The Mermaids Singing Read online

  “Gráinne!” Stephen erupted with his orgasm, and I almost dropped the phone. I could feel the damp heat of his lips seeping through the receiver. “Don’t,” he whispered. “God.”

  The ringing continued through it all, gnawing at my ear.

  When I hung up the phone, they came in, my mother and Stephen, looking worried and guilty. My mother lowered the bed railing with a click and sat down beside me. She had a towel with her and began rubbing it over my wet hair in soothing strokes.

  “Don’t ever go in the water without me,” she scolded.

  “Mom,” I said. I was crying so hard that the whole bed was soaked, as if it had been walloped by a sea wave.

  “Shhh,” she said. “We’ll have time to talk when you’re better.” I pushed the towel away so I could look at her.

  “But you’re dying,” I said. “Stephen took you to the hospital.” She laughed, looking at Stephen, and he was laughing along with her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m not the one dying.” She began to cough. She hacked with a liquid sound until her face turned purple, and what looked like a jellyfish erupted from her throat and fell with a squishy plop on the bed.

  “You’re all right, Grace,” Stephen said, moving in to hold her. He kissed her earlobe. Her hair was thinning fast; corkscrewed strands of copper fell from her shoulders like rain.

  She took the towel and scooped up the bloody mess. I saw a nipple protruding from the towel folds and I could tell by the way her gown sank on one side that only puckered skin and stitches remained. She had vomited up her breast.

  “This is my body,” she said, holding the bloody towel high in front of her. “It will be given up for you.”

  “Please don’t go, Mom,” I said, reaching for her. I couldn’t move far because of the straps on my legs. “Please stay with me,” I said.

  My mother grinned as if nothing was wrong and she thought I was just being a pain in the ass, so she needed to humor me.

  “If you close your eyes,” she said, “I’ll read to you.”

  Once I’d closed them, I couldn’t seem to open them again, and it was not her voice which continued, but a man’s voice, sounding far away.

  Again and again when I am broken

  my thought comes on you when you were young,

  and the incomprehensible ocean fills

  with floodtide and a thousand sails.

  I struggled at the belts, and when I got free, I was on the beach, the waves crashing stormily in the dark night. My mother’s voice was there, rising from the water, and I ran down toward it, the sand squealing and singing beneath my rubber soles.

  “Mom!” I screamed. I couldn’t see her, only the bluish curve of something dangerous in the water.

  She sang out lines to me.

  Dance there upon the shore;

  What need have you to care

  For wind or water’s roar?

  And tumble out your hair

  That the salt drops have wet;

  Being young you have not known

  The fool’s triumph, nor yet

  Love lost as soon as won…

  What need have you to dread

  The monstrous crying of wind?

  I dove into an oncoming wave, which broke across my shoulders like a hard wooden plank. I tried to swim toward her voice, but the sound of the sea in my ears deceived me. Another big swell pushed me under, and the current, like hands on my ankles, pulled me deeper out to sea. I reached my arms out for my mother, and she found me and pulled me to shore. I was lying on pinching sand, coughing up black water and bits of seaweed. Words still pounded in my ears. It was no longer my mother’s voice, but the man’s, moany and vaguely familiar, who sounded like he was pushing the poetry through tears.

  The shore of troubles is hidden

  with its reefs and the wrack of grief,

  and the unbreaking wave strikes

  about my feet with a silken rubbing.

  When I opened my eyes it was Liam, and not my mother, leaning above me in the moonlight.

  “You’ve a cut over your eye,” he said, pressing his shirtsleeve gently to my forehead. “I thought you said you couldn’t drown if you knew how to swim,” he joked, touching my cheek with his free hand.

  My mother’s still out there, I wanted to say, but he plummeted down and kissed me, and the salt and warmth of his lips swallowed my words without answering them.

  While we lay there, sucking deeply on each other’s mouths, Liam’s hands all over me, swelling my skin to the point where I wanted to burst, my mother’s voice called me for the last time.

  Will you defy the barbarous sea,

  challenging the misfortune of ocean,

  will you sail again peacefully with the tide,

  will you swim like a love-making tune?

  …

  Perhaps there will appear to us a gentle dream

  in which will be seen on the floor of oceans

  a black shapely one and a fair one

  encompassed with a sea of brightness.

  When I opened my eyes I saw my father, holding a thin book near a lamp that lit the hospital room with a foggy yellow glow. His hair was down, black and silver curling like night around his earlobes. He was reading to me.

  How did the springtide not last,

  the springtide more golden to me than to the birds,

  and how did I lose its succour,

  ebbing drop by drop of grief?

  He glanced up then and smiled at me—and I saw myself, shifting and drowning in the black mirror of his eyes.

  “Am I dying?” I said, my throat squeezed thin and dry.

  “God, no,” he said. “You’re malnourished and anemic, but if you smarten up and eat a little you’ll recover in no time.”

  I started to cry, wanting to be back in the dream with the chance of meeting my mother if I swam out far enough. “Mom’s gone,” I said to him.

  “Yes,” my father said. “I know, Gráinne.”

  “I didn’t say good-bye,” I whispered. His face blurred under my watery lashes until it seemed I was looking through the screen of the sea, making a soundless confession.

  “Ah, now, your mother was never the one for good-byes,” my father said. “She prefers to slip away unnoticed, like the tide, and come back when you least expect her.”

  “But she’s not coming back to you,” I said, imagining him looking out over deceiving waters. “Not ever.”

  “Aye,” my father said and he put a warm palm on my forehead, as if he meant to ease my life with the pressure of skin. “I know that.”

  “Why didn’t you come for me?” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Gráinne,” he said. “I wanted to. I was afraid it would be like the last time.”

  And I saw him then, with younger, more hopeful eyes, taking a sand-filled teacup from my hand, snapping my picture from behind the mask of his camera. One of my mother’s boyfriends—there and then gone, without memory, without significance, without, I had thought, any connection to the family that was the two of us.

  My father, Seamus O’Flaherty, sat with his hands fiddling and tapping against his knees. He had long, brown hands, with calluses lined up like a mountain range on his palms, ink staining the rough bump on his pen finger. His knuckles, like mine, were thicker than the flesh of his fingers—the type of hands that suggest the raw bones of a skeleton.

  It was my father’s hands that I watched as he told his story, and my mother’s hands that I thought of as I translated his words into myth in my mind—her hands gentle on my hair, before they were waxed reproductions tied up in a rosary. Her hands as they might have been, when she was a girl my age.

  There was a girl who grew up with no father, whose only family was a mother who loved her harshly. A girl who was only ever touched by the sea, or by the hands of boys enchanted by her. A girl who laid an empty plate for an imaginary pirate queen, an invitation to a fierce spirit she hoped was like her own.

  There was a
young man, an ocean away, who had only a father; his mother was the harsh land and grieving water which surrounded him. A young man in love with the myth of his island, who watched for magical sea-women in the rhythm of the tide.

  When they met, the girl was thin as a rail, her eyes bruised in sorrow. She had been taken from her home and transplanted to a place where her language sounded strange and her body refused to stay warm. She knew only how to swim and how to use her fingers and mouth in passion. She had lost a child, and was afraid of losing herself.

  When he first saw the girl, the young man knew how to pull a living from the sea, and how to weave a story so it sounded like a song. He could read the soil and stormy weather, speak the language that had been beaten from his ancestors. He could travel to any country, translate other lives onto paper, but could not live in any land but his own.

  They fell in love—she with his body, he with her spirit. It was his heat that breathed her own life back into her, his voice that raised her eyes over the water. He fed her the land and the language he loved, thinking her fierceness was a sign of the sea-woman he had dreamed of as a boy. They took from each other what they could not create in themselves: a partner to fit in the empty slot of his world, a lover to accompany her back to the sea.

  When they married, their love was immersed in fear. She was afraid of being his prisoner, he was terrified of the day she would leave him. Each of them waited for the other to change.

  They had a child: a girl with the dark sea coloring of her father and the fierce look of her mother. The child had her father’s reticence and dreamy fascination with language, as well as the blunt, demanding temper and adventurous streak of her mother. She was them and she was not them; she illuminated each to the other and she stretched forth ahead of them, beyond their reach or understanding. The man and woman loved their child as they could not love each other: with the grief and the joy that they could not keep her for long.

  The woman never learned to love the man’s island. Year by year it grew smaller, colder, more her prison than his paradise. She left him as he’d always predicted she would—slipping away by night, disappearing like a mermaid sliding under the sea. Perhaps she hoped he would follow her, even as she knew he would not be able to. She left him regardless, left him because her love for him was not as strong as the pull of her own spirit. She took their daughter, not knowing—or did she?—that one day she would send the girl back.

  The man, paralyzed by grief, sustained by false hopes, waited. He waited for the woman to return, waited for their natures to shift just enough to allow them to be happy together. He waited, as it turned out, for too long.

  By the time he traveled across the ocean after his family, like the journalist he was, in search of the story, his baby girl was five years old. This is the part that only he knows, the part of which no one was aware.

  He approached her in a park in Boston, where she played quietly in a sandbox while her baby-sitter read on a bench nearby. The girl was laying pretend tea out in plastic flowered cups. He told the sitter he was a friend of her mother, and asked the girl for permission to join her.

  “Are you one of my mother’s boyfriends?” his daughter said, the suspicion of a city child in a face that was, in vivid flashes, her mother’s.

  “I was once,” the man said. She filled a cup with sand, balanced it on a saucer and passed it to him with polite grace. She laid a place reverently to her left, and then one for herself.

  “Will there be someone joining us?” the man said, thinking of the table they once shared, the three of them, in what he had wished was happiness.

  “That one’s for my father,” the girl said. She formed her words with care, as if each one was as important as the other.

  “And where is your father?” the man said, but what he was thinking was: Look at me, Gráinne, please truly look at me. I’m right here.

  “He’s at sea,” the girl said, pretending to sip her sand. “He’s a pirate, so he’s very busy; I keep his tea ready for him.” She looked up, concerned. “Don’t tell Mommy,” she added. “She gets upset.”

  “And how will you know him when he comes?”

  “Oh, he’s very handsome,” she said, with the exaggerated patience children bestow on grownups. “And he’ll be wearing pirate clothes, of course.”

  Her voice no longer had the lilt of the island in it.

  As he watched her tending the empty place—filling a tiny plate generously with grass and stones and arranging it next to the teacup—he remembered a story his father had told him as a child. A story about Jesus and his last instructions before his death.

  “Lay a place at your table for me,” Jesus said, “for when I come again to the world. And if a stranger appears, give him my share—for every time you refuse a stranger, you refuse me.” The man’s father, in the tradition of the islanders, had always set a third place for their supper. What the man, as a boy, had imagined but never told his father was this: that the plate awaited a woman rising out of the sea to join them.

  I am a stranger, he thought as he watched her little hands refill the imaginary father’s cup. She is not my daughter if I am not with her.

  Her coloring was still his own, but in this city light looked nothing like the sea. He remembered how it used to be when they looked into each other’s eyes: they had seen themselves looking back through those tiny round mirrors. Now, she did not see herself in him. He snapped a photo with his journalist’s camera, to capture her.

  That night he stood in a shadow outside their living room window, watching his wife and his daughter laugh and recount their day to one another. He looked at the doorbell, labeled with her maiden name. He could ring it, walk back into their lives, leave behind his land and its language and everything that defined him. He could try to live in a city which would suffocate him, try to get used to sandboxes instead of beaches, paved parks instead of bogland.

  Or the could steal his daughter away, teach her again to love her homeland, to speak in the music of the water surrounding her. Watch her grow up motherless.

  In the end he did nothing. Because he knew he could never have what he wanted: his home as well as his family. Because he looked at the two women of his life and saw they were not his to keep. In the end he returned to the only woman he had ever understood: Inis Murúch, the Island of the Mermaids. Where he set his table, each evening, for a family of three.

  He returned knowing that one day he would see his child again, and that he would have to explain his absence in her life. Knowing also that he would not be able to answer in the blunt way of her mother, but in the myth and mystery of his language, and that no explanation would ever be enough.

  I am not sure if these were my father’s exact words. But with my eyes closed and the image of my mother skimming across my mind like a mermaid cloaked in mist, these are the words that I heard.

  “That is where my door to the story closes,” my father said. “The rest of it—your mother’s life and your own—that is your story, Gráinne.”

  I looked down at my untouched hospital food; the soup had fogged-over the cutlery and tray with a beaded moisture. I thought of the place setting I used to find in the cottage, everything laid out in some secret, ancient preparation by my mother. Of her gray-paneled door, left ajar and expectant, and how I’d sneaked past it, afraid my motion might swing it open. As if opening that door would release my mother’s soul, like the souls in cages under the sea, and then she would be lost to me forever.

  “Why won’t you eat?” my father said. “Can you not see what you are doing to yourself?”

  How could I tell him? That if I ate, time would begin again, and I would know I was alive. And if I was alive, then it was my mother, not me, who had died. My mother who had died without me.

  “Close your eyes, Gráinne,” my father said, when he realized I was crying too hard to answer him. “You can begin again in the morn.”

  And he sang to me then, in a language I had forgotten, until t
he tears dried to salt on my cheeks, and I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  When I woke again, it was daytime, and Liam was sitting in a padded blue armchair by my bed. I had the strange feeling that I’d fallen asleep with the wind and rain storming at my windows, and woken to a calm blue morning.

  “Hey,” I said, testing out my voice. He looked up and smiled. Excitement ran like a drug through my veins, and I felt like jumping over the bed rails. No one, not even Stephen, had ever smiled at me like that before.

  “I was worried about you,” Liam said, standing up and resting his arms on the silver bars. “You’re looking more like yourself now.”

  “Is that good?” I said, rubbing crusty sleep from my eyes. I couldn’t possibly look attractive, unwashed and swaddled in a yellow johnny. There was a tube attached to my arm and a faint bruising ache where the needle was embedded in my skin. Liam put a hand to my face, stroking a crumb of sleep away with his finger.

  “Aye, that’s good,” he said, but his voice caught and he moved away. There was a low rumbling in my stomach.

  “I think I’m hungry,” I said.

  Liam brightened. “It’s about time,” he said. “What do you fancy? I’ll get you anything.”

  “Something salty,” I said.

  He came back bearing white paper bags crammed with fried fish and chips. We sat cross-legged on the bed, eating with our fingers. I couldn’t eat it fast enough, and the smell of salty fish in the room made me dizzy and aroused. Liam fed me a piece of cod from his bag, letting his thumb linger on my lip.

  “Where is he?” I whispered, looking toward the door.

  “Seamus?” Liam asked. He looked feverish, his eyes glazed—like light reflecting off water. “He’ll be back this afternoon.” He was staring at me, without shyness, so intensely I stopped chewing and could hardly breathe.

  “Gráinne,” he said, and I knew he was going to kiss me, no fantasy or mistake this time. His lips were warm and tasted of oil and salt and fish, with another richer flavor beneath that I knew, with a thrill of recognition, was the taste of him. The chips bags spilled in our laps, then Liam was lying down with me, and his hands on my breasts, stomach, and back were not groping or alien, but so natural my body seemed to reach out of its skin toward him; it could hardly get close enough.