Learning to Swim (7 page)

He laughed again. “Old. The only good kind, right?”

I laughed with him.

“What about yours?” he asked.

“It’s my mom’s father’s business,” I explained.

“Ah, smart guy, your dad, marry into it,” Owen said with a teasing smile.

“Yeah, he’d be happier if I had any interest in it whatsoever. I don’t. Lucky for him, my mother never did, either. Otherwise he never would have gotten to run the show. The way she was, though, my grandpa was only very happy to pass it down to a son-in-law. He didn’t have any sons of his own.”

“It looks like it’s going that way again,” Owen said. He didn’t sound sarcastic, as I would have, or domineering as most boys would when speaking of such things. My grandfather’s business, and his daughter’s and granddaughter’s complete lack of involvement or interest in it, made for some very happy relatives of mine.

“Yeah,” I said. “I have a cousin who’s being groomed for the business—just in case I never succeed in the husband hunt.”

Owen laughed and nodded. It wasn’t a gesture disgusted with this system, like I was, or outraged by it—simply accepting. This was how things went. Fathers made businesses to hand down to sons, and daughters were made to marry other sons from other families with businesses. He seemed oddly, and even refreshingly, placid. For a reason I couldn’t place, it was comforting to find someone like that. So unlike myself, he wasn’t pure angst and outrage, and so unlike other boys, he wasn’t pure arrogant pride. I wondered what business Owen would inherit.

“Well, I know a kid born into the Heel Warehouse franchise. We could set up a merger and the two of you would have a monopoly on the American shoe market.”

I laughed, a real laugh. One that started in my belly.

“A real shoe dynasty. I can set it up if you like.” He was grinning and for one glorious moment, I forgot to dislike him.

I was delightfully surprised to find that, at the end of the night, Owen insisted on walking me home. Well, at the time of night when I got tired of the drunken roaring of the Huston kid and others like him and announced that I was hitting the sack.

There had been a few groans—I was magically, suddenly, not-so-mysteriously popular. Of course this had nothing at all to do with the Fullington Factory rainbow shoelace craze of the 1990’s. It had made the company a pop culture icon.

I might have otherwise been bitter, but Owen had eagerly jumped up to walk me home and I felt oddly chatty.

“There’s not much to do around here, is there?” I said as we made our way down the boardwalk.

He laughed. “No, not really. You can tan, swim, go shopping, tan, go shopping, and tan.”

I laughed. “I haven’t been doing a lot of that. But I have been walking a lot. The boardwalk gets more interesting over there.” I waved in the vague direction of my pier.

Owen looked at me quizzically. “That would give my mom a heart attack to hear.”

I laughed. “It’s kind of interesting. There’s a really old-looking pier down there. It’s kind of deserted; I wonder what it was ever used for.”

Owen shrugged.

“Have you ever met an old lady that lives over by the resort?” I tried again. It hit me as a stinging realization that I
still
didn’t know her name. “I-I don’t—I don’t know her name, but she lives in this dumpy little house near the resort.”

I made a mental note to ask the old woman her name the very next time I saw her.

Owen shook his head. “We don’t really go over that way much. It becomes … well, it gets into a different world over there. Touristland and local territory—and that’s nowhere you want to be.”

I was silent because I kind of liked it.

“Especially after your little adventure,” he said. “My mom would skin me alive if she heard I’d set foot down there.”

He left me at the end of the walkway in our yard and waved as I paused in the middle of the stairs.

“Hey, Owen?” I called before going inside.

“Yeah?” he called back. He had his hands shoved in his pockets.

Cute or cocky?
I couldn’t decide.

“Do you know how to play the recorder?”

“The what?”

“Like the instrument,” I said, already wishing I hadn’t gone there.

He laughed. “Is that how you screen all your dates?”

Dates?

My mind was too muddled to do anything other than mutter, “Good night.”

After watching him walk away in the direction of the old houses, I went inside feeling oddly cheerful, though uncertain when, in the four hours since I had left, everything had changed. I’d started the night loathing the boy in the preppy clothes. And now, apparently, it was a date, and I didn’t find myself annoyed by the thought.

To my utter dismay, my mom was sitting at the dining room table when I walked in.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “It’s like two a.m.”

“I wasn’t about to go to bed before you got back,” she replied, as if this was her common practice at home (it wasn’t). “Besides, I was worried, it looks like rain.”

I smiled. I was in too good a mood to fight with her. “It’s just Teran trying to break free from the bottom of the ocean,” I said, hopping lightly up the stairs.

“What?” she called after me.

“He’s going to battle the Sea Mother!” I shouted.

An Fear Óg

The Boy

Recuperating from my previous night out, I slept late the next morning. It was nearly noon when I finally climbed out of bed. The night at the beach had left me sticky and scratchy. I took a shower before setting out for the old lady’s house, deeming it too late to go to my pier. The gorgeous swimmer would have already taken it over.

The old woman was sitting with a quilt over her legs today, a weak wind lapping at the fringe.

“How are you, Cora?” she said, her eyes on the sea.

“A little bit tired,” I admitted, climbing the steps and settling into the deserted rocking chair. Princess settled at the old woman’s side where a withered old hand slipped slowly out from under the quilt to pet her.

“How have your parents taken to your declaration of travel?” she asked.

I was a little embarrassed. “I haven’t really asked,” I admitted. “Not seriously, anyway.”

“I thought you weren’t going to
ask
.”

“Well, I haven’t
told
them yet, either,” I said. My mind was occupied with running over conversations and impressions of the people I’d met the previous night, but they didn’t seem like things I could mention to the old woman.

Blondie and the bimbo? They belonged to a different world than this innocent old woman.

“Did you hear about the sailors that drowned?” she asked abruptly.

I froze. I’d done more than
hear
about them.

“The boat went down weeks ago, but they’re still finding the bodies.” The old woman paused and glanced at me. “In fact, one of them was found by a young girl from the big houses.”

I looked at her quickly. “That was me,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her. “You
knew
, didn’t you?”

She smiled and
nodded
as she said, “I did
not
.” It was confusing to watch. “But I had my suspicions,” she added.

For some inexplicable reason I was embarrassed. I felt guilty for having found that body. For having seen that man at the most vulnerable a human body could be. Utterly defenseless.

“There aren’t many girls from the big houses that make a habit of walking around down here. Besides, I assumed it would be too traumatic a thing for a young girl to recall—whatever young girl was unfortunate enough to find him,” she said. “So if it was yourself, I didn’t wish to bring bad thoughts upon you.”

Guilt flooded me. She was right. I should have been more upset. Why wasn’t I more upset?

But the man had never been alive to me. He had only ever been a dead person. And maybe that’s why I couldn’t understand my mother’s need to have this summer on the beach, her belated need for me to learn to swim. Gretel had never been alive to me. She had always been just a long-dead person.

“It was a horrible thing, wasn’t it?” the old woman said, snapping me back to reality.

“What exactly happened?” I asked timidly. “I never really heard anything about it. After it happened, nobody talked about it again, like it was no big deal at all.”

The woman looked at me, a long, disappointed look. A long moment for her eyes to be away from the ocean. “Nobody talked about it? You must be trying to fool me. It’s all anyone’s talked about.”

I looked at the floor.
Nobody in the old houses,
I thought. It was a world quite different from hers, as Owen had stated all too clearly just last night.

“Even an old hermit like myself has heard of nothing but the wreck these last weeks. The boat just crashed, ran straight into an outcropping of rock, right off the side of Sele Island a few miles out.”

“How terrible,” I said.

But it must have come out flippantly because the old woman looked at me sharply. “It is
very
terrible. Horrific. The whole of the crew drowned.”

I shook my head solemnly, trying to prove my sympathy.

“It was a fishing boat, you know. Professional fishermen, the whole of them. Peculiar way to go for locals who know the area so well. Spend most of their time out there on trawlers. Nobody understands how they could have made such a basic error of direction.”

I waited for her to go on.

“Things are not generally how they seem.” She smiled a grim twist of her lips as she nodded and rocked her chair gently with her feet. “Do you know what sirens are?”

And now I saw the real reason she’d brought any of this up in the first place. Visions were already hurtling through my head. The image of a rusty old bird cage stuck in the sand at the bottom of the ocean lodged in my mind. The round, floating body on the surface of the water seemed fragile and transient—the soul, the part that was forever—was a little black rock in a cage at the bottom of the ocean, plucked from the body by imaginary creatures.

“Oh, sirens are terrible, wonderful creatures.” The old woman’s face was tense. “Beautiful, but evil to the core.” Her rocking chair made a creaking sound in the seriousness of her silence. “You know what they do, don’t you? Sirens lure fishermen to their deaths.”

“How?” I asked in spite of myself, gently pulling my feet up on the rail of the rocking chair to let it lull itself into a rhythmic rocking.

“They say the sirens are gorgeous half-human creatures that sing beautiful songs. Unlike anything human. Unlike anything you could imagine. So beautiful in every way that men are lured there uncontrollably. But these sirens, they’re evil. They know their power; they know
exactly
what power they hold. And they lure the men in their boats, they lure them close to cliffs and rocks that sink the boats.

“They have such power over the men, these seasoned fishermen, they steer their boats right into the rocks and the cliffs. That way it looks like an accident to the rest of the world. A simple error in calculation. They say many a fisherman has lost his life to the machinations of the sirens.” She left this to float on the heavy, hot wind that blew around the little house and its porch.

“I wonder what the sirens’ singing would sound like,” I said, remembering the recorder I’d brought. I moved to rummage in my bag and bring the curious instrument to her attention.

“Oh, I have imagined it,” the old woman said, happy that I was taking interest.

“Well, would you happen to know what this—”

“Mrs. O’Leary! I’m done for the day!”

The unexpected interruption sent my thoughts reeling. My hand clutched the cold metal in my bag, as every fiber of my being clenched in embarrassment, and I slammed my feet to the ground to stop the rocking of the chair. I was embarrassed to have been caught so far outside the realms of reality as the speaker emerged from the side of the house. My mouth dropped at the sight of the young man, no older than myself, walking across the tiny, sandy lawn, wiping his hands on a handkerchief.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly noticing me. He slowed to an awkward amble. “I didn’t know you had company.”

Even at the distances from which I normally saw him, there was no mistaking this boy.

This
Brad Pitt knockoff
.

“Ronan, do come sit,” the supposed Mrs. O’Leary said cheerfully. “I’ve made a new friend who you must meet.”

The boy eyed me a little bashfully as he made his way slowly up the front stairs. He wore jeans and a t-shirt with dirt smeared on the front, and he continued to knead the pad of his thumb on the handkerchief. His dark hair was dry and tousled slightly and his unfamiliar eyes shone a dark brown at such a close distance. Dry and upright, with only the barest hint of sweat on his arms, he looked more like a normal boy and less the corporeal being at one with the ocean in the early morning.

But there was no mistaking him. This was my swimmer.