False Mermaid (3 page)

She reached into her pocket for the knot of green hazel Cormac Maguire had woven for her on their last evening together, at a place called Loughnabrone. Lake of Sorrows. A place where a number of people had died, where she had nearly lost her own life. She did not dwell on that thought. What she remembered most clearly from that awful day was the expression on Cormac’s face when he saw her hands, her clothes covered in blood. And the relief that washed over his features when she said:
Not mine. It’s not my blood
.

Swells of longing swept through her. It was just as she had feared that day out on the bog, that upon leaving Cormac she would start to see him everywhere.
Stop
. She was going to drive herself mad, thinking like this. And yet it was really because of him that she was on this plane, heading back home again. The time they’d spent together these last fourteen months made her question whether she’d done all she could for Tríona. Without Cormac, maybe she’d still be working away in Dublin, trying to avoid thinking about what had driven her there. But working beside him, she had been carried along into stories of people whose lives had ended in grief. They were all real to her, though she had become acquainted with them only in death. And most of all there was the red-haired girl, the
cailín rua,
that nameless, decapitated creature from the Irish boglands who had set everything back in motion. It was the
cailín rua
whose fierce and unending suit for justice had set Nora’s own foot again on the path she never should have left. As deeply as she’d become involved in the stories of the bog people, whose stories she had helped to reconstruct, she had come to realize that they were all just stand-ins. Behind everything, it was Tríona’s unfinished story that kept catching at her conscience, pulling her back into places she did not wish to go.

Cormac had not asked her to remain in Ireland. On the contrary, he said he understood why she had to make this trip—but how could he
begin to understand, when there was so much she had deliberately kept from him? She had explained what happened to Tríona—the bare facts of the murder, at least—and confessed her suspicions about her brother-in-law, Peter Hallett. But the thought of spelling out all the rest of it—trying to find words to explain about the rift with her parents, about her young niece, Elizabeth, not to mention the harrowing dreams and doubts about her own grip on reality—all of that was more than she had been able to face in her evolving relationship with Cormac.

She must remember Elizabeth. How long would the innocence of childhood protect her, how long would it be before Elizabeth had to navigate the same minefields with her father that Tríona had tried to cross? No matter how many different ways Nora thought about the situation, it always came down to a final question: What was she prepared to sacrifice to see that tragedy did not repeat itself?

This time she would not fly away to Ireland when things got difficult—and they would get difficult; there was no point in deceiving herself. She felt the power of the jet engines only a few feet away, anticipating the dreadful roar they would make at touchdown, trying to reverse their own lethal momentum. She felt the last stomach-churning lift just before the huge wheels skidded onto the tarmac and understood that there was no reverse, no slowing down, no stopping now.

Rain was nothing new in Seattle. Usually it was just damp and misty, but today the clouds had begun to pile up in varying shades of black, letting down a hard rain all day long. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hallett slung her heavy backpack into the empty back seat in the yellow mini-bus, and sat down beside it, pushing the wet hair out of her face and watching the water streak against the windows, turned to shadowy mirrors by the strange mid-afternoon darkness. As she stared at her reflection—the high forehead, the sprinkling of freckles, the wavy red hair now plastered to her head and shoulders—she wondered what it was, exactly, that made people stare at her. To her own eyes, nothing stood out. But there must be something. She could see it in the way they looked at her. Maybe she should just learn to ignore it. Being different wasn’t so terrible. It was just a fact, like having freckles or red hair.

It wasn’t just the rainstorm that set this day apart. For the past week, she’d been going to day camp at the art museum downtown. Her dad’s idea—probably just a way to keep her out from underfoot while he was busy. Today, her last day of camp, was also their last day in Seattle. Tomorrow she and her dad were moving back to Minnesota.

Elizabeth wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that yet. The moving part might not be so bad—her grandparents lived in Saint Paul, and it was a long time since she’d seen them. It was the other part that made her feel strange, about her dad getting married again. Why did he have to get married? Weren’t things all right as they were? When she thought about all that, it seemed like something was caught in her throat, and she couldn’t seem to swallow. She should have known something was up when he started asking what she thought of Miranda. What was she supposed to say? She couldn’t tell him the truth, so she just said something stupid about how pretty Miranda was. That wasn’t a lie. But how could it not bother him when the look in Miranda’s eyes didn’t match her perfect, pasted-on smile? Elizabeth wondered why her dad didn’t notice things like that. Maybe he couldn’t see it.

Miranda was Uncle Marc’s sister. Elizabeth had always thought of
him as her uncle, even though they weren’t really related—Marc was her dad’s best friend. He would have been her uncle if he’d married Aunt Nora, but something had happened, grown-up stuff nobody would talk about. Now Marc was going to be her uncle anyway, sort of.

Miranda was already back at their old house in Saint Paul—working on the wedding trip, she said, like it was a real job or something. Miranda had a real job—an event planner, whatever that was—but she never seemed to work. She seemed to like hanging out at their house a lot more than working.

The ride out to the island took a while, and the rain had begun to diminish as the mini-bus wended its way through the island’s curving roads and cul-de-sacs. When it pulled up beside their driveway, Elizabeth hopped out, hoping she could make it to the house before the rain started again. The driveway snaked from the main road along a crooked shoreline through spruce trees and white pines whose fallen needles made thick beds on either side of the road. Elizabeth felt the heavy backpack pounding against her as she tried to walk quickly.

A wild gust blew up and rain began to fall in sheets around her, pushing her forward, making it difficult to walk upright. She ducked under a pine tree to wait until the rain subsided. Among the books in her pack was one she had stolen from the public library two weeks ago. She had never stolen anything before and now felt pangs of conscience, remembering how her fingers had trembled as she removed the crinkly plastic jacket and substituted one of her own books instead. By the time the library figured it out, she would be gone. Of course they had library books in Saint Paul, but they might not have this one. She could not leave it behind.

She zipped open her backpack and took out the stolen book.
The Selkie’s Child
. A picture book, really, meant for little kids. But she had come across it by accident in the returned book bin, and found the picture on the cover irresistible. The story told of a fisherman taking refuge on an island during a storm. The next morning, climbing on the rocks, he happened to catch sight of a beautiful fair-haired selkie as she was shedding her sealskin and taking human form. He fell in love with her, and made up his mind to steal her sealskin, which meant she could not return to the sea. He took her home with him, and for a while they were happy. They had a child, a boy named Dónal. As Dónal grew, he could see that his mother was troubled. For days on end, she would weep and stare out at the sea. Sometimes she would sing in a low voice, in a language he could not
understand. He began to hear whispers in the village that his mother was one of the seal folk, and she wept because she was missing her own people in the Land Under Wave. One day Dónal found a bundle of sealskin in the rafters of their house, and showed it to his mother. He didn’t understand the change that came over her. She snatched the bundle from his hands and disappeared over the sea rocks. When she didn’t come home, Dónal and his father had bread and tea for their supper. His mother had been gone for a few weeks when Dónal thought he saw her, one stormy day, floating on the waves at the mouth of the sea. He could have sworn that she raised one hand, as if to wave good-bye, and then she disappeared. He called her name, and squinted against the wind, but no one was there. From that day until he was an old, old man, he swore he had seen his mother’s bright head bobbing beyond the rocks at the edge of the sea.

Elizabeth closed the book and held it to her, aware of the new, slightly foreign tenderness of the skin beneath her clothes, wondering what it felt like to shed your outer shell and become something new. She didn’t fully understand why she couldn’t let go of this book; all she knew was that the words and pictures made her feel strange and sad, and that returning it to the library was out of the question.

From her refuge under the tree, she could see out into Useless Bay. Such sad names—Useless Bay, Deception Pass, Cape Disappointment—what were they looking for, the people who had put those names on the map? To her, this bay was anything but useless; at low tide, its beaches were studded with anemones, bright starfish, and sand dollars. She would miss the swirling patterns in the sand, the scuttling crabs and tiny freshwater streams and rivulets that trickled down from higher ground. She had studied the map of North America. Minnesota was as far from the ocean as you could get. Her dad said their house in Saint Paul was on the Mississippi River—but what good was that? A river wasn’t at all the same.

Through a curtain of mist, she could see a small shape moving far out in the bay—a seal, floating on its back, tasting the raindrops. The same one that came nearly every day, watching from a distance as she walked the beachfront. Sometimes she waved, and the seal would raise a flipper or dip its head in greeting. At least that was how it seemed. Mostly they just looked at each other. She knew it was the same seal from the mark on its face, an irregular dark spot like a star that covered its missing eye. Once she had even waded out into the water, and the seal had come right up to her. But when she reached out her hand, it had turned and
backed away. She liked to imagine there was a communication between them, the understanding of two silent creatures, alone together. She had resisted the urge to give it any sort of a name, preferring to think that it already had one—something strange and beautiful in its own language. Seals did have their own language; Elizabeth had heard them calling to each other. An ordinary human name might be a bit insulting. As the seal ducked under the water’s surface, she felt an uncomfortable tightness in her throat. And suddenly her face felt hot, as she remembered an incident from earlier in the day. Normally she would have taken her lunch outside, but they’d been forced to stay inside the museum because of the rain. She was sitting alone—reading, as usual—when a group of girls walked by. Shelby Cooper and Nicole Buckley and some others. Girls like Shelby and Nicole and all their Crombie Zombie friends usually made a point of avoiding her, but today they’d been staring and whispering behind their hands. She had heard Shelby’s hushed voice as they passed by: “No, it’s true—I swear to God. Her mother is—”

The last word dropped to an inaudible whisper, and the girls moved closer together, covering their mouths and laughing nervously.

Nicole said: “If you don’t believe us, we’ll show you. It’s all on the Internet.”

Elizabeth knew her mother had been killed in a car accident when she was six. Why should that be some big secret? She felt a little sick, suddenly realizing that she didn’t know anything about the accident. Nobody ever came right out and told her what had happened. All she remembered was a series of strange, endless days where conversation seemed to be taking place far above her head, hushed voices stopping abruptly whenever she came near. At one point, she overheard something about a car. If she asked when her mother was coming home, her father would just look pained and turn away. One thing she did remember distinctly was Aunt Nora taking her aside one day, asking if she understood that her mother was not coming home. If she knew what it meant when someone died. Elizabeth thought about the baby bird she and Nora had found on the sidewalk once. She asked whether it was like that, and Nora said it was. Elizabeth had nodded then, and said she did understand, but it was a lie. She hadn’t understood anything at all. Any tears she had shed that day had been for the bird. She could still remember the downy softness of its breast, the wrinkled lids on the tiny eyes.

She couldn’t even remember her mother’s face anymore. In five years,
the picture in her head had faded away until it was only a hazy impression, a shape without features. She did remember a few things: hiding in a closet, face pressed into clothes of rough wool and soft fur, the thrill of being discovered, gathered up and rocked by someone with a low voice, humming a tune that traveled through her bones. She remembered letting her fingers slide through long, smooth hair that smelled faintly of soap, drifting to sleep on whispered stories about fantastic creatures, half animal, half human. The stories themselves had mostly slipped away, but sometimes an unfamiliar word or the ghost of a scent could conjure up that strange mixture of sadness and contentment she had felt lying in bed and listening, fighting to stay awake.

Sometimes she could see her mother’s face, but only when she was dreaming. One particular dream came over and over again. A bell would ring, and she would answer the door to find a red-haired stranger on the front steps of their house. Even though the face was unfamiliar, somehow she knew this smiling visitor was her mother. That’s the way dreams were. Her mother would take her hand and walk with her down to a rocky beach, where they stepped into the water, wading out deeper and deeper, past floating seaweed and foam until the ground disappeared from under their feet and the waves pulled them under. Then came the big surprise: in dreams she could breathe as easily underwater as in the air above. It wasn’t even cold. Of course she knew it was only a dream. But upon waking she felt half sick with longing, wishing it could be true.