Tides (11 page)

The seal’s shoulder blades rolled beneath a smooth layer of blubber, its body moving like the swell of the tide. It pulled its head up and to the side, straining toward the sky.

And then its skin began to peel away.

It slid slowly, reluctantly down in wet rolls and furrows. A nascent form emerged: a mop of black hair, round, narrow shoulders, a soft and flexible torso. She rested a moment, the sealskin slipping around her hips. Then, with a flick of her tail, the rest pulled away. Her legs gleamed.

Noah’s palms began to sweat. His life rewound to when he was six and Dad told him Santa Claus wasn’t real, and that moment was reversed—not erased, but made into a lie. These things were real; they were possible. A heady feeling of infinite magic washed over him. He was the little boy Noah again, the child who believed every star was a UFO coming to take him away.

Selkie.
He couldn’t stop repeating the word, turning it over and over in his mind like a smooth stone,
selkie, selkie.
Mara was a selkie—what else could she ever have been? No human girl had ever acted as she had with him. It was all part of her supernatural spell, no doubt. He was onto her now.

“Mara!” he yelled.

She jerked around, covering herself with her empty sealskin. She squinted up at him. “Hello,” she called back. “Stay there!”

Noah dropped his head between his arms. Too much was happening. He couldn’t take it all in.

Before long he heard Mara’s soft footsteps behind him. She sat down, dressed in another oversize men’s shirt—white this time, with no belt. She wasn’t carrying her skin.

“Hello,” she repeated.

Noah stared at her.

She sat down beside him. “I’m sorry you found out like that,” she mumbled, almost shyly.

Noah snorted. “As if you didn’t mean for me to.”

“What?” Mara frowned. “I saw you head toward the cottage, so I came here to change. I was going to knock on your door.” She looked down at her toes, which, Noah noticed for the first time, were slightly webbed. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Christ, Mara—” He stopped. “That is your name, isn’t it?”

She looked wounded. “Of course,” she said. “Maelinn Mara, sworn as daughter to Terlinn Maebh.” She stuck out her arm in a stiff imitation of human handshakes.

Noah didn’t move. “And you are a selkie.” He wanted to hear her say it.

“We have many names,” she said, “but, yes, that is one.”

They sat close together, their legs almost touching. Noah scooted away a little.

“Wait.” He remembered Maebh’s reaction when Mara had walked into the cottage. “Maebh is your mother?”

“Yes,” said Mara. “She is also the leader of our family, our pod. She is the Elder.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t look it.” Noah recalled Maebh’s smooth, youthful face. “I figured she was your older sister, or your cousin or something.”

Mara shrugged. “We age differently than you do.”

“Okay, fine,” said Noah. “That’s not really what I’m having trouble with here.” The wind blew too harshly across his hair. He shivered.

He forced himself to look at Mara, to pretend she was only the young woman he’d met a week ago, not some fairy-tale monster who had just shed her skin before his eyes.

Her feet were long and angular, and they turned out from her legs like dancers’ feet. Like a tail. Her legs were strong and toned, but smoothed over with the layer of softness he’d felt when he’d first caught her in his arms. Her thighs and torso were hidden under the loose, thin shirt she wore, but his hands recalled the softness there all too well, too.

Mara wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. Even the translucent webbing between her fingers dimpled into tiny bumps.

Noah realized she was cold. He unzipped his sweatshirt and, leaning over until he could feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek, he draped it around her shoulders.

Tentatively, she smiled at him.

She was still the girl he’d met before. He couldn’t deny it, much as his brain balked at the idea. Part of him owned that truth and saw how human she was—even if she didn’t fit the technical definition.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s always colder this way. No blubber.” She patted her stomach. “Well, not as much, anyway.” She laughed, and Noah found himself smiling along with her.

It was easy, if he could only let himself go. Noah still wasn’t sure if he could, but he decided to try. He sensed that he was working toward something important, and while he didn’t quite understand what it was, he wanted—rather desperately—to try to find out.

“You said you wanted to talk to me.”

Mara nodded briskly. Her hands moved up to the hood of his sweatshirt and raised it to nestle against her small, flat ears.

“I want to apologize for my behavior last week,” she said. “I was rude.”

Noah shook his head. “I deserved it. It was presumptuous of me to . . .” He faltered. He didn’t want to say
rescue you;
he knew the reaction that would get. “I was being presumptuous.”

They sat together in awkward silence. Noah scuffed his foot against the ground.

This was so much easier when she was human,
he thought. But then, she had never been human—he’d only thought she was.

“I came to tell you,” Mara said, her voice cutting through the whistling island air, “about me. I came to tell you that I am a selkie.”

Noah thought he probably shouldn’t believe her, but he did. “And Maebh?” he asked. “She doesn’t have a problem with your telling me that?” She had certainly seemed to when he’d seen them together.

“Well . . .” Mara hesitated. “You saw us talk about it.”

Noah would hardly call that “talking,” the way they had crashed out the door like a pair of hurricanes, hollering accusations at each other. He could only imagine how much worse the fight had gotten when they’d gone home to . . . well, wherever they lived. Mara didn’t seem to feel guilty, though, as he often did after a “talk” with his parents. He compared their icy silences and passive-aggressive manipulation with the scene he’d witnessed between Mara and Maebh. He decided the selkies’ way was probably better.

“It’s complicated,” Mara said. She sighed. “I think she might understand.”

The sky had faded from violet to deep blue. Noah felt the chill more deeply now without his sweatshirt.

“Why don’t we go in?” he asked.

He held out his hand, and Mara took it. His sweatshirt’s long sleeve flopped down and a breath of warmth drifted onto their clasped hands.

Noah moved his fingers ever so slightly, feeling for the webs he’d seen earlier and hoping she wouldn’t notice. They reached only to her first knuckles. He could hardly feel them at all.

eighteen

M
AEBH
waited, but Dolores had stopped speaking.

“Should I tell the rest of it, love?” Maebh asked.

Dolores shook her head. “I can bear it. It’s remembering, knowing how I hurt you, that’s worst.”

“No. We’re so far from that now. And we wanted to talk to Lo about hurting—right, Lo?”

Lo nodded again, still careful, still disbelieving. She watched them both.

“Love.” Maebh pressed her hand over Dolores’s. “It is my turn to tell.”

In their first winter together, Dolores taught Maebh how to read.

It rarely snowed on the islands, but harsh storms and freezing winds kept them indoors. Dolores offered to lend her novels, but Maebh balked, embarrassed.

“I’ll get them wet.”

“What?—Oh, I guess you would.” Dolores’s face colored. Maebh was always having to remind her that she wasn’t human, didn’t live in a human place. “Well, I can keep it here for you. This door doesn’t lock—only the front door does.”

They stood together in the narrow corridor between the lighthouse and the cottage, shivering with cold, relishing their privacy.

“Oh . . .” Maebh sighed, searching for some other excuse. Dolores sounded so worldly when she talked about books and the places they described—all the places she yearned to visit someday. It made Maebh feel naïve and homely and a little stupid. She’d hoped Dolores would never find out she couldn’t read.

But when she finally told her, Dolores’s face showed none of the deep disappointment she’d expected. “I’m so sorry!” she said, as if mourning a recent death. “Well, I’ll just have to teach you.”

Maebh blushed and looked out the window. It was still raining. The rocks were black and icy, and the ocean was riddled with pockmarks. She hoped her pod had found shelter—then remembered that in seal form, no one minded the cold or the wet. She wondered how she could have forgotten something so basic. Perhaps the Elders were right—perhaps she was spending too much time as a human.

Dolores smiled at Maebh and took her hand, a sensation to which Maebh had almost, but not quite, grown accustomed. She forgot about the Elders.

“Let’s go find a book,” Dolores said.

Maebh nodded. She glanced around for her sealskin, then remembered it was tucked safely in the rocks on the other side of the island.
As if it would have gone anywhere,
she thought. Still, she couldn’t quite bring herself to feel certain, whenever she was with Dolores, that her skin would stay in its proper place.

In the living room, Dolores ran her long, smooth fingers over the musty bindings of the books. “What should we read?” she asked. “These are Mother’s, in theory, but this shelf is where I keep all my favorites . . . Oh, I know.” She withdrew a thin brown volume and read the title aloud. “
The Journals of Miss Eugenia Humphrey, Lady Adventurer.
”

“No!”

Dolores looked up at her, startled.

“I just think . . .” Maebh cast around for an excuse. She didn’t want to hear about the far-off places where Dolores wanted to go, where she could not follow. “How about something . . . something with magic?” In magic, at least, she had more experience than Dolores. She wouldn’t feel foolish if they read about her world instead of the human one.

Dolores still looked confused, but she nodded. “Okay, let’s see.” She grinned and pulled out a much fatter book with a dark blue cover. “This is called
Metamorphoses,
” she said. “It was written a long time ago, but people still love it. I think it’s the perfect thing to read to a selkie, don’t you?” She laughed.

Maebh smoothed her hands over her still-damp hair, not sure whether to feel happy or embarrassed. “Yes, all right,” she said. “That sounds nice.” She sat down on the couch, but Dolores shook her head and beckoned her to the door.

“I don’t want to bother Mother,” she said carefully.

They crept back into the shadowy corridor. Dolores sat down near the window, to use what light they had, and patted the packed dirt floor next to her. “Sit down.”

Maebh leaned against the wall and slid to the floor.

Dolores scooted closer to her. “You need to be able to see the pages.” She balanced the book on their thighs. One open page lay on her lap, and the other on Maebh’s.

“This is an em,” she said, pressing her finger under the first black marking on the page. “It sounds like this—mmm.” She looked up. “Now you.”

Maebh pressed her lips together and echoed the sound. She felt it vibrate in her mouth and stared at the
M
on the page, telling her mind to remember what it meant.

“Good.” Dolores smiled at her and slid closer.

Lo was starting to smile now too. She turned to Maebh. “So did you tell her your stories? The selkie stories?”

Dolores shook her head. “Not till later, sweetheart. Not until much later.”

Maebh nodded. “We were too busy with our own story, then.”

Maebh never wanted to tell Dolores the old stories of selkies and humans. She never spoke of the fisherman, the stolen skin, the captivity. She knew Dolores would never do such a thing to her; she would never hurt her. Maebh didn’t think she had to tell.

Every night, swimming away from White Island, she saw their mutual future stretched in front of them like overlapping waves, constant and steady. Eventually, Dolores’s mother would retire to the mainland, and Dolores would take over the keeper’s duties. Then they could always be together, and if Maebh changed form every day, she could grow old along with Dolores.

Together, they looked forward to the warm nights of the coming summer. Dolores never dared to bring Maebh into her mother’s house at night, and it was too cold to stay out for long in humanskin in the winter dark—so while they vowed their love for each other, they shared no further physical affection than occasional embraces and stolen kisses in the lighthouse. Their relationship was a quiet, private one, both because the girls were somewhat quiet and private themselves, and because Dolores told her the world would not want to see them together. She said most humans didn’t like seeing two girls in love. Maebh told her selkies weren’t like that; they mated and raised their young together in pods, but love was love, and it was something else entirely. She found herself waiting impatiently for summer to return so they might spend a night together on the beach.

But on the first warm night in May—a night she thought she’d ask Dolores to spend with her—the hotel staff played records and drank beer on the Star Island lawns until the sun was almost up. She and Dolores had lain at the edge of the water for hours, waiting for them to go inside. They couldn’t quite touch each other, hearing so many others nearby.

And so, when Dolores’s mother invited a man to dinner, Maebh wasn’t thinking about what that might mean. All she could do was watch Dolores move, watch her speak, watch her eat. The beauty of Dolores’s mouth had fascinated Maebh since their first meeting, but now she could hardly bear to look away from it.

“This is Roger,” said Dolores’s mother when the man came through the door, a bottle of red wine in one hand and a camera in the other. “Roger Delacourt. His mother used to baby-sit for Uncle Jerry and me, Dolores—I’m sure you’ve heard me mention her—and now Roger’s at Star all week, photographing the hotel for the
Times
—imagine that!”

Dolores’s mouth opened, and her eyes widened. “Oh,” she murmured, “you must travel a lot, Mr. Delacourt.”