The Mermaids Singing (21 page)

The sea had not taken Owen MacNamara's body, but swallowed it and spat it back up with the life gone. The men on the boat had found his broken form on the rocks of an uninhabited island, as if sea creatures had ravaged it then tossed it away. They delivered him to the mainland so the undertaker could prepare the remains for the funeral. I overheard all this in the whispered conferences of Clíona and Marcus, who assumed I was sleeping. Clíona sounded almost like she was crying, though it wasn't like her. Two days after the storm, every islander who could walk stood on the quay, waiting for the ferry to deliver Owen's coffin.

As the boat rounded the harbor entrance by Granuaile's castle, the church bells began to gong, so loudly the ground vibrated beneath our feet. The men, looking stern and pale, lifted the coffin from the boat and carried it up to Liam's house. There was an open
viewing, where Mary Louise and her children sat to one side, and the islanders stopped to kneel by Owen's swollen, rubbery face. There were monstrous flower arrangements with blue ribbons that said
Da, Beloved Husband
, and
Captain
, and three candies lit in a semicircle around his head. I listened in awe as the islanders said things to Mary Louise and Liam that no one had dared say to me. People hadn't talked about my mother at her funeral, except to say stupid things like how full and lovely her face looked, considering. I remembered, watching Liam nod to mourners, how I'd snapped at a woman from my mother's work.

“They stuffed her cheeks with cotton,” I'd said. She'd stuttered and turned to Stephen, to get away from me.

In Liam's house, there was drinking and laughter in the kitchen, and men telling funny stories about Owen. The women cried openly and clutched at Mary Louise.

“You're all alone now, God love you,” they said to her. It was true, of course, but I was amazed that people were saying such things out loud. Mary Louise only nodded and gave a comforting smile. People kept reminding Liam that he was now the man of the house.

“You'll have to take his place in the seisiúns as well,” Marcus said. “Your father was a great one for the craic, boy.” I thought it was mean to remind Liam what he was missing, but he thanked them. Imagine if my mother's funeral had been like this, I thought. People commenting on her bad wig, reminding me I was an orphan, saying “I heard she never even said good-bye to her own child.”

I couldn't think of anything bold to say, but when I took Liam's hand, I tried to squeeze in meaning, to hold it the way he'd always held mine. He didn't seem to notice, but moved on to the next hand in line.

“Why are the mirrors covered?” I asked Clíona, when she came and stood beside me.

“Ah, it's just an old superstition,” she whispered. “Some believe if you look into the mirror just after a death, it's the spirit's face you'll be seeing instead of your own.”

I remembered cutting my hair in front of that cottage mirror. How I'd said my name again and again, making myself a stranger. I would have given anything to see my mother's face looking back at me.

“Is that a Catholic thing?” I asked Clíona, and she laughed. I couldn't get used to all this laughing during a funeral.

“Ah, no, Gráinne,” she said. “We Irish are devout Catholics, but we're fanatic pagans as well.” Liam's grandfather, who was sitting just next to us, smiled and nodded at me.

After the funeral service, the islanders walked in a line behind the pallbearers, up the long hill to the graveyard. I'd never been sure which or how many of the island children were Liam's siblings, but now I could distinguish five of them with Mary Louise, all boys, looking like those identical dolls that come out of one another—becoming smaller and smaller in the same black suits. Liam helped carry the coffin and he was as tall as the other men, though thinner.

At the grave, Father Cullen said a prayer that started:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me
.

The priest had said that at my mother's funeral. I realized now that the prayer was supposed to be in the voice of the dead person. At my mother's grave, I had thought it was me walking through the shadow of death. And I was afraid, because my mother was not there.

The rest of Father Cullen's words drowned in my ears; I could only hear a pulsing—a wavering, muffled sound, as though I were listening under water.

The men put the coffin in the ground, covered it with dirt, then a layer of stones and shells.

“How long is Da gonna be in there?” Liam's smallest brother asked, which made people who had stopped crying start up again. They wailed as loudly and unabashedly as they had been laughing before. Mary Louise picked the boy up and whispered in his ear.

They would all be able to come back here, I thought, on anniversaries and whenever they missed him; they would plant flowers
and an engraved stone. My mother was in a stoneless grave south of Boston. I wouldn't remember which grave it was even if I got back there. I would never be able to show it to my father.

Clíona put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pass me a handkerchief. I stepped away and wiped my eyes, looking at the tears on my palms. With the sun burning my vision, the sliding drops looked like blood.

 

The next morning, I packed a bag with clean underwear, the carving of Granuaile, and my passport, in case I had to prove to my father who I was. I wore my mother's claddagh engagement ring on my index finger. When Clíona left to check in hotel guests, I snuck down to the kitchen and took forty pounds from the grocery jar. I'd woken up hot and fuzzy-headed, so I gulped down four aspirin from the bottle next to the oven. I left through the kitchen door so Clíona would not see me from the hotel.

When I reached the ferry, it was Eamon's son who helped me on. I was relieved; he'd just moved home from the mainland and didn't really know me, so wouldn't ask questions. I sat on a crate with my back against the damp wood of the cabin. Just before we were scheduled to leave, an American family got on. I recognized them from the hotel: a husband and wife about my mother's age, and an awkward, moody-looking girl of ten.

When we pulled away from the quay, Eamon came out of the cabin and sat down beside me. I half expected him to scold me, but he was calmly cutting an apple with his pocketknife, eating each sliver before he cut another.

“Is it going to see your father, you are?” he said, when the apple was half gone.

“No,” I said, too quickly. “I'm just doing errands for Clíona.”

Eamon nodded, licking spatters of apple juice from his mustache. “You'll want to take the train from Galway,” he said. “If you put a pleasant face on you. those Americans there'll give you a lift to the station.”

He stood up then, went over to the couple and said something I couldn't hear, and the mother smiled at me, nodding in agreement. Eamon walked past my side toward the cabin.

“Thank you,” I said, suddenly on the verge of tears. Why was this man, whom I'd never said one nice word to, helping me? He winked and handed me the last slice of fruit before disappearing inside. I tossed the apple, which had browned quickly in the air, into the rushing gray water below.

The American mother came over to me, swaying on the rocky floorboards.

“I understand you're an islander,” she said. “We're visiting from Boston, in the United States.”

I almost snapped at her, almost told her where I was really from. But, for some reason, I changed my voice, and the music of Clíona came out of my mouth.

“I am,” I said. “Did you enjoy your holiday?” I was even convincing to myself.

The mother was awfully interested in me. She asked me stupid questions: Did I go to school? Did I speak Gaelic? Had I ever seen a mermaid? She spoke very loudly, emphasizing her words, and I thought it was because of the sound of the engine and the wind. But when we docked in town, she kept yelling, as though I were deaf, or didn't speak English. We walked up the main street to their rental car, her husband dragging the suitcase on wheels.

“Here, I'll put your bag in the trunk,” he said to me. I had forgotten it was called a trunk—on the island, they called it “the boot.” He stuffed my backpack in with a pile of green plastic tourist bags.

“I want my Irish girl,” his daughter demanded, and he dug for a minute, then pulled out a boxed doll.

“I feel like we've spent the entire week shopping,” he said to me, and winked. I rolled my eyes, in conspiracy with him, a reaction that came to me automatically. My mother's boyfriends, Stephen included, used to do that all the time—whisper to me about what
they thought were strange feminine habits: excessive shopping, canisters of cotton balls in the bathroom, rolled napkins in silver rings at the dinner table. As if they thought, because I was only a girl and not a woman, that I would find it as foreign as they did. I'd always played along, because it was one thing I could share with them that even my mother couldn't.

We climbed in the car; I had to sit in the back with the daughter and another pile of purchases. The girl hadn't said one word to me yet.

“Show her your doll, honey,” the mother said, shifting to face us from the passenger seat. The daughter reluctantly turned the plastic-filmed box, displaying a doll with bright red hair, green eyes, and a green velvet dress with a claddagh stitched into the chest. It was strangely familiar, like someone had made a doll version of my mother, or Mary Louise.

“Her name's Meghan,” the daughter said. She moved the box down and the doll's eyes closed, so she looked like she was laid out in a tiny, plastic-covered coffin.

“Do you leave her in the box so she won't get ruined?” I said. The daughter smiled, and nodded at me. “I used to do that, as well,” I said in my new accent.

“What's your name?” she asked, warming to me.

“Gráinne,” I said, hearing my mother's voice.

“Like the lady in the castle?” the girl said. “The queen pirate?”

“Aye,” I said. “It's her I was named for.”

“What a lovely name,” the mother said. “Are you actually a descendant of that queen?”

“They say so, yes,” I said, though no one had ever mentioned such a thing to me.

“How nice to know so much about your family,” the mother said. “I was adopted, and I've been told my birth parents came from Ireland. I was hoping I could look up their history, but I haven't had time this trip. I picked up this pamphlet, though.” She was
searching through her purse. “It's an application for a heritage tracing. You're lucky, you have all your history around you.”

Lucky? I felt suddenly guilty, pretending to have an accent, posing as a child from a nuclear, grounded family. These three people were more of a family than I'd ever been a part of.

“Do they work?” the mother asked me.

“What?” I said. I was starting to feel carsick, and her voice was fading, like she was backing slowly away.

“These heritage tracing places. Do they work, or is it a tourist scam?”

“I wouldn't know,” I said. I rolled down my window, exposing my fevered face to the damp, cool air. “My mother's dead,” I added, in my own voice. No one heard me but the daughter; she clung to her boxed girl and looked at me wide-eyed, waiting to see what evil thing I might do.

 

I met a boy on the train. He sat down across from me in my booth, sprawling his skinny arms across the breadth of the table between us.

“Do you fancy a bit of company?” he said, once he'd settled himself. He had greasy hair pulled into a painful-looking ponytail; his teeth and the delicate inner skin of his lips were brownish—yellow. His eyes, though, like saucers of black ink, could have been mine.

“Why not,” I said, doing my best to stare level at him.

He took out a blue pouch and rolled two cigarettes out of twiggy tobacco, offering me one. I inhaled, and the woodsy smoke seemed to seep over my brain at the same time as it filled my lungs.

He talked, for what seemed like a long while. The smoke was muddling my head, so that I could hear only rhythmic snatches of sound like the break of a wave, and then I went under again. The few words I heard him pronounce seemed to have no reference to each other. I must have talked back. Must have invited him over to my side of the booth, must have allowed the bonfire taste of his tongue to invade my mouth. It could have been me that eased open
his fly, though I was only conscious of sliding my fingers into the gap.

“Jesus!” he yelped, and pulled back. He was pressing my blue-tinged fingers in his palms. “I thought you'd slapped a fish in there,” he said. “You've the coldest hands on earth.”

“That's because I'm dead,” I heard a voice say. His smile faltered.

“What?” he said, dropping my hands. He slid out of the booth, zipping up his fly. There was an older couple at the other end of the car, looking at me.
Slut
, their silent voices said.

“You're one fucked-up girl,” the boy said to me. I wondered, but didn't ask, what his problem was. He strutted away down the aisle and forced open the door that led to the dining car, letting it slam shut behind him.

He'd left his pouch of tobacco and papers. For the rest of the journey I rolled loose, misshapen cigarettes, inhaled red embers, and pressed my cold fingers against my fiery forehead.

 

In Dublin, I walked down streets crowded with people who moved like Bostonians, swiftly and expertly weaving their way. At the
Irish Times
office, a woman called four different extensions to find out who the hell Seamus O'Flaherty was.

“Sorry, dear, it's me first day,” she whispered, her hand over the mouthpiece.

I sat down on a padded stool, a ringing in my ears.

“Nope, he's not in today,” the woman finally said. “He's on assignment, in Belfast.”