The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  And really, it was not so much. She gave up her living tongue to grasp at love, for such is the price. To craft the means to kill a man, we needed only the hair of the seven royal princesses, though it is true that we sheared their long locks right to their scalps and that the eldest flinched under the blade so that a cloudy puff of blood rose from her head.

  They were no longer lovely when it was done. They gazed from one to the other and not one of them lifted a hand to touch her head. We left them rediscovering themselves in one another’s stricken gazes, eyes wide, exposed, as they learned the lengths of their necks, the shapes of their ears, the juts of their jaws.

  We made the blade, heated it until it glowed blue, then white, cooled it until it hid its fire. We sharpened it on a braid woven of her sisters’ hair, a bond so strong now that the knife-edge sparked against it. We bloodied it once, on the severed tongue of the one who was intended to wield it, and we brought it out to the princesses, her sisters, in a pearl case. For love of her they bore it to the surface of the sea, brushed off her cries of dismay at the sight of their poor bare heads, pressed the blade into her hands.

  In the story told Above the words are repeated just as they were spoken.

  “Plunge the blade into the heart of the prince,” they told her. “When the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again and you will once more be a mermaid.”

  And when she hesitated, from wonder or hope, disbelief or rejection, they crowded in around her, stroking her slender white legs with their wet hands. Nor could she find words to tell them that their fingers felt cold and alien against her skin, even as she sighed with pleasure at the water’s caress.

  “Come back to us,” said the youngest of her sisters. “Oh, little love, come back.”

  KATHLEEN

  Aria for Soprano

  Come home, come home, they said, the fucking women in the water, the ones who ruined our vacation and made me think I was crazier than I already knew I was, who got in my head and wouldn’t get out and who made me lie to Harry.

  When I saw that picture of the Cliffs of Moher, I knew what they meant but I couldn’t say anything then. How many Dramamine had I taken? I can’t remember. Harry probably knows. But it doesn’t matter, because while I was busy being crazy, seasick and crazy, Harry and Robin came up with Ireland all on their own.

  I know that Ireland is what they meant, where they wanted me to come. I know I’ve come home. It should feel like home. Instead it’s just a place, alien as any other place I’ve ever been.

  I sit at breakfast with Harry and two other women, a mother and daughter doing a walking tour of western Ireland, and push some food around on my plate so Harry will think I’m eating the chunks of rubbery melon, pieces of a grainy Irish sausage. I slice my toast into tinier and tinier triangles on my plate. The girl across from me is watching me like I’m nuts. I put the knife down, balance it on the edge of my plate. My head is pounding, my mouth hurts. When I pick up my water glass, my hand doesn’t shake, but only because I am good at hiding it. I think of Marie, the nun. She was so old and still so sad, the story of her lost love like the melodic line of her whole life, even though she’s lived now nearly seventy years without her lover, three times as long as Caolinn lived at all. I’d never thought about that before we came here, about the ones left behind. Robin has Tae but I wonder now if Moira haunts their relationship the way she haunts this place for him. And before Robin, there was my grandfather, Deirdre’s husband, who never remarried; before him, Marie; before Marie, Caolinn’s father, who brought his daughter to the mainland. I bet he never remarried either. There are as many left behind as there are lost at sea. Harry, sitting beside me, is quiet. Last night we both slept badly, not touching, in the unfamiliar bed. Now I want to touch her. I put my fingertips on the back of her hand as she forks up a piece of fruit.

  “You can’t have a lock of my hair,” I tell her. “If I don’t give you one you won’t have one to lose.”

  Everyone at the table stares at me.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, WE go to Inis Mór. I know that it is a mistake, but Harry needs to do something, and what else is left to do? She shows me pamphlets at breakfast, in full cruise-director mode, suggests that we join one of the bus tours that drive people around the island, browse the sweater shops and cafés in the villages, maybe even walk up to the ancient fortress perched high on a cliff. She does not mention checking records or hunting down family histories, but I know that’s what she wants to do. There’s a visitor’s center on Inis Mór and I’m sure we’ll end up there, Harry smiling at whoever is working at the desk and explaining that we’re just doing genealogical research and could they help us with some names and dates. She hasn’t given up, still thinks there must be some answer that we’ve come all this way to find.

  The weather is awful: cold, steady rain that blows suddenly sideways with the gusting of the wind. We walk to the pier after breakfast with our heads down. The woman in the ferry ticket office is giving out rain ponchos to people who don’t have them. Boarding the boat, it’s all I can do to navigate the slippery metal steps. I can hear the sea, and I want to stay on deck to watch it, but we all get herded into the cabin, which is horrible. It’s luxurious for what it is, I suppose, with high-backed cushioned seats and plenty of space between the rows. But the windows are so small that only someone sitting down right beside them would be able to see out. The cabin is filling up with people, including the contents of two tour buses: some German high school students and a group of older Americans who are complaining loudly about the weather. I am blocking the aisle. A woman touches my elbow, indicates the empty seats beside me. She smiles, polite, patient, and I bolt for the open door.

  The wind and the sudden surge of the motor as we cast off throw me up against the deck railing, which is slick with rain and sea spray. I grip it and hang on to keep from being swept overboard, or from diving in. It would be simple enough: put one foot up onto the lower rung, then the other up onto the top one, and plunge into the sea.

  It is the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen, a dark, dark green, not black as it appears from far away. It has a dull gleam like rough-cut quartz, across which the ferry is churning up foam that is such a pale green it’s nearly white. It seethes beneath us, around us, before it rejoins the rest of the sea a few feet out, the paler color submerging itself eagerly in the darker depths.

  Harry has come out with me. She stands under the shelter of the upper deck, her hands tucked in her pockets, her hood cinched tight around her face. One curl has escaped and keeps slapping against her cheek, resisting her efforts to tuck it back.

  “Go inside, silly,” I shout over the noise of the motor. “There’s no sense in you getting soaked just because I want to be out here.”

  “I suspect we’ll both be soaked before the day is over,” she says. “We may have to break down and buy sweaters. Makes me think this weather is just a tourist trap.”

  I try to laugh and then turn away, partly because I can’t fake it convincingly, partly because my hair is in my mouth, plastered to my cheeks, wrapped around my neck like a choker.

  I can taste the sea from the spray, thick and salty and cold, and I can hear the surging, liquid slamming of the waves against the sides of the boat. I grip the wet railing tighter, so tight it hurts my hands. Two quick steps up, it wouldn’t matter if I tripped, fell sideways, didn’t make a clean dive. I’d be in the ice-green foam and then away, beneath the waves and the wind and the grinding sound of the boat’s motor, and I could dive again and swim down, down toward home.

  I pull all my hair back from my face with one hand, tuck it down into my jacket. Water runs into the waist of my jeans, seeps through my shirt where my hair is lying against it. Harry comes up beside me, puts her hand over mine on the railing. I want to shake it off, but I don’t. This is not her fault.

  Is this how Moira felt, then? And Deirdre and Caolinn? Like they would die without the touch of this water? It washes over my feet, soak
s right through my boots and heavy socks, and it does not say a word to me. This is enough of a relief that it takes me a moment to realize that for a few minutes after each fresh wave my feet don’t hurt at all. Not at all. At first it just feels strange; it takes me a while to even identify the sensation as the cessation of pain. I put out my tongue to lick my lips and the water is like a balm.

  But my mouth, my tongue, wasn’t hurting this morning, hasn’t been bothering me since I got out of the hospital. And now, as soon as the seawater is gone, my tongue burns in my mouth, the pain as bad as it’s ever been. My feet throb too, worse and worse in between each new wash of water. It is hard to stand up; they haven’t hurt so much in years, not since I was a teenager. The water comes again—ah, God, that’s better—and recedes again, and the pain is like knives through my skin, right up into the bone.

  I sit down, fall down, on the deck, catch myself a bit on the railings. Harry bends over me, murmuring something that I can’t make out. A great wash of water breaks over me and I am wet from head to toe, soaked with this sea—

  As you were meant to be. You drink it in the way they drink in air Above. When you return to yourself you will breathe too, just as they breathe their air.

  And there they are after all, the voices again, close as if they were speaking in my ear, their words clear even as the wind tosses Harry’s away. Telling me that I have nothing to be worried about, that I won’t drown after all—

  You will. You must listen carefully, Kathleen. You will drown. You must use the blade first or you will sink into these depths as another corpse and we cannot help you.

  I don’t understand. I swallow and the taste of the sea begins to leave my mouth, the pain like a slow-moving blade seeping in to replace it. The women murmur of death and drowning and breathing water like air, and I think that perhaps what they mean—what I mean—is that I can’t fight this, this water or this pain.

  The pain is the pain, that’s all. So we told her, so we told them all. You were not meant to live like this. You must come to us soon. He will tell you how.

  Another wave, delicious feel of the icy water on my skin, running through my hair. I clamp my mouth shut against the urge to open it and drink more water. The pain is growing, bad enough that I can barely concentrate, barely listen. I cannot be these voices then, they cannot be me, even though they are in my head.

  Must come to them? Come to who? Who will show me? Show me what?

  There’s a hand on my back too heavy to be Harry’s, and an Irish voice asking if I’m ill. It’s probably one of the crew members on the ferry, though I don’t lift my head to be sure.

  “You’ll be all right with a bit of ground beneath your feet, then,” he shouts, and briefly, his hand moves to the top of my head, caresses my wet hair. “We’re almost there now, just a few more minutes.”

  Seasick. He thinks I’m seasick. If I could laugh—I shake with it anyway, with something that’s longing and laughter and incredulity all together. Because he’s wrong, of course, but also right, more right than I knew back in the airport in Florida. A whole packet of Dramamine wouldn’t ease this, because I am finally, literally, sick for the sea—my throat clenches against the pain in my mouth because I’ve been refusing to open it, refusing to let the water in again. If I don’t taste it again soon I will throw up.

  I lift my head, open my mouth on a gasp, swallow a gulp of water flung up over the side of the boat. The pain vanishes. There is a gap here, between the deck and the first rung of the deck railing, wide enough for me to fit. I grope blindly for Harry, not lifting my head from my knees, and find her hand. I grip it so tightly that I can feel the small bones moving at the base of her fingers. I am hurting her, I know I must be hurting her, but it’s either that or drown. I don’t know if she knows this or not, but she doesn’t make a sound, at least not one I can hear above the waves and the motor, and she doesn’t let go.

  WHEN WE DOCK, Harry and the crewman pick me up, help me off the ferry past murmurs of sympathy for me, poor seasick girl. The sodden red curtains of my hair hide my face, drip water on the ground as I walk between the supporting arms. I am dimly aware of being embarrassed, glad to hide behind Harry and behind my hair. But only a few yards onto dry land I am starting to shake with pain as the sea leaves me, and it is hard to think of anything beyond that.

  A round-cobbled street, the smooth stones mocking my feet because they hurt to walk on as much as if they were made of shards of glass. Then a step up and a straight-backed chair, just inside the door of a craft shop.

  “Thank you,” Harry says to the ferryman. “Thank you for your help.”

  “Are you making the trip back today, then?” he asks.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, get some solid food into her stomach before then. Just some brown bread, maybe a bit of soup. Nanny O’Meara’s makes a lovely bowl. And we’ll see to her, get her back all right.”

  “Thank you,” Harry says again. Then she is crouching in front of me, rubbing my hands.

  “Are you all right?”

  I shake my head.

  “Stop—” My voice feels like sharp pebbles in my mouth, the sound just as broken and uneven. “Stop rubbing my hands, please.”

  She does. My skin feels like it might split open and bleed as soon as the water dries on my clothes. I make Harry buy me new socks and a heavy sweater, and she helps me first into the public restroom, then into the new, dry clothes.

  “Kath, this wool”—she holds out the sweater to me—“won’t it bother you? It’s awfully rough.”

  Yes, and usually I’d flinch away from it. But it works the way it needs to now. It itches, chafes my skin like sandpaper, but I am used to that. And after she has tugged the socks onto my clenched feet, my feet still hurt, but in the way my feet always hurt. It’s bearable, maybe even more bearable than usual because it’s dwindling. Now I know how much worse it can be. I try not to think about how much better it could be.

  She is kneeling in front of me again, her hands still clasped warm around my foot.

  “Better?” she asks.

  Of course I cannot explain my shuddering sigh of relief. I just nod. We are a set piece, she and I, the hysterical soprano and her faithful friend in the mezzo role. For God’s sake—

  “Harry, get up,” I snap, and her face tightens, that expression again like I’ve just hit her.

  I try to fix it. “I just—I don’t want you kneeling in front of me, for God’s sake, on this dirty floor. You’re not my servant.”

  “I never thought I was.” She stands up, puts her hands into her pockets. I keep my head down. The silence between us stretches out long enough that two women enter the bathroom and leave again.

  Harry sighs. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  No. “Let’s just go back to the shops, okay?” I lean over to put my shoes on, gritting my teeth as water from my wet sneakers soaks through my socks. “Maybe we can find that restaurant the man from the ferry was telling us about.”

  “It’s in the next village,” Harry says. “You have to get on one of the tour buses to get there.”

  “Well”—I can talk like a cruise director too—“that’s what we were planning to do anyway, right? So let’s do that then, before all the good buses are taken by the tour groups.”

  I stand up and turn to leave the bathroom and Harry, Harry of all people, grabs my arm and yanks me back. “Damn you, Kath! Don’t you shut me out, don’t you dare shut me out now.”

  She is so angry, finally angry at me, and really, who can blame her? I don’t. She has her hand locked around my wrist, the hand that kept me out of the water back there on the boat.

  She thinks I’m not going to respond; she jostles my arm a bit. “Kathleen!”

  What can I say? What can I tell her? She is here, she hasn’t shied away once, and she is saving my life. I know that. She deserves to be treated like my lover, not my nurse. But if I tell her—what? That the Irish water really does make
me think of drowning myself? That when it touched me I felt completely pain-free, but when it left me the pain made me want to scream? That I heard voices in the water, voices I’ve heard before?

  If I tell her all of this, she will be so frightened. And she will be right to be.

  I keep my eyes on her hand on my arm while I lie to her a little more.

  “I’m sorry,” I say—better to start with something true. “I don’t know how to explain it. I just hadn’t even been near water since we were in Florida, and the water here is so different.”

  I have my story now, and I’m sticking to it. I can even embellish, watch me.

  “It’s as if we’re in another world now, you know? With this awful black water and the rain and the terrible food and—I just keep thinking about Sanibel and how far we’ve gone from there, from everything that was there, including how happy we were . . .”

  I take a stumbling step forward to hold her tight against me. I press my face into her neck, kiss her wet skin, then turn my head and find her mouth with mine. She moves her hands to my hair and holds my head, kissing me back so desperately that I know that she knows I’m lying to her.

  The door opens again and we pull apart as a group of teenage girls tumbles in, their hair plastered on their cheeks, eye makeup running. They are laughing, jostling, teasing one another in German. There is not room in here for all of us.

  “It’s okay,” I say quickly. “We were just leaving.”

  INIS MÓR IS the largest of the three Aran Islands. The children are taught only Irish in school, no English until high school, and there’s a year-round population of nine hundred people. So we’re told by the charming Sean, who bullies us genially into his tour bus as soon as we step outside the bathroom. For only ten euros per person he’ll drive us all the way around the island, let us off for an hour or so for lunch, show us the medieval graveyards and the ruined churches and the thatched cottages that people still live in. There are eight of us on the bus, just a van really, all of us very wet and getting wetter sitting so close together with our windbreakers on.