Lost Voices (29 page)

“Yes,” Luce agreed; she still felt bizarrely calm, even as Violet began rasping in hysteria. “That’s why I was with my uncle.” Dana splashed drunkenly over to Violet and pulled her into a hug. Violet struggled free. She was stretching her arms toward Luce, but not as if she wanted to embrace her; Luce was reminded more of the way a rock climber might reach, urgently trying to grasp a handhold just a little too far above.

“How did he die!” Violet yelled. “How did your father die?

Luce, what
happened
?”

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Luce’s profound calm almost failed her now. Could she really say this? Violet’s eyes were wild with need, Catarina’s mouth was set in a hard line, and Luce saw the shining stripe of a tear on Miriam’s cheek.

“He died in a shipwreck,” Luce said at last. “He was working on a fishing boat, and they went down. Probably somewhere near here.”

Not even Anais could speak in the silence that followed.

Everyone was looking around at one another, except for Violet, whose face was hidden in her hands. They were all absorb-ing the implications, and all at once Luce’s head ached as if it were about to split open. It was simply too much truth, too much . . .

A terrible sound wrenched the silence. It got louder, higher, tore at all of them, and Luce gaped around in confusion. Miriam was screaming at the top of her lungs. She threw herself across the water, her fists flying out, her tail slashing in all directions.

Mermaids jerked out of her way, but Catarina and Dana lunged in the opposite direction, seizing Miriam by her arms. The midnight blue tail still swung and heaved, and blobs of seafoam flew through the dimness.

“Bring me some of those clothes!” Catarina commanded; suddenly all her intensity seemed to be back, her strength. “ Miriam, I
won’t
let you dishonor yourself. We need to tie her up before she hurts someone.” There was a stunned pause, then a few girls rushed to obey her, binding Miriam’s arms behind her with silk scarves and panty hose. Soon she was immobilized, her writhing tail wrapped in three pairs of arms, but she was still screaming.

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“DON’T YOU SEE!” Miriam shrieked. “DON”T YOU

SEE!” Violet was hyperventilating again, clinging to a crag, but everyone else was squeezed in around Miriam now, trying to calm her down. Luce swam closer, too. “Oh!” Miriam wailed.

“Don’t you see? All this time we’ve kept blaming the humans. But it’s us! We’re the ones who are responsible for what happened to Luce! If we hadn’t killed her father, she would have been
safe,
she would have been
happy,
she could have grown
up
. . .” Luce was embarrassed by this; it seemed so dramatic. But of course what Miriam was saying might be true. She couldn’t honestly deny it.

“Oh, Luce!” Miriam had found her in the crowd, and she was fighting to free her arms. “Oh, Luce! I’m so
sorry
. . .”

“I don’t blame you, Miriam,” Luce said. But there was something cold in her heart as she spoke the words, and they didn’t sound right. Miriam sobbed.

“But I suppose you blame
me,
Luce?” The voice was Catarina’s; it was silky, patient, and ferocious. “Or should I call you Lucette? Lucette Gray Korchak, I believe you said? You blame me, and that’s why you . . .” Catarina couldn’t finish the sentence. The gray eyes flashed inside Luce’s. It was like the moon gazing into her, swelling the pain in her head. An image of Catarina hungrily kissing her father’s mouth in a rush of bubbles filled Luce’s mind; she couldn’t keep it out.

“
Should
I blame you, Cat?” Luce asked very softly. Everyone gaped, and in the corner of her eye Luce saw Anais again grinning viciously to herself.

Luce knew she shouldn’t leave things this way. Anything that made Anais so happy must be terrible; it must be some-i 247

thing she should try to stop at once. But the pain seared her mind with blasts of white heat, and Miriam was screaming again, making the ache leap in time with her voice. There were too many eyes all staring at Luce, driving into her like some kind of nightmarish rain . . .

Luce turned and swam away through the pale gray waters.

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16

A Song for Miriam

It was at some point in that indeterminate, endless dawn when she heard it. It carried with immaculate clarity over the echoing surface of the water, rebounding from every wave. Luce wasn’t really asleep, just in a kind of feverish daze, but that particular sound would have recalled her even from perfect unconsciousness.

A scream, but it was louder, and somehow paler, than a normal scream. Luce knew what it meant at once. She’d heard it before; it had even ripped from her own throat. The scream broke into strange pulsations of noise, a kind of gagging “HA, HA, HA,” and then faltered, but an instant later it came back again at full force: a long, high note of purest agony. Luce was already out of the cave, her tail spiraling violently behind her; she was nothing but the movement of indigo waters. Unidentifi-able shapes veered suddenly away from her head, but there was i 249

no time to worry about colliding with something. She had only moments left, moments . . . That scream was the sound of a mermaid out of the water. And as she raced closer Luce became sure of what she’d suspected from the first moment. It was Miriam.

As long as Luce could hear her there might still be time.

Soon some of the shapes had reaching arms and corkscrewing tails like hers, all of them converging on the voice. They ruptured the waves with their speed, and a harbor seal zigzagged in con fusion at the onslaught of bodies. For a few seconds the scream fell away, and then there was only the blue- glowing water stirred into streaks of white by dozens of tails, the gush of racing foam in Luce’s ears and the roar of her blood. Where was Miriam’s voice?

It came back but more faintly now: she was on a different beach, one they never used because it was too broad and open, too easy to spot from passing boats. Had she deliberately chosen a beach where they wouldn’t immediately think to look for her?

There was no air in Luce’s lungs, and no time to swing up to the surface for a breath. Instead she slashed out, driving herself faster, until the water blurred in her eyes and she was barely in control of her direction. It was all one vague onward thrust, a formless press for speed into the sudden, uncanny silence. Pebbles scraped across her belly before she even knew where she was, and then she saw the curls of amber morning dancing on top of the waves. Air poured into her lungs.

Miriam was there but at least twenty feet back. It was incredible that she’d managed to drag herself so far from the water. Luce bit her lip as she thought of the pain Miriam must have endured during that long crawl up the beach. She still had 250 i LOST VOICES

her tail, she was still trembling and exhaling a raspy, rattling hiss, but her scales were no longer their usual glossy blue- black.

They looked disagreeably ashy, flaky: almost like dandruff or the shells of desiccated seeds. A dozen girls were around Luce now, all leaning on the shore, all reaching, but Miriam was far above them, almost at the line of black clotted seaweed that marked the highest tide. Even if someone miraculously managed to reach her, Luce thought, they’d never make it back to the sea in time.

A quickly strobing vision possessed Luce’s mind, just for a moment: now it wasn’t Miriam lying there but her own mother.

Alyssa was shaking from pain in the back of the red van, fighting to suppress her screams; she was dying all over again, while her small daughter clung to her chest. Then Luce’s eyes cleared, and she realized that, while it would be impossible to pull Miriam back into the waves, she might still find a way to save her.

She could make the sea go to Miriam.

It would take a much bigger wave than she’d ever conjured before, but still she could try. Luce closed her eyes and concentrated on gathering every last bit of strength so she could pour it all into her voice. The note began to form, to spread . . .

“ Miriam!” It was Violet shouting near her.
“ Miriam!”
And then Luce heard a final, sharp groan like tearing flesh way up on the shore. The song she’d barely begun crumpled in her chest, and she looked up. It was already too late.

Miriam was silent, unmoving. Her scales were peeling off so quickly that it was hard to really see what was happening; they seemed to become like tissue paper, then like something even frailer, spiderwebs, old crumbled flecks of seashell, wandering smoke . . .

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All at once Miriam had two long, bluish, naked human legs where her tail had been. Her toes were curled tight, like a new baby’s. The skin on her legs looked raw and unused, traced by oddly dark purple veins, and her black hair lay in ropes along the tide line.

She was dead, lost beyond all doubt or hope. All that was left of the girl she had been was a grimace of stilted pain.

The tribe was still gathering. Stragglers were catching up to the mermaids gathered along the shore. Every time another head broke through the water, a fresh cry of shock shivered out across the sea. Luce was unnaturally aware of the rhythm of the surf against the pebbles, aware of the aching immensity of the sky above them all.

What she felt was a song, Luce realized. She’d failed Miriam, she’d wounded her beyond repair, she hadn’t reached her in time, but she absolutely wouldn’t leave her body there on the beach, stripped and sad and exposed to the view of anyone who came by.

Miriam belonged to the sea. Luce could feel something strange entering her chest: the whole silky interface of ocean and wild sky. She could make the water bend, rise . . .

The noise that erupted from Luce was a mixture of song and scream. A wave with peculiarly vertical sides towered five yards into the air, knocking bewildered mermaids out of its path. It teetered for a moment, struggling for balance, then as Luce’s voice ascended to a higher pitch it gained strength and raced far up the shore. They all saw Miriam’s pale body lifted in the water’s arms. She floated above their heads for a moment, stretched out peacefully at the top of a moving silver bier.

Then Luce gradually lowered her voice; it followed a velvety downward slope, carrying Miriam back home.

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* * *

Miriam was in the mermaids’ arms. They kissed her eyelids, and their hands swirled over her, caressed her cold wrinkled feet, then gently carried her out to the deep water. They were all singing at once, all swimming out into the spreading ocean, and their song was more uncontainable than it had ever been before.

None of the anger, none of the bitterness mattered now; they were together in the song, united in one endless vibration. Luce saw Catarina in a rippling blaze beside her, her hair mingling with the molten gold of the dawn. None of that mattered. Fins sliced the blue depths with giddy speed. Anais’s blond waves scrolled through the water, and Luce’s voice merged with hers without the slightest resentment. They sang for Miriam, and no ocean could have been big enough to hold them.

The ship just got in their way.

It was huge, the biggest cruise ship Luce had ever seen in their territory, its sides as white and numb as an iceberg’s. Luce dimly registered its bulk slicing the air in front of her. There had to be hundreds of passengers on a boat that size. It didn’t matter. They didn’t have any business coming here, anyway.

This was a place where the sky crashed and dripped, liquefied in the howling of the mermaids for their dead. The elegy was half a scream, inhumanly sustained, and they would make the whole sea scream with them. None of them said a thing; they only sang. It had nothing to do with the humans, and it wasn’t a song intended to enchant them. Luce let her voice rise into another sky- sweeping wave, and now she rode along the crest of the water- tower she’d raised, her mouth open around a shriek of unimaginable music.

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She could see the people stumbling out onto the deck, still in their pajamas or sometimes just underwear. They were all driven insane by a sound that was at once intolerably beautiful and murderously sad; they were running into one another like ants, clawing their own foreheads until the blood dribbled down. Luce saw one man smearing yellow paint on his face then shoving his cheek against a wall, using his own head as a brush.

The ship slowed, feinting from side to side as the pilot’s mind reeled under the impact of that unearthly music. It wasn’t a song made for humans to hear, and there was no way they could endure it. The world they lived in wasn’t a
human
world, Luce thought.

It was the humans’ own fault if they were arrogant enough to believe that it was. If you were honest, if you were brave, you’d know that anything could happen: you might overhear a mermaids’

funeral, their voices distended in frantic grief; you might die. She made the wave carrying her arch like a swan’s neck, and she swept back under the water.

Catarina’s voice was silkening now. It softened the air into floating kisses. Luce understood, of course. They hadn’t wanted the ship, not at a time like this, but now that it was here it didn’t stand a chance. Any human who heard the mermaids singing had to die; the timahk made that clear. Gently the mermaids let Miriam’s body go. Then one by one they followed Catarina’s lead, and the stupendous scream- song relaxed into a thrum. Only Luce was still shrieking, but finally even her voice jolted upward, higher and higher, until it floated like a single savage star. The star had appeared out of nowhere at the top of a worn farmhouse staircase, and it was poised to fall into the arms of the lovely dark- haired woman who waited at the bottom. Luce 254 i LOST VOICES

still sang for Miriam, but now for the first time she also sang her own mother’s death from a ruptured appendix on the dirty floor of the red van. Her mother squeezed Luce’s hand and tried to smile, but her smile kept knotting up from the pain . . .

The mermaids were spreading out, falling into formation around the ship. Catarina had turned it to the right. They were going back to the island, then, but approaching it this time from the other direction. There was no time to worry, no time even to think. Dana was swimming in the wake, so Luce let her voice carry her around the ship’s left side. The note finally broke and tumbled down the stairs, and as it fell Luce thought of her mother. The song spelled Alyssa’s name. A few blurred forms began to pitch from the deck, streaking past Luce as they plunged into the water. Luce’s voice rose into another angelic scream, and she burst up through the waves and stared at the white hulk above her.