Promise Bound (26 page)

I didn’t hear any reply. Neither did I feel any rush of movement within a mile’s radius from the dock. Maybe I’d get lucky and she wouldn’t hear me. I could buy another day.

“Maris,”
I called again, this time stronger, but with a desperate sob in my voice.

There was a rush of current, and when I opened my eyes, Maris was mere inches in front of my face. Our noses nearly touched.

“Oh my,”
she said, her voice like honey. I almost heard her say the word.
Honey. Lily, honey. “You are a mess, now, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t a question. She tsk-tsked me mentally, like a scolding mother hen.

I stared right through her without a response.

“I can see how much you’re suffering, Lily. You are more fully mer than you know, than perhaps I’ve even realized. The pain … I can help with that. I can show you how.”
Then she cocked her head to one side.
“Are you tempted? Let me help you.”

My heart twinged at her words, which confirmed everything I knew but had been trying so hard to ignore.
“My mother,”
I said.

“I saw her,”
she said.
“Jason, too. He knows I can make no guarantee?”

I swallowed.
“He does.”

“And he will side with me against Pavati? No matter what?”

“He will.”

“I need to hear it from him.”

I surfaced and pushed my wet hair back from my face. Maris surfaced as well, but she had swum away from the dock and was facing the shore, where my parents sat with the waves breaking over their legs. I tried to ignore the panic that was clearly evident on Mom’s face. She moved out deeper, still sitting, but now the water broke around her chest.

“She needs to hear you promise, Dad.”

Dad stood up and looked directly into his sister’s eyes. “I promise to give my allegiance to you,” he said, “as head of the family.”

I watched a flicker of memory flash across Maris’s face. Did she wonder if he was good for his promise? Did she wonder if he was more like his father than their mother? Was Maris
also
afraid?

Maris dove, and a second later we all watched in horror as two pale hands grabbed Mom by the ankles and slowly pulled her deeper.

I put one hand on the dock to steady myself. This was wrong. Dad needed to stop this now. It wasn’t going to work.

Her arms drifting out to her sides, my mother formed a cross as she floated on her back. I could feel the vibration in the water of my mother’s heart thudding inside her chest, racing to a point where I hoped it might stop of its own accord.

Mom closed her eyes as Maris continued to pull her out deeper. Then Mom’s ankles dipped below the surface, followed by her knees, her body arcing slowing downward until … she was gone.

Only now did Dad react. He took two quick steps into the water.

I pulled myself up onto the dock and scanned the water in a panic. There was no struggle. Was Mom so willing to die that she could override the instinct to fight drowning? Or was she simply that weak?

I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t see Maris. I could hear nothing. The absence of sound was more frightening to me than anything that had come before. How could they have both
just disappeared? I looked back at Dad in terror. Sophie stood beside him, clinging to his arm.

Before any of us could speak, a sizzling sound broke the silence, followed by a bright flash of light. A second later, Mom’s body floated to the surface, facedown in the surf.

Maris came up and pushed my mother’s lifeless body away from her as if it were nothing more than passing driftwood. “Now you are free,” she said to Dad. “Come with me.”

Dad ran into the waves and pulled Mom’s body to shore. “What have you done?” he howled.

“She was holding you back,” Maris said.

“You were supposed to reinvigorate her!” Dad cried.

“It’s too late for that. I told you it might not work.”

“You bitch!” I cried, dispatching birds from the willow tree with my scream. “You didn’t even try!” The dock shook like an earthquake under my feet.

Dad dragged Mom up on shore. He flipped her over and blew air into her lungs. “Come on, honey,” he whispered, filling her lungs again. “Carolyn, come on, baby. Breathe.”

Sophie stood—paralyzed—looking at me in horror, her eyes huge with fright. Her mouth hung open in disbelief.

I drew my fingers to my forehead. The light hurt my eyes; there was a grinding sound, like metal on metal, in my ears. I couldn’t think straight. I needed to get away. My mind fell dark with grief and rage and shame, like a black velvet curtain drawn over a window. I crumpled to my knees, then fell forward. My head struck the iron boat cleat on the dock.

And Nadia was back.

I
stop outside a record store on Ashland’s main street. A taxidermist’s eagle is featured prominently in the window below a banner that reads
VICTORY
in red, white, and blue letters.

Not for the eagle
, I think, but nonetheless, a celebratory flag waves from every doorway. Men in hats talk animatedly on the street corner, and women with rolled hair hurry arm in arm to buy their newspaper. A few cry. But not prettily like they do in the movies. Theirs is an ugly, soul-wrenching sound that sickens me. Victory came too late for some.

My reflection in a storefront window catches me off guard. I cradle my pregnant belly and try to make my way up the crowded sidewalk, before stopping again, three doors down. The humans around me are loud. Their emotions are a whirl of high excitement and jubilation. Their war is over. My head spins. I stagger down the sidewalk, toward a pay phone.

I had no intention of doing this today. I had planned a private spot, not here, so far from the lake. But I can never get anything to go according to plan. I stop at a boarding-house and knock. It takes the woman in the faded housecoat a long time to answer. She is putting on lipstick. I can hear a radio blaring “God Bless America” from the kitchen.

She takes one look at me and leads me to a back room with a cot, around the corner from a kitchen stove that radiates heat throughout the room. Now free of the crowds, my head stops pounding. The woman gets a cold towel and lays it on my chest. It’s wet, and my body instantly relaxes.

She calls a doctor, but it’s too late. I am already delivering a baby girl.

Maris.

Later that evening, while the woman sleeps off her martinis, I wrap the child in the clean sheets from my cot, slip out the back door, and catch a cab to the college. The driver happily leaves without his fare, and I find an open window on the ground floor of the science building.

I climb three flights and at the top I inhale. Following the father’s scent, I trail the wall to the third door.
PROFESSOR JOHN BISHOP
is stenciled on the door.

I leave the baby with a note.

I
would never say what I was really thinking, but humans always strike me as a little odd with their many limbs, all gangly and hanging. Even when I don their strange vestiges, I avoid my reflection. So why Tom Hancock has accentuated his legs with black-and-red-striped pants, I cannot begin to comprehend. Worse, he has taken to wearing a pair of shoes he calls winklepickers, which sit neatly beside him now. His bare feet dig into the sand, which is cold with the changing seasons. I like his T-shirt, though: Jefferson Airplane. The waves thrum against the sand as he strums a guitar he calls Gibson.

Tom turns the knob on his transistor radio and picks up the Mamas and the Papas. They’re dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.…

His long hair hangs in his eyes. He has grown out his sideburns. He says, “Tell me I’m not like the others,” while he clumsily picks out some chords.

It is probably not a good idea, but I tell him the truth. “You are not like the others. You know that.” I hear the veracity of my words in the tumbling cadence of my voice and hope he does, too.

“Do I?” he asks. He taps a pack of cigarettes absentmindedly against his thigh.

“I will be back in the spring. I promise.”

He grins broadly. He knows a mermaid can never break her promise. “That’s what I needed to hear. I knew it all along,” he says, though I know that is not true. I have shared too much of my life with him. He knows too much. I am not made for love.

“You will take care of him,” I say, touching our three-month-old son, Jason, who lies on a pile of blankets beside me. He is the most beautiful of all my children, and that is saying something. Never before have I stayed with a father this long, stayed with my baby this long. “And when I return, you and Jason will both join me.”

Tom pulls back with a questioning look and blows a long stream of gray smoke from between his lips. “We haven’t talked about that before.”

“Come to the water,” I say. “I will change you. Then we can be a family—as complete a family as this lake has ever known. That is something I’ve never offered the others, Tom. Now do you see how much I care?”

“Change can be good,” he says, fidgeting with the radio, looking for a new station. The signal screeches like dolphins in the Gulf. “Maybe someday …”

“Someday has come early,” I say, teasing him with a finger drawn down his spine.

He chuckles. “Yes, I’ve always suspected you were the real November witch.” He rolls over on top of me, brushing the tumble of hair from my face. “Just a beautiful storm, coming when some innocent man least expects it.”

“Do not joke,” I say.

“Okay, but it’s still not time.”

“It is,” I say. “It’s time for my family to be together.”

T
om Hancock has left the front door unlocked. From the hallway, I can hear his bedsprings groan as he turns over. A woman’s sigh. I feel the urge to wring her sleeping neck,
but can do nothing here on land. Instead, I climb the narrow staircase, touching the pictures on the wall. At the top, I trail the dark corridor to the nursery and step inside, inhaling the sweet baby smell. Vanilla and lavender.

“What are you doing, Nadia?” Tom asks from behind me, his voice dangerous but calm. He is beautiful. Even more beautiful than I remembered. I want to protest the woman sleeping in his bed. He should be with me. But I am afraid and so I feign control and say, “Jason is a year old. He’s walking.”

“I won’t let you take him.”

“Watch me,” I say too loud, while he glares down at me.

“Quiet. Diana is sleeping.”

Tom closes the nursery door and turns on a small lamp, flooding the blue room with light. His warm hand covers my shoulder. “Find someone else, Nadia. Start another family. Leave Jason with me.”

“He belongs with me,” I say.

“Over my dead body.”

My heart sinks with his betrayal as he slams me against the wall. I grit my teeth as the chain around my neck snaps and snakes its way over my shoulder and hits the floor.

“This isn’t over, Tom. You made me a promise.”

“Some promises were meant to be broken,” he says.

I straighten my shoulders and say, “I want my family to be together.”

Tom’s face transforms into an expression I cannot read: Grief? Worry? Hope? If it’s hope, it leaves an unmistakable glow. Tom reaches down and takes Namid’s pendant from the floor.

A
lmost two months later and the seeds of my hope have been scorched by Tom’s silence. I scramble every suicidal thought I have, but as young as Maris is, she’s amazingly intuitive. She swims far behind me, lurking behind the rocks, watching me with worried eyes.

She follows me into deeper water, watches my dark descent. The waves above us rage into whitecaps. A sailboat passes, hurrying back to port. The wind changes tack, and the shadow of a boom swings overhead. There is a scream and a splash.

I see my son, Jason, plummeting through the water. He is as graceful as a poem. But he does not transform.

His pale arms and legs pull at the water. He makes no progress. Air bubbles rush out of him like a rabble of silver butterflies. He is sinking. His eyes close. The vibration of his heart trembles in the water. The cold slows it steadily, until there are too-long gaps between each beat.

It is not Jason. It is someone else’s son. And it is almost too late.

Maris calls to me in the water.
“No,”
she says.
“We don’t need him.”
Her cries capture Pavati’s and Tallulah’s interest, and they are quick to come see.

Maris is too young to hide her thoughts from me. She thinks I save the boy because I am dissatisfied with her. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I am too preoccupied with saving the little life to correct her.

Tallulah, I see, loves him already. With a burst of light, the boy is silver-tailed. Just like her.

P
avati and Maris have gone off to hunt. I am watching Calder and Tallulah chasing each other, darting through the wake of a Boston Whaler, careful not to catch the attention of the man and woman who sit somberly at the wheel, neither of whom look left or right, least of all behind. As far as I can tell they do not speak to each other.

Suddenly, the man cuts the engine and the boat stops as if it’s hit a stone. The water lunges and tosses the boat before settling to a calm.

I call Calder and Tallulah back to me, and Tallulah hides behind my arm. A seagull lands on the waves, and we look up to see an arm reaching over the side of the boat. It lays a strange object on the water. There are a few beats of silence before the boat pulls away.

Calder swims up after the strange floating thing. He returns with a circle of flowers, woven together on a wire frame. It is all roses and ivy with a satin banner that says
OUR BOY
.

Calder is careless and the banner floats away. He bows to Tallulah and places the floral wreath on her head like a crown.

She laughs, saying,
“Now I am the queen and you are my king, and someday you and I will lead this family.”

“And we’ll make Maris eat wormroot for breakfast,”
Calder says.