by Ann Claycomb
The circle of spot-lit water was dark green and frothing under the driving rain. Two pinpoints of red caught the light, vanished, then reappeared. Eyes. They were eyes in a sleek dark head that you might mistake for human unless you knew it wasn’t. The seal lingered a minute in the light, as if he was letting us see him, then ducked under a wave and disappeared.
“I’ll be damned,” the man said beside us. He straightened up and cupped his hands over his mouth to call up to the wheelhouse.
“Seal! It’s a seal!”
The spotlight went out and the crew member turned back. “You sit tight here now,” he said, clapping Kathleen on the shoulder, “and let us get you back safe.”
She nodded, still watching the sea.
“Thank you,” I called after him. He put up a hand as he bounded up the steps. I grabbed Kathleen by the shoulders and turned her to face me. I was shaking all over, my teeth were chattering, and my head hurt. I shook her. “What did you do? You didn’t—did you do that on purpose?”
She’d been clutching the blanket around her with her hands tucked tight in the folds. She let it go and cupped my face in her fingers.
“No,” she said. She leaned in close so we wouldn’t have to shout. “No. I promise.” She kissed me. Her mouth as wet and cold as mine, but it struck me how calm she was. And Kathleen had never kissed me like that before, never been the one offering reassurance, her holding me up.
“It’s all right,” she said. She rubbed her nose against mine, brushed her spiky wet lashes against my cheek. “It’s going to be all right. Here—” She leaned back and retrieved the blanket from the deck, pulled me down to sit beside her against the wall of the cabin, where we were sheltered a little from the wind. She wrapped the blanket around us both.
“Better?”
“I’m so wet I’m not sure anything would make a difference,” I said. She laughed and laced our fingers together under the blanket. I wanted to grab hold of her harder than that, wrap her hair around my wrist, my arms around her waist—something to keep her there. She’d put herself on the outside, nearest the water, and she held her free hand out under the railing, letting the bigger waves wash over her hand and wrist.
“Stop it,” I said. “Please.” I didn’t say, You’re scaring me. I didn’t say, You almost drowned. For once can’t you leave it alone?
She turned toward me and again I had a feeling of strangeness at the expression on her face. There was something of the sureness that she had when she was singing, and something of the same joy.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not about to throw myself into the sea. Not now.”
“Not now?” I snapped. I gripped her hand. “You said you didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I didn’t. I told you I didn’t.”
“So what, you fell?”
Again, she smiled.
“You think this is funny? After today you think it’s funny that you went into the sea?”
She shook her head. “There’s the dock,” she said. “We made it in. Let’s go get you dry.”
She helped me up, helped me off the boat, turned back to the crew members with a dazzling smile as she handed back the blanket, held on to me as we made our way down the dock, fished our room key out of my pocket and opened the door. She turned on the shower, peeled my wet clothes off, and put me under the spray. I pushed my hair off my face and caught her hand when she tried to close the curtain.
“You need a hot shower too, more than I do after being in that water.”
“You know that’s not true,” she said, and now, in better light, I saw that the smile still lurked in her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, like a secret she was savoring, something wonderful and astonishing. Amusing too, or perhaps the keeping of the secret was what was amusing. I was reminded of times when I came into the room while she was talking to Tom to find them both laughing at some joke too perfect or too subtle to share.
“Kathleen, what is it? What happened?”
She shook her head. “You won’t believe me, not yet. Just take your shower, okay? You’re getting water all over the floor.”
I took my shower, came out still shivering, and heard her talking out in the bedroom. I peeked through the crack in the door. There was no one else there, only Kathleen pacing back and forth in her wet clothes, the frayed bottoms of her pants making tracks like seaweed trails on the floor.
“It all makes sense,” she was saying, “it’s crazy but it all makes sense, it actually makes more sense than anything else. The voices—it wasn’t me, it was them all along. It sounds crazy but it really means I’m not crazy, don’t you see? I’m not crazy and Moira wasn’t crazy, none of us were.”
She was gripping her elbows with her hands, arms crossed under her breasts, facing the bed as if she were talking to someone sitting there. Me, I thought, she’s practicing making an argument to me. And here I am spying on her. But I didn’t stop. I watched her suddenly bolt for my carry-on and get out a notebook and pen.
“What did he say,” she muttered. “I should have written it down right away. Dammit! What was it? Something of myself, something of the sea . . .”
She scribbled furiously. Her wet hair fell across the paper and she pushed it back. I finished drying off, wrapped myself in the towel and tucked the end in between my breasts. I didn’t open the door. I turned back into the bathroom and rubbed lotion on my face, finger-combed my hair, brushed my teeth. I’d never thought Kathleen might really be mentally ill. Not once. If I’d considered it as a possibility, would I know what to do now any better than I did?
I spit toothpaste in the sink, cupped one hand to rinse my mouth. I could call Robin and tell him that Kathleen was acting strange, but what could he do? The only thing to do was to get through the next day, our last full day here, and fly her home. And what exactly was so strange now that was any stranger than anything that had come already? Kathleen seemed to have had some kind of revelation in the sea, she seemed to know exactly what was wrong with her, and whatever it was that she thought, it had energized her, excited her. These were all good things. This revelation and the change in her—they meant that the trip to Ireland had been worthwhile, when only a few hours ago we’d thought it a waste. I’d never doubted her before, so why was I doubting her now? Because she’d come out of the sea smiling in the middle of a storm? Because she had a secret from me, something she had to work out how to tell me? Because she hadn’t explained how she’d ended up in the damn water in the first place?
The mirror revealed a purpling bruise on my temple where I’d hit my head. I didn’t want to go out to Kathleen. She’d been . . . transfigured by something, while I just felt hungry and tired and scared.
But when I came out, Kathleen didn’t say anything more about what had happened. She seemed to be feeling the cold, finally, and the chill of having been wet for so long. She went into the bathroom and called out to me: “We should see if we can use the laundry facilities here tonight. These clothes are never going to dry otherwise and we don’t want to pack them wet.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “We can ask when we go down to dinner.”
I heard her turn the water on. I slipped into my underwear, then a shirt and jeans and a cardigan sweater. I hadn’t packed for weather this cold. I sat down on the bed to put on my socks. I didn’t see the pad Kathleen had been writing on. There was a drawer in the nightstand, or it could have been under her pillow or tucked into her suitcase somewhere. I sat there a moment and decided that I couldn’t go hunting for it. She was planning to tell me whatever it was anyway.
We paid five dollars to do a load of laundry and then, rather than brave the rain again, ate dinner in the dining room of the inn. Afterward we sat together in front of the big fireplace in the library, where guests could drink complimentary port or coffee and help themselves to the books. I drank a glass of port and stared at the flames and waited for Kathleen to say something. I felt dizzy from the port or the wine at dinner or just
fatigue or worry. I went over the words she’d used upstairs in the room: it’s crazy but it all makes sense. And the other thing she’d said, that she’d been hearing voices that weren’t in her head, were them all along. Who were they? I couldn’t imagine an answer that didn’t frighten me.
“Your hair is so curly from the damp,” Kathleen said. “It’s curlier than I’ve ever seen it.” I felt her hand on my head, again the new and alarming tenderness in her touch. She tapped the bruise.
“What’s this from?”
“I hit my head on the ferry,” I said. “With one of the swells.”
“Poor love,” she murmured. She leaned in and kissed my head. I smelled the salt water in her hair and shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You still smell like the ocean.”
“I just rinsed my hair out, I didn’t wash it,” she said. “I wanted to smell the sea awhile longer.”
“It doesn’t . . . upset you? This morning you were miserable from it.” And the rest, unspoken, as if countering her in the conversation we hadn’t had yet: How does that make sense?
“Let’s talk about it in the morning, okay?” she said. “It’s late and we’re both tired.”
“You’re not acting tired.” I sounded petulant. I sounded like Kathleen did when her pain was getting bad.
“I am tired though,” she said. “And we have all day tomorrow. Come on, let’s go to bed.” Her hand slipped up to the back of my neck, under my hair. She brushed her fingertips against my skin, traced circles on my nape. I closed my eyes. I did want her. The way she was touching me was so new between us that it felt like—almost like we were role-playing, with Kathleen as nursemaid and me as the passive invalid. I could picture us in the bed upstairs, picture myself lying as if cocooned between the feather mattress and the down comforter and Kathleen bending over me, long and white and supple, not feeling the cold as much as I seemed to be, pulling back the comforter only a little at a time and covering the exposed part of my body with some part of her own, until I gave in and flung the covers off, needing her instead.
But even as I turned my head into her caress I breathed in the smell of the sea that still clung to her. It smelled like dead things and scouring wind and reminded me of staggering out onto the deck of the ferry, how certain I had been that she had drowned.
“I am tired,” I said. I leaned away to put my glass down on the tray before the fire. “You’re right. We should go to bed.”
WHEN I WOKE up, she was waiting for me. She’d dressed and braided her hair. Kathleen never braided her hair, except when she had to do something sweaty or dirty, both of which she avoided as much as possible. She was sitting in the rocking chair that faced the bed. When I met her eyes, she put one foot down to stop the movement of the chair and sat forward, gripping the armrests.
“All you have to promise,” she said, “is to hear me out. Then you can tell me how crazy I am, okay?”
I sat up in bed and pushed my hair off my face. “Okay.”
“You were right,” she said, “you didn’t know it but you were right! There was an answer here. He told me some of it, not all of it, but—”
“Who told you?”
“The Sel—” She bit her lip and started over. “The man, the one from the bus who was staring at me, you remember? He came out and talked to me on the ferry deck while you were asleep.”
“And told you what, exactly?”
“He said he couldn’t tell me everything, but he told me how to find out. You’re not going to believe it, I know. I didn’t think I believed it until I knew I did, until I realized that it’s the only thing that makes sense, really, the only possible explanation for everything.”
“What is?”
When she said it, the sensation I had was not the icy fear I’d been feeling the day before. Then I’d been questioning her sanity and my own ability to handle her, to stay with her, to help her. But the moment she said, “I’m a mermaid,” I felt my stomach tighten with a terrible, helpless sense of loss, a feeling more like grief than fear. I wanted her to unsay it, wanted her to take it back. It was as if she’d said, “I don’t love you anymore,” because it meant the same thing. It meant she was gone, she had left me. I stared down at my hands, clenched around the edge of the comforter, and watched as they obeyed my silent command to unclench, to relax.
“Go ahead,” Kathleen said. “Say it. It’s all right.”
“Say what?”
“Say that I’m crazy.”
But I could only have said it aloud if I hadn’t believed it, if I’d been willing to throw it out as a point of argument. I didn’t tell her that she had red hair, did I? Or that mine was curly and blond? I didn’t tell her things that were obvious and irrefutable and so I couldn’t tell her that. That she was crazy.
I lifted my gaze from my lap. “Kathleen,” I said carefully, trying not to sound like I was talking carefully, “how does this man claim to know this about you? Why would he tell you?”
“They sent him,” she said, and the rest of it came tumbling out. Her whole face was flushed, her pupils dilated so that her eyes were nearly black. She looked beautiful. She sat there, setting the chair rocking again as she talked to me about witches who spoke to her in the waves and a cave in the cliffs along the shore where she planned to go today to make an offering of some kind.
“Something of myself, something of the sea returned to it, and something gifted to the sea from—well, he said, ‘from above,’ which I think now means simply from on land, or from the air. But I think something from the natural world.” She tugged on her braid. “A flower, maybe, or a bird’s feather. It shouldn’t be too hard to find something.”
“And what are you supposed to do with these things?”
“Take them to the cave.”
“And then what?”
Her face clouded a little. “I don’t know. He said they wanted to see me. I think they can tell me how to fix it, how to go back.”
“You mean turn you back into a mermaid?”
She must have heard me, finally, though it had taken her longer than it should have. Kathleen had perfect pitch but she’d missed the flatness in my voice until then. She stopped rocking again.
“You don’t believe me.”
“You didn’t expect me to, did you? You said yourself that you couldn’t expect me to.”
She didn’t say anything. I felt cold and exposed sitting up in the bed in just a T-shirt. I got up and pulled on some jeans, turned my back, and pulled off my shirt, put on a bra and a clean shirt. I turned back around to face her as I folded up the shirt I’d slept in.
“I think in my head I told myself that I couldn’t expect you to believe me,” she said slowly, “but all the same I did expect you to. You’ve—” She hesitated. “I don’t know what to do if you don’t believe me.”
I put the folded shirt on my pillow and started making the bed. I was angry now, angry and sad. I felt like we were breaking up and even though it was because of what she’d told me, because I couldn’t possibly believe her, the breaking up felt more important and more real.
“So these sea witches,” I said, smacking a pillow, “there’s a whole group of them?”
“Yes,” Kathleen said miserably. “Yes, that’s what he said. And as soon as he said it, I knew they had to be the ones I heard in the water in Florida. They kept telling me to ‘come home’ over and over again. Then when I saw the picture of the cliffs—remember, when we were on the plane?—I knew they meant Ireland, that this is home.”
“What are they like, I wonder? Did he tell you that? Are they half lady, half octopus?” I sat down on the bed, saw her shrinking into herself with every nasty word I threw.
“Why would they look like that?” she asked.
“Well, you’re the perfect Ariel, aren’t you? So all you need is an Ursula. Too bad I’m no handsome prince. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Stop it!” she cried. I stopped. I lowered my head an
d felt the painful pressure of tears behind my eyes.
“I always hated that movie,” she murmured after a minute. “I couldn’t understand why she’d want to leave the sea and go live on land, or why she’d ever give up her voice.”
“It’s not the way the original story goes, you know,” I said. “In the original story the witch cuts out her tongue.”
Kathleen made a choked sound.
No, I thought. No. It can’t be.
But more pieces of the story unfolded in my head. I’d had a collection of Andersen stories when I was little, with “The Little Mermaid” as the centerpiece. There had been a picture of her as a mermaid in an underwater garden, embracing a statue. A picture of her lying on the sand, slender white legs splayed beneath her at an odd, helpless angle, like a broken pair of scissors. A picture of her throwing herself into the sea while the prince and his bride slept peacefully.
“The witch cuts out her tongue,” I said, “and also tells her that even though she will be beautiful and graceful on land, walking will be painful, excruciating even, like walking on knives.”
“How does it end?” Kathleen asked.
“It’s a terrible ending. She gets a knife and she’s supposed to kill the prince, but she can’t so she throws herself back into the sea instead and turns into sea foam or something.”
She got out of the chair and sat down on the bed with me, laced her fingers in mine.
“Harry,” she said.
I shook my head. What I was feeling couldn’t be hope. I didn’t believe her, for God’s sake. She was mentally ill.
But she hadn’t known the story until I told it to her.
“How can you not have heard that story before?” I demanded.
“A lot of people probably haven’t heard that story,” she said. There was warmth and humor back in her voice. “You know that perfectly well. I didn’t know the detail about Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to fit the glass slipper until you told me, remember? I’d only ever seen the movie.”