One of the many dangers—along with massive infection and kidney failure—a burn victim faces is dehydration. Which is why the water used to scrub away the dead skin is a saline solution. I could smell the salt in the shower room before the treatment would start. There were other smells but I tried to focus on the smell of salt. The morphine would be kicking in—the good nurses knew how to time the dosage to carry you through the course of the treatment—and I’d close my eyes and try to think of the ocean. It was as good a technique for dealing with the pain as any, but I’ve wondered since if it hasn’t ruined the ocean for me.
I had first-degree burns on 10 percent of my body. When the canvas bag—which held my mother’s memoir—caught fire, Aidan knocked it off my back. My burns extended in two long strips down my shoulder blades—on either side of where the registration book lay against my back. The book, which was lost in the fire, and Aidan’s quick reflexes, protected most of the skin on my back.
Aidan wasn’t so lucky.
When the fire swept through the window he was already kneeling on the ledge, his hands grasping the sheet-rope. The flames caught the back of his shirt and he must have jumped because I saw his legs kick out just above my head and his body twist in the air, a cape of flame lofting above him. Somehow he managed to hold on to the rope. I climbed down as quickly as I could; he followed. Halfway down the pain must have been too much for him and he let go. I tried to break his fall, but when he landed against me I fell backward onto the terrace. The back of his head hit the stone—not as hard as if I hadn’t broken his fall at all, but hard enough to knock him unconscious. Or maybe it was the pain from his burns that made him pass out. I smothered the fire on his back with the sheets we’d used to climb down, but I could see that the fire had burned down to the bone.
By then I could hear the sirens from the other side of the hotel heading up the mountain. I pulled Aidan out to the edge of the ridge—as far as I could get him from the burning hotel—and ran around to the front to get help. Two firemen came back with me to carry him around the hotel and load him into the ambulance. I left with him. I don’t remember looking back at the hotel or even thinking about it. The last I saw of the Hotel Equinox was a few hours later from the medevac helicopter that took Aidan and me to the Manhattan University Hospital Burn Center.
The sun was climbing up the eastern side of the ridge, but when it got to the ledge a wall of smoke stood where the hotel used to be. Beyond the smoke lay the Catskills and from where I lay in the helicopter it looked like another ridge had been added to the line of mountains—a cliff hewn of mottled gray marble shot through with flame-red quartz. As I watched I saw the wall of smoke was moving, lifting off the base of the ridge and drifting east to the river, and I thought of the story of Henry Hudson’s ship the Half Moon, floating above the Catskills. As my first shot of morphine took me under I imagined that ghost ship sailing down the river below me, heading out to sea.
The first person I saw when I woke up in the hospital was Aunt Sophie. I couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten there from Florida so quickly until I learned that I’d been unconscious for thirty-eight hours. She told me Aidan’s condition was stable, but he hadn’t regained consciousness yet. He had suffered third-degree burns over 30 percent of his body. Over the next few weeks I learned a great deal about burn degrees and body percentages. The question it boiled down to—no pun intended, although that’s mild compared to some of the ones I heard in the burn unit—was how much of your skin can you give up without losing it all.
The nurses told me it was probably a blessing that he was unconscious and during my own treatments I agreed. The fire hadn’t touched his face or the front of his body, so he looked peaceful—like he was sleeping. He was Tam Lin who falls asleep in the woods and is taken away by fairies. Soon he’d come riding past the well and I’d pull him down from his enchanted steed and throw a circle of earth and holy water around him. I’d hold on no matter what shape he took.
At first I didn’t want to see any visitors but Aunt Sophie and Aidan’s mother, Eveline, a tiny woman aged beyond her years by cigarettes, who sat silent as a stone by Aidan’s bed with a rosary in her hands. I wanted time to stop while Aidan was sleeping the way everyone in the castle goes to sleep while Sleeping Beauty is under her spell. I didn’t want to know the end of the story until he was back in it. But then Sophie started carrying little bits and pieces of what my visitors had to tell her and I started passing them on to Aidan—like bread crumbs dropped in a path to lead him out of the forest.
“They caught Harry on the Thruway,” I told him. “Not only was he covered in polyurethane, he had three of the Hudson River School paintings in his trunk. And the fake ferronière in his pocket. He’s been arrested for arson and attempted murder—of me—and for Joseph’s murder. The warrant for your arrest has been revoked.”
“I think I saw his eyelid flutter a little bit,” Eveline confided to me. “I’m sure he likes the sound of your voice.”
I thought it amazing that Eveline Barry didn’t blame me for her son’s condition. I would have. She seemed to accept this colossal bad luck with a grim determination to sit it out every day until Fiona, her sister, came and took her home, stopping on their way at St. Patrick’s to light candles for “both of you.” I thought Eveline was probably making up the bit about his eyelid fluttering, but I decided on that day to see whoever came to visit me who could tell me a piece of the story that I could pass on to Aidan. That would be my circle of earth and holy water.
I hadn’t quite bargained on Phoebe Nix as my first visitor. Even though I knew she didn’t kill Joseph I couldn’t pretend to like her since learning that her mother had killed my mother. Especially when she told me she suspected it all along.
“In her journals she wrote obsessively about Kay Morrissey. She couldn’t believe some little maid that Peter’d had an affair with had turned into a writer. That’s what drove her wild. When she stayed at the hotel she could hear your mother typing in the room above hers, and it drove her crazy—she was convinced that she was writing about the affair.”
“So that’s why you hid in Joseph’s room that night—you thought my mother’s manuscript was in the locked storage closet with the paintings. You told Aidan that Harry wanted him to check the paintings so he would unlock the closet . . . but then how did you expect to get into the closet?”
Phoebe lifts her shoulders a centimeter or two—which passes as a shrug for her. “I thought I’d startle him by coming into the room unexpectedly and . . . I don’t know . . . just sort of convince him to let me look in the closet. . . .”
I stare at her and she looks away. It’s impossible for me to believe that she would come up with such a lame plan . . . but then I realize that what she’d really meant to do was seduce Aidan into letting her into the closet.
“Can you believe the nerve of that woman?” I complain later to a comatose Aidan. “Like she’d have had a chance with you! And then she told me that after the Dreamland Hotel fire her mother wasn’t able to write at all. Like I’m suppose to say ‘Gee, I’m sorry that killing my mother gave your mother writer’s block.’ ”
Aidan’s composure strikes me as reproachful so I go on. “She did apologize for trying to tell me what I could and couldn’t write. That was very unprofessional, she said and then she told me she was prepared for whatever I might write in my memoir. I didn’t mention that I’ve given up on the idea of writing it.” To Aidan’s continued silence I add, “I know, my mother’s book burned up in the fire, so I guess I still could write the memoir, but I’ve been thinking that maybe my mother wrote her own memoir so I wouldn’t have to. I know it sounds kind of crazy—and I’ll never know for sure—but I think that’s why she called it The Selkie’s Daughter. The mother in the selkie story wants her daughter to be free and I think that’s what my mother wanted for me. She wouldn’t want me to spend my life telling her story, she’d want me to tell my own.”
My next visitor is Hedda. She com
es to me like a penitent seeking absolution. She had no idea that Harry was trying to get the necklace back and that he had killed Joseph. If she had, she would have told me he was upstairs in her apartment the night I came to see her—which is how he knew I was on my way up to the hotel to find the necklace.
“He reminded me of Peter,” she tells me in a hushed voice more suitable for the confessional than the busy dayroom of the burn unit. “That’s why I was drawn to him this summer.” Hedda lays her hand over mine. She’s had an operation on her hands since I saw her last and the gauze bandages remind me of the gauze they use to rub the dead skin off Aidan’s back. I take my hand away. Maybe when Aidan wakes up I’ll find it in my heart to forgive her, but not now.
Jack comes several times—as do Ramon, Paloma, Natalie, and a few of my other students. Mr. Nagamora brings me a soup made from seaweed and miso, which he says will help my skin heal. He comes so often I finally realize that he’s coming to see Sophie. In the last week of September he takes her to a concert at the 92nd Street Y and she takes him to an exhibit of Indonesian textiles at the Brooklyn Museum.
When Sister D’Aulnoy comes I ask her into Aidan’s room, not because I expect a holy intervention but because I figure a nun in the room might get his attention. I start out by telling her I lied when I came to St. Christopher’s, that I didn’t know Rose McGlynn was my mother at that point or that John, Arden, and Allen were my uncles.
“But you see, it turned out you weren’t lying. Sometimes God leads us to the truth when we think we’ve strayed farthest from it.”
I look at Aidan, still in the tangle of tubes that feed him and take the poison from his burns out of his body. His skin is paler now than it ever was when he was in prison. I remember something he said in that paper he turned in. I think that sometimes when you get used to a bad thing—like being in prison or getting kidnapped by fairies—it’s better to live with that bad thing than trying to change it. Because what if you get a chance to change things and you mess up? What if it’s your last chance?
“I would have preferred not to know the truth,” I tell Sister D’Aulnoy, “if this is the price for it.”
She follows my gaze down to Aidan’s face. I expect a motivational speech, a sermon along the lines of The truth shall make you free, but instead she shakes her head sadly. “We don’t get to choose what truths God reveals to us—but we do get to choose what we do with that truth—whom we share it with and how.”
She takes a slip of folded paper—a bright pink Post-it note—out of her cardigan pocket and hands it to me. “I did a little research. Your uncle John died of a stroke in prison the year before his sentence was up. Allen, his younger brother, is still alive. St. Christopher’s started getting donations from him about ten years ago from a Coney Island address. When I went to the address his landlady said he’d moved to an assisted living facility near the boardwalk. He’s still there. He’s seventy now and not in the best of health. I gather he lived a pretty hard life but gave up drinking about ten years ago and his landlady says he was a quiet and clean-living tenant.”
For the entirety of this speech Sister D’Aulnoy holds the bright pink slip of paper out to me. Even when I notice her arm begin to quiver from the strain of holding it up I don’t take it. “I think he could tell you some things about your mother.” I look away from her and Aidan to the window where pigeons noisily crowd the thirtieth-floor ledge. “Maybe there are a few things you could tell him about his sister,” she adds.
I sigh, an echo of the pigeons cooing outside the window, and take the slip from her, pocketing it without looking at it.
“I don’t know if I want to leave him that long,” I say, meaning Aidan. “Besides, I hate taking the subway.”
The next day, while I’m playing a game of gin with Sophie, Mr. Nagamora, and Aidan’s aunt Fiona, Aidan opens his eyes. Sophie has just declared gin. Aidan looks over at us and remarks that he saw a movie once about some guys playing chess for another guy’s soul but he’d have thought his soul was worth more than a game of cards. My cards flutter to the floor as I move to the bed and Sophie runs out to tell the nurse. Fiona goes to get Eveline from the cafeteria.
“I’ve been having this dream,” he tells me, “about birds pecking at my back. Isn’t there a Greek guy whose organs get eaten every day by some bird?”
“Prometheus—he was punished for stealing fire from the gods. The doctors say the worst of the treatments are over.” It’s only a half lie because what they told us just yesterday was that Aidan was about halfway healed. In a few weeks they hope to graft a new synthetic skin onto the bare patches on his back.
Fiona and Eveline come back then, followed by the doctor. By the time Aidan’s been brought up to speed on his condition he’s fallen back to sleep. Fiona and Eveline leave to go light some more candles at St. Patrick’s. Before Mr. Nagamora leaves, Sophie says there’s something he wants to tell me, but that I need to come back with them to the dry-cleaning store. I don’t want to leave Aidan, but the nurse assures me he’ll sleep for hours now.
“Go on,” one of the nurses tells me, “he’s out of the woods now.”
Taking the crosstown bus with Sophie and Mr. Nagamora, I hum that phrase to myself. He’s out of the woods now. My all-time favorite, I decide.
The dry-cleaning store is closed and the rest of Mr. Nagamora’s family has gone home. Sophie leads the way through a tunnel of quivering plastic, batting the bags out of her way as if she’d spent her life running a dry cleaner’s, to a back room facing on a little garden. I notice that the painting of the rainstorm over the mountains is hanging on the wall.
“I’ll make some tea, Isao, while you show Iris.”
“Show me what?” I ask.
“We didn’t want to tell you while you were still worried about Aidan,” Sophie calls from the kitchen—even while she’s out of the room she’s running the show. “Because we knew you couldn’t focus. But now that your mind’s a little easier—well, someone’s got to tell the police.”
“About what?” I ask Mr. Nagamora. “I’ve told the police everything I know.”
Mr. Nagamora nods eagerly. “Yes,” he says, “you had no way of knowing about this. Not your fault! Good thing, though, you bring the dress to me.”
“What dress?” I ask, but then I notice it, hanging in its sheath of sheer plastic on the door behind Mr. Nagamora. “Don’t tell me Phoebe Nix has been here trying to get her mother’s dress back.”
“I have a theory about that dress.” Sophie, carrying a tray loaded with teapot, teacups, and a plate of rugelach, comes in from the kitchen. “Your mother had it with her when she came to the hotel—I saw it hanging in her closet and . . . well, you know me, I asked her where she came by such an expensive number. I could tell she was embarrassed. She said it belonged to a girlfriend. She said a man gave it to her, but she had to get rid of it because the man’s wife had seen it on her and been furious because he had given the same dress to her. Imagine! Well, at the time I thought there wasn’t a friend —that she was the one who’d been given the dress. But now I think that Peter Kron gave it to Katherine Morrissey—the real Katherine Morrissey—and your mother had it because she had her suitcase. I never saw your mother wear it. She must have thought it had brought her friend bad luck. But then I got to thinking about how she kept it all that time even though she never wore it and . . . well, show her what we found, Isao, I can’t wait to see the expression on her face.”
Mr. Nagamora unlocks a metal filing cabinet and takes out a small lacquered box decorated with a pattern of dancing cranes. He opens it and holds it out to me with both hands, his face creased into a thousand lines of delight. The silk weaver presenting his finest sail to the ship’s captain. The box is full of jewels. Pearls, diamonds, and one emerald cut in the shape of a teardrop.
“Where? . . .” But of course I’ve already guessed. The weights that held down the swag on the green dress. My mother had sewn the net of tears into the green dress.
>
Two days later I take the subway to Coney Island.
“You have to go,” Aidan tells me. “It must have been Allen who was in trouble with Peter Kron, because John McGlynn was already dead. Your mother went back to Brooklyn because Peter had something on him. We’ll never know if you don’t go see him—the old guy could die of a heart attack any day.”
“I don’t need to know any more,” I say, half truthfully. “Look what’s come of running after my mother’s story.”
Aidan takes my hand. “We’ve come of it,” he says. “Besides, I want to know how it ends.”
So I go. Back down into the subways, all the way to the end of the line. I follow the directions to Bel Mar—Gracious Living for Seniors by the Sea, which turns out to be a high-rise facing the boardwalk. Allen McGlynn meets me in the Buena Vista Social Room. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but not this tiny bald man in a yellowish fisherman’s cardigan and kelly-green golf shirt. Someone must have told him once that green brought out his eyes. It’s the only bit of him where I can see my mother, but I fasten my eyes over his shoulder, at the strip of blue Atlantic just visible above the boardwalk outside the windows. I don’t want to be swayed by family resemblance right now—at least not until I know what role he played in my mother’s death.
“Sister D’Aulnoy says you might be able to shed some light on what happened to my mother in 1973,” I say to a spot over his shoulder. An orderly in a white uniform opens the sliding glass doors, letting in the smell of the ocean. It brings me back to the treatment room at the burn unit—where Aidan probably is right now. “Did you see her that year?”
Allen runs a withered hand over his shiny pink scalp. “I learned from John that she was still alive just before he died. I think he felt bad leaving me all alone and I’d been telling him how I missed her sometimes worse than I missed our mother. I remembered her better . . .”