“In other words, you didn’t admit a thing then, and you won’t now.”
“Listen to your heart. It will tell you the truth.”
“You didn’t come here to give me advice. What do you want from me?”
“I have come to ask you for a favor. You are kin to me after all. Distant kin, but those bonds are important to me. And should be to you.”
He began to laugh. He held out one large, long-fingered arm, his hand palm up, as graceful as a courtier. The movement revealed the sensuously entwined woman and dolphin tattooed on the underside of his forearm. “Madam Bonavendier comes here thirty-odd years too late, not to confess how she and her sisters killed my parents—” he smiled grimly—”But to remind me we’re related and ask me for a favor.”
Lilith walked to the box. She laid a hand on it. “This keepsake box belonged to your mother.” Her gaze bored into him, conjuring the spirit of his mother around him, riveting his attention. She laid a key atop the box. His sardonic smile faded to a shadow. Lilith nodded. “You’ll know when to unlock it.”
He wet his lips, struggled for a moment, then repeated in a low voice, “I said, What do you want from me?”
“I want you to watch out your windows for a fellow lost soul. Take care of her when you see her waiting at the docks we share, speak to her kindly if she asks for your help, and don’t frighten her away. Because she fears the land as much as you fear the water.”
“Then I feel sorry for her. And I can’t help her.”
“She is my half-sister. She is a treasure you must reclaim for us all.” Lilith paused. “Her name is Alice Riley.”
He stared at Lilith. What was left of his color drained from his face. After a long, quiet moment, he exhaled. “Alice,” he said.
Lilith took one look at the recognition in his eyes, and her heart made a thready leap. He’s heard her singing; he’s felt her touch somehow. There is hope. He can hear the songs of his mother’s kind.
“I’m sure you’ll take care of her as if she holds your heart,” Lilith whispered.
He said nothing, but she knew.
Alice already held it.
Griffin stirred in his bed, sleeping drunkenly on an afternoon when cool wind whipped the cottage and the old seaside house trembled. The wind seemed to send the timbre of its voice through his skull, relaxing cramped muscles from healing bones, massaging his brain. The sensation became an erotic hum, not a force coming into him but focusing itself inside him, blooming low in his belly until he was thrusting and hard, then, suddenly, singing out, forming into words, forming into his own urgent voice.
Alice, make him look at you. You saved my life; now I’ll save yours. Make him put down the gun.
Griffin woke with a jerk, sweating, tingling. He shoved himself upright in the darkened bedroom, staring straight ahead, stunned at the words he hadn’t spoken aloud and couldn’t understand, at the thick erection pushing up the material of his pajama bottoms. He felt worried and orgasmic, directing commands at an endangered woman he didn’t know. What she provoked in him was a sensation he’d never experienced before in his life. Another rush of energy surged through his body, and he sank a hand into the jumbled covers as he came, like a lovesick teenager, inside his clothing. And somehow he knew.
Alice Riley had heard him. Wherever she was and whatever had just happened to her, she’d listened.
I froze in a front aisle of the convenience store with a container of whipped butter in my hands, while a sad young man with dirty blond spitcurls waved a pistol at both me and the Mexican cashier who had befriended me. Her name was Maria.
“Give me your damned money,” he screamed at us.
Maria shrank back. I could not make myself move an inch. I felt doom swirl around us like a pulling current.
Make him look at you, Alice. Make him put down the gun or he’ll shoot.
The deep male voice rose inside my mind out of nowhere, filling me with the vibrations of a low-pitched hum. My spine arched; I gasped as if electrified. Him. The face in the water. The injured man. Fingers of sensation webbed my skin and delved inside me. I felt my womb loosen, welcome, and then retract. Moisture spread between my legs, and my knees went weak. Pleasure, at a moment like this. Life. That voice.
“Please, don’t hurt us,” Maria begged and began fumbling with the cash register. She knocked over a jar of pennies, and the robber jumped at the crash.
“I’ll kill ya!”
“No, you won’t,” I said. Just like that, in a low voice. The robber swung toward me furiously. Inside, my backbone turned to water and drained into my own feet. Strangely, I was still satiated with the unknown voice, the slick fertility some male stranger had provoked inside my belly.
Make him look at you, Alice, the voice urged again. The way I’m looking at you.
My head came up. I squared my shoulders, tilted my chin just so, feigned grace and patient command. I stared into the robber’s eyes, past the bloodshot whites and wide-open irises, inside the dark, fluid pools of his brain. So much of what we are is water. We change with the tides, we struggle in our own endless seas to transform ourselves into something or someone splendid. I dived beneath his fear and confusion, his paranoia, the currents of drugs and abuse and hopelessness that pushed him away from every shore. I made a mewling sound of sympathy.
Float, I sang in my mind. Breathe. Become who you truly are. I began to hum to him, a silent, erotic, spiritual song.
He wavered. His hand, bearing the pistol, slowly eased to his side. His expression stilled. Without a word he turned unsteadily and walked out the front door. A tiny set of metal windchimes sang in his wake. The sound filled the stunned silence.
“How did you do that?” Maria cried. “You charmed that crazy snake!” She pressed a button behind the counter. The door lock slid into place, alarms began to ring, and the police were summoned by some faceless computer somewhere. Out under the awnings of the gas pumps, the robber wobbled to a halt, sat down on the ledge of a pump, and gazed back toward the store, watching me. He began to cry and dropped his head into his hands. I began to cry for him, and my knees went weak.
I was changing. I had left Riley and had begun to turn into someone new, someone even odder and more potent than before. Maybe because I was free of my hateful relatives, other people could see me differently. Or I could see them. And in some cases, hear them.
You did it, Beautiful.
His voice again, the stranger. I didn’t sense him nearby, or I would have run. But his masculine current vibrated under my skin, and as my womb cooled I recoiled.
All my life men and boys had stared at me oddly, taunted me, ignored me, avoided me. My fantasies of loving and being loved by a man were just phantoms, my sexuality confined to stroking my own body in the lonely nights of my bed. I didn’t trust men this easily and did not want any man inside me, body, mind, or soul, without my explicit permission.
Where are you? I demanded. Who are you? How do you know me? What do you want from me?
No answer. Silence.
Sobbing, Maria ran to me and threw her arms around my shoulders. “You are a hero!”
Not again. Oh, my god. My knees collapsed. I sank down on a stack of canned soft drinks while she continued to hug me and cry.
Griffin stumbled to a window overlooking the cottage’s front yard, crashing the cast of his injured leg into a table, slamming the cast of his broken forearm against a wall. He gripped the edge of a captain’s desk and looked out over the bay as if it held answers.
All his life he’d had quirky moments of prescient knowledge, and people often commented on his uncanny ability to find rare objects underwater. But he had told them it was because he read, he studied, he was an accomplished if uncredentialed archaeologist and historian. He’d bought his first deep-sea rig and had begun treasure hunting by the time he was twenty-five; by thirty he had a million dollars in the bank and had begun to earn his notorious fame for prying antiquities from the sea. But he regarded his abilit
ies as just trained instincts, like following the stars across the ocean. Nothing like what had been happening recently.
Randolphs did not have psychic experiences or melodramatic spiritual epiphanies. They were staunch Protestants, raising each new generation to a stiff-upper-lip standard of worshipful decorum. Religious experiences ought to be practical, socially responsible, and good for business. Telepathic hallucinations were looked down upon.
Griffin scrubbed a shaking hand over his black hair and stared out the window, searching. He wanted to find Alice Riley standing in his sandy yard. No such luck. He dragged an armchair and ottoman to the window and, gasping for breath, folded his tall, pained body into the seat, then stationed his gaze out the window.
I suffered some kind of neurological brain damage during the explosion. That’s what’s causing these phantom effects. After all, one of his injuries had been a severe concussion.
But he knew no recent injury explained all the years of haunted dreams, dreams in which Lilith Bonavendier and her sisters took him into their watery arms but would not save his parents. Imaginary conversations and full-body vibrations were alarming new choruses of an old, tormenting song. He poured bourbon into a pewter mug, swallowed a pill to coat the shaky state of his sanity with chemical reassurance, then feverishly returned his gaze out the window, watching the road. Proof of reality had better, by God, arrive soon.
Come on, Alice. Prove there aren’t any mysteries of the deep inside either one of us.
10
“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
—T.S. Eliot
As soon as I finished telling the curious police my version of events—dodging questions from a reporter for the Macon Telegraph, too—I packed and left the motel, pulling my boxes by makeshift handles of braided duct tape. I wouldn’t risk a crowd of strangers coming to examine me like a specimen in a zoo. I wouldn’t wait to see them remember my name in the media. Never again.
Maria and her entire family saw me attempting to drag my belongings down a back street and rushed after me. I halted and began backing away. But Maria smiled. “Where are you going, dear friend?” she begged in Spanish.
“To the bus station. I’ve decided to travel on to my relatives’ home.” If I could just get within walking distance of the coast, I would find my way to Bellemeade and then to Sainte’s Point, and I would never set foot on the continent again, never risk being seen as a monster or a hero again.
“Oh, no,” Maria protested. “You saved my life. We will drive you wherever you want to go.”
I stared at her. Before I could say another word, her brothers—men from high deserts—began loading my boxes into a car. These people knew how to seek water. I would be in Bellemeade within a few hours, and then, Sainte’s Point. Maybe I’d be better off out on a barrier island with three half-sisters who made me feel ordinary by comparison. Relief weakened my restraint. I pushed the strange events of the day from my mind.
Please, leave me alone, I said to the unknown man.
Once more he didn’t answer. Or didn’t exist. Or was lurking in some recess of my life, down the road somewhere. Afraid of his silences and my own, I left one stranger and hurried into the car of another stranger’s family.
I had taken a step forward. I was on my way to the sea and the Bonavendiers.
And to him?
Out on the island, Lilith stood like a statue atop a wide, white-marble dais that had been carried to the New World in the hold of an Italian frigate. The frigate now lay in the waters off Sainte’s Pointe, and the dais, a stunning work with gentle tendrils of vining roses carved around its circumference, sat grandly on the wooded banks on the island’s bayside. A massive maritime oak dipped its limbs around it and wept in mossy tendrils on its surface. The shadow of the nearby lighthouse fell across the oak and the fantastic marble dais at certain hours of day, marking the passage of forgiving time.
Lilith shielded her eyes and gazed across the bay to the southwest, just making out the sand dunes and turreted roofline of Randolph Cottage, sitting like a separate world from Bellemeade. The cool wind melted a flowing white top to her body in the breeze, and a long skirt of sheer silks swayed around her bare legs and feet. She moved with the wind and she listened.
Something had stirred inside Griffin, some part of Undiline’s heritage that vibrated like the lightest touch on a symphonic chord. And something had happened inside Alice because of him. Lilith pressed a hand to her chest and bowed her head. They were both safe, for now. She held out her arms to the water with grateful joy, knelt down for a moment and pressed a kissed fingertip to the dais, then went to call her sisters and prepare for Alice’s arrival.
Alice Bonavendier—not Alice Riley—was finally coming home.
Late afternoon. Hours on the road. My body ached. I was terrified. I left Maria and her family in Bellemeade, lying to them, saying I had arranged for relatives to meet me and that I would wait alone.
“It will be dark in only two hours,” Maria protested.
I almost laughed. “I’m not afraid of the dark.” She sighed. Her brothers carried my boxes to the veranda of a charming bay front inn called WaterLilies. I thanked Maria and she hugged me.
“You have a special power,” she said. “May you find happiness and bring it to others.”
“I’ll be looking,” I answered, my eyes already shifting helplessly to the bay across the street. Not more than twenty yards from me the water of the world lapped one tendril of its vast tongue at Bellemeade’s coquina seawalls and weathered docks, beckoning me. As Maria turned to go, a quiet sense of knowing came over me. “Maria,” I called. She looked back, and I spoke to her in soft Spanish. “You will have the child you want, within two years. A boy. Healthy.”
She put a hand to her heart and stared at me. She and her husband had been told she would never conceive. “Mia Madre,” she whispered, “you are truly gifted, I pray.” Then she turned and hurried to her car.
My knees wobbled. Now I had become a fortuneteller, divining people’s lives. But I had no doubt I was right about her baby. I shook my head to clear it. As soon as Maria and her family drove away, I deserted my boxes and stepped off the inn’s elegant porch, moving like a nightwalker across a sleepy street lined with beautiful shops, passing, hypnotized, beneath the winter shade of small pines twisted like bonsai by the wind. At the docks, pleasure craft and shrimp boats nuzzled one another like tethered ducks, bobbing on the quiet surface of BellemeadeBay. I went to the edge of the seawall and stroked the coarse surface embedded with sand and broken shells. As I looked out at the little marina and the bay and the island, I began to tremble.
The wind was cold, a bright blue sky domed the world, and my heart was pounding in my chest; my eyes were on BellemeadeBay because something I’ve always feared happened instantly. I fell in love with the ocean at first sight. I might never admit it to anyone, but I was home.
I turned, trailing one hand along the seawall, and walked the tiny main road out of town, passing beautiful little cottages with tree-shaded yards. I caught a wisp of wind-blown moss from the trees on my hand, let it go like a butterfly, every texture imprinting on my skin.
“Find your way east out of town to Randolph Cottage,” Lilith had instructed weeks earlier, when she left me in Riley. She had said something about the Bonavendiers sharing a mainland dock and boathouses with the Randolphs, an old coastal family on the mainland.
I walked beside the waters of the Atlantic, the edge of the waters of the world, scented with brisk brine and fish, adorned by hardy white seagulls and gliding brown pelicans. I walked on the unnatural heels of my laced black boots, the salty breeze curling around my stiff denim skirt and jacket like annoyed fingers. I carried nothing but my awe along a flat, narrow two-lane road where even the concrete was mixed with crushed shell. Sand seeped in pretty patterns onto the pavement from the roadsides, and palmetto grass rattled its hard fronds. Pine w
oods shouldered me on my right and the long, placid, gray-green bay on my left. On the horizon, fringing the line between water and sky, lay the mysterious silhouette of Sainte’s Point.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the island, the bay, the womb where my teenage mother was seduced by a man old enough to be her grandfather. I was worried but hypnotized by my own conception in this magic, and now I took the first small step to understanding how euphorically she must have danced, my young mother, to Orion Bonavendier’s enchanted song.
I began to hum to myself, my gaze always turned to my left, out there, off the edge of the continent. The water. The bay. The ocean. I had tried to imagine the ocean all my life, but my fantasies had been a dull substitute. I moaned silently with the sweet surf out beyond the horizon; I arched in the perfumed air and smiled at the squawking of the gulls. I reveled in the perfection of it all, what I’d lived thirty-four years without. Tears slid down my face.
People passed by in pickup trucks and salt-rusted cars. Suddenly, they began to turn around, to follow me, and then a dozen or more pulled off the road. Just simply pulled over on the landside. Hardworking fishermen, housewives, and tanned children got out of their vehicles, then stood silently, respectfully, as if they knew my name and were paying tribute.
I halted in confusion. “Hello,” I called. “I’m just walking to the docks at Randolph Cottage. Going to wait for Lilith Bonavendier from Sainte’s PointIsland to meet me , thank you.”
Men nodded. Women pressed their hands to their lips or their hearts. Children studied me with wide eyes. What had I done? Yet, there was nothing fearful about their scrutiny of me.
A little girl darted forward, her puzzled eyes riveted to my spiky auburn hair. “Ma’am, if you’re a mermaid like the other ladies, where’s the rest of your hair?” A mermaid. Ludicrous.
Her mother hurried up, smiling, and took her by a hand. “Miss Bonavendier, you’re mighty fine lookin’, just like we expected.”
“I . . . my name is not . . . I’m not a . . . ” my voice trailed off. “Thank you,” I managed. Clearly these people, these townsfolk of Bellemeade, indulged the Bonavendier claim of mermaidhood, no doubt because the Bonavendier family was rich and powerful. Money and influence put a respectable polish on even the most bizarre traditions. Poorer people conceded. I had conceded all my life.