by A. L. Knorr
I watched as Mom and Jozef stood and talked, until Jozef leaned in and kissed my mother’s cheek before leaving. She didn’t react to the kiss, only stood there and allowed it. Jozef hiked his jacket up around his ears and crossed to a black car parked in the manor’s small visitor parking. He kept his head down against the wind, but the posture also made him seem defeated somehow. My mom watched him go, her face both impassive and yet sad.
I expected her to come into the manor, but instead, she turned for the path leading to the gate…and the beach.
I scampered for the door and took the front steps down in one big leap. Running across the grass, I caught up to Mom as she reached the gate.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
She turned back, one hand on the latch, and the look in her eyes made my stomach tighten. It wasn’t the expression on her face, but the deep indigo color her eyes had become and the way the brows pressed down on them, the muscles tightening like cages.
“Swimming,” she replied, simply. “Always swimming.”
“You weren’t going to…” I paused.
Maybe putting the expectation on her that she was always to share her secrets with me wasn’t right. This new distant mother was unfamiliar to me, and made my heart ache, but I thought I understood something of what she was going through.
“I saw you with Jozef,” I said, instead.
“Did you? Yes, he was here.”
“Are you okay? He seemed upset.” And she seemed upset, too, in her own quiet way.
“He came to ask me to accompany him to the exhibition in the spring, and dinner before that, so we could catch up.”
My heart lifted a little. “That’s great, Mom! You said he was one of the few people here that you liked.”
“I said no, Targa.”
My heart did a faceplant. “Why?”
Her hand still on the gate’s latch, her exasperation broke free, and I felt glad for it. It was better than her introverted melancholy.
“To what end?” she snapped.
I had no answer to this. “But… you like him,” I said, weakly.
“I more than like him, Targa. There is something connecting us that I cannot explain. The only way I can make it make sense is that if I were beginning a land-cycle, he would be my one, my love. My heart can feel it, but my body is pulling me the other way, to the ocean. There is no point in encouraging a relationship with him that I am unable to partake in. It would only break his heart, and mine.”
Every word struck my chest with a fist of truth, and every sentiment sat in my mind like a cold brick. Another lash of suffering to add to what she was already bearing. She couldn’t move on with her life until she went to the sea. It wasn’t a matter of just changing our lives, keeping her distracted or entertained, or being able to go swimming as much as she wanted. She was inside a body that needed things to happen in the right season, and she was in the season of salt and fighting it. Worse, the fight was getting harder.
I couldn’t think of what to say. She reached up and touched my face.
“You know where I’ll be,” she said.
I watched her pass through the gate. Her shadow grew thin as she hurried in the direction of the ocean.
“How long,” I whispered. “How long can she do this?”
But this was not the question that I should have been asking and I knew it. My mother was the strongest person I knew, and she would deny herself everything to be with me if she thought I needed her. The question I wasn’t brave enough to find the words to voice was: How long would I keep her from her fate?
6
A few nights later, I woke to the shushing sound of distant waves and an eerie quiet in the empty manor. The light of a half-moon fell across the floor through the warped glass of the old window nearest my bed. Feeling small and a little spooked, I threw the covers back and fished under the bed for my slippers. It would be nice to share a bed with my mom, and I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me when we’d said goodnight. There were less than four of us in the huge house at night these days and tonight, though nothing had changed about the building itself, the thought of being alone in this ancient and towering home made me think of ghosts, which in turn made me think of Georjie, which in turn made me homesick.
Padding softly on the carpeted hallway, I made my way to my mom’s suite. The door was ajar and I pushed it open and entered.
“Mom?” I whispered into the gloom, hoping not to startle her. She’d always had reflexes like a cat and a preternatural awareness of what was going on around her, even at night while she was asleep.
No answer.
In the dim shadows I peered at her bed. The coverlet and sheets were rumpled and disorderly, as though she’d had a nightmare and thrown the blankets off in frustration. But she wasn’t in the bed. I frowned, approaching the bed and resting my hand on the divot created by her body. It was cold.
“Mom?”
The old fears of my childhood emerged slowly, languidly. Memories of sitting outside my parents' room at night, with one eye leveled at the crack in the door, watching their sleeping forms, came to my mind. Fear opened in my heart—a blossom that only blooms in the darkness of night, by the cool blue light of the moon. In the dark, my anxieties magnified and my rational mind took a back seat to the horrible imaginings of my worst fears.
I searched her small suite of rooms, stumbling over a pair of shoes as I reached for the light switch. Electric brilliance flooded the space and I looked down to see that it was her everyday sneakers I had stepped on. Panic rippled up and down my spine and I took a deep breath in an effort to squash it. She was here. Somewhere. She had to be here.
I called twice more, louder each time but not so loud I’d wake the others asleep in the manor. Swallowing down a cold terror, I ran down the hall and to the main stairway. The foyer was a den of shadows, with only one dim and flickering electric bulb glowing from the sconce closest to the front door. They were closed and locked.
Mentally talking myself through my search, I told myself that there was no way she would leave without saying goodbye to me. She wouldn’t do what Sybellen had done to her family—just vanish in a splash of seawater.
Would she?
As I took the narrow passageway leading to the back garden and private beach, my heart threw itself against my ribcage like a trapped animal. My mouth became an arid wasteland of panic as I threw the door open wide and yelled for my mother.
Only the wind answered. Heedless of the chill, being barefoot wearing only my pajama shorts and t-shirt, I ran across the yard to the gate leading to the beach path.
My vision blurred as tears of worry filled my eyes and spilled over, running down my cheeks and neck. Angrily, I brushed them away, straining to focus on the path ahead. The sound of the waves grew loud as I sprinted to the beach, stumbling in the coarse sand and weeds. Tough grasses ripped at the tender flesh between my toes. I barely noticed and staggered onto the beach, calling for Mom, throwing my words out over the Baltic with desperate abandon.
“Mira!” Her name ripped from my throat and the sound was a plaintive, agonized cry, even to me. I raked my hair back from my face, holding my head and biting my lip to keep from screaming uncontrollably. I tasted blood. “Please don’t leave me. Not yet. I can’t…” I took a shuddering breath. “I can’t handle it. I don’t know what to do without you.”
I paced along the beach, frantically skimming the black horizon where the sea met the moonlit sky, helpless, not even knowing where to start searching.
“I’d give it all,” I whispered aloud to any deity who might hear me and have power to help. “I’d give up all my elemental power, even my fins, to have her back. Please.”
A shiny black head broke the surface in the distance, followed by her wet, white face.
I gasped, nearly choking on my relief. Sprinting into the waves, I ran forward to meet her as her feet hit the sandy floor and she stood, naked and pale and beautiful.
“Mom!�
� I threw myself into her arms and she clutched me tightly, one hand against the back of my head, the way she used to hold me when I was upset as a child.
“Shhhh.”
The taller of the two of us, she lifted me off the sand.
“I’m here.”
The vicious pounding of my heart began to slow, and along with it my breath. Relief coursed through my limbs, making me feel weak.
“I thought you’d gone,” I said, steadying my voice as I realized that if I fell apart on her in this moment, it would make the inevitable even more difficult…and dangerous.
“I wouldn’t,” she whispered, hugging me close and then releasing me as we were pushed around by the cresting waves.
She turned to face me and the moonlight illuminated her face fully.
What I saw there ran me through like a frozen blade. Her eyes were glassy and bloodshot, the skin of her cheeks had a stiff unyielding quality I hadn’t seen before, like marble, as though expression was more difficult than normal. Lines of stress bracketed the sides of her mouth, making her look old, and her hand trembled as she lifted it to push her wet hair from her forehead.
The sight of that tremor in a body that had always been steady and more than strong––formidable––nearly undid me. My knees buckled.
She grasped my forearms and lifted me easily to set me on my feet for a second time, demonstrating that she was still powerful. “Hey, it’s all right. I’m all right. Are you?”
The tears were still streaming down my face and I put on a smile for her and brushed them away. I nodded. “I could use a fortifying swim, though.”
Her brows rose a fraction, her eyes widening. “Now?”
I nodded, fighting a lively internal battle to keep the worst of my emotion from my features. “Now. Let’s go. Please? Let’s go…” I paused, searching for an idea, a distraction, something more than just a desperate swim in the dark trying to get away from my terror. “Let’s go visit The Sybellen. I haven’t seen the wreck since last summer, I would really love to see it again.”
“Are you sure?” She brushed a wisp of my hair from my cheek.
I nodded, already taking my t-shirt off. “It’s exactly what we need, to forget and enjoy for a little while.”
She smiled. Some of the age vanished from her face, and some of the glassiness faded from her eyes. I tossed my clothing onto the windswept beach and without another word, my mother and I disappeared beneath the waves, leaving the human world and its many worries behind.
Though the waters of the Baltic were so low in salt as to almost qualify as fresh, they still offered the soothing, stabilizing effect I so needed. My heart resumed its regular rhythm as we swam through gloomy waters. Shoals of fish caught the moon and starlight as they flickered out of our way, and a grayscale sea bed offered up swaying tendrils of seaweed which reached up like an adoring crowd of fans as we swept by.
The swim to the wreck worked its miracle on me, and by the time we saw the mast in the gloom, all of my cares had shrunk to a manageable size. My mother regained her ageless beauty and powerful grace. I became more entranced by watching her than I did about the details of the wreck.
Her skin glimmered with a pearlescent sheen, and her torso seemed almost to glow preternaturally in contrast to the dark blue-green shades of her fins. Her long black hair fanned around her head, a shadowy halo swaying and darting in response to the elegant movements of her head and neck as she swam. Her face and its delicate features seemed so ethereal with its supernatural beauty that she hardly seemed to look like her human self.
Her expression was marred for a moment when her brows drew together and I followed her gaze.
“The foremast wasn’t like that before,” I observed, always a little amazed at how well our siren voices allowed us to talk underwater. The words came out clear, and without bubbles to garble them. “It must have collapsed since we were last here.”
She made a thoughtful noise and swam closer, floating over the wreck’s hunched and angular shapes. Detail became clear as we approached, and I noticed that other things had changed as well.
“Look.” Mom pointed out a thick, algae-coated three-cord rope, coiled and scattered over the deck like intestines. The rope had clearly been moved, because nearby was a void in the algae marking where it had used to sit. The wood of the ship was bare where the rope had once sat, and little drifts of algae and particulate snaked their way around the deck, framing its old resting place and providing clear evidence that it had been recently disturbed.
Now that I was really looking, there was evidence of disruption all over the deck. The juxtaposition of items’ current resting places and the outlines of their previous places came into focus like a three-dimensional drawing.
“Someone has been here,” Mom said, her voice soft and calm. “Recently.”
“Treasure hunters? Come to scavenge and see what might have been left behind? The location of the wreck is no longer a secret; anyone who wants to can dive on it.”
She made a disbelieving sound back in her throat. “Maybe.”
“Let’s look inside,” I suggested, my siren tones floating from my mouth and spreading around us like a musical chord that then faded slowly.
The last time we’d been at The Sybellen, Mom hadn’t allowed me to go inside. She’d said it was dangerous, and because I was still so new, I didn’t have the control over my body that I needed to have in order to fit into such a tight space without disturbing the things inside. But a lot of things had happened since we were last here, not the least of which being that the wreck had already been salvaged and I had mastered my mermaid tail. She didn’t protest when I followed her through the hatch and into the belly of the wreck.
My eyes adjusted quickly to the dimness inside and I couldn’t swallow down my startled, “Oh!” When Mom didn’t say anything right away, I added, “Is this how you guys left it?”
“Absolutely not.” Her voice was tight and not a little dismayed.
“Good, because what a mess.”
We drifted through the first level where it appeared that someone had raked over every single surface and corner. The salvage team had done their best to disturb the wreck as little as possible as they retrieved the items of value, and my mother had made this task even easier for them by carefully positioning the artifacts so they’d be easy to spot and even easier to extract. This was what my mother had become so skilled at. I wondered how she felt to see that whoever had been here after the salvage dive had rendered all that fastidious work futile.
She didn’t say anything as we combed over the deck and dropped into the next level, and then into the hull. Even the belly of the ship––which was smothered in silt and algae and littered with jagged, broken beams––had been torn apart by someone.
“What were they looking for?” Mom muttered, her gaze falling on a large wooden trunk. Someone had wrenched the lid off its hinges and cast aside the top. Now the trunk sat upside down, displaying an underside which had yet to become home to the Baltic’s microscopic creatures.
I gave a little gasp as something shiny beneath the rubble beside the trunk caught my eye. I drifted over and picked up a small candle-snuffer with a delicately made handle.
“It’s silver, right?” I held it out to Mom.
She didn’t take it, but nodded. “Yes. I found it last summer, but it wasn’t on the manifest, so I left it. Why wouldn’t whoever was searching The Sybellen have taken it with them? It’s definitely worth something.”
“Maybe they weren’t looking for treasures,” I mused, unsure of whether or not I should put the candle-snuffer back. I elected to keep it unless Mom told me I should leave it behind. It would become my own private artifact.
“What did they want, then?” she asked.
“You know more about this wreck than I do. Was there anything else significant on the manifest or in the reports that Martinius gave to Simon?”
I followed Mom as she turned toward the hatch opening, clenching th
e candle-snuffer in my fist. When she didn’t answer immediately, I continued, “Maybe paperwork? Legal documents of some kind? Proof of ownership of something valuable, like property or a bank account?”
Mom looked over her shoulder and gave me a bemused smile. “My, you have an active imagination.”
“You said that sometimes even paperwork can survive underwater if it’s protected well enough––tightly wrapped in leather or closed in a safe. Right?” I had to admit I was loving the mystery of it all, and my joy at being distracted mingled with the relief of seeing my mother appear as though all was normal once again. “What else would they be after if it wasn’t leftovers?”
“I’m more concerned with who than what,” Mom said as we retraced our path through the open hatch and out through the largest exit. “No salvage diver that I know, and no treasure hunter either, would ever do this to a wreck, not because they’re good people, but simply because it would take too much energy for almost no reward. Not only that, it’s the way in which it was done. Human eyes cannot make out details well enough in this gloom to dismantle things so expertly, and even a diver who has lights would be hard pressed to do this much damage, even on purpose.”
A chill swept across my skin and I almost forgot to swim. “What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything for certain,” she replied as she hovered over the foredeck and peered down at the wreck below us. “But I suspect this was done by a siren.”
7
When Mom and I returned from our swim, I watched her carefully for any signs of that glassy-eyed look I’d seen when she’d come out of the water. Thankfully, her eyes seemed clear enough.
I went to my room to put on my pajamas and stash the candle-snuffer in a drawer. Grabbing my toothbrush, I brushed my teeth in her bathroom with her, instead of in my own. I poured her a glass of water and set it by her bedside table as she slipped into fresh pajamas. I even fluffed up her pillow and tucked her in once she was under the covers. Normally, my mother would laugh at these protective and motherly behaviors. She’d tell me to stop worrying and remind me that she was the parent and I was the child.
