Nothing, my wee love; my feet are just a little peculiar, hmmm? Nothing wrong with that.
He examined one of his own feet, prying apart his toes. I have lines inside my toes, too, but they’re not so bad.
Well see, then, we’re alike—only your feet are much nicer than mine.
But Father doesn’t have lines inside his toes.
Not everyone is as lucky as you and I are. Smiling, she lifted him quickly into her lap and slid her foot back into the slipper. I say you’ve got fine, handsome feet. So much the better for you. Now don’t you be telling other people about my secrets, promise?
I promise.
She went back to her hair. The snipping of her scissors accompanied the soft copper fluffs as they fell into Griffin’s outstretched hands. I’m giving you my heart, every time, she told him. Just as I gave my whole heart to your father on the day we wed. You take care of my heart, promise? Just as you must care for all the lovely gifts of the sea, but do no’ forget you’re a Randolph, and you live on the land.
I promise, Mother.
Now, as a grown man, Griffin reached into the box. The memories suddenly had new meanings, possible and impossible. He lifted out a thick coil of copper-red hair bound with white ribbon at the cut end. He unwound it with trembling hands, held the ribboned end as high as his head, and let the stunning hair unfurl. It draped sensuously toward the floor, more than six feet long.
Mother’s hair.
His hands shaking a little, he carefully laid the long swath across his knees, then reached back into the box. He picked up a slender silver case about the size of a wallet, heavily figured and tarnished almost black. He closed the box, set the silver case atop the lid, and gently popped a tiny latch.
Inside was a folded note on fine, yellowed stationary, and beneath that, a mysterious silk bag. He opened the note and read in his mother’s hand:
My darling son, forgive me for what I did to you when you were a baby. You never knew, you never remembered. Your father accepted the idea that you had a harmless deformity, and a surgeon snipped it away before anyone else knew. If you are reading this, it is because Lilith feels you have no heart without the truth. Never forget your father loved you, and that I sacrificed small pieces of your soul because I loved you, too, and wanted you to be what you could never be.
Ordinary.
All my sorrows, and all my love,
Mother.
Griffin slowly picked up the small silk bag, which felt bulky but light. He untied its drawstring and poured its contents into his palm. Eight small, dark, curled bits of leather fell out. He frowned, touched them with his fingertips, and a jolt of understanding went through him with sick shock.
These had been part of him when he was born. A delicate part of his feet, soft and tender, like Alice’s, no doubt easy for a doctor to cut away without leaving a trace.
Webbing.
Hair, you see, contains potent magic, I had read in one of Lilith’s books, and was believed by some to contain the person’s soul. Thus the ancients thought the sensual celebration of it could release the most evil and passionate forces. They were right about the passion.
“What have you done? What have you done to your hair?” Pearl cried.
Mara staggered, naked and shorn, from the cove’s edge. Standing a few paces above them on the pathway to the docks, I tried not to stare at her in horror and pity, but I felt both. What was left of her dark hair hung in blunt rags around her face, chopped off, ruined. Her face was wan, her eyes swollen from tears. She looked up at me with terrible exhaustion and pain and anger. “Love a Randolph and you’ll give up all dignity. He’ll own you more than any other Lander ever could.”
“You gave your hair to C.A. Randolph?” Pearl whispered. “Did you tell him what that means?”
“Leave me be. I had a moment of blind impulse. I left him immediately after I did it. I was a fool. He seduced me. We won’t talk about him anymore.”
“But—” Pearl gazed from her to me in tearful awe. “Among our kind, giving your hair to someone is a symbolic vow of eternal love.”
“Vows are ludicrous with an ordinary man. It’s only hair. It will grow back.” Mara slumped at the water’s edge, then pointed a sharp finger up at me. “You see the lesson I’m teaching you? Stay away from Griffin. Give up this plan to betray us. You’re bringing misery to us already. This is all your fault.”
I bowed my head. “Please, don’t say that. I’ve never wanted to—”
“If you don’t care about us or yourself, think of Griffin at least. You’re going to destroy him. Destroy him. You’ll destroy him as well as us.” Mara searched my face with her devastated eyes. “You believe me. I see it. And I hear it, in your pathetic little worried humming.”
I went silent, struggling for defensive words that wouldn’t come.
Mara crept in for the kill. “Do you want to know what really happened to your father—our father—because of your mother?”
“Oh, no, no, it’s too cruel. It wasn’t her mother’s fault,” Pearl cried. “She was seduced. Father dishonored himself. He did what he felt was right. He did it to set her free.”
I stared at Mara. “What are you implying?”
“Your mother—the fool—told him she’d never leave him, never love another man, never give up loving him. He drowned himself to escape her.”
I reeled. Now I understood what Dr. Abernathy’s strange story really meant. My mother had given Orion her hair. My mother wanted so badly to be one of the Water People, and my father knew that she wasn’t just mimicking their customs, she was giving him her devotion forever.
Mara saw the understanding in my face, laughed bitterly, and got to her feet. “Live with it,” she said, then dived back into the water.
Pearl ran to me, threw her arms around my shoulders, and hugged me hard. “Please, don’t feel bad, Alice. We love you, anyway.”
“Then he really did kill himself because he thought that was the only way to give my mother a future without him?”
She took my face between her hands and made a dolphin-like click of sorrow. “Darling Alice, when someone ordinary loves one of our beautiful kind, the love is all-consuming. Father knew that. Your mother fell in love with him—that was his fault, not hers. He didn’t want to bind her to him—he didn’t want to trap her in his aging life. He did an honorable thing—painful though it was to us. He had no idea your mother was pregnant, or he surely wouldn’t have left her. Lilith doesn’t blame her for his death, just as you have found it in your heart not to blame him for your mother’s death. Haven’t you? It was love, Alice. Love. Among our kind, love can either keep us afloat or drown us.”
I staggered.
Pearl kissed my cheek. “Darling Alice, please don’t look like it’s the end of the world. When Lilith comes back, she’ll make it all make sense.” Pearl looked frantically at the cove, where Mara reappeared briefly, shoving at dolphins that tried to nuzzle her like anxious pets. “I have to go. I’ve never seen Mara so upset over a man. She shouldn’t swim alone right now—she’ll hurt the dolphins’ feelings.” Pearl shucked a soft silk lounging outfit and followed her sister into the cove. They disappeared like matched nudes in a water show, beneath the spring tide.
I stood there utterly alone on the shores of Sainte’s Point.
And quietly, very quietly, I began to sing a mourning song to myself, understanding what I had to do.
22
The children display remarkable calm despite the trauma of the near-drowning incident in ocean. Their fantasy remains intact. They continue to assert that a white-finned mermaid saved them.
Psychiatric counselor’s journal
Somewhere on the East Coast
1978
Alice had never been afraid in the water until she went back down to the Calm Meridian. She felt its sorrows around her, the physical wreckage as well as the heart’s, as she sank down next to the bow. Her skin flinched at every hint of movement. A sting ray fluttered alon
g the bottom, and she jerked up her feet as it grazed them. Despite all admonitions to herself, at any moment she expected to feel the mysterious hands again. She sang out, received no images or vibrations in return, and told herself to hurry.
She had come there to take the gun.
And then to disappear.
She saw no other choice. The gun was the key to a tragedy of deliberate violence. Someone had pulled its trigger. Could Mara’s dislike for Randolphs have justified killing a cousin who married one? Was Lilith protecting Mara’s crime? Or had Lilith pulled the trigger, equating honor with death, a tradition Bonavendiers clearly enshrined? Had she decided Griffin would be better off without his own parents? Alice groaned, not wanting to picture Lilith performing some horrible act of matricidal execution, nor even Mara stooping so low. As for Pearl—unfathomable. Pearl would have been harmless, blameless, a horrified bystander.
Griffin deserved to know the truth about the sisters—whatever it was. He deserved to punish anyone who had deliberately caused his parents’ deaths. He deserved to put his grief and fears to rest. But would the truth do it? No. The truth rarely changed minds and only sometimes provided peace. All the answers were imperfect, caught between two worlds.
Alice had no good solution, nothing that would heal anyone, no side she would willingly sacrifice. I brought this on, she thought. I let Griffin see my abilities, and he realized the sisters really could have been out here, doing the impossible during the storm. And I gave Griffin the idea to search this wreckage when I found the little sculpture. I caused this misery.
She bowed her head to the ruined bow of the Calm Meridian and cried. For the first time she realized her transformation. She’d gained a lover and a family, a home, a new idea of herself, some poignant realities about her beginnings. Her father had been a flawed man but ultimately a man of honor, and her mother had innocently ruined him as much as he ruined her. Alice had her own debts of honor to pay.
So she would take the gun, and no one but her would ever know about it, ever touch it, ever hear its terrible, incriminating song. On the south end of the island, near the lighthouse, she’d left a waterproof bag stuffed with a few clothes and some money. She planned to swim back for those belongings, then head down the coast into Florida. From there she thought she might make her way to the Caribbean, or anywhere. The irony was that she had the courage and know-how to consider such a journey without flinching, and that the strongest emotion she felt was not fear, but the pain of losing the sisters she had come to cherish and the man she loved dearly.
She slid down to the sandy bottom and felt her way around the bow. When she reached the gap where she’d attempted to enter before, her feet floated where the slope dropped off. She turned and sang into the Point Trench. Ancient riverbed, that’s what you are, flowing to an ancient sea. Green trees grew on this hill once. The sky met you at the borders of your shores. I remember you, and so you still live.
Nothing died, not love, not honor, not the memory of water. She would always remember the love. She shut her eyes for a moment. Then she turned, shoved her arms into the small black tunnel beneath the ruined bow of the Calm Meridian, and squirmed inside.
How still it was, and darker even than the ocean outside it. She spread her hands, moved around, was tickled by small fish that had sought refuge inside there. The width was easily ten feet. She tilted her head toward the sandy bottom and hummed. Shapes came back to her. She got down on her hands and knees, touched bits of debris, rivets, and then, the barnacle-encrusted gun.
No, please, do no’ do it, please, think of Griffin . . .
She heard Undiline’s begging, windswept plea as if she were standing beside her. Alice lurched back and slammed into the bow’s inner wall.
The bow trembled, tilted, then began to slide down the ancient slope of the Point Trench.
Alice grabbed for a handhold but couldn’t find any. The bow’s lurching movement threw her forward, and the side of her head struck an outcropping of the yacht’s ribs. A snap of pain flashed away every specific thought. She floated, unconscious, as the bow settled on the slope, twenty feet below its former spot, mired hopelessly in deep sand with no escape route.
A tomb.
23
It is quite likely the fabulous worlds of Melasine and her kind had been in ruins for millennia when Neptune began paddling around Grecian male fantasies with his nubile nymphs and phallic trident.
—Lilith
Griffin knelt on the dock at Randolph Cottage, sitting back on his heels with his hands on his thighs, his gaze on the water of BellemeadeBay, his manner utterly still. He remembered the sight of dolphins circling his laughing mother as she swam—and circling him as he swam as a child, too. He began to remember that Mother was careful to take him swimming with her only when Father wasn’t there to watch.
Dolphins. Circling them.
Circling Ali, the day she had arrived.
Recognizing a branch of the family tree a helluva lot closer to their kind than the average human being?
He thought of evolutionary biology, of ancient history, of sailors’ dirty jokes and fanatics’ theories and mystics’ mythologies and a thousand other doctrines to explain the unexplainable. If there were seeds of truth in all the world’s fabulous mysteries, then anything was possible.
Even himself.
He spread his hands, the hands of any man, as if webbing might begin to grow between his fingers. He touched the sides of his neck. No gills. He thought of horror movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
This was what Alice had grown up believing, that she was different, alone, impossible. And all the time he’d been out there in the world, feeling the same way. Lilith had tried to tell him, but he had hidden that part of himself.
He stumbled to his feet. The singing. God, it’s another element of what we do. Like sonar, like telepathy, who knows? Ali, talk to me. Meet me anywhere out in the water. I know how to find you, if you’ll only sing. I’m listening.
But she didn’t answer.
He stared at the bay, clenching and unclenching his hands. Dive in. Try it. Let go of the fear and see what happens. Sweat broke on his brow. He called out to Ali again, and heard nothing again. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but the slam of a car door broke into his thoughts.
“C.A.,” he said, without turning to look.
C.A. walked up behind him. “I want to apologize—”
“How much did my father know about my mother and me?” Griffin pivoted and searched the older man’s startled eyes. “Did he know we were . . . something different?”
Sorrow filled C.A.’s face. His shoulders slumped. “He knew there were some odd traits. But your mother hid a lot from him.”
“I had webbed feet when I was born.”
C.A. sagged. “She told your father they were a common deformity in her family. They had your feet surgically altered, and no one in our family ever knew. Except me.”
“Did he think I was a freak?”
“Griffin, he loved you, and he loved your mother. For years, he pretended there was nothing seriously different about you or her, and, as I said, until the last she hid a lot from him.”
Until the last? rose to the tip of Griffin’s tongue but vanished as a tremor went through him like a high-pitched chime. He gasped. His bones echoed, his skull filled with the most potent vibrato of a lyrical feminine voice he’d never heard before, wordless but swollen with urgent information. Out to the sea, to the dying place, to her, to her.
“Griffin. Griffin.” C.A. had him by the shoulders, staring into his blind eyes. “What is it?”
“Ali’s in trouble.” Griffin shoved him aside and ran for the speedboat.
C.A. followed, jumping down into the well of the fast boat just as Griffin slung off the dock lines, then sent the boat flying across the bay, heading around the tip of Sainte’s Point, toward the open Atlantic.
Toward the Calm Meridian.
The water is the womb and all our
children flow from it. Go to her before you lose her, too.
Lilith awoke on the secluded cove’s beach with the singing voice in her mind. She slid from Riyad’s sleeping embrace and stood quickly, her disheveled silver hair cloaking her in matted sand and dried tears, her hands rising to her throat as she pivoted like a compass, searching for the direction, finding it, halting with a soft cry.
Riyad woke and bounded to his feet like a young man. He clasped one olive-skinned hand on her white shoulder. “Who is this voice, and why is she calling you?” he asked gently.
“Melasine,” Lilith whispered. And then, in answer to his second question, “Alice.”
“When did Alice leave?” Pearl asked the Tanglewoods. She and Mara had just wrapped themselves in robes after climbing from the water at dockside on Sainte’s Point. The Tanglewoods peered at Pearl and Mara anxiously from the island’s dock. Pearl regarded them as three middle-aged blond dodo birds, asexual and wingless, as sweet as cherubs.
“We’ve seen no sign of the Alice for over an hour.” Kasen moaned. “She just swam away. Oh, woe is us. The world is turning upset down and will pour dirt on us. We’re so worried.”
Mara threw up her hands. “Did she say where she was going?”
“No! And she took a small travel bag with some of her belongings in it.”
Pearl gasped.
“Relax,” Mara ordered. She scowled as she strangled droplets of water from her chopped hair. “We can’t get rid of her that easily.”
Pearl whirled toward her sister. “You vicious sea creature! You’ve driven her away!”
“That was my intention. I’m surprised it happened so soon.” But even Mara frowned and glanced toward the ocean. “Anyway, she’s too cowardly to go far. She’ll be back by nightfall. Like a sea slug creeping back to its shell.”