by Ann Claycomb
Harry plunges on into my silence. “We could do more research into your family, still. The Aran Islands must have a historical society, since they’re interested in reviving Gaelic language and culture there. There might be records that they’ve kept that might have some clues in them, even personal records: diaries, letters, newspaper stories.”
I laugh; I can’t help it. What she’s envisioning is so futile and so ridiculous in the face of what I know, the inexorable pull of this sea that can’t possibly be explained by a disease or a trick of the genes, and that no one would have written down.
“My love,” I say, “give it up. Please. It’s not Act 5, not yet. But it’s Act 4, for sure.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means the mad scene has happened already, the heroine has been betrayed—whatever. We’ve done our research, Harry, and come up on the inevitable.” I rock forward in my seat, still sitting on my hands. The round window over Harry’s shoulder is awash with rain.
“The inevitable?” She turns in her seat and grabs me by the shoulders to jerk me around to face her. “Kathleen!”
I catch a glimpse of her face and it’s enough to know that I’ve got to stop this conversation, got to get a grip, just long enough for us to get off this boat, back on land, away from the sea. I should have told her what was happening to me on the ferry ride over.
“I was just joking,” I say. “I’m sorry. It was stupid. But you have to admit, part of the reason you want to keep poking through records and stuff is that it’s fun for you.”
“Fun for me?”
I shrug. “It’s the English major in you rearing her lovely head. It’s okay.”
She lets go of me then, sits back, and turns her head away.
“You think that’s what’s motivating me?” she whispers.
No. I should feel guilty for saying these things, but I just feel trapped. Why won’t the goddamn ferry move?
“Not deliberately,” I say. “Just—maybe you have a fantasy in which there’s some answer for me that only you, with your love of books, can find.” I sit back, shut my eyes, swallow hard. Beside me, Harry is quiet for so long that I begin to think that I’ve gone too far this time. I blindly put out my hand toward her and she catches my fingers in hers.
“Maybe,” she says in a low voice. “You may be right. I’m sorry.”
The boat leaves the dock with a lurch then and I can’t help it—I look at the window again to see the first eager waves splash up against it as we head out into open sea. The sound the sea makes against the glass is like a voice: liquid calling to solid, the water teasing the hull, which offers only a flat, dull sound of impact in answer.
I have to go back out. Beside me, Harry’s head is back against her seat, her eyes closed.
“Tired?” I ask softly. She doesn’t answer. Stupid. Of course she’s tired. I lean over to kiss her forehead and then maneuver down the center aisle, catching myself on either side as the ferry dips and sways. And then I am out again, finally, standing in the mingled rain and sea spray, water sluicing over the deck with every wave. Within seconds I am soaked to the knees. There are only a few other people out here, a miserable couple—probably trying to avoid throwing up—and one big man by himself who is visibly enjoying the thrill of being on an open deck in the middle of a storm at sea.
The ferry heaves to the side, dipping me so close to the surface of the water that I can touch it with my fingertips. As I do, a wave leaps onto the deck and falls on me like a triumphant predator. When the boat rights itself I am wet from head to foot and dizzy again from the shock of the feeling of this sea against my skin. I hang on to the railing, lean over it as far as I dare, gasping for a gulp of water. And the sea obliges me, sending another wave crashing over the deck from so high that I am able to tip my head back and drink it in before it plays itself out around my feet.
“Funny,” says a voice beside me, quite close. “You don’t look seasick.”
It’s the man from the bus, from the graveyard. He’s standing next to me, not bracing himself at all against the plunging of the boat, but keeping his footing just the same. His red hair is plastered against his skull, his absurdly thick eyelashes beaded with water. Close up, I realize how slight he is, shorter than I am.
I should ignore him. There are no wrinkles around his eyes, no gray in his hair, so I don’t know how he could possibly know anything. He can’t be much older than Robin. But even when Harry was grilling Robin, he didn’t mention any women before Caolinn, who’d also died too young. This man knew not only where to find my family’s gravestone, but also that the names on it would mean something to me. I can’t ignore that.
“I never said I was seasick,” I say.
“No, that’s true, I’m sure. But you let them believe it, didn’t you? You let her believe it. She’s worried about you,” he says. He’s so close that his elbow is touching mine, so he does not need to shout. “Does she know of your andùil?”
“My what?”
“Your need,” he says. “How much you long to dive into the sea and never come back?”
The ferry heaves again, water drenching us from first one side and then the other. From inside the cabin comes a collective shriek. I hang on to the wet railing.
“She knows.”
For a moment his next question hangs unasked in the stillness that we two seem enclosed in, within the crashing sounds of the water and the boat. If he asks it then it means that he knows—something—more than I know.
“Does she know why?”
“I don’t even know why! Do you think I wouldn’t tell her or change it if I could?”
“But you can’t,” he says. “It is your nature.”
My hair is in my mouth and I pluck it out, my fingers numb and shaking. “What could you possibly know about my nature?”
“What I was trying to show you earlier, in the graveyard. That it is inescapable, as it was for all the women who have come before you.”
“What is? Wanting to kill yourself?”
He actually laughs, very lightly and quickly. “No, a amadáin. Wanting to return to the sea. To go home.”
He jerks his chin at the green-black water. “If your kind could be like mine, this would not have happened, not to you, not to your mother, not to the one who began it all. But you are not so changeable as we are. I have always thought that you—your kind anyway—ought to be grateful for that. It is uncomfortable, surely, to slide between two worlds. But you . . .” He turns back to me. His face is full of pity again, his liquid eyes very sad. “You would slide between the worlds if you could, but I think also now you would just wish to go home, would you not?”
I brace myself against another roll of the boat, curl my toes into the water that rushes into my shoes. I remember the café where we ate lunch and how he gestured at the mural on the wall.
“There’s no such thing,” I whisper. “No such thing—”
“As mermaids?” He shakes his head. When he speaks again, his Irish accent is thicker.
“You are a mermaid, lass,” he says. “Like your mother before you and her mother before her, exiled all of you, but mermaids nonetheless.”
“The . . . the pain—”
“I don’t know much about it. I’m only the messenger. But the pain, yes, in your legs and your feet is from the splitting of your tail, and the abrasion of cloth or wind on your skin.” He leans even closer to me so that he can murmur under the wind. “Do you see the sense of it?” His coat, that stylish pony-hair jacket he is wearing, is unaccountably warm against my arm, even through layers of sleeves.
And I let it go on, this strange conversation, even as I turn my face into the wind to catch the full force of the spray and the waves. Already I want to ask him to show me how it can be done, how I can dive deep and feel the pain leave me, feel my body change. Already I believe him, although of course I don’t.
“And my mouth? What about the pain in my mouth?” I laugh, then, bitterly.
“Don’t mermaids have tongues?”
He shakes his head. “Most do. There are some questions I can’t answer.”
“Who can?”
“The ones who sent me to you. They are—” He hesitates. “You would call them witches, I think.”
“Are they the ones who did this to me?” And yes, yes, I am slipping from my world into his. I am angry at these witches. I must believe in them to be angry at them.
“You must go to them. They want to see you. Will you let me tell you how it can be done?”
I hold on to the railing, keep my eyes on the sea, which is lashed by rain as if under some futile attack. A few yards away from our boat, the dark swells swallow up the rain and rise up again, hungry for more.
“There is a cave,” he says, “in the cliffs near the town. It is not hard to get to, when this weather dies down. Go down to the pier and turn to the right, walk on the rocks. You will see it before you pass it, an opening in the rock, nothing more.”
“And then?” I try to laugh him off one more time. “Do I turn around thrice, touch the surface of the water and recite an incantation in Mermish?”
He ignores me. His voice has the cadence of song now: this must be his message, the message he was sent to deliver.
“Something of yourself,” he says, “something of the sea returned to it, and something gifted to the sea from Above.”
And at that I feel a new shifting, dizzying level of panic because those words—oh, not the words themselves, but the insistent cadence of them—remind me of the voices that I’ve been hearing in the sea.
“What—” There has been no wave recently for me to wet my lips on. My mouth throbs with the beginning of pain. “What if I bring the wrong things?”
“I don’t know, lass,” he says, in his own voice again. “I assume they won’t come.”
I nod. Simple enough.
“I don’t believe any of this, you know,” I say, just to say it out loud. The sea shoulders up under the ferry just then, lifting it right out of the water and letting it drop down with a smack. From inside the cabin, people scream again, though they sound more excited than frightened, like riders on a roller coaster. I gasp with relief as I choke on the water filling my mouth.
Beside me, the man lets out a sudden bark of laughter.
“You can believe or not believe,” he says, “but you are a mhaighdean mhara all the same. And you want to be under the water right now.” His hand closes around my wrist as the boat tips and we dip down close to the seething surface of the sea again. “Shall I prove it to you?” he asks, shouting now over a drumroll of thunder and the raised voices behind us—the boat is nearly on its side. “It’s been a long time since I’ve swum with one of your kind.”
And he pulls me in, like falling, or sliding, really, just the tug of his hand on my arm and my other hand releasing the railing to reach for the sea, for the icy cold bubbling of the froth around my arm and on my face and then the colder, colder black depths below.
I cannot see a thing, can hear the shriek of the wind even under the water and the protesting, answering shriek in my head that is telling me my lungs need air. I come to the surface spluttering, thrashing—as anyone would who has just gone over the railing of a boat in a storm. The rain is coming down in curtains and I use one hand to sweep my hair off my face, stroking automatically with the other to keep afloat. As I kick with my legs I feel how heavy and cumbersome my shoes are, and my jeans. If I could take them off—
Something bumps against me under the water and I look down to see his head break the waves at my shoulder, a glossy brown head beaded with water, turned toward me and close enough that I can see the amusement in his huge dark liquid eyes, count the whiskers on his muzzle.
The wind cuffs me sideways so that I swallow water midbreath and choke. I need both my hands to tread water and turn to face him fully. I am not going to drown, not on purpose, certainly, and not by accident, not now. I am not afraid, for one thing, and the ferry is still so close. I can hear shouts and screams from the deck. In a minute they will have a life preserver in the water, ready to haul me in.
For now, though, for a moment, I swim with the Selkie in a sea that has turned the color of salt in the rain. I duck my head under and come up again and he is still there. He dives in his turn, butts his head against my thigh, insinuates himself between my legs, his whole strong body pushing against my knees so that I can feel the way he swims, the effortless, undulating movement he makes.
Before he can come up again, behind me, I dive down and follow him, brush his tail with my hands, pat my way along his back until I find his neck and we are side by side. I cannot move the way he does, but I could. If I had my body back I could. And so I know that I do believe—of course I do.
Mhaighdean mhara, he called me. Mermaid.
While the prince lay with his bride for the first time, Maeve became Fand and fled from her prince and from the sea, and for many years we knew only that she was alive. After she fell into the sea and the blade made its way back to us, released into the water from her broken hand, we saw that she must have confronted her prince again, and failed, again, to kill him to free herself. We were curious enough then to call on the magic that let us see what happened between them.
Fand’s prince still lived in his palace, with a beautiful wife at his side and two heirs safely grown. But he could not sleep in the bed with his wife, for he reached for her in the dark, already sweating with lust, and tried to bend her body to his in unspeakable ways and called her by another name. He kept no more lovely girls at the palace, though the queen would have been glad to relinquish her claims upon him, and he grew fierce and unyielding in dictating the morality of his court. He came to believe in the power of that Hell that those Above speak of with such delighted horror, and in the seductive charm of the demons and witches who are said to be its servants. If ever a man deserved to lose his life’s blood, it was this man, and yet Fand could not take his life to save her own, nor even when his one life could have saved two. Fand would have returned to the sea and her daughter with her, both of them free of the pain of their lives Above.
When Fand returned to him, she was forty years old and more beautiful than even his most fevered dreams of her. What kindled in his eyes when he saw her again was the lust he had always felt for her, quick and eager as an adder’s tongue. He rose from his chair to reach for her, she held the blade in the folds of her skirts, and still she could not set it against his throat. She did not convey to him by any means that she had a child. She did not ask him, with her enormous stormy eyes, to show her by word or action that her years of pain and exile had not been in vain, that he loved her after all, that he had made a terrible mistake. Nor did he say so unasked. He only grasped at her, tore her dress, set his hot hands on her white skin.
She stepped from his elegant patio straight off the cliff and into the sea. The rocks of the shallows were unyielding, as she had known they would be. Her body was broken when we found her, her lovely face crumpled, washed clean of the impetuous passion that had ruled her life. We searched her heart carefully for what we knew must be there. She had hidden it well, but we found it at last, and plucked it out.
Left uneased, regrets sharpen and crystallize like the diamonds so prized Above. Fand’s was black and many-faceted and heavy as a stone. It gleams with a sullen, reluctant light when shaken from its wrappings into the palm of a hand. And it grows heavier every year.
HARRY
Aria for Mezzo-Soprano
I dozed uneasily when Kathleen left me, drifting off for minutes at a time and then coming back to an awareness that I was wet and cold. The lights inside the cabin were flickering. I was so tired. I leaned my head against the wall just above the porthole and shut my eyes. Then the ferry leapt out of the water and smacked back down so hard and at such an angle that my head slammed into the wall. Several people screamed, a little boy started to cry—and then out on deck there was a chorus of shouting, screaming, a crew
member roaring, “Man overboard, starboard, to starboard, dammit!”
“Lights,” someone else shouted. “Get the light on the water!”
Feet pounded down the metal steps that lead from the wheelhouse, like thunder in the ceiling. I sat up, rubbing the bump on my head. Through the porthole the water suddenly lit up in the white glare of a searchlight.
“Oh my Lord,” murmured the woman behind me. “Oh my Lord.”
Out on deck a man called, “It’s a girl! She’s keeping her head up!”
Then I was on my feet and stumbling through the cabin, clutching the backs of the seats to steady myself and half-falling with every step. By the time I made it to the deck they were hauling Kathleen in on a life preserver, two crew members braced at the railing with their feet planted far apart, one man ducking under the rail to catch her under the arms and lift her up. Another man stood by and swaddled her in a blanket as soon as she was on board.
“There, miss, there, we got you, you’re all right.”
The ferry lurched and I fell, caught myself on the rail, went down on my knees in front of her. One of the men who had pulled her in bent over us.
“Was there someone else went over?” He had to bellow over the wind and his voice was urgent. “There’s a fellow was standing near you said he thought he saw a man in the water too.”
Kathleen stared at him. “A man?”
“There wasn’t a man with you?”
Incredibly, bizarrely, Kathleen smiled. “No. No man.” She raised her voice so we could hear her. “It was just me. Maybe it was a seal he saw.” She turned to watch the water, still smiling, though she was shivering so hard that she couldn’t keep the blanket up and it kept slipping off her shoulders.
“Not likely to see seals out in this,” the crew member shouted. “Are you sure no one else went in with you?”
“I’m sure,” Kathleen cried. The wind whipped a length of her hair across her face so she had to spit it out. “Look!” she said. “Out there, you see?”