The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

“But I was scared. I was hungry and cold. And I was getting tired.”

  Finch nodded. “Sometimes it is scary, to feel what another creature is feeling. I think that’s what your mom does, too. It can’t be easy, to feel another’s pain.”

  Emmie nodded in the dark, her arms wrapped around her little girl. “Sometimes, when I was a little girl, I would feel the pain of the horses or the cows. It made me cry.”

  “Where I work, with the Samish people? Dreams are important. Sometimes dreams are sent to guide you,” Finch whispered. “To tell you something you need to know. You know the best thing you can do? With these feelings? These dreams?”

  Robin shook her head. “What?”

  “Use it. Use it to help, any way you can, any creature you can. Maybe since you love the orcas so much, you will grow up to be a great orca scientist. Do research, like that Maggie Edwards. Study the orcas. Help them. Figure out why they can’t find enough food. Figure out ways to help them get more.”

  Robin got very quiet and still.

  “When I was a little boy, my dad used to take me to fish for salmon,” Finch murmured. “I remember that first one I caught. So beautiful. The pink color of the flesh, the silver scales. I think I fell in love with the salmon.” He put her hand down and took a deep breath. “When something touches you like that, then use it. Follow it. That’s how you find your way in this world.”

  Robin’s tears had stopped. And just like that, her path in life was set.

  Up until school started, Robin had never even considered the idea that she and her mother were different from everyone else. The fact that Emmie walked through town, talking to almost every creature she met—dogs in yards, cats in windows, birds in the trees, sometimes even the trees themselves—had always just seemed normal.

  The confrontations began as soon as she started school. Robin got a firsthand look at just how cruel children could be. Classes were small in the Cove, and there were only fifteen students in the first grade. All of them had heard their parents talk about Robin’s mother; all of them were well acquainted with the word witch. And now she heard the other students using that word to describe her mother, and herself.

  Three weeks into first grade, she was in the cafeteria at lunch when she happened to hear Brian Carter, in the second grade, whisper the word witch as she walked past him. She stopped right next to his table and turned to look at him. “What did you say?” She said it loudly enough that everyone at the table heard it.

  Brian smirked, but he didn’t repeat it.

  She waited for him outside, after lunch. As soon as he walked out the door of the cafeteria, starting to run toward the slide, she charged him from behind. His own momentum, combined with the surprise attack, sent him sprawling on the rocks, his face in the gravel. Robin had thrown herself on top of his back. “Don’t you ever call me or my mother names,” she whispered into his ear. “I know magic that will make your penis fall off.”

  She stood up, brushed herself off, and walked away. That was the first indication that she would not handle things the same way that her mother always had.

  Where Emmie was always quiet and circumspect, and let the gossip of town roll off her, her daughter could not. Robin displayed none of the qualities of patience and forbearance and calm that had kept her mother going all those years. They were like yin and yang, night and day, black and white, in the way they approached life—total opposites.

  Robin always forced the issue. She pushed, she challenged, she refused to back down. And somehow, she made it work. What started in the first grade as fear and ostracizing gradually turned to grudging tolerance. The boys, at least, started to look at her as someone who was tough and hard and able to hold her own with any one of them. The students learned to give her a wide berth, managed to keep most of their gossip and insults to themselves. If they didn’t, cuts and bruises always ensued, Robin often going home with fewer than anyone else.

  Emmie told her repeatedly to let it go. “Let it roll off. Who are these people, anyway? Their opinions don’t matter.”

  Finch told her it was important to pick her battles, to save her strength for the ones that really mattered.

  All that advice swept away in the breeze, none of their wisdom sticking in her head when confronted with the latest bit of insult from the catty girls in school. Robin had to scratch and claw and fight her way through school. She was never the type who would sit at the back of the room like some shy church mouse and watch while the others made fun of her.

  She filled her hours at school doing two main things: sketching and singing.

  Song tracks looped through her head, and she came to class late, singing, dancing her way down the aisle. Stephanie Spencer rolled her eyes and leaned to whisper to a friend, and Robin stopped right in front of her. “Too bad you don’t know how to dance,” Robin said, loud enough for the class to hear.

  When she wasn’t doing actual classwork, she spent every moment in the classroom sketching. Trees, flowers, orcas, all flowed from the tips of her colored pencils and gave her somewhere to focus her energy. Occasionally, she would draw a sketch of one of those catty girls, her face contorted into that of a sea monster.

  Though they would never have admitted it, the boys liked her. She was cute and funny and played tag football as well as any of them. Secretly, they all hoped that Robin would tackle them, a real tackle that would “accidentally” bring her body down on top of theirs.

  After school was a little easier to navigate. Schools in Copper Cove weren’t large enough to have swim teams, but if they had, Robin would have been a champion. During the summer months, and into the fall, she spent many mornings down at the sea wall park, just below the main street of town, where she could dip into the waters of the Sound and swim along the shore. It was fairly shallow there; she could stand up if she got tired, and it provided her with a physical release for all the frustration of not belonging. The only time when she wouldn’t go in the water was the dead of winter—November, December, January. February was always iffy—but there were occasional days when she went ahead, wearing a wet suit given to her by Maggie, after an intern had left it behind. It was swimming that brought Robin a small level of peace. She loved the feel of her hands cutting into the water, loved the way the water shimmered silver off her arms and shoulders as she moved. For those fifty minutes that she was in the water, she could erase all the ugly comments and rude looks from the girls at school.

  And so she survived her adolescence in Copper Cove, swimming and sketching, and all of it accompanied by the endless soundtracks that ran through her head. Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Queen, Prince—she knew them all. Stevie Nicks remained one of her favorites, even when she wasn’t singing with Fleetwood Mac. Robin thought the woman was brilliant. She knew the words to every song, and she also knew how to harmonize, letting her own voice weave with Stevie’s into a blend she was sure even Ms. Nicks would approve. Stevie Nicks seemed to be the one person who wasn’t intimidated by the idea of witches and their offspring.

  Her plan worked pretty well for most of her elementary and middle school years. She turned sixteen at the end of tenth grade, and when she came back to school that fall of her junior year, everything was different.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Daniel loved surprises. Not the kind of surprises that included boxes of candy and bouquets of flowers, not the kinds of surprises that might elicit a smile. The kind of surprise that really intrigued Daniel was the one that would make Alex afraid.

  He would sneak up on her while she was cooking or doing laundry, touching her shoulder ever so lightly, and watch as she shrieked and jumped. He liked to have her in the car beside him, one hand on her thigh, the other on the steering wheel, as he sped up, headed straight for a group of trees. He loved the look of terror that came over her face, the way her fingers dug into the upholstery of the car seat. He’d hit the brakes at the last minute, laughing as the car screeched to a stop, sometimes even fishtailing.

  “Just ki
dding, Alex. Why do you always get so worked up about things? Don’t be silly.” And then he’d lean across the car, his hand traveling up her thigh, and press his face into her neck.

  Her terror seemed to be the one thing that always turned him on. It did not have the same effect on her.

  She was always a little afraid of him, afraid of those surprises, even before they turned physical. And that was before she had started lying to him, hiding bits of cash. Now there was a wariness in her that went well beyond those adrenaline rushes of fear. She had that secret knowledge, and the weight of carrying all those lies was beginning to take its toll.

  It was another ordinary evening, ordinary for the life of Alex and Daniel, at any rate. Daniel had not come home for dinner, despite the fact that he was working in town and was not out on some remote job location. He did not call to say that he would be late, or when he would be home, or what he was doing. And Alex had learned, years ago, that life was more peaceful for her if she did not ask.

  She could still remember the first dinner that she had had to toss out, ruined after sitting for three hours, waiting for Daniel. She asked him where he had been and why he was so late. He spun around, grabbing a fistful of her shirt and lifting her off the ground. “If there’s something you need to know, then by God, I’ll tell you. You sound like a jealous wife.”

  Alex felt her jaw working, trying to find the words. “It’s not that. It’s just that I made dinner, and now it’s ruined.”

  He set her on the floor, but his eyes were blazing. “Dinner ruined? That’s what you’re worried about?”

  She said nothing else, her eyes locked on the anger that flamed in his face.

  He turned to walk away from her, running his hand through his hair. He stopped, and her heart stopped at the same time. “I’ll give you something to worry about,” he whispered. He picked up one of the plates on the counter and turned quickly, hurling it at her head, food and all. She ducked. It hit the wall behind her, spaghetti sliding down the wall and onto the floor.

  She learned to quit asking where he had been.

  So on this particular evening, the third one this week in which he had not come home for dinner, she simply stood up from the table and carried his plate to the kitchen. She stood over the trash can, the fork in one hand. It took only a moment to decide: instead of scraping food into the trash, she tossed in everything—plate, silverware, meatloaf, all clattering into the bin. And then she went to bed, not bothering to change out of her sweatpants and sweatshirt. She lay down and pulled the covers up around her.

  Lying in bed, she seethed. It was not jealousy that churned her anger, not the idea that he was once again out with another woman. For a few years, at least, she had fantasized that he would fall in love with someone else, that he would leave her for another. It was just another version of the “someday Daniel will be gone” game that had kept her afloat, that gave her a reason to keep going.

  What really galled her was that she had never liked to cook. She hated coming home from work, tired and wanting a few moments to herself, and having to start her second job—the job of Daniel’s wife. He expected a meal on the table when he got home. If he came home. And she never had any way of knowing ahead of time whether he would show up or not. She had just wasted another evening, standing in the kitchen, preparing a meal that he liked, for no good reason. Another evening, gone. Her whole life was wasting away in these little dribbles of resentment, in these endless efforts to try and keep the peace.

  She said nothing when he came into the bedroom three hours later, dinner forgotten as he climbed in bed beside her. Many nights, when he came in late like this, he reached for her, ready for sex. As if the woman who permeated the atmosphere around them with Chanel No.5, who had already bathed him in the scent of sex, was simply the first course in a multicourse meal. As if his manhood was proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if he could have sex with more than one woman per evening.

  That night, though, instead of crawling in beside her, he grabbed her shoulder and turned her toward him. His movements were rough, his voice clipped and lethal.

  “You little slut.” He slapped her across the face.

  “What?” Alex raised a hand to her cheek, still shaking off the fogginess of coming up from a deep sleep. “What are you talking about?” Even as the words left her mouth, she could feel the truth flushing her face with color. She was lying to him. She had amassed more than $600 in the past several months.

  “You’re lying to me, Alex. I always know when you’re lying.”

  He grabbed her arms, pulling her up from the bed. His breath smelled of whiskey. “Don’t play innocent with me. I’m not some dumb high school kid. I’ve been down this road before. I know a lie when I smell one.” He half-pulled, half-dragged her from the bed and pushed her, stumbling and barefoot, into the living room.

  Alex willed herself not to look at her purse, sitting on the table by the front door.

  He pushed her hard, and she fell in a puddle on the carpet.

  He got down on one knee and leaned close to her face, his breath hot and sour. “I can see it, Alex. I can see it written all over you.”

  She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her fear had ratcheted from zero to deathly afraid, in the space of only a few moments.

  “Who have you been fucking on this carpet? Who have you been fucking while I was at work?”

  The words left her stupefied. She looked at his eyes, bloodshot, his head reeling slightly from drink. “What are you talking about?”

  “I can see it, Alex. I can see where you’ve been fucking your little friend. It’s written all over your face. It’s written all over my house.”

  He slapped her, and then pulled her to her feet and slapped her again. She fell on her side, and he was on top of her in an instant, turning her head and grinding her face into the fibers of the carpet. “Smell that, Alex? I can. Two filthy bodies, fucking, on my living room rug.”

  Alex went completely still, shocked, yet again, at the level of his anger, at the craziness of his ideas. She said nothing; she did not look at him directly. He stood, wiping his hand over his face. And then he turned and kicked her, as hard as he could. She curled into a tighter ball.

  He stood over her, swaying slightly, as if he couldn’t quite remember where he was or what he was doing. And then he stumbled off to bed.

  “Ahh!” Alex shot awake, her heart racing. The memories assaulted her, jumping at her from every angle. Haunting her, plaguing her sleep, creeping up to surprise her when her mind was elsewhere. Like a soldier returned from war, every little thing set her off, sent her right back to those moments when she crouched in terror. It didn’t take much: the smell of Giorgio Armani aftershave, a glimpse of a tall man with dark wavy hair, the sight of a black Volvo driving down the road.

  Alex took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall. She knew what it felt like to sleep with one eye open, to sleep with only half her brain, like the orcas. She’d been doing it for years. Listening for the sound of his car in the driveway. Listening for the sound of his steps on the porch, his key turning in the lock.

  Her stomach clenched even now, with the memory of hearing him come home. The thought of wondering if this would be the night when he actually killed her. Despite the fact that she was two thousand miles away, that he could not hurt her anymore, she still woke with the taste of terror in her mouth, the adrenaline rush of fear.

  Alex threw back the covers and headed to the kitchen for a drink of water. She stood at the sink, her eyes closed as she drank deeply, trying to find her way out of the talons of fear that still gripped her. She lowered the glass and took a deep breath. And then she heard it, just behind her, at the door that led to the back porch. She turned to look.

  The doorknob twisted. The latch released with a soft click. The door creaked open, like a slow-motion horror film. She could hear footsteps on the floor in the kitchen, not far from where she stood. A rush of cold air brushed past her.


  No one was there. The back door stood open; cold air swirled into the room. But no one was there. Before she could even think about moving to close it, before she could begin to process what she had just witnessed, the door slammed shut, the dead bolt turned in the lock.

  “Ah!” she gasped. With her hand at her throat, Alex tiptoed over to the back door and peered out into the night. There was no one outside, no one on the back porch, no car in the driveway, other than her own. Nothing that she could see. She moved back into the house and checked the dead bolt, making sure it was locked in place.

  And then she felt it, moisture seeping through the bottom of her socks. Alex turned to look at the floor. There were footprints across the wood, starting at the back door. Wet footprints, as if someone had entered with wet shoes. She knelt and touched the floor with her fingertips. They, too, came away wet.

  Alex ran a hand through the tangles of her hair. I must be losing my mind. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.

  It didn’t seem to matter that she was two thousand miles away. All the horrors of her past had followed her here, seeping into the woodwork, twisting into the very structure of this old house in Copper Cove. As if the house itself were forcing her to look backward, to pay attention, to remember. As if every scratch at the window, every turn of the lock, every wet footprint, was scraping at the layers of fog in her brain. Whispering in her ear. You cannot escape.

  She sat in the chair the rest of the night, wrapped in a blanket, her eyes glued to the handle of that back door. Watching. Waiting.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Alex was out the door the next morning before the sun was up, heading downtown to the café. She needed food, she needed coffee, she needed to be out of that house. She needed to find somewhere she could feel safe, at least for a short time.

  The bell on the back of the door at the Drift Inn tinkled her arrival. The aromas of home-cooked food rose to greet her: homemade bread, bacon frying, coffee brewing, pancakes on the griddle. She stood for a minute, her nose in the air like a dog, savoring the breakfast bouquet, listening to the sounds of real people around her. Real people going about their ordinary, everyday business. She hung her jacket on the hooks by the door and turned to the main part of the restaurant.