“Oh, more than elaborate,” Pearl interjected brightly. Mara scowled at her.
Lilith put a graceful, opalescent-trimmed hand to her heart. “Our father—and yours—went out into the ocean one day and never returned. We found him later—his body. The dolphins brought him home. We were all heartbroken, including your mother. She left the coast immediately—returning here, to this town, to her family. I wrote to her kindly. She never answered. I learned later that she’d died. I also learned she’d borne a child. I was certain, of course, the child was Father’s. I was told the child had died, too, at birth.”
I exhaled a long, rattling breath. “Someone in the Riley family told you I died?”
“Your aunt.”
My mother’s eldest sister. Anger poured into me even more, a widening torrent. “My aunt.”
“I should have known better, Alice. I should have felt your presence in the world. I should have heard you calling. I’ve dreamed about you for years. Why didn’t I hear you singing before now? That’s a question I have to answer for myself.”
Because you didn’t care, I thought cynically. You didn’t want to be bothered with me.
“If I am going to believe any of this,” I managed, “then please tell me why we’re so different from everyone else.”
“You aren’t ready to hear that yet. You’re consumed with anger and pain and distrust. Come with us to our home, Alice, and learn about us, and learn about yourself. And then you’ll understand. And you’ll believe.”
“I prefer clear answers instead of vague promises. Simple answers.”
“That’s not possible. The truth, my dear, is far more complex than you’ve ever imagined—and far more wonderful.” She went on in her lovely voice, telling me that she and her sisters—my half-sisters, if I believed her—come from one of the barrier islands off Georgia’s coast, a small isle named Sainte’s Point. She said it has been owned by Bonavendiers since the late 1700s. “Our ancestor was a French privateer,” Lilith said.
“A pirate,” redheaded Pearl interjected eagerly.
Lilith silenced her with a stern glance. “A privateer in service to the American revolutionary government. He fought off a British warship that threatened an American village on the mainland. After the war—in return for his service—President Washington deeded him the small island across the cove from that grateful village. Our ancestor named the island Sainte’s Point. He settled there quite happily, bringing with him a quite remarkable wife.”
“And she is responsible for the very special circumstances that have existed in all her Bonavendier descendents ever since,” Pearl put in, shaking an elegant, webbed foot for mysterious emphasis. “Because she was a . . . ”
“Shhh.” Dark-haired Mara hissed at her.
Pearl’s eyes widened. She huffed.
Lilith gave both women a rebuking stare. They lowered their eyes. Lilith looked at me again. “Our family has so much lovely history to tell—so many traditions, so many proud memories. But, you, of course, simply need to know your own history at the moment.”
I took a deep breath. “If I do believe you, then tell me this much. What kind of monsters are we?”
Pearl sputtered. “Monsters? Monsters?”
“How dare you,” Mara hissed. “You weakling. You . . . you pretender.”
Lilith inhaled sharply. “Say no more, either of you.”
“But we’re not monsters,” Pearl cried, her expression wounded.
“Pearl, say no—”
“We’re mermaids!”
Silence. Pearl pressed her fingertips to her indiscreet lips. Mara gave me a slit-eyed glower, while Lilith watched me with quiet concern. Neither attempted to explain, correct, or dismiss Pearl’s claim.
“Oh,” I said. “Mermaids.”
And, moving as casually as I could, I left them there with the fish.
I am not one to accuse others of frail whimsies and lunatic notions, considering my own strange afflictions and tastes, but the Bonavendier sisters were crazy. Not crazy in an evil way, I decided, or even a clinical one, but deluded, gently fantastical, dancing with moonlight. I never doubted that they and I shared the same freakish talents; I never seriously doubted we were blood kin. The difference, I concluded, was in defensive rationalizations and adjustments. I tried to be clear-eyed about my bizarre qualities. I mourned my oddity and went about my life as if it were a daily mea culpa for my unnatural ways. But the Bonavendier sisters were smug, vain, and wealthy, all of which grants lunacy the soft succor of respectability. They had designed a world for themselves in which lovely notions of mythological mermaidhood explained the unexplainable. They had clearly survived by designing their own fairy tale and inhabiting it.
I would not be taken in. Though I wanted to be.
That night, I sat in a small blue rocking chair in the deep-sea-themed living room of my cabin, my head in my hands, not a single light turned on, the darkness of early evening as tight as shut eyelids around me. I had no idea where the magnificent, insane Bonavendier sisters—my half-sisters, I did acknowledge repeatedly on instinct—had gone after I left them in the pet shop. As I rocked, head in hands, mourning the day’s events, I pushed my bare, webbed toes into a pile of seashells one of my e-mail correspondents had sent me. I’d arranged them prettily at the base of a water garden in a ceramic pot. I caressed my conch shells and sand dollars for an unwitting moment, then jerked my feet away.
Mermaid. Then where were my iridescent scales, my transforming flippers and coquettish charm and subverted genitalia? In the water I was still two-legged Alice. And how was it that I came by my mermaid-dom through a father, not a mermaid mother? I shuddered at the Bonavendiers’ nonsense, hugging myself inside a thin white robe over plain white underwear. I was rooted in cotton reality, not silken dreams. The Bonavendier sisters could console themselves with ludicrous whimsies, but the world operated by harsher rules: We were genetic freaks, not mythological marvels.
“My father was not a merman,” I said aloud, just to assure my own intelligence.
The sound of several cars turning into my long driveway made me jerk to attention. I hurried about my dark cabin, changing the robe for an ankle-length denim skirt and oversized denim jacket, the kind of clothing I wore routinely, hiding myself inside a moving tent. I wanted to cry but had no water left in me. My life in Riley was ruined. All my efforts to get along, to be left alone, to be invisible, had been destroyed.
So tell me, would you save that child again, knowing the consequences?
I stopped stock still in the middle of my own floor. The humming filled my head again. Lilith Bonavendier was speaking to me again. I groaned in defeat.
Yes, I would.
Then you’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Alice. And nothing to keep you here anymore.
You are my family in name only. I don’t believe in you. I began frantically lacing up high black boots on my feet. Since high school, I’d made it hard for anyone to jerk my shoes off. Trembling in denim and Victorian leather, I walked out onto the cabin’s dark porch and pressed a switch. A hooded, tin light fixture cast its glow on the yard and the winter woods beyond. Two dozen steps behind me, below the sloping backyard of my house, the lake waited with dark, quiet appeal. I fought an urge to run down the bank, pull off my baggy clothes and strict shoes, dive in, and escape.
Car lights pierced the cold dusk.
The vehicles contained my aunt, plus about a dozen other Rileys—older ones, younger ones, men and women—stern upholders of the family’s hard, respectable philosophy. “You’ve humiliated us in public. This is the last straw. We want you out of here,” my aunt said. She stood there in my yard, a strong, stocky woman with my mother’s russet hair but nothing resembling any charm. She was about sixty, and my mother, I realized in passing, would have been a little more than seven years younger, if she’d lived. Suddenly I could see my mother—Mother, I thought of her, for the first time—in a way I’d never imagined before. Smiling and kind, loving and doo
med. I’d heard glimmers about my aunt’s hard feelings toward her over the years. Duller and stauncher, my aunt had always been the family’s girdle, while my mother had been its crown.
“Did you hate my mother?” I asked. The question leapt out like a snake’s tongue. In the course of one day, I’d rejected an award, thwarted my aunt’s orders, been claimed by three clearly notorious women, and talked back. My aunt scowled and buttoned a long gray coat tighter around herself. The other grim Rileys traded grim looks.
“Were you glad she fell from grace?” I persisted. I was vibrating, picking up Lilith’s goading song and singing it myself.
My aunt’s face contorted. “She threw away her life. She had everything a girl could want. What happened to her was her own fault.”
“When I was born, did Grandmother and Grandfather Riley take me away from her against her will?”
That froze my aunt. The others shifted unhappily. I studied their faces, watching anger mix with embarrassment, and I saw the answer. My heart squeezed in on itself, then began to weep for ruined joy. “I see. She did want me, but they took me away from her. And she couldn’t bear it.”
I stepped forward, my voice rising with the movement. “Wasn’t that enough punishment? You killed her. Did you have to make my life miserable, as well?”
“You weren’t meant to be born,” my aunt spat out. “You’re a mistake of nature, you’re just a sickly thing, you’re nothing like a normal person, and you’re a lying troublemaker, to boot. Whatever happened in the lake between you and that little girl will cause gossip forever around here. And those females . . . those flashy women who waltzed into our business today—they can say whatever they want about being your kin. I don’t know, and I don’t really care. They only feel sorry for you, Alice. Or they want something from you. They figure you’re a celebrity. Yes. That’s it. That’s why they came, Alice. To see what they could get out of you.”
All of that was a possibility, of course. Here I was, throwing fuel on the funeral pyre of my only secure life, insulting the tepid indulgence of people who had cared enough to tolerate me for thirty-four years, and I couldn’t really defend three strangers who secretly claimed to not only swim with the fishes but to be fishes. I said nothing and began to sink inside my own skin.
“We’re going to buy this cabin from you,” my aunt went on, smirking at my fading defiance. “You’ve got some savings already, and with the money from this house you can start over somewhere new. Somewhere where people won’t know about you. It’ll be better for you and us, too, Alice.”
She was confiscating my home. My only familiar surroundings. Telling me, too, that I had to give up my job at the pet shop. Give up every road and byway, every shop window and face and faded country house and breath-strangling mountain vista, every face I knew and every person who shared my last name. I would be even more alone in the world—just weak, sickly, odd Alice, nobody and nothing, floating free on a tide of strangers and strange places.
I held out my hands, trembling. “I’ve done nothing to deserve this. Isn’t it possible to forgive me for being different and let me stay here? The talk will blow over. I won’t encourage people to notice me. I never laid claims to any miracles when I rescued the little girl. And I never asked for any awards.”
“Miracles? I don’t know what to think about you and your strange ways, Alice, but I’ll tell you this much: I do believe in miracles. But I believe in evil, too. And I believe you are evil.”
I put a hand over my stomach as I fought nausea.
An elegant female voice rang out, filled with disgust. “You’re motivated by nothing except petty revenge. And thus, your beliefs regarding Alice are absolutely meaningless.” Everyone looked around wildly, me included. Lilith stood in the light at the edge of my porch, facing my aunt and the rest of my tormentors.
She was naked and wet.
Her soaked silver hair was plastered over her, front and back, offering just enough modesty to reveal only glimpses of youthful breasts and the long, slim belly of an accomplished swimmer. Her soft, flawless skin, ivory and peach, glowed with diamond ankle bracelets and a thick pearl choker around her throat. Her body steamed in the cold air, lifting a silver mist around her. Lake water trickled down her body and limbs in caressing streams. She was absolutely calm, regal, totally in charge.
All the Rileys took several steps back. Real fear clotted their eyes. My aunt raised ruddy hands to her throat as her gaze hung on Lilith, and Lilith gazed at her. There was a long pause, tension gathering in the air like the carbon scent of ozone just before lightning strikes.
“Be gone,” Lilith ordered very softly and very clearly. “Before I lure you into the lake.”
Her innuendo filtered into the crowd like icy tentacles. I saw the horror of it snare people, raise the whites of their eyes, hold them very still. This was no dimestore threat, built on cheap theatrics. All of us standing there at that moment would have done whatever Lilith Bonavendier asked, including sink into the lake with her lithe hands around our throats.
Slowly she raised a hand and made a slight, shooing gesture, breaking the spell. My Riley kin flung themselves toward their cars as if released from a slingshot. My aunt fumbled as she climbed inside her vehicle, slammed the door, and locked the locks. So did the others. I watched in amazement as my aunt and the rest drove away quickly. My mother’s family disappeared from my life as if swallowed by the night.
I walked to Lilith in a daze. She looked at me and I at her, searching each other’s hearts and souls. I felt a surge of joy, but a lifetime of confusion and pain, and bitter pride made a hard shell for it. I didn’t doubt I was more than just Alice Riley now, but I would never believe I could be Alice Bonavendier.
“You want to turn me into someone who doesn’t exist,” I accused hoarsely. “ I’m not a mermaid. There’s no such thing.”
“My dear, whatever you want to call us is fine. But we do exist.”
“So my father was a merman?”
“Your father was the only great-great-grandson of Simon and Melasine Sainte Bonavendier, she of the Water People, as the Old Ones called themselves. And like all of us who are descended from her, your father was of her kind.”
“He lived in the water and sported a fine, finned tail?”
“No fins, I’m afraid, and no stereotypes. We are people, not fish, my dear.”
“Then I assume that we two-legged descendents of Melasine are, biologically and genetically speaking, watered down?”
She smiled beneath her cool eyes. “How droll you are. Such flowing wit. You realize, of course, that just meeting us has begun to change you? Your voice, your manner. You sense who you are, now, and you’re more confident.”
“You’re wrong. You have provoked my worst nature. I apologize. I’m not a sarcastic person.”
“My dear, no need to apologize. You think I’m absolutely delusional, and you’re trying to reason with me via humor. And I am humoring you because deep inside I recognize every bit of your urgent need to believe in us—and yourself.”
I took a step back. “I can’t live up to your fantasy.”
Lilith touched my face with the back of one hand. Even in the steaming cold, her fingers were provocatively maternal and warm. “You already have. Come to us whenever you’re ready. Just follow the water to the sea.”
Something or someone splashed in the dark lake. I jumped. A glimmer of porch light caught the emerging heads of Mara and Pearl. Their bare shoulders gleamed like wet porcelain. Their hair floated around them in graceful swirls. They were amazing, sensual, ethereal. Mara looked me up and down with disdain, but Pearl issued a reassuring smile. “Let’s go home, Alice. The water there is much finer.”
Mara raised a hand and tasted the lake on her fingertips. She grimaced. “Needs salt,” she said.
I stared at them, then Lilith. “I need to think.”
“You need to dream. You’ll float to us on your dreams,” Lilith replied. “Just as before.”
> I turned, walked indoors, turned off the porch light, locked up, and sat in the darkness again. They left silently; I don’t know when.
Sometime during the night, I went out to my small backyard dock and stood there naked, grieving with deep loneliness and fear of the future, preparing to swim in my lake one last time, before the mob of Rileys returned. I spied a small gift box, which someone had set quite obviously on the edge of the dock’s weathered floor. I knelt warily and opened it. On a liner of dark silk lay the most beautiful emerald ankle bracelet. I opened a small, folded note tucked beneath it. Lilith’s handwriting was beautiful. Her message was clear.
Adorn your special feet and celebrate every step you take toward your true kind.
6
The term “mermaid” is literally translated as “virgin of the sea.” And thus I have never considered that popular term a particularly apt or complimentary name for our kind. To celebrate the water is to celebrate the consummation between water and earth, female and male. To have never experienced that unity is to be half-lived.
—Lilith
“So handsome. Look, Senor,” a nurse said, holding up the newest issue of National Geographic for Griffin to see. “You will look like this again when you are well.”
The woman propped the magazine on her hands with the pages folded to a story titled Secrets Of The Mirabelle. Griffin and his crew posed atop the deck of the Sea She with a deep-blue Caribbean sky behind them and the coral-encrusted cannons of a sixteenth-century French warship at their feet. The nurse looked from the picture to him with a sigh, as if assessing the sad contrast between the adventurer and the bedridden invalid. Griffin squinted at the magazine through swollen, bloodshot eyes, his face covered with black beard stubble, a sutured wound making a raw pink slash across the right side of his jaw.
“Handsome bastard,” he managed in a hoarse voice.
“Oh, Senor, yes. Yes, you will look that handsome again. And all the ladies who have tried to come here and visit you will be waiting.”