The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

“But, Kathleen”—I made a helpless gesture with our clasped hands—“it’s a fairy tale.”

  She leaned in and kissed me, pushed me backward onto the bed and kept kissing me gently. I closed my eyes, felt the tears that had threatened before leaking out. Kathleen kissed them away.

  “You believe in fairy tales, Harry,” she said softly. “It’s why I love you.”

  AND AFTER THAT, we had the loveliest day together. The sun was out and everything was so wet from the storm of the day before that the colors of the sky and the grass and even the whitewashed houses and tumbled stone walls gleamed like they were poured from fresh cans of paint. Kathleen wolfed down slabs of brown bread with butter and honey at breakfast and asked the owner of the inn which shops in Doolin were the best.

  “We’ve been out to Inis Mór and to the pub, but we haven’t bought anything yet,” she said. “We’ve got to be good little tourists today.”

  I listened to her chatting about whose sweaters were fairly priced and which jewelers really made their own pieces. In my head I began a conversation with someone else. Robin, maybe, or a doctor. Not the one we hadn’t liked, Biancini. The other one, the neurologist who’d delivered the ECT news.

  She came out of the sea with this new delusion—of course I know it’s a delusion. But the weird thing was that once she fixed on this idea she cheered up, her appetite came back, her mood—she hasn’t been this happy since . . . I couldn’t think of when. Oh, and her sex drive came back too. Who would I report that to? Not Dr. Kapoor, certainly, and not Robin either. But as the day went on I kept it up, offering a jumbled defense of Kathleen’s clarity and my own complicity in her madness. Because she couldn’t be crazy after all—just look at her—drifting down the street, stopping to scratch a sway-backed horse on the nose, grabbing my hand to pull me into yet another shop with Celtic knot sun catchers sparkling in the windows. And if she was crazy (she had to be crazy to believe this thing) then I couldn’t do anything but go along, could I? What if I tried to force her out of this delusion and she ran off, or had another breakdown?

  We found a shop that sold only Irish music and talked to the proprietor for an hour, listening to his favorites while Kathleen teased him about his anti-opera prejudice. She bought a half dozen CDs for Robin and made the man promise to listen to Patrick Cassidy’s Deirdre, which has both an Irish composer and Irish story. In a tiny jewelry shop painted white inside and out, Kathleen bought a slippery silver bracelet of interlocking knots for Tae and a necklace for herself. It was unlike her to wear jewelry at all, and I wouldn’t have picked that necklace for her. It was a pendant made from a cone-shaped seashell. The chain was threaded through the narrow end and at the opening was a pale green bead that the girl in the store said was an amethyst.

  Kathleen slipped it over her head as we left the shop. Her braid began to unravel when she lifted it over the chain and she shook it out and left her hair loose.

  “This bead is pretty,” she said. “Maybe I’ll save it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll have to break it apart to give them the shell.” She held the pendant up so she could examine it closely. “Yes, it shouldn’t be too hard. And that’s one thing I need. Something of the sea returned to it.”

  We had a bit of a walk to the next shop, which was beside the only non-pub restaurant in Doolin.

  “Shall we eat lunch there?” Kathleen asked. “It’s beautiful. All those windows facing the sea.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said. And then—and how can I justify this question? I’m encouraging her, for God’s sake—I asked, “What are you going to do for the gift from above?”

  She had clearly been thinking about this already. “I don’t know yet. I suppose I could just pick some flowers or grass, but I don’t want to do that. I want it to be a gift, something special. I’m sure I’ll find something.”

  I followed her down the path that led to the restaurant. The wind lifted Kathleen’s hair up like a tournament banner and whistled through the tall grasses that grew along the path. Kathleen put her hands out on either side to let the grass brush her palms. I almost asked her what she was going to offer of herself, but I could see the answer in the streamers of hair whipping back toward me. One long lock that normally lay hidden at the nape of her neck was noticeably shorter than the rest. She must have cut it just that morning while I was in the shower.

  I thought of Marie, the nun who’d saved Caolinn’s hair in a locket all those years. What was it she had said about her locket? When it went into the sea I imagined that the waves were reaching for the last of her, the only bit they hadn’t already taken.

  I stopped walking. I felt like I was grasping at something that was slipping away, the same dizzying sense of hope or understanding just out of reach that I’d had this morning when I’d remembered the fairy tale. It wasn’t a physical sensation so much as an intellectual one, the way I felt trying to grapple with The Waste Land or with a passage of tricky literary theory.

  In “The Little Mermaid,” the mermaid was supposed to kill the prince with a knife. Where had she gotten it?

  The sea witch again, of course.

  Caolinn had had a knife. Marie had seen it, had held it briefly in her hands. Deirdre had slit her wrists, and then—according to Moira, her daughter—the knife “went back to where it came from.” And Moira had had a knife, double-edged, Robin had said, in a case that might have been made of pearl.

  I was standing in the middle of the narrow lane leading to the restaurant. Kathleen was waiting for me at the entrance.

  “Come on, slowpoke,” she called. “I’m starved.”

  So what’s worse? I thought. If it’s not true, then she’s crazy and I’m crazy for helping her. And if it is true—which it can’t be, but if it is—why did they all still kill themselves? Just because they had no prince to kill?

  THE RESTAURANT WAS as beautiful inside as out, all blond wood and sheer white curtains, no colors to distract from the food or the view. We ate celery root soup and shrimp salad on crusty white bread and drank a bottle of Riesling. We agreed that Tae would like the bracelet and that Robin would be pleased to know that Doolin was still flourishing as a musical center. I suggested that Tom would have thought the music shop owner was cute and Kathleen snorted.

  “Can you imagine what would happen to that poor man if they hooked up and then Tom found out he didn’t like opera?”

  “Tom wouldn’t hook up with him until he’d changed his mind,” I pointed out.

  “No, you’re right.” She grinned wickedly. “He’d get double duty of tying his partner up and making him listen to Les Contes de Hoffman while he couldn’t get away.”

  “Please! I’m eating!”

  She giggled and forked up some shrimp that had fallen out of her sandwich.

  “We’ll go down to the cave before dinner,” she said. “We’ll want to go back to our room to put our bags down and get some warmer clothes. And I think I saw a flashlight in one of the dresser drawers. We’ll want to get that. We should have boots, but of course who would have thought to pack those?”

  I sipped my wine and nodded.

  A few shops later she found a decorative saucer on which butterfly wings had been delicately arranged to cover the whole surface, then covered in clear glaze.

  “It’s a little creepy,” Kathleen said, holding the plate up so the wings caught the light. The glaze made them iridescent, like beetle wings or the inside of a shell. “I mean, I hope no butterflies were harmed in the making of this plate.”

  The shop owner assured her that the artist simply collected dead butterflies from her garden and used their wings. She wrapped the plate in several layers of tissue and Kathleen pronounced our shopping done. Back in the room, she pulled the necklace over her head, slid the shell from the chain, and snapped off the amethyst bead. She retrieved the length of her hair, wrapped in a ponytail holder, from her toiletry kit, and put everything in the bag with the plat
e.

  “Ready?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d let it go too long, let it go all day. We were going to call on some sea witches in a cave along the shore. If I tried to stop her now, she’d just go alone.

  I settled for banality. “Did you check the batteries in the flashlight?”

  She turned out the light in the room and shone the flashlight on the wall.

  “Come on, silly,” she said.

  I followed her downstairs and out onto the path that led to the pier.

  “Why the rush all of a sudden? The man who told you all this didn’t say there was a set time for a meeting, did he?”

  She was scanning the cliff face off to the right. It was black and pitted. From where we were, there could have been dozens of caves, or none—just shadows on the rock. “He didn’t say anything about when, just told me where,” she said. She jumped lightly off the side of the pier onto the narrow ledge that hugged the cliff and started to pick her way along it. “I just didn’t think we’d want to be doing this in the dark, that’s all.”

  There it was again, Kathleen being practical. In the midst of this madness she was thinking about the wisdom of trying to explore a cave in the dark. I caught up with her but stayed a step behind. There wasn’t room for us to walk side by side.

  “This man,” I said, “the one who followed you all day yesterday, did he tell you what his connection to the witches was, why he was the messenger they sent?”

  Kathleen laughed. “He didn’t tell me his connection to them,” she said. “He showed me. He showed you too, but you didn’t get it.”

  “He showed me? He didn’t show me anything.”

  “Yes he did.”

  He’d worn a glossy leather jacket. I remembered that because it had been far nicer than the rest of his clothes. He’d seemed amused by us, had translated Sean’s Irish so I’d be sure to know that I was being foolish. And his eyes had been so weird, too big not only for his face but—just too big, and oddly shaped. They’d reminded me of an animal’s eyes, of the shock of seeing eyelashes on a deer up close, or a seal.

  I grabbed for Kathleen, caught her arm just above the elbow.

  “That was him in the water? Is that what you mean?”

  She turned back and nodded at me. She wasn’t laughing now, but her face was radiant again with the wonder of her belief. “That was him. He pushed me over and went in with me.”

  “He was a Selkie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Kathleen, I can’t!” I pulled on her arm, spun her toward me. “I can’t do this, I can’t believe this. It’s got to stop.”

  “Harry,” she said. She pulled her arm free. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. I know it seems crazy. I told you this morning that I knew that. But you’ll know soon enough.” She gestured with the hand holding the flashlight. “See? We’re here.” And then she turned her back on me and ducked into a dark crevice in the rock.

  I hadn’t even noticed it. I plunged in after her, but she didn’t wait. She’d realized by then that we weren’t on the same side. She kept several steps ahead of me, playing the light back and forth so that we could both see where our feet needed to be, but not letting me catch up. It was all I could do once we were inside to keep up with her, because the ledge continued along the wall of what I realized was a tunnel and the sea ran beside it in a channel right up to the other wall. One wrong foot and you’d be in the water in the dark. I could hear the little slaps of the water against the rock at our feet and Kathleen’s breathing, but except for the small yellow beam of the flashlight it was pitch-black.

  Kathleen swung the flashlight back for me one more time and I caught sight of a rock just before I tripped over it. Then she stopped and shone it in front of us instead. I nearly ran into her back.

  “Goddammit, Kathleen!”

  “Shh!” she hissed.

  She played the light around slowly so we could see the cave. The ledge had ended and in front of us the sea pooled into a dead end. There was nothing but water below and rock around and above us, no sign that people had ever been in here, no writing on the walls, no trash or debris. No animal traces either, no sounds of crabs scuttling away, no discarded shells or skeletons, not even any smell of animals. It just smelled of salt water and of darkness. It was colder in here than it had been outside, with a chill that felt settled and old.

  “Here,” Kathleen said. “Hold this.”

  She pushed the flashlight into my hand. I played it along the water’s edge, checking for tide marks. That would be all we needed, to get trapped in here when the tide came in. But I didn’t even know what I was looking for, how I would tell.

  “Stop that,” Kathleen said. “I need the light over here so I can see. Shine it on the water.”

  Her hands shook as she pulled the things she’d brought from her pockets and placed them on the surface of the water. I thought, For God’s sake, just drop them in. But I crouched down beside her and kept the light trained on the water as she made her offering. I even put my hand on her back as she leaned forward.

  “Calm down,” I whispered. “The last thing we need right now is for you to fall in.”

  She hushed me again, sat back with a breathless giggle and groped for my hand.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  She’d laid the things on the water in a kind reverent order that I supposed must have matched her instructions. First her hair, then the shell, then the plate. They all floated in our weak little circle of light, not drifting apart or sinking, but floating on the surface of the water right in front of us. Then they all vanished, abruptly, as if they’d been snatched under. And the flashlight winked out.

  I gasped. “Shit!” Kathleen squealed and jumped, pulling me backward with her. The wall of the cave was like ice against my back. I fumbled with the light, clicking it on and off. Nothing.

  “Kath—Christ, I can’t see a thing,” I whispered. “We’re going to have to feel our way out. Dammit.”

  “Shh!” She was still clutching my hand but she clawed at me with her free hand, first at my arm then my shoulder and finally my face and throat. I realized that she was trying to put her hand over my mouth, to get me to stop talking. Her fingers were frantic, trembling against my lips. I shut my eyes and drew a deep breath, trying to think of what I could say to get her out of here, to get us both out of here. We were going to have to crawl to be safe, to crawl along the ledge, hugging the cave wall . . .

  A woman spoke, so close to my ear that it sounded like she was sitting right beside me. I opened my eyes, put my hand up to push her away. But there was no one there. I strained to see something, anything, but the darkness was unrelieved.

  “Kathleen, did you hear—”

  “She heard.”

  Another woman, from the other side of the cave, her voice low and pitched to carry.

  “Who’s there?” I sat up straighter, flexed my fingers just to feel that Kathleen’s were still there.

  “But we must be paid also,” said the first voice, still so close that I should have been able to feel breath on my cheek. No one there.

  “And it is not a trifle we ask.” Another voice, that made three, this one coming from the water at our feet.

  “Thank you for the gifts, Kathleen.” Close by again, on Kathleen’s other side. She jumped and shrank against me. There was a long moment of silence. I could feel them waiting, feel them listening.

  “You’re welcome,” Kathleen whispered finally. “I-I didn’t know what to bring.”

  “How could you?” Yet another—five voices now, or was it six? I’d lost count. This one came from somewhere over our heads. All women, some young, some old. This one sounded . . . amused. “You couldn’t possibly be expected to know.”

  “And Harry helped you. That’s never happened before.” This came from another place in the cave. I kept turning my head to try to see the speakers. My eyes ached. Then I realized what she’d said.

  “Me—how do you know
my name? How do you know Kathleen’s name?”

  And at the same moment Kathleen sat up straighter against the wall and asked, “Did my mother come to you?”

  Another pause. “Yes,” said the one in the water. “She came. She brought a braid of her hair plaited with seaweed and feathers, all three gifts in one.”

  “But then—” Kath’s breath caught on a sob. “Why didn’t you help her?”

  They sighed, all of them, each voice we’d heard already and others we hadn’t. The sound swept around the cave like a wind.

  “We tried to help her,” one of them said softly.

  “We tried to help them all,” said another.

  “You are the eighth, Kathleen.”

  “We tried to reach you sooner—”

  “But you’d gone too far away.”

  It was impossible to keep track of the voices, of which one was speaking.

  “Do you mean when she went to Boston?” I asked. “How was that too far away?” I felt angry but my voice wouldn’t cooperate. It just sounded confused and frightened. I tried again.

  “How many of you are there? Why won’t you let us see you?”

  There was another murmur, communal like the sigh but somehow amused again. They were laughing at us.

  “You can’t see us,” they said, “because we aren’t here. We live in deeper waters than this.”

  “We are bottom dwellers.”

  “Scavengers, they call us,” said one. She sounded bitter.

  “We are what we are,” said another, as if in reproof.

  “And we have sea lilies in our garden,” murmured the one by my ear. “They only grow for us.”

  “She wants to see,” said the one at our feet. She sounded exasperated. “Humans aren’t used to the dark. She feels blind.”

  “Ohhhh.” A little ripple of sound went round the cave and lights came up in its wake, little blurry green lights, like fireflies except that they didn’t move. There were lights in the walls and in the water and on the ceiling, but they didn’t correspond to the voices. There were too many—more lights than voices—and they revealed nothing but the cave itself, and Kathleen and me sitting on a ledge. I could see my own hand in front of me, gripping the useless flashlight. Kathleen put her hand over mine and said “Harry?” in a small voice. I glanced up at her face. I think I screamed.