Learning to Swim (11 page)

One day near the end of June, I outlasted Mrs. O’Leary on the porch. It was the first time I’d stayed until sunset, and she declared her intention to go inside. After she locked up, I lingered on the porch, taking advantage of the view of the sunset the little porch afforded. It faced north, giving a split view of the ocean and the endless row of mansions, the sun settling quietly behind the big houses and throwing an orange glow over their impeccable white paint.

Well, all but ours. The Pink Palace sat in a soft pinky-orange glow, taunting me.

I was so absorbed in it, I didn’t hear Ronan come out of the garage. When I noticed him, he was standing in the grass, wiping his hands on a towel and watching me. Startled, I blushed.

“Has Mrs. O’Leary already gone inside?” he said.

I nodded.

“She had a rough day today,” he said. “She asked me to get her jacket three times.”

I nodded, debating whether it was okay to start a conversation with him given our past. I wanted to explain that embarrassing night on the pier, or as he called it, the jetty, but I couldn’t. So if he stayed away from that topic, then I could be civil.

“What’s that about?” I asked. “She does that to me a lot.”

He looked at me with squinted eyes, as if assessing whether or not I was trustworthy. But he finally looked resigned and said, “I don’t really know. She’s had a rough time since Mr. O’Leary died.”

I nodded sympathetically, as if I could possibly know how that felt.

“He did everything around the house,” Ronan went on. “And when he died, she would say she didn’t know where anything was anymore. That’s why my parents set me up to help her go through the house, clear things out. She talks about this jacket that she says her husband must have left somewhere, some days she says he hid it. But I’ve been through that house several times over, and no matter what I find, it’s never the right one.” He paused. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s never completely
here
anymore.”

“I have noticed,” I said. I also couldn’t help noticing this boy was being suspiciously nice to me, compared to the last time we’d met.

“Well, that’s recent. She isn’t usually like that.”

“How long has he been dead?” I asked.

“About ten years,” he said. There was a pause, again, as if he was contemplating my merit. Then he finally said, “You know, my name
isn’t
Ronan.”

I gaped at him. After a few moments of fuzzy silence, I spluttered, “What?”

“My name isn’t Ronan,” he said again. “She’s been calling me that for years.” He looked at my confused face a moment longer, then laughed. “My name’s Rory,” he said with an amused grin. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He offered his hand.

I shook it, perplexed. “Why does she call you Ronan?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know if she thinks I’m someone else or if she just gets confused. It’s been going on so long, maybe she just doesn’t remember that it’s not my name.”

“It doesn’t scare you?” I asked. “I mean, that she thinks you’re someone else …”

He shook his head. “She had a son named Ronan. Years and years ago she had a baby, a boy that they named Ronan. He disappeared when he was just a few months old. A few years later she had another baby, but it didn’t live more than a day. She was really sick after that. And then a little while after her husband died, she started calling me Ronan. I think it’s all just tangled up in her mind.”

I was shocked. “The baby disappeared?”

He shrugged. “Nobody knows what happened to it. Some say it must have drowned when she and Seamus weren’t looking.”

A lump crept up my throat.
Nobody was looking.
How many times had I heard that murmured behind my back?

“All anyone knows is that he disappeared without an explanation.” He could see I was unsettled. “Anyway, I’m used to it—her calling me Ronan.”

I swallowed a few times. “You … you never correct her?”

He shrugged. “I did early on. My mom tried talking to her. We don’t think that she actually believes I’m her son. She’s just confused. I have a lot of brothers. She just gets names mixed up. And now that it’s been going on so long, well, she’s probably just forgotten.”

Having opened up this much, I wasn’t afraid to ask the question I was too scared to ask Mrs. O’Leary herself. “How did her husband die?”

Ronan—uh … Rory—sighed. “At sea. In a little dory.”

“What’s a dory?”

Despite the serious countenance of his face, a flash of amusement passed through his eyes. “It’s a boat,” he said. “A tiny little boat. Seamus liked to fish alone, but all he had was that little dory. And one day he didn’t come back. The boat was never found.” Rory looked at me and I realized my mouth was hanging open. “Of course, as you’ve seen yourself, boating accidents aren’t uncommon around here. But there was a lot of discussion about whether or not it was suicide. Whether their marriage had fallen apart after the death of their children.”

Mrs. O’Leary had told me nature conquers the feelings of the Merrow. Had it conquered her feelings? Had it stifled her own feelings for her husband?

“You know how people talk,” Ronan—Rory—said absently.

I knew all too well how people talked. But in my experience, they whispered. Whispered behind your back, when they thought you weren’t listening, not wanting to disturb the children, of course.

Then something occurred to me. “She’s always looking,” I said. “She never stopped searching the ocean. Like he’s lost at sea.
She’s
lost at sea.”

He nodded and we lapsed into silence. To be left alone like poor Mrs. O’Leary, in a house you couldn’t run, with nobody to visit but Rory, whose name you didn’t even know, and a strange, disinterested girl who thought your stories were proof that you were psychologically unstable.

I felt like an absolute
jerk
.

“You’re here late,” Rory finally said.

I nodded, trying to gather my thoughts into the same hemisphere. “I was just leaving and got distracted by this view of the sunset.”

He turned to see where I gestured. “I would think you would be used to it,” he said. “Don’t all the big houses have gigantic windows facing west for this exact purpose?”

A retort was on my tongue, but he went on. “My room has a window with a glorious view of the resort pool. There are no walls thick enough to keep out the shrieking in the kiddie pool at seven a.m.”

I laughed. “Is that why you’re up so early?” It was out before I could stop it. Meant as a joke, in another conversation with any other person in the world, it would have sounded mocking and light. My cheeks were on fire and other random, embarrassment-aware parts of my body burned.

Stupid cheeks. Stupid cheeks. Stupid cheeks!
It was like guilt, painted right across my face in the brightest paint possible.

Rory turned around, and I held my breath, waiting for a sudden realization of my early-morning stalking or a quick fleeing from my sight, or at the very least some scathing remark about hard work.

Instead he said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you—I’m really sorry I was rude the other night. That night at the jetty—with your dog. I really wanted to apologize. I was in a bad mood already, and then I just—but I mean, it happened so quick, I shouldn’t have assumed you weren’t going to …”

I shrugged. “It’s okay.” I was torn between not telling this boy anything about me, not to gratify him with reasons, or on the other hand spilling all to the newfound confidante, this new boy I felt I had met only moments before, this Rory. The boy had transformed along with his name.

“I thought I had to act quick, you know, just in case you had ideas to let the poor pup drown.” He said it with a smile to let me know he was teasing. He had no idea how that last word cut through me.

I forced myself to smile back and then said evenly, “I can’t swim.”

He was quiet for a moment, shocked by my sudden revelation, no doubt. “Is that all?” he finally said with a smile.

Of course it wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to go that far. “Yes, I have no death wishes for Princess,” I said.

He smiled, seemed to deliberate for a second and then said, “You know, I can teach you to swim.”

My cheeks flushed.
Does he know? Is that his way of telling me that he knows?

I wanted to blurt out that I wasn’t a stalker, but at the same time, visions of the two of us swimming the ocean in the morning drifted at the forefront of my consciousness and many parts of my body were burning. But I never got to answer. I was interrupted by the appearance of someone on the boardwalk.

The thin girl skipped over to Rory and embraced him, lightly kissing him on the cheek. The scene unfolded in front of me like a stack of bricks tumbling onto my head.

I waited for an introduction, but an explanation was unnecessary. The girl slipped her arm around Rory’s lower back and put her head on his shoulder. It was the blonde, leggy girl with pigtails. The one who knew her way around so well—the one who didn’t get lost. She was probably a local, and she probably knew how to swim, too.

“How was your day?” The girl broke the silence, throwing me a furtive look while addressing Rory. She may or may not have recognized me, but either way she was clear about her utter lack of interest in me. “I wondered what was taking so long.”

“Hey, Jen, this is Cora,” Rory said.

“Hi,” I said.

She merely looked at me.

“Jen,” Rory said gently, pausing a moment, “Cora is the one who found Rick.”

The girl’s face dropped. She turned to look me up and down. She finally said, “What were you doing so far south?” It felt like an accusation.

“I was just walking,” I said, my traitor cheeks turning red. Once again, that guilty feeling rose in me. As if I had been doing something wrong by being at the pier when that body surfaced. “I was just walking. You know, wandering.” I was blabbering nervously; this could only end badly.

“Wandering a little far from home, weren’t you?”

“I just walk a lot,” I heard myself say, as if from outside my own body. “Nowhere in particular, and then I just stumbled upon the pier and I saw something big and puffy in the water …”

“Which would be my brother,” she interrupted icily.

My face flooded red. “Your brother?” My forehead, my nose, my lips, my ears. “Oh, my god. I’m so sorry.” Any hotter and there would have been flames erupting from my face. “I just saw … it was so sad. All those men, and your brother. Mrs. O’Leary said it was the sirens’ fault …”

“The
what
?”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Rory jumped in deftly. “You know her, with her tales and things.”

“Yeah, and I’m sure Rick was too busy texting Big Bird to watch where the goddamn boat was going,” Jen said. “Bet he drove right into Atlantis.”

Rory slipped an arm around her back and steered her toward the boardwalk. He shrugged and shot me a sympathetic smile meant to reassure me as he walked her quickly away.

I twirled around in frustration.
Stupid,
stupid
Cora! Learn to control your words!

Motion from the cloudy window at the top of Mrs. O’Leary’s little yellow house caught my eye. It was Mrs. O’Leary, up in the attic. I briefly wondered what she was doing up there by herself. She moved out of sight again. I decided using your own attic wasn’t a crime and whirled back around to go home.

On the way, I walked in the sand, kicking up dusty clouds to keep myself occupied. It wasn’t enough and I couldn’t help but wonder what the sinking feeling in my stomach was. I didn’t think it had anything to do with my terrible conversational skills. I was used to embarrassing myself. But every time I saw it in my head—Ronan’s arm around the Jen girl—my stomach sank like I was on a roller coaster.

What a crappy roller coaster.

Selkies

Selkies

It was only a matter of time before I was forced into the presence of Owen Carlton again, and unfortunately for me, my mom was there, too. “Would you excuse us, Mrs. Manchester?” he said in that polite voice of his that he reserved for talking to adults. “I’ve been dying to speak with Cora alone.”

Mom was beaming as she shooed us into privacy. It was the Carltons’ own dinner party that I’d been wrangled into attending, and so he had the upper hand in the situation. Not knowing the terrain, I had unknowingly followed my mother into the pool hall—Owen’s own den. Now he led me out of the room and up an impressive set of stairs.

“I was just getting ready to go,” I faltered, caught up in the grandeur of the portraits of the Carlton family strung along the staircase.

“You just got here,” he said matter-of-factly.

He took my hand and though I pulled some at the outset, he was persistent and I saw little point in resisting. We appeared in what resembled a second game room on the second floor. This one was smaller, free of a pool table, but complete with air hockey and foosball.

He led me over to the air hockey table where he spun around and pinned my waist against the table. He grinned and said, “Long time no see,” before pressing his lips against mine.

I wrenched my face away. “Are you kidding me?” I said.

“Cora,” he sighed. “I’ve been dying to see you ever since that party.”

“Oh, you must have misplaced my number,” I said, gathering my sarcastic strength from somewhere in the depths of my teen-angst-filled soul.

“No, I just thought you were going to be pissed at me,” he said.

“You’re clairvoyant,” I replied.

“Cora.” He wouldn’t budge, my body pressed firmly between the foosball table and his annoyingly chiseled body, my face inches from his. “I miss you.”

My remark about the painful length of six days was lost somewhere in my throat where a strange unwanted lump was forming. I was saved the trouble of replying by the appearance of Blondie, leading her redheaded male by the hand.