Alice At Heart (28 page)

Undiline felt the bullet tear through her body and fell back, arching, gasping. Porter yelled her name, and suddenly his arms went around her. He knelt on the tilting deck, gathering her to him, trying to staunch the rush of blood from the wound, failing.

How human he saw she was then, dying in such an ordinary way. He begged her forgiveness, he told her he loved her, he raised his face to the wind and rain, he sobbed. And then he grasped the pistol as it slid across the deck near him, put it to his heart again, and pulled the trigger.

Lilith shivered as that sight came to her and held Undiline closer. Undiline sighed her last breath.
Save my son, Lilith. And never let him know how this was. Only let him know there was love
.

Lilith rocked Undiline in her arms, crying.
I swear to you. Only the love
.

Mara and Pearl screamed as the ocean suddenly rose up like a hand. The
Calm Meridian
capsized in a terrible crash of water and ripping wood. Undiline’s body was torn from Lilith’s arms. Lilith plunged as deeply as she could, kicking aside a tangle of rigging, singing out to her sisters.

Here, yes, we’re here
, they answered.

She linked hands with them deep beneath the rolling ocean and watched in horror as the yacht sank past them. They trailed it to the bottom. It struck with a sickening collapse, tearing apart at the midsection.

Lilith pointed.
There. There he is.

They pried torn planks aside and reached into the ruined cabin. Griffin floated inside, bleeding and badly hurt, yet faintly moving his broken arms. His dark young eyes looked straight at Lilith, and he pleaded with her to save his parents. She and her sisters cradled him in their arms and hushed him.

Remember only the love
, Lilith whispered in his mind.

And he began to forget everything else.

C.A. was nearly thirty years old
then, rough and ruined and elegant, roaming the waters bitterly, drinking, chasing illusions that could never match the affair he’d had with Mara as a college student. He mourned Porter’s death like a brother and spent days after the storm searching the wreckage for Porter’s and Undiline’s bodies, to no avail. Other Randolphs openly accused Lilith and her sisters of hiding something,
something
that would have explained the reckless journey that had killed the family’s brightest scion and put his heir, four-year-old Griffin, in a Savannah hospital. Griffin had been found by fishermen on the shores of Bellemeade. He could remember almost nothing about the storm or his parents’ reasons for sailing in it. Nor could he remember having visited Sainte’s Point, or why.

Submerged in grief, Lilith and her sisters revealed nothing, ignored the accusations, and refused to answer the questions.

C.A. roared into the cove at Sainte’s Point alone in a speedboat one cold autumn afternoon and strode up the pathway from the docks. Dark-haired, dressed in rough-weather wool and rubber boots, a beard shadow darkening his harsh expression and haunted dark eyes, he looked dangerous.

“He’s my problem,” Mara said quietly, and went out to meet him alone.

It was the first time they’d spoken face to face in years. He halted before her, and the look they traded seethed with agonized defenses. “Where are Porter’s and Undiline’s bodies?” he demanded.

Mara exhaled slowly. “You accuse us as well? Are you no smarter than your relatives?”

“Don’t play your goddamn games with me. I’m not a kid, anymore.”

“Don’t stand here hating me and my sisters for miseries your cousin brought on mine.” In a rush of anger and pain, she leaned close. “
Porter killed her
.” C.A.’s shoulders sagged. Mara put a trembling hand to her heart as he bowed his head.

He suspected the truth, and he believed her. C.A.’s eyes gleamed with tears. “She should never have lied to him about what she was.”

“What should she have said about herself, C.A.? What should she have called herself? What was she—what am I and my sisters? Circus freaks? A figment of decent, ordinary human beings’ imaginations? No. We’re a wonder. We’re a marvel. Porter saw her as she really was, and he couldn’t accept her, so he destroyed her.” Mara stepped closer. Tears slid down her face. “There are many ways to exist, C.A. Many ways to love and be loved. Many ways to have your heart broken. Do I horrify you? Do you consider me a monster, a circus freak, too?”

“I consider you a miracle at heart and a monster in your soul.”

“Would you kill me if you could?”

“No.” He looked down at her with a furious love that tore her apart. “I’d kill myself.”

She shivered. When words came, she said softly, “If you ever do that, I shall hate you for eternity.” He reached for her but she pulled away. “Now you understand what happened to Porter and Undiline.” She told him everything, and when she finished, they swayed together for one brief moment of tenderness. She clutched his shoulders and whispered brokenly in his ear. “Do you ever want your family to know how they really died? Do you want some heavy-fingered coroner to pry the bullets out of their bodies? Do you want Griffin to grow up knowing his father shot his mother and then killed himself?”

“No.” C.A.’s voice was a guttural rasp of emotion.

She stepped back from him. He looked as ruined as she. “Then that is a secret you must help us keep.”

“
Where are their bodies
?”

Mara gazed up at him with quiet resolve. “By the water.”

Lilith, Mara, Pearl, and C.A.
stood beside the dais of Italian marble facing BellemeadeBay and the mainland. The faint outline of Randolph Cottage could be seen on the spit of sand where the continent seemed to turn a corner away from the world. The sky was blue, as if a storm had never occurred, but the island’s forest seeped its grief, and the earth around the dais had been churned into sandy mud.

“We wrapped them in lace duvets and gold silk before we buried them,” Pearl said tearfully.

C.A. dropped to one knee and laid a hand on the large dais. The sisters turned their heads as he prayed silently. But when he stood, his face was hard. “Stay away from Griffin.”

“Oh, please, no—” Pearl began.

“That’s not fair,” Mara said, then bit her tongue.

“Stay away from him, or I swear to God I’ll take him to the other side of the world and never bring him back.”

Lilith said as calmly as she could, “Please let us help raise him. You know he’s not like ordinary children. Without us, he’ll forget who he really is. That’s never what I intended.”

“His own mother wanted him to be
normal
. I’ll make sure he grows up thinking he’s like anyone else.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I said,
Stay away from him
.”

Lilith searched his face but saw only bitter devotion.

Mara asked hoarsely, “Is this the pound of flesh you have to take? Then punish me, not my sisters.”

“I just want Griffin to forget you all,” C.A. said between gritted teeth. “I want to forget you myself.” He and Mara traded bitter looks. He walked into the forest.

The sisters stood there by Undiline and Porter’s secret grave. The past closed over them, and the future became a dull vision. In the grave, they had also buried their own youth, the memories of children who would never be, their father’s charm, their mother’s smile, Griffin’s magic, Joan Riley’s innocence, and the dead baby daughter they believed she had borne, yet another lost child.

“We saved Griffin, and only Griffin,” Pearl whispered. “How will we ever tell him?”

In that moment, Lilith lost the ability to sing.

“Without a miracle, we won’t,” she said.

26

They say there are tragic water spirits who sing to passing boatmen. Yet as anyone who has heard one of us singing can tell you, there is nothing tragic about the music of the water. It is the singing, not the silence, that matters.

—Lilith

Thirty-five years later, Griffin bowed his head over the gun, which he held on his cupped palms, like an offering, listening to its terrible song. I saw the resignation on his face. He did not doubt the story Lilith had told us. Neither did I. My head ached, and my body was sore and bruised. I watched Griffin with a quiet mewl of devotion inside me. We were like children, comforting each other in the sharing of grief.

Hurts me.

Hurts me, too.

Lilith laid a hand on his bare shoulder. He looked like a lost wayfarer in drying trousers, the scars on his body blue in the sunlight, his dark eyes haunted. “All these years we didn’t know how to tell you,” she said, “or how you’d react. We feared the truth might destroy you. Without Alice’s influence, I think it would have.”

He nodded and raised those dark eyes to hers, then to C.A.’s face.

“I never wanted you to know how they died,” C.A. admitted hoarsely. “I thought it’d be better if you forgot everything—including how different you were.”

“I see now,” Lilith added, “that our silence did you no good. Alice opened us all to our fate again. Whatever that may be—to love and love passionately and risk the truth is what we must do. What you must do, too.”

Griffin slid an arm around me, and I kissed him. Lilith touched my face, then stroked a fingertip over the white gauze that covered my temple. “You, my dear Alice, are our miracle.”

Everything I might have said to apologize to her and the sisters was locked inside me. Happiness and sorrow, shock and relief, the deepest love for Lilith, Mara, Pearl, and Griffin. I had done the right thing. Something larger than me existed, but I could not name it yet.

“I don’t know . . . ” I attempted, then stopped. “I don’t know,” I could only conclude. I huddled beside Griffin with my feet curled and a soft mauve blanket wrapped around me.

My sisters, along with Riyad, C.A., and Barret, sat around us on the stern deck of the
Lorelei
, wrapped in other light blankets brought out by anxious Tanglewoods. My sisters were still naked beneath their blankets, and so was Riyad, silver-haired and regal with his blanket discreetly wound around his hips. He stood behind Lilith on the deck and kept the fingers of one hand entwined lightly in the long drying curls at the top of her head. A maroon sunset washed over the ocean and the somber faces around me. I looked from Lilith to Griffin.
How do I help him?

Patience.

Pearl clutched Barret’s hand and said tearfully, “We saved the only child we could that day.”

Mara met my gaze with a troubled frown. “The only one we
knew
about. You do understand that we would have helped you, too?”

I inclined my head. “I have no doubt you’d have terrorized all the Rileys and taken me.”

Mara nodded. She drew a little closer to C.A., who had taken a position just behind her, close enough for her to lean back into his embrace, which she did. Her chopped hair fluttered around her face, and there was nothing vain or decorous about her at the moment. She seemed to have landed like a bedraggled butterfly inside C.A.’s arms, and he barely breathed.

We make a special and beautiful kind of people
, I thought, and suddenly I knew what to do. I knelt in front of Griffin and rested my hands atop the gun on his palms. I searched his eyes and saw the understanding there.
The people who loved us then and love us now all want us to live in peace and joy.

He nodded. We stood and walked to the bow of the boat.

He held the gun up for a moment, then dropped it into the ocean.

We watched it disappear.

That night the house
at Sainte’s Point mourned with renewed passion. Lilith and Riyad, Pearl and Barret, Mara and C.A., Griffin and me. I woke in the darkness of my suite and listened to the soft songs of redemption, forgiveness, poignant acceptance, and change. The pillow beside me was empty. I rose gingerly on one elbow.

In the moonlight, I saw the open French doors to the private garden. Griffin leaned there, his somber face turned up to the moonlight. I slid from the big bed and went to him. He welcomed me within the curve of his arm, and we stood together in the moonlight, naked and close.

“Now we learn how to forgive and forget,” he said.

“Now we learn how to sing and remember,” I replied.

He touched my face. We walked outside and through the forest, past the Bonavendier cemetery streaked in pale golden moonshine to the island’s bayside shore, where the marble dais glistened in the ethereal white light. We sat down beside it.

“I have to forgive him,” he said finally. He let tears come then, and I leaned against him with one hand tucked inside his elbow and the other laid flat on the cool stone, alongside his.

Sing to your man. Soothe him and be soothed
, a soft voice whispered to me, growing fainter as it traveled out beyond the Point Trench, into the abyss, back into fantasy.

I bowed my head. Yes, Melasine.

27

The more pragmatic among Water People insist that no finned ancestors ever existed and certainly don’t exist now, and that variations in our skills and physiology are mere vagaries, easily explained by random intermingling among our kind. I will not get into any wilder claims, here.

—Lilith

We sat in the sunroom with Lilith. I read from a book some Bonavendier, long having disappeared into another kind of sea, had written. “It is not necessary,” I recited, “to prove where we Water People began, or whether we owe our origins to beings as gossamer as Angels. No more than a grain of sand can comprehend the earth that birthed it, nor a single drop of water imagine its place in a summer cloud. It is simple enough to cherish the special shore we inhabit and to return the rain as a gift to the land. To celebrate the Belonging of both.”

Griffin turned his somber gaze from Melasine’s portrait to me. “What would you think of marrying a pirate?”

I closed the book, got up, took his face between my hands, bent down, and kissed him. “A privateer,” I corrected.