The Mermaid's Daughter

by Ann Claycomb

  “What?” She fastened her hand on my wrist. I dropped the flashlight and it rolled into the water.

  The light was just barely enough to see by, but still for a moment I really thought it had turned Kathleen into . . . into something else. I had to look down to register her clothes, her jeans and her feet still there, sneakers smeared with mud and sand. But her face was appalling. The greenish glow was not reflected on her skin; it shone like it was in her skin. The shadows under her cheekbones were dark green and her eyes were long and black and alien. I’d never noticed how oddly her eyes were set in her face. Then she moved her head a little and it was gone. She was Kathleen again.

  “Harry, what is it?” she whispered.

  I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m sure we both look ghastly in this light.”

  The listening voices made a collective sound of disbelief in their throats. Kathleen didn’t seem to hear. But they knew what I’d seen in her.

  She smiled at me tremulously. “Can I ask—do you believe me now?”

  “I believe you.” I tried to smile back. “No ‘I told you so’ later, though, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Kath let go of one of my hands, the one that had held the light, and we both turned back to face the water. I think we had some vague sense that we needed to talk to the water to talk to them—to the sea witches.

  “So,” Kathleen said, “you tried to help my mother. You tried to help all the women in my family but—what—you couldn’t? Or is suicide your idea of a happy ending?”

  The water smacked against the ledge and surged up a little over our feet.

  “We will tell you the whole story,” they said. “We will tell you what you need to know. Will you listen?”

  “We are listening,” Kath said.

  “Both of you—” They hesitated.

  “Have we ever told the tale to them both?” asked one.

  “Never,” said another.

  “We would remember that.”

  “‘Them both’?” Kathleen asked. “What do you mean, ‘them both’? You mean me and Harry?”

  “We mean the mermaid and her lover,” they said. “‘The seeker of one who is lost,’ that is our name for him.”

  “Or her,” said one. “Remember Caolinn.”

  “Or her,” they agreed.

  “You’re talking in riddles,” I said. I could feel the bones in Kath’s hand from how tightly I was holding her, or she was holding me. “Just tell us.”

  So they did. They told us about Maeve, who had renamed herself Fand, who had fled from the end of her own story, who had met a storyteller in Italy and let him reshape her tale into something he called his own. They stopped talking when I made a noise of disbelief. It’s just a story! He made it up! Like “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Red Shoes” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” I didn’t say anything, though, and after a moment they went on. They told us how Fand had lived so long in Italy—nearly twenty years before she took a young lover and conceived a child—that the witches themselves lost track of her, lost sight of the curse stretching like a trip wire across her path. They told us about Victoria and Muirin and Ceara and Caolinn. We didn’t tell them that we’d already heard that part. They told us about Deirdre and Moira. Kathleen began to cry when they said her father’s name. She came up out of a sitting position and knelt forward on the wet shelf, crying silently as they told her how her mother had died. The story went on, lyrical and relentless. They told us about the limits of their power and how they had tried to contact Kathleen before now but hadn’t been able to reach so far, not until they discovered a way to use a shell as a kind of receptor down in Sanibel. They explained all her symptoms. The pain in her feet and in her legs. The phantom pain in her mouth. The sensitivity of her skin. The longing for water, for the sea.

  They told Kathleen what she had to do to end it all. By the time they got to that part, I knew what it had to be. I shut my eyes as they said the words “and let her blood run over your feet” and thought, This means I am her true love. That’s something.

  A small, dry voice in my head muttered back, Couldn’t it have been a kiss then to break the spell? But of course it couldn’t have been a kiss. It had to be the knife and the blood, the fatal pull of the story toward its ending.

  The witches didn’t say anything about a happy ending. They talked singly and together and over and under one another in rivers and currents of story that washed over us and only broke with an audible splash when they had finished their tale. Something bobbed and shone on the surface of the water in front of us.

  They were silent, then, waiting. Kathleen was still crying, shaking her head and choking on her tears.

  “No,” she said. “No. I won’t take it. You can’t make me. Just take it back now. If I won’t use it, what difference does it make if you take it now or later?”

  “We cannot take it,” they said. They sounded sad, finally, or maybe just tired. “It will return to us when it has been used for its purpose, or when you are dead, Kathleen. That is how it was made.”

  Kathleen started wildly to her feet, straining away from my hand. I held on. I knew where she was headed.

  “What if I just come now?” she asked. She swiped at her nose with her free hand. “Can’t I just come with you now, and then you can take whatever it is you want from me, my hair or my tongue or”—she gagged and had to swallow hard before she could go on—“my voice, whatever that means. Harry can go back to Boston and tell my father—tell him what you did to his wife and daughter and it’ll all be over, isn’t that right?”

  A shiver ran across the surface of the water.

  “That’s right.”

  “Because I’m not going to kill Harry!” she screamed. “I’m not going to kill her—oh my God!” She tugged violently to free her hand again and went down on her knees, retching.

  I didn’t let go. I tried to imagine Kathleen stabbing me with a knife, but all I could conjure up was a stage scene, like the climax of Tosca, where the knife goes in and the character crumples, still singing, and you know it’s not real. The idea was—it was fantastical, more impossible to believe than the green glow and the voices of this cave. But the image of Kathleen in the water, sinking as Moira had, with her hair mushrooming up around her—that I could picture. I could even picture the look she’d have on her face, the defiant set of her jaw as she refused to take my outstretched hand . . .

  “No,” I said aloud. I got to my feet and pulled Kathleen up with me. The case with the knife in it caught the light and winked at us. Robin had said it seemed decorative, more like a letter opener than a knife. What would he have done if he’d known the whole story? I felt my brain start to work again. What had the witches called me? The seeker of one who is lost. But I wasn’t the same as Robin or Marie or even the damn prince. They hadn’t known anything. They couldn’t have done anything because they hadn’t known anything.

  “If we don’t take the knife now,” I said, “it’ll just follow us, right? It’ll show up on her bed someday, or in a drawer?”

  “Yes.” The voices sounded almost apologetic. “That is how it was made.”

  “Kathleen,” I said. “Get up, love. We’ll figure it out. But we’ve got to get out of here first.” I turned back to the water and raised my voice to address the witches again.

  “We dropped our light,” I said. “We can’t see to get out of—”

  The flashlight popped out of the water and rolled against my feet. I reached down, picked it up, and turned it on. It worked. Kath had gotten sick, either from the pain in her mouth that the story had triggered or in reaction to what the witches had told her. She was limp now, hardly conscious.

  “At least you’re not fighting me,” I muttered to her. I stuck the light in my pocket so I could reach into the water and pick up the box. It was an unusual shape, like a flattened oval, striated in bands of white. The pearl from which it had been carved would have had to have been as large as a basketball. I di
dn’t open it.

  “Will you die for her, then?” murmured the voice closest to my ear. “Is that your answer?”

  “What if it is?” I asked. It sounded like a taunt. Maybe it was. I felt like I had a secret from them now, like I understood something they didn’t. They were inside this curse as much as Kathleen. But I was only here because I wanted to be, because I loved her. And now I knew everything.

  “If I turned the knife on myself, what would happen?” I asked. Behind me Kathleen made a choking sound of protest and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “Harry—”

  “Shh,” I said.

  There was a silence. Then the voice in the water sighed. “She must be the one to wield the blade.”

  “I thought so,” I said. I stood up. Kathleen clutched at me, pulling me toward the tunnel.

  “You think we are cruel,” said a voice from the wall, and the others chimed in.

  “We are only what we are.”

  “We were paid for magic and we did as we were bidden.”

  “The spells we wove for Fand were intricate, beautiful things.”

  “As was the blade we made for her sisters when they gave us their hair.”

  “And yet—” They hesitated. “We would gladly see them undone now and their power drained away.”

  “Then do it!” Kathleen whispered. “Cast a new spell to end it some other way, or call the old spell back. You said you needed payment. Isn’t there some way we could pay you?” She crouched over the water again. Her hair tumbled over her shoulder and into the pool. “My hair, my voice . . .”

  “Use the blade,” they said. “Come home.”

  Kathleen hit the surface of the pool with her open hand. Water sprayed back at her and slopped over my feet. “Damn you,” she snarled.

  The green lights began to go out, one by one. I tugged Kathleen up again.

  “They can’t do anything more,” I said.

  “Can’t or won’t?” she demanded.

  The cave continued to dim. The witches did not speak again. I tucked the box with the knife in it under my arm and gripped the flashlight, then turned us both around and began to pick my way along the ledge. Kathleen straightened up and pushed away a little to walk on her own. We navigated side by side until we emerged from the tunnel, where it got too narrow to walk any way but single file again.

  “You go first,” I said.

  Kathleen sighed. “I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  “Good.”

  When we reached the pier, she turned back to help me up.

  “Besides,” she said, “once I made myself sick on the whole grand ‘Fuck you’ gesture I realized I didn’t want to even give them the satisfaction, you know?”

  “I don’t think they would have been satisfied,” I said. “I mean, they want the curse to end but they don’t want you to kill yourself. Or me.”

  She shuddered and didn’t answer.

  “They’re just as trapped by it as you are, as we are,” I said. I shifted the box under my arm. It was so smooth and curved that it was hard to hold. “I think they’d love a way out, but they can’t find one, any more than anyone else has.”

  “There isn’t a way out,” Kathleen said bitterly. “It’s like we’re back to square one only now I know I’m eventually going to kill myself.”

  “There’s got to be something,” I said. “There does. Fand was much older than the others when she killed herself. They said it was because she was stronger and that you’re strong like she was, but there might be something else. We just have to think. I want to write the whole story down and try to figure it out.”

  “My God,” she said, “listen to you. You find out that the only way I can avoid my inevitable suicide is to kill you, and instead of bolting you’re planning a literary analysis of the whole thing.”

  I reached for her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “And you thought I was crazy!” she said, but she let me lace my cold fingers with hers as we scrambled up onto the pier.

  “I felt worse when I thought you might be,” I said.

  Kathleen made an incredulous sound. “Worse than you do now?”

  “Yes.” My throat closed around the words that would convey to her the wrenching loss I’d felt this morning, the hopelessness. It didn’t make any sense to feel less hopeless now, but I did.

  “And what about my father? Will hearing all this make him feel better than thinking I have some sickness I inherited from Moira? Can I even tell him any of it?”

  I stopped walking and tugged Kathleen to a stop with me.

  “You’ll tell him all of it,” I said. “Or we will. He’ll believe us.”

  “Harry—”

  I cut her off, shrugging my shoulder to call attention to the slippery case under my arm. “We’ve got proof, remember?”

  Kathleen flinched. “Why did you take that thing? How can you even stand to hold it?”

  “I didn’t want it to just show up mysteriously.”

  “No.” She shuddered. “That would be worse.”

  “And Robin has seen this knife before. Your mother had it.”

  “Oh God. She showed it to him?”

  “No. He caught her looking at it one day.”

  “Just like Marie caught Caolinn,” she murmured.

  “In that way, yes. But the witches said they’d never told one of the mermaid’s lovers the story before. Yet now they’ve told me, and we’re going to tell Robin.”

  “Why?” Kathleen asked.

  We’d reached the lighted streets of Doolin by then and stopped under a streetlamp near O’Connor’s. Whenever the doors opened, the sounds of ragged music poured out, a male singer fronting a guitar-heavy band. I felt like we were in a bubble of strangeness, with the ordinary world pressing in.

  “Because it’s a fairy tale, love,” I said. “Isn’t that what you reminded me of this morning? It’s a fairy tale come real, and anyone who knows fairy tales knows there’s always a way to break the spell.”

  “Really?” She glanced down at the box I held and then jerked her head away.

  “Really,” I said. “There’s got to be.”

  Act 3

  ROBIN

  Composer’s Notes on Duet Between Soprano and Mezzo-Soprano

  Kathleen had texted as promised when she and Harry had landed at the Shannon airport. Then Harry had sent several pictures of Doolin, tourist pictures: a plate of Irish breakfast, complete with blood pudding and real oatmeal; the view out a bus window down a narrow, hedge-choked lane; a placid gray horse nosing around a tumbled stone wall at the edge of a field. From Kathleen, Robin heard nothing more about the trip until he got another longer text saying that they’d touched down in Boston and wanted to tell him about the trip. Could they come visit for a few days?

  Robin had said of course without even checking with Tae, who shook her head when he apologized for that and said of course it was fine. The bed in Kathleen’s room had clean sheets on it; there were fresh towels in the bathroom. Robin had gone to the grocery store this morning and gotten shrimp for dinner, checked that there was white wine in the refrigerator.

  And yet he knew that he was unprepared for this visit, because it wasn’t just a visit. What had happened in Doolin that Kathleen couldn’t tell him over the phone or that couldn’t wait a few weeks? Robin felt the kind of pointless urgency that he often felt in the hospital thrumming through him as he sat at the piano late that afternoon and tried to attack the next scene of The Scarlet Letter, which introduced little Pearl as an uncanny, changeable child. After less than an hour, he pushed the bench back and the sheet music aside and gave this effort up as a bad job. It was going to be difficult to capture Pearl’s strangeness without resorting to the kind of music-box melody that would make her seem just mad. Today Robin feared he’d write his own edginess and anxiety into the music.

  He gathered up the pages of Hester’s scene with the other women of the town. The ease with which he set Hester’s voice up i
n contrast and conflict with other women’s voices made him think suddenly about doing the same for Kathleen. Almost absently, setting down the finished scene, Robin reached for a fresh score sheet and scribbled notes. Singing against a lower chorus, Kathleen would escape vocally. But backed by other sopranos, she ran the risk of pushing the whole song higher and higher until there was nowhere to go. Above the struck-out words Male Chorus and Mixed Voices? he wrote, Women’s voices, perhaps discordant or atonal? Reference Gregorian chant? He set the otherwise blank sheet down on top of the piano and stared at it awhile, hearing Kathleen’s voice laid over the tightly woven texture of the music of that tradition, in which the vocal sacrifice of the one into the many produced a sound somehow all the more potent for its restraint and containment.

  “Daddy?” Kathleen’s voice, Kathleen’s light, quick steps in the hall. Then she appeared in the doorway.

  “We’re all here,” she said. “Tae pulled in right behind us.”

  Robin crossed the room and drew her close. She felt strange in his arms, like she was made of wire instead of bone, humming with both tension and a new and unfamiliar energy.

  “Are you all right?”

  She shook her head once against his shoulder, then pushed away.

  “Kathleen—”

  “Robin,” she returned, a mocking lilt to her voice. “I’m fine.” She turned to give Tae a hug. “Hi, Tae. You’ve let your hair grow. It looks beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Tae said. She was always careful not to act maternal with Kathleen, but this time when they drew apart she put her hand on Kathleen’s cheek and held her still a moment. “We’re glad to have you here,” she said. Then she smiled and withdrew her hand. “Your father is so dull I can barely stand to be in the same room with him.”

  Kathleen laughed and Harry, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen with a tote bag over her shoulder, smiled slightly.