vivid Florida ocean here, the blue as bright against the white beach as the flowers—in pink and purple and orange—are bright against their backdrop of green. I am out of the cart while it is still moving, and I don’t know if my movement precedes or follows Harry’s murmur to me to “Go, just go. I’ll catch up.”

  I run down to the water and into the water and I only stop then because the relief of feeling it on my feet makes me reel.

  “Colder than you were expecting, huh?” a man asks, sounding amused, but I don’t even register his face. He’s standing in the surf next to me and talking about how even though it is Florida it’s also only March, and the way the tides and currents move, this water is actually cooler than water farther up the coast . . . It is cold, but not the gasping cold of the Atlantic Ocean in New England. And I’ve gone swimming in the pewter-colored water off Nantucket in every month of the year, gone out when the few other people on the beach shuddered as they watched me plunge in.

&nbs
p; I wade out farther and the man’s voice fades away. The sun on the endless, glinting blue surface of the water is too bright, the light where the two meet hard and sharp and sparkling. I look down, and the water is clear enough that I can see my jeans, heavy and black, and my bare white feet beneath them. When I am far out enough to pick my feet up off the bottom, I unfasten the jeans and kick them off, shrug off my sweater and shirt, shimmy out of my underwear, and duck my head under. At last. Immersion.

  Naked, I dive under and swim out into deep water, behind even the biggest swells of surf, where I have to come up for air. I stroke the water with my feet and hands and it strokes back, the cold current pulling at my feet and ankles. I give in and go down again. I never close my eyes underwater if I can help it. I’d rather blink against the salt sting and be able to see where I am down here. The sand is still white beneath me, as white as an endless new carpet, no seaweed or small plants to break it up. On the plane Harry read to me about the island being famous for its seashells and about how people come here just to collect them. She joked about taking up seashell crafts, making picture frames or vases. There are shells and pieces of shell everywhere, shifting slightly in the sand as the tide moves over them, as if settling themselves more comfortably. I surface for a breath, then swim straight down to the bottom to pick up a conch shell.

  I have a whole collection of these at home. Harry will tease me for picking up another one. I push my hair off my face and tread water. The sunlight seems already to have bleached the shell from the color and sheen of a pearl to the colorless white of a clean bone, but for the pleated curve of the interior, which is pink and satiny. I tuck my fingers inside so I can hold it in one hand and swim with the current for a while, paralleling the beach but not moving any closer to shore. The sun will be setting soon, but it still burns on my cheeks and my shoulders wherever my hair has not mantled them. I am not swimming toward anything, but, with some effort, I am not swimming away from anything either. Not the white beach I can still see out of the corner of my eye, nor the people on it, who I always try to pretend will have forgotten all about me, so that when it is time to come in, I will be able to slip past the “only an idiot would swim out that far” line that they’ve drawn in the water with their eyes and join the rest of them in the shallower water, all of us floundering together up onto the stinging sand.

  Of course my little attempts at camouflage rarely work. I’ve learned, over the years, to pay attention to whistling sounds or amplified yelling, so that a lifeguard doesn’t actually get into a boat or onto a surfboard to “rescue me.” Even so, I have their attention. Maybe it’s the red hair, hard to miss out here in the middle of the water. Whatever it is, whenever I give up and swim back to the beach, people come over to me: “I thought you were heading out to sea!” “Are you crazy? Swimming that far out all alone?” “Are you a triathlete?” And I smile vaguely and say that I just love the ocean. I know that they are afraid of the sea and they know that I’m not afraid of it and that makes them more scared for me or of me, because . . . well, because you ought to be afraid of the sea. The sea can kill you.

  I do feel, for a moment, small and hollow when I realize how far out I am in the water. It’s a weird sensation, like I’ve just made a wrong turn on my way to a place I know, a wonderful, safe, familiar place, and now instead of being there, I’m nowhere. I’ve felt it before and it’s always bad, like vertigo or reaching out across the bed for your lover to find her gone.

  I turn my back on the sea and swim toward the beach—a little closer, anyway, close enough to make out Harry standing in the surf, watching me. She is holding something in her arms—my discarded clothes—and even from here I can tell that she is holding herself stiffly, the way she does when she senses trouble. Like I’m about to crumple in a heap on the floor and refuse to go to class because my feet hurt too much. Or like I’ve emerged from a practice session talking a mile a minute and singing full voice in the hallway because I’ve taken a pain pill without telling anyone and washed it down with too much caffeine on an empty stomach. Times when she has to manage me.

  Well, she can’t come manage me now. She can’t make me come out. I wave to her. She’s still dressed in the khakis and navy blue cotton sweater she wore on the plane and she could be a page out of a J.Crew catalog. The wind is playing with her hair, blowing the short blond curls in her face as she tries to wring out my jeans. She must have gone into the condo already, because she has a towel over her shoulder. Of course she would have thought of that.

  I swim farther in and wave to her again, showing off my shell, but when my feet brush the bottom I stop. I will go to her soon. Just not yet. I go under again and focus on how good the water feels under my hair, lifting it off my neck and shoulders so that its weight no longer tugs my head back. It’s a discomfort I don’t even notice until it’s gone. I close my eyes and feel the water on my eyelids, just a faint pressure, and the drag when I open my eyes again. I turn toward the open sea again, one cupped hand still holding the conch, and pull the water apart like a curtain, kicking my legs behind me. I used to swim like this for hours, coming up for air only when I absolutely had to, deliberately keeping my back to the shore, and to Robin waving me in.

  He is so protective that I wonder sometimes why I don’t chafe at his concern the way I chafe at Harry’s. Of course, he’s my father, not my girlfriend. And he reveals himself in ways that wouldn’t be obvious to someone who didn’t know him, or me. Like the house in Philadelphia, which he bought when I was in college, and which he kept calling his “dream house” and teasing me about over the phone—how there was a room in it for me, but if I didn’t come home often enough he was going to turn it into a music library. It wasn’t until I spent my first summer break there that I saw through him. The room is painted blue and green in gradually intensifying shades down the walls, like you’re going deeper into the water as you get closer to the floor: custom-painted room, with blue lights and blackout curtains and my own bathroom with a sunken tub big enough to submerge in.

  The house is also only fifteen minutes from one of the best psychiatric hospitals in the country, although of course I didn’t know that when I first came home that summer. I’m sure Robin knew, though, before he bought the place. There are things we don’t talk about, my father and I, because it’s always been just the two of us and we don’t need to say anything. And then there are the other things we don’t talk about. Water. The sea. The pain in my feet and my mouth. My mother and the pain she felt in her feet and in her mouth until she drowned herself to be free of it.

  In place of memories of my mother, I have only the few pictures Robin has, and those not very good. His favorite is a Polaroid that’s been leached of color over the years so that it’s practically sepia-toned. In it Moira stands beside the crib Robin has just put together, cradling her incongruously rounded belly. She is clearly delicately built, her arms thin, collarbones hollow, fragile even in late pregnancy. The expression on her face could be the half-smile of a shy teenage girl—she was only twenty when I was born, after all, and self-conscious about being a freckled redhead. Robin says she didn’t know she was pretty or believe anyone who told her so. She could also be smiling as much as she is able, which is only halfway, a smile attenuated by the strain of concealing despair.

  She was dead just a year later.

  When I was sixteen, I finally asked Robin the obvious question. “Did Moira have pain like I do?”

  He shook his head miserably. “I don’t know for sure. She had days when . . . when she wouldn’t talk to me. When you were little, when you first started complaining about your feet hurting—I made some connections. She was so quiet anyway, Kath.”

  But she knew what would happen to me. She had to know. She knew, she felt it, and she left anyway, didn’t even warn us.

  Damn. I’ve bumped blindly into this train of thought, like a fish nosing through dark water. I surface abruptly, treading water, and shake my hair back. The conch shell is an awkward
burden in my hand. I hold it up and explore its strangeness, the abrupt unfolding of one texture from the other at the edge of the inside pleat, from rough to silky. I put it to my ear to hear its whispery echo of the sea—

  Come home.

  The voice is right in my ear, as though the woman is leaning over my shoulder. I jerk the shell away from my ear and spin around, abruptly aware of how far I am from shore. The sunset splinters on the water, blinding me, but still I can tell there’s no one there. Yet I heard the voice. The only other explanation is so stupid that I put the shell to my ear again.

  Come home.

  A different voice, also a woman’s, and then another and another while my treading legs lose their rhythm and I sink down into the water, where the voices grow louder—

  Come home come home come home.

  I drop the shell and kick out for the shore in the same motion, swimming away from the voices—

  Come home come home come home.

  The problem is that the voices are not in my head, or in the shell anymore. The shell is behind me, turning as it falls and settling into the sand, and I feel a pang of loss almost as sharp as physical pain. Why did I let it go? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Come home come home come home.

  Except that when I dropped it, I didn’t know the voices would follow me. It’s as if the shell was just a homing device, some way of locking onto me, and now the voices trail me through the water, murmuring, as if the women speaking are so close behind me that if I just turned and glanced over my shoulder there they’d be—

  Come home come home come home.

  Nope, nobody there, the voices are still behind me and around me, each one imperative, but all of them together—I can’t count how many there are, there’s a young one and an old one with a quaver to it and an impatient one and a gentle one and one that maybe wants to laugh, that thinks this is funny—loop and lap one another into a single urgent cadence—