by Ann Claycomb
“Harry,” Robin said, “come in, silly, put your bag down, have a glass of wine. Here—” He reached for the tote and she gripped the handles and took a quick step back.
“No,” she said. She flushed and glanced at Kathleen. “No, sorry, I-I’ll hang on to this. It’s—it’s not heavy.”
Kathleen made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “It’s quite light, actually.”
“Kath—” Harry began, but Kathleen cut her off.
“Listen, Daddy, Tae . . .” She turned to face them both and again Robin thought there was something different about her, some new awareness of her body. It reminded him of the difference you might observe in a young singer who’d been taught how to breathe properly, or in a young musician who had finally learned how to hold his instrument so he wouldn’t grow tired.
“We’ve got a story to tell you,” Kathleen said. “And we’re going to tell it to you. We found some answers in Ireland. But they’re—it’s not simple and it’s not—” She broke off, crossed her arms, and tried again. “You’ll understand everything when we tell you. And in the meantime I’m going to do what Harry’s been asking me to do ever since we found things out and that is to lay off the black humor, which is, at the very least, confusing right now.”
“At the very least,” Robin said dryly.
“Well,” Tae said, “should we start dinner and talk afterward?”
“That would be great,” Harry said. “I’m starving. Can you help me with our bags, Kath?”
When they’d left the room, Tae turned to Robin.
“Hello.” “Hello yourself.” He smiled at her. “We’ve been invaded. How was your day?”
“It was fine. Are you all right?”
“I have no idea,” Robin said. “I know neither what’s happening nor what’s happened.”
“Kathleen seems . . .” Tae frowned. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since Christmas. It could just be that she’s so thin and clearly tired.”
“But it’s not,” Robin said. “It’s something else. She warned us just now, I believe. You heard her: they’ve ‘got a story to tell us.’”
THEY ATE THE shrimp with rice and a salad. They drank white wine, but only a bottle between the four of them and Harry didn’t touch her glass. As soon as Tae rose to clear the table, Harry jumped to her feet and offered to do the dishes.
“They can wait,” Tae said. She turned to Robin. “I have some scheduling work to do in my office—”
“Please,” Kathleen said. “We want to tell you both, Tae.”
Tae nodded. “Should we move to some more comfortable chairs?”
Some of the tightness in Harry’s face visibly softened, as if the mere approach of the conversation was a relief. In the living room, she sat at one end of the sofa and Robin and Tae both waited for Kathleen to sit beside her. But Kathleen dropped onto the rug at Harry’s feet, so Robin took the chair closest to Harry’s seat and Tae settled in at the other end of the sofa, legs tucked up and her hands quiet in her lap.
“Now you have to promise not to say anything until we’ve finished,” Kathleen said. “No interrupting to tell us we’re crazy, okay?” She tossed her hair down her back and shook a finger at her father as if she were teasing him, but both words and gestures hung sharp and staccato in the air.
“Kathleen,” Robin said. “Just tell us what happened.”
They must have consciously orchestrated their telling of the story, they told it so well. They even switched parts, mimicking the push-pull of their experience in Ireland, first Kathleen foregrounding her skepticism and her despair against the backdrop of Harry’s hopeful, eager search for answers in county records and the local pub. Harry began the tale of their encounter with the old nun, but Kathleen finished it, confirming that there had indeed been another pair of female lovers in her family. Then after the trip to Inis Mór and the boat ride, Kathleen was the hopeful, eager one, her voice rising and shaking, while Harry sketched out her growing fear and confusion as she followed Kathleen around Doolin and then into the cave. They never quite interrupted one another but they told the story in insistent, propulsive cadences, speaking sometimes by turn and sometimes together, not letting the narrative thread drop even for a minute.
They’re afraid to stop telling the story, Robin thought. They haven’t thought past that, past telling it to me, to us. He glanced at Tae, who was watching the girls. Her expression was akin to the one she wore when she was hearing a particularly difficult piece of music for the first time.
Robin himself felt trapped in the story and in their telling of it. When they reached the part in the cave and crossed into the impossible, he caught hold of the only dissonance they had not smoothed out—they clearly disagreed about when and how to show him the knife. Kathleen would have had it appear at the moment in the story when it did appear, bobbing in the water at her feet, while Harry had held off, perhaps wanting to wait and show it to him as proof after he had voiced his inevitable disbelief.
“Enough,” he said. “Stop.” He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “Let me see it now, please.”
“I’ll get it,” Harry said. She got up and left the room.
“I—she keeps it,” Kathleen said into the silence that followed. “We figured that was the best way. I didn’t want it. But the witches said—they made it seem like if I didn’t take it from them, it would just appear in my suitcase or something. So Harry took it.”
Harry came back carrying the tote she’d refused to part with earlier. She hesitated in front of Robin, torn between the impulse to remain standing and formally present him with the knife and the wariness that his abrupt demand for it had awakened in her. Finally she slipped past Kathleen and sat back down on the sofa, then fished the case out of the bag. Robin took it and rested it on his knees, the weight registering as familiar when it should not have. He’d never lifted it, that day he’d found it in Moira’s drawer, he’d only opened it. He realized that the box felt like a laptop on his knees; it was just as heavy and nearly as large. The bizarre similarity nearly made him laugh and he thought of Kathleen’s remark earlier about how she’d try to lay off the black humor. Clearly, the impulse was genetic.
“It opens . . .” Harry began, leaning forward to show him. But he remembered the catch on the underside. When he pressed it the lid rose smoothly, like the top of a great shell, and he saw the knife inside, fitted into brackets so cunningly made that they might have been part of the box itself.
Robin looked up. They were all watching him, Kathleen with desperate focus, her eyes fixed on his face so that they would not waver downward to the box. Harry was tense and expectant and Tae—he could not read the expression on Tae’s face.
“Do you want to see it?” he asked her.
She got up and came around to sit on the arm of his chair. Robin held the box up and Tae took it, balancing it on her own lap and closing the lid, then feeling for the catch and opening it again.
“It’s hard to believe that this is as old as they told you it was,” she said. “And I can’t think what it’s made of, the materials—this box—it’s just like it was sliced off a pearl. The striations along the lid here, if you think of it as a cross section, that’s exactly how a pearl develops, in secreted layers like this.” She ran one of her hands across the surface, shaping her palm to the curve. “And it feels very organic, the way it responds to the warmth of my hand—it’s like a violin that way.”
Robin did laugh then. Tae looked up at the girls and back to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Robin shook his head. “Don’t be. You’re demystifying it. It’s just an object to you, not a threat or a memory.” He set the case carefully on the coffee table.
“So you do remember it!” Harry said.
He gave her a level look. “I do.”
“But why didn’t you say so!” Kathleen cried, rising to her knees. “You just sat there just now. And then you asked Tae what she thought as if it was just an ord
inary thing instead of admitting right away—”
“Admitting!” Robin surged to his feet, Tae bending to the side to let him out of the chair. He walked to the window and spoke from there, his hands thrust into his pockets.
“You came in here, sat us down, told that story—you wanted me to say that it was impossible, that I didn’t believe you. And then you could bring out that knife, knowing I’d seen it before—”
“I didn’t know,” Kathleen murmured. Robin shook his head.
“Harry did,” he said. “And don’t go down that path, Kathleen, not now. Was I supposed to tell you that your mother had hidden a knife in her lingerie drawer? You already knew she’d taken her own life, you’d known it since before I was ready to tell you. Why would I have told you about the knife? What could that possibly have done but cause you more pain, knowing that she was suicidal long before she died?”
“But that’s not what the knife is for,” Kathleen said, still speaking softly, her head down now, demure and passive but for the occasional cutting flash of her eyes. “So it didn’t necessarily mean she was suicidal, having it there. If you’d told me—”
“Goddammit, Kathleen,” Robin roared. She flinched. “I didn’t know this story. I only knew there was a knife and then it was gone. Have you thought of what it means to me to know it now? What it means that my wife had that knife in our bedroom?”
Kathleen began to cry. No one else moved and for a moment her sobs were the only sound in the room. Robin turned back to the window. He remembered Moira saying to him once, fondly, You’re just not very good at being angry, Robin. It’s not a bad thing, not to me, surely. He couldn’t remember ever being angry at Moira. She had been right. He wasn’t terribly good at it.
A hand on his shoulder, very lightly. Tae had come up to stand behind him. He could not do anything to convey to her that he was glad she was there. He could only stand rigid, clenching and unclenching his fists. After another moment, she rested her hand briefly against the nape of his neck, then withdrew it.
“I’m going to get a glass of water,” she said. “Would you like one, Rob?”
He nodded. His throat felt like it was lined with gravel. “Thank you.”
“Anyone else?” Tae asked. No answer from the girls. Perhaps they nodded, or shook their heads. Tae left the room and Robin heard the refrigerator open, the clattering sound of the ice maker.
“We didn’t think,” Harry whispered. “We didn’t—what you said earlier was right. We didn’t think you’d believe us.”
“I know,” he said.
He swung around slowly. Kathleen had her head buried in Harry’s lap, her shoulders heaving. Harry was stroking her hair, but her eyes were on Robin. Her face was stricken.
“You forget,” he said, “that I grew up there.”
“I—” Harry bit her lip. “I think I know what you mean, but—”
“I’ve seen the seals, heard them calling out across the water. I’ve walked to the edge of those cliffs. I’ve been out in the sea in a far smaller boat than the one you were in.”
Kathleen picked up her head and pushed her hair out of her face, listening.
“It’s not to say that kids grow up like this in Dublin,” Robin said. “The Aran Islands are different, the islands and the coast around them. It’s not a question of belief. You grow up knowing a white horse is unlucky, never mind why or how you know it. You see things wavering in the rain out on the water—a figure high on the cliffs that could be a woman or a bird. When you look again it’s—she’s—gone. You hear screaming in the wind and who’s to say what it is?” He could hear his voice changing in his head before it emerged from his lips, the lilting, accented rhythm underscoring the words.
“You tell your father or your grandfather that it’s just the wind and they stare at you like you’re daft and suggest you get your hearing checked. But they don’t say what they think it is, that screaming that sounds like a man in pain, or a wild creature. You don’t speak the name of anyone who’s gone to sea until they’re safely home again. You leave a bowl of fresh milk under the eaves of the house when you want good luck in the morning, and when it’s gone you wonder if the cat got any of it. You don’t look too closely at the seals when you glimpse them in the sea near your boat. Yes, one of them looked almost like a man or a woman, but what’s the use of knowing for sure? What difference will it make to you? Better just to leave well enough alone.”
He paused. Tae brought him a glass of water then went back to her seat on the sofa and tucked up her feet again. Robin took a drink, felt himself adrift in the middle of the room. Kathleen got up, stumbled over Harry’s feet, and came to him.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I—You’re right. I couldn’t possibly have understood before. Now that I’ve been there, I do understand. I can’t”—she swiped at her cheeks—“I can’t imagine how she stood it. That water so close all the time! Daddy, she—she loved you very much, to have resisted it for so long.”
He nodded. Kathleen reached for him and he held her hard with one arm, his water glass in the other hand. He felt his daughter holding herself stiff against him, the sheer force of her will even when she broke down. Moira used to melt into him, a succumbing that Kathleen would never allow. Robin pressed his lips briefly to her hair, then let go. Kathleen pushed herself away from him and crossed her arms.
“So if you do believe us,” she said, “then—”
Robin cut her off. “I didn’t say I believed you,” he said. “I can’t not believe it. And I won’t believe it either, can you understand that, Kathleen? I left Doolin, took you away, so I wouldn’t have to make those distinctions, and now here we are all the same. It’s come home to us. You and Harry”—he glanced over to the sofa—“are fixated on the wrong thing. You think it makes a difference if I believe you? Or if Tae believes you? Or if we believe halfway? It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” Harry said, “no. I see what you’re saying. We still have to figure out what to do.”
“You mean like, for example, I could go get ECT and hope it erases my memory of the whole trip,” Kathleen said.
Robin lifted an eyebrow at her. She shrugged.
“Just outlining options,” she said. “Your point is that the options haven’t necessarily changed the way we thought they had.”
“The point is you—we—still have options,” Robin said. “Choices to make. Now you may make some different choices, because of what you learned—or think you learned—in Ireland. But that’s why you went, isn’t it?”
Harry nodded. “Yes. And I’m still glad we went. I think we did establish that Kath’s not crazy, or if she is then so am I and so is the nun we met and”—she ran a hand through her curls—“you know what I mean. Which means that she can say no to ECT. She doesn’t need it. The doctors were wrong.”
“I wonder,” Kathleen said, “if it’ll be any better having that”—she pointed to the knife on the table—“hanging over my head instead of the idea of ECT.”
Tae spoke quietly from her seat, her hands cupped around her water glass.
“There is a difference, I think,” she said. “No one—not even the witches who gave you that knife—is telling you that using it in some way is a good idea, or that you’d be foolish not to use it. They’ve said that it’s the only way, but they did seem—from what you told us—to understand why you wouldn’t choose to take that way.”
“As none of the others ever did,” Kathleen said. A note of pride crept into her voice. “Seven women before me and not one of them has used that thing. I’m certainly not going to be the first. I think they knew that even when they gave it to me.”
“So put it out of your mind,” Robin said. “It’s not a choice, not even the way we felt like ECT had to be a choice you considered—or we considered. It’s not and we all know that. Let Harry keep it or”—he hesitated only a fraction of a second, hoped she didn’t notice—“let me keep it.”
Kathleen nodded, then smiled faintly. “
This is terrible,” she said, “but I have to pee.”
She slipped out of the room. After a moment Harry got up and went to the kitchen for more water. Robin came over to the sofa and sat down beside Tae.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for being here. I’m afraid to even ask what you thought of all that.”
Tae had her right hand tucked inside the napkin she’d wrapped around her water glass. She set the glass down on the table and slowly opened the napkin from around her index finger. A vivid bloodstain bloomed inside the folds and Robin saw a clean deep cut across the tip of her finger. It bled again freely as soon as she took the pressure off it.
“What—”
“The knife,” Tae said. She nodded to it. “I was trying to make sense of it, just how it was made, while you were talking. I can’t see a seam of any kind between the hilt and the blade. It’s remarkable. And then I touched the tip of the blade, just touched it.”
She looked up at Robin. The serenity he was used to finding in the depths of her dark eyes was not there. “I’ve no idea what it’s made of, or how,” she said, “but it’s certainly sharp.”
LATE THAT NIGHT, unsurprised to find himself unable to sleep, Robin sat at the piano in the dark. He struck a chord, then another, modulated up, down, into deliberate dissonance. He imagined the whole house straining to hear what he would play to vent his emotions after this evening, the windowed walls of his studio withholding even reflection while they waited. And the three women in the upstairs rooms—what might they expect to hear?
He read over the first scene of Act 2 again. It was still good. Robin felt a guilty impulse to pick up his pencil again and keep going, to work and not think about Kathleen at all. He rose from the piano bench and found his pencil, his highlighter, the photocopied packet of the pages of The Scarlet Letter. He could highlight lines of dialogue and think of other things, like how he was going to take his own advice to Harry and Kathleen and figure out what to do in the face of—or in spite of—this new possibility. That his daughter was a mermaid.
It would be frighteningly easy to believe. He didn’t want to go to sleep just yet because he did not want to dream of Moira. She’d felt like a rare, slippery creature even when he’d known her. Why shouldn’t she have been from some other world? And if she’d been—what she’d been meant to be—all along and he’d seen her in the water one day, who’s to say he wouldn’t have loved her all the same, with her fair freckled skin and her soft, tremulous mouth?