by Ann Claycomb
“I don’t know,” Robin said. “I think she must have finally gotten rid of it, maybe even because she was afraid she might use it. For several months, before she died, she sort of slowly broke down. She cried in her sleep, cried when she nursed the baby.” His throat felt raw. He picked up his glass and took a sip, though there was nothing left but water from the melting ice. “When I packed up her things after she died I didn’t find the knife anywhere.”
“So she got rid of it,” Harry said. “But you don’t know for sure that it was the same knife her mother used, the one that ‘went back where it came from.’”
“Unless that’s not what she meant,” Robin said. “Unless she meant that someone—maybe her father—put the knife back where it belonged when he found his wife’s body, and there isn’t any mystery at all.”
“But there is!” Harry cried. She counted on her fingers. “Caolinn kills herself, that’s one, then Deirdre kills herself, that’s two, and then Moira, that’s three—three suicides of women in the same family line, three generations in a row, all right after they’ve had babies, all using water.”
“Harry,” Robin said gently, “as for the ‘using water,’ it was a coastal village where everyone knew the sea could kill. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“But Kathleen’s obsessed with the sea! Maybe they were too! Was Moira?” She was so frustrated at his obtuseness that Robin began to feel angry in return. Did she really think he had never thought of all this, never tried to make sense of it?
“There’s no answer here!” he snapped. “Yes, Moira was obsessed with the sea. Kathleen could tell you that herself, just like she told me when she was a little girl, how she didn’t think Mommy wanted to die, just that Mommy wanted to be under the sea where it didn’t hurt anymore. Was Deirdre obsessed with the sea? I don’t know! Was Caolinn? I’ve no idea. And I’ve thought that it must matter, that it must make some kind of sense, but it doesn’t except in the obvious way. They were all depressed, suicidally depressed. That’s a genetic condition, a documented one, and all it tells us is that they didn’t get help. But Kathleen’s gotten help and she’ll get more, as much as she needs.”
“Even ECT?” Harry asked.
He jerked as though she’d slapped him. “Which side are you on here, exactly?”
She drew a sobbing breath and put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said through her fingers.
Robin said nothing. He wished the waitress would come back so he could order another damn drink, but she was probably avoiding their table now, not wanting to get into the middle of whatever this was.
After a moment Harry murmured, “I have to go to the bathroom. Please don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Robin said, surprised, but she was already out of her seat and hurrying to the back of the bar.
The waitress came by to clear their dishes and leave the check.
“Hard, isn’t it?” she said, and when Robin glanced up at her blankly she jerked her head at Harry’s empty chair. “Kids. My eldest went through a terrible stage when she was that age. How old is your girl there, twenty-five, twenty-six? I thought it’d be a miracle if mine made it to thirty, seriously. And now”—she leaned across the table to get the bread basket, a reflective smile on her face—“she’s got two terrific kids, is married to a sweetheart of a guy, lives out in Beverly, and works with autistic children. And if you’d told me five years ago that’d be my daughter I’d have laughed in your face.” She turned her smile at Robin. “You want another drink?”
“No,” he said, “thank you.” He didn’t bother to correct her about Harry. He pulled his credit card out absently and slid it into the folder with the bill. A miracle if she made it to thirty. Kathleen was twenty-four. Biancini, damn him, seemed to think it was a miracle that she’d made it that far, and why shouldn’t he? Biancini didn’t even know about Moira, dead at twenty-one, or about Deirdre or Caolinn—how old had they been when they died? Harry thought it mattered; Robin wondered if she could possibly guess how determined he was that it not matter, that those deaths didn’t have to mean anything to Kathleen.
Harry appeared over his shoulder, put her coat on first, then sat back down. She was shivering again.
“Are you all right?” Robin asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “They had a window open in the bathroom, so I’m cold but . . .” She leaned in across the table, her face tense with contained excitement.
“Robin,” she said, “you have to take her to Ireland.”
He could only stare at her, but she plunged on as if he’d offered a verbal objection.
“I know it sounds crazy but listen—these women in her family, if it’s a small community as you say, well, there might still be something we’re missing, some genetic disease, some predisposition. Even if it is just depression, they all killed themselves after they had babies so maybe postpartum blues pushed them over the edge, right? Even that’s important for Kathleen to know. She can decide to not have children or to get special treatment if she gets pregnant. The point is that there might be more family history that you don’t know, or that you know but you didn’t think was important before.”
“Harry—”
“And there’s another thing too,” she said. “I don’t know what it means, but I think it would help her to go to Ireland. I get why you didn’t want to go back but maybe there are other reasons to go there too. When we were on the plane coming home from Florida, she was having one of those things, you know, where she’s just barely keeping it together and everything’s hurting, and I showed her a picture of the sea taken from the top of cliffs off the coast of Ireland and she grabbed it from me. She kind of conked out for most of the flight”—she faltered for a moment—“I think she took something, Benadryl or Dramamine maybe, because she was really out of it for hours, but she wouldn’t let go of that picture.”
Robin resisted the urge to rub his eyes. He was abruptly exhausted, as much by what was coming as by what had already passed.
“The Cliffs of Moher,” he said. “She told me about it.”
Harry nodded. “That’s near where you’re from, isn’t it? I thought it was. I asked Kathleen but she couldn’t—she wouldn’t—say anything. But couldn’t you take her there? Take her and let her see the real thing, the cliffs and the town where you grew up, where she was born.”
“Ireland’s not her home,” Robin said, trying to keep his voice even. Hadn’t he just had this conversation a week ago?
“It is,” Harry said, implacable now. “It’s where she’s from. I don’t know why she never asked you before why you’ve never gone back—”
“Yes you do,” he said. “She never asked me because she thought she knew the answer—that I couldn’t bear to go back because of her mother—and she didn’t want to hurt me. And now it seems I’ve hurt her—possibly put her in the hospital—by not answering the damn question.”
“Oh no!” Harry cried. “You didn’t, it wasn’t that conversation that started this! It started in Florida, I told you—”
Robin cut her off. “When I told my father-in-law that I was taking Kathleen to America, do you know what he said? He said, ‘It’ll all come out the same in the end.’ He was holding her when he said it, holding his granddaughter and matter-of-factly predicting—I don’t even know what he was predicting,” Robin said, though he could tell from Harry’s face that she knew he was lying. Of course he knew. They both knew. Harry knew as much of the story of Kathleen’s family history as Robin himself did now. “But I left with no intention of taking her back.”
“Of course not,” Harry whispered. “Of course you couldn’t. But don’t you see how all this time you’ve been protecting Kathleen? And at the same time, she’s been trying not to hurt you, not asking you anything about Ireland or about her mother or anyone in her family?”
“And somehow our little unstated pact has stopped working, is that what you’re saying?”
Harry flinched, but didn�
��t back down. “I guess that is what I’m saying. I just think, what if you go back and try to find out if there’s more to the story of her family. I can’t think what it could be, any more than you can, but what if there is something, something so simple and so clear when you’re there—” She sat back, trembling with urgency inside her coat. “It could make this whole thing—the ECT—it could open up some other options, that’s all. I mean, it probably won’t, but it could.”
“I see what you’re saying,” he said. “I do see.”
Harry drew in a breath as if afraid to hope that she’d made her case. Robin felt himself suddenly inclined to smile at her intensity. It was almost Kathleen-like. He also thought that this was a lover’s errand she was proposing, not a father’s. Never mind the fact that he didn’t want to go back at all, wanted to leave Ireland to the boy who had not yet outlived his young wife, who had never imagined leaving the rocks just off the coast where the seals sunned themselves, groaning and barking, or the sea that was black in some lights and jade green in others but never blue, not even under a blue sky. Never mind, either, that all of his protective energy toward his daughter had been focused, all of her life, on keeping her away from places and knowledge that might cause her pain. The fact was that Harry proposed slaying one monster for Kathleen by forcing her to face another and that was a lover’s role.
“I bet you like Don Quixote, don’t you?” he asked aloud.
Harry blinked. “The novel or the opera—and which opera?”
Robin shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t go anywhere right now. I’ve got a deadline on this opera commission. You take her. I’ll buy the tickets.”
Act 2
And so the time has come to untell and tell the tale of Fand, parts of which many of those Below, her own people, have forgotten.
First, to untell, which is delicate work, like picking apart tightly knotted netting . . .
In the story told Above the sea seems a mere wading pool, and desire is leached of its dark power, painted as nothing more than chaste affection.
The Little Mermaid sought out the sea witch. Thus we are diminished from the many to the one and our magic labeled black and evil.
And when the mermaid failed to kill the prince and save herself, she rose into the air, her foolishness and her weakness and her rejection of all the magic offered to her turning her into something called a Daughter of Air, who flitted ghost-like above the human world. One day, the teller promised, the Little Mermaid earned an immortal soul and ascended even higher above the sea, into the ether that those Above call heaven.
That knot opens easily.
She did not ascend anywhere. She lies where she fell, onto the rocks and into the sea, her bones picked clean long ago by the ragged claws of scavengers.
Her voice was the voice of deep blue-black ocean currents: what a bargain that was, for a mere pair of legs. We wove it into a net to catch shipwrecked sailors in and ease the task of tugging them down to the bottom of the sea. They hear it and they stop their struggles to rise Above. Their blind eyes close and their clenched fists open and they drift down like weary children glad of the chance to rest.
She was called Maeve by the prince who loved her and betrayed her. The name means “fragile” in Gaelic, and it was not poorly chosen for her. But when she proved stronger than she appeared, surviving his betrayal, she discarded both the name and its meaning and instead called herself Fand, after an Irish goddess who married Mannanán Mac Lir, the god of the sea.
She was the eighth daughter, not the seventh, nor the sixth, though some tales would have it so. The Above-lore that sinks this far down is as murky as the waters themselves, but we know that seven is the magic number Above: the seventh son of the seventh son shall find an adventure on the seventh day . . . and so forth. There’s much of the lore from Above that wavers and shifts and speaks of the inconsistencies that must be accounted for in a world where the currents of the air can blow the beauty from an orchard full of blossoms in an hour. We’ve a different world here, and she was the eighth daughter, the loveliest by the standards of any world.
She was taken Above to see the world when she was twice eight years old, sixteen, and about to be wed. Most of us would no sooner explore that dry world than those with two legs would explore ours, but she was entranced by the silken feel of air against her skin, by the light from the sky that splintered into diamonds on the crests of the waves and stung—she had no word for “burned”—her upturned face. Then too there was the boy, riding high in a great ship that bore down on her like a whale and might have cut her in two had one of her sisters not pulled her under, out of the way.
He was a splendid boy, tall and strong, with eyes a bright, glinting shade of blue that is as foreign to us as the colors of bird feathers. We would have been happy to have him when the storm brought so many of his fellows to us, along with all that the ship had held. Some such debris we treasure, like the thick bottles made of glass and the fine small boxes or chains made of silver or gold. Much of it we have no use for: their clothes and books, weapons and foodstuffs. These things float down to the ocean floor and are left alone, save for a few fish that may nudge them curiously. In a few months or years they are gone as if they never existed.
We would have liked the boy, but she had been watching him, even that night, through the driving rain from Above and the rising waves from Below. She caught him almost as soon as he hit the water and swam him to dry land. Who would have guessed she had it in her, that quiet little girl! But there he lay, stretched out on the sand, alive and safe while all his men and possessions swirled around us. And it was not long after his rescue, when more of his people came for him and she had to dive under or be seen, that she sought us out.
We were expecting her. The draught was brewed, cooled, and sealed in one of those same fine bottles that broken ships spill into the sea. The payment was her voice for her new legs, and she hesitated only a moment before agreeing. She was a fool, of course, but so beautiful that we really did think she had a chance. Hair that had a deep, murky violet gleam to it in our world, but shone like the heart of a fire up Above, long enough to wrap about her exquisite nakedness like a cloak when first they found her. Those big eyes, that white, white skin, her body like supple sea grass that bends and sways and seems to dance when the water flows over it. No girl from Above could move like she did, every tilt of her head sending her heavy hair rippling around her, every step light and graceful as a trickle of water from a silver cup.
The man who wrote her story into his book of “fairy tales” would have it that the pain was another payment. But he did not understand how magic works. To exact a second, terrible payment for a spell already bought: we would not have done so. The pain was the pain, is all. It was inevitable. We could not have given her legs and feet that did not cause her agony with every step. To do so would have meant changing her essence, making her into something she was not, and that is a great and terrible magic that we cannot work, would not work even if we could. We tried to warn her, to explain to her what the pain would be: Every step you take will feel as if you are treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow.
There is much of the tale told Above that is distorted, misunderstood, poorly told. But that line is true. That is what we told her. Still she put out her tongue to be sliced off, clutched the green glass bottle in her hand, and swam to the surface to drink it.
She was weeping from the pain when they found her washed up on the shore, naked beneath her tangled hair. Her white skin had an iridescence that they could not tear their eyes from, a sheen like the inside of a scallop shell. They were men of the prince’s court, several courtiers who counted themselves his friends, with their servants. She cringed away from their hard, hot hands, so they gave her a cloak to wrap herself in and bore her between them on another cloak as befitted the princess that she was, though of course, they did not know that. When they presented her to the prince and she lifted up he
r head long enough to utter a wordless cry and twine her arms about his neck, he cradled her like a child and took her immediately to his bed. Hours later he sought out those who had found her and demanded to know if they had touched her. She had bled and she had wept, but she had also clung and writhed in his embrace. He was maddened at the thought that he might not have been the first.
The prince carried a dagger in his boot that had been given him by his first sword master. It was a highly ornamental piece but the blade was keen. Feeling its edge at their throats, the prince’s men swore that they had only done their duty, only saved the girl’s life. They did not confess what their thoughts had been as they had borne her up from the beach, but then, he did not ask them if they had wanted her, only if they had taken her.
The story known Above says nothing of this, nor of the fact that Maeve was the prince’s concubine, his favored bed partner from the very first hour she left the sea until an hour before he wed another. But the truth seeps in at the edges: “The prince said she should remain with him always, and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion.” The tale makes her his pet, and so she was. But she was also his lover, and he was as much in thrall to her—to the strangeness and beauty of her hair and her skin and her long-lashed eyes—as any mortal man has ever been in thrall to a mermaid. She was a fool to go to him, but he was a fool too to think he could ever love another after her.
Perhaps, indeed, the prince did not think at all when, three years after Maeve came to him, he sent a ruby ring to the princess who had been promised to him since they were children. Perhaps he thought that Maeve would recognize the difference between wife and lover and count herself lucky to be the one who made him cry out and bruise her with the ferocity of his grip in the darkness, while his wife slept alone in her chamber across the corridor. Perhaps he saw his wedding as a necessity, a strategic move, not as a betrayal of the woman who loved him.