Promise Bound

by Anne Greenwood Brown

  I nodded bitterly. “Life’s not fair.”

  CALDER

  Chelsea’s house was like all the others on her street: one-story, with a front door centered in its brick facade, a picture window on either side. Presumably it had been her mother who had tried to express some individuality with a white flower box under each window, filled to capacity with red and yellow tulips. They were pretty from a distance, but as we approached the door, my nose twitched at the odor of Styrofoam and plastic flowers.

  From inside the house, the sound of women’s off-pitch harmonies faded, while a few male voices carried a bass note. The end of the song gave way to chattering and the dull thud of chairs being moved around the living room.

  “Sounds like they’re wrapping up,” Chelsea said. “Let’s go catch Mrs. Brandon.”

  Chelsea opened the front door. She kicked off her shoes in the entryway and pulled me through. The living room, to the right, was painted sky blue. A navy couch was pressed up against the wall, and several high-backed dining room chairs stood in front of it. I stepped to the side as an older gentleman carried one of the chairs back to the dining room.

  “Mrs. Brandon,” Chelsea said, as she crossed the room to greet a woman with dark hair, a streak of silver in the front. She wore a lot of dark makeup, I thought, especially for a Saturday morning. Lily used to do that. The first time I saw her, she’d been ringing her eyes with thick black lines. She never did that anymore. I couldn’t remember when she’d stopped.

  “Oh, hello there, Chelsea,” said Mrs. Brandon. “And who’s this? Your boyfriend?”

  “What’s this about a boyfriend?” a second woman asked, entering the room with a coffee cake.

  “Nothing, Mom,” Chelsea said.

  Mrs. Brandon took the plate from Chelsea’s mother and placed it on the table. “We sounded good this morning, Gretchen,” Mrs. Brandon said.

  Chelsea’s mom cut the cake. “It’ll be better when Norma gets over her head cold. Chelsea, you should introduce your friend.”

  “This is Calder, Mom. I met him at the library. I brought him by because he has some questions about Mrs. Brandon’s boat.”

  “What’s this about our boat, eh?” Mrs. Brandon asked. “You’re asking about Race Me?”

  Chelsea nodded, while I eyed Mrs. Brandon speculatively. We had the same hair color. Maybe something similar about the eyes. I wondered if Chelsea was also seeing the resemblance, because her voice became more animated.

  “Did your family own it back in the sixties?” Chelsea asked.

  “Chelsea?” asked her mom. “What’s going on?”

  Mrs. Brandon chuckled and poured herself a cup of coffee from the decanter on the table. I watched her hands. They were still too young to be my mother’s, but maybe a younger aunt? Or an older cousin?

  She said, “I can’t help you there, dear. Mr. Brandon bought it at a sheriff’s auction in Milwaukee about ten years ago.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Drug raid. Mexican drug cartel. I still can’t believe that kind of crime gets this far north. Just terrible. But that’s all you see on the news these days.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, and Chelsea and the two women looked at me.

  “Law enforcement confiscated a lot of property in the raid,” Mrs. Brandon said. “Cars, boats, jewelry. They auctioned it all off. Mr. Brandon got quite the deal. Why do you want to know about that?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Thank you for your time. Sorry to bother you.” I turned for the door without another word to Chelsea, her mother, or Mrs. Brandon. I’d felt so close. Now I just felt lost.

  Behind me, I heard Mrs. Brandon ask, “Did I say something to upset your friend? Is that all he wanted to know?”

  “Not exactly,” said Chelsea, “but … Calder, wait up!”

  I retrieved my phone and charger from Chelsea’s car and was almost to the potholed street when she grabbed my arm and tried to spin me around. I shook her off me and kept walking.

  “So that’s it?” she asked. “You’re just going to go? Even drug dealers have bone marrow. You’re not going to give up like that, are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, mentally calculating the distance to the lake. I was walking fast now, and Chelsea was struggling to keep up.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. “And what do you mean it doesn’t matter? Let’s go search arrest records. Let’s go visit the prisons. Criminals or not, if they’re family, you’ve got a shot. How can you throw your life away like that?”

  “No need,” I said, trying not to smile. I’d done all I could to find my family, but it was a bust. Was I disappointed? A little. More so for Lily because I knew how important she thought it was for me to find them. But more than anything, I was relieved. I’d fulfilled my promise to Lily, and now I could go home to her. If she’d still have me.

  “What are you talking about? Would you please just stop?” Chelsea grabbed my elbow, and I shook her off again.

  “Just leave me alone,” I said.

  Chelsea ran a few steps ahead and turned to face me, obstructing my path. I took a step to the right, and she put both hands on my shoulders to block my dodge. “I’m not going to leave you alone. I want to help you find your relatives.”

  “Chelsea,” I said guiltily. “I’m not really sick.”

  She jerked her hands from my shoulders, and they hung there—midair—like she didn’t know if she should celebrate or pound me into a pulp. “Why would you lie about something like that?”

  “I lie about lots of things,” I said. It was a jerk thing to say, but it was also the truth, and wasn’t that better than another lie?

  Her fists came down hard on my chest. “Why do you have to be such a prick?”

  “Born that way, I guess.” I pushed past her and kept on walking. It was three miles to the lake. I could smell it. I swear, Chelsea’s artful string of profanity followed me all the way to the water’s edge.

  27

  LILY

  Nothing Dad said about changing Mom would ever make me think it was a good idea. But after my epiphany that Pavati might have more heart than we originally thought, Dad asked that I give her one more chance before I turned to Maris. If I could trust a mermaid (and according to Jack you never could), the safer bet was Pavati (lying sack of physical perfection that she was).

  I tried not to think about what Calder would say about all of this. It wasn’t hard to do. I had to look at the photos on my phone to remember his face. If left to just my memories, I could barely picture him. The curl of his hair could be any number of boys’ and his green eyes were faded to gray in my mind. It terrified me that I was losing my connection to him.

  Reluctantly, I sought Pavati the only way I knew how, swimming out from the end of our dock and calling her name halfheartedly, even at the risk of Maris responding.

  The lake was not as clear as usual. The winds had pulled at the water the night before, stirring the bottom. A millennium of pulverized sandstone and iron ore clouded my perception of what was right and what was wrong. Once, these waters had been home to Maighdean Mara and her offspring. Her devotees had given gifts of tobacco and copper. But there was no sense of devotion in the water anymore—no sense of love. It was a cold and brutal place. I barely recognized it.

  I called again, and a moment later Pavati emerged from the silt-clouded expanse—breathtakingly beautiful as always, and this time, when she invited me to swim with her, I agreed.

  Maris’s suggestion of a mermaid utopia was still firmly planted in my brain, and as I swam with Pavati I let my imagination go to that place, fantasizing about what life could be for me, for us as a family. I couldn’t get over how right it felt. But rather than give me hope, it brought me into a funk because without Calder, how utopian could it really be?

  As we swam, Pavati listened to my thoughts, sometimes smiling, sometimes touching my bare shoulder when my thoughts turned dark. I ignored her attempts to console me; I couldn’t afford any distraction from my singu
lar purpose. I was giving Pavati one more chance to help my mom.

  The water gave me courage. I was just about to broach the subject when Pavati said, “You look like Mother. Did Calder ever tell you that?” She turned to look at me, then averted her eyes while she reached one arm forward and one arm back toward me. “I can see you don’t want to talk about him.”

  “No, it’s okay.” I exerted an extra amount of energy to keep up with her. Why did she have to be so beautiful? And fast? “He may have mentioned it.”

  “Same hair. Same eyes. There’s something about your nose. More turned up than hers I think, but the resemblance is striking. Maris doesn’t like that, you know.”

  I looked questioningly at Pavati. “Why would she care what I look like?”

  “She resents the position you’re in with Mother, and your having her pendant.”

  I snorted. “It’s not that great. I haven’t slept in months. But Pavati, I want to talk to you about—”

  Pavati smiled but refused to look my way. I knew I was in a bad mood, but it must have been worse than I thought by the way she avoided looking at me.

  “I can tell you haven’t been sleeping,” Pavati said. “You’re beat. Do you want to take a break? There’s a sunny little bay on the south side of Raspberry.”

  “Too many sailboats,” I said.

  “Not today. Not enough wind.”

  I followed her up to a bright spot on the water, through the glitter of sunlight, then through the glassy ceiling of the lake.

  Pavati pulled herself up onto a large boulder and pushed her dark hair off her face with both hands. She combed her fingers through her tresses. “I haven’t seen Maris in a while. Have you?” She looked down at me quickly with the tiniest flash of suspicion.

  I shook my head, and it seemed to mollify her. “The thing with Maris is … What I want to—”

  “Maris tries too hard,” Pavati said, her lavender gaze straining to fix on my face. “She’s worked her whole life to bend us all to her idea of how this family should run, and look where we are. Tallulah is dead. Calder has run off. Your father is acting like more of a Half than you are. None of you are hunting—not that I’m complaining about that part. It does make it easier for me.”

  That last comment threw me back to my visit with Daniel earlier this morning. It was the other reason I’d sought out Pavati.

  “Danny is starting to worry about that,” I said.

  “Worry about what?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. She flipped her cobalt tail slowly, menacingly, against the rock, like a cat flicked its tail before pouncing.

  “Adrian needing to hunt,” I said.

  Pavati closed her lids slowly, like a sated lizard, and leaned her head back to soak up the sun’s rays.

  “Does he need to worry?” I asked, swimming closer to her rock. The waves I created sloshed against the freckled granite.

  Pavati made a dismissive sound.

  “I’m serious,” I said. I put one hand on the boulder and pulled myself halfway out of the water. “And I guess I’m curious. Why do you still feel the need to hunt?”

  “I don’t understand,” Pavati said, looking down at me, her eyes flashing with lavender brilliance. I could see how Jack and Danny had both fallen for her.

  “You’re a mother,” I said, dropping back down into the waves.

  “Yes,” she said. Suspicious.

  “And happy about that.”

  “Very.” Although I couldn’t see colors like Sophie did, I couldn’t help but notice the flash of heartache in her voice.

  “So …?” I hedged.

  “So …?” she asked, mimicking my inflection.

  “I just thought if you found happiness in your son, you wouldn’t need to absorb it from other sources. Neither would he.”

  “What on earth gave you that idea?” She laughed and the sound soured my mood.

  “Calder,” I said grimly.

  “Calder,” she scoffed, but then she saw how her tone hurt me. She closed her eyes to the muddy colors I must have been putting off, and softened her voice. “Calder is imaginative. I’m sure he was able to convince himself of that. I’ll remind you that my mother was a mother four times over, five, really. And she was the most insatiable hunter of all of us.”

  “Do you think Calder’s hunting now?” I asked, bracing my heart.

  “Away from you? I think we can be fairly certain he is.” Pavati said it in a way that was both matter-of-fact and sympathetic.

  I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t let myself believe it.

  “That’s hard for you to picture,” she said, slipping back into the water and treading closer to me. Her hair was half-dry, and it curled and looped around her face. “I can see that. His methods aren’t like Maris’s, but he used to be an effective hunter. Until he met you. But now …” She left her thought to hover in the air between us.

  “What are his methods?” I asked, not really wanting to know but at the same time not being able to resist asking, as if knowing any detail about his life—no matter how disturbing—might keep him from drifting further away from me.

  “I don’t want to upset you anymore.” She scrunched up her nose. “Your emotions are really quite repellant today. Perhaps we should talk about other matters. You still have a decision to make. You and your father’s allegiance for Danny’s sanity? Do we have a deal?”

  “What methods, Pavati?”

  She sighed. “Calder is fairly good-looking, wouldn’t you say?”

  My heart quickened as I realized where she was going. I had a flashback to a girl sitting on a bench outside the Blue Moon Café, dangling a flip-flop from her foot, licking her fingers.

  “He’s not so much for the snap-and-grab. That’s Maris’s method. Just like me, Calder is the follow-me sort.”

  I knew how that went. I’d felt Calder’s hypnotic pull many times. The second time we met, I followed him into the woods and let my sister go off with strangers. How easily I had given up on all rational thought. How easily I would have followed him into the water. For a second I was jealous of whoever was with him now, no matter what her fate.

  “Does he always hunt girls?” I asked, looking downward.

  “They are attracted, not threatened. Most men, on the other hand, see him as a threat, so they sour. They’re not worth the kill. With some exceptions, of course. But girls have always proved the most satisfying for him. They tend to fill—”

  “You know what? Never mind. I don’t need to hear any more.” She was speaking of his past, I told myself. This was not the Calder I knew. And besides, I needed to get this conversation back to Mom.

  “If you joined me, Calder would follow you,” Pavati said. “You have that same effect on him as he has on others.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think he’ll come back?”

  I didn’t answer Pavati right away. For now, it was just a fear. As soon as I spoke the words, they would be true. So instead of answering her directly, I said, “I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

  Pavati raised her eyebrows and dove. I bleakly followed and listened as her memories traced backward to the point where song lyrics began to lace her thoughts. The words were sad, as was the mildly familiar melody. The first lines lifted with the lilt of a lullaby:

  I can hear you well, though your thoughts are far away.

  Do not be sad about the one who wanders on the waves.

  I myself am thinking on the one I’ve loved and lost

  Not in waves and water, but from love’s sweet bitter cost.

  “What is that?” I asked. “I think I’ve heard it before.”

  “A song Mother used to sing to Calder as he fell asleep at night. You made me think of it.”

  Pavati’s memories of the young Calder painted a more comforting picture than her account of his hunting techniques. I yearned to replace one image for the other and begged Pavati for more. “Is that it? Is that the whole thing?”

  “L
et’s see …” Pavati thought, then continued:

  The child-starved heart; the hands wrung dry, o’er the waves Mick Elroy cries.

  The woman walks a white trenched line of feet and pebbled sand.

  And would ransom all the dear sweet sons we’ve lost beyond the strand

  But I lie quiet waiting, Son, for the time we’ve not yet reached

  When I will send you back to those who walk weeping on the beach.

  “Why?” I asked, touching her arm. She looked at my hand before she looked at my face.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did Nadia sing such a sad song to a little boy?”

  Pavati picked up her pace, and flipped her blue fluke just past my shoulder. “I don’t know. But toward the end, in the weeks before she died, it was nearly every night.”

  “Who’s Mick Elroy?” I asked.

  “No idea,” she said, turning abruptly to face me. I could feel the warm buzzing heat of her thoughts in mine. I tried to push them away, to gain control of the conversation, but I was not as talented as her. Pavati continued, “Some human, I suppose. Maybe a lover. The name of one of her prey?”

  That didn’t sound right. “Did she normally make up lullabies about her prey?” I scoffed.

  “Well, when you put it that way.” Then she groaned, saying, “Get a grip, Lily. You look disgusting.”

  Pavati was fast. Very fast. I struggled even harder to keep up with her as she tore away, and I could tell our time together would soon be over. But I wasn’t done with her yet! She’d distracted me from my initial purpose. Only now did I realize that had been intentional—how every time the thought of Mom’s transformation entered my brain, Pavati had stripped it from me.

  She was giving me no choice but to turn to Maris, and I hated her for it.

  Hearing my thoughts, she said, “I told you, I won’t take Sophie’s mother away from her. Quit trying to ask me.”

  “Mom’s taken a turn for the worse,” I said. “It’s now or never.”

  “It’s never,” she said, and there was a firm resolution in her face that I knew I could never shake.