by Sonya Taaffe
Her hair clung in wet coils to her naked skin, stranded black as calligraphy, and an old, familiar bitterness turned in his stomach, colder than anger. Save for the drowning-dark eyes, she had none of the old look about her. If he had saved her life, he had done her no favors.
He got to his feet anyway, skidding only a little on the puddled tiles and the sodden violet bathmat; stopped himself from reaching for a handhold in the towel rack in case it broke off. She was not looking at him, slowly pulling herself upright on the tub’s dun-colored rim. “Anson Penders,” he said into her silence. “You don’t know me. I promised my cousin I’d check in on you. He told me your name and how he met you. He didn’t tell me you were a risk to yourself.” Even his scarf was trailing damply off his neck, beading water at the ends of its brown plaid fringe. “I’d have asked for hazard pay.”
The hawking noise she made might have been congestion or an opinion. He caught another all-black look, flicked from underneath water-weighted lashes, before she clarified it: “You’re the shittiest paramedic I’ve ever met in my life.”
Anson snorted. “I’m an unemployed chemistry teacher. Currently canvassing for the census, which is why my cousin—who is a paramedic—thought I’d have the spare time to Samaritan you. Goes to show how much he knows about government work.” He knew how facetious he sounded; he could not think of any other way to reassure her. She kept her feet in the tub, her head turned away from him beneath the weed-black tangles of her hair; he had to lean against the doorframe to keep from looming over her. The bare curve of her back shone like a stripped shell. “He said you’ve been here since last night, is that right? You can think of it as a safe house, if you like. To be perfectly honest, I think it belongs to Tony’s girlfriend who’s out of town. I have some faint, horrible memory of being handed a bottle of vodka full of Swedish fish on that couch.”
“Stop it.” She spoke quietly, but he heard the taut note in it. “Your creepy fucking cousin didn’t tell me anything about you or this house or why he didn’t take me to a hospital like a normal person. Just sat up with me all night, asking questions about my parents and my dreams and telling me it was going to be all right, until he had to leave for work in the morning without so much as a phone number or a forwarding address. So you’re going to tell me something I can trust, right now, or I’ll leave this house screaming and naked if I have to. Taking care of that on the list your cousin left for you?”
Turned coldly toward him, her face looked even less human, cut sharply in from the cheekbones that broadened like fins toward her small, shallowly whorled ears: less like anyone who had ever come ashore from the black coral of Devil Reef. Anson breathed down the adrenaline skip in his throat and prayed for the least lecturing voice of his life.
“Going by your name, you’re a direct descendant of Carleton Waite and the woman he married out of the sea and called Keziah as long as she was on land. The churchyards of Innsmouth are as lost as the rest of the town, but there were never any headstones for her or her children because she took them all back down with her after Carleton’s death. Some of them married first. Some of them left children. Either your family split off early or they really went underground after ’28, because Tony’s an amateur genealogist as well as an asshole and he had no idea there were actual, in-the-telephone-book Waites out there who weren’t either unrelated or already in touch. You dream of the sea, and of things in the sea, and you’ll drown before you let yourself die on land like your parents or grandparents.” A silvery translucence flickered across her eyes and he hesitated, waiting for the clench of her hands or the twist of her mouth, but she merely looked at him. “You can trust that I don’t know any more about you than that. You’ll have to tell me the rest. If you want to,” he finished hastily, hearing a beat too late the last sentence like a good cop or a disappointed teacher. “It’s not like we have to talk.”
He could not read Gorgo’s expression, not even her unblinking eyes. When she finally spoke, her voice was shaded with something even less identifiable: he could not imagine that she was really amused.
“So you’re not here to initiate me into the mysteries of the sea-mother whose faces rise and fall with the countless waves and her consort who makes the fish shoal as thick as cornfields in the fall?”
The last time he had heard those words, his mother had still been walking, affectionately tousling her youngest child’s hair with one dry-skinned, nail-thickened hand as he asked for another story of sea-cities whose names rilled from her tongue like a net of bubbles, sea-temples sunken in a tourmaline gleam where the bright and dark weeds streamed upward from terraces and colonnades of basalt and whalebone and corals branching like veins of the human heart.
Decades and states and losses away from the shores of that sea, Anson said in amazement, “Fucking Tony,” and heard for the first time the newest of his cousins laughing, bitter as brine.
**
Tony had gotten the call a little before midnight: a naked woman washed up at the foot of Bass Rocks Road, threadily alive and still trying to crawl into the silver-shifting sea as a pair of horrified boyfriends worked to stop her. Romantic beachcombers a moment before, shivering now on the windstruck shingle while one hurriedly stripped his overcoat and the other swiped at his phone—really wrong with her, she’s freezing and her eyes—no, she’s moving, she’s making noises, but it’s like she can’t tell we’re here, she just keeps clawing at the sand and struggling. I don’t know if she’s high or she’s brain-damaged or…. Yes, Jason’s got her, he’s got his coat around her, but she’s not responding—and Anthony Woodhouse who was a Marsh on his mother’s side had looked at the high tide and the full moon and earnestly, unrelentingly talked his partner into agreeing to drive an unconscious, blanket-wrapped woman to a two-family Victorian on Elwell Street instead of the ER at Addison Gilbert and convincing the dispatcher it had all been a false alarm. You know they won’t know what to do with her, if I’m right. And you know I’m right. Look at her. Come on, Cau. We’ve always taken care of our own. Cláudia Rocha might have told him to fuck himself then, but in the three years she had worked with Tony, she had watched the slow changes move over him like a wave wearing its patience into sea-cliff stone, eroding a little more each time of the lanky, lantern-boned man whose hair had glittered silver and black once like mackerel scales; she said tightly, You better be right, and turned off Bass Avenue.
Or so Anson gathered, coming blearily awake in the cold moonlight with Tony’s voice running on in his ear like the tireless line of the sea. He had forgotten his dreams, only that they were choppy and he missed Meredith’s weight in the blankets beside him; he looked to the window for the time and saw the cloud cover reflecting the skyline like bioluminescence, small warm-colored points of light and cool ones in a web of milky haze. Brighton Avenue on a weeknight was white noise beyond the dry hissing of the heat in the baseboards. The shouting four floors down in the street was almost certainly students. He said carefully, for what felt like the hundredth time, “You do know that Boston isn’t even in the same county as the North Shore?”
“She’s one of the family, all right, Anson? She gave me her name and that clinched it. Can you just look in on her tomorrow while I’m at work?”
“Tomorrow? Don’t you work nights?”
Tony drew an exasperated breath that sizzled through the old receiver like a backwash of spindrift, static froth. “Most nights—and I’ll really be in the shit with Cláudia if I try to talk her into playing nursemaid to a girl she’s already thinking about reporting me for. You can drive out in the morning—”
“Meredith’s the one with the car, and both he and it are in Chicago—”
“—and I’ll come by for her at the end of the day. Totally domestic. You’ll be home in time for dinner. You’re dating a guy named Meredith?”
Because it was Tony, he only sounded bright-eyed with interest, and because it was Tony, Anson said nothing. The receiver was heavily cold against his cheek, ha
lf crushed into the pillows where he had dragged it in the first adrenaline jolt of thinking it was Meredith. He had a moment’s vindictive regret that his lover had not been home to answer the phone instead—Meredith Radke looked like the amiable second lead in a Depression-era comedy, the kind who was always a beat behind the screwball and never had any luck with girls, but he was not even faintly a night person and had never had any patience with the side of Anson’s family that called asking favors. He had sent pictures of breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s that morning, orange juice and an omelet with at least two vegetables Anson disliked and one he was allergic to, signed VICTORY! Sometimes Anson let himself think they might move in together; more often he remembered that he had never stuck out a relationship more than five years and the ease of the last year and a half still surprised him. He was sliding back into dreams, stone-skipping off domestic: Meredith’s heavy sunflower hair, as tousled from sleeping as though he had been in a bar fight; the way he burrowed under blankets and pillows, one arm always stuck out at improbable marionette angles. Anson hitched his chin up against the cold plastic and said very clearly, because it was the question he should have asked as soon as he realized who was on the other end of the call, “Don’t tell me you couldn’t find any other poor relations to bother in the middle of the night. Why me, Tony?”
“Well….” He could hear the equivocation in his cousin’s voice as plainly as if he were watching Tony’s loose-shouldered shrug, not quite lying while he rummaged for the next credible thing that was not quite the truth, either, his confidence trickster’s transparent grin keeping the one real secret safe. The last time they had seen one another in person, Tony had slouched along at Anson’s elbow in an old denim jacket nearly the color of his prominent eyes, a much taller man than he let himself look; he had pointed out his favorite objects in the Peabody Essex Museum, a set of eighteenth-century brass knuckles, a greened-over figurehead with a sweet, salt-cracked smile, and insisted on paying for dinner at Okea even after Anson nearly flipped a piece of tekkadon across the table with the full-body vehemence of interrupting, No, of course not, it’s not complicated for you. They had walked silently along Derby Wharf before Tony drove him back to Boston, the last of the sunset crumbling out of the clouds in slipper-shell pinks and slaty blues. He’s family, he found himself saying to Meredith, who said as usual, So? It was one of the reasons Anson loved him.
In the silence, Anson could not tell if he was still waiting for Tony to answer or if he had blinked out between associations and his cousin was waiting on him. Hoping he sounded warning rather than groggy, he started, “Tony….”
His cousin sighed like a concession, hands held up over something he had not wanted to say. Dragonfly-paned, the window’s glass was streaked with a thin branching of ice, twisting its refraction across the light-fogged sky like a sea-spell over sand; he stared and the shadows rippled, blinked and they froze again. Tony’s wiry voice rocked and fell, touching truth with the hindsight nicety of an oracle: “She’s not going to have a lot of sympathy for me.”
**
Wrapped in a grey-and-navy-striped bathrobe and hunched over a mug of heavily honeyed tea, Gorgo Waite looked less like a trawler’s bycatch and more like a daytime Goth: he wondered if it was her camouflage, as academic hermitage had been his mother’s. He could imagine her in fishnet sleeves and drainpipe jeans, her pupilless eyes passing for contacts and her hair for dedicated dye, her triangular face cut-porcelain fashionable. Even dry, her skin had a faint iridescent bloom, but it would look like powder in most lights; the gill slits lying closed as knife-cuts under her chin would stand out only as much as scars might. Even with sea-green bruises sponging the side of her face, she looked as fearless as the Spartan queen one of her parents must have named her for, or the monster.
What she did not have was the sleek-skulled, strong-boned look of the children of Innsmouth, bred to withstand the pressures of the deep and the perils of ascent, their scales or spines or powerful claws. The tips of her fingers were bruisily purple, as if her nails had shed themselves, but no nacreous sheaths had grown in their place; the bare ridges where her eyebrows should have been looked painfully vulnerable, knowing the hard ring of scutes that should have protected her deep-set eyes. Only her teeth showed small and sharp, grey as sidewalk ice, and he wondered how recently they had come in, or if she had been born with them, and if her parents had guessed then at the changeling they had brought unwittingly into a drydock world. If they had known their own heritage, hoped against the strength of the tides and the fall of Mendel’s dice that their child would go down to the sea as easily as generations of her ancestors, since they could not hope that nothing of Innsmouth would touch them on land. If they had lived to find out that they were wrong. He could offer her a choice of herbal teas from the breadbox on the counter, a mug from RISD or one with a broken heat-sensitive cartoon; he could not ask her the rest. She had said almost nothing as she dried herself off on an oversized towel the color of a bruised orange, not even wincing when the terrycloth snagged on the visible softness of her skin; Anson had finally made himself stop hesitating outside the bathroom like an amateur valet and foraged through the kitchen cabinets until he found clean mugs and a teakettle that produced a sustained blare like a boat horn when the water boiled. He would leave an IOU for Trina if he had to. He was tempted to sign it with Tony’s name. Until then, he set one mug down in front of Gorgo and cradled the other between his chilled hands, steam coiling upward like a noir effect in the bright mid-morning sun; with no conversation forthcoming, he reached across the coffee table for the topmost of a slumping stack of National Geographic, and she said as if he had just stopped speaking, “So which kind are you?”
“Excuse me?”
Her mouth was as pale as her cheekbones, despite the heat of the tea. “Dracula or Renfield. One of them, or just in the know? Your cousin—”
“—really is my cousin, and for God’s sake don’t call him Dracula where he can hear. He’s insufferable enough as it is.” That drew a slight smile, although it might only have been for his efforts. She was asking the wrong question; sooner or later he would have to tell her the right one. He was not Tony, by choice or talent. Already she was looking down at her tea again, small-fingered hands linked tightly around the college-logo ceramic, dipping her face into the steam as if into a veil. He felt as if he were trying not to spook a strange cat, offering a palm for inspection without threatening a pat: “If you’ve heard the litanies, I’m guessing you know at least something about the four families of Innsmouth and the bargain they made with the people of the deeps, who bring the sea-catch and delight in the imperishable”—the unwieldy, inadequate translation of nineteenth-century hymnals for a word that shone like incorruptible gold in the devouring salt of the ocean, like the translated bodies of her children that time could not slow or slacken or kill—“and the promise they made to their descendants, that all who dwell in her waters shall never die. And they pledged their children to one another and their blood to the mother of the sea and it all ran like cod in winter until the Feds got tired of chasing Charlie Solomon all around Boston and went after law-abiding citizens for a change. But there weren’t many—unaffected—people left in Innsmouth by the end. Most of them were in-laws or recent arrivals, people from away.” No native-born New Englander himself, he made sure she could hear the quotation marks around the taxonomy. “So we’re not very closely related on the landward side, Tony and I, but we don’t need to be. Cousin is the easiest way to talk about it. We’re cousins, too, if you want to think of it that way.”
He was fairly certain that her silence meant no, thanks, but at least she did him the grace of not saying it to his face. Drying in full sunlight, her hair still gleamed as if water ran from it; he could almost see the next swallow of tea as she drank it, the hollow of her throat pulsing as softly as a frog’s. She swirled the mug, a tiny vortex of orange and star anise. Her voice was cool, dismissive.
“Dracula, then.”<
br />
Sharper than he had intended, Anson said, “No.”
“Oh?” If she were one of his students, he would have thought she was goading him, demure as a teenager’s shark-instinct for the unconvincing or the ill-defended. “You’re not related to Innsmouth’s families?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it?” Gorgo’s voice was small and cold and cutting as her teeth, suddenly flashing for the throat. “All who dwell in her waters—I walked into the sea, Mr. Samaritan Chemistry Teacher. She threw me back. Despite my prayers. Despite this,” twisting one hand to show herself from thin-webbed clinging toes to hijiki-black hair. “And I’m supposed to feel grateful for you deigning to read my palm like Sherlock fucking Holmes and tell me the history of everything I’ll never have? That you’ll send me a card at Christmas—wish you were here!—and leave me to wither while the rest of Innsmouth inherits the deeps?”
For a moment he thought of laughing, then of strangling Tony. He swallowed both impulses, awkward as they were; he could not blame his cousin, any more than he would blame a gull for eating starfish or a Portuguese man-o’-war for stinging. As evenly as he could, Anson said, “Gorgo. Look at me.”
He was anticlimactic and he knew it: a tall, round-faced man with dusty brown hair slightly feathered from pulling off a woolen winter hat, fair-lashed blinking eyes, the sides of his throat as unlined as infancy. His coat and boots were drying by the hall rack, creeping a lichen-bloom of road salt into the paper grocery bags laid down in place of a doormat, but his sweater was still patched with dampness and the cuffs of his trousers were drip-drying as if he had walked out into the scouring-blue ice-slap of Gloucester Harbor. He flexed his fingers for her, a little ironically, unwebbed.
