Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (13 page)

“They’re all from shipwrecks, these ladies,” Ezekiel Pitt said. “Their names are beneath the sea, like their ships. I suppose you might call them widows.”

“Yes, you might,” I said, although it seemed to me, looking at their wide, blind eyes, that it would be fairer to call them lost spirits, sundered from their proud bodies, their unbounded blue world, their joyous wooden lives.

Ezekiel Pitt was crowding me again, and I did not like him. I moved toward the door, to finish my tour of this dismal museum and return to my dismal life. He stayed where he was; out of the corner of my eye, I saw him touch the green woman’s face, caressing it like a lover. At the door, I stopped. I had one question more. “Why are they all women?”

He glanced up from the green woman and gave me a horrible, unbelievable, leering wink. “I only like the ladies, miss,” he said.

I could stand him and his sad prisoners no longer; I fled.

179. Figurehead. Wood. 32” x 17”. American, ca. 1840. Figure of a woman crowned with flowers. Ship unknown.

Byron Pitt stole the selkie’s skin on an August afternoon when the sky was dull with heat, the sun as fake as an arcade token and not a cloud near to cover its shame.

Byron knows the old stories either far too well or not nearly well enough. He ran with her skin that first day, ran like an ungainly jackrabbit, and nothing—nothing within the limited compass of what she is allowed—will make him tell her what he did with it. She cannot hurt him, much as she would like to; she cannot leave him. She
could
refuse to have sex with him, but it would do her no good. Byron is willfully stupid about a lot of things, but not even he is foolish enough to believe she would stay with him one split-second past the moment she got her hands on her skin again. And although selkies can lie, it is not natural to them: she admits the truth of her own appetites. Even Byron is better than no one at all.

But he isn’t enough. He could never be enough, even if she loved him as the stories say some selkies came to love their captors. And she doesn’t even like him, although much to her own irritation, she finds him too pathetic to hate. She’s all he’s ever had, he tells her over and over again, and it’s all too easy to believe.

She doesn’t care about charity. She wants her damn skin back. Her life. Her home.

In the six months she’s been trapped on land, she’s trashed Byron’s apartment twice, searching. Her skin isn’t there. She’s explored this dreary town as thoroughly as she ever explored the sunken ships that were her childhood playground. She knows everywhere Byron goes, and she’s searched all those places, too. All of them except for one.

She knows her skin is in the Maritime Museum, the same way she knows, not quite in her head and not quite in her gut, where her sisters are, out in the cold Atlantic. It may not be true, this knowing, but it’s real. These days, it’s the most real thing about her.

But she can’t go into the museum. The museum is Ezekiel Pitt’s territory, and her fear of him is too deep for reason.

Ezekiel is Byron’s uncle or cousin or something like that. He knows what she is, knew the moment he laid eyes on her, without Byron saying a word, and he doesn’t care. He’s not impressed, not appalled; he looks at her as if she’s just another curio in the museum, and not even an interesting one. But the way he looks at Byron . . . Ezekiel Pitt may not care about selkies, but he understands Byron perfectly. He knows what it is to keep something that doesn’t belong to you. Knows and gloats, and she knows it was Ezekiel who put the idea of catching a selkie into Byron’s stupid head.

She fears him because she does not understand him and because whenever she sees him, she smells death in captivity, smells the truth, that Byron is never going to let her go. Ezekiel Pitt makes her want to submit, to let Byron take her self the way he took her skin, and that scares her most of all.

191. Figurehead. Wood. 45” x 15”. American, ca. 1840. Figure of a woman using a telescope. Ship unknown.

That night, lying beside Dale’s indifference, I dreamed of the figureheads. They were free from their mountings, standing at the windows of their prison, staring out at the clamoring surf. The moonlight showed the tears on their faces, showed their small pleading wooden hands pressed against the indifferent glass. And then, in my dream, like a gull I flew out from the museum, out over the dark and terrible sea. I flew for miles and miles without becoming tired or afraid, marveling in the beauty of the water and the night.

Then I dove beneath the waves. I seemed still to be flying, effortlessly, down through the water, and I knew I was a seal, as much at home in this element as gulls were in the air. I reached the sea floor and there danced in and out of the gaping, barnacle-encrusted hulls of sunken ships. These were the ships of the figureheads, their lives and their deaths, all here interred in the sand beneath the black weight of the water.

188. Figurehead. Wood. 37” x 22”. American, 1865? Figure of a woman holding a broken chain. Ship unknown.

The selkie spends a lot of time on the beach. It drives Byron up the wall; he seems to be afraid that someone will figure out what she is and take her away from him. “Well, I can hope,” the selkie said, and Byron winced and shut up.

She met the artist on the beach, let him think he was seducing her. She’s learned a lot, these last few months, about the lies men tell themselves.

She pushes the cuffs of her sweat pants up and walks as far into the tide as she can in this stupid body that will drown if she lets it, or die of cold. She doesn’t swim; without her skin, it’s just a mockery.

She stands for a long time, until her feet start to go numb, and it’s not until she turns back toward the land that she realizes she’s not alone. There’s a woman standing at the high tide line.

The selkie startles, splashing. The woman doesn’t even seem to notice, and as the selkie wades back to dry land, she realizes that the woman is crying. The selkie skirts wide around her, light-headed with relief when she makes it to the public parking lot without attracting the woman’s attention. She glances back, and the woman is still standing there. Staring out to sea, crying slow silent tears, as if the oceans of her body are trying to find their way home.

176. Figurehead. Wood. 39” x 19”. American, ca. 1820. Figure of a Native American woman. Ship unknown.

I woke up hard, my breath caught in my throat, rolled over and looked at the clock. It was almost six a.m. I couldn’t stand the stifling closeness of the bedroom any longer; I got up, dragged on yesterday’s clothes, and escaped into the open. Dale always slept like the dead, and he wouldn’t care even if he woke. I took the same path I’d taken for days, threading my way through the stiff, sullen town to the beach. I stood there, just above the undulation of seaweed that marked the high tide line, staring at the jeweled golden mystery of the sunrise, my mind, still half-dreaming, full of the memory of the figureheads, imprisoned in a hall as stifling as that bedroom, held away from the place where they belonged. The green woman’s childlike face returned to me, her rapturous eyes.

Somewhere beneath those waves was her home. The rich strangeness, the terrible sadness of the dream returned to me, and I realized that I was crying, hot silent tears sliding down my cheeks; I licked one off my upper lip, but could not distinguish its taste from the salt miasma of the sea. I stared at the water until my eyes felt as sea-blasted and blind as the figureheads’, and then I began to walk, aimlessly, blindly, my mind in the air with the gulls, in the deep water with the seals, in the dusty prison with the waiting women.

190. Figurehead. Wood. 30” x 18”. American, ca. 1870-1890. Figure of a mermaid. Ship unknown.

The selkie answers the phone: “Moonwoman Coffeehouse.”

“Hi, Russet, it’s me. Byron.” Byron always has to name both of them when he calls her, as if he has to guard against the possibility that their identities might slip. She feels sorry for him, for the crippled understanding that thinks identity has anything to do with something as arbitrary as a name.
Russet
isn’t her name anyway, but it’ll do.

“Hello, Byron,” she says warily.

“Look,” Byron said, his voice a little too high, a little too fast, “I’ve been thinking. I think we should get married.”

She wants to laugh at him, but she can’t find the breath. Because marriage means Byron isn’t getting tired of this horrible fake relationship, isn’t coming to his senses. No, quite the opposite: Byron wants to make it
official
.

She hears herself say, “Well, we can’t talk about it now, Jesus, Byron!” And watches her hand, small and broad and brown, hang up the phone. And then she starts to shake.

She looks up, and Shelly is staring at her. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just Byron, y’know?”

Shelly says, “I wish you’d just go ahead and dump his ass,” and the selkie gives her half a smile and a shrug and gets back to work.

She clears tables and scrubs counters all morning, remembering to smile at the regulars, remembering receipts and correct change and to keep out of Shelly’s way as she works. She has the afternoon off. She doesn’t have another meeting with the artist until next week. Byron won’t be home ’til six. She walks to the museum after eating a lunch she doesn’t taste, and then stands in front of the door for nearly five minutes, trying to stop shaking. Ezekiel Pitt isn’t interested in her. The worst he’ll do is tell Byron, and she isn’t afraid of Byron. Byron’s power over her is only a matter of her skin and the old stupid rules about possessing it. Nothing here can hurt her, so why can’t she move?

Because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of Ezekiel Pitt; she’s afraid of the museum where he dens. Her fear is brutal, terrible, so vast she can’t even run from it. She stands, wooden and helpless, on the sidewalk until a voice says, “Are you all right?” and breaks her stasis.

It’s the woman from the beach, the pale, mousy woman who was watching the sunrise and crying, and this time the selkie is close enough that even a stupid human nose can catch her scent. “Oh!” the selkie says involuntarily. “You’re . . . ” The woman the artist is cheating on with me. The woman I smell on him, although he claims you’re hundreds of miles away.

“Magda Fenton,” the woman says. “And you’re Dale’s new model. Russet, isn’t it?”

The selkie nods.

And then a thought seems to strike the woman; she tilts her head to one side, like a bird, and says, “How did you know who I was? Dale showed me his sketches, but he hasn’t drawn me in years.”

“I smelled you.” And then her heart stutters in her chest, because of all the things she shouldn’t have said . . .

“You
smelled
me?”

“On him. I’m so sorry.”

“He’s sleeping with you.” She doesn’t sound surprised, or even angry. Only tired. “That explains a great deal.”

“I really am sorry,” the selkie says; she feels sick. Because she can’t claim she didn’t know the artist was cheating on his wife. She can’t even claim she didn’t know it mattered. Not when that’s why she was sleeping with the artist herself. Because it’s the only thing she can do that hurts Byron at all.

“Dale’s decisions aren’t your fault,” the woman says, almost kindly. “But . . . you
smelled
me? How? I don’t wear perfume, and I haven’t . . . ”

The selkie knows she should lie. But she doesn’t. She’s hurt this woman already, and the woman has not tried to hurt her in return. She has behaved like a sister, not a hunter.

The selkie turns her hands palms up, spreading the fingers. And she says, “I’m a selkie.” It’s the first time she’s ever spoken the words.

The woman becomes very still for a moment, staring into the selkie’s eyes as if she could find truth in them. Then, slowly, she bends her head to look at the selkie’s hands, the webs between her fingers, the rough skin of her palms. And then she looks up again, her pale eyes like rock, and says, “Where is your skin?”

The selkie blinks hard against the salt burn of tears. “In there,” she says, nodding toward the museum. “Byron hid it in there.”

201. Figurehead. Wood. 35” x 20”. American, ca. 1850-1860. Figure of a woman, her hands crossed at her breast. Ship unknown.

I believed her.

Dale would have laughed at my gullibility, but I was astonished at how little I cared. I saw the truth, not in her webbed fingers, but in her eyes, which were dark and sad and much older than her face. She was a selkie, a seal-woman, and her soul was trapped in the museum just as the figureheads were.

We walked through the museum together, the only visitors, while she told me about Byron and her skin and in return I told her about the figureheads. Neither one of us mentioned Dale. We didn’t go into the figureheads’ room, but stopped in front of a diorama, dusty and crude, of an Inuit ice-fishing.

“They’re imprisoned,” I finished. “Does that seem like nonsense to you?”

“They’re man-built things,” she said. “I don’t see how the ocean can possibly be their home.”

“Because they’re inanimate?”

“Because men built them,” she said with an impatient shrug.

“Not all men are like Byron.”

“But you’re all . . . ” She waved her hand in an angry, inarticulate gesture and said again, “They’re man-built things.”

“And the works of human beings have no souls?”

“Man-made souls,” the selkie said. “Souls that belong with men.”

“Souls that would profane your home,” I said, understanding.

“You got that right,” she muttered, a pitch-perfect imitation of the sullen girl she appeared to be.

There was nothing I could say. I stood silently, helplessly, wondering if it would be worth the effort to try to convince her to come look at the figureheads, or if it would simply be wasted breath. And what, I asked myself, did I think she could do anyway? She was a creature out of a fairytale, but that fairytale had nothing to do with me and my self-proclaimed duty. She had her own problems.

She’d gone from standing hipshot in front of the diorama to leaning on—no, pressing against the glass.