The Mermaids Singing (17 page)

“I won't be staying, Clee,” Eamon said. “We need Marcus on the boat. Paddy and Seamus haven't come in yet and they took the curragh out this morning.”

“They're right eejits going out before a storm,” Marcus said. He threw his cigarette in the fire and got up to put his coat on. Grace and the children were crowded at the kitchen doorway, quiet so they wouldn't be sent from the room.

“Ah, you know Paddy,” Eamon said. “He thinks if he's with his boy nothing can drown him.”

“You kids get upstairs now,” Clíona said, and they groaned but trudged up, the twins with hunks of cake in their trouser pockets. Grace stayed behind.

“Seamus will be all right,” Grace said to Eamon, with an assured tone. He took it as a question.

“Don't worry yourself, girl,” he said. “The O'Flahertys have got the mermaids on their side, in the odd case God isn't watching.”

“Mind that talk,” Clíona said, pushing Marcus out the door. “Mind yourselves as well.” She kissed her husband's cheek roughly. Grace watched the men from the window, two figures swallowed in a bullet-spray of rain.

 

Grace slept after hours of waiting, and dreamed of a dark-haired mermaid under a storm of water, her breasts mapped with green veins. She'd trapped Seamus and was kissing him, blowing water into his lungs. She had his penis gripped in her webbed fingers, and when he ejaculated black foam, she let him go. He sank, dead and plump with water, toward the rocky bottom.

Grace woke and heard voices in the sitting room. From the stairway she saw Seamus laid out on the sofa, Clíona tucking blankets around his bare chest. Marcus, Eamon, and two other men were standing, dripping on the carpet, behind her.

“Why did you not take him to hospital?” Clíona was saying. “He'll have hypothermia after being in that water.”

“We couldn't risk going to Galway in this storm,” Marcus said. “Besides, feel him yourself. He's not even cold, sure, he's not.” Clíona pressed her palms against Seamus's head, hands, and feet.

“Jesus in Heaven,” she said, covering him up again. “This boy's blessed by angels if any of us are.”

“More than his father, sure,” Eamon said, and the lot of them crossed themselves.

“Is he dead?” Grace said, and they all turned to her. She walked
to the sofa, looking at Seamus's moon-white face against the blankets.

“He's all right, child,” Clíona said. She touched Grace's arm briefly, then took her hand away to fuss with her own bathrobe.

“I mean his father,” Grace said. “Is he dead?”

“Shush,” Clíona said, and the men backed into the kitchen for their tea. “The sea took him, yes.”

Grace sat down on the floor and watched Seamus breathing.

“Poor Shamie,” Clíona said softly. “He's no family now.” She went to put on the kettle for the men.

Grace slid her arm under the blankets and took Seamus's hand. It was as hot as ever, and she stayed there, gripping it, until he woke up and saw her.

 

Grace volunteered to mind Tommy at home during Paddy O'Flaherty's memorial Mass. She didn't want to be there, the one outsider in a family of mourners. Seamus's grief was like Michael's—it made her a stranger. She couldn't help wondering if he would turn to her now, as Michael had after his father's affair, and let her take advantage of it. He'd better hurry, she thought, because she was leaving. She was determined to remake herself, into a being independent from any race or family. Like Granuaile, who took her father's and husband's kingdoms and made them into her own.

Grace had been taking money from the hotel register, twenty pounds a day, whenever she dropped by to relieve her mother for lunch. Her own version of piracy. In another month, she'd have enough for a plane ticket to Boston, which would be the starting point. Anything was possible, she believed, once she was away from this island.

When she went to Seamus's house late that night it was to take his grief and turn it into lust. She felt sorry for him, she knew how much he loved his father, but sympathy made her feel useless. She preferred manipulation.

But when she arrived, he was not surprised, nor did he act like
he was giving in. He'd been expecting her, and undressed her by candlelight in his room, as though he'd done it a dozen times before. Grace felt shy, for the first time she could remember. She hesitated from taking his clothes off, so he did it himself.

“It's not my first time,” Grace said, warning him.

“I know,” said Seamus, and he didn't stop. He swept her hair back from her collarbone and took a long look down her body.

“Why now?” Grace said, fishing for assurance. “What were you waiting for?” She couldn't decide between the excitement of him looking at her and the disappointment that she wasn't initiating it. “Wait!” she felt like yelling. She wished she could rewind to the beginning and rip his clothes off.

“I wanted you to love me,” Seamus said, his hands in her hair. He didn't seem broken or even like he was giving anything up. It was quite a confession, Grace thought, to voice so casually.

“I do love you,” she said, happy to assert something. He kissed her, his mouth like warm tea on her tongue, and her legs rippled like water weeds.

“No, you don't,” he whispered, easing her back on the bed. His body over her was blue-white, his muscles like shadows in a full moon. He held her hands up by the pillows, keeping his eyes level with hers, and he watched her, not blinking, as he slid between her legs. He stayed motionless until she couldn't stand it, her insides screaming. She lifted him off the bed with her hips. He moved slowly then, slower than Michael had ever managed, and every feeling he raked out of her was delayed, stretched over a torturous space of time. She pulled at his back, but she still felt like he wasn't close enough. She wanted more of him, his whole body, inside her.

“You were there,” he whispered. She arched her neck, trying not to gasp.

“What?”

“You were there, in the water. When my father was pulled down. I lost hold of him and dove, and you were there—waiting for me.”

“I wasn't,” Grace said. Her orgasm was backtracking, building up stronger just when she thought it had finished. His face hovered above her like a wet moon. She kissed him, filling his mouth with her tongue, and her whimpering echoed in his throat.

When it was over, the slickness on their bellies already beginning to congeal and pinch like sunburn, she noticed the hot tears on her face and thought they had fallen from him. But she looked, and he wasn't the one crying.

I'm thinking about Gráinne—as I do all day every day—when Liam brings her into the hotel, sopping wet and blood running over her eye.

“What's happened?” I say, rushing out from behind the desk. I put my handkerchief over a gash in her forehead.

“She slipped on the rocks when we were swimming,” Liam says. He's shakier than she is, though he's trying to look as if he's holding her up.

“It's nothing,” Gráinne says, but she looks surprised to see my hanky soaked with blood.

I bring her into the house and ring Bernie, the island nurse, but her daughter tells me she's on the mainland for the day, so I take out the first aid kit and clean the wound, which is deep enough to need stitches. Gráinne looks frightened when I thread the needle.

“You can't do that,” she says. “I need to go to a hospital.”

“Nonsense,” I say, preparing a syringe with a local anesthetic. “I've stitched that boy beside you in three places. I know what I'm doing.” Gráinne doesn't look as though she believes me, but Liam tries to reassure her. He shows her the faint scars on his leg and the one under his overgrown bang.

“Nana's as good as any doctor,” he says.

“And less expensive,” I say.

“What if it gets infected?” she says.

“Stop your whining,” I say. “I wouldn't let that pretty head of yours go septic.” Once she's gotten the local, she keeps straining her eyes up, checking on me.

“Am I hurting you?” I say.

“No,” she says, grudgingly, as if she'd prefer this without the painkiller, if it meant she could be mad at me.

I stitch the wound up small and neat, so she won't have a big mark on her forehead. It's up by her hairline, and once that shearing of hers grows in, the scar will be hidden well enough.

“Why do
you
know how to do this?” she says. I ignore her superior tone.

“I help the nurse on the odd day,” I say. “I wanted to go into medicine myself once, and I've never lost interest in it, I suppose.”

“If you wanted to be a nurse, how'd you end up a maid and a hotel clerk?” Gráinne snaps.

“I had your mother younger than I'd planned,” I say. I show her the neat black line in the hand mirror. It will bruise up soon, but the blood's gone. I start bandaging her forehead.

“My mother thought you had no ambition,” Gráinne says—softly though, as if she knows how bad it sounds.

“Did she tell you that?” I say.

“Once,” Gráinne says. “When I asked about you.” Liam's passing me the sticking plasters, looking uncomfortable, as if he's afraid of intruding.

“Your mother didn't think much of how I turned out, it's true,” I say.

“Didn't you tell her, though,” Gráinne says, “that you wanted to be more?” I'm finished, so I turn away from her, gather up the papers and the bloody gauze.

“I'm not ashamed of who I am, Gráinne,” I say. “And I didn't tell Grace any such thing, because I never wanted her to think she'd held me back. That wouldn't have been fair to her.” What would happen if I told Gráinne everything? That I'd started out a bad mother, that I'd hated that fierce little baby for stealing my chance in life.

“Maybe if you'd told her the truth, she would have liked you better,” Gráinne says fiercely.

“There's more to it than that, sure,” I say.

“What?” Gráinne yells. “What more?”

“Not now, Gráinne,” I say. She storms off, sending her chair crashing on the limo, thumping up the stairs and slamming the door so hard the pots rattle on their hooks in the kitchen. All this banging around, it's like living with my daughter again.

Liam looks at me apologetically.

“I guess it's confusing,” he says. “When you don't know the whole story.”

“Yes,” I say. “It most definitely is.” I don't know the whole story myself, and what I do know, I'd not have the easiest time explaining.

It is at night, now, when Marcus is sleeping, that I practice what I would say to Gráinne if I could:

I made mistakes, compromises followed
.

The best intentions sometimes have the worst outcome
.

Life's defining moments never come at a person singly, but rush at you two or three at a time
.

If I could have laid my life out one crisis at a time, I am sure I could have handled them all. As it happened, though, I always missed
something. It was in this way that I lost my daughter, not all at once, but step by step through the years.

It was just after Seamus's father died that my own father was struck with the illness he never recovered from. Since he had stopped fishing five years before, Da had lived a quiet life. He insisted on staying alone in the house where he was born, even though I thought he'd be more comfortable with Marcus and myself. During the days he tended the sheep and cattle, and at five o'clock every evening, he put on his waistcoat and went to the pub. He sat at the corner of the bar with the three men he'd fished with for fifty years, drinking Guinness slowly until his eyes clouded; then he walked home alone over the dark pitted roads. Da's was the lonely life of most older island men, but he didn't think himself lonely. He thought himself patient; he was waiting in the only way he knew how. Waiting for the day when he would join my mother.

We never found out for sure what was wrong with my father, because he refused to see the doctor. I myself suspected kidney failure, and at first I was angry because I knew he could prolong his life with dialysis. My father was old-fashioned and fatalistic; if it was his time to go so be it, he wouldn't be pumped along by a machine. (I myself have been accused of fatalism—by my daughter and by Gráinne. I often say if a thing is meant to be it will happen by the grace of God, though I'm not sure I believe that. Sometimes I think my faith is more of a habit than a reality.)

As it happened, while Grace and Seamus were falling in love, I was spending all my time nursing my dying father. At first he resented me; it is hard to keep your pride when your own daughter assists in all your bodily functions. But as he grew weaker he seemed to want me there. He liked me to sit at his bedside while he was sleeping.

My father was always an affectionate man; when I was a child it was his hands that comforted me in fever, his lap that I snuggled in before going off to bed. His body was the warm, solid body of a fisherman; his hands so thick with skin he could slide a knife a quarter
of an inch into his thumb before drawing blood. Yet he was gentle. My mother's body was soft, at least it looked soft, but she never touched us. Her breasts and stomach were not a place I thought to bury my head, but an armor that protected her from my touch.

One afternoon while I was sitting by my father, reading to him from a book of Patrick Kavanagh's poetry, he opened his eyes and looked at me with a peculiar expression. I could tell he wasn't about to ask me to help him to the toilet or make him a cup of tea.

“What is it, Da?” I said, closing the book.

“You put me in mind of your mother,” he said, and I was taken aback. He rarely mentioned her; I think he missed her as much then as the day she died and it pained him to speak of it.

“It's Maeve who takes after Mum,” I said. Maeve had her gold hair and amber eyes which had always gotten the men's attention.

“It's not your head I'm thinking of,” my father said. “She's there in your manner. Your voice. The way you read that poetry.”

Am I so cold? I thought. That was my mother's manner, frosty, and her voice had been the harsh angry music of a woman who hated her life.

“Mum had the Northern accent, Da,” I said. I thought maybe his mind was failing.

“It's not the accent,” he said, frustrated. He let it go, scowling and turning his face away.

I shouldn't have argued with him, I knew his intention was to compliment me. He saw my mother differently than I had. After all those years of believing my mother a cold, unforgiving woman, it frightened me to hear myself likened to her. For the first time I had the notion that my father had seen my real mother, and I her façade, rather than the other way around. Perhaps I had merely misunderstood her, just as I believed that Grace misunderstood me.

My father died twenty-three years after his wife, and yet it was my mother I grieved at his funeral. I grieved that I had not known her, that she had died before I was a mother, before I had a chance to understand that no one is the mother she plans to be.

It was this grief that caused me to do what I did to my own daughter. I'll have to tell Gráinne eventually—I know that well enough. She'll find out when she meets her father and she's better off hearing it from me. It's my own fault, all of it. Grace leaving, Gráinne growing up without a father. I trapped my daughter here, like a fish in a net, and once she got away she never came back. I can't say I blame her. Marcus says I shouldn't blame myself, but I can't just let it be. You have children, you're responsible for them forever, is the way I see it.

I can't say I didn't expect that romance between my daughter and Seamus, I was only too preoccupied to recognize it. I would have preferred it happen later, but Grace was a beautiful girl and Seamus not immune to beauty. He was honorable enough in his intentions, if not in his actions. He loved her with all his heart, he did. Loved her with more than that, as she turned out pregnant and she barely eighteen. My baby girl, following my mistakes like a road map. Of course, she couldn't find a better man than Seamus to get in trouble with. He never hesitated about marrying her, knew what he wanted, sure. It was Grace who made everything more complicated than it already was.

She came to me one morning when Marcus was not in the house.

“I'm going to have an abortion,” she said.

And I saw her, in that moment, lost to me.

“You'll get that filth out of your head this instant,” I said. Even she was taken aback by my tone. “You'll marry Seamus. I'll not let you ruin your life and your soul along with it.”

“I don't want to marry Seamus. I'm moving back to Boston, I can get an abortion there.”

“Shut your mouth,” I yelled. “You'll not get off this island until you've married that man and had this baby. You made this mistake, now you'll handle it like a Christian woman, or God help me, I'll handle it for you.”

She accused me of hypocrisy, which of course was true enough.
I am a woman who's made her share of mistakes. I can't say abortion would have been any worse than resenting your own baby. This isn't a Catholic position, I know, but a reflection of how my faith changed over the years, though I've kept up appearances. I did not always find God as pragmatic as I'd have liked.

But this was what I was thinking: This child will change things. Grace would grow up, a new baby would bring us closer together. And it's not as though she didn't love Seamus, that was plain as day. She only wanted to do the opposite of everything I wanted for her.

I was as good as my word. Eamon was instructed to call Marcus did Grace try to get on the ferry. She gave in after a week of trying, and one failed attempt at stealing an islander's boat. Seamus caught her in the harbor, going round in circles.

She married him. He gave her a sweet carving on the day, one he'd made himself, of Granuaile in her curragh; he knew my daughter, he did, better than she thought. And he adored her more than Michael Willoughby ever had.

Grace could have been happy with Seamus, had she let herself. But I forced her to marry him and she was determined to get me back for it, and her husband in the process. I can't say I'm sorry, for if she'd had that abortion, Gráinne wouldn't be alive, and that girl, I know, was everything to Grace. She was a good mother, no matter what decisions she made later.

I'm not proud of what I did. But I did it out of love. I did not want to die with Grace thinking me cold and unfeeling. Of course, it was Grace who died, died without me, half a world away. Died thinking exactly what I believed of my mother. Died, possibly, not thinking of me at all, but thinking herself alone, as she always had, from the time she was born and I did not know how to love her.

God help me, I was a mother, and more than once I foolishly thought I'd done the right thing. I'd take the blame, all of it, heaped like coals on my head, if I could just have her back awhile. Back from the beginning. Newborn and flat-faced, rashy and wailing with colic. I'd cherish every scream. She'd be the best-loved baby since Jesus Christ Himself.