The Mermaids Singing Read online

  It clearly had been my room. Under the window was a toddler-sized bed with detachable safety rails and a quilt with bright patchwork fish swimming along the edges. The center patch was a mermaid pieced together in various shades of blue and green. She had no facial features, just a pearly-white satin disk beneath her sea-green hair. There was an old changing table painted in a chipping white and a bin of toys: Legos, wool-stitched dolls, storybooks, and a collection of shells and sea glass.

  I didn’t remember any of these things and, for an instant, doubted my assumption that it was my room. Maybe my father had a new child that no one had told me about. But the toys were arranged too neatly, there were no diapers on the changing table shelves, and when I pulled back the quilt the sheets underneath smelled stale.

  The other half of the room was an office. There was a desk wedged against the wall, with a computer and more books, plus typed pages fanned across so the desktop was barely visible. Newspaper clippings and photographs were pasted on the wall all the way up to the ceiling, and I walked closer so I could read them. The articles were all by my father and some were very old, the paper jaundiced and wrinkled. Interviews with celebrities I didn’t recognize and politicians I’d never heard of. A story about a missing teenage girl, in a place called Wicklow, who had last been seen hitching her way home from work. A series of interviews with hunger strikers in a prison in Northern Ireland. I paused on this one. I couldn’t understand all the references, but they were IRA members—I’d heard about those—who wanted to be treated differently because they were political prisoners instead of just plain criminals. The article was from 1981, a year after I was born. Some of the men died after starving themselves for months, waiting for a recognition that never came. I wondered if they had enjoyed their hunger, if they had felt like they were accomplishing something, if they had imagined their stomachs consuming their bodies and their memories from the inside out. I wondered if they had really wanted to die.

  Along the right edge of the group of articles was a vertical line of photos—some of me as a baby and some of my mother looking like she was trying not to smile but couldn’t help herself. In the lowermost corner there was an oversized black-and-white of a young girl in a sandbox. She was playing with a tea set, pouring pretend tea into a miniature cup and laughing, half her face hidden by dark curls. It took me a minute to realize it was me. But it couldn’t be; this girl was at least four or five. How could my father have a picture of me two years after we’d left him? Unless my mother had sent it.

  I knew that sandbox. It was where I used to go after school with my baby-sitter until my mother picked me up on her way home from work. She’d had a boyfriend then who was a photographer—one of those boyfriends I later remembered and she didn’t. He’d taken a lot of pictures of me—I can still see the camera at his eye. He might have taken this picture and my mother might have sealed it in an envelope and mailed it across the world.

  Maybe she had stayed secretly in touch with my father. Maybe she had written letters about me, sent pictures of me at ten when I won the state spelling bee, at thirteen when I’d gone to my first boy-girl dance. The idea of this was stranger than the idea of her never contacting him. If she shared me with him then why had she never done the same for me?

  The photo blurred and my eyes stung with salty tears. I should have been angry at my mother, but I wasn’t. What I was thinking in my baby room, looking at my father’s daily view, was this: If I could have my mother back, if I could make it so she had never been eaten by those tumors, I would not ask about my father this time. I wouldn’t ask about any of it. I’d take what she wanted me to have and nothing more. Because if I had to lose her to get this—an empty house, ancient pictures, and an echo of a father hiding away from me—then it wasn’t worth it.

  I ran out of the house and almost fell over Liam, who was sitting on the front stoop.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. I think I yelled, because he flinched, though he didn’t back away.

  “My Mum said you’d be here,” he said. “I just came to look after you.”

  “I don’t need you guarding me, too,” I said.

  “I’m not guarding you, silly,” he said. “I’m inviting you for tea. Mum has it ready for us.”

  “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” I snapped.

  Liam looked at me strangely, not hurt as I’d intended him to be but curious, as though I’d said something in a foreign language.

  “Because we’re friends,” he said. “I want you to feel at home.”

  “This isn’t my home,” I said. I was crying again.

  Liam scrounged in his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled handkerchief. He folded a clean corner and wiped my face quickly, unembarrassed, like he was some uncle of mine and he’d done it a million times before.

  “It is if you want it to be,” he said.

  I don’t know whether it was what he said or the feel of his fingers steadying my chin, but something made me exhausted. I didn’t want to fight him. I didn’t want to have to fight anyone.

  “I’m sick and tired of tea,” I said to him, and he laughed and walked me up the road to his family’s house.

  CHAPTER 17

  Grace

  She wakes Stephen when she rips the bedcovers from his side. He sits up quickly, with the attention of someone who barely sleeps, who’s always listening. Grace is stuffing the comforter and sheets between her legs, like she is trying to plug herself up.

  “What is it?” Stephen says, trying to pull her fingers from the wrinkled covers.

  “Seamus,” she says. At first, Stephen thinks she’s said “shameless.” “Seamus, I’m losing the baby. It’s Gráinne, she’s bleeding out of me. Stop her, Seamus. Please!” She is crying, her legs tight around the clumps of sheets.

  “It’s Stephen, Grace. I’m here. Gráinne’s asleep in the other room. Remember?”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she yells. “Do something, you fuck. I’m having a miscarriage.”

  “Grace, you’re not having a miscarriage. You’re not pregnant. Please, honey, wake up.”

  Grace looks at him and it is Stephen, crying; she has frightened him again.

  “Is Gráinne all right?” she says, and he shrugs, then nods. He looks knackered, she thinks. Hasn’t he been sleeping? She lets go of the bedding, allowing him to smooth it back over her. She remembers now. She’s not having a miscarriage. It is she who is dying, not Gráinne.

  “It’s freezing in here,” she says. “Why is the bed all wet?”

  Stephen feels the bed around her, finding nothing. “It’s not,” he says.

  “It is so,” Grace sighs. No one ever notices this but she. “This house has gone damp.” She can smell the mildew in the duvet. “Can I have a mint?” she asks. She’s been vomiting all morning, and her throat is sore and bitter. Stephen gives her a Tic Tac. She was expecting a Silvermint, large, white, and round, with the texture of baby aspirin. These are what Seamus used to give her, when she was pregnant with Gráinne.

  She forces herself out of bed, holding her breath at the wallop of pain. In the dark kitchen, she finds a note tacked to the refrigerator from her daughter.

  A mermaid found a swimming lad,

  Picked him for her own,

  Pressed her body to his body,

  Laughed; and plunging down

  Forgot in cruel happiness

  That even lovers drown.

  Grace is sure that Gráinne still dreams of drowning. She doesn’t know that she comes from an island both nourished and cursed by the sea; where people disappeared yearly, dragged under the rough waters by jealous mermaids. But something inside her must remember.

  Grace wishes she could wake Gráinne up, hold on to her as she used to do in the water while teaching her to swim. Just enough above the surface so she felt safe. But Grace is drowning herself, her lungs and mouth full of liquid pain. She might not be able to hold on tight enough, and Gráinne would be pulled under. She leaves her daughter a
note about the grocery shopping and limps back to her bedroom.

  Stephen goes to the bathroom to get her medicine. She tries to think quick of what it is she wants to say, because once she gets that shot, it won’t come out right.

  “I’d like to know what she was thinking,” Grace says, when Stephen comes forward with needle and vial.

  “Who, Gráinne?” he says.

  “No, my mother. I’d like to know what she was thinking.” She has to concentrate on every word, because the pain is ripping them away from her.

  “When, sweetie? When do you mean?”

  “Always,” Grace says as the needle plunges. She’s sinking now.

  “I think I got it wrong,” she says. Stephen crawls in beside her. “I think I got it backwards.”

  “What’s that?” He’s stroking her hair. Has he done that before? There was another man who did that, but they’re all bleeding into this one beside her.

  “I thought I was the strong one,” she says.

  Stephen kisses her ear, breathes warm, damp air over her face. “You are. You’re the strong one, Grace.”

  The night she miscarried, the blood-soaked towels made her think of Jesus, the slice in his side, the maroon rivulets following the lines of his palms. That blood was shed for you, the Sisters had said when she was a girl. Jesus bled so you don’t have to. Had she actually believed that once?

  “No,” she says. She’s losing her grip. She sees a man’s moon-white hand, holding her palm against a textured stone wall. She has the sense of her mother carrying her, which can’t be right because she hardly remembers her mother ever touching her. Only it’s Gráinne holding her up above the cold water, and she wants to say: Put me down, I’m bigger than you! Then Seamus is back, lying beside her in the bed, holding on so tight she can barely breath—and still, she knows if she wriggles away and escapes to the ocean, her body will ooze out from the inside, blood and pulp and bone, until there is nothing left of her human shell.

  CHAPTER 18

  Grace

  In the five years that Grace lived on Inis Murúch, no matter what the season, she was always cold. The weather was not a normal cold like the freezing wind of Boston she was used to, but a wet cold that ate its way through everything she used to cover herself. Everything she had, oiled wool cardigans, long johns, layers of socks, and the three blankets on her bed, all of it was slightly moist. It was as though she’d gone swimming fully clothed and was eternally caught in the sluggy hour between being soaked and fully dry. Damp.

  All the islanders spoke of it, it was a fact of life. “My house has gone fierce damp,” they would say. Yet it didn’t seem to bother them. No one but Grace huddled by the turf fire or laid their underclothes on the cast-iron stove for the morning. It seemed as if she was constantly shivering, waterlogged, while the rest of the family remained comfortable. Only when she was swimming did Grace feel warm. If she immersed herself in the freezing ocean, her muscles came alive, and heat crackled like a coal fire in her middle. It was the in-between she couldn’t stand, the damp that refused to dry. It followed her like a curse, like the memory of running soaked and freezing from the water, while Mrs. Willoughby drowned behind her.

  She hated it here. Hated the island, which she knew every inch of because she could only walk forty minutes in any direction before coming to the barrier of the sea. She hated Marcus, the ignorant pig her mother had married, and his children, who were like dim, grinning dolls. Their eyes, duplicate disks of the same blue shade, reminded her constantly that she was not one of them. She despised the islanders, all of whom she seemed to be related to. They were like a colony of inbred, nosy aliens who spoke without moving their mouths in a secret, throaty language. The food was greasy, the milk tasted strange. The sky was either hurling horizontal rain, or just recovering from a shower, or threatening another downpour any second. Old, smelly men snaked their arms around her waist and told her they loved her and wanted to take her for moonlight walks. It didn’t matter that they were her great-uncles or her cousins twice removed. Everything and everyone around her made her cringe and want to bite, spit, and scream. I hate you, she wanted to say to the Anties clucking about her grades and her shortened skirts. I hate you, to her baby stepbrother Tommy, who wailed whenever Grace looked at him. Most of all, Grace hated her mother for dragging her here, then ignoring her in favor of her new, blue-eyed family.

  Grace missed Michael. On good days, she wrote to him, clinging to the hope that he would write back two words: Come home. On bad days she was humiliated, unable to wash away the smell of her sex, which she now thought was disgusting, fungal. She dreamed that Michael was growing inside her stomach, attached to her organs with bubbled vines of seaweed. She threw up in the mornings, after lunch, and sometimes during dinner. It didn’t occur to her that she was pregnant. Her periods had never been regular. That’s what she thought it was—one of her occasional periods—when the blood started.

  It was in the bedroom she shared with the blue-eyed girls, Stephanie and Mary Louise. Stephanie was only four, one of those invisible, introverted children who are easy to ignore. But Mary Louise was irritating. Clíona liked Mary Louise because she was responsible and pleasant; Grace despised her for the same reasons.

  That night, Mary Louise was reorganizing her records while Grace lay on her damp bed, looking at the yellow water stain on the ceiling. There was a cramp in her lower abdomen, squeezing and releasing slowly like a blood pressure cuff.

  “What sort of music do you fancy?” Mary Louise said. Grace wouldn’t look at her.

  “Why?” she snapped.

  “Ah, I’m only curious,” Mary Louise said. “I thought maybe we’d like some of the same.” Grace sat up, pulling her cold fingers into the sleeves of her nightgown.

  “What makes you think we have anything in common?” she said. Mary Louise only smiled.

  “Aren’t we sisters now?” she said. “We’ve that in common, sure.”

  “Whatever that means,” Grace said. She stood up. Mary Louise looked at her and blushed.

  “You’ve a visitor,” she said, gesturing at the back of Grace’s nightgown. Grace looked and saw a red-brown stain on the floral print.

  “Fuck,” she said, and the cramp squeezed again. She felt a burp of thick fluid against her underpants.

  “Do you need a sanitary towel?” Mary Louise said, but Grace ignored her and went to the bathroom.

  For the next hour her insides slopped out, filling the toilet and soaking six towels with red jellyfish flesh. Nothing would stop it. One clot was so large she thought sure it contained one of her organs, that eventually, everything else inside her would follow. She ignored her stepsisters’ knocks and pleas for the bathroom, and later swore angrily at her mother’s curt voice through the keyhole. She didn’t come out until the bleeding had lessened, and she was dizzy. Clíona was the one who told her she’d miscarried, when she saw the towels.

  “I couldn’t stop it,” Grace cried. She wanted her mother to touch her then. Needed her for forgiveness, comfort. Someone to mop up the crud that seeped out of her, and make her well again.

  But her mother was unreachable. Her reaction was only shame mixed with annoyance. Like she couldn’t be bothered. To her, Grace was like the remains on the towels: a child she’d never wanted. She looked on Grace with those hooded black eyes and said only: “Stop your crying now.” And suddenly, Grace was alone. Her mother took her to the doctor, made her wear a wedding ring. In the hospital waiting room, Grace imagined she saw emotion in her mother’s face. Something like fear or maybe guilt. It was gone in an instant, and later Grace forgot it. It wasn’t what she had wished to see anyway.

  The winter after her miscarriage, Grace felt nothing, no connection to life other than the damp cold that kept her moving. When she thought of it later, it was as the year of her death. Emptiness without peace, time moving on without purpose. She was emotionless on the outside but infected with a fear that grew like a hard tumor in her abdomen. She didn
’t eat or sleep. When it was day she couldn’t remember it ever being dark; at night it was as though she’d gone years without the sun. Her mother and the blue-eyed family were invisible—or maybe it was Grace who was invisible and they normal, living. She tried to drown herself every time she entered the water, but her swimmer’s body wouldn’t allow it. It always went up for air no matter how hard she fought. She hadn’t the strength to die any more than she had the strength to live. At times she felt possessed, like her dead jellyfish baby was clamped onto her soul, dragging her down into a grave where the dirt caved in from the sides, filling her mouth, nose, and eyes with a sickly sweet plug.

  When she first saw Seamus O’Flaherty, it was as if the thick gauze covering her world had been ripped just enough to let him show through. He was the only person she’d looked at in a year who had sharp, definite outlines, features, and skin color. He was something to focus on. His black hair curled and glittered around his ears and neck; his face beamed white, as if the moon were just beneath his skin; his dark eyes were a warm liquid texture that seemed to shift within itself, capturing and retreating from the light. He smiled at her and her insides cracked, the clotted fear squeezed aside, making room.

  She couldn’t speak to him. She wanted to, but was afraid when she opened her mouth that all her words would meld into a primitive moan. Language had left her, and the sounds she had in her throat were too ugly to let out. He must have been warned by her mother, because he didn’t ask her to speak. He spoke for both of them and did it in a way that made the whole situation seem normal.

  He brought her to the beaches and told her the stories of Inis Murúch. He spoke of the mischievous mermaids, whom the island people thought were sinful, corrupting men with lust and seduction. His voice was like no one else’s; it savored every word and rose like waves at the end of a sentence.