The Rathbones (48 page)

I glanced up at Mordecai. He stared at me, then turned away to face the wall.

I closed the little book and looked at Mordecai. He lay quietly among his pillows, staring up into the hull. No starlight shone; instead, a dull red glowed in the sky behind the knotholes, though it was, I remember vaguely thinking, too soon for dawn.

“She didn’t know that what she and Erastus did was wrong, Mordecai. Who was there to teach her?”

Mordecai turned his head away.

“Maybe Erastus did know, maybe that’s why he went away. But he came back. He couldn’t help himself.”

I picked up Mordecai’s journal and unfolded the chart. I looked at the fourth row of faces: Verity and Erastus, the twins, the seven shell girls. Under them, in the last row, Gideon and me. And floating
off to the side, Mordecai. I picked up a pen and drew a line between Verity and Erastus, and connected it to Mordecai. I drew a line from Mordecai to me and from me to Gideon.

“You were the real reason she finally agreed to go back to the house.”

Mordecai shot me a look filled with bitterness, and turned away again.

“I would be lying if I said that she was not also relieved to have you … aside. But she did care. Before Papa was gone all the time, before she stopped seeing what happened around her. Before she began carving.”

Mordecai turned from the wall. His voice was low and hoarse.

“She could have been kinder to you, too, Mercy.” His eyes softened. “Sister.”

My hand strayed to an open crate that stood next to my chair and fumbled with the excelsior that spilled from it.

“I was so like Gideon. She didn’t like to be reminded of him, of Gideon alive. She preferred to tend to his bones. They stayed still, in one place.”

I looked up at the marble bust of the woman. Crow, clutching her hair, spread a wing out to preen, a fan of feathers that shadowed her eyes.

“Remember when I asked you about the red hat? When you told me how you used to eavesdrop on Mama and the stranger up on the walk?”

He nodded.

“That wasn’t a stranger. That was Papa.”

I told him how I had realized it was Papa who came and went, and how I hadn’t wanted to tell him back at Circe’s cove, when he was already so disappointed about not finding the sperm.

“But she called him another name, not Benadam. Tayles. Captain Tayles.”

I flipped through the diary.

“I know. She uses that name sometimes in here. Only it wasn’t spelled Tayles, it was Talos. Don’t you remember?”

On the worktable, under Mordecai’s strewn papers, were a few of the red-leather books. In the volume stamped with the silver face of Jason, I found what I was looking for: a giant made of bronze, straddling a harbor between two points of land. I turned the book so Mordecai could see.

“He was one of the Titans, remember? He had a single vein, from neck to foot, closed at his heel with a bronze nail. Medea deceived him into believing that he would become immortal if he removed the nail. Or some versions say she hypnotized him so that he tripped and fell, driving the nail from his heel, and the hot oil poured out into the sand.” I looked at the sea that Talos straddled, which the artist had etched in stylized waves that rose and fell in a perfect rhythm. “He wanted to prove that he was stronger than the whales, than the sea. But Mama kept pulling him back.” I smoothed the page with my hand; the sea, printed with gold ink, shimmered as the paper moved. “And I think it was guilt that always drove him away again. Guilt over losing Gideon.”

Mordecai stared down at the engraving.

“You know now, don’t you, why Mama and Papa put you here, in the attic?”

Mordecai looked puzzled, then his face cleared, and he nodded slowly.

“They had to keep you up here, out of the light, so it couldn’t hurt you and … they didn’t want you to know the truth about your father.”

Mordecai was so quiet. Crow hopped from my shoulder to Mordecai’s and settled there. He had never done that before.

I pulled Mama’s little book from my pocket and flipped through the pages to the back. I hadn’t told Mordecai everything. There were other, later entries in the diary, other things he didn’t need to hear, about Gideon and me.

She wrote that we were as alike as two otters, as strong and as quick. We both could swim before we could walk. Papa would take us, one in each hand, and skim us through the surf, then toss us on his back and dive in and out of the waves and Mama would laugh.
She wrote of an old seaman bouncing us, one on each knee, on the dock on a fine summer day, spoiling us with rock candy and boiled sweets from a little paper bag. Rowing together in the blue skiff, with small oars to fit our hands—gliding along close to shore at dusk, the sky going dark, the sea quiet under us, Mama calling to us, saying it was time to come inside. A warm and cloudless day when Gideon’s baby frock was changed for knee breeches and he ran laughing down the pier, the water sparkling on either side as he ran.

I had strained to remember what Mama remembered, but it had been too long ago.

Each of her memories—only pictures to me—stayed separate, like tide pools too high on the shore, never joined by a sweep of sea into something deeper and broader. Gideon had been away more than he had been home.

I sat up and looked down at Mordecai’s face. The purple-black blotch had spread farther, down his cheek and along his neck, dark seaweed on a white beach.

I saw too, now, Gideon’s face before me, not salt-white but bright brown and full of life, smiling, his green eyes so like mine. Gideon was like Papa. Gone or longing to be gone when he was right beside me. I had found Gideon, as much as I would ever have been able, in finding my sympathy with the sea. I had found something I wouldn’t lose.

Though Gideon was my twin, though his face rose before me, it was Mordecai I was thinking of. It was Mordecai who was my true brother. I had looked into the distance so long that I hadn’t seen what was near at hand. If we don’t cherish those who stay near, what do we have? Only longing. Longing which we grow to love because it’s all that we have.

Mordecai’s pale-green eyes had drained to nearly clear. His breath rattled faintly. He might have had something left to say, but he couldn’t speak it.

I pulled down the blanket that covered Mordecai. I looked at his
thin mottled body and felt for a moment that I had no choice. I felt the same tidal pull that my forebears had, that Mama had. I forgave her, a little. I wanted to sail with Mordecai one last time.

Instead I drew the blanket back up, and waited with him until he was gone, and kissed him goodbye.

{in which Mama shines bright}

S
HE WOULD HAVE
liked her funeral. The boat of bones, her bier; the sail I sewed from her gowns, its deep blue billowing against a like sky; Gideon by her side. I dressed her in her corset, and in the muslin gown in which she was married and whose cloth had cushioned Gideon’s bones in the trunk.

The trunk went, too, stowed in the stern. In it I neatly rearranged, on a fresh bed of kelp, the objects that Mama had provided to keep Gideon company: a flute carved of bone; a soft kid glove of her own; a little round tin with a ship on its lid, filled with sweets, a snack for the afterlife. To these I added my dead crow and the woven bracelet.

I considered carving a headstone of whalebone for her, and consigning her to the worn wives for burial in the graveyard behind their house, where all the Rathbone women who lived on Mouse Island are buried. The island being of solid granite, the graves were made in packed earth brought from the mainland long ago, which the sea is slowly reclaiming; at high tide the stones are partially sunken, and the water will take them all in the end. But I knew Mama would rather be in the sea, where Papa always was.

After I set the boat aflame and pushed it off from shore, before the flames took hold, Crow flew down and plucked a few hairs from her
head for his nest. She burned clear and bright for as long as I could see her. With her boat sailed a flotilla of crates, unopened crates, all labeled “For Mordecai.” I found them in the attic after he died. For all his hunger for the bones and specimens sent to me, Mordecai hadn’t wanted to open any gift from Papa to him. He never received the only gift he ever wanted: a place on Papa’s ship. A space in his life.

As I watched her go I knew why Mama had invited the suitors on that last night. She wasn’t searching for a substitute for Papa, or trying to forget him with a landsman who found no siren call in the sea. She meant to make him jealous, to lure him home with the threat of finally giving him up. And I think, too, that she knew how it would end.