Seven Tears into the Sea (25 page)

Nana made a calming motion with her hands. “I'm fine,” she said. “I'm simply not used to staying up so late.
How awkward that he thought me debilitated.”

Nana looked a little embarrassed, but that was all. My heartbeat slowed and I took a deep breath. I'd left Jesse …

“But I certainly need you now that you're here,” Nana was saying. “We're having a dark tea; not to be gloomy,” she assured me, “but to block out the gloom. The weather report says it will stay clear, but my sea horse never lies.”

Above my head the stained-glass oval hanging from the Inn's rafters spun in the breeze, but sunlight struck emerald, gold, and aqua beams from the mosaic, and the sky didn't look at all threatening.

Inside, the curtains were drawn and the candles were lighted. The Hobbits were playing a complex card game in the parlor and were eager to discuss my reign. I curtsied and tried to joke, but I couldn't stop thinking of Jesse.

Zack would have his revenge. I knew it. Didn't Siena Bay have a sheriff? Why hadn't he shown up and locked Zack away?

“We're pretty burned out, too,” Arnold said, so I guess he didn't see my expression as queenly. “The car's packed, and we're leaving right after tea.”

My car had a flat tire, and I wasn't about to change it in the rain. But maybe the storm would hold off until I got home.

“Last free meal till we reach the dorm.” Myra gave me a worn grin.

We put out a huge spread for tea and did it early. I felt confined and oppressed by the drawn curtains. When tea was finished, I pleaded for permission to open them. Nana agreed, grudgingly, and when I pulled them back, I saw why.

Thunder clouds crowded the horizon and wind sent a chair skidding across the patio.

“Thelma, we forgot to get the furniture under cover,” Nana said.

“We'll help you, Mrs. Cook,” Arnold offered, and all four Hobbits trooped outside with Thelma in the lead.

I stayed inside with Nana.

“This has the look of a serious storm,” she said. “We may lose power. It might be best for you to stay.”

The clouds had turned almost black. They scudded along so fast I could see them move. Waves towered a glassy gray then hammered the beach.

The Hobbits and Thelma staggered against the wind as they carried the chairs around to the side of the Inn.

“Jesse was going to come over,” I told Nana, and I hoped it was true. “I don't know where he'll go in this storm.”

“Oh Gwennie, surely—”

“He had a fight with Zack,” I told her. “He—Zack—put Gumbo in a fishing net and tied her up and—”

Nana patted my shoulder and gave a deep sigh. “All right, then. But be careful.”

As soon as she said it, there was a crash against the front window.

All of us rushed to peer out through the pelting rain. Driven by the wind, an orange-eyed gull had smashed into the casement window. Quite dead, it lay on the patio with its neck broken.

I wore Nana's navy blue slicker home, head bent against the rain.

Please let him be okay,
I chanted in my mind.
Please take care of him.

I tried to believe Zack's threat against the sea lions was only a humiliated boy striking out, and this sudden storm was only the sort that happened all the time. It couldn't be the violent tempest caused by the shedding of a selkie's blood. I'd be a fool to believe such a thing. I had no solid proof Jesse was a selkie, but every tendon and nerve pulled tight in me as if I did.

Hoping no one was watching from the Inn, I ran out on the Point and listened. Wind ripped the hood back from my head, and I closed my eyes, trying to hear past the screeching wind and the rocking squeak of the wooden fence. I walked to the head of the path down to the cove and leaned over, straining to hear.

A sudden gust caught the tail of my slicker and blew me. I slipped, got a slanted view of the path to my right and a rock ahead of me, but I didn't fall. I sat down hard,
slipped a few inches, and closed my eyes. No seals called in panic from down below. Maybe they'd sensed the danger and gone.

I could go home.

I trudged through the near-darkness, slashed by wind and rain, wishing I'd left on the lights. I was almost to the cottage when I heard shouting from the beach.

Wind snatched their words, but I thought I saw Roscoe and Perch. Soaked more than rain could manage, they'd obviously been in a boat. And capsized.

I wanted to burst into my cottage and lock the dead bolt. I didn't want to hear what they were shouting, scared and pale, looking back toward Little Beach as if something was after them.

“Don't go down there!” Roscoe yelled. “He's got his dad's skinning knife. Jesus, he's killing everything!”

My mind stopped.

Killing.

No.

“It capsized our boat—”

“This big-ass seal, then the shark—”

Perch grimaced, on the verge of tears. “It's bleeding all over the beach.”

I realized I was holding both sides of my head. Covering my ears or steadying my brain, or both. But I felt detached, as if I hovered above my body, noticing they didn't ask for an ambulance or a ride somewhere.
Not that I could have given them one. My car was at Nana's with a flat tire. They quit staring at me and ran for the highway.

“—too late,” Roscoe screamed.

The storm took the rest of his words, but I wouldn't have believed them.

“Jesse!” I screamed as lightning flashed overhead.

I rushed down the driveway. Water lapped over it. I splashed, slipped, and then stumbled on toward the sand dunes. My hair was plastered to my head, and I could barely see past the rain.

Nothing
lay bleeding on the beach. Those ugly, awful liars. I heard my own panting as I ran down the beach, to the water, drenching myself to the knees as I squinted to make sure Jesse wasn't there, tossed on the waves.

He'd washed up, farther down the shore.

Naked and bleeding, he lay beside a seal skin that looked like a length of ruined black velvet.

Oh Jesse. I'd wanted proof, but not like this.

I believe, I believe, I believe it.

Was this some Celtic deity's way of convincing me he still ruled?

I fell on my knees beside Jesse.

“Gwennie, the shark took Zack. All the blood drew it, but Zack's dead.”

Dizziness threatened. First out of relief. Jesse was alive. He could talk. For a second I even felt sorry for
Zack, cruel as he'd been. But then I looked down.

“All the blood,” Jesse had said. All the blood was his.

Dark red and undiluted by the rain, it ran from a slash across his chest. I pressed both my hands over the wound. They weren't big enough to cover it.

“Gwen, stop. I'm … okay.”

He was
not
okay.

Could I run to Nana's for her car? Get him to a hospital? What would happen when they tried to type his blood, and God, was there time?

“I'll take you to the cottage,” I said. I didn't know how I'd carry him, but I knew I could.

“I can walk,” he said. “Take my skin.”

Mouth open, rain hammering on my head, I stared at it, half-awed, half-disgusted.

“It's the most important thing, if you want to help me—” he said.

I did. Every muscle fiber I'd ever trained and strained would obey me tonight. I grabbed the skin, wedged my shoulder beneath Jesse's, and we started home.

That night, candles took the place of electricity, and magic replaced medicine. On a blanket thrown on my wooden floor, Jesse told me to link my hands, side by side like the sunrise shell he'd given me, and rub my palms on his wound.

“Like the story,” he gasped.

But he'd never finished the story. I didn't know what to do, but I linked my hands together, lowered them on that awful wound, and I tried.

Tears started into his eyes from the pain, and I cried too. I was hurting him, helping him, both at once, and my heart would break if his pain didn't stop.

In only moments, it did. The blood beneath my hands grew less slick, then powdery, until only a bruise remained. I watched the pulse beat in his neck, making sure Jesse only slept.

Denial wouldn't work anymore. My heart had known from the beginning that Jesse was a selkie. My head had been more stubborn, but I was sitting on my floor, next to a man I'd healed with my own hands. A black skin lay beside him. His skin.

I gazed toward my living room window. That fierce storm had softened into a warm summer night as soon as his bleeding had stopped.

I could accept this enchantment or choose to be blind.

I took the afghan off my couch and covered him. My hand stroked his forehead again and again, recording each touch in my fingertips so I could hold the feeling forever.

When Jesse's brown eyes opened, he asked with purely human sarcasm, “
Now
do you believe?”

I silenced him with a kiss.

The kiss lasted. It had to. What if there was never another?

But finally I began searching for explanations only words could give me. Except I couldn't find them. I don't think they existed.

“I believe you're a selkie. And you always have been? Even that night?”

He nodded. “I told you. You called me with your tears.”

“But not this time.” I thought of the quiet cove, the mother sea lions, and how he'd appeared behind me, basking on a hot rock.

“No,” he said.

“Why?”

He took my hand, the hand that had healed him. He didn't hold it like a boyfriend this time. He was restraining me, as if I'd strike out.

“Don't be scared,” he said.

“I'm not!”

“You're going to be,” he said with a regretful laugh.

I waited, because maybe I wasn't so brave after all.

“We come ashore to mate,” he said.

I didn't pull away from him, because that wasn't the scary part. I could tell there was more coming. And it would be worse.

“Jesse?” I knew I had to ask, but I couldn't.

I had to see his face when he answered me.

I settled back on the blanket and touched his smooth golden cheek.

“The rhyme—it's at the center of this, right? That
‘mayhap seven years,' what does it mean? What does it
really
mean?”

Not what I think it does, please, Jesse.
This time I made him read my eyes.

His head dipped. He kissed the side of my jaw, and then he looked into my eyes.

“It's how often I can come back to you.”

He might as well have stabbed me too.

“No,” I said. “But if I—if we”—I closed my eyes to say it—“if I'm your mate, then you can stay. Right?”

“No. I can come back,” he said.

“No?” I cried as if he'd broken a rule. “I don't believe it. Seven years. That would mean, after this summer, I'd be twenty-four before I saw you again. Then, thirty-one”—I kept counting on my fingers—“thirty-eight, forty-five, fifty-two! Jesse!
Fifty-two
. If we had kids, they'd be grown. I would have wrinkles around my eyes from staring out to sea, watching for you. I could die, and you wouldn't hear of it for years.”

A flicker of uncertainty crossed his eyes, and I took it for hope.

“But you don't know. You're not sure, are you?”

“It's the way it will be, Gwen.”

“But you haven't done this before,” I said as a cold infusion rushed through my veins. “Have you?”

“Never, never!” He held me to his chest. It had been torn and I'd healed it, but what was happening to me
couldn't be healed. Even he couldn't stand looking at my eyes.

Please help me.
I appealed to God, the universe, anyone, or anything. And Jesse felt it and thought of something.

“I could try to stay,” he said. Desperate excitement edged his tone. “Hide my skin. Don't tell me where you put it.”

I went still, holding my breath. I thought of those woodcuttings that showed selkie wives staring out to sea. Children clung to their skirts, but the selkie wives turned their longing faces to the waves. Could I do that to Jesse?

Yes, I could,
a voice vowed in my head.

He'd offered to stay. I hadn't forced him.

“But I love you.” I was crying now for real, and my hands were shaking.

“And so, I'll stay.” His chin jerked upward, but even as it did, his eyes took in the ceiling, the walls, the closed door and windows.

I love you.

And so I'll stay.

So simple and so wrong.

I love you, so I'll let you go. I'll let you be who you really are.

That was the right answer. It would poison my life, but it was true.

I came up with excuses, with ways to cope. We could live in a house with a swimming pool. Or on an island.
Our house would have open walls so that the wind could blow through. I'd seen that in pictures of homes in Hawaii.

Before I could speak, Jesse clenched his fists.

“Burn my skin,” he demanded. “That way I could never go back.”

“Jesse, no.” I thought of lions in the zoo—caged.

“But I love you,” he said.

Wild celebration should have risen in me. In a way it did, but it made the torture worse.

“Gwen, you must destroy it. Otherwise, I'm too weak.” He looked furious as he went on. “I tried it last night. I decided to stay at the fire until dawn, not return to the grotto for my skin, not go into the water until I'd seen you again. And maybe if you'd been there, but you weren't and I gave in.”

Just like I “gave in” to breathing when he brought me to the surface after that long underwater kiss?

He had no choice.

“I'll always want to go back, but I want you more.”

For now, I thought. In time, he'd hate me.

“If you were going to go,” my words came rasping from my throat. “When—?”