The Mermaids Singing (20 page)

Mary Louise pulled me aside in the house kitchen, to give me my birthday card in private. Inside she had written the address of
The Irish Times
in Dublin and a phone number.

“You'll be able to reach your father with that,” she said. I didn't answer. I already had the number of the paper; I'd looked it up in the hotel phone book. I'd almost called my father a few times, but something kept me from going through with it. Once I'd gotten as far as the
Irish Times
receptionist, but lost my voice when she'd said: “Extension, please.”

“Gráinne,” Mary Louise said softly. I couldn't look at her. “Waiting doesn't always get you what you want. Sometimes, it's the waiting on a thing that causes it to pass you by.”

“Tell that to my father,” I said, shoving her card in my jeans pocket.

“I'm telling it to you,” she said. “In Ireland, Gráinne,” she whispered, “you're best not depending on the man to make the first move.” She walked out to join the family.

Liam and I blew out the candles together. I didn't answer when Clíona asked what I'd wished for.
Family
, was what my mind had automatically called out, though the table was full of so-called relatives. To me, “family” was only another word for my mother.

When Clíona was slicing the cake, Eamon came into the hotel, dripping water and looking battered from the wind. He said that Owen's boat had lost radio contact.

“Don't worry, now,” Eamon said. “I'm just letting you know Owen won't make it for the party. I suspect they're holed up somewhere, sitting out the storm.”

Mary Louise decided to go back to her house to wait by the radio. Liam said I could come, but Clíona tried to stop me.

“There's nothing you can do there except get under your aunt's feet,” she said. “Stay here, I want to talk to you.”

“Leave me alone,” I said, pulling away from her. “I'm going to wait for Liam's father.”

I fell asleep on Mary Louise's couch. When I woke in the middle of the night, I saw Liam sitting up in a chair by the fire. He was raking the coal, his face glowing orange and moist.

“Liam,” I whispered. He didn't look at me. “Are you scared?” He wiped his cheek with his sweater sleeve and shoveled more chunks of coal on the flames. The fire exploded and spat upward. Tiny black slivers pinged against the grate.

“Go back to sleep, Gráinne,” he said.

I drifted off and dreamed I was in a curragh on stormy seas. I flung myself overboard, and a mermaid was waiting for me. I grabbed on to her neck and rested my cheek against her soft, floating hair. She swam toward warmth and light, which I thought at first was at
the surface, then realized, as the water filled my lungs, was the bottom of the sea.

At dawn Liam woke me to say he could see the trawler pulling in to the harbor. We ran down to the quay, the rain soft and misty, the smell of low tide seeping into my skin. There was a group of islanders already there waiting with Clíona, Marcus, and Mary Louise. When the blue trawler pulled up to the quay steps, women ran forward to meet their husbands. I stayed back, watching.

Liam was tying the ropes onto a column, to steady the boat. The fishermen came up one at a time, looking tired and sea-worn. They all looked like island men, the ruddy faces, similar noses, and untrimmed beards. Women took them into their arms, and with each reunion, I looked at the next man for Liam's father, whom I'd only seen pictures of. Two more men came up the stairs. A pause in the line and then one last fisherman. They were all so wet and bundled, I could have missed him, so I looked at each man again. He wasn't with them.

“He's not there,” I said, a lump like dense fog in my throat. I heard voices in my head, mixed together in one long, mournful noise that sounded like the windblown singing of mermaids.

“Clíona,” Marcus said, touching her shoulder and gesturing down the pier. She looked up and her face went hard and pale. I turned and looked myself. Mary Louise was standing at the edge of the quay, swaying in the wind, her dress flapping wetly behind her. The fishermen were standing to one side, appealing to her to step back. Her mouth was wide open, and I realized that the sound in my head was actually her, screaming.

“Dear God in Heaven,” Clíona said, crossing herself, “the sea's taken Owen.” She left me then, and walked down the pier. She pulled Mary Louise back from the lip, held her steady with her large hands on my aunt's little shoulders. She said something to Mary Louise that I couldn't hear. But it made my aunt stand a bit straighter, and her screaming stopped, and faded out over the water.

In the pale morning light, with Mary Louise's undone hair, it
almost looked like my mother Clíona was holding. My mother and my grandmother, grief flowing out of one and strength coming in from the other. I wanted to join them. But it wasn't my mother, it was Liam's. And Liam's father, Owen, who played the fiddle, whom I hadn't seen since I was three years old and couldn't even remember, was dead.

I watched Liam, who took his mother's arm and helped Clíona guide her away from the boat. His face looked blank, but I knew he must be terrified, and I was surprised to see him walking so calmly. He was fatherless. I expected him to bolt off, run away from it all, vanishing into the fog. But he got in an islander's car with his mother, and before I knew it, it was me that was running, the rain like needles against my eyes, sprinting blindly away from the voices that called my name out like a song.

“Do you hear that, Gráinne?” Grace whispered. She knelt down to where her daughter was digging in the sand. “It's the mermaids, they're singing.”

The little girl rose from her squatting position, putting a hand on her mother's shoulder to steady herself. She stretched her neck, listening in the way that Grace loved—as if she were using her entire body to capture the sound.

“Mer-mays,” Gráinne repeated, her coal-colored eyes widening.

“They're ladies, sweetie,” Grace said. “Ladies who live in the sea.”

“Mer-laylees,” Gráinne said. She cocked her head in the direction of the singing wind. “Plitty.”

“Yes, it's pretty,” Grace said. She brushed the violet-black curls from Gráinne's forehead.

Gráinne squatted again, returned to shoveling sand. She took her time, lifting each shovelful slowly and patting its contents into a neat pile. Grace watched her. Her little girl was so careful, so graceful in her movements. She surveyed every situation before plunging in. She liked to taste things, touch them, before accepting them. She smelled her own fingers periodically throughout the day, to see what invisible layers they had collected. She was rarely frustrated, never impatient, even at two years old. Grace envied her.

 

From the first moment she had held Gráinne, Grace had not wanted to put her down. The baby's sweet, warm skin was unlike any body Grace had ever known. That first year she had wanted to keep Gráinne to herself, but she couldn't go anywhere without nosy, peering island faces. Mary Louise kept calling in with Liam, or jogging along with the carriage to catch up with Grace on the road. Whenever Grace met island women, they'd pick up the baby without invitation.

“Is that Seamus's girl?” Mrs. Keane would say. “My, she's getting big. She's the image of her father—Grace, I don't see a sign of you.” Grace got into the habit of whispering into Gráinne's baby ears everything she couldn't say to others.

“How it's possible that Mrs. Keane can be uglier than her husband, I do not know. Next time she holds you, Gráinne, spit up on her.” The baby's eyes sparkled, and followed Grace's voice.

“She worships you,” Seamus always said, but Grace was jealous at how much the baby adored him. When he spoke to her in Irish, Gráinne laughed and gurgled as if they were conversing. It was like their secret language, and Grace hated it.

“I'll teach it to you, too,” Seamus said, but Grace ignored him.

“Your father's a sexy man, Gráinne, but he's manipulative,” she said, and the girl smiled.

“Why do you say things like that?” Seamus said, angry. “You'll confuse her.”

“I tell her everything I think,” Grace said.

“And that's what you think of me?” Seamus said, handing her the baby.

Grace kissed him. “Only sometimes,” she said.

Gráinne kept Grace warm in the daytime—a clean, powder warmth that Grace breathed in hungrily. At night, it was Seamus who heated her, from the musky fire within his chest, and made her believe, in that moment before dreaming, that her body would die without him.

 

Seamus only left her when he was given a newspaper assignment he could not resist. He made most of their meager living on his father's fishing boat, but would not give up the journalism, no matter how Grace begged him. She didn't like his being away, for it was when he wasn't next to her that she imagined leaving him.

He was often sent to the North, where there was fighting, to interview paramilitaries and men in prison starving themselves in protest. When he returned from these trips, his mind stayed away. For days he would be distant, he wouldn't seem to see Grace, he would mutter and curse to himself, or bury his face in Gráinne's hair, looking miserable. It was the only time Grace ever felt she had no effect on him, and this frightened her.

“Why do you have to go there?” Grace said once, as he was packing his camera bag. “It's dangerous. What if you get shot?”

“I'm a journalist,” Seamus said. “Someone has to listen to these people and tell their story.”

“Why does it have to be you?”

“I'm Irish, Grace. This is my country—my countrymen who are digesting their own organs in jail. We have our freedom, you and Gráinne and I. They don't. The least I can do is help them demand it.”

Grace did not feel she had her freedom. When Seamus was not there, his island was her jail. She hated his love for his country, wanted him to love her as much as he did those anonymous, violent men. She wanted him to give up everything for her, the way she
imagined she had for him. She was afraid, when he left her alone, that she might disappear. That she might make herself disappear.

On the nights Seamus was home, he and Gráinne had a bedtime ritual. He would tuck her in, sing to her, and when she started to fight her sleepiness, he would put a hand on her forehead.

“Can I close my eyes?” Gráinne would say in her charming new voice.

“Yes,” Searnus would say. “Close your eyes.”

“What if I open them?” Gráinne would yawn.

“I'll still be here,” Seamus would say.

Grace always listened to them with guilt flooding through her. When Grace closed her eyes, she imagined opening them in a place far away from mis Murúch.

Grace began to go to the pub with Mary Louise when Seamus was away. Owen and the other musicians would play for the summer tourists, and the crowds made the island seem almost exciting. Grace and Mary Louise would put their toddlers together in a carriage, and the two slept peacefully through the noise. Grace would drink hot whiskeys until the room blurred with excitement and possibility. She would run her fingers through her hair and return the appreciative glances of new men.

Toward the end of one night, Grace was sitting in a corner booth, flirting with a young Norwegian man. He kept his hand on her thigh while he wooed her in broken English, gazing at her with ice-blue eyes. Mary Louise interrupted them, telling Grace that Gráinne was looking to be fed. The man excused himself, scurrying off at the mention of a child. Grace went over to the carriage, but the kids were still asleep.

“What's the idea?” Grace said to her stepsister.

“Would you tell me what you think you're doing with that man?” Mary Louise said. “What will Seamus think?”

“I was only talking,” Grace said. “And Seamus isn't here. Who's going to tell him, you?”

“The first person he sees when he gets off the boat will tell him,” Mary Louise whispered.

“I'll talk to whoever I want,” Grace said. “It's nobody's business.”

Mary Louise sighed and patted Grace's arm. Grace could tell by the look on her face that her stepsister thought Grace was only being friendly. She wanted to smack her. Mary Louise was the stupidest woman alive.

“I wouldn't want people to get the wrong idea, is all,” Mary Louise said. Gráinne woke up then and called for her mother. Grace picked her up.

“I'm mapping out escape routes,” Grace whispered to her. Gráinne laughed and repeated her, her babyish voice rising and falling in waves like her father's.

 

In August, when the nights were warm, Seamus and Grace would leave their daughter with Clíona and walk to a secluded beach on the western end of the island, to watch the sunset. If she closed her eyes, and blocked out the bleating sheep, Grace could almost pretend they were somewhere else, and that behind them there was so much more than that little island. She remembered back to when the dark blanket had fallen over her mind and she had thought that getting Seamus would be the answer to everything.

Once they stayed beneath the sheltering cliffs until after dark, building a fire from driftwood and a broken fence. Grace stood looking out at the dark sea, listening to the waves sizzling up after her. Seamus wrapped his arms around her from behind, pressing his fiery chest against her back.

“How is it that you're so warm?” Grace said, craning her neck back so he could kiss her.

“It's not me that's warm.” Seamus laughed. “It's that you're always cold.”

“Maybe,” Grace murmured.

“Do you know why the mermaid fell in love with my great-great-grandfather?” he said.

“Good kisser?” Grace said. Seamus smiled into her hair.

“Because his body was the warmest thing she could find outside of the sea.”

His voice was like cords pulling everything inside her toward him. She turned around, kissed him so deeply that he whimpered far back in his throat.

“Tell me you're happy,” he whispered, and she nodded automatically. “If I let go,” Seamus said, “would you dive back to your home beneath the sea?”

Grace leaned her head into his chest. “I don't know,” she said. “Could I take you with me?”

“Sure, I'd go anywhere with you,” Seamus said, locking his fingers behind her so she couldn't wriggle away.

“But we don't,” Grace said. “We never go anywhere.”

“I'll take you to Dublin next week,” Seamus said.

“That's not what I meant at all,” Grace said.

Seamus kissed her earlobe, and her body lit up like a raked fire. “You haven't given it enough time,” he said. “You're getting happier every day, I can see it. Wait awhile.”

Grace wanted to say she could be on this island for centuries and never be happy, but Seamus was kissing her, filling her with a heat that swallowed her words.

He took off their clothes and made a blanket on the sand, pulled her down and made love to her slowly, and for so long that Grace was delirious. She thought she heard the singing of the mermaids in the coves, a sensuous chant calling to her in the same rhythm as Seamus's sliding hips. But when he clamped his mouth on hers, she realized she'd been moaning, so loudly that her voice echoed in the cliff walls.

 

The next time he was in Belfast, Seamus sent her a letter. Inside was a poem, copied out in his neat, almost feminine script.

“He'll follow us, Gráinne,” Grace said, folding the paper carefully. Grá was playing with the miniature tea set Clíona had given her for her second birthday. “Wherever we need to go, he'll follow us.”

“
I
know that,” Gráinne said, pouring invisible tea into a special cup, the one she'd just recently begun to save for the mermaid.