boat caused the fingerlike grasses to pulse gently around us, caressing our bodies like a thousand peacock plumes. I repeated the line she’d written for me:
“ ‘Where I’ll find myself entangled in a merman’s silken hair.’ ”
She couldn’t understand me, or hear me. Not really. But she pulled me closer, and I pressed my lips to hers again.
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28
SWIMMING LESSONS
L ily should have been freezing. Despite her theory, I couldn’t understand what was keeping her warm. She said it was from being close to me, but being cold- blooded I wasn’t in any position to warm her. I wondered if breathing for her stemmed the cold, but these thoughts were only in the background. The rest of my brain was preoccupied with the thrill of swimming with Lily, my arm wrapped around her soft waist, keeping her face even with mine for easy breathing.
I took her over the 1881 wreck of the fire- ravaged
Ottawa
and then swam her north to Stockton Island. The century- old
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remains of
Noquebay
lay just ten feet below the surface. We swam along the donkey boiler and rudder. Lily trailed her hand around the gears lying on the ruined deck. Bits of vegetation floated down around her like confetti in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I marveled at her beauty. It rivaled any of my sisters’, including Pavati’s. With the exception of Lily’s pale lower limbs, she looked every bit the mermaid.
Eventually I brought her to Manitou Island. As the water grew more shallow, she let go of me and stood up to walk onto shore. She turned back with a questioning glance. I hovered in deeper waters, watching, wishing.
“Are you going to get out of the water, Calder?” “Probably not.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have any clothes stashed on this island.” Her eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. “Oh, I hadn’t
thought about that. I could stay out on the water with you.” “No, that’s okay. Go collect some kindling and then sit
on that driftwood log. I’ll just go over there a ways. Then— if
you don’t mind— I’ll come from behind you and sit on the
other side of that bush. We can talk then. I promise.” Lily walked up the beach, looking over her shoulder at
me again, probably afraid I was going to swim off and leave
her there. For a second I considered it. It wasn’t a terrible idea.
She’d be out of the way. Maris wouldn’t be looking for her
here. In a couple months, there’d be plenty of wild blackberries to eat. . . . That was about when the idea fizzled. I swam up the shore, and when I was sure she could no
longer see me, I floated into the shallows, willing myself to
change. I took a deep breath of air and tensed my muscles,
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gritting my teeth as the tightening started. A spasm rippled through me and then the ripping. I doubled over and wrapped my arms around my middle. I strangled the yell in my throat and sat gasping in the shallows as my tail gave way to two legs still in the throes of the seizure. The agitated water around me slowly calmed as I stood up, letting the water run off my body. Then I staggered into the brambles, kicking up sand.
When I came up behind her, Lily was sitting on the log as I’d instructed, staring out across the lake, with a small pile of sticks in front of her. The wake of a passing Boston Whaler pushed waves up on the shore with a gentle pulsing. Her body shook uncontrollably as the wind sucked the water off her skin.
I was quiet. I walked slowly. I knew Lily would jump whether I made a loud noise or not. Her posture was rigid. She probably thought she was dreaming. Another hallucination— and here she was, sitting on an uninhabited island, wondering how in the hell she got here.
“Lily,” I said quietly.
Her arms were wrapped around her knees, and her shoulders flinched infinitesimally at the sound of her name. Her pink skin showed through the wet linen.
“I thought maybe you lied to me, that you left,” she said. “No. I wouldn’t leave you.” The words— now out there, hovering in the air between us— were more true than I realized. “Besides, I promised you I’d be back. Merpeople may be great liars, but we can’t break our promises.”
She winced and whispered, “Where are you?” “Right behind you.” I rubbed my hands together to build up the friction, then ignited a small piece of driftwood with
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a spark from my palm. I handed it to her over her shoulder, and she lit the campfire. “Is it okay if we talk like this? Just keep your eyes straight ahead.”
“It’s okay.” The pink glow from her body was fading into lavender. I recognized the sign: the excitement of adventure. The same color as my kayaker, the same color sailors put off before smashing their ships on the rocks. Purple Prows, the ancients called them.
Her hair was now pulled up in a ponytail, and it curled as a single unit into a spiral. The back of her neck was translucent. I reached out and ran my finger along the bumps of her vertebrae. She shivered and turned her head.
“Eyes straight ahead, please.” I secretly enjoyed doing this to her. Wasn’t it what she had been doing to me for the last week? Unconsciously, maybe, but I still owed her.
I wrapped her ponytail around my hand and then released it, letting it snake around my palm.
“You’re teasing me,” she said. Goose bumps rose on her arms.
“Maybe.”
“That’s mean,” she said, sighing.
“I’m a monster, remember?” I let my fingers trail down her arms, making the situation worse, no doubt, and enjoying every second of it.
“Calder, how come nobody knows who you are?”
“Who says nobody knows me?”
“The Pettits had never heard of you, and they’ve lived here all their lives.”
I rubbed my palms up and down her arms, warming her up as best I could. “First of all, I’m only here during the summer.
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Second, until I met you, I didn’t have much reason to be on land.”
“Are you and your sisters in Maine the rest of the year?”
I shook my head even though she couldn’t see me. “I know you’re really caught up in that whole Passamaquoddy legend thing Jack told you about, but that’s not me. That was a long, long time ago. Maybe some ancestral connection, but that’s it.”
“You mean you’re not immortal?”
“No,” I said laughing. “Why would you think that?”
“You’re mythical.”
“I’m not mythical. I’m sitting right next to you. And other than the fact I turn into an enormous fish, there’s not that much special about me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“My body is just as fragile as yours. I bleed. And I will die. Maybe not as quickly as a human. I age more . . . slowly, about one year to every three human ones.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“I mean when were you born?”
I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to face her question. “I know where you’re going with this, Lily. But my birth year is just a date on the calendar. Think of it like dog years, but in reverse. When it comes to aging, I’m eighteen. How many times I’ve seen the ball drop in Times Square . . . that’s inconsequential. I’ll get old— just like you— ”
“Not just like me.”
“Well, yeah, but we all get old and die. Eventually.”
“Your mother died, didn’t she? That’s why I haven’t met her.”
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My throat constricted. “Yes, my mother died.” “Was she as beautiful as your sisters?”
“Exceptionally beautiful. She looked most like Tallulah,
maybe even a little like you.”
“She was
Ariel.
”
“No. She wasn’t. She was a
real
mermaid. Underneath.” “Right,” Lily said, and I could tell she was smiling. “Monster. So if you’re not the ones from the legend, where did your family come from?”
“They were born here, which is why the family comes back every spring. I’m tethered to them through our mother. I have to come back whether I want to or not. I bet if someone tied me to a chair and locked me in a room on the South Pole, I’d still manage to get back here.” I remembered my last day in the Bahamas, Maris’s annoying phone calls. If I’d known Lily was at the end of that path, I would have been back even sooner.
“I go to the Caribbean during the winter. There’s a beach in the Abacos I like to hang around.”
“Lots of girls there, I bet.”
I paused. She was facing away from me, so I couldn’t read her expression. There was something in her tone, however, that had my attention. It was sharp. Bitter. Mermaid jealousy I knew; I was weaned on it. If that was the emotion I was hearing in her voice, the human version was different. I could taste it on the air, like wine turned to vinegar. As I took the time to experience it, I failed to notice her anxiety growing.
“How
many
girls?” She started to turn around and I pushed her back.
“What?”
“Did you ever kiss any of them?”
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I didn’t know what to say. My mouth hung open like an idiot.
“Because I’ve noticed that you’ve never kissed me,” she said.
“What are you talking about? What have we been doing for the last hour?”
“Not the same thing. That was for survival.”
My heart rate quickened as I realized what she was after. I could already see the excitement on her skin. I knew from experience what a kiss would do. The emotion would rise, then spill over the edges, light flooding over us like a tide pool. I’d never been able to resist that before, but I’d come this far; it was worth the risk.
Turning backward, I pulled up alongside her until my right shoulder aligned with her right, and we faced in opposite directions. I leaned in and pressed my lips to her collarbone and let my mouth slide down her shoulder. She lifted my chin with her finger and kissed me back, her lips warm and soft and absolutely bitable. I kept my eyes closed, tasting her excitement on my tongue but resisting the urge to take more than she offered.
She pulled away, touching my mouth with her finger. “Your lips are glowing.”
“That’s you. Your emotion left behind.”
“And Jack was right. You do smell like incense,” she murmured. “Patchouli, I think.”
I chuckled softly. “We’re supposed to be able to entrance our prey once we’re close enough. I don’t think smelling like a fish would help. Like I said, evolution has been good to us.”
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“Is that what you did to me? Entrance me?” She drew her finger across my lips one more time.
I laughed again, this time louder. “Believe me, I tried hypnosis on you. Truly gave it my best effort. You were amazingly resistant.”
“No,” she said. “That was acting.”
“Survival of the fittest,” I murmured.
She leaned against my shoulder and recited more Tennyson by heart:
“I would be a mermaid fair;
I would sing to myself the whole of the day; With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair . . .”
I shook my head. She was picking out the parts she liked. “Listen to what I’ve been telling you, Lily. It’s not all pretty like that. You forget this part:
‘Till that great sea- snake under the sea / From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps / Would slowly trail himself sevenfold / Round the hall where I sate.’
Don’t ever forget that part. It’s the only part that’s true. Slithering stalkers. That’s what we are.”
Lily
humphed
and wrapped her arms around herself. The wind had evaporated the last of the water off her skin, and she shivered.
The small fire was doing little to warm her, so I resumed my original spot and rubbed her back, trying to create some heat. Besides, I couldn’t face her, knowing what I had to do next. No matter how much I cared about her, I was still tied to old family loyalties. No matter how much Lily told me I wasn’t a murderer, I knew it was true in only a limited sense.
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I would never hurt her, but Maris would collect on the debt. I couldn’t explain that to Lily. I couldn’t even try. I was shackled to my sisters and my part in their plan— no matter how much it sickened me. Lily lay back against me, and the feel of her breathing filled me to the point of overflowing.
“Remember what you asked me before about my human family? Whether I ever thought about them?”
She nodded.
“What I should have said is that I didn’t think about them, the actual people. They were strangers almost immediately after I changed. But I did miss
the idea
of them. After Mother died anyway. The idea of a normal family. Yeah, I missed that part. I still miss that.”
Then I closed my eyes and said what I was compelled to say. “Your dad invited me and my parents over for dinner sometime.” Each word was barbed, tearing my throat and tongue.
“Mmm- hmm. That would be fun.” She reached up and behind her, cupping the back of my neck in her hand.
“Of course, you know I don’t have any parents who would actually come.”
“That’s fine, too.” She leaned heavily against me. I wondered if she was falling asleep.
“So should I come over again?”
“Sophie would like that.”
I smiled despite myself. “And you would like that?”
“I would like that.”
I could feel the stinging welling up behind my eyes as I led her down this path. In my head I could rationalize everything. I could be happy. I could even love her. But that
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didn’t mean I wouldn’t kill her father. And what would that do to her? I pushed the thought away. I could not fail in this. Satisfying Maris’s condition, securing her revenge on Jason Hancock, was my only sure means of freedom. I could not give up on the dream, no matter what the cost.
“So, what do you think?” I asked.
“I’ll tell them I’ve invited you for tomorrow night.” I nodded and then froze. Something else had my attention. They were only small dots on the horizon, invisible to the human eye. Maybe someone would think they were loons, or the tips of sunken timbers, but there were three of them, and I knew.
“Stay here!”
I got up, dropped two fistfuls of sand onto the tiny campfire, and ran into the brush, following my path back to the lake, fifty yards up the shoreline from where Lily sat. Sharp sticks and thorny plants cut my ankles and stabbed at the soles of my bare feet. I splashed into the water, running, my knees high, before diving in. It was my fastest transformation to date. When I came up again, directly in front of Lily, I was in full panic mode and bristling with electricity.
She was pacing in the shallows. “Calder, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I took a deep breath and subdued the electric charge as much as I could before beckoning her to me. “Get in. Come out to me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re looking for me, and they can’t find you with me. At least not like this. They wouldn’t want you to know, and it won’t be good if they find out.”