Alice At Heart (27 page)

“Porter, my darling,” she called out. “What are you—” The look on his face halted her. He stared incredulously at her and their son in the cold, rolling water. Wild dolphins surrounded them as playfully as pet cats. Both she and Griffin were naked despite the whipping wind and the chill. Neither shivered, though they’d been in the water for hours.

Griffin smiled up at his father proudly. “I can swim like a fish, Father. Mother says it’s a secret, but she can, too. We went all the way to the bottom of the ocean. I can hold my breath forever.”

Undiline saw the horror and revulsion on Porter’s face mingle with fear. She moaned again. What he’d discovered about her and their son was unexplainable. Impossible. Beyond the laws of nature. Inhuman. “My love, please, let’s talk,” Undiline hugged a bewildered Griffin to her in the water. Porter remained frozen in place, dazed. He said nothing and made no move at all.

“Father, it’s all right. I really can swim like a fish,” Griffin called out again. “And I sing to the dolphins, and they sing back. I even know their names. Mother says they’re our family, too. Like the Bonavendiers. We’re Water People.”

His father flinched.

“Into the
Princess
,” Undiline whispered to Griffin. “Your father’s worried about us being gone so long, and we’ll talk to him later.”

Griffin slid from her arms, dived innocently beneath the water, and reappeared with startling speed beside the nearby ketch. Several wild dolphins gathered around him like protective aunts. “See, Father?” he called again. “I’m a dolphin with legs.”

His father stared down at him, ashen, then tracked Undiline’s equally swift swim to the ketch. She lifted Griffin to the deck, then climbed up naked after him. Quickly, she dressed him and herself in the white shorts and T-shirts they’d worn before swimming. Tears slid down her face, and she barely took her gaze from her stunned husband, who steadied himself like a sleepwalker in the well of his motorboat. “Porter, I’m taking Griffin to Sainte’s Point. Will you follow, please? Please, my darling. Do no’ look at us that way. We’re flesh and blood, not monsters. Come and talk to me. Come and try to understand.”

“Stay away from me.” He cranked the speedboat’s engine, gunned it, and left them there.

The storm drew closer.
Rain whipped Sainte’s Point, pouring from the mansion’s slate roofs and turrets into pipes that fed a freshwater storage tank. The ocean surged over the beaches and cast white spray as high as the dunes. Even the sheltered cove beat against the island’s docks. Life-giving water was everywhere, and yet nothing could soothe Undiline. Porter had deserted her.

“The bastard broke her heart,” Mara said. “I always knew he would. Randolphs are the antithesis of everything our kind represent. Undiline’s known their marriage was doomed all along. She hated hiding her true nature from him.” Mara clasped a locket to her soft white sweater. Her children’s pictures were inside. “She stayed with an unworthy husband for the sake of a child.”

Didn’t you, as well
? Lilith thought, but said nothing.

“A child is love,” Pearl countered sadly. Then only twenty-seven, she looked like a red-haired teenager playing Ophelia in a school production of
Hamlet
. Her long hair streamed over a flowing white nightgown. Her face, pale and ethereal, mirrored her agony. “Anyone capable of love knows that pure love is a child.” Her face crumpled. “And when children die . . . when they die, all love dies with them.”

“Back to bed,” Lilith ordered gently, and Barret, who had been watching with grim misery, carefully picked Pearl up and carried her from the parlor where they had gathered.

“Say no more,” Lilith told Mara.

“Nothing’s left worth arguing about,” Mara said dully. “Nothing’s left worth caring about.”

Lilith went down a hall to the bedroom suite where Undiline paced and sobbed, a long silk robe trailing her, her shoulder-length hair in matted streams around her swollen face. Griffin played in another part of the rain-swept, old mansion, distracted by adoring Tanglewoods who called him
the Griffin
.

“Are we not meant to have husbands and children?” Undiline asked brokenly, as Lilith grasped her hands. “Is it beyond the hope of our kind to be a part of the greater world?”

“If I say you should have fallen in love with a man made in the image of our own special God, what good does it do? That is no guarantee of happiness, as you can well see in the case of my sisters and me. We have to love whomever we love and accept the consequences. When the weather clears, I’ll go with you to Savannah. We’ll plead your case to Porter. This façade is over, my dear. Either he’ll accept your mysteries and make peace with the knowledge that there are far more unusual people in a world he thinks he knows so well, or he won’t.”

Undiline bowed her head. “When Griffin was born, Porter ordered the doctor and nurses to tell no one about his webbed feet and to keep his wee toes covered in booties so no Randolph could see them either. I saw the humiliation in Porter’s face. He told me, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as a cleft palate or a clubfoot. It’s just a small deformity. I’ll get a good surgeon to fix him, not like the hack who sliced your feet when you were a baby.’” She groaned. “He thought my own parents had me ‘fixed’ as a child. Freed of a
deformity
, Lilith. And he clearly could no’ accept even the smallest ‘deformity’ in his son. That’s when I knew I could never tell him the rest about myself. Oh, but he’s such a fine man in other ways, and I love him so!”

“Undiline, regardless of your love for him, you couldn’t go on hiding your true self from him. Or Griffin’s.”

“Yes, yes, I could! I wanted my son to be one of his father’s kind, one of ‘Them.’ It’s so much easier that way. Just to be a full and plain human being.”

Lilith grasped her hands hard, almost shaking her. “We see worlds they can never see. We travel where they can never go; we hear music they only wish they could hear. We are not less human, Undiline. We are
more
.”

“Without him, I’m nothing.”

“Without you,
he
is nothing.”

Undiline shook her head, pulled away, and buried her face in her hands. Lilith watched her with pity but also firm resolve. “I am the head of this family now. My sisters and I will never have more children of our own—I feel that judgment in my soul. If worse comes to worst and Porter can’t be reasoned with, you have a home here, and so does Griffin. We adore him, and we need a child to raise. But I swear to you, if there is any way to mend this breach between you and Porter, I’ll help you. I swear it.”

A soft knock came at the room’s doors. “Mother?” Griffin called. “Don’t you want to come and eat? Kasen is making a butter pudding with oysters in it.”

Undiline stretched out on the room’s broad, canopied bed and flung an arm across her eyes. “Please don’t let him see me this way. Tell him I’m sleeping. I want him to know as little as possible about this upset. And, yes, I know hiding the truth from him is as hopeless as the rest of it. But I love him too much not to try. Our kind can live in secrecy, Lilith, but no’ in despair.”

Lilith stroked her hair, then turned out the room’s light. Standing in the darkness beside Undiline, she whispered, “I do understand.”

The sound of a ship’s horn
blasting drew Lilith, Mara, and Undiline to the windows early the next morning. The oaks were bent in the wind; rain fell in silver sheets. In the cove sat the
Calm Meridian
, a forty-foot sailboat Porter proudly swore he could command in full winds with only Undiline as his mate. The two of them had sailed the tall-masted yacht to South America and back for their honeymoon.

Porter stood on the
Calm Meridian
’s deck, his black hair plastered to his skull, a yellow slicker slung open carelessly over his khakis and sweater. He swayed as the yacht rocked in the cove’s protected waters. Its sails were furled; the mast probed the rain and mist with barren command.

“Keep Griffin inside,” Undiline cried. He was still asleep in a small bedroom off her suite. She ran from the mansion and down the pathway to the docks. The downpour clamped her white silk robe and nightgown to her tall body. Her coppery hair curled in soaked tendrils down her back. “Porter!” she screamed.

“Stay here,” Lilith said to Mara. “I’ll follow her.”

Mara scowled out the window at the reckless sight Porter Randolph made. “He’s drunk or out of his mind. Be careful.”

Lilith slung a soft cashmere cape around the shoulders of her gold robe. Her hair, the color of rich chocolate then, burst from tortoise-shell combs. As she strode from the mansion’s veranda, the wind and rain took her breath away, and she stared in dismay at Undiline on the dock. Undiline held out both hands to Porter. His handsome face contorted. He shook his head, then placed a fist over his heart.

“No, my darling, no,” Undiline sobbed.

He turned to the yacht’s wheel. The motor made the slightest throbbing in the wind. He guided the sleek sailboat toward the cove’s mouth and the deadly, open Atlantic beyond.

Lilith took Undiline by the shoulders from behind.

Undiline shook. “He thinks he married a demon or such. He does no’ know how to comprehend it. So he’s going out there to die.”

“Sing to him. Sing with all your heart.”

“He does no’ want to hear what he can’t believe!” Undiline pulled away from her and dived into the cove’s churning water. Lilith lunged to a piling and held on as a gust of wind raked her body. She screamed for Undiline to come back, knowing it was useless.

As the
Calm Meridian
slid into the open water, Lilith saw Undiline reach up from the water and snare a docking line. She climbed aboard and lay on the yacht’s aft deck, then got to her feet and made her way toward Porter. Fog and rain closed around the yacht like a curtain, and Lilith strained hopelessly to see more. They disappeared into the mists.

Pearl and Mara were waiting when Lilith made her way back up the path to the mansion’s veranda. Pearl clung tearfully to Mara’s staunch arm. Both were like windswept butterflies, hair and nightgowns floating in the air. They gazed at her in distress. Lilith waved a hand.

“I’ll go after them alone. If anything happens, you two must care for Griffin.”

“Even you shouldn’t brave this storm,” Mara said.

“Oh, you can’t,” Pearl cried.

“I’ll take the
Aqua
. It’s strong and fast.” The
Aqua
was the island’s small cabin cruiser. “Go inside, Mara. Tell Barret to bring me the engine keys.”

But before Mara could go, Judith Beth ran onto the veranda, wringing her hands, her soft blond hair flying. “The Griffin saw his mama and papa from the upstairs window, and he’s gone. He’s gone after them!”

Lilith and her sisters traded quiet looks. This was one child they could save. “We’ll all go find him,” Lilith said.

Lilith’s heart sank
when they spotted the
Calm Meridian
tossing on the deep swells of the open ocean. The mast had snapped and toppled, dragging sails and ropes in the water. The yacht dipped heavily to its starboard side.

Drenched with rain, Undiline was slumped beside the broken boom on the yacht’s foredeck, her arms twined in the rigging. There was no sign of Porter or Griffin. Lilith shielded her eyes in the whipping torrent as she, Mara, and Pearl leaned over the
Aqua
’s bow.

Barret cut the engine. “I can’t bring us any closer!” he yelled from the cruiser’s small cabin. “Too dangerous!”

Lilith threw off her soaked, clinging cape and nightgown, and sang out grimly.
Into the water, my sisters
.

Yes, into the water.

Yes
.

Mara and Pearl stripped their gowns off. They plunged into the churning ocean after Lilith.

When the three of them reached the
Calm Meridian,
they grasped the tangled rigging and held on as the yacht lurched and bucked.
It will roll over at any moment
, Lilith thought. She sang out.
Griffin, Griffin, where are you?

She and the others heard a faint, wounded hum in return.

He’s locked below, in the cabin. Dear God, what has happened here? Undiline, can you hear me
?

Save my son
, came the weakest reply.

Pearl and Mara moaned aloud, and Lilith bowed her head.
She’s dying
.

“Wait here,” Lilith told Mara and Pearl. Lilith climbed through the ruined rigging and the torn mast. When she looked over the side of the yacht, she saw Porter lying across Undiline’s folded legs, his head in her lap, his eyes open in death. Blood streamed from a gaping wound at the center of his chest.

Lilith clawed her way across the rainswept deck and knelt beside the collapsed Undiline, who was also covered in blood down the front of her body.
Oh, my dear, my dear doomed cousin
. Lilith cried out at the sight of the equally horrific wound just below Undiline’s ribcage. Lilith took Undiline’s face in her hands and lifted her head.

Undiline opened her dreaming, dying eyes. Lilith, crying, bent her head to Undiline’s and saw everything Undiline had seen.

Mother, why are you and Father leaving me?

Oh, Griffin! How brave you are! We weren’t leaving you. Never
. She pulled him from the churning water at the bow of the yacht.

Where’s Father taking us?

Home, of course. Now into the cabin with you, where you’ll be safe.

I want to stay up here with you and Father.

Into the cabin.

She shoved him below and shut the door tightly, then made her way back to the wheel.
Porter, my darling, no. Please, no.

Porter Randolph stood on the yawing deck, a heavy-barreled revolver in his hand.
I can’t live without you, and I can’t live with what I know about you. I don’t know what you are. Or what our son is. You can’t be real. And I can’t go on if you’re not
. He raised the pistol to his heart. She lunged at him, caught his hands, and twisted them away from his target. A tall swell broke over the yacht, flinging them down. The mast snapped. The gun fired.