The Mermaids Singing Read online

  In the pale morning light, with Mary Louise’s undone hair, it almost looked like my mother Clíona was holding. My mother and my grandmother, grief flowing out of one and strength coming in from the other. I wanted to join them. But it wasn’t my mother, it was Liam’s. And Liam’s father, Owen, who played the fiddle, whom I hadn’t seen since I was three years old and couldn’t even remember, was dead.

  I watched Liam, who took his mother’s arm and helped Clíona guide her away from the boat. His face looked blank, but I knew he must be terrified, and I was surprised to see him walking so calmly. He was fatherless. I expected him to bolt off, run away from it all, vanishing into the fog. But he got in an islander’s car with his mother, and before I knew it, it was me that was running, the rain like needles against my eyes, sprinting blindly away from the voices that called my name out like a song.

  CHAPTER 24

  Grace

  “Do you hear that, Gráinne?” Grace whispered. She knelt down to where her daughter was digging in the sand. “It’s the mermaids, they’re singing.”

  The little girl rose from her squatting position, putting a hand on her mother’s shoulder to steady herself. She stretched her neck, listening in the way that Grace loved—as if she were using her entire body to capture the sound.

  “Mer-mays,” Gráinne repeated, her coal-colored eyes widening.

  “They’re ladies, sweetie,” Grace said. “Ladies who live in the sea.”

  “Mer-laylees,” Gráinne said. She cocked her head in the direction of the singing wind. “Plitty.”

  “Yes, it’s pretty,” Grace said. She brushed the violet-black curls from Gráinne’s forehead.

  Gráinne squatted again, returned to shoveling sand. She took her time, lifting each shovelful slowly and patting its contents into a neat pile. Grace watched her. Her little girl was so careful, so graceful in her movements. She surveyed every situation before plunging in. She liked to taste things, touch them, before accepting them. She smelled her own fingers periodically throughout the day, to see what invisible layers they had collected. She was rarely frustrated, never impatient, even at two years old. Grace envied her.

  From the first moment she had held Gráinne, Grace had not wanted to put her down. The baby’s sweet, warm skin was unlike any body Grace had ever known. That first year she had wanted to keep Gráinne to herself, but she couldn’t go anywhere without nosy, peering island faces. Mary Louise kept calling in with Liam, or jogging along with the carriage to catch up with Grace on the road. Whenever Grace met island women, they’d pick up the baby without invitation.

  “Is that Seamus’s girl?” Mrs. Keane would say. “My, she’s getting big. She’s the image of her father—Grace, I don’t see a sign of you.” Grace got into the habit of whispering into Gráinne’s baby ears everything she couldn’t say to others.

  “How it’s possible that Mrs. Keane can be uglier than her husband, I do not know. Next time she holds you, Gráinne, spit up on her.” The baby’s eyes sparkled, and followed Grace’s voice.

  “She worships you,” Seamus always said, but Grace was jealous at how much the baby adored him. When he spoke to her in Irish, Gráinne laughed and gurgled as if they were conversing. It was like their secret language, and Grace hated it.

  “I’ll teach it to you, too,” Seamus said, but Grace ignored him.

  “Your father’s a sexy man, Gráinne, but he’s manipulative,” she said, and the girl smiled.

  “Why do you say things like that?” Seamus said, angry. “You’ll confuse her.”

  “I tell her everything I think,” Grace said.

  “And that’s what you think of me?” Seamus said, handing her the baby.

  Grace kissed him. “Only sometimes,” she said.

  Gráinne kept Grace warm in the daytime—a clean, powder warmth that Grace breathed in hungrily. At night, it was Seamus who heated her, from the musky fire within his chest, and made her believe, in that moment before dreaming, that her body would die without him.

  Seamus only left her when he was given a newspaper assignment he could not resist. He made most of their meager living on his father’s fishing boat, but would not give up the journalism, no matter how Grace begged him. She didn’t like his being away, for it was when he wasn’t next to her that she imagined leaving him.

  He was often sent to the North, where there was fighting, to interview paramilitaries and men in prison starving themselves in protest. When he returned from these trips, his mind stayed away. For days he would be distant, he wouldn’t seem to see Grace, he would mutter and curse to himself, or bury his face in Gráinne’s hair, looking miserable. It was the only time Grace ever felt she had no effect on him, and this frightened her.

  “Why do you have to go there?” Grace said once, as he was packing his camera bag. “It’s dangerous. What if you get shot?”

  “I’m a journalist,” Seamus said. “Someone has to listen to these people and tell their story.”

  “Why does it have to be you?”

  “I’m Irish, Grace. This is my country—my countrymen who are digesting their own organs in jail. We have our freedom, you and Gráinne and I. They don’t. The least I can do is help them demand it.”

  Grace did not feel she had her freedom. When Seamus was not there, his island was her jail. She hated his love for his country, wanted him to love her as much as he did those anonymous, violent men. She wanted him to give up everything for her, the way she imagined she had for him. She was afraid, when he left her alone, that she might disappear. That she might make herself disappear.

  On the nights Seamus was home, he and Gráinne had a bedtime ritual. He would tuck her in, sing to her, and when she started to fight her sleepiness, he would put a hand on her forehead.

  “Can I close my eyes?” Gráinne would say in her charming new voice.

  “Yes,” Searnus would say. “Close your eyes.”

  “What if I open them?” Gráinne would yawn.

  “I’ll still be here,” Seamus would say.

  Grace always listened to them with guilt flooding through her. When Grace closed her eyes, she imagined opening them in a place far away from mis Murúch.

  Grace began to go to the pub with Mary Louise when Seamus was away. Owen and the other musicians would play for the summer tourists, and the crowds made the island seem almost exciting. Grace and Mary Louise would put their toddlers together in a carriage, and the two slept peacefully through the noise. Grace would drink hot whiskeys until the room blurred with excitement and possibility. She would run her fingers through her hair and return the appreciative glances of new men.

  Toward the end of one night, Grace was sitting in a corner booth, flirting with a young Norwegian man. He kept his hand on her thigh while he wooed her in broken English, gazing at her with ice-blue eyes. Mary Louise interrupted them, telling Grace that Gráinne was looking to be fed. The man excused himself, scurrying off at the mention of a child. Grace went over to the carriage, but the kids were still asleep.

  “What’s the idea?” Grace said to her stepsister.

  “Would you tell me what you think you’re doing with that man?” Mary Louise said. “What will Seamus think?”

  “I was only talking,” Grace said. “And Seamus isn’t here. Who’s going to tell him, you?”

  “The first person he sees when he gets off the boat will tell him,” Mary Louise whispered.

  “I’ll talk to whoever I want,” Grace said. “It’s nobody’s business.”

  Mary Louise sighed and patted Grace’s arm. Grace could tell by the look on her face that her stepsister thought Grace was only being friendly. She wanted to smack her. Mary Louise was the stupidest woman alive.

  “I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea, is all,” Mary Louise said. Gráinne woke up then and called for her mother. Grace picked her up.

  “I’m mapping out escape routes,” Grace whispered to her. Gráinne laughed and repeated her, her babyish voice rising and falling in waves li
ke her father’s.

  In August, when the nights were warm, Seamus and Grace would leave their daughter with Clíona and walk to a secluded beach on the western end of the island, to watch the sunset. If she closed her eyes, and blocked out the bleating sheep, Grace could almost pretend they were somewhere else, and that behind them there was so much more than that little island. She remembered back to when the dark blanket had fallen over her mind and she had thought that getting Seamus would be the answer to everything.

  Once they stayed beneath the sheltering cliffs until after dark, building a fire from driftwood and a broken fence. Grace stood looking out at the dark sea, listening to the waves sizzling up after her. Seamus wrapped his arms around her from behind, pressing his fiery chest against her back.

  “How is it that you’re so warm?” Grace said, craning her neck back so he could kiss her.

  “It’s not me that’s warm.” Seamus laughed. “It’s that you’re always cold.”

  “Maybe,” Grace murmured.

  “Do you know why the mermaid fell in love with my great-great-grandfather?” he said.

  “Good kisser?” Grace said. Seamus smiled into her hair.

  “Because his body was the warmest thing she could find outside of the sea.”

  His voice was like cords pulling everything inside her toward him. She turned around, kissed him so deeply that he whimpered far back in his throat.

  “Tell me you’re happy,” he whispered, and she nodded automatically. “If I let go,” Seamus said, “would you dive back to your home beneath the sea?”

  Grace leaned her head into his chest. “I don’t know,” she said. “Could I take you with me?”

  “Sure, I’d go anywhere with you,” Seamus said, locking his fingers behind her so she couldn’t wriggle away.

  “But we don’t,” Grace said. “We never go anywhere.”

  “I’ll take you to Dublin next week,” Seamus said.

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” Grace said.

  Seamus kissed her earlobe, and her body lit up like a raked fire. “You haven’t given it enough time,” he said. “You’re getting happier every day, I can see it. Wait awhile.”

  Grace wanted to say she could be on this island for centuries and never be happy, but Seamus was kissing her, filling her with a heat that swallowed her words.

  He took off their clothes and made a blanket on the sand, pulled her down and made love to her slowly, and for so long that Grace was delirious. She thought she heard the singing of the mermaids in the coves, a sensuous chant calling to her in the same rhythm as Seamus’s sliding hips. But when he clamped his mouth on hers, she realized she’d been moaning, so loudly that her voice echoed in the cliff walls.

  The next time he was in Belfast, Seamus sent her a letter. Inside was a poem, copied out in his neat, almost feminine script.

  I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  When I had laid it on the floor

  I went to blow the fire aflame,

  But something rustled on the floor,

  And someone called me by my name:

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded through the brightening air.

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  “He’ll follow us, Gráinne,” Grace said, folding the paper carefully. Grá was playing with the miniature tea set Clíona had given her for her second birthday. “Wherever we need to go, he’ll follow us.”

  “I know that,” Gráinne said, pouring invisible tea into a special cup, the one she’d just recently begun to save for the mermaid.

  CHAPTER 25

  Gráinne

  The sea had not taken Owen MacNamara’s body, but swallowed it and spat it back up with the life gone. The men on the boat had found his broken form on the rocks of an uninhabited island, as if sea creatures had ravaged it then tossed it away. They delivered him to the mainland so the undertaker could prepare the remains for the funeral. I overheard all this in the whispered conferences of Clíona and Marcus, who assumed I was sleeping. Clíona sounded almost like she was crying, though it wasn’t like her. Two days after the storm, every islander who could walk stood on the quay, waiting for the ferry to deliver Owen’s coffin.

  As the boat rounded the harbor entrance by Granuaile’s castle, the church bells began to gong, so loudly the ground vibrated beneath our feet. The men, looking stern and pale, lifted the coffin from the boat and carried it up to Liam’s house. There was an open viewing, where Mary Louise and her children sat to one side, and the islanders stopped to kneel by Owen’s swollen, rubbery face. There were monstrous flower arrangements with blue ribbons that said Da, Beloved Husband, and Captain, and three candies lit in a semicircle around his head. I listened in awe as the islanders said things to Mary Louise and Liam that no one had dared say to me. People hadn’t talked about my mother at her funeral, except to say stupid things like how full and lovely her face looked, considering. I remembered, watching Liam nod to mourners, how I’d snapped at a woman from my mother’s work.

  “They stuffed her cheeks with cotton,” I’d said. She’d stuttered and turned to Stephen, to get away from me.

  In Liam’s house, there was drinking and laughter in the kitchen, and men telling funny stories about Owen. The women cried openly and clutched at Mary Louise.

  “You’re all alone now, God love you,” they said to her. It was true, of course, but I was amazed that people were saying such things out loud. Mary Louise only nodded and gave a comforting smile. People kept reminding Liam that he was now the man of the house.

  “You’ll have to take his place in the seisiúns as well,” Marcus said. “Your father was a great one for the craic, boy.” I thought it was mean to remind Liam what he was missing, but he thanked them. Imagine if my mother’s funeral had been like this, I thought. People commenting on her bad wig, reminding me I was an orphan, saying “I heard she never even said good-bye to her own child.”

  I couldn’t think of anything bold to say, but when I took Liam’s hand, I tried to squeeze in meaning, to hold it the way he’d always held mine. He didn’t seem to notice, but moved on to the next hand in line.

  “Why are the mirrors covered?” I asked Clíona, when she came and stood beside me.

  “Ah, it’s just an old superstition,” she whispered. “Some believe if you look into the mirror just after a death, it’s the spirit’s face you’ll be seeing instead of your own.”

  I remembered cutting my hair in front of that cottage mirror. How I’d said my name again and again, making myself a stranger. I would have given anything to see my mother’s face looking back at me.

  “Is that a Catholic thing?” I asked Clíona, and she laughed. I couldn’t get used to all this laughing during a funeral.

  “Ah, no, Gráinne,” she said. “We Irish are devout Catholics, but we’re fanatic pagans as well.” Liam’s grandfather, who was sitting just next to us, smiled and nodded at me.

  After the funeral service, the islanders walked in a line behind the pallbearers, up the long hill to the graveyard. I’d never been sure which or how many of the island children were Liam’s siblings, but now I could distinguish five of them with Mary Louise, all boys, looking like those identical dolls that come out
of one another—becoming smaller and smaller in the same black suits. Liam helped carry the coffin and he was as tall as the other men, though thinner.

  At the grave, Father Cullen said a prayer that started: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.

  The priest had said that at my mother’s funeral. I realized now that the prayer was supposed to be in the voice of the dead person. At my mother’s grave, I had thought it was me walking through the shadow of death. And I was afraid, because my mother was not there.

  The rest of Father Cullen’s words drowned in my ears; I could only hear a pulsing—a wavering, muffled sound, as though I were listening under water.

  The men put the coffin in the ground, covered it with dirt, then a layer of stones and shells.

  “How long is Da gonna be in there?” Liam’s smallest brother asked, which made people who had stopped crying start up again. They wailed as loudly and unabashedly as they had been laughing before. Mary Louise picked the boy up and whispered in his ear.

  They would all be able to come back here, I thought, on anniversaries and whenever they missed him; they would plant flowers and an engraved stone. My mother was in a stoneless grave south of Boston. I wouldn’t remember which grave it was even if I got back there. I would never be able to show it to my father.

  Clíona put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pass me a handkerchief. I stepped away and wiped my eyes, looking at the tears on my palms. With the sun burning my vision, the sliding drops looked like blood.

  The next morning, I packed a bag with clean underwear, the carving of Granuaile, and my passport, in case I had to prove to my father who I was. I wore my mother’s claddagh engagement ring on my index finger. When Clíona left to check in hotel guests, I snuck down to the kitchen and took forty pounds from the grocery jar. I’d woken up hot and fuzzy-headed, so I gulped down four aspirin from the bottle next to the oven. I left through the kitchen door so Clíona would not see me from the hotel.