The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  There is, of course, no way that he could have known that in marrying one woman he was killing another. Maeve could not tell him, however sad and expressive her eyes, however cold her hands, however tremulous her mouth when he kissed her as he rose from their bed on the morning of his wedding and smiled at the sight of his new wedding suit, pressed and waiting for him. He would be dazzling in it and he knew it.

  Maeve watched the wedding with the rest of the court, until the heavy, dusty scent of the lilies the bride favored made her gag and she had to slip away. She rose from the chamber pot still shaking with nausea and saw on the windowsill the dagger her sisters had given her. She did not remember leaving it there, to glint in the last red light of the sun. The shadows in its filigreed hilt refused to catch the light and reminded her of all she had lost, of the depths in which she had cultivated her garden, of the beauty of her flowers in the dark water.

  She wiped her mouth, pushed back her hair. She took up the dagger. The metal felt cool and liquid, comforting and familiar as the seashells she had collected on the beach ever since she had come Above. It did not feel like she held a murder in her hand.

  She waited until moonrise, then slipped into her prince’s chamber with only silver light to guide her way. She saw that the sheets—the sheets in which she had lain with him that very morning—had been changed. The prince smiled in his sleep, his cheek against his bride’s, his face slack and easy in the aftermath of his release, and his betrayal was the worse for his failure to admit to it. Maeve raised the blade above her head and in an instant would have had him dead, his blood spraying like seawater at the base of a jagged rock, splashing her in an arc from head to toe. The castle was built beside the sea. With a simple turn and a thrust of her arms against the windowsill she could have tumbled back to the water even as she changed, as the frayed and broken edges of her tail knit themselves together, as her scales returned and the searing wound in her mouth sealed itself off and ceased to give her pain.

  We waited for her return all through that night. As the sun rose and neither Maeve nor the blade that we had made for her appeared, we wondered: Had we not been clear? Had her sisters not told her truly? Had the prince perhaps awakened to stop the knife’s descent? It was many hours before we knew that she had simply turned away. By then she was gone, too far inland for us to trace her. Nor could the prince find her, though he tried.

  HARRY

  Aria for Mezzo-Soprano

  Taking Kathleen to Ireland initially seemed like a kind of shining solution to something—maybe to everything. But it was the end of March. We’d just gotten back from spring break and had six weeks of classes left before the semester was over. I had voice students to whom I was accountable, we both had performances and exams, and Kathleen wasn’t discharged from the hospital until the end of the week. She got a medical excuse for missing those classes, though Professor Menotti, Bella, sniffed over the official paperwork Kathleen handed her, tossed her scarf over her shoulder (Kath did an impression of the gesture), and warned Kathleen “not to confuse ethereal with wan. The one is every lyric soprano’s goal. The other just makes the audience nervous.”

  “Did you tell her you weren’t wan on purpose?” I asked. Kathleen shrugged. She’d lost weight she didn’t need to lose, color she never had to begin with, and some of the fizzing energy I was used to seeing in her.

  Robin had gotten her discharged and off the drugs as soon as he could, against medical advice. He didn’t tell the doctors about the planned trip, just said that he’d take their recommendations for Kathleen’s care under advisement. It was three more days before she really came back to us, when she sat up, stretched, and wrinkled her nose at how lank her hair had gotten, rather than swallowing convulsively or shifting fretfully against the sheets and the restraints as soon as she was awake. The nurses wouldn’t let her shower alone, but for the most part once Robin had announced that he was taking her home, they washed their hands of her. Kapoor never came back to check on her after he spoke with Robin, only Biancini, who asked her to rate her pain level whenever he came in and made a mark on the chart when she answered, wearily, that it was decreasing day by day. I wondered why he bothered.

  I spent as much time at the hospital as I could, but I had to go to classes and rehearsals and let repairmen into the apartment. I wasn’t there when Robin told her about the electroshock. I came in a few hours later. Robin was sitting by the bed with several sheets of an orchestral score. He’d commandeered the swing table that was attached to Kathleen’s bed and was making pencil notes. Kathleen had her eyes shut and her phone in her lap. When I came in she tugged the headphones from her ears.

  “What are you listening to?” I asked.

  She handed me the headphones and I held them close to listen. “I don’t know . . . Tell me—wait. It’s not Wagner but that’s Birgit Nillson, isn’t it?”

  Kathleen smiled. She’d gotten so thin that I could see a tracery of lavender veins along her collarbone. I handed back the headphones and touched her cheek.

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  She shrugged my hand away. “It’s Fidelio,” she said. “I figured I needed an opera with a happy ending, to remind myself that those things do happen, you know, sometimes. Of course usually everyone dies, but—”

  Robin spoke without lifting his head from the score. “Kathleen.”

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Would I look good with a big white streak in my hair? You know, sort of Bride of Frankenstein after the jolt of electricity?”

  I glanced at Robin.

  “Kathleen has decided to arm herself with black humor today,” he said. “I’m finding it charming, myself, but then I find everything about my daughter charming.”

  “Especially my tendency to try to drown myself in the bathtub?” Kathleen asked brightly. Robin shook his head and bent over his score again.

  “Did he tell you what we thought you might do instead?” I asked. “About Ireland?”

  “Yes.” She began to carefully wrap her headphone cord around the phone.

  “And?”

  “I think—” She hesitated, cut her eyes at her father. “I think it’s a good idea. I think. And not just to avoid the other wonderful idea that’s been proposed to me by the medical community. I mean, I’ve never been.” She looked at Robin again and this time he met her gaze. He had the same expression on his face that he’d worn when he’d talked to me at the restaurant a few nights before: guarded and slightly alarmed, but also resigned, as if he didn’t like what was happening but didn’t see any alternative to it. “Some of the things he told me, about my family, my mother, and my grandmother—you said you told Harry all of this already.”

  “I did.”

  “Weird, isn’t it?” Kathleen said.

  “That’s one way to think about it,” I said. “Maybe it actually all makes sense when you have the whole story.”

  “It’s not like we’re going to be able to find that just by going,” Kathleen said. “That’s too easy. But still, I want to see it.”

  “So we’re going,” I said. “As soon as the semester’s over we’re going to Ireland.”

  BUT OF COURSE the semester took over for both of us for a while. The conservatory puts on a major operatic production each semester, along with concert opera and collections of scenes. Kathleen had sung the lead in Manon Lescaut in the fall so she hadn’t gotten a major role in the spring production of Rigoletto. Amusingly enough—at least to Kathleen—Professor Menotti, who was constantly picking at her in their private lessons, had been incensed when the cast list went up and Kathleen wasn’t Gilda. Kathleen had pointed out that there were other talented singers in the program and it was only fair to allow everyone an opportunity. Bella said—famously, now, since either Kathleen or our friend Tom loved to quote the line at parties—that “fair has no place in opera.”

  I’d sung in a concert performance of Les Contes de Hoffman in the fall. This spring I was working on a scene from Vaness
a that included one of the saddest, loveliest arias for mezzo: “Must the Winter Come So Soon?” It’s a lament for the kind of encroaching, inevitable sense of loss that winter brings and that the singer mourns even as it’s happening. I’ve always loved it and I felt like I was doing it justice in early rehearsals. But the first time I sang it all the way through after Kath had gotten out of the hospital, everyone went quiet when I finished. I wished I was like Kathleen or Tom and could make a joke out of the moment. I also wished that I hadn’t sung it better than before—and I knew I had—because I knew why I had. Kathleen was home and singing again and we were going to Ireland in just a few weeks. But still I was frightened. Whenever Kathleen took a shower I stayed in the bedroom where I could hear the water running and make sure she turned it off.

  Robin was making all the travel arrangements, so Kathleen and I hardly talked about Ireland at all. But Kathleen would bring it up at odd moments, saying, “I wonder if it will rain as much as everyone says it does,” as we walked home from the train station, and “I wonder if they really look like that,” as she stood in the kitchen with her spoon raised over her cereal bowl.

  “If what really look like what?”

  “The cliffs,” she said absently. She set her bowl down untouched in the sink. “The Cliffs of Moher.”

  And then one night—the first night we’d had sex since she got out of the hospital—she murmured something against my shoulder that I couldn’t make out.

  “What?” I gathered up the whole long fall of her hair and twisted it off to the side, stroked it smooth on the pillow.

  “I wish he’d taken me home before now,” she said. “I feel like he still doesn’t want me to go.”

  “Robin, you mean.”

  “And he won’t go himself.” She turned to lie half across my breast, resting her chin on her hands. Her mouth shone faintly in the dim light, wet and fragrant of both of us. “You know I want you to go,” she said, “but why won’t he?”

  “Did you ask him?”

  She shook her head. I let her hair go and it slithered back down around us with her movement. “We talk about everything except for the things we don’t talk about,” she said. “And those are things we don’t talk about at all.”

  “Do you think it’s because of your mother?”

  “No. And yes. I think he feels guilty that I know about her, about what she did, that I’ve always known. Like that’s somehow his fault. I knew before anyone could even have told me. But I think he got yelled at a lot by at least one therapist of mine who thought he’d told me about Moira. So maybe that’s why he didn’t want to tell me any of the rest.”

  “About Deirdre.”

  “And the one before.” She smiled slightly. “My lesbian great-grandmother.”

  “I think he’s been scared for you,” I said. “I think telling you that history would be the last thing he’d want to do. When he told me—it was more than hard for him. It was like he had to force himself not just to tell me but to actually remember it. Like he’d talked himself into forgetting it.”

  “They’re lovely names, aren’t they?” she asked. “Moira, Deirdre, Caolinn.”

  “Kathleen’s lovely too.”

  “Silly.” She slid down onto her side, curled up around me. When she spoke again her voice was thickening with sleep.

  “Anyway, I hope they’ll be satisfied.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. Because we’re going to Ireland,” she murmured, as if this made perfect sense. “I think that must be what they want me to do. To come home.”

  THE WEEKEND AFTER classes ended, I had to go to Martha’s Vineyard to sing at a wedding. I didn’t want Kathleen to come, knowing that we’d have to cross water to get to the island and wondering what on earth I’d do if she had a breakdown an hour before I was supposed to sing a tricky arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer and an unaccompanied “Ave Maria” to a hundred and fifty people. But I asked her if she wanted to come, carefully, trying to convey that it wouldn’t be a big deal either way. When she said that she was going to stay home and start packing, I didn’t question her, even though packing, for Kathleen, usually involved throwing things in her suitcase haphazardly: silk tops totally inappropriate for rainy weather, only one pair of jeans but two different kinds of perfume, the sturdy walking shoes I’d made her buy that hurt her feet, and no socks to wear with them.

  The church on the Vineyard was white clapboard outside and unvarnished red wood inside, the vault of the ceiling shaped exactly like the hull of a boat turned upside down. I sang to that ceiling and to the doors and windows left open to the sea air: “Maria, gratia plena.” There were masses of yellow roses on the altar and the bride was as tall and slender as Kathleen. I thought, We could get married here. Kathleen would love it. It was a shock to think it: I’d never imagined our future so clearly before. We could ride the ferry over here together. Kathleen would lean over the railing to watch the white froth the boat left in its wake, laugh at the dazzle of sun on the water. She would love this church. It was built high on a bluff and you could see the glint of the ocean from the windows all around. Maybe after Ireland was what I thought next, and knew that the trip had taken on a kind of magic power, not just in Kath’s mind but in mine.

  I took the last ferry back from the Vineyard on Saturday and got in late. The apartment was a wreck and Kathleen was in a panic because she couldn’t remember where she’d put her passport. We eventually found it curled up and stuffed inside a ballet flat in the bottom of her suitcase, which of course meant that her entire bag had to be repacked. Kathleen sat on the floor and burst into tears, trying to flatten her passport out in her hands and crying harder when it insistently rolled back up again. I finally snatched it from her and told her to just go to bed. I was tired—I’d been up early, driven almost three hours, performed, then driven back again, all of which she knew and, typical Kathleen, forgot about in the midst of her meltdown. She came out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth, calm and dry-eyed, and put her arms around me from behind while I knelt over her suitcase.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Inexcusable. How was the wedding? Was it lovely?”

  “It was,” I said. “It was beautiful. Nothing tacky to report.” I didn’t tell her about the church built like a boat or the smell of the sea in the air. I didn’t tell her about picturing her walking down the little aisle. She kept her arms around me a while, until I stopped packing and covered her hands with mine. Then she rested her cheek on my back for a minute.

  “I’m just so scared,” she said. “Scared about how much I’ve got invested in this trip.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought about it today,” she said. “If this was an audition we were flying off to and putting this kind of pressure on it, you know we’d be jinxing it.” She lifted her head. “You remember Tom’s story about his friend, the one whose family threw him a huge party before his Juilliard audition and then he walked into the audition room and threw up on the floor?”

  “Or Alyce,” I said. “Remember my voice teacher in college? Froze up at her Met audition.”

  “Oh God.”

  I leaned over to get a stack of clothes.

  “You’re not going to blow it,” I said. “There’s nothing to blow, nothing to jinx. Although it might help if you learned how to pack a suitcase.”

  She laughed, kissed me on the back of the neck, and went to bed.

  We were leaving in two days, taking a direct flight from Logan to Shannon Airport, then a bus to a town called Ennis, then another bus all the way to the west coast. Robin had offered to rent us a car, but neither one of us wanted to drive in Ireland. Kathleen was a terrible driver anyway. She was the first to admit it, and she had fears of careening right off the road and over a cliff. I just didn’t want to have the added stress of learning to drive on the left while also driving with Kathleen giving directions and possibly dealing with . . . well, with whatever else came up. So we were taking buses.

&nbs
p; We weren’t going to stay in the village where Robin and Moira had grown up, simply because there was no place where tourists could stay. It was listed in only one of the guidebooks I’d found, as “a charming remnant of an old fishing village, worth driving through on your way to Ballyvaughan, if only to catch a glimpse of a way of life that’s vanishing on Ireland’s west coast.” Alongside this blurb was a photo of a grizzled man standing by a rowboat, a length of net in one hand and a wool cap pulled down over his forehead. He was glaring at the camera.

  We were going to a town called Doolin, apparently “the music capital of Ireland.” It seemed to be one long main street lined with bed-and-breakfasts, shops, and two famous pubs, one on each end of the street and marking out the town limits. The bus line dead-ended in Doolin, for the simple reason that there was no place else to go except into the ocean. And there was a local Office of Records and Genealogy there, which was where I planned to start. I had a list of angles to try: living relatives, newspapers or other local records like obituaries, even just the correct spellings of names to plug into a Google search. Until Robin wrote the name Caolinn down for me, I’d been spelling it in my head the way it sounded: Colleen.

  We were staying for four days, booked into a gorgeous inn that was built halfway up a hillside at one end of the town and surrounded by a wide deck of gray slatted wood. It could have been a house in California overlooking the Pacific, but the website advertised kippers and blood sausage for breakfast and the owner’s name was Siobhán, so Kathleen had approved it as “Irish enough.” Robin said one of the board members at the symphony had stayed there and recommended it, although not exactly on those grounds.

  Before I zipped Kathleen’s suitcase up, I checked the local weather forecast in Doolin. It said the same thing it had said every other time I’d checked: partly cloudy, windy, chance of rain. Yet all the photos on the various tourism sites showed sunny skies, sea and sky competing for degrees of blueness, green grass like carpet running right down into the surf. I turned off the computer and went to get another sweater out of Kathleen’s drawer, then added “compact collapsible umbrella” to my running list of things we needed to buy. As I bent over the counter, I heard Kath sob once in her sleep, a single deep indrawn breath. Afterward it seemed even quieter in the apartment. I crouched on the floor near her side of the bed. She was breathing through her mouth, shallow breaths, which meant her mouth was hurting. I watched her for a while, thinking that of all the things I was worrying about, packing appropriately for the weather was the least of our problems.