Dark Water: A Siren Novel (26 page)

“Considering that’s all I want every day, absolutely. I’ll do my best to make it happen.”

I could hear the smile in his voice. Despite the upsetting conversation that had just transpired in the living room, it made me smile, too.

We talked for a few minutes more. I told him about the evening at Betty’s, carefully editing out some of the more alarming moments, since those would be better discussed in person, and he told me about his dad’s birthday dinner.

“I wish you’d been there,” he said.

“Me, too.” I finished off one water bottle, opened the second. “Next year?”

“Definitely.”

We agreed to work out date details in the morning, said good night, and hung up.

The effects from my moment with Tim, the movie theater employee, certainly not helped by my stressful night, were fading. My body was fatigued and my skin dry enough that pale flakes dusted the waistband of my black skirt. Deciding a quick swim wasn’t a bad idea, I returned to the bathroom to get my swimsuit hanging from the hook on the door. Before changing, I went to the window to lower the shade—and noticed Charlotte’s bedroom light still on.

She was in bed, but I couldn’t tell if she was reading or
sleeping. A book was open in her lap, but her head was resting on the pillow and turned to one side. I watched her a minute; when there was no movement besides her chest’s rising and falling, I took the shade cord in one hand and pulled.

I’m awake
.

I froze. I didn’t breathe as I slowly raised the shade.

Charlotte was sitting up. Her eyes were open … and looking right at me.

Would you like to come visit?

Like Paige’s hadn’t earlier, Charlotte’s lips didn’t move.

I swallowed. Nodded.

She was still in bed when I reached her room. I stood in the doorway, uncertain whether to step inside. I hadn’t been in this guest room since she started staying there, and I couldn’t help feeling like I was trespassing—even though this was my family’s house.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi.” I didn’t move.

“Would you mind bringing me my sweater?” she asked, after a moment. “Please? It’s on the window seat.”

Now that it had a specific task, my body thawed. I entered the room, retrieved her sweater, and handed it to her. Up close, I saw that she wore only a cotton nightgown, and I looked away as she put on the sweater.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a bother … but would you mind? Do you think you could …?”

I turned back. Breathing quickly, Charlotte struggled to lift
her back from the pillow. Her hands and arms shook as she tried to slide them through into the wool sleeves. Her face twisted, like the small effort caused great pain.

“It’s okay,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t betray my concern.

I went to the bed and held up the sweater. When she still had difficulty moving her quivering limbs, I pressed gently on one arm until she lowered it, and then I guided the sleeve to her shoulder. I offered her my hand and she took it with both of hers. She held on and pulled herself up just enough for me to drape the material behind her back with my other hand, and then she fell against the pillow with a
whoosh
and closed her eyes. I finished the job while she recovered, sliding the other sleeve up her right arm.

“Do you want me to close the window?” I asked.

“No, thank you. The cold air feels nice.”

I lowered myself to the edge of the window seat, waited. I looked around the room, at the new dresser, overstuffed chair, and ottoman. The beach-scene painting done by a local artist. The pale blue area rug. The white roses on the nightstand. It was the kind of guest room you’d see in a magazine, that most people would love to replicate in their own homes and most guests would never want to leave.

Except our guest, it seemed, had other plans.

“Your suitcase is out,” I said. It sat on the floor by the door. Her shoes and purse were next to it, her jacket lain across the top.

Charlotte’s eyes opened. Her head turned slowly toward the luggage. “So it is.”

“Why?”

She sighed—or tried to. The breath stuck in her chest, prompting a coughing fit that rattled the bedposts.

I jumped up, dashed into the bathroom, and brought back a glass of water. Mom hadn’t installed another mini refrigerator for Charlotte’s stay, but she had made sure a pitcher of fresh salt water was always available.

Charlotte reached for the glass. I faced her as I sat on the bed, pressed on her shoulder until she sat back, and brought the glass to her lips. She sipped in between coughs and I watched her mouth, cheeks, and forehead. They should’ve flushed and smoothed instantly … but they didn’t.

At least the fit abated—after a second glass of water. When it did, Charlotte rested her head against the pillow and tried to smile.

“Did you go swimming today?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You should go again. Right now. I’ll help you down to the beach.”

“Thank you, Vanessa, but that’s not necessary. I’m just tired. You understand.”

I would understand if that were what was really wrong. But I didn’t believe that it was.

“I’m leaving in the morning,” Charlotte continued. “I’ve already stayed much longer than I’d planned, and I can’t delay my appointments anymore.”

“But you’re sick—or more tired than I’ve ever seen you.
And it’s late. You can’t drive to Canada on so little sleep.”

She slid her hand from her chest to the blanket between us as if to reassure me. “I’ll be fine.” She inhaled, exhaled. The breaths were dry, scratchy. “I want—I need—to tell you a few things before I go.”

“They can wait,” I said automatically, wanting her to conserve her energy. “You already shared something that’s made a huge difference in my day-to-day life. Whatever else you want to tell me can wait until the next time I see you.”

“But as I explained—”

“You don’t know how long you’ll be gone. I remember. And I can wait.” She started to protest again so I added, “If I have any other questions in the meantime, I can always ask Betty.”

Her eyelids fluttered closed and for a second, I thought she was crying. But then they lifted again and her eyes were even clearer than they’d been before.

“You need to leave this world,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“When you listen. You need to tune out everything around you—conversations, passing cars, waves crashing—until your thoughts still and your mind clears. Until it’s just you totally alone, even in a room full of people. Complete focus is absolutely necessary.”

“I’m not sure I’m following.”

Still on the bed, her fingers stretched toward me. “You want to know how to hear others like us, don’t you? At will and not just when spoken to?”

I did want to know this—at some point, maybe in the very distant future. Now wasn’t the time.

Unfortunately, Charlotte continued before I figured out how to say this convincingly. As she spoke, I became too curious to try to stop her.

“You must listen for her voice, and to do that, you must know it in its natural form. You need to have heard it laughing, crying, screaming, or used in some other purely emotional way. You need to be able to hear that sound again, as clearly and exactly as if it were happening right then, right there in front of you.”

She paused to catch her breath. I tried to stand to get her another glass of water, but she slid her hand on top of mine, stopping me.

“And then you need to choose one note to focus on. Stretch it out, blow it up, let it fill your head until the pressure is almost too great to bear. The thoughts will follow.”

I studied her face as I listened. She didn’t appear to be weakening further, and she’d made it clear that she wanted to share this information now. So even though I was tempted to leave and let her rest … maybe it wouldn’t hurt to ask a few questions first.

“When I’ve heard sirens in the past,” I began carefully, “without intentionally listening for them, how did that happen?”

“Like at the bottom of the lake? When you heard me speaking to you?”

I nodded.

“Sirens are born with the natural ability to silently communicate with one another. The difference between that and what I just described is that the dialogue needs to take place in person. We automatically tune into one another; our bodies sense commonalities even when we don’t. As long as a siren’s close enough that you can reach out and touch her, you should be able to speak to her without saying a single word out loud. Focus is still required on both parts—each needs to intend to speak to the other—but the effort needed is much less. And after an initial exchange, communication becomes even easier. Close proximity isn’t as necessary. That’s how you and I can speak silently from different rooms in the house.”

This could explain how I’d just heard Paige say Raina’s name at the restaurant, and how I’d heard her whisper her unborn baby’s name the night of the Northern Lights Festival last summer. It also explained how I’d heard Zara on the bottom of the ocean at the base of Chione Cliffs, and at the lake last fall.

There was one thing, however, that didn’t match up.

“Last summer,” I said, “I heard Justine. Talking to me, after she was gone.”

The corners of Charlotte’s mouth turned down. “I remember. You told me that last fall.”

“But she wasn’t a siren … was she?”

“No.”

“So how was that possible?”

Charlotte’s fingers moved lightly across the top of my hand. “It wasn’t,” she said. “At least not the way it seemed.”

Outside, a wave crashed into the rocks below the house. Already on edge, I jumped.

“This might be difficult to understand,” Charlotte continued, “and even harder to accept. Are you sure you want to know?”

Heart thudding in my chest, I settled back down on the bed. “Yes. Please.”

“The voice you heard, though it sounded identical to the one you’d heard every day for seventeen years, didn’t belong to your sister.” She paused, letting this sink in. “It belonged to you.”

The thudding in my chest fell silent.

“Justine seemed to speak to you in moments of distress, yes? When you were feeling particularly sad or scared or confused?”

I thought back to last summer. I’d heard her my first day back in Winter Harbor after the funeral, when I pulled into the lake house driveway and thought I saw flashes of silver light behind me. She’d encouraged me to follow other silver light streaming from beneath Zara’s bedroom door, and to keep looking through Zara’s scrapbook of conquests and targets when I ached to throw it and run. She’d guided me toward Caleb when he was fleeing his pursuer’s hold. She’d reached out every time I needed her, just as she would’ve if she’d still been alive.

Charlotte took my silence for agreement and continued.

“Our bodies can act without instruction, as we know, and when you heard Justine, yours was doing two things unprompted. The first: it was manipulating your grief by making you hear a
voice that wasn’t there. This could happen to anyone, siren or not, who has suffered a tragic loss.”

“But she—the voice—knew things I didn’t. Like that Caleb was running down the road, toward a gas station. That helped me find him. If I was just talking to myself, how would I have known where to look?”

“That’s the second thing your body was doing,” Charlotte said. “It was already tuning in to the sirens around you without your knowing, taking the information they provided, and sharing it with you via Justine’s voice so that you’d listen.”

I shook my head, struggled to make sense of this. “So when I heard Justine say Caleb was running down the road … I was translating information my body picked up from Zara?”

“Precisely. She and Caleb had been physically close just before he ran, correct? So they were still connected to some degree, and she could sense his whereabouts. Your body picked up on that. Unlike hearing the voice of someone you’ve loved and lost, only sirens have this ability.”

I turned my head, looked out the window. Charlotte was right. This was hard to hear—and even harder to accept. This whole time, I didn’t know how it was possible, but I still liked believing that it was. I liked knowing Justine had still been with me for a time even when she no longer was physically.

“You stopped hearing her after the Northern Lights Festival, right?” Charlotte asked gently. “After you’d faced your fear of jumping off the cliff and successfully stopped the sirens’ attack?”

I hadn’t stopped them for long, it turned out, but the rest was true. Anytime I’d heard Justine since then, there was no question I was only remembering her speaking to me.

“You transformed that night, and you no longer needed Justine to be the brave one,” Charlotte said. “Your body could sense on its own without tuning in to other sirens, and your mind was healing. You didn’t need her—”

“Of course I did.” My head snapped back. “I’ll always need her.”

Charlotte gave me a sad smile. “I wasn’t finished. I was going to say you didn’t need her in quite the same way.”

I wanted to disagree but couldn’t.

“There’s something else, Vanessa,” Charlotte said, a moment later. Her voice was soft, serious. “I don’t really know how to—”

She was cut off by another coughing fit. This one started with a jolt and quickly grew stronger. I leapt from the bed and grabbed the pitcher of salt water from the bathroom. I tried to hold a glass to her mouth but her body writhed uncontrollably. Each time her lips neared the water, her lungs seemed to explode inside her chest, shoving her head back against the pillow.

“Vanessa, what—?”

I looked up. Dad stood in the open doorway, his eyes wide, locked on Charlotte.

“Help!” I gripped her hand, lifted the glass again. “She’s choking and I can’t—I don’t know how to—”

He was in the room in an instant. He sat on the bed next to her and put one arm around her shoulders. She leaned into
him until his body shook as much as hers. He wrapped his other arm around her torso and held her as tightly as her coughing would allow. Her knuckles threatened to crack their thin covering of dry skin as her fingers dug into his leg.

For a split second, I was taken aback by their contact. It was uncomfortable. Wrong, even.