Tides (3 page)

In his
MARINE SCIENCE RESEARCH CENTER STAFF
shirt and new khakis, Noah really did look like a scientist. He kept putting his hands in his pockets, taking them out, and putting them back in again. He looked at Lo; he looked out the window; he looked at the door. He exhaled.

Lo groaned. “Hey, big brother,” she said, “you’ll do great.”

Noah looked startled for a second, then smiled back at her. He could never manage to smile evenly—the right side of his face always dimpled. It was the only thing that could make him look mischievous.

Lo walked over to him, stood on her tiptoes, and scruffed up his hair. “There,” she said. “You’re good to go.”

Noah nodded grimly, a slightly geeky soldier off to battle. He grabbed an apple from a bowl on the kitchen table, and with a last, panicked glance at his watch, he ran out the door.

Lo considered the two very different encounters she’d already had that morning. She shook her head. This was not starting out to be the private day of sketching she’d imagined.

She sat down and once again cast around for a subject. There were three apples left in the large wooden bowl on the table. They were all at least a little bruised, with dry leaves still attached to their stems. Lo thought about plucking off the leaves but decided they mostly looked fine the way they were. She turned the biggest one around to hide its bruises.

She put pencil to paper, letting her mind wander as her eyes and hands focused in on her drawing. She thought of Maebh, framed in the doorway to her grandmother’s room. She wanted to tell Noah about it, but she’d talk to Gemm first. Lo held her new secret close, tucked deep in a locked chest of secrets inside her.

four

N
OAH
rushed through the hall to catch Professor Foster before he disappeared into his office again.

“Professor—” he called. “Professor Foster, wait!”

The older man turned around, a smile placed carefully among the tired lines of his face.

“Hello there, Mr. Gallagher.” He sighed, not quite letting the smile slip. “What can I do for you?”

“I, well . . .” He’d been so sure Professor Foster would want to talk to him, but it was obvious all he wanted was to be left alone in his office. Noah hadn’t quite thought that being an intern would feel so . . . insignificant. He’d beat out dozens of other kids—college students, even—for this job, and he’d thought it meant he was special, or at least that Professor Foster thought he was. He couldn’t quite believe filing checks and tax exemptions was really all he was meant for this summer.

Blood flamed over his cheeks and forehead. “I just wanted to know if there was anything else I could help you with, sir.” He glanced back as a trio of researchers moved through the hallway, murmuring seriously to one another. His stomach ached with jealousy. “Or if there was anyone else I could help.”

Professor Foster raised his hand to his temple for a moment, an overloaded key chain hanging from his thumb. “I’ve got you where you’re most needed right now, Mr. Gallagher. I’m sorry.” Another fraction of his tired smile vanished.

“Oh.”
Don’t sulk,
he told himself.
It won’t help anything.
“Well, let me know if you need anything else. I’m just—I just want you to know I’m really excited to be here.”

Professor Foster sighed. “I know. We’re excited to have you. Just—” He glanced back into his office. “Just keep at it in the filing room for now, and maybe I’ll find something else for you later in the season.” He looked back toward Noah, his blue eyes glinting through his wire-rimmed glasses. “You seem like a smart kid, Mr. Gallagher. Just show me you can do what I need you to do, and well . . . then we’ll see what else I can find for you.” He nodded, and his smile ticked for a moment into something more genuine. “You see what I’m saying?”

“Yes, sir.” Noah smiled back and almost meant it.

Professor Foster closed his office door behind him, and Noah walked back into the main lab. He wound his way through it, trying not to stop and stare at every single project going on around him. He turned down a small hallway lit with overly bright but flickering fluorescent bulbs and walked all the way to the door at its end. He turned the doorknob, but he had to push his shoulder against the humidity-swollen plywood before the filing room opened for him.

It was dark and it was dank and it smelled like old paper. It smelled like his father’s office, like the guidance counselor’s room at his high school, like every cramped indoor place in the world. The light was flat and dismal, the carpet brown. There was a window on the far side of the narrow room, but it was covered by stacks of boxes, and it would be for at least another few weeks.

Noah decided that would be his first goal. He’d get through enough boxes to clear the window, and then maybe, just possibly, he could actually see the ocean.

That was why he’d come here, really. That was all he wanted. To see the ocean, every day. Every minute.

To learn from Professor Foster too, if he could get half a chance. He’d managed to audit the professor’s Intro to Marine Science course at UNH last fall. It was one of the most popular classes on campus, and it filled up quickly every semester, so he’d had to beg for his registration, just for permission to sit in the back of the crowded lecture hall and listen, and in the end his biology teacher had had to call in a favor to Professor Foster himself.

And just like every college freshman in the room on the first day of class, he’d seen in an instant how brilliant Professor Foster was. The man glowed with energy and love for his subject with every word he spoke. He’d had tenure at UNH for quite a while, but he acted and looked like a much younger man than he was. His obvious passion had hooked into something inside Noah, something that had been there since the first time his father took him fishing. That something spread tingling all through Noah’s body, and he knew, he was completely sure, that all he wanted out of college was to go to UNH and study marine science and be Professor Foster’s student.

And thanks to that same high school biology teacher, he’d gotten a glowing recommendation that had landed him an interview for this internship even though all the other applicants were college students already.

Noah had walked into the interview with sweaty palms and a tie that felt too tight around his neck, especially when he swallowed. Professor Foster’s office door—his office at UNH—was closed, and he’d had to knock.

“Come in,” the professor had called, his voice a touch deeper and slower than Noah remembered from class.

Noah had stepped carefully through the door, his back as straight as he could make it. He’d looked Professor Foster in the eye the way his dad had told him to.

“Hi, Professor Foster. I’m Noah Gallagher. I’m here for the interview. I know you probably don’t recognize me, but—”

“Back of the classroom.” Professor Foster nodded. “Taking notes like a madman. More than most of the actual students. I certainly remember.” He extended a callused, strong-looking hand. “Gary Foster.”

Noah took his hand and shook it, hoping his grip was right. “Noah. Gallagher.” He grinned, he hoped not too foolishly. “I’m really excited I might get to work with you this summer, sir.”

He’d sat down as Professor Foster settled back in his desk chair.

“So, Mr. Gallagher, what’s your interest in marine science?”

And Noah had found himself spilling over with stories: the first time he’d gone fishing with his father, the other classes he’d practically abandoned for more hours in the science labs, the academic articles he’d started reading in his freshman year of high school, all the weekends he’d spent studying alone in his parents’ house or the UNH library, or out on the beach or on the water—alone then, too. Alone except for the thing he loved.

Eventually he’d felt a dry catch in the back of his mouth and stopped to clear his throat. A slow-rising blush had crept up his face as he thought about the rant he’d just delivered.

Professor Foster stood and extended his hand again.

Noah took it, thanked Professor Foster for the interview, and walked away, convinced he’d utterly failed. But a week later, his biology teacher had greeted him with a “Congratulations!” and a beaming smile.

“You’ll start in June, as soon as school’s out,” he’d said, shifting from foot to foot in squirming excitement.

For a moment, Noah had wanted to ask where, but of course he knew—he’d known right away.

He’d spent the latter half of his senior year paying even less attention to his other classes than before. After he’d gotten into UNH—on a cross-country scholarship—he’d done nothing but run and get ready for this internship. He knew it was supposed to go to a college student, and he wanted to be more than prepared.

And now he was stuck in a tiny, airless backroom, filing. For the whole summer. He might as well have stayed on the mainland and worked in his dad’s office as his parents had wanted.

Noah let himself kick one of the crumbling boxes. Just one. Hard.

Then he sat down and got to work.

five

L
O
sat on the crest of White Island, squinting at the waves, sketchpad in hand. She wanted to try to draw the inbetween, the not-quite ocean not-quite land, the thing that soaked through her memory of Gemm’s story.

She saw darkness under the water, and she saw the solid white glint of light on its surface. As hard as she tried, though, she couldn’t see into the space between the two—at least not enough to draw it.

She flipped back to the sketches she’d made the night before. Seals and women swam in a fluid border around the edges of the page between swirling lines of India-ink water. Lo usually liked to start her new projects with pencil, but the dry, gray graphite hadn’t seemed right for drawing selkies. A thin brush and a pot of blackest black ink had given her drawings the liquid quality she wanted, but there was still a blank expanse in the middle of the page.

Lo took a pen from the messenger bag at her side and twirled it between her fingers. She started drawing almost without thinking, more wet black lines for long hair, smooth cheeks, large eyes. She had a face somewhere in her mind, but she didn’t recognize it until she leaned back to look at her finished work.

Long hair straight and black as her own. A round, pale mouth and soft cheeks. Black eyes huge and wide-set and sad, somehow older than the face that framed them. Maebh.

Lo smiled at the page, proud of the likeness she’d accidentally captured. Maebh was lovely—not with Gemm’s bright and glowing kind of beauty, but muted, like sea glass. Lo rarely liked her drawings so soon after she’d made them, but she could see she’d brought Maebh’s soft beauty to the page. She blew lightly on the paper to make sure the ink was dry, then carefully closed her notebook.

She looked up and realized she wouldn’t have been able to draw a landscape just now, anyway. The light had changed too quickly. The clouds were clumping together overhead, and a cold shadow was seeping over the island.

She shivered. When she stood, her legs started to prick and tremble. She hadn’t noticed them falling asleep.

Lo walked into the cottage and shut the door behind her. Gemm was reclining on the couch and reading a worn paperback copy of A. S. Byatt’s
Possession,
another mug of dark tea steaming beside her. She put her book down when she saw Lo.

“A wonderful book—sad, though. But sometimes the sadness makes a story better, don’t you think?” She smiled.

Lo made a vague agreeing noise. “Gemm,” she said tentatively, “do you think you could finish the selkie story now?” Lo didn’t understand why her mind had hooked onto the idea of selkies so tightly. All she knew was that she really wanted to hear the ending.

“If you like,” said Gemm. “That one has sad parts too, you know.”

Lo shrugged. She sat down next to her grandmother, ignoring the heavy sound of the couch springs as she settled in, the sight of her thighs squashed against the cushion, the puff of fat where her legs met her shorts.
By next month,
she thought,
these clothes will be too big. By two weeks from now. Easy.

“It’s not even lunchtime,” Gemm said. “I figured you’d still be asleep.”

“I got up early.” Lo looked down at the floor. “I saw Maebh before she left.”

It was quiet.

Gemm started to get up, then sat down again.

Lo waited.

“Lo, there are lots of things you don’t know about me. Things your parents don’t necessarily approve of.” She laughed, short and bitter. “Actually, there’s just the one thing.”

Lo looked up and saw that Gemm’s mouth was set hard and that her fingers trembled in her lap. She placed a hand over her grandmother’s.

“I love your mother,” whispered Gemm, so quietly that Lo had to lean forward to hear her. “But I couldn’t live my whole life lying. I had to be the—the person I am.”

Lo stayed quiet, sensing that maybe she didn’t need to say anything at all.

Gemm met her eyes at last, and her face was open and sad. “The story,” she said. “That might help. Now, where were we?”

Lo smiled. She’d been telling herself the beginning all morning. “He’d just found the selkie skin.” She lowered her voice to imitate her grandmother. “He knew what he must do . . .”

Gemm took over without missing a beat. “The fisherman crouched there, hidden behind the line of boulders, and he watched the selkies sing.” The sadness in her voice was gone now, as if she’d forgotten she was Gemm at all and had become only a storyteller. “Well, that young woman, who sat apart from the others, she was the most beautiful thing the fisherman had ever seen in all his life.”

Lo smiled at that, though Gemm’s voice stiffened when she said “thing.”

“The fisherman ran his hands over the skin. He couldn’t believe his luck. He folded it and tucked it carefully into his satchel. He wrapped it in a net to protect it from his gutting knife and the sharp edges of his shells.

“He closed the sack, blood thrumming fast through his veins. He turned around and saw shining black eyes looking into his. The selkie had come to him.