Promise Bound

by Anne Greenwood Brown

  Lily took my fingers lightly in hers and led me back to the couch. She curled into the indentation I’d left in the cushions and faced the fireplace, where, by now, there was only a faint, flickering glow from the remaining log on the grate.

  “Feeling better yet?” I asked, though I could see she was still exhausted from her last transformation.

  “Maybe if I swam more often it wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “You don’t want to overexert yourself.”

  “At the very least I don’t want to hold you back. Don’t wait for me. You should go out tomorrow with Dad. You’re looking a little dry.” She moved over to make room for me on the couch. I hesitated, looking anxiously toward her parents’ bedroom.

  “If it’s all the same,” I said, “I’m happier suffering through with you. Besides, you know how much I love a challenge.” And it was true. I was pretty damn impressed with myself. A six-day stretch between transformations! It used to be I’d get the shakes after twenty-four hours. A year ago, three days nearly turned me to chalk. I didn’t know if it was a matter of practice, sheer will, creative coping skills, or something more phenomenal than all three put together, but I didn’t really care so long as I could be there for Lily. I could see how much she needed me.

  “Good,” she said, as if she were considering a different challenge altogether, and placed her palm over the pendant around her neck.

  “Why don’t you just take that thing off?” I asked.

  She looked at me miserably. “I would, but I feel uneasy without it. I … I think Nadia is trying to communicate with me. Remember that story you told me?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I mean, no, I don’t want to hear it. I’m sorry, Lily. I really am. But I don’t want to talk about my mother.”

  She stifled a yawn. “That’s fine. I don’t really want to talk about her either.”

  “It’s probably your imagination,” I said. “And the stress of all the changes you’re going through.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  I frowned.

  “Okay,” said Lily, “then let me rephrase my earlier statement. I don’t think Nadia is trying to communicate with me. I know she is. It’s just that I don’t know what she’s trying to say. You told me the pendant stores mermaid histories.”

  “That’s just a legend,” I said.

  “Like the dagger was supposedly part of the legend? Like Maighdean Mara was only a myth?”

  “Point taken, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have an overactive imagination.”

  Lily avoided the argument and changed the subject. “Gabby called again today,” she murmured, tapping the couch cushions for me to lie down.

  I added another log to the fire and lay beside her, curling my body around hers, protecting her from a threat that I could feel but couldn’t see. Lily pressed her face against my shoulder while the logs crackled in the stone fireplace.

  “Did you talk to her this time,” I asked, my lips behind her ear, “or did you make her leave another message?”

  “I couldn’t avoid it anymore. Gabby’s pretty persistent.”

  “Is she enjoying college?”

  Lily traced the point of my collarbone with her finger. “That’s not what she wanted to talk about.”

  Yeah. I knew that. Lily rolled onto her back, and the fire cast a warm glow across her face. She closed her eyes, and her lids shimmered like gold leaf in the firelight. This was how I preferred her. Warm. The raspberry-pink glow of happiness melting around the outline of her curves. It had been awhile since I’d seen those colors on her.

  Lily sighed, and I kissed her forehead. “So what do I do about Gabby? And Jack?” she asked.

  “I’ve told you. There’s nothing anyone can do for Jack.”

  Nearly half a century as a merman, and I’d never had to deal with this side of things before. It made me uncomfortable to think of all the families who were still searching for children because of what I’d done. The days when I hunted humans to satisfy my emotional appetites seemed like a million years ago. Ever since Lily had fallen—literally—into my life, I’d forgotten what it felt like to be empty, desolate, alone. The need to hunt was forever gone.

  Lily rubbed the pendant, her thumb moving methodically over its smooth contours.

  As she did so, my eyes watched the ring finger on her left hand, wondering, dreaming. Unbeknownst to her, I’d spent some time over the winter fashioning a ring for her. It wasn’t fancy, only braided copper wire and a polished agate. But now that it was finished, I had no idea how to present it to her. I didn’t even know what it should mean. Only that I wanted her with me. Always.

  I’d told Jason about it over a week ago. I guess I was asking his permission. I’d seen that in the movies, but his reaction didn’t make me any braver.

  Jason: “Well, what did Lily have to say about it?”

  Me: “I haven’t said anything to her. I thought it was normal to ask the father first.”

  Jason: “Son, I appreciate the gesture, don’t get me wrong. But this isn’t something you should surprise her with. Are you sure? You’re both so young.”

  Me: “Do you think she’d say no?”

  Jason: “I think she’d say what’s the hurry.”

  Hurry. The need for hurry glowed in Lily’s skin, and in her eyes, and in the light that shone from both. Or rather, the absence of that light. Couldn’t Jason see that in his own daughter? Couldn’t Sophie, who despite her maintained humanity was more in tune to moods and emotions than any full-blooded mermaid I knew?

  Jason: “It doesn’t have to be an engagement ring. Why don’t you call it a promise ring? They were very popular in my day.”

  I had to admit, a promise ring fit my mer-sensibilities. In promising myself to Lily—a promise she knew I’d be incapable of breaking—maybe I could restore some of the happiness that last summer’s events had stolen from her. I don’t know. Maybe I was kidding myself.

  As Lily worked the pendant in her fingers, she didn’t blink; her thoughts seemed very far away. “We could fake some postcards from Jack,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow. “You could go to Canada and send them from there, saying, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m hiking through Ontario. I’m fine. Love, Jack.’ That sort of thing. I wish I had saved the card he gave me. You could have used it to copy his handwriting. It was messy. That’s all I can say about it.”

  Beneath her oversized cardigan I recognized the Jimi Hendrix T-shirt she’d worn when she confronted Jack, and nearly lost her life.

  “I would never go to Canada without you,” I said. I waited a few seconds, but she didn’t respond. Finally I prompted, “So?”

  “So … what?” she asked.

  “So, if I go to Canada, will you come with me?”

  She looked at me with a serious expression. “Do you think postcards would give the Pettits some peace?”

  “What more can we offer? Really, Lily, people go missing every day.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  No. Not really. I drew one finger through her hair and tucked a strand behind her ear. “Why do you have to feel bad about this? It’s not your fault what happened to Jack.”

  “It feels like my fault.”

  I sighed, trying to be patient. “If it were up to you, everything would be your fault … but you didn’t answer my question.”

  “What question?” Pine sap snapped in the fireplace and scattered sparks on the hearth.

  “If I go to Canada, will you come with me?”

  “Let’s just wait and see,” she said, kissing the end of my nose as if punctuating a sentence.

  3

  LILY

  When I came down the stairs, I was glad to find Calder awake, too. I didn’t want to go back to sleep. I smiled against his chest, remembering the way he half crawled, half climbed the stairs toward me and, when he stood up, how his pajama bottoms hung low
on his hips, revealing the line of muscle that made my insides squirm.

  His bare chest, broad and scarred with a crisscross of cuts in various stages of healing, expanded with a deep intake of breath. I’d never felt the misery I’d seen in regular mermaids, but his reaction to me—like I was filling some emotional tank—wasn’t too hard to understand. I felt the same way.

  Calder’s body warmed me even more than the fire. I curled into his chest and wrapped one arm around him, pulling my knee up over his leg. He drew me closer, and I inhaled the patchouli-like scent of smoke and incense that perfumed his skin and flooded my mind with memories. He dipped his chin and tipped mine up, kissing me.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” he said. “You need to get back to your room before your dad gets up for a midnight snack.”

  I smiled at the thought of getting caught, but it barely moved my lips. All I could think of was how stupid I was being. Why had I suggested Canada? I wished I’d never brought it up. Why drag out hope for the Pettits that Jack was alive? It was cruel, really. Irrational thought must be the result of interrupted sleep. Right now, I wanted nothing more than three solid hours of dreamlessness. Was that really so much to ask?

  No more, I said soundlessly.

  Though Nadia had been dead for over thirty years, I trusted she could hear me. I’m just so tired. No more dreams.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” Calder said.

  But I counted my breaths like sheep, marking each one with another plea because I knew Nadia had more to say tonight, and just like that, in the silent space between two breaths, the line between our two selves began to blur and blend like cream stirred into coffee. I slipped deeper into the dark well of her mind, my bloodstream cooling and my mind roiling bleak and black until the moment when I lost myself: I am me, and then I am we, and then I am not.

  * * *

  Nadia swims the shoreline. Her body is a solid sheath of muscle and pink iridescent scales that dazzle the school of fish trailing in her wake. Her mind is a tangled web of fury and grief. Someone has wronged her, and whoever that is, he should be afraid. She emerges from the lake, breaking the silver plane with head and shoulders. Dark rings of water run from her body.

  Through her large eyes I see my house. Lichen grows on the shingles. Ah, I understand things now. It has been a long time since Tom Hancock has been here. It has been many years since he took Nadia’s son.

  I clutch my chest in pain. From Nadia’s center, dark anger simmers, then boils like pitch, finally exploding in a bolt of electricity from her eyes and fingertips. The electric charge strikes an enormous willow tree at the shoreline and splits a branch down the length of the trunk, charring it, laying it bare on top of the water. Small green leaves rain down.

  A sound of disgust rattles in the back of her throat, and with a great whip of her tail, she drowns the beach in a wave.

  The dream drifted effortlessly to a new scene: a very young Maris cowers in the shadow of a sunken log and watches her mother. Nadia feels her eyes on her but does not acknowledge her daughter’s presence. Instead, she weaves in and out of caves, scraping her belly and tail along the rock, releasing her grief in a long trail of blood. She sings a lullaby that turns into a dirge.

  Then there is a noise, or the feeling of noise: a suction and a sinking. And then again, this time louder and heavier than before. The sound pulls Nadia away from the rocks, and she spies a tiny boy clawing with open fingers for the surface. His jaw slackens as his head falls forward, his body rising as if pulled upward from the shoulders. A tremor of bubbles, and the last bit of air escapes the little boy’s nose.

  Black heavy curls float around the boy’s small face like a dark angel’s halo. “Calder!” I call out with a gasp.

  I woke with a start. A cool hand rested gently on my shoulder and rocked me back and forth. “Babe, it’s time. You’ve got to get ready.”

  I scowled at whatever was shaking me. Too rough. Too much. Stop it.

  “Babe, it’s time to get up.”

  I opened my eyes, disoriented for a moment, thinking the window was in the wrong place and I was too high off the ground. I gripped the edge of my blanket, hoping to find my place in the texture of its fabric.

  “You fell asleep downstairs,” Calder said. “I had to carry you up before your parents woke up.”

  “Oh,” I said, slowly recognizing the dead-poet portraits on my bedroom wall and the mountain of clean and dirty laundry on the floor. “Sorry.”

  “Never a problem.”

  I could still feel the coolness of Nadia’s pulse in the pendant. I rolled over so Calder couldn’t see my face. He had an easy enough time reading my emotions without letting him see the worry so plainly on my face.

  “You really need to get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “It’s like trying to raise the dead with you.”

  That’s ironic, I thought, covering my head with a pillow. Every time I fell asleep I raised the dead.

  He whipped the pillow away and dropped it on the floor. “What’s wrong?” His voice was tinged with worry.

  I gave him a withering look. “Just a dream.”

  “Tell me.”

  I groaned and stared up at the ceiling. “You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Tell me anyway. If you talk about it, the dreams will go away.”

  Yeah, sure. “Maybe if I talk about it, you’ll get pissed off.”

  “I’ll try very hard not to.”

  I looked over at him and had to grimace at his vain attempt to plaster a patient expression on his face.

  “Fine,” he said. “Don’t tell me. But it’s ten o’clock. We should get going soon.”

  He was right, but it didn’t make me want to hurry. Actually, I felt a little sick about what the day held in store. Maris had called the house the day before—which was weird and unsettling in itself—but she didn’t have a choice because Calder refused to take her calls when she tried his cell. Maris and Pavati’s winter hiatus in New Orleans was over. They were migrating back to Bayfield, and she had called to say they’d be here by noon. The fact that they’d called at all led Calder to one conclusion, but Maris didn’t say if Pavati had had a boy or a girl.

  4

  CALDER

  Lily dragged her feet like they were encased in concrete. She’d already changed her outfit three times, making me wait in the hallway outside her room, then flinging the door open for a two-second fashion show. If I didn’t react quickly enough, she groaned and slammed the door—opening it again a few minutes later, wearing something completely different.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I said through the door. “You’re just stalling. It doesn’t matter what you wear.”

  “If you’re making me go, I want to look good!” she yelled back.

  “For what? For whom? It’s Maris and Pavati, for God’s sake.”

  “Exactly!”

  I still didn’t get it, but when she whipped the door open to outfit number five (yellow leg warmers, a green corduroy miniskirt, and a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band T-shirt), I was quick to say, “Perfect. I love it. Now can we go?”

  “Fine,” she said, stomping down the stairs to the kitchen. “But I don’t see why we have to. If there’s really a baby, it’s Danny’s problem. Not yours. And definitely not mine.” She opened the refrigerator and drank milk straight from the carton.

  “Because I don’t trust Daniel Catron to make good on his parental obligations,” I said, holding out the phone to her. “And since when did you turn into such an animal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I gestured at the milk carton still at her mouth. “As for Daniel, I want to make sure he takes responsibility for the baby, and I want to make sure he gives it back when it’s time. It’s a long summer, and for a big lake, it can sometimes feel awfully small. If he bails on Pavati, we’ll all pay the price somehow. You should call him.”

  She looked at the phone for a second longer, then took it from me. “You really think Pava
ti has a baby?”

  “Let’s just be prepared, okay? If she does, she’s going to want to hand it off as soon as she gets here.”

  “So much for motherly affection,” Lily muttered.

  “It’s not that.” I didn’t bother to explain. Lily had never experienced the normal desolation of the mermaid mind or the incessant need to medicate with human emotion. Whether that was because of her Half nature, or because I was the balm to her that she was to me, I didn’t know. It didn’t really matter. I was only too grateful for her immunity, and I hated to bring up anything that might make her think of it, like how a landlocked baby would interfere with Pavati’s hunting schedule.

  “Whatever,” Lily said. She slid open her phone and hit Daniel Catron’s number on speed dial. When he picked up, Lily switched to speaker (though I could have heard him clearly enough without it), and laid the phone on the kitchen counter.

  “She’s back?” Daniel asked, not even bothering with hello.

  “Just about,” Lily said. “You need to be at the pier by noon.”

  There were a few beats of silence, then Daniel whispered, “You’ve got to help me. My God, what was I thinking?”

  Lily looked at me with an expression of restrained exasperation, then said, “Danny, you told me you had a plan. You said you had this all figured out. For crying out loud, you’ve had over ten months.”

  Of course the kid had no plan. Give him another ten months and he’d still have nothing. Hey, Mom and Dad. Yeah, I know I’m only nineteen, but I thought it would be a good résumé builder to raise my mermaid child for a year. I hear college admissions boards are always looking for unique extracurricular activities.… I didn’t know who’d thought this through less: Daniel or Pavati. I could only imagine the conversation between my sisters in the car ride up, especially with a wailing infant in the backseat. Maris had to be loving that.

  I pulled myself up onto the kitchen counter and turned on the faucet. The warm water calmed my mind as I ran my hand through it.