Lost Voices (13 page)

“I’m okay,” Luce whispered. “I just want to be alone for a while.”

That got Catarina’s attention. “Alone?” she asked, and her steely voice stroked Luce’s skin. “ Luce, are you upset about some-102 i LOST VOICES

thing? Because if you are we should talk about it.” Her eyes flared at Luce, daring her to say it.

You lied to me, you tricked me into helping you kill all those people, and
maybe you’re the one who murdered

Luce closed her eyes, trying to crush the thought before it went too far. Then she looked up into Catarina’s searching moon gray stare.

“Don’t you just feel like being alone sometimes, Cat?” Luce was amazed to hear how sharp and clear her voice had suddenly become. “It doesn’t mean I’m upset. It just means I’m not in the mood for a lot of talk.” Samantha let out a short bark of laughter, but Luce didn’t smile.

“There are a few little caves up the coast,” Miriam offered; Luce thought maybe she wanted to get away, too. “ Luce? Do you want me to show you? They’re all kind of cramped, but one of them isn’t too bad.” Catarina was glaring, but Miriam made a point of ignoring her. “Come on. It’s not too far . . .” They drifted alongside the cliffs together, keeping their heads out of the water. One cave was open at the level of the sea, and the larval mermaids were already sleeping there, heaped up with their small arms wrapped around each other’s waists.

Luce and Miriam kept swimming on for another mile or so, then Miriam glanced back at her and dove. The entrance of the cave was so narrow that they couldn’t even swim. Instead they had to wriggle through, pushing with their tails and using their hands to maneuver between the crags. The cave inside was as narrow as a tent, but it was deep and its beach was smooth, with round, small quartz pebbles. The roof was tall and fissured, opening onto a rag of dark blue sky.

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Miriam twisted her body until she was halfway lying on the beach and stared up. There was just enough space for the two of them to lie comfortably side by side, and now that Miriam had brought Luce here she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. Her midnight- colored tail barely showed through the dark water, but Luce’s gleamed with silver lights. “Do you mind if I stay here for a little bit?” Miriam finally asked. “It’s just everyone else gets so excited when we sink a ship. And sometimes I feel like like I don’t want to
make
myself be happy about it. Does that sound crazy?” Luce sat up and looked down into Miriam’s eyes. Their color was so deep and inky that it was impossible to guess what she was feeling.

“You don’t need to act happy around me,” Luce finally said.

She wasn’t sure if it was safe to tell Miriam how sad
she
felt about everything that had happened that day. She kept remembering the warm touch of dark curly hair, the glow in the young sailor’s brown eyes.
More and truer love
. . . Luce knew she had the power now to force any human being who came within earshot to love her. But they’d only love her as long as she kept them enchanted, only as long as they were speeding toward death.

“I thought maybe since you’re metaskaza, or you just were, anyway maybe you’d understand better than the others.

Luce, I don’t completely hate humans. Or at least I don’t hate them enough. I mean, I understand why Catarina does, and I know she’s right, but sometimes I can’t help remembering . . .” It occurred to Luce that this might be another trick. Maybe Catarina had sent Miriam to find out how she really felt. “When I heard how you sang I thought maybe you remembered some good things about being human, too.”

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Luce lay back down on the pebbles and thought about this.

She didn’t want to say too much, but if Miriam was telling the truth about how she felt then Luce didn’t want her to feel all alone either.

“I loved some of them,” Luce finally said. “Before I changed, I mean. So I just I don’t totally care if humans are as evil as Catarina thinks or not.” Luce stopped, feeling like she’d already admitted too much. From the corner of her eye she could see Miriam’s dark shimmer swarming into those pictures that weren’t quite pictures. Miriam
had
loved her mother, Luce realized, but then her mother ran away one night with a strange man and never came back. Miriam had waited alone for days in an empty house, waited until the food ran out, and then she’d swallowed the contents of a brown glass bottle from her mother’s medicine cabi-net, trying to die, and curled up in the bathtub.

“It’s worse when you love them,” Miriam whispered. “I think at first I wanted to kill all of them. Everyone. Because if there were no people left alive then I’d never have to love one of them again.” She wouldn’t look at Luce; her face was twisting. “But once I realized that was impossible . . . What’s the point of killing any of them, Luce, when there are always so many left? And I’ve been in the water for so long now, and it’s always the same.

They listen to us, and they die, and then soon enough there’s another boat . . .” Miriam sounded almost like she was talking to herself, and then Luce saw the gleam of a single tear.

Luce was surprised; it seemed like such a strange, pitiful reason for drowning people. But were her own reasons any better?

Were Catarina’s?

Miriam sat up and gave Luce a sad smile. “I’m really glad i 105

you’re living with us now, Luce. I mean, I know you weren’t singing for me today. It was all for those humans. But hearing you made me feel better, too. I don’t feel quite as cold inside.” Miriam looked away, as if saying it made her feel shy.

So, her fierce, powerful voice must not be completely evil, Luce thought. If it could comfort Miriam, even after all the long years she’d spent out in the sea, then maybe it would be okay for Luce to sing sometimes. Maybe, she thought, just maybe, she could even find a way to use her singing for good . . .

Miriam leaned in suddenly and kissed Luce on the cheek.

Then she ducked down and squirmed out through the cave’s narrow entrance. Luce stared up at the sky. Suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone after all. The world was so enormous, yawning like a hungry mouth. She could forget all that hunger and loneliness when her tribe surrounded her, their long tails swaying next to hers and their faces dreaming together on the beach.

In the end it was pride that kept Luce where she was. She didn’t want Catarina to think she could get away with lying like that so easily.

* * *

That night Luce dreamed of her father. She was sitting on the bed in that cheap motel room outside Minneapolis, snow spinning in the window, while the sequin- covered woman dipped and leaped across the TV screen. Her father sat next to her, gazing into her eyes, a worried expression on his face.

Luce’s voice poured out of her: too big for a small human girl, too big for the narrow mustard- colored room. She couldn’t make her song stop, and she saw that her father wasn’t enchanted 106 i LOST VOICES

by it in the way all the other humans had been. He winced, and Luce thought her voice was hurting him. It floated up into that high, trembling note and coiled just under the ceiling.

“You know you don’t have to do this for me, Lucette,” her father said. “You’ve made your point. You can stop now, all right?”

I never judged you,
Luce wanted to say.
No matter what you did.

But her mouth was full of that pulsing, savage song; it took hold of her throat, her chest, and since she couldn’t make the music stop she couldn’t
say
anything. The piercing note broke and tumbled down an endless staircase.

“It’s not that I’m judging you, baby doll,” her father said as if he’d read her mind. His eyes were glazing from pain as Luce’s song clashed like metal snakes inside his head, but he was doing his best not to let her see how terribly she was hurting him.

“How could I? I just hate to think that you’re doing things you might be sorry about later. And especially if you’re doing them because of me somehow. You don’t have to is all I’m saying. You can stop this right now.”

But Luce couldn’t stop. Her voice fell and fractured into aching chords and then her father couldn’t stand it anymore. He grabbed his head, trying desperately to make the pain stop. And Luce saw that it wasn’t snow in the window anymore, but tall lead- colored waves. The ocean knocked on the glass, asking to be let in . . .

No,
Luce tried to tell the waves.
You can’t come in. He’ll drown!

But the song still controlled her voice, and she couldn’t make her voice say the words. The waves crested and slammed at the window, and Luce saw the glass starting to bow from their weight.

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The glass crunched and screamed with a sound like tearing metal, and Luce was lost in the dark sea. She looked around for her father, but she couldn’t find him anywhere.

The scream of the breaking glass kept going, and then Luce realized that the scream was hers. She was flailing from side to side in the narrow cave, thrashing so hard that her body had rolled up out of the water and the top of her tail was exposed to the cold night air. It was the pain in her drying tail that had made her wake up. She was out of the water all the way to where her knees used to be, and for a second Luce just stayed where she was, feeling the burning claw through her.

It would be so easy to die,
she thought. All she’d need to do would be to pull herself a little farther up the beach. So easy but also so terrible. She used her hands to slide herself back down into the sea, gasping as the pain gradually subsided.

If she could completely forget her human life, not miss any of it anymore, then being a mermaid would be so wonderful. She could be free and wild and beautiful forever; she could welcome the cold into her heart and not care how many people she killed.

It would just be a game to her, the way it was for Samantha. A joke. She could laugh at the people she drowned for believing the forgiveness in her song was real, laugh at them for loving her.

A trace of her father’s warm voice still thrummed in her mind, a residue left over from her dream.

Luce decided then that she’d rather die. She would never let herself turn as cold as Samantha seemed to be, not even if she’d be happier that way, not even if what Miriam had said was right. “It’s worse when you love them,” Luce repeated to herself, and the caramel- skinned boy smiled in her mind, his hair rip-108 i LOST VOICES

pling in the green, shining water. Humans were grotesque a lot of the time, but just once in a while there was something about them that was marvelous, too. A sustained note of something that was greater and sweeter than any emotion . . .

There had to be some way she could stay a mermaid but still keep that note alive in her own song.

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8

Quick Animals

Fifty miles inland, in a town called Henton, a woman paced the nighttime hallways of an ugly, flashy, oversized house. It had once been the mansion of a man who’d made a lot of money in the canning business, then he’d died and left his house to the county. They’d converted it into a home for orphaned and abandoned girls, the ones who were already too old when their parents died, so that nobody wanted to adopt them. The house was bigger than they really needed. Fourteen girls lived there, along with Mrs. Beebee Merkle, but the emptiness of the rooms made everyone nervous and all the girls slept in the three bedrooms that made up the house’s east wing. Mrs. Merkle had her own apartment upstairs, but at night she had trouble sleeping and more trouble keeping still. She’d lie awake in a pile of knotted, sweaty sheets, convinced that animals she couldn’t see were nip-110 i

ping at her feet with tiny fangs like crescent moons. She’d kick and throw off the covers, but the slithering animals were always too fast for her to catch sight of them, and when she couldn’t stand the biting anymore she’d slide her feet into her grimy pink slippers with holes in the toes and pace through the unused rooms, turning on every light that still had a working bulb and rapping anxiously at the huge, dusty sofas and gutted home entertainment centers.

On nights when it got especially bad, she’d get out a ham-mer and saw and start ripping into the plaster. The animals that plagued her had to make their nest somewhere, after all. Sometimes she could just catch glimpses of them from the corners of her eyes: slippery, malignant weasel- like creatures with girl-ish heads, and Mrs. Merkle thought, a kind of dark shimmering around them.

This was a
very
bad night.

Beebee Merkle had begun tearing out a wall in what had once been a large formal dining room, making such a ruckus that all fourteen of her charges were wide awake. The twins, Jenna and Dana, who were the oldest, gathered all the younger girls together in their room. Girls in donated T- shirts and faded pajama bottoms sat huddled together on the floor, dirty comforters wrapped around their shoulders. Tufts of pale polyester filling leaked through the holes in the comforters, so that the girls seemed to have bits of cloud sticking to them. Some of the smaller girls were whimpering. Jenna tended to get impatient when the young ones cried, but Dana was cuddling them and doing her best to distract them with a story about a witch who kept turning kids into cats and rabbits because she liked watching them i 111

eat each other until the cats and rabbits wised up and formed a strategic alliance against the witch. Dana had just reached the part where the first brave rabbit accepted the cats’ offer to join forces.

A drawn- out, musical crash shook the house, and Dana stopped her story and pulled the small girls closer. The girls all looked around at each other, realizing together that Beebee must have somehow managed to rip the huge brass and crystal chandelier out of the dining room ceiling. The crash turned into a rela-tively subdued tinkling as broken crystals slipped off the wide mahogany table and rained onto the floor.

“How much longer are we supposed to pretend that she’s not completely out of her mind!” Jenna exclaimed in exasperation.

“You sit there telling your stupid stories, but if we don’t do something . . .” Dana hit her with a pillow to stop her from finishing the sentence, but not before nine- year- old Rachel, who was smart but constantly terrified, figured out what Jenna meant and started howling. Dana’s dark brown hand stroked Rachel’s soft pink cheek. Almost everyone in that part of Alaska was either very white- skinned or else Native American, and Jenna and Dana stood out: their mother had emigrated from India and their father was African American. They had thick ebony braids, huge dark eyes, and mouths like sad red flowers.