The Siren (9 page)

After Paris, fashion became one of our favorite indulgences. When we traveled to any place that seemed concerned with up-to-date styles, we would naturally comply. We had to fit in, right? So when we had the extra money, we shopped. Clothes were fun. The clothes in India were long saris covered in prints. They were beautiful and colorful and easy to wear. It was easier to wear than, say, the popular jeans of the States after living in the freedom of the island. It was an easier transition for me, though I did enjoy a good dress more than anything.

Just before the Ocean gave me the island, I was living in Virginia. The Ocean had given me money without me asking for it. I don’t think She did that as a rule. Eventually even Her stores would run dry if She did. But at that moment, She just wanted me to get out and enjoy the day. The first thing I did was buy a dress. I returned the plain, ill-fitting clothes I had borrowed to the hamper of the empty house. Shopping in someone’s closet wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as walking into a store. The clothes smelled like the person who owned them, which was strange. And I was an individual stuck in someone else’s style. I hated it.

So I bought a dress. And I loved that dress. It was wholesome and had cherries printed all over it. I sat outside in my new dress and had ice cream and just enjoyed the day— like She wanted me to. I had nowhere to keep it, so it was the dress I wore as I traveled to the island. It tore to pieces, of course. It was a spiteful thing to do. I could have just left it somewhere, but if I couldn’t keep it on me, I at least wanted the pieces of it to be somewhere I always was. I adored that dress. It was the one thing in years that had actually been mine. And I just couldn’t keep it.

Ten years of silent wanderings led Miaka and me through nothing special. Though little of consequence happened, this period was different for us. I was more content these days. If nothing happened to distract me all day long, I wouldn’t be restless at night. If I saw too many couples, I’d escape to a daydream and not bother with tears. Miaka would create all day, and I would praise her talents. It wasn’t a remarkable life, but it was good.

Miaka and I spent that decade together except for the few times I would run away to be with the Ocean. I wouldn’t even bother staying near the shore to come and go at my leisure. I would just live
in
Her. My skin didn’t mind the water like all the other frail humans’ did. Actually, I think being in Her made it prettier somehow. I would float and just let Her guide me through the waters, ending up no place at all. I saw arctic seas full of floating bits of ice. The cold blue was fresh and beautiful. In some places the ice made mysterious frosty webs. It was a shame that most of the world missed this. There were other coasts covered in mossy rocks, organisms living off a diet of Ocean and sunshine. Sometimes, I felt like that was the way I lived, too.

I couldn’t go for more than a few months without going back to Her. Those first thirty years were full of rage at Her for what She made me. Now I knew Her more intimately than any of my sisters did. She confessed I knew Her better than anyone ever had. I had finally come to terms with what I was, the temporary nature of my situation, and the truth that something better was coming for me one day. So I could let myself love Her. And I loved myself. It helped. It still wasn’t the life I wanted, but it was very close.

Finally, in 1966, we were granted another sister. Elizabeth was like nothing I had ever encountered. Upon meeting her, I was most surprised by the fact that she wasn’t crying. Even Ifama, who had put up a good fight against the tears, had cried. Elizabeth was disoriented, but listened to everything we said with this look on her face like she had happily stumbled into a fairytale. I had seen the world slowly change. Girls were different now— not all of them, but some. The ones like Elizabeth.

She was a defiant kind of lovely. Her gently curling hair made me think of honey— not quite blond, not quite brunette— and she had mysterious eyes that were so blue they were practically violet. Her whole appearance was a collection of almosts.

She had been enjoying a trip abroad between semesters at college when we brought down the
Heraklion
near Crete. The ship was traveling in the Aegean Sea, which was one of the Ocean’s unpredictable areas, particularly in the winter. The storm was there and would have happened anyway; we just guided the captain a little too close. The ship went down in the wee hours of the morning. Elizabeth was one of the few near enough to the top decks to make it into open waters. Mercifully most of the passengers were unseen and trapped in their cabins. Elizabeth had braved the rocking of the boat to, of all things, smoke a cigarette. At two in the morning. This was our first hint at her personality.

We were right on track. The Ocean obviously enjoyed Elizabeth’s sense of humor. She did eventually ask to live, but her first thoughts as she began to sink were “Damn! This is inconvenient!”

She was a welcome addition as far as we were concerned, but I was afraid that she’d be disappointed since she’d left so much behind. Like all of us, Elizabeth lost her family, so we all felt that with her. But she was in the middle of being educated and had been in a serious relationship when she joined us. She said no man was better than having all this time to see the world. I wanted her to like me, so I didn’t bother disagreeing.

She was absolutely sure of herself, carefree. Miaka was jubilant to have such a welcoming younger sister. We were so excited by her fresh enthusiasm, we even invited Aisling to come stay with us. She said that she would rather chew sand, asked the Ocean if she could leave, and disappeared without a goodbye.

“She needs to get laid,” Elizabeth said after Aisling left. Miaka and I looked at one another with shocked eyes and blushed. We came from an era when things like that just weren’t said. But then we both laughed at the probable truth and great impossibility behind that statement.

Elizabeth was a sign of the changing times. What I had suspected as an observer in this era was made real through the living example of our newest sister. We were glad to have a better view of the world through her eyes.

Miaka and I peppered Elizabeth with questions. She was the first woman in her family to go to college. She was looking at twenty different majors when she came into our sisterhood. She hoped this time would give her more clarity, make her focus on what she truly loved. But before she worried about any of that, she wanted to live it up. I could tell she was going to have silence issues. Elizabeth was American like me. Our common unity of the English language would make note passing easier.

Elizabeth had experimented with
certain substances
in college and said it was something she was going to miss since those kinds of things had no real effect on us. Beer, too; she would miss beer. I was shocked. Prohibition had been in effect when I was a teen. To see someone enjoying these things and not meeting her doom made it all seem like a silly waste of efforts.

Her family had ignored her somewhat and gave preference to her three older brothers. This seemed to be a common theme in our sisterhood: the lone daughters, either prized or ignored. She was an unexpected addition to her family, and it appeared that they ran out of steam as she grew. But this lack of attention drove her towards success. She had been hell-bent to prove to them that she could be just as successful as any boy, her brothers in particular. Elizabeth was bothered that they wouldn’t see her do it, but she was sure that time would make her flourish in anything she truly committed herself to.

“In the end,” she said, “who cares if I have an audience?”

I asked her questions about small details, wanting her to hold onto to her old life long enough to share her incredible yet common stories with us. She liked to shock people. She had already caught Miaka and me off guard a dozen times our first day together. But she would do things like spell out dirty words in a game of Scrabble with her mother and all her old friends. Really, anything to raise an eyebrow was her idea of a good time.

“I don’t understand. What’s a scrabble?” Miaka asked.

I was drawn to Elizabeth’s openness. She was blunt and funny and warm. I also envied her for her ease at relating to men. To put it delicately, she had already been with a man. A few. And she was my age! How times had changed. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions about that, but the lady I was raised to be won out in that round. Maybe down the road I could ask her, if I could ever reach half the boldness she had. There was no denying we had the time.

Miaka showed Elizabeth the ins and outs of our life, and I was free to sit back and enjoy them. Since there were three of us, I could easily disappear to be with the Ocean without them feeling neglected. It was the beginning of a new time for us. I added all the time up in my head. I had spent thirty-two years bitter, wondering if I had made the wrong decision. I’d spent nearly a year alone wallowing in my sadness and anger with the Ocean and myself. I’d spent another year truly being introduced to the Sea. And I’d spent the last eleven years peacefully existing, communing with my sisters and the Ocean. Forty-five years in all. Plus the nineteen before that. That’s a lot of life, but I was not prepared for this new era.

One of the most shocking changes was the response to our times of service. I was never sure how Aisling felt. I assumed she wasn’t bothered based on her coldness. Miaka had gotten a little better with it as the years passed but was always a little down afterwards. But Elizabeth was tough in a serious way. She wasn’t daunted by the actual act of taking lives. It’s not that she prided herself in being cruel, but she was… I don’t know, desensitized. It just didn’t faze her. Elizabeth’s personality was so influential that Miaka followed suit and began to take the whole process with a grain of salt. I was alone in my ache. The Ocean understood this part of my nature and always gave me warning, and afterwards, I would have to be alone, away from the unnatural calm of Elizabeth and Miaka.

I didn’t begrudge them this. If they could find peace in this life, I was happy for them. But I just couldn’t do that. It hurt me, cut me to the core every time. Aisling had her solitude, and Marilyn used to have her glass of wine. Miaka used to paint, and now she and Elizabeth would just watch a movie if they could or do nothing special at all. I just took it differently. So for a few days, I would retreat into my mind and build myself a world where things just didn’t have to be the way they were. I tried to keep these thoughts away from the Ocean; I didn’t want to offend Her. And, for fear of seeming weak to my sisters, I didn’t tell Miaka or Elizabeth.

After one of our times of service, I left for a few days to be on my island. The Ocean was always very giving with me, not bothered by how hard it was for me to talk to Her right after those moments. A few years after She gave me the island, She gave me a present to go along with it. Someone had either lost or thrown away a hammock, and She had found it. When it washed up on shore I bounced around like a child; I was so happy. There was a set of trees on the western coast of the island that was just perfect for it. When I arrived this time, that was the section of shore I went for.

It was late afternoon, so I just climbed into the hammock still wearing my heavy dress, and watched the sun fall away. Normal eyes can’t stare at the sun without going blind, but mine could. It was brilliant, and its radiance was a comfort to me. It mesmerized me, sinking lower and lower, until it disappeared behind the Ocean’s wide back. I was asleep immediately.

I don’t know what took my mind there, but I dreamed of the day when I became a siren myself. So many of the details are gone. Our memories are like faulty cameras, and we can never be sure if the image we’re trying to capture is actually clear at the time. But the murky moments of my humanity focused into perfect clarity, and those final seconds assaulted my mind…

The ship steering sharply, away from the sunshine and into the distant gray. Lying on the floor, trying not to get sick from the storm. In our life vests on the deck, covering my ears from the screaming. Grown men jumping off the boat, ready to die. A wall of water so huge there was no point in running, and nowhere to run to anyway.

Take a deep breath, Kahlen. Hold on tight.

Ripped from my lifejacket under the water. An unknown body hitting my legs. I was dying. I was losing my family. I was losing everything.

My eyes snapped open to the dark of the island, a light drizzle was falling over me. Though it was warm, I was convinced I was still drowning. I screamed.

Her voice came to me off the breakers, caressing my shaking body. She heard me, of course. The rain. I was sobbing, my body jerking with gasps. I stumbled out of my hammock and towards the shore. I sat down in the edge of the surf.

I had a nightmare. I’m fine.

If She was paying attention, She might have seen the source of my tears. But either way, She let me have my privacy. The memory brought up all the reasons I had to be angry with Her, but I had decided to let that go. Every person dies. Every soul passes through the gate. I brushed it away.

A week later I returned to my sisters.

I couldn’t stay sad with Elizabeth around. She opened herself to us immediately. She was just casually comical. After our first day together, we decided we’d have to live somewhere very remote. Elizabeth was full of one-liners that caused Miaka and me to unexpectedly erupt with laughter. We couldn’t contain it, so we stayed away from the ears that those moments would harm.