by Ann Claycomb
In the front, Robin turned to look at us.
“All right?”
“I guess,” I said. My voice betrayed me, though. I sounded terrified.
“Tom’s going to make our excuses,” Robin said.
“What’s he going to say?”
Robin didn’t bother to answer me.
What we were doing—the composer and librettist fleeing from opening night through a back door, taking the incapacitated soprano with them—was so bizarre that I don’t think either of us could imagine any “excuses” that might account for it, not even from Tom. God, poor Tom. Poor Carianne. And my poor parents—I hadn’t done more than hug them before the show. I could picture, all too clearly, the scenes unfolding in our wake: our friends huddling in groups backstage, the Dolans and Robin’s other friends huddling in the lobby, fear and confusion dampening the pride and excitement that all of them ought to be feeling.
As if on cue, my cell phone vibrated in the pocket of my blazer. I managed to extract it one-handed and sat staring as it jumped in my hand again and again. My mother. Abby. Abby. Three different singers in the cast one after the other. Jim Dolan—I’d forgotten he even had my number. Abby. My mother.
“Give it to me,” Robin said.
I looked up from the screen to see him half-turned in his seat and holding out his hand.
“Mine too,” he said. “I’ll put them both in the glove box for now.”
Mutely, I handed over my phone, feeling another message come in even as I let go. Other people’s panic seemed impossible not only to answer but to even acknowledge, intruding as it did on the terrifying realization that we might have done magic together, Robin and I, but done it too soon or too well. Idiot! I thought. You were so sure this opera was going to work. What the hell did you imagine that might mean?
Kathleen jerked again and moaned as I tightened my arm to keep her from sliding onto the floor. It was like trying to gather a wild animal onto my lap. Whatever I might have imagined, it wasn’t this.
“Tae, where are we going?” Robin asked.
“Pleasure Bay is open access all night,” she said, “and there certainly won’t be anyone swimming there at this time of year.”
“How far?”
“Ten minutes, no more.”
I bent my head over Kathleen. “Ten minutes, Kath, just hang on ten minutes and we’ll have you in the sea.”
Kathleen tried to nod, I could feel her head moving against my forearm, but she didn’t say anything. Her breathing grew so labored and loud that after a few minutes we would have had to raise our voices to be heard over the sound. Tae took us through the dark streets, traffic thinning out as we left downtown and approached the harbor area. She turned at the sign for Pleasure Bay/Castle Island and drove along a black lane without passing a single other car, then pulled into a parking lot and stopped under a light. Robin opened the passenger door of the backseat and leaned in.
“Kathleen,” he said, “can you sit up a little so I can get you? There, yes, that’s good.” He slid his hand under her neck and lifted her head off my arm, then gently pulled her toward him.
“Sweetie, you have to let go of my arm,” I said. I tried to extricate my other arm from around her so I could press myself back against the seat and make it easier for Robin to take her, but her grip stayed locked.
“Loosen her fingers, Harry,” Robin said. “She may not be able to.” I followed his gaze to Kathleen’s hands. Her fingers had elongated until they nearly wrapped around my arm and they were webbed, with taut, translucent skin extending between the fingers all the way up to the first knuckle. I remembered her complaining during dress rehearsal that her hands had started to hurt.
I had to slide my fingers under hers to pry them off my arm, and then she flailed her hands as if she didn’t know how to move them or where to put them. Robin eased her out of the car, shifted her in his arms, and began to walk along the path from the parking lot to the beach. I scrambled out and ran to catch up with them, stumbling a little when we reached the sand. Tae caught my arm to steady me and we crossed the short expanse of beach to the ocean. There was little surf here, because of the way the bay was sheltered. The sea lapped delicately at the sand and then retreated just as softly. Robin waded in and Tae and I followed, then both staggered back from the shock of the icy water. I gritted my teeth and kept going. Robin and Kathleen were visible as a single figure up ahead, her hair spilling over his arm on one side and the trailing skirt spilling over on the other.
“If I ever talk to her again,” I said, “I am so going to make fun of her for how ridiculously perfect she looks being carried into the sea.”
Tae didn’t laugh. “You’ll talk to her again.”
We were up to our knees in the water but Robin was well ahead of us. He hadn’t stopped to get accustomed and he was in up to his waist. He put his head down and murmured something to Kathleen, then cried out when she suddenly wriggled and flipped out of his grasp and splashed into the water. I screamed as Robin went in after her, surfaced briefly, and spun in a circle where he was, looking wildly toward us for a moment.
“She’s gone. She went in and I felt her for a moment and now she’s gone, goddammit. It’s so dark I can’t—” He spun again and dove into the water, surfaced several yards out.
“Kathleen!” he roared. “Kathleen!”
Tae plunged in up to her shoulders. “Robin, be careful, please!”
“But what if she’s—What if she needs help?” Robin asked hoarsely. He was out beyond his depth, treading water, still turning in a slow ring even as he talked, scanning the water for any sign of her. I was doing it too, my eyes aching from trying to see movement on the black surface of the water. I pushed forward until I was next to Tae, the water lapping at my chin.
“Just wait,” Tae said.
We were all shivering convulsively. I started to cry, ugly wrenching sobs, my nose running.
“Did you see her after she went in?”
“I told you, I felt her,” Robin snarled. “The water surged around me like someone pushing off, that way.” He gestured out to where the bay met the open sea, then suddenly slapped the water. “Kathleen!”
A head broke the surface. Then another, and another. Soon there were seven of them, sleek wet heads shining in the moonlight and ringed loosely in a semicircle, perhaps twenty yards away. I couldn’t have said what they were from that distance and in the dark. Mermaids? Selkies? They did not acknowledge us. They seemed, like us, to be waiting.
When the eighth head broke the surface in their midst, they surged forward as if in greeting and welcome. But she held them off with an imperious turn of her head and a look. I couldn’t see her face but it didn’t matter. I knew that look. I burst out laughing, choking through my tears from sheer incredulousness, that the first thing she would do when I was expecting her to be so utterly changed would instead be so familiar. Then she plunged toward us and fanned her tail, pure silver in the moonlight.
“My God,” Robin said. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. Kathleen came up out of the water and flung herself at her father. He grabbed her and held her tight, his face in her hair, then suddenly set her away from him and tried to disentangle her arms from around his neck.
“Kathleen,” he said. “The water. Don’t you need to breathe?”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, and her voice was hers and not hers, amused and sobbing and singing all at once, in just two words.
“I can breathe air for a little bit,” she said. “Long enough to thank you, long enough to tell you what you’ve done, all of you . . .” She turned to me and I started to cry again at the sight of her face, which was hers and not hers, just like her voice. Her eyes glittered with black light but there was no hectic flush in her white cheeks, no urgency to her gestures, no desperation in her voice. The hysteria we’d grown used to calming in her was gone.
“Daddy,” she said, “it’s done. It’s broken.” She put her hands on either side of Robin’s face
. “You saved me, Daddy. You saved me and you ended it, you and Harry. Please—oh please don’t be sad.”
Her voice had water in it, a liquid undercurrent that made it difficult to understand her without listening hard. I felt like I was eavesdropping but I couldn’t stop straining to follow her words.
“I’m not sad, baby,” Robin said.
“Liar,” she crooned. “Liar.” And she flung herself upward again to wrap him in her long arms, both of them seeming unaware of her nakedness as he pulled her close. She murmured for a long minute in his ear and he stiffened and pulled back to look at her. Then he nodded. She pulled his head down to hers and murmured something else that made him laugh and hug her tighter for a moment, his eyes shut and tears seeping out under the lids. At last he set her away from him.
“I love you,” he said. “Little mermaid. Now go on. Those of us without fins and tails are freezing out here.”
He swam back to take Tae’s hand and tug her toward the shore, while Kathleen splashed his back. “You take that back! I haven’t got any fins!”
“But you’ve a tail now, don’t you?” Robin turned once more to smile at her and spoke in lilting Irish cadences, making his words a blessing. “And if I never see you again, my darling”—his voice broke—“it’s glad I am that I got to see you as your own true self.”
KATHLEEN SWAM TO me, looped her arms around my neck, and pulled my face down to hers. Her lips were cold and wet and when she slid her tongue into my mouth I tasted the sea, felt it rushing in my ears. I couldn’t kiss her back. I didn’t even put my arms around her, afraid to feel this sinuous wet creature instead of Kathleen. I was already so wet and cold.
When I felt her tugging harder, pulling me under the water with her, I tried to pull away, but she was too strong. She pulled us both under and the one-sided kiss filled with water—and then I was kissing Kathleen. Her mouth was warm and tender against mine and she tasted of strawberries and champagne. I shut my eyes and reached for her. The skin of her bare back was warm and the feel of her small bare breasts pressed against mine through the barrier of my clothes was desperately erotic. I slid my hands up under her hair and kissed her until I had to pull back, gasping.
She was smiling at me and crying, though of course there were no tears on her cheeks. But I could see her clearly and I could hear the sound of tears in her singing breaths.
“Kathleen!” I tried to talk before I thought about it, but instead of choking on water I simply shaped her name and sent it to her.
“It’s all right,” she said. Her voice seemed to eddy all around me and it sounded even more like singing now than it had in the open air.
“I had one kiss to give,” she said—sang. “You can see, breathe, talk. And you should be warmer now, aren’t you?”
I hadn’t noticed anything but her. Now I registered that I’d stopped shivering.
“Yes,” I said. “But how did you know you had one kiss to give? How long will it last? Can I swim like you can?” I thought suddenly to look down at my legs—still legs. Kathleen’s laughter burst like bubbles against my ears.
“You’re not changed, silly, just gifted.” The tears were in her voice again. “For a few minutes.”
“And then?”
She shook her head, her hair swirling around her. Underwater it was still red, but darker, with lovely, murky purple shadows in it. “Then I’ve got to go home.”
“To Ireland.”
“Yes. Back to my water—do you remember how it made me feel? But—Harry, look at me!”
“You’re beautiful,” I said. Kathleen kissed me again, fumbled at the buttons on my shirt, opened the catch on my bra so we could embrace skin to skin. I shuddered at how good it felt and slid my hands down her back to where the skin became scales. They slipped under my hands like petals of pearl, curved and satiny smooth. Beneath them, she was supple and yielding, undulating against me, taking my sobs into her mouth, then moving her mouth down to my throat, my breasts . . .
I was gasping for breath from the feel of her, then I was just gasping for breath, then suddenly I shut my mouth on the certainty that I couldn’t breathe at all.
“Oh damn, damn, it’s too soon!” Kathleen cried. She caught me around the waist with one arm and pushed upward. We’d gone very deep. The water was going dark around me and I couldn’t even see her, could only feel the press of the water as we rose through it.
Then we broke the surface and my head lolled back on Kathleen’s shoulder.
“Breathe!” she snapped. I breathed. I was so tired I couldn’t even kick my legs to help her as she swam back into the cove. We’d gone very far, nearly to the open sea.
“Were you planning to take me home with you?” I meant it as a joke, but my voice sounded frightened, not teasing.
“Hush,” she said. “Of course not. I just—I lost track of where we were. It was just like my dreams, do you remember, the dreams I used to have of swimming underwater with you? I’ve never had a dream actually come true before.”
She swam us past the creatures still waiting for her near the entrance to the bay. I turned my head and met enormous liquid eyes without any visible whites.
“Are they Selkies?”
Kathleen snorted. “Just seals. I think they’re here to guide me home, or some such thing.”
“I bet the witches sent them,” I said. “You should go see them and tell them what’s happened.”
“Aren’t they supposed to know already?” she asked. “Here. You should be able to touch bottom now.”
I could, though I began to shiver again as soon as my feet touched and I wasn’t sure how I’d make it all the way back to shore. Robin waded back out to help me but I threw his hand off.
“Listen,” she said. “You’re going to hate me tomorrow, both of you—all of you—Tom and Tae too. Because I’m leaving you to clean up a mess again, aren’t I?”
“I don’t care. We don’t care.”
“Tell Tom I love him. And don’t protect me anymore. When you go back, let people—reporters, the police, it doesn’t matter—let them all see all the medical records. Tell them I made you bring me here. Stick to the truth, Harry. Tell them”—her smile was delighted—“that I drowned.”
“I want to come with you,” I said. I’d cried so much that I seemed to have run down. Now it was only hiccupping and the tears on my face.
“You don’t want to come with me,” she said. “You can’t. I will love you forever and ever but you have to stay here and write an opera of Tam Lin. And then another one. And another. Write them all and find a girl and love her—”
I gasped. “Stop it. Don’t be an idiot,” I said.
“Love her and let her love you,” she insisted. Her voice was growing stranger and harder to understand, as if the water was rising in it and drowning out the human tones.
“I love you,” I whispered.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You broke the curse. You saved my life. You set me free.”
“It’s a happy ending, then?”
She laughed. “It’s a happy ending.” The water gurgled in her throat and she was already receding from me, letting the tide carry her out.
“Do you promise to live happily ever after?”
“I promise,” she said. “Do you?”
What else could I do? She was already half gone.
“I promise,” I said.
She’d been laughing at me when we met. She laughed at me now. “You think you’re lying,” she said. “But you will, Harry. Just wait and see.”
She turned fully away—she always had to have the last word, damn her—and dove out toward the sea. I stayed there, in icy water up to my neck, watching the seals turn at some invisible signal that must have been a mermaid swimming under them. They disappeared without a sound. Still I stood, shivering, until she surfaced once more as I’d known she would, right at the entrance to the bay. Any farther out and we wouldn’t have been able to see her at all. She blew us a kiss with her shini
ng, webbed hands and showed us the fan of her tail once more as she submerged.
Then she was gone.
When the knife came back to us, we did not at first recognize it for what it was, for we had ceased to hope for its return like this—in shards, with edges that might scratch or poke the skin but had no power to pierce it. They fell like rain from Above into the chamber where we worked, and we caught them, at first, automatically, knowing only that they must be ours. When we recognized them, holding enough slivers of shark fin in our cupped hands to feel them shift and slide against one another like coins, we rejoiced.
And we grieved, for the death of the girl called Harry, for Kathleen and the pain she had taken on, her lover’s blood spilled in exchange for her tail. We even felt a ripple of unease that it should be over now, so suddenly and after so long, and that we had not been ready. Then too, we owed Kathleen for the gifts we had taken from those who had come before her. Our cabinet held a net made from her mother’s hair. We sent some guides to lead the mermaid daughter home and told ourselves it was enough.
We took the remains of the knife out to the garden and fed the shards to our oysters, slipping one into each of many rough gray shells. The usual irritant is just a bit of sand or grit, but we have long coaxed our oysters to form pearls around stranger, sharper debris, and we knew even as we sowed the slivers that the pearls they would produce would be exceptional.
We did not expect them to be bloodred, or to grow so quickly. The oysters spat them out only weeks later. We were harvesting the pearls, which were extraordinarily beautiful and gleamed like a basket of berries from Above, when Kathleen came to see us.