The Mermaids Singing Read online

  When the nurse came in and caught us there was screeching and scolding, and I laughed until my stomach ached, watching Liam trying to look apologetic while holding his hands over his groin and licking his swollen, delicious lips.

  CHAPTER 28

  Clíona

  It’s the ringing of the telephone that wakes me. I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa—something I’ve been doing lately while Mary Louise watches the hotel on slow afternoons. Never before have I been the napping sort, but I suppose it comes with age.

  It’s Seamus ringing to say that he and Gráinne will be in on the four o’clock ferry. The girl’s well enough to travel again. I’m happy, if a little nervous, that they will both be here for Christmas dinner tomorrow.

  After I hang up the phone, my head still feels strange, ringing with the echoes of my dreams. I dreamed about my mother, scolding me when I was a wee girl. More of a memory really. I must have been just this side of seven years when I convinced my brother Colm to take me out in the curragh to gather seaweed for the fields. I plopped over the side after overextending myself to reach what I thought was a lovely-looking piece. Colm fished me out and when he brought me home soaking to Mum, she was livid.

  “Ah told ye ne’er to go out in that boot!” she said, in the Northern accent she had which was so different from my own, and every other islander’s. “Are ye wantin the mermaids to git ye?” At the mention of mermaids, I started crying. I’d heard enough stories of how heartless the creatures were, how they clamped onto you with their webbed hands and held you under, laughing bubbles as you choked for air. I tried to hold back my sobs; my mother hated it when her children cried. She beat me that day, hard and unrelenting with my father’s belt. My father never hit us, but she liked to use his belt for the appearance of authority, as on our island it was usual for the men to punish the children. Whenever she asked my father to unbuckle it, he did so slowly, as though he were the one about to be spanked.

  I hated my mother that day—hated her most of the thirteen years I spent with her, that’s true enough. Now I can look back and see that I’d frightened her, that the terror of me drowning had been hidden behind her rage. But at the time I only saw a mean, ugly woman who never smiled and hardly ever left the yard, for she hated to meet her island neighbors. My mother was never at home on Inis Murúch. Mind you, it’s a lovely place, and I’ll live here until the day I die and am buried in the graveyard up the road. But I’ll admit that island people can be hard on strangers. My mother lived here for near-on twenty years and I don’t think she had a friend besides my father. Islanders can spot it a mile away if a newcomer has any contempt for the place, and my mother had plenty. They won’t forgive that.

  I can still see every detail of my mother’s funeral, as if it is happening right before me. She was laid out on the bed for the viewing. I myself had helped the island woman wash her yellow limbs and prepare the hair above a face gone stiff in that familiar displeased expression. All the islanders who had never welcomed her moaned pretend sympathy to my father.

  “Ah, she was a good wife to you, Jared,” they said. “It’s hard-pressed you’d be to find a better woman.” The urge to contradict and expose them boiled in my throat.

  I had nursed my mother as she wasted away those last three months, the cancer spreading so quickly I don’t think it left a bit of healthy flesh in her body. She had been mean until the end, and sometimes confused myself and my sister for the island women she despised.

  “Say it to my face, you bitch!” my mother had growled at me one morning, before she’d lost her ability to speak. “I know well enough how you hate me. You’ll be thrilled when I’m gone, so you can get your trampy hands on my husband.”

  “Mum,” I said, backing away, the brush I’d been using on her hair held at a useless angle in front of me. “It’s me, Mum. Clíona.”

  “I know who you are, girl,” my mother said. Spittle ran down her chin like the foamy suds of washing-up liquid. “You’re the daughter who wants me to die.”

  I cried then, begging her not to say such things, clinging to her with more affection than I ever had in my life. Because she was right, you see. I did want her to die.

  At the funeral, Mrs. Keane came over to me to offer her sympathies.

  “You’ll miss her something awful, won’t you girl?” she said.

  “No,” I said coldly. “I can’t say I will.”

  Mrs. Keane was appalled. Of course, she was probably thinking even harsher things about Mum, but had the manners not to say so. “God help you, you’re a vicious child,” she said, turning away.

  The whole island knew what I’d said before the day was through. I suppose that’s how I got my reputation of being a hard woman, which still sticks in the old one’s minds today.

  “Clíona O’Halloran will tell you straight,” they say of me, though I can be as circumspect and hypocritical as the next person.

  I was true as my word, sure. I didn’t miss my mother, not for years. Not until my father died. I long for her now, with the pain of a child and the understanding of an old woman.

  Brónach—the Irish word for sorrowful—was my mother’s Christian name. It is only after my own life as a mother that I can see how the name suited her. If I could have just one moment back, one time when she was screaming at me in rage, then I could say: I’m sorry you’re lonely, Mum. Maybe it would have made a difference; we might have wound up the best of friends, like Grace and Gráinne.

  I wonder, sometimes, if Grace missed me when she was dying, if for the first time she saw me as I truly am.

  I sometimes think God planned our lives all wrong. What’s the use in learning the truth so long after the opportunity to use it has gone by? I suppose that’s what the afterlife is for, though it’s not so easy, even for a Catholic woman, to keep in mind the promise of resurrection when you’re drowning in the deep sea of your own mistakes.

  I stand on the quay and watch the ferry slide past Granuaile’s castle, the tiny figures of Seamus and my granddaughter standing on deck, pointing and leaning toward one another so they can be heard over the roar of the engine. Seamus, though he’s been halfway around the world, will always be an islander. I suppose it’s the only thing Grace could never love about him.

  When they climb off the boat, Seamus steps forward and gives me a hug, right there in front of Eamon and the other men on the dock. He lifts me a little off my feet, until I screech in protest.

  “You’re an awful man,” I say, prying myself away, but he’s laughing and I can’t help but smile at him. He’s happier than I’ve seen him in years.

  Gráinne, poor girl, looks about half her age, pale and skeletal, her short curls standing up in the wind.

  “I guess you’re mad at me,” she says, a gleam in her dark eyes.

  “Ah, you’re all right, girl,” I say. “It would be nice if you told a person, before you went traipsing off to the city.” I leave it at that. I don’t blame her for going to look for Seamus, it seems the best thing really. I can see the affection they once had for each other is there still, just clouded a little by intervening years.

  When we get to the hotel, Seamus leaves us alone, walking toward his own house. Gráinne and I sit in the conservatory, the last of the sun glinting off the glass behind her head.

  Her hair has grown enough that it resembles the short, violet-black curls she had as a baby.

  I hear one of the two hotel girls call out “Clíona,” and Mary Louise’s murmur silencing her.

  “What does your name mean?” Gráinne asks, as I pour her a cup of tea.

  “It comes from an old legend,” I say. “Clíodhna eloped against her parents’ wishes and sailed off in a curragh with her man. He left her by the shore of an island—some say this one—to go hunting, and a freak wave crashed in and dragged her under. He thought she’d drowned, but later the islanders said they’d seen her, and that she had become a fairy of the sea.”

  Gráinne is quiet for a moment, and I can hear Gr
ace’s contempt in my mind. “Figures,” Grace once said, “you’d be named after a loser.”

  “She was probably better off,” Gráinne says.

  “Come again?” I say. I’m confused, not sure if she’s referring to my daughter or my namesake.

  “Well I’d rather be off with the mermaids then stuck with some guy who treated me like that,” Gráinne says, sipping her tea, that look of fierceness in her eyes. Her features are Seamus’s, but the expression is the image of her mother.

  “It’s just an old story,” I say. “I think it’s told to discourage girls from running away.” I didn’t mean to imply anything, but Gráinne’s brow furrows viciously.

  “I wasn’t running away,” she says. “I just wanted to talk to my father.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “But if I did want to leave,” she adds, stiffening her bony shoulders, “I could. You can’t keep me here. I know you tried to keep my mother here, but you just can’t do that.”

  “I’d like you to stay, Gráinne,” I say slowly, carefully. “Most island children leave when they’re eighteen. Some come back, but the majority find something to keep them away. I made a mistake with your mother, Gráinne. I did not want to let her go. And I lost her—lost the both of you—because of it.”

  She cringes, the poor thing, when I say the word “lost.”

  “I hope one day you will feel at home here,” I say. “But I won’t force you, sure. I never meant to force you.” She looks confused, like she expected a big row and my agreement has left her speechless. I’m a bit surprised myself. At how easy this feels.

  “I guess I’ll stay for a while,” she says quietly, and I nod, passing her a scone—which she actually eats.

  You’re the strangest of the lot of us, I want to say to her. A bit of everyone and every place of our lives in you. I was an Irish woman lost in America; your mother was an American girl trapped on Inis Murúch. You, Gráinne, are a little of both, and have been dragged between the two like a hooked fish. You may never feel at home here, I want to say, or anywhere. But sure, you’re the kind who can make a place for herself, wherever you are.

  Gráinne is looking out the glass walls at the sun, which is setting like a pool of blood on the water. The gaze is not quite her mother’s. Gráinne doesn’t seem to be looking at what’s beyond that sea, so much as she’s looking at the water for its own sake. Sure, this could be just an old woman’s wishful thinking.

  All the words I long to say to her crowd and clot in my throat. I cough them aside and hope my eyes will speak for me.

  “More tea?” I say, and she lifts her saucer with a shaky hand. I steady it with the spout and pour the red-brown liquid, steaming, over the lip of her cup.

  CHAPTER 29

  Gráinne

  On Christmas Eve, my sixteenth birthday, my father and I went for a walk along Mermaid Beach, which was a mirror reflection of the singing sand my mother had died by. For days I had asked him questions, and he’d answered in a voice I now remembered having loved as a girl. I could fill things in now, and the image of my life and my mother’s stretched across boundaries I didn’t know were there.

  “Was your mother happy?” my father asked, as we marked the wet sand with the patterns of our soles.

  “Yes,” I said, immediately. We were almost always happy, my mother and I. Though she had brief periods of sadness, her “damp days” she called them, that I now associated with a memory I hadn’t shared.

  My father didn’t look surprised or even resentful that she’d been content without him. I know my mother well enough to see that she loved this man, probably more than she loved Stephen. I also know that love had nothing to do with her being able to stay with him. “Always love the man second,” my mother had told me. “You come first.”

  I looked down at the brown blanket of shore, decorated by miniature Play-Doh-like curls left by the sandworms.

  “Do you still like living here?” I asked my father.

  He smiled, understanding what I meant. He must see my mother behind every rock, glimpse her curving form in every wave.

  “I do, sure,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Um,” I said, taken aback, “I don’t know. I haven’t really been living here.”

  “What is it you’ve been doing these last four months?” my father said, his eyebrows lowering toward his grin.

  “Waiting,” I said.

  “Waiting for what?” he asked, as though it were a simple question.

  Waiting for a boat that carried my father, for Stephen to write, Liam to kiss me. Waiting for my mother to stop dying and come to my door.

  “Just waiting,” I said.

  My father’s eyes seemed to look inside me, as if my skin had the transparency of water. “Take a wee bit of advice from an old man who knows about waiting,” he said. “Now that you’re back here, you can start living. Then you’ll decide if you like it.”

  I thought about what my grandmother had said, how she hoped I’d feel at home here. If I stayed with this family, would my voice always sound so conspicuous in my ears? Would I always be an outsider?

  My father turned his face into the sea wind as we walked.

  “On this island, Gráinne,” he said, “you can watch the moon and the sun rise and fall, with nothing to separate you from them but the water. Silver and gold and green. Some find this island too small. I feel as though I live on the grandest place on earth.”

  We stopped by a large barnacle rock. On its flattened top, where the tide never reached, was a miniature lawn of deep green grass, pimpled with lichen-stubbly stones.

  “At the high tide,” my father said, “your mother would stand up there, looking toward the mainland, and dive into the water. Sometimes I’d follow her down and watch her, half expecting that she would never again emerge from the sea.”

  We both looked out over the silver-rippled waves. I could see her, my mother with her hair like a sunset on her shoulders, her legs melding into fins as she dove.

  “I still watch for her,” my father said.

  I imagined my mother’s response, sharp and teasing; she would diffuse the emotion, turn her eyes to his and flirt him into distraction.

  I wanted to take his hand, to put my head against his warm, beating chest and cry. Me too, I wanted to say.

  My father touched my head, briefly because there was still an awkward grief between us that would be there for a while. The waves sizzled whispers at our feet.

  At Christmas dinner, there were more of my relatives in Clíona’s house than I could possibly keep track of. Marcus’s twin sons were home with their wives and a pack of blue-eyed, rambunctious children. My grandmother’s sisters, slightly less good-looking versions of her, squeezed me and bluntly grieved that they’d missed me for years. I glided through the crowded room, smiling and answering questions, trying to pretend I was used to such a big family. Clíona moved at my side, introducing the faces by their connection to me. This is your antie, your cousin, your uncle twice-removed. This was what she wanted for my mother, I thought, and what she now wants for me. To be able to look into faces and see my own features, to be told that my love of poetry comes from my great-grandfather, my dreaminess from my father, my tendency to brood from the O’Malley side. Only my mother hadn’t wanted it; she preferred to define herself. The only person she’d ever admitted a connection to was me.

  Liam, whom I hadn’t seen since he left Dublin in November, arrived with his mother and the line of brothers. My father put a firm arm around Mary Louise’s waist.

  “I’m so sorry about Owen,” he said, looking into her eyes. “He was a good man.”

  “You’ve always been a friend to us, Seamus,” Mary Louise said. I could tell by her face, which was tired but composed, that she was not in danger of becoming weepy.

  “Who’d have thought it,” she said, trying to smile. “Both of us widowed at our young age.” I saw Liam watching them, calculating possibilities. He closed his eyes, and I knew he was
picturing his father.

  Later, while my father and Mary Louise chatted, Liam and I snuck out the back door and went behind the storage shed, where he kissed me for a long time.

  “You’ll never guess what Seamus gave me for Christmas,” he said, when our mouths were red and tender. He took a thin cardboard package from his inside pocket. Fetherlites, it said, with a fogged portrait of a man and woman, looking at each other in ecstasy.

  “Condoms?” I said, laughing.

  “Can you believe it?” Liam said.

  “Why not?” I shrugged. My mother had given me condoms; they had lain unused in the drawer of my bedside table.

  “I thought maybe it was some sick test,” Liam said. “Fathers don’t give their daughter’s boyfriend rubbers. Not here, anyways.”

  “Maybe they should,” I said.

  Liam smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “We’ve got them so. If we need them.” He looked at me mischievously. “Do you think we’ll need them, Granvaile?” he said, putting his arms around my waist.

  I pulled him in closer, inhaling the smell of his mouth and skin. “I’d say we will,” I whispered, and I knew I sounded sexy.

  I could hear the water lapping the shore by the hotel, and I knew the tide was low because there was the smell of exposed seaweed—a thick, sensual smell, as though thousands of mermaids had left the evidence of their lovemaking in the sand.

  Before she got sick, I used to crawl into bed with my mother in the morning, after whatever man she’d been with had left for his life. I would nuzzle her neck, inhaling the sea-smell of her, the salty excitement that perspired from her skin. I used to think that when I finally felt passion it would smell like that—like my mother. Now I knew that the sex on my mother was only a layer, like perfume. What was underneath was what I missed the most. Underneath the myth of her was an odor so particular nothing could re-create it: the smell of her flesh and her soul, still new beneath her scales.