by Annie Cosby
“He did everything around the house,” Ronan went on. “And when he died, she would say she didn’t know where anything was anymore. That’s why my parents set me up to help her go through the house, clear things out. She talks about this jacket that she says her husband must have left somewhere, some days she says he hid it. But I’ve been through that house several times over, and no matter what I find, it’s never the right one.” He paused. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s never completely here anymore.”
“I have noticed,” I said. I also couldn’t help noticing this boy was being suspiciously nice to me, compared to the last time we’d met.
“Well, that’s recent. She isn’t usually like that.”
“How long has he been dead?” I asked.
“About ten years,” he said. There was a pause, again, as if he was contemplating my merit. Then he finally said, “You know, my name isn’t Ronan.”
I gaped at him. After a few moments of fuzzy silence, I spluttered, “What?”
“My name isn’t Ronan,” he said again. “She’s been calling me that for years.” He looked at my confused face a moment longer, then laughed. “My name’s Rory,” he said with an amused grin. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He offered his hand.
I shook it, perplexed. “Why does she call you Ronan?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if she thinks I’m someone else or if she just gets confused. It’s been going on so long, maybe she just doesn’t remember that it’s not my name.”
“It doesn’t scare you?” I asked. “I mean, that she thinks you’re someone else …”
He shook his head. “She had a son named Ronan. Years and years ago she had a baby, a boy that they named Ronan. He disappeared when he was just a few months old. A few years later she had another baby, but it didn’t live more than a day. She was really sick after that. And then a little while after her husband died, she started calling me Ronan. I think it’s all just tangled up in her mind.”
I was shocked. “The baby disappeared?”
He shrugged. “Nobody knows what happened to it. Some say it must have drowned when she and Seamus weren’t looking.”
A lump crept up my throat. Nobody was looking. How many times had I heard that murmured behind my back?
“All anyone knows is that he disappeared without an explanation.” He could see I was unsettled. “Anyway, I’m used to it—her calling me Ronan.”
I swallowed a few times. “You … you never correct her?”
He shrugged. “I did early on. My mom tried talking to her. We don’t think that she actually believes I’m her son. She’s just confused. I have a lot of brothers. She just gets names mixed up. And now that it’s been going on so long, well, she’s probably just forgotten.”
Having opened up this much, I wasn’t afraid to ask the question I was too scared to ask Mrs. O’Leary herself. “How did her husband die?”
Ronan—uh … Rory—sighed. “At sea. In a little dory.”
“What’s a dory?”
Despite the serious countenance of his face, a flash of amusement passed through his eyes. “It’s a boat,” he said. “A tiny little boat. Seamus liked to fish alone, but all he had was that little dory. And one day he didn’t come back. The boat was never found.” Rory looked at me and I realized my mouth was hanging open. “Of course, as you’ve seen yourself, boating accidents aren’t uncommon around here. But there was a lot of discussion about whether or not it was suicide. Whether their marriage had fallen apart after the death of their children.”
Mrs. O’Leary had told me nature conquers the feelings of the Merrow. Had it conquered her feelings? Had it stifled her own feelings for her husband?
“You know how people talk,” Ronan—Rory—said absently.
I knew all too well how people talked. But in my experience, they whispered. Whispered behind your back, when they thought you weren’t listening, not wanting to disturb the children, of course.
Then something occurred to me. “She’s always looking,” I said. “She never stopped searching the ocean. Like he’s lost at sea. She’s lost at sea.”
He nodded and we lapsed into silence. To be left alone like poor Mrs. O’Leary, in a house you couldn’t run, with nobody to visit but Rory, whose name you didn’t even know, and a strange, disinterested girl who thought your stories were proof that you were psychologically unstable.
I felt like an absolute jerk.
“You’re here late,” Rory finally said.
I nodded, trying to gather my thoughts into the same hemisphere. “I was just leaving and got distracted by this view of the sunset.”
He turned to see where I gestured. “I would think you would be used to it,” he said. “Don’t all the big houses have gigantic windows facing west for this exact purpose?”
A retort was on my tongue, but he went on. “My room has a window with a glorious view of the resort pool. There are no walls thick enough to keep out the shrieking in the kiddie pool at seven a.m.”
I laughed. “Is that why you’re up so early?” It was out before I could stop it. Meant as a joke, in another conversation with any other person in the world, it would have sounded mocking and light. My cheeks were on fire and other random, embarrassment-aware parts of my body burned.
Stupid cheeks. Stupid cheeks. Stupid cheeks! It was like guilt, painted right across my face in the brightest paint possible.
Rory turned around, and I held my breath, waiting for a sudden realization of my early-morning stalking or a quick fleeing from my sight, or at the very least some scathing remark about hard work.
Instead he said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you—I’m really sorry I was rude the other night. That night at the jetty—with your dog. I really wanted to apologize. I was in a bad mood already, and then I just—but I mean, it happened so quick, I shouldn’t have assumed you weren’t going to …”
I shrugged. “It’s okay.” I was torn between not telling this boy anything about me, not to gratify him with reasons, or on the other hand spilling all to the newfound confidante, this new boy I felt I had met only moments before, this Rory. The boy had transformed along with his name.
“I thought I had to act quick, you know, just in case you had ideas to let the poor pup drown.” He said it with a smile to let me know he was teasing. He had no idea how that last word cut through me.
I forced myself to smile back and then said evenly, “I can’t swim.”
He was quiet for a moment, shocked by my sudden revelation, no doubt. “Is that all?” he finally said with a smile.
Of course it wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to go that far. “Yes, I have no death wishes for Princess,” I said.
He smiled, seemed to deliberate for a second and then said, “You know, I can teach you to swim.”
My cheeks flushed. Does he know? Is that his way of telling me that he knows?
I wanted to blurt out that I wasn’t a stalker, but at the same time, visions of the two of us swimming the ocean in the morning drifted at the forefront of my consciousness and many parts of my body were burning. But I never got to answer. I was interrupted by the appearance of someone on the boardwalk.
The thin girl skipped over to Rory and embraced him, lightly kissing him on the cheek. The scene unfolded in front of me like a stack of bricks tumbling onto my head.
I waited for an introduction, but an explanation was unnecessary. The girl slipped her arm around Rory’s lower back and put her head on his shoulder. It was the blonde, leggy girl with pigtails. The one who knew her way around so well—the one who didn’t get lost. She was probably a local, and she probably knew how to swim, too.
“How was your day?” The girl broke the silence, throwing me a furtive look while addressing Rory. She may or may not have recognized me, but either way she was clear about her utter lack of interest in me. “I wondered what was taking so long.”
“Hey, Jen, this is Cora,” Rory said.
“Hi,” I said.
<
br /> She merely looked at me.
“Jen,” Rory said gently, pausing a moment, “Cora is the one who found Rick.”
The girl’s face dropped. She turned to look me up and down. She finally said, “What were you doing so far south?” It felt like an accusation.
“I was just walking,” I said, my traitor cheeks turning red. Once again, that guilty feeling rose in me. As if I had been doing something wrong by being at the pier when that body surfaced. “I was just walking. You know, wandering.” I was blabbering nervously; this could only end badly.
“Wandering a little far from home, weren’t you?”
“I just walk a lot,” I heard myself say, as if from outside my own body. “Nowhere in particular, and then I just stumbled upon the pier and I saw something big and puffy in the water …”
“Which would be my brother,” she interrupted icily.
My face flooded red. “Your brother?” My forehead, my nose, my lips, my ears. “Oh, my god. I’m so sorry.” Any hotter and there would have been flames erupting from my face. “I just saw … it was so sad. All those men, and your brother. Mrs. O’Leary said it was the sirens’ fault …”
“The what?”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Rory jumped in deftly. “You know her, with her tales and things.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure Rick was too busy texting Big Bird to watch where the goddamn boat was going,” Jen said. “Bet he drove right into Atlantis.”
Rory slipped an arm around her back and steered her toward the boardwalk. He shrugged and shot me a sympathetic smile meant to reassure me as he walked her quickly away.
I twirled around in frustration. Stupid, stupid Cora! Learn to control your words!
Motion from the cloudy window at the top of Mrs. O’Leary’s little yellow house caught my eye. It was Mrs. O’Leary, up in the attic. I briefly wondered what she was doing up there by herself. She moved out of sight again. I decided using your own attic wasn’t a crime and whirled back around to go home.
On the way, I walked in the sand, kicking up dusty clouds to keep myself occupied. It wasn’t enough and I couldn’t help but wonder what the sinking feeling in my stomach was. I didn’t think it had anything to do with my terrible conversational skills. I was used to embarrassing myself. But every time I saw it in my head—Ronan’s arm around the Jen girl—my stomach sank like I was on a roller coaster.
What a crappy roller coaster.
Selkies
Selkies
It was only a matter of time before I was forced into the presence of Owen Carlton again, and unfortunately for me, my mom was there, too. “Would you excuse us, Mrs. Manchester?” he said in that polite voice of his that he reserved for talking to adults. “I’ve been dying to speak with Cora alone.”
Mom was beaming as she shooed us into privacy. It was the Carltons’ own dinner party that I’d been wrangled into attending, and so he had the upper hand in the situation. Not knowing the terrain, I had unknowingly followed my mother into the pool hall—Owen’s own den. Now he led me out of the room and up an impressive set of stairs.
“I was just getting ready to go,” I faltered, caught up in the grandeur of the portraits of the Carlton family strung along the staircase.
“You just got here,” he said matter-of-factly.
He took my hand and though I pulled some at the outset, he was persistent and I saw little point in resisting. We appeared in what resembled a second game room on the second floor. This one was smaller, free of a pool table, but complete with air hockey and foosball.
He led me over to the air hockey table where he spun around and pinned my waist against the table. He grinned and said, “Long time no see,” before pressing his lips against mine.
I wrenched my face away. “Are you kidding me?” I said.
“Cora,” he sighed. “I’ve been dying to see you ever since that party.”
“Oh, you must have misplaced my number,” I said, gathering my sarcastic strength from somewhere in the depths of my teen-angst-filled soul.
“No, I just thought you were going to be pissed at me,” he said.
“You’re clairvoyant,” I replied.
“Cora.” He wouldn’t budge, my body pressed firmly between the foosball table and his annoyingly chiseled body, my face inches from his. “I miss you.”
My remark about the painful length of six days was lost somewhere in my throat where a strange unwanted lump was forming. I was saved the trouble of replying by the appearance of Blondie, leading her redheaded male by the hand.
“Whoa, I didn’t know this room was taken,” Blondie giggled.
“Seriously, guys?” Owen said, leaning away from me, but keeping a firm grip on my hand. “Our parents are downstairs. That’s sick.”
Blondie giggled again and shrugged, but whatever her plans were, they were destroyed by the bimbo’s appearance and her insisting upon a match of foosball.
“Cora and I will take on any of you,” Owen said with that easygoing nature that had succeeded in bringing down my guard the first time around. He snaked an arm around my back, and while I went to pull away, the image of the leggy blonde with pigtails popped into my head. Jen. She had a name now.
Rory. It was familiar and comfortable, like I had known his name all along. The boy, Ronan, was a disagreeable thing of the past. Rory was somebody new, someone I could talk to. Rory was—Rory and Jen.
I let Owen lead me to the foosball table with a hand on the small of my back.
“Ronan is finished in the garage,” Mrs. O’Leary told me one day.
I had been hoping conversation would stay clear of him, but I felt my heart shift just a miniscule amount at the thought of him not hanging around Mrs. O’Leary’s anymore.
The old woman seemed nervous and fidgety today, at least more so than usual. “He’s getting so old. So much older than a boy of his age should be.”
I didn’t even try to unravel that logic.
“He’ll be starting on the house now,” she went on. “There’s so much my husband left sitting around. One can’t find a thing in all of it.”
I nodded absently, silently grateful I’d still see Rory, however distantly.
“He was a messy man, my Seamus. But I wouldn’t have had him any other way.”
“Are you cleaning the house up for something, Mrs. O’Leary?” I asked. I had been wondering where this project was leading, what would become of the old woman when her handyman went off to Europe as he was scheduled to do in the fall. She mentioned his leaving sometimes, but only in passing.
Whatever her motive, Mrs. O’Leary wasn’t letting me in on it. “Things belong in a place,” she said cryptically. “You have to let things go to their places.”
I nodded as if I had any inkling of her meaning.
“Yes, I do think everything has a place,” she went on. “Yourself included.”
Huh? This had to be one of those life-direction lectures that had permeated my life all of the last year of high school via teachers and my parents and Rosie’s parents. But for some reason, the looming lecture coming from this frail old woman didn’t sound threatening or even boring. In any event, my intuition was completely wrong. Because next she said, “Have you heard of selkies, dear?”
The word was buried somewhere in the recesses of my memory where old stories and childhood books lay.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Have you seen the seals around here?”
I nodded slowly, remembering that night at the pier. When Princess and I had come face-to-face with a seal.
“Well, selkies. They are—they are creatures of land and sea. It’s a rare thing, much like the human being. Proficient in water and out.” She spoke rather hurriedly—at least quicker than her normal speech. And her eyes tripped back and forth along the horizon much faster than usual. It was as if she was trying to get the words out before being interrupted. I didn’t know what was so special about this story above the others, which always stumb
led from her thin lips in slow tangled masses.
“But selkies are slightly different. While humans start on land and learn to navigate water, selkies are born to the water and learn to navigate land. They’re creatures that can turn from their seal form to human form at will.”
“Is this your … your favorite story?” I asked carefully. I had long been convinced that the old woman believed each of the stories she told. Of course I did not believe in them, but I also didn’t want her to know that.
Mrs. O’Leary stopped her rocking chair, and I noticed a glimmer in her eyes. Was it the sparkle of excitement—or the trace of a tear? I couldn’t be sure. But she appeared troubled by my question and I felt guilty. I gently prodded her to continue. “So, selkies. They’re sea lions?”
She shook her head and recommenced the rocking. “Seals,” she corrected.
I nodded. I’d previously thought the two were interchangeable.
“They can shed their sealskins in order to take to the land and live with their human … their human lovers. But only at spring tide. They can only change at spring tide. Beautiful creatures, the selkie women.” She touched a crumpled hand to her papery face, and I couldn’t help imagining that Mrs. O’Leary would have been a beautiful young woman. Her skin was dark, hinting at a beautiful complexion. And the hair that slipped in wisps out from under her silk scarf was unnaturally dark, even at her age, which I couldn’t imagine was any less than seventy-five or eighty.
“The man who captures a selkie, he becomes her husband. But they’re usually only in contact for a short time. It is unusual for a selkie to be among humans for a long time. Highly unusual. It is a great love, the one between a human male and a female selkie. True love? I don’t know. How are we to know that what humans experience is real love?” She paused. “But, Cora, you do remember what I’ve told you about nature?”
She didn’t wait for my answer.
“For all the love in the world, nature abounds tenfold.”
Like the Merrow, and her everlasting will to return to the water.