The Mermaids Singing (25 page)

On Christmas Eve, my sixteenth birthday, my father and I went for a walk along Mermaid Beach, which was a mirror reflection of the singing sand my mother had died by. For days I had asked him questions, and he'd answered in a voice I now remembered having loved as a girl. I could fill things in now, and the image of my life and my mother's stretched across boundaries I didn't know were there.

“Was your mother happy?” my father asked, as we marked the wet sand with the patterns of our soles.

“Yes,” I said, immediately. We were almost always happy, my mother and I. Though she had brief periods of sadness, her “damp days” she called them, that I now associated with a memory I hadn't shared.

My father didn't look surprised or even resentful that she'd been
content without him. I know my mother well enough to see that she loved this man, probably more than she loved Stephen. I also know that love had nothing to do with her being able to stay with him. “Always love the man second,” my mother had told me. “You come first.”

I looked down at the brown blanket of shore, decorated by miniature Play-Doh-like curls left by the sandworms.

“Do you still like living here?” I asked my father.

He smiled, understanding what I meant. He must see my mother behind every rock, glimpse her curving form in every wave.

“I do, sure,” he said. “Do you?”

“Um,” I said, taken aback, “I don't know. I haven't really been
living
here.”

“What is it you've been doing these last four months?” my father said, his eyebrows lowering toward his grin.

“Waiting,” I said.

“Waiting for what?” he asked, as though it were a simple question.

Waiting for a boat that carried my father, for Stephen to write, Liam to kiss me. Waiting for my mother to stop dying and come to my door.

“Just waiting,” I said.

My father's eyes seemed to look inside me, as if my skin had the transparency of water. “Take a wee bit of advice from an old man who knows about waiting,” he said. “Now that you're back here, you can start living. Then you'll decide if you like it.”

I thought about what my grandmother had said, how she hoped I'd feel at home here. If I stayed with this family, would my voice always sound so conspicuous in my ears? Would I always be an outsider?

My father turned his face into the sea wind as we walked.

“On this island, Gráinne,” he said, “you can watch the moon and the sun rise and fall, with nothing to separate you from them
but the water. Silver and gold and green. Some find this island too small. I feel as though I live on the grandest place on earth.”

We stopped by a large barnacle rock. On its flattened top, where the tide never reached, was a miniature lawn of deep green grass, pimpled with lichen-stubbly stones.

“At the high tide,” my father said, “your mother would stand up there, looking toward the mainland, and dive into the water. Sometimes I'd follow her down and watch her, half expecting that she would never again emerge from the sea.”

We both looked out over the silver-rippled waves. I could see her, my mother with her hair like a sunset on her shoulders, her legs melding into fins as she dove.

“I still watch for her,” my father said.

I imagined my mother's response, sharp and teasing; she would diffuse the emotion, turn her eyes to his and flirt him into distraction.

I wanted to take his hand, to put my head against his warm, beating chest and cry. Me too, I wanted to say.

My father touched my head, briefly because there was still an awkward grief between us that would be there for a while. The waves sizzled whispers at our feet.

 

At Christmas dinner, there were more of my relatives in Clíona's house than I could possibly keep track of. Marcus's twin sons were home with their wives and a pack of blue-eyed, rambunctious children. My grandmother's sisters, slightly less good-looking versions of her, squeezed me and bluntly grieved that they'd missed me for years. I glided through the crowded room, smiling and answering questions, trying to pretend I was used to such a big family. Clíona moved at my side, introducing the faces by their connection to me. This is your antie, your cousin, your uncle twice-removed. This was what she wanted for my mother, I thought, and what she now wants for me. To be able to look into faces and see my own features, to be told that my love of poetry comes from my great-grandfather, my dreaminess from my father, my tendency to brood from the
O'Malley side. Only my mother hadn't wanted it; she preferred to define herself. The only person she'd ever admitted a connection to was me.

Liam, whom I hadn't seen since he left Dublin in November, arrived with his mother and the line of brothers. My father put a firm arm around Mary Louise's waist.

“I'm so sorry about Owen,” he said, looking into her eyes. “He was a good man.”

“You've always been a friend to us, Seamus,” Mary Louise said. I could tell by her face, which was tired but composed, that she was not in danger of becoming weepy.

“Who'd have thought it,” she said, trying to smile. “Both of us widowed at our young age.” I saw Liam watching them, calculating possibilities. He closed his eyes, and I knew he was picturing his father.

Later, while my father and Mary Louise chatted, Liam and I snuck out the back door and went behind the storage shed, where he kissed me for a long time.

“You'll never guess what Seamus gave me for Christmas,” he said, when our mouths were red and tender. He took a thin cardboard package from his inside pocket.
Fetherlites
, it said, with a fogged portrait of a man and woman, looking at each other in ecstasy.

“Condoms?” I said, laughing.

“Can you believe it?” Liam said.

“Why not?” I shrugged. My mother had given me condoms; they had lain unused in the drawer of my bedside table.

“I thought maybe it was some sick test,” Liam said. “Fathers don't give their daughter's boyfriend rubbers. Not here, anyways.”

“Maybe they should,” I said.

Liam smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “We've got them so. If we need them.” He looked at me mischievously. “Do you think we'll need them, Granvaile?” he said, putting his arms around my waist.

I pulled him in closer, inhaling the smell of his mouth and skin. “I'd say we will,” I whispered, and I knew I sounded sexy.

I could hear the water lapping the shore by the hotel, and I knew the tide was low because there was the smell of exposed seaweed—a thick, sensual smell, as though thousands of mermaids had left the evidence of their lovemaking in the sand.

Before she got sick, I used to crawl into bed with my mother in the morning, after whatever man she'd been with had left for his life. I would nuzzle her neck, inhaling the sea-smell of her, the salty excitement that perspired from her skin. I used to think that when I finally felt passion it would smell like that—like my mother. Now I knew that the sex on my mother was only a layer, like perfume. What was underneath was what I missed the most. Underneath the myth of her was an odor so particular nothing could re-create it: the smell of her flesh and her soul, still new beneath her scales.

“Hey,” Liam whispered. “Where are you?”

The mist was so thick I couldn't see the ocean or the mainland behind it. There was nothing to orient me in the bubble of fog, but Liam, whose face looked clear and sharp, kissed me again with his swollen, salty mouth, his hands fluttering lightly up and down my sides, and for the first time in a long while, what lay beyond this island of singing rock and grieving, hungry sea didn't matter.

I set the table for Christmas dinner: eleven adults and fourteen children, Clíona tells me. At the end of the table nearest to the door, I add an extra plate, glass, side plate, napkin, gleaming silver cutlery.

After we have eaten, the sounds of laughter and bickering gone, the music of Liam's flute only an echo, I will clear the table, leaving the unused place. Later, when all the others have gone to sleep, crammed five to a room on extra cots from the hotel, I will sneak down here, and wait in the darkness.

She will enter quietly, her bare feet squishing liquid prints upon the carpet. When she sits beside me, I will smell the dank, sexual odor of seaweed, of low tides, of the bed I was always welcome to crawl into as a child. In the shadows of blue moonlight, her hands will appear webbed, her long fingers connected by paper-thin fins. As she eats, her copper curls dripping beads of water onto the table
cloth, I will tell her about Liam, about the particular scent of his skin, about the kisses, and the condoms waiting in his pocket. She will laugh music, tease me, offer advice. I will tell her of my grandmother, my father, my cheery mob of a family—where the women adore the men, but only pretend to depend on them. About how their voices rise and fall like water, about how a part of me wants never to go back to a place where people don't speak in tunes.

I will tell her I am no longer afraid of her dying. I know now that there are far worse ways of losing people, even when they're right in front of you.

She will nod, smooth my short curls back from my forehead, kiss my raw red scar.

Gráinne
, she will sing, naming me again.

She will recite poetry, without any pages to guide her.

I will know exactly who she means.

Perhaps one of my little cousins will come downstairs for a glass of water or a secret snack, and see the retreating shadow of a woman, hear the gulp of water and the far-off moan of wind.

“Who was that lady?” the little girl will say, and I will settle her in my lap.

She is the pirate queen, Granuaile, who barges in, hungry and battle-worn, leaving her sword to glint by the fire
.

She is the sea-woman, Muirgen, who transforms from the ocean at night, to steal one last look at her sleeping human children
.

“She,” I will say, “was my mother.”

First, I thank my parents, Thomas and Ann Carey, for their generosity, patience, and humor, as well as the literal and figurative support they have given me during the writing of this novel. And my brother, Tommy, for being another artist, thus deflecting their frustrations.

I am grateful to the following for tea, shelter, palm readings, constructive criticism, personal loans, faith, and, in one fashion or another, for giving me the island I fell in love with:

Bernard and Mary Loughlin of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Ireland; The Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers; the staff and faculty of Vermont College; the Islanders; Dana Brigham and Gang at Brookline Booksmith; Alan Paciorek, Sandra Miller, Gary Miller, Matt Swig, Justin Barkley, Noreen Ryan, Terry Byrne, Bridgid Walsh; Sara O'Keefe and her family; The Drisko Girls and Jim; Dr. Judith Robinson; Donald and Norah Alper; my agent, Elizabeth Ziemska; my editor, Jennifer Hershey; and my mentor, Douglas Glover.

Last, because it's our favorite spot, my Best Friend, Sascha.