Learning to Swim (12 page)

“Whoa, I didn’t know this room was taken,” Blondie giggled.

“Seriously, guys?” Owen said, leaning away from me, but keeping a firm grip on my hand. “Our parents are downstairs. That’s sick.”

Blondie giggled again and shrugged, but whatever her plans were, they were destroyed by the bimbo’s appearance and her insisting upon a match of foosball.

“Cora and I will take on any of you,” Owen said with that easygoing nature that had succeeded in bringing down my guard the first time around. He snaked an arm around my back, and while I went to pull away, the image of the leggy blonde with pigtails popped into my head.
Jen
. She had a name now.

Rory. It was familiar and comfortable, like I had known his name all along. The boy, Ronan, was a disagreeable thing of the past. Rory was somebody new, someone I could talk to. Rory was—Rory and Jen.

I let Owen lead me to the foosball table with a hand on the small of my back.

“Ronan is finished in the garage,” Mrs. O’Leary told me one day.

I had been hoping conversation would stay clear of him, but I felt my heart shift just a miniscule amount at the thought of him not hanging around Mrs. O’Leary’s anymore.

The old woman seemed nervous and fidgety today, at least more so than usual. “He’s getting so old. So much older than a boy of his age should be.”

I didn’t even try to unravel that logic.

“He’ll be starting on the house now,” she went on. “There’s so much my husband left sitting around. One can’t find a thing in all of it.”

I nodded absently, silently grateful I’d still see Rory, however distantly.

“He was a messy man, my Seamus. But I wouldn’t have had him any other way.”

“Are you cleaning the house up for something, Mrs. O’Leary?” I asked. I had been wondering where this project was leading, what would become of the old woman when her handyman went off to Europe as he was scheduled to do in the fall. She mentioned his leaving sometimes, but only in passing.

Whatever her motive, Mrs. O’Leary wasn’t letting me in on it. “Things belong in a place,” she said cryptically. “You have to let things go to their places.”

I nodded as if I had any inkling of her meaning.

“Yes, I do think everything has a place,” she went on. “Yourself included.”

Huh?
This had to be one of those life-direction lectures that had permeated my life all of the last year of high school via teachers and my parents and Rosie’s parents. But for some reason, the looming lecture coming from this frail old woman didn’t sound threatening or even boring. In any event, my intuition was completely wrong. Because next she said, “Have you heard of selkies, dear?”

The word was buried somewhere in the recesses of my memory where old stories and childhood books lay.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Have you seen the seals around here?”

I nodded slowly, remembering that night at the pier. When Princess and I had come face-to-face with a seal.

“Well, selkies. They are—they are creatures of land and sea. It’s a rare thing, much like the human being. Proficient in water and out.” She spoke rather hurriedly—at least quicker than her normal speech. And her eyes tripped back and forth along the horizon much faster than usual. It was as if she was trying to get the words out before being interrupted. I didn’t know what was so special about this story above the others, which always stumbled from her thin lips in slow tangled masses.

“But selkies are slightly different. While humans start on land and learn to navigate water, selkies are born to the water and learn to navigate land. They’re creatures that can turn from their seal form to human form at will.”

“Is this your … your favorite story?” I asked carefully. I had long been convinced that the old woman believed each of the stories she told. Of course I did not believe in them, but I also didn’t want her to know that.

Mrs. O’Leary stopped her rocking chair, and I noticed a glimmer in her eyes. Was it the sparkle of excitement—or the trace of a tear? I couldn’t be sure. But she appeared troubled by my question and I felt guilty. I gently prodded her to continue. “So, selkies. They’re sea lions?”

She shook her head and recommenced the rocking. “Seals,” she corrected.

I nodded. I’d previously thought the two were interchangeable.

“They can shed their sealskins in order to take to the land and live with their human … their human lovers. But only at spring tide. They can only change at spring tide. Beautiful creatures, the selkie women.” She touched a crumpled hand to her papery face, and I couldn’t help imagining that Mrs. O’Leary would have been a beautiful young woman. Her skin was dark, hinting at a beautiful complexion. And the hair that slipped in wisps out from under her silk scarf was unnaturally dark, even at her age, which I couldn’t imagine was any less than seventy-five or eighty.

“The man who captures a selkie, he becomes her husband. But they’re usually only in contact for a short time. It is unusual for a selkie to be among humans for a long time. Highly unusual. It is a great love, the one between a human male and a female selkie.
True
love? I don’t know. How are we to know that what humans experience is real love?” She paused. “But, Cora, you do remember what I’ve told you about nature?”

She didn’t wait for my answer.

“For all the love in the world, nature abounds tenfold.”

Like the Merrow, and her everlasting will to return to the water.

“The selkie will return to the ocean. No matter how strong her love for her human man. No matter how many children she bore him. She needs her sealskin to do so, but when she finds it, she will return to the ocean.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that telling me these things was making Mrs. O’Leary nervous. I wished I could relieve her apprehension, but I didn’t know what was causing it.

“You know, selkies live much longer than seals or humans,” she went on. “And the ones born of a Selkie and her human lover, they age strangely. It is very rare, very, very rare,” here, she closed her eyes for what appeared to be a painful moment before continuing, “for a half-selkie offspring to change back to human form after already having returned to nature. But when he takes off the sealskin a second time, the human body is as young as the day he left it.”

I was quite at a loss for words, but didn’t get the feeling that she was expecting any.

“It is a magical thing, and the seal of the half-selkie will not age again until he is back in the water, just like the human part of him will not age until he walks again on two legs. In seal form, a selkie and her human-born children will age and eventually die, but not for many, many years longer than most things in the ocean. In human form, they would age and die, too, but very few can resist the yearning for the water and live a complete life in human form.”

Mrs. O’Leary pressed a hand to her eyes. “Even I don’t see like I used to. I was always blind to colors, but now, I need you children to find things. My eyes …”

I didn’t know how to console her, but she seemed to snap to rather quickly, and went on unaided.

“Left on land for too long—oh, the selkie will age. Age dreadfully. Eyes that are meant for water, left in the air too long.” For some reason this brought the image of the pale, bloated body back to me. Human eyes, left in water too long. For days, weeks.

Mrs. O’Leary finally said, softly, as if defeated, “Thank you for listening.”

“I love to listen to your tales,” I said. Belatedly, I wondered if she would take offence at the fiction that the word
tale
implied.

“It is nice to speak of this, as I don’t tell Ronan this. But everything has a place, even a child knows this.”

She doesn’t tell Ronan these things? I had heard her on countless occasions speaking of myths and legends to Rory, so I could only wonder if the “Ronan” she was speaking of now was her son, her baby, the dead Ronan O’Leary—or her handyman Rory. Or maybe she did think her son and her handyman were one and the same.

“Nature always wins,” the old woman murmured as her rocking chair slowed. Her eyes were drooping, and after a few moments I wondered if she had fallen asleep.

I left her in silence until the sound of a seagull roused her and she was herself again. She launched into a story about Doolin, the town in Ireland where her husband Seamus was born.

Rory appeared at lunchtime. As he climbed the steps with a friendly smile, I could feel my cheeks reacting. I was embarrassed and mad at myself that his mere presence made me have a physical reaction. But the thought of his leggy blonde only made me feel worse, so I sat up straight and willed myself to speak, calmly and as though his presence didn’t bother me.

He plopped down on the steps, setting a sandwich on his knee.

“I was just talking to Cora about Ireland,” Mrs. O’Leary said. “Have you been abroad, dear?” she asked me.

I nodded. “My parents go a lot, and sometimes they take me along.”
How would Jen answer that?
Radiant and composed, no doubt. I, on the other hand, had cheeks made of tomatoes as I answered and hated myself for it. “I really prefer other places, though,” I added, gathering steam from my churning gut. “The less tourist-y countries. You know how commercial and obsessed with tourism a lot of places are becoming.”

Rory looked up from his sandwich, and it took me a moment to understand the insult he’d interpreted. Tourism.
Shit
.
He lives in a resort for Christ’s sake!
“Imagine having the luxury to pick your favorite country,” he said icily.

“Have you been to Ireland, dear?” Mrs. O’Leary asked me, oblivious of the emotional undertone.

I shook my head, my heart racing. How could I backtrack? Maybe if I pretended I’d never said it. “My parents have never really had a reason to go to Ireland,” I said breezily. “They usually travel for my dad’s business, but they don’t have any factories … or … or offices in Ireland.” I trailed off lamely.

“No rainbow shoelaces in Ireland,” Rory murmured.

“And where does Princess go when you travel?” Mrs. O’Leary asked, turning the conversation to the dog, per usual.

“She stays at home,” I said.

“Poor thing, she must get lonely. Who takes care of her?”

I knew trouble was coming, but I could think of no way to avoid it, and Rory’s ignorance of my life only angered me more—so I said it with as much arrogance as I could muster. “The housekeeper watches her,” I said.

Sure enough, Rory snorted.

“Someone to keep the house?” Mrs. O’Leary wasn’t offending me on purpose. But it was an unfortunate side effect. “What a novel idea. Well, I suppose Ronan is my housekeeper.”

“But I would refuse point-blank to be a dog’s butler,” Rory said.

“Well, yes, but Princess the Beagle is a special dog,” Mrs. O’Leary cooed, finding Princess’s favorite spot behind the ears. It annoyed me that the old woman was so unwittingly insulting me. “Better to spoil the dog than the children, I would say. It will make for rotten children, but dogs are so good—it couldn’t do any real harm to their character.”

“So you named her ‘Princess’ because even your dog is richer than half the country?” Rory mused.

I wanted to yell and perhaps even slap him, if only I could get my wits about me. “No,” I said instead. “I named her Princess because when we got her, I was eight years old!”

Apparently any geniality we’d built up was now depleted.

An Leabhar Luachmhar

A Valuable Book

I spent my July evenings with Owen and company, but my mornings with Mrs. O’Leary. I learned about Seamus O’Leary and all the nuances that the old woman had fallen in love with so many years ago, which she gladly retold like a young woman.

Sometimes Rory was there, sometimes he wasn’t. If he was, we would trade snide remarks, Mrs. O’Leary always oblivious. We ignored that slip into decency, maybe even fondness (at least on my part) that belonged to one evening in the past. I was a snob and he always jumped to conclusions about my life. We were too perfectly content, each content with our own imperfect teenage self.