“A story?” Pearl sighed, got up, and came to me patiently, prying my arms loose from the hug I was giving myself, taking my hands. “Dear Alice, there are many kinds of transformations. Believe what you can, but always leave your heart open to Melasine.” She laughed. “No need to look so solemn about her. When I was a child, I called her ‘The Great And Powerful Flipper.’ “
I didn’t even know what to say to that, and she didn’t seem to expect an answer. She tweaked my nose affectionately. “A mermaid’s mind is best suited for cultivating beauties and nurturing interesting philosophies—you know, tidying the great depths of the heart. One has to be careful not to burden us with too much sorrow. We have to remain buoyant or we’ll sink.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. Not yet. But keep looking for ‘Et cetera,’ and you will.” She laughed, threw off her clothes, and dived, naked, into the surf.
And I stood there on the beach, bound in denim and logic.
I had to find Lilith.
Lilith loved the mansion’s plant-filled sunroom. I could see that, see the contentment in her face anytime I met her there. Her cockatiel, Anatole, shrieked with interest when I walked in. Lilith looked up from the fabulous glass table at the room’s center. She was writing in one of her journals, which she closed when she saw the look on my face. Without a word, she gestured to someone behind me, and I realized one of the sweet Tanglewoods had appeared magically in my wake. He closed the room’s glass doors, giving us privacy.
“Ask me,” Lilith said quietly.
“Do you believe in Pearl’s version of Melasine?”
She sighed and stood in a sleek rustle of raw peach silk. She walked to a lovely marble wall across from us. It was one of the few areas of the sunroom not crowded with exotic trees or potted plants. On it hung a set of white velvet drapes, always closed. Lilith stood to one side, pulled a delicately tasseled drawstring, and the drapes parted. They revealed a rectangular portrait hanging longways, filling most of the wall, dwarfing both her and me.
I put a hand to my mouth. The colors were rich and old, the style was classic eighteenth century portraiture—dramatic, romantic, vibrantly realistic, yet very soft. The setting was a chamber of stone and rich fabrics, fringed pillows, gilded vases—what any fine lady of the time would want in the ambiance of her portrait. Through an open window, the ocean crashed on a sandy shore. The lady clearly wanted water behind her.
Because the lady, lounging decorously on an ornate chaise, was a mermaid.
“Melasine,” Lilith said.
Her skin was ivory, her lips deep red. Her eyes, large and ocean-green, were tilted on the ends, with no lashes or brows, giving her face an ageless patina, a face like an oval moon, like a fine porcelain doll’s. Yards of dark gold hair streamed over her bare breasts and jeweled arms, draping in luxurious waves across her pale stomach.
Her hands were larger than normal and webbed in opalescent skin. Her smooth, bone-white torso was perfectly human and perfectly beautiful, tapering at the waist, rising at white hips, merging below a perfectly ordinary navel, adorned with a gold waist chain and an emerald pendant. But at the vee of her thighs the milky skin merged, and there were no thighs.
There was a very different kind of being.
She glistened with pale blues and pinks, just a shimmer to her skin, a different texture, not scales, but a body meant to glide through water, like the lower half of some iridescent white dolphin. Sleek and smooth, that part of her bore ornamentation, too. A swath of gold cloth wound around her where the thighs might have been on one of us. It was tied in a large, ornate rosette over the middle of her, and I wondered, dazed, if it discreetly hid some sort of genital opening.
I couldn’t begin to form that question into words.
Her body tapered with aquiline power to a long, slender tail. Its twin white flukes streamed over the chaise’s upholstered end with gossamer beauty, like the divided train of a wedding dress. As I pulled my gaze back along the length of her, she looked at me with her surreal face, the magic of the portrait placing her gaze directly on mine, and I was caught up in her gray-green eyes.
“See the resemblance to us?” Lilith said quietly.
I did. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move.
“I’ve never seen her myself,” Lilith went on, “but I can tell you I’ve felt her presence at times, out in the water—and in that way I do believe she exists. In some form, Alice, either like this physically or not, her spirit is this grand. And when you need her, you’ll know she’s there.”
I finally nodded.
I couldn’t leave the parlor until Lilith closed the drapes, so I no longer saw Melasine. And Melasine no longer seemed to see me. Then I walked slowly out, went to my rooms, and laid flat on my back in the bed. When the spell began to fade, I started rearranging everything I believed, everything I assumed, everything I thought I knew. I wasn’t sure what I thought, instead, or what had just changed in me, but I couldn’t not believe, anymore.
The education of Alice had begun.
14
Some Water People use the word Halfling as a slur when someone exhibits Lander-like traits. That usage, however, is generally considered both inaccurate and ill mannered.
—Lilith
“Someone has taken all my clothes,” I announced, standing in a parlor of the mansion where the sisters and Barret gather for tall glasses of vodka every evening.
“Those were not clothes,” Mara retorted, “they were body bags.”
“We took your hair clippers, too,” Pearl confessed, looking gently distraught. “I couldn’t bear the thought of you mutilating your lovely hair anymore.”
I stared at the two of them.
Lilith watched quietly. “You’ll find new clothing in your armoires,” she said. “But if you wish, I’ll have the old things returned.”
“I don’t wish to be a charity case.”
“Charity case?” Lilith straightened regally in a damask lounge, where she lay like a silver lioness, swathed in white silk and holding the finest crystal tumbler of pure, uncut vodka. “You are a Bonavendier. You have an inheritance here. You have rights. You have an image to uphold. And you’re a beautiful woman, as all true women are beautiful.”
“In other words,” Mara snorted, “we’re tired of you looking like a skinny turtle in a denim shell.”
“Oh, Sister,” Pearl rebuked.
My face flamed. I didn’t know what else to say, so I finally muttered at Mara, “Better a turtle than an ill-tempered crab.”
Mara’s mouth drew up in an angry bow.
Pearl burst out laughing. “An ill-tempered crab,” she agreed, nodding at her aggravated sister.
Even Lilith repressed a smile with the back of one long hand. Her gaze went to me proudly. I was talking back. She approved.
In my rooms I indeed found fine cottons and silks, dresses, robes, flowing tango pants, delicate shoes, lovely blouses, even svelte, classic swimsuits, though no one around here seems to swim clothed. I now owned the latest, sleekest, yet most classic fashions, owing to Lilith’s impeccable and expensive taste. I knew the first moment I slipped into a clingy dress with a draping neckline and tiny straps that show off my shoulders that I had been seduced. After thirty-four years of being ignored, chastised, or taunted like a sexless freak, I was now adorned in silk by the most beautiful crazy women in the world. The thought drugged me with desperate hope.
I walked out, head up, cheeks red, and returned to the drinking parlor. I stood in the doorway, staring over everyone’s heads, waiting for execution via laughter, polite smiles, and Mara’s taunts.
Silence.
Then—
Pearl ran to me, crying and applauding. “So beautiful!”
Lilith stood, the glow on her face beaming with pride. Mara gaped at me in silence.
“All right, put her in silk, and she’ll more than do,” Mara said finally.
High praise from the priestess of insult.
I thought my heart w
ould burst with gratitude. Wish it, believe it, and it will be so. A saying I made up when I was a child.
Wish it, believe it, and it will be so.
They are seducing me.
In the evenings the island fills with azure mists. Traces of red-gold sunsets finger through the oak’s greening boughs, setting ruby fire to the first tiny fronds of ferns unfurling from the leafy ground below. Spring is nearly here. I think of everything that’s happened in the past few weeks and of Griffin Randolph’s provocation, of Lilith’s expectations, of the adoring townsfolk lining the road out of Bellemeade, of Melasine’s portrait. I see the sisters swim with the wild dolphins every day, and when I swim the dolphins accompany me, too.
Across from my bed are French doors, and through them I gaze into my own tiny garden. The mansion juts out on one side here, forming a privacy wall to my left. The ocean lies in front, and the island’s forest begins on the right. I go outside often and climb into the oak limb’s coarse, moss-covered cusp, gazing, enthralled, at the white surf of the Atlantic. I am happy facing the ends of the earth, defined only by water. When I’m satiated, I lounge on the oak’s cradling arm and gaze into the lyrical shadows of the deep forest. A white, sandy lane arbored by oaks beckons me into that palmetto-and-vine wilderness. Every morning, several large deer gather there, watching me placidly. I watch them back.
Is it really so safe here?
They flick their tails and go back to grazing on spring greenery, as if a peaceful appetite is all that matters. Judith Beth, the female of the Tanglewoods, slips into my suite every afternoon and leaves a silver service on a small dining table in the sitting room. Liquored tea steams from an exquisite silver pot there, and a crystal decanter glistens with fine vodka. To my amazement, I can drink most liquors unscathed, in quantities that would kill any normal person. Beneath silver hoods on small china plates Judith Beth has placed mounds of pure butter filled with fresh herbs, saucers of heavy cream to be eaten like a dessert, and salty biscuits. Here my cravings are known before I admit them. Known, and encouraged. Lilith says my appetites are perfectly appropriate for our kind. Merfolk, if I believe the fantasy, are metabolically fueled by a diet of liquors and fats.
Not a bad fantasy.
All right, so the sisters don’t sprout fantastic tails in the water. They transform themselves with fantastic tales instead, and I am becoming their willing accomplice. In my bath I study my naked self in each of several large, gold-framed mirrors hung on stone walls colored the soft white hue inside an oyster shell. I admit the sisters are perfectly formed, and I am a thin edition of them, but for the first time in my life I think I have potential. Sometimes I don a soft silk robe Lilith placed in my armoire. I stand in the middle of my bedroom, excited, sexual, confused, forlorn, listening to some ethereal hum that must be the island singing to me, or might be the future, warning me to beware.
The golden sunsets fall on my bare feet as I sit in the oak. I spread my toes, remembering the erotic invasion of Griffin Randolph’s fingers. Griffin. Man-Beast. I drop his last name and admit we are acquainted, have been intimate, have saved each other from harm but might harm each other in the future. Yet my webbing looks invigorated, translucent and gilded, and my skin glows. My hair has grown eight inches almost overnight. Am I being transformed?
Maybe.
But I cannot possibly live up to the color of this light.
A typical breakfast at Sainte’s Point consisted of creamy shrimp pudding laced with sherry. Puddles of butter adorned the top. This delicious dish seemed to strike no one as an inappropriate morning meal, and I had consumed perhaps a half-gallon of it every day in helpless adoration. We ate at a linen-covered table in a nook overlooking a rose garden and a tall stone fountain. Through an open window we listened to the music of saltwater splashing from a stone shell onto a pair of naked lovers, who held the shell aloft. Water trickled down their bodies into a base surrounding their webbed feet. Most mornings I could barely take my eyes off their fluid congress.
Lilith waited until I was sufficiently hypnotized one day.
“What happened between you and Griffin Randolph the day you arrived?” she asked without warning.
I sat back from the table, a silver soup spoon idle in my hand, and kept my gaze focused on my fingers. She knew. I had never mentioned meeting Griffin, never indicated I even knew his name. Of course she’d divined it all along. I shivered and looked at her apologetically. I told her everything. And then, “He saw what I can do in the water. He said he wants to know all about me and you-all, too. It’s my fault. I apologize.”
Lilith inclined her head. “Nothing is your fault. This was meant to be. And there’s a history to it you don’t know. There are serious issues between his family and ours. There have been feuds for two centuries. We live in the sea, and the Randolphs live on it. A subtle but significant contrast. To them we’re troublemaking oddities, pilfering from the waves, shirking real commerce. To us, they’re—” she lifted her fine hands and gazed out the window at the naked lovers beneath the fountain waters—”they’re dry goods. They have an insatiable need to dominate the ocean, and that, my dear, is an insult to every living drop of water, inside our bodies and out.” She sighed. “Yet we can’t do without their kind. The ocean is defined by the shore. The shore is defined by the ocean.”
She told me about Griffin’s work and the accident that had nearly killed him in February. She told me, in vague terms, that his parents had died when their yacht sank in a storm off Sainte’s Point when Griffin was a boy, and that he’d nearly died, too. “You see, he’s come full circle,” she said. “Confronting life and death as a child in the ocean, and now again, as a grown man.”
“His fear of the water began in childhood?”
“Yes. He’s fought it ever since, but after the recent accident it’s taken over completely.”
“I don’t understand why he and I connected suddenly. Just as I don’t understand why you and I . . . . Why, Lilith? I spent thirty-four years of my life alone in my own strange silence, then suddenly—” I spread my hands “—I’m hearing beautiful things.”
“When you chose to save that small girl in the lake—when you chose to risk your life—you opened yourself to everything you fear and everything you want to love. Just as Griffin did when he risked his life to save a man in his crew. Those events were the catalysts of your souls and mine. You’re not hearing voices that don’t exist. You’re hearing voices that finally have meaning for you. We all are.”
“What does he want with me? How does he think I can help him?”
“You’re an answer he’s seeking. You’re a way out of the confusion that has always marred his life. The endless questions he asks himself about himself.” She paused, looking at me with her beautiful head tilted. “And, Alice, whether you believe it or not, you’re a desirable young woman.”
“This situation isn’t—” I shook my head “—this isn’t about that sort of thing.”
She smiled knowingly, sipped her tea, and gazed out the window. “Every aspect of life is about desire, Alice. Every passion, every dream, every danger. Griffin keeps taunting the ocean to kill him, and if he doesn’t stop, it will soon grant his desire. You, my dear, must change him. It’s one of your desires in life, I am certain, to be taken seriously, to make a difference in the world. No doubt he has a purpose in your life, as well.”
I went very quiet inside. “You seriously believe in destiny, then?”
“No doubt. Every drop of water is destined to find another, my dear. From the clouds to the seas to our bodies and back again, an endless cycle since the beginning of time. An ancient stream. Nothing is lost, and there is meaning in every current.” She paused again, looking at me kindly but steadily. “He has vague memories—dreams—in which my sisters and I rescue him with our own hands. A feat which is impossible.” One more pause. She had impeccable timing. “Of course, we did rescue him.”
I exhaled a long, shaken breath. “Do you think you can eve
r tell him?”
“Yes, but how to tell him is the problem—how to help him understand.”
“Perhaps all of this—” I indicated the house, the finery, the indulgent food, the whole, lovely world in which she and her sisters had cocooned themselves “—is a false dream, and Griffin can prove it doesn’t deserve to exist.”
My honest rebuttal didn’t seem to bother Lilith. She looked at me sadly. “I am willing to risk having you and Griffin destroy all that we Bonavendiers have created, in order that you may learn to believe in it.”
I laid my hands flat along the table’s lacquered edge. “I was speaking rhetorically about his justifications. I can assure you I’d never hurt you in any way. I am eternally grateful for your kindnesses. I’m just not sure I can share your faith in the explanations for what we are or how we fit in.”
“That is precisely why you must try to listen and to trust. And so must Griffin.”
I considered everything in silence while she sipped herbal tea and our breakfast pudding cooled. “His mother,” I said slowly, “was she like us?”
“Yes, my dear. The traits, the talents, the exquisite taste.” Lilith smiled wistfully.
“And so . . . he is, too?”
“Yes. Of course, with his father being a Randolph, and not at all of our kind, Griffin’s not as blessed as you or I. But he is a remarkable young man, Alice, and I certainly consider him more Us than Them.”
I stared at her. My heart constricted and expanded; joy raced through me. “So he’s odd, like me,” I whispered happily.
“He’s special, like you,” Lilith corrected.
“Special.”
“Believe it.”
“Should I be afraid of his powers?” I had a distinct feeling there was quite a bit she hadn’t told me. And wouldn’t tell me . . . yet.
“Only if you forget to lead as well as follow.”
“Should he be afraid of mine?”
“That,” she said with a sad smile, “depends on where you lead him.”
I floated on the edge of forever. Below me, I could sense but not see forms that must have been pieces of the Calm Meridian, and just beyond the wreckage site a depth as big as the sky. The Point Trench. A vast underwater valley beyond the shallows of Sainte’s Point, curling out into the deep of the Atlantic. A dozen yards above me, the pale green water of the ocean surface had begun to fade to the dark hue of the deep sea. I could just see the hazy glow of the sun, lighting schools of small, dark fish that swirled and turned, agitated by the dolphins who had followed me. The dolphins’ songs were curious, bewildered. They were not afraid for me but were not certain why I’d come out so far and down so deep.