The Mermaids Singing (23 page)

Grace turned her back and told him to leave her alone. She peeled Gráinne's wet clothes off and rubbed her viciously with a
monogrammed blue towel, as Gráinne looked at the water with a calm, detached expression.

“Don't ever do that again,” Grace yelled. “You don't jump off a boat. You could have drowned, do you understand me? You'd have drowned if I hadn't found you.”

“The lady
told
me to do it,” Gráinne whined. For a minute, Grace thought she meant Clíona.

“What lady?”

“The mer-lady,” Gráinne said. “I wanna swim with her. She pulled me.”

“There's no such thing as mermaids, Gráinne,” Grace said. “That was me that pulled you out of the water.”

“No, there!” Gráinne insisted, pointing at the dark water.

Grace looked and thought she saw the bluish curve of something diving, probably a dolphin. Or, God, a shark. She shivered, holding Gráinne tighter.

“I don't care what you think you saw,” Grace said. “Never go in the water without me.”

“She's following us,” Gráinne said, wriggling away and peering over the rails.

“Stop it, Gráinne,” Grace said.

“She's lonely,” Gráinne said. “I sing to her.” She started singing in her little island voice, the lullaby her father had taught her in Irish. Grace had no idea if the words were even right—they sounded like gibberish. But Gráinne sang with confidence, wooing and moaning at the water.

Grace started to cry. “I'm sorry, Gráinne,” she whispered, hugging the girl from behind. “We'll be all right, kiddo. Just me and you, for a while. You won't miss him for long, I promise.”

She rocked the girl until long after the island faded out of sight, and Gráinne sang faintly, the same tune over and over like an echo, until Grace could no longer distinguish whether the music came from her daughter, or rose from the sea below.

I was in my mother's bed, huddled at the corner, my hot cheek against the cool wall. I was aware of a man's presence; I couldn't see him, but there was that sweaty, musty smell that made me think it was one of my mother's men. I could hear my mother's voice coming from the dark corner of the room; she was reading poetry from one of my notebooks.

“Mom!” I called, and she came over, her face barely visible in
the blue night-light I hadn't used since I was five. She sat down on the bed; there was no man there, it was only the two of us.

“Are you feeling better?” she said. Her hair was down, like curls of blood around her neck. I tried to get up but I couldn't move.

“I'm not sick,” I said, though I wasn't entirely sure my voice was working.

My mother kept reading the poetry, from typed columns on sheets of white paper, forming the words through a secret grin.

“Mom,” I said. I was crying, but my mother continued to smile. “Don't you know you're going to die?” I said. She stood up then and walked away, as though I'd stumbled on a rare untouchable topic.

I got out of bed and noticed I was wearing Stephen's flannel shirt, which smelled of low tide, and my mother's sand-caked sneakers. I left the room and found myself in the cottage at Singing Beach. On the braided rug was a path of shorn hair, seaweed, and blood—red jellyfish, leading to my mother and Stephen's bedroom. I followed it, the debris slipping under my feet.

I opened the door slowly, afraid of what I might find. It wasn't the cottage room but a hospital: a tall silver-railed bed, IV poles and red flashing buttons on the walls. I got into bed to wait for my mother, and someone who looked like my grandmother but didn't seem to recognize me started to hook me up to tubes and strap my legs with seat belts to the railing.

“There's nothing wrong with me,” I said, but she shoved the prongs of an oxygen line up my nose. There was an IV needle stuck to my inner arm, and I could see it pumping—sliding in and out like it was having sex with my vein.

“Where is my mother?” I said, and I heard myself wheezing, saw my breath like sea fog in the air.

“You're all right, Gráinne,” the woman sang. She leaned over me with a needle, pulled a ropy black thread through a gash in my breast.

“Stop that,” I said, and when I pushed her away, both she and my wound disappeared.

There was a telephone next to the bed. I lifted it and dialed my home number. It rang continuously, but behind the ringing I could hear my mother's laughter, and the rhythmic moan and breath of a man.

“I should answer that,” I heard Stephen say, his throat thick with sex, the way it had been long ago, when I'd listened to them making love in the next room.

“Don't stop,” my mother moaned, and the thumping quickened.

“Gráinne!” Stephen erupted with his orgasm, and I almost dropped the phone. I could feel the damp heat of his lips seeping through the receiver. “Don't,” he whispered. “God.”

The ringing continued through it all, gnawing at my ear.

When I hung up the phone, they came in, my mother and Stephen, looking worried and guilty. My mother lowered the bed railing with a click and sat down beside me. She had a towel with her and began rubbing it over my wet hair in soothing strokes.

“Don't ever go in the water without me,” she scolded.

“Mom,” I said. I was crying so hard that the whole bed was soaked, as if it had been walloped by a sea wave.

“Shhh,” she said. “We'll have time to talk when you're better.” I pushed the towel away so I could look at her.

“But you're dying,” I said. “Stephen took you to the hospital.” She laughed, looking at Stephen, and he was laughing along with her.

“Don't be silly,” she said. “I'm not the one dying.” She began
to cough. She hacked with a liquid sound until her face turned purple, and what looked like a jellyfish erupted from her throat and fell with a squishy plop on the bed.

“You're all right, Grace,” Stephen said, moving in to hold her. He kissed her earlobe. Her hair was thinning fast; corkscrewed strands of copper fell from her shoulders like rain.

She took the towel and scooped up the bloody mess. I saw a nipple protruding from the towel folds and I could tell by the way her gown sank on one side that only puckered skin and stitches remained. She had vomited up her breast.

“This is my body,” she said, holding the bloody towel high in front of her. “It will be given up for you.”

“Please don't go, Mom,” I said, reaching for her. I couldn't move far because of the straps on my legs. “Please stay with me,” I said.

My mother grinned as if nothing was wrong and she thought I was just being a pain in the ass, so she needed to humor me.

“If you close your eyes,” she said, “I'll read to you.”

Once I'd closed them, I couldn't seem to open them again, and it was not her voice which continued, but a man's voice, sounding far away.

I struggled at the belts, and when I got free, I was on the beach, the waves crashing stormily in the dark night. My mother's voice was there, rising from the water, and I ran down toward it, the sand squealing and singing beneath my rubber soles.

“Mom!” I screamed. I couldn't see her, only the bluish curve of something dangerous in the water.

She sang out lines to me.

I dove into an oncoming wave, which broke across my shoulders like a hard wooden plank. I tried to swim toward her voice, but the sound of the sea in my ears deceived me. Another big swell pushed me under, and the current, like hands on my ankles, pulled me deeper out to sea. I reached my arms out for my mother, and she found me and pulled me to shore. I was lying on pinching sand, coughing up black water and bits of seaweed. Words still pounded in my ears. It was no longer my mother's voice, but the man's, moany and vaguely familiar, who sounded like he was pushing the poetry through tears.

When I opened my eyes it was Liam, and not my mother, leaning above me in the moonlight.

“You've a cut over your eye,” he said, pressing his shirtsleeve gently to my forehead. “I thought you said you couldn't drown if you knew how to swim,” he joked, touching my cheek with his free hand.

My mother's still out there, I wanted to say, but he plummeted
down and kissed me, and the salt and warmth of his lips swallowed my words without answering them.

While we lay there, sucking deeply on each other's mouths, Liam's hands all over me, swelling my skin to the point where I wanted to burst, my mother's voice called me for the last time.

When I opened my eyes I saw my father, holding a thin book near a lamp that lit the hospital room with a foggy yellow glow. His hair was down, black and silver curling like night around his earlobes. He was reading to me.

He glanced up then and smiled at me—and I saw myself, shifting and drowning in the black mirror of his eyes.

“Am I dying?” I said, my throat squeezed thin and dry.

“God, no,” he said. “You're malnourished and anemic, but if you smarten up and eat a little you'll recover in no time.”

I started to cry, wanting to be back in the dream with the chance of meeting my mother if I swam out far enough. “Mom's gone,” I said to him.

“Yes,” my father said. “I know, Gráinne.”

“I didn't say good-bye,” I whispered. His face blurred under my watery lashes until it seemed I was looking through the screen of the sea, making a soundless confession.

“Ah, now, your mother was never the one for good-byes,” my father said. “She prefers to slip away unnoticed, like the tide, and come back when you least expect her.”

“But she's not coming back to you,” I said, imagining him looking out over deceiving waters. “Not ever.”

“Aye,” my father said and he put a warm palm on my forehead, as if he meant to ease my life with the pressure of skin. “I know that.”

“Why didn't you come for me?” I said.

“I'm sorry, Gráinne,” he said. “I wanted to. I was afraid it would be like the last time.”

And I saw him then, with younger, more hopeful eyes, taking a sand-filled teacup from my hand, snapping my picture from behind the mask of his camera. One of my mother's boyfriends—there and then gone, without memory, without significance, without, I had thought, any connection to the family that was the two of us.

 

My father, Seamus O'Flaherty, sat with his hands fiddling and tapping against his knees. He had long, brown hands, with calluses lined up like a mountain range on his palms, ink staining the rough bump on his pen finger. His knuckles, like mine, were thicker than the flesh of his fingers—the type of hands that suggest the raw bones of a skeleton.

It was my father's hands that I watched as he told his story, and my mother's hands that I thought of as I translated his words into myth in my mind—her hands gentle on my hair, before they were waxed reproductions tied up in a rosary. Her hands as they might have been, when she was a girl my age.