Fathomless

by Jackson Pearce

  “He didn’t love you. There was no need to kill him.” I try to sound calm, even-keeled, like Molly is nothing more than an insolent child. But I’m shaken; I feel like I could dissolve into the water around me.

  The girl. The girl on the shore knew my name. Naida.

  While Molly curses at me, I turn the name over in my mind. The memories it sparked when I first heard it are dull, faded now, and I’m having trouble bringing them up. But the name, the name I can remember if I just keep repeating it. I don’t know why I care. Naida is long gone. And yet over and over, I keep saying it, don’t let go—

  “Do you, Lo?” Key asks.

  “I…” I look at Key, who draws closer to me. We look so different than humans, don’t we? I’d forgotten till I saw the girl, but now, compared with Key… you would never know we were once like them. What did my hair look like when I was Naida? What color was my skin? I look down at my arm, at the milky-blue color. Key’s is milky-green. But when we were humans, we must have been bronze or golden or some sun-kissed color. I haven’t thought about these things in ages, yet now I stare at my forearm in wonder, in sorrow that I can’t remember what it once looked like. Who can’t remember her own body?

  “I was telling her that you didn’t want the boy’s soul anyhow? You sound like one of the old ones, Lo. Should I hold on to you if a hurricane passes through?” Her words are teasing, but the humor doesn’t reach her eyes. I do sound like one of the old ones—they don’t listen. They don’t care. They’re as quiet as the sand, letting the water push them around like branches of seaweed. Getting their attention is hard.

  But I don’t feel old. I feel like I did when I was new, when I was younger than Molly, even. Naida. Naida. I can’t forget it again. Naida.

  They’re staring at me, waiting for me to answer. “No. No, I didn’t want his soul. I just see no point in needless death,” I say, waving my hand in Molly’s direction. It’s not a lie. I don’t care about the boy—I liked his eyes, the way he looked at me, but right now I care about my name. I care about how a human girl knew my name…. Did I know her when I was like them? Please, Molly, let it go. I just want to focus on my name—

  Naida.

  “He might have loved me. It might have worked,” Molly hisses. Her hair is red—or, it was red. It’s now faded and darkened by the sea. Still, it’s the most vibrant hair among us, and it blossoms around her face. It never mattered to me before, but now I scan my sisters, picking out the differences, the tiny differences between us. Darker skin, longer torsos, fuller lips. Only the old ones look the same, like the ocean beat their differences out of them, made them all equally beautiful. I’ll look like that eventually. And so will Molly. I look back at her, suddenly envious that her hair is still so red. I notice calluses on each of her left fingers. What did she do as a human to earn those?

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, drawing closer. “I didn’t mean it. Forgive me.” When a sister asks forgiveness, there’s really little choice. We have to forgive one another, the old ones say, because none of us can get by alone. We don’t lie to one another, we don’t hold grudges, we don’t hate. It wouldn’t make any sense to.

  “It was my one chance. My only chance to escape. I could have gone back! I could have fought, could have gotten revenge for what happened to us….” Her words are mournful, but her face is not. I raise my eyebrows—I don’t understand what she means by revenge, and from my sisters’ confused expressions, neither do they. It’s something we’ve forgotten, and it’s hard to care about things you’ve forgotten, I suppose. Molly sees this and exhales, shakes her head like we’re too stupid to understand. Just as I’m about to ask her to explain, she swims closer to me, and the water around her feels hot. I watch, waiting, wondering if she’s too young to understand forgiveness. Was I ever this young?

  “Forgive me,” I repeat. Molly stares at me for a long time. Her eyes flicker, pools within the ocean that seem so shallow, yet so dangerous.

  “It’s a good thing, Molly,” one of the other girls says. “It wouldn’t have worked anyhow, and now you can be happy with us. Your sisters.”

  “Exactly,” I say, voice unconvincing—last night I would have been able to persuade her, to tell her how beautiful it is under the water when a storm passes overhead, how perfect we all are together. Those things are still true, and yet… I try to shake off the sense of longing, a sharp pain that strikes at my chest.

  Molly hisses at me, and for a tiny, tiny moment, I think she’s going to attack. She’ll lose—I’m older, stronger. She seems to realize this; she pulls backward like the water itself is sucking her away. Molly folds her arms across her waist as if she’s sick, swims up the ship’s staircase, probably headed to one of the few bedrooms on the upper floor. When I was new, I spent ages sequestered in the back of the largest bedroom, lingering by a sunken-in bed, trying to pretend everything was normal, that this was a normal room in a house on land. I stared at the coral-covered globe, tried to close the curtains—they disintegrated like dead seaweed in my hands. I wish I could help Molly, wish I could tell her that I understand, but that I just couldn’t let her—

  “You should have let her have him,” one of my sisters says, our thoughts as matched as our bodies.

  “It would have been easier,” another echoes. “Now she won’t realize that it can never work.”

  “She’ll understand eventually,” I answer. “She’ll learn to be happy here. We all did.”

  Key smiles at me. Her teeth glisten, too sharp compared with the human girl’s. “True, but you had to kill your boy to understand. Now she’ll always wonder.”

  I grimace as I remember the boy I killed. That’s one thing that hasn’t faded over time—the memory of his limp body, of pressing my cheek against his chest and realizing his lungs were full of water, not air. Key is right, though; I know she is. I had to try, had to know that getting a soul wasn’t as simple as singing a boy close to you. No wonder Molly can’t really forgive me.

  The crowd of my sisters disperses, somewhat. They split off into groups to braid one another’s hair, lie in the sand, race around the Glasgow until they collapse into fits of laughter. The old ones sit on the ship’s deck, occasionally looking up when the new ones zip past but mostly staring endlessly into the sea. It’s like they see something we don’t, deep in the ocean. Like they’re waiting for something they’re certain is coming. For the angels to come back for them. Did the angel who brought me here know who I used to be? Did he know what happened to me? Did he know—

  My name. My name, my human name. I had it, moments ago, but… My throat feels tight, my stomach twisted. It’s gone; it can’t be gone. I can’t lose it again. Remember, remember, I have to remember—

  Naida.

  I exhale in relief. I still have it. I haven’t lost it. I lie back in the sand, dig my toes into it, and close my eyes. If I stare straight up, I can see the light of the moon. The water distorts it, throws it around with each wave that passes overhead. Naida.

  I wonder what Naida was like when she came to the sea. I wonder where she was from. Molly was from New York. She wanted to be a singer. I remember those details about her because she cried them to us over and over, all the plans she had for her human life that now had to be forgotten. There was more, I’m sure, but I don’t remember them, and I doubt Molly does, either. We all forget when we come to the ocean.

  An old one told me once that we weren’t brought to the ocean because we are ocean girls—we came to the ocean because we were trying to cling to our humanity. She said when we changed, we started to slip, fall away from our human selves, and the angel, he knew the ocean could remind us what being human felt like. It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us. It tosses us around, rakes our backs across rocks, stings our eyes with sand and salt water. The ocean makes us feel everything and, for a little while, makes us feel human again, until finally even the water isn’t strong enough to keep our humanity from slipping away. We becom
e sea creatures, because only the sea loves us, and we give up the silly idea of our humanity.

  Yet the girl on the shore, she knew my name. Did I know her? Were we friends, so close that she could recognize me even now? I try to remember her face, place it in my old life, but my mind won’t allow me to hold on to my name and the girl’s face. I let her image slide away. The name is more important. I don’t know why—I’m Lo now, and I’m happy. I’m happy here, right now, in this moment. I don’t need to remember Naida, to fight for memories that are as decayed as the Glasgow.

  But… I close my eyes, say the name again.

  Should I tell the others about the girl on the beach? About how my feet bled when I stepped in the sand? Most of us wouldn’t care, I’m sure. Molly might. The others would be disappointed that I spoke with a human; unless we’re after their souls, it’s best they don’t see us. I don’t like having a secret, though. Secrets make me different. Secrets make me alone, make me unhappy.

  But I decide not to tell them. I close my eyes, let the waves swish my hair up and over my body until the moon drops low and the ocean gets dark, so dark that I know it’s nearly dawn. All the while I repeat the name in my head—no, not the name. My name.

  Naida. Naida. Naida.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Celia

  I take a cab from the hospital back to our dorm. The campus is dark, but it always is during the summer—the old, weather-beaten brick buildings loom like monsters amid the palm trees. The upper dormitories, where my sisters and I live, are the most lonesome of all. Most of the girls who go to Milton’s Prep come from money and spend their summers on islands or yachts or in foreign countries. They return in August with tans and new clothes and accents they claim to have “just developed” in the weeks they were away.

  We never leave. We’ve been in our suite in the upper dorms since we got here, a single-story concrete building with ancient couches in the lobby. We tell everyone we don’t go home for the summer because Ellison is boring, but the truth is, we don’t go home because there isn’t a home to go to—there’s just an empty house in Georgia and an uncle in California who sends us an allowance from our father’s estate every month. We were the last of ten children—our parents were already old when we were born, and most of our brothers were long out of the house. Our mother didn’t live to see us start second grade, and raising daughters alone scared our father—not that it mattered much, since his Alzheimer’s meant he’d forgotten us before we made it through our first year here. I read his past once. Thousands of memories, bright, vivid, colorful. I described them to our father while Anne and Jane watched eagerly, convinced that this would fix everything, that he’d remember us, that we’d be a family.

  It didn’t work. He didn’t recognize his own memories. He didn’t know them.

  He didn’t know us. It was the only time my power seemed useful, and it failed me.

  Technically, I guess there is something more than our empty house, faraway uncle, the brothers we barely know: There’s our father, sitting in a nursing home in Atlanta, with no idea who his children are. So as far as Anne, Jane, and I are concerned, we are alone in the world, except for one another.

  I sneak into the dorm’s main door, shivering at the blast of air-conditioning. The hallways smell like pine cleaning solution until I get to the end, where our apartment door is, and the smells of clothes and perfume and life mingle with the chemical. I unlock the door and push it open—Anne’s and Jane’s purses are on the kitchen counter. They must have thought I went to bed early—they’d never have gone to sleep if they realized I wasn’t home. I slip into my bedroom—it’s tiny, but then, all the bedrooms here are. Maybe I should wake up my sisters and tell them what happened, I think as I pull off my clothes. With Jude, with Naida—but how could I possibly explain Naida to them? A naked girl who came out of the water and went back into it, her memories of screaming. I’m afraid to try to explain her, afraid of the fact that I can’t explain her.

  I fall back onto my unmade bed, tangle my legs into the sheets, and close my eyes. Maybe she was a dream. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll realize there was just the boy. Nothing more. No one else.

  My dreams are full of screams and waves, boys falling into the arms of girls in the ocean. When I open my eyes and realize my room is flooded with sunlight, I feel like I’ve been tricked—how have I possibly been home for hours? It feels like one, at the most. Regardless of how long I was out, sleeping didn’t do what I’d hoped—I still remember Naida perfectly, well enough to know for certain that she was real, even though I don’t know who or what she is. Just thinking about her makes my head hurt.

  I can never fall back asleep once I’ve woken up, so I begrudgingly get out of bed. My hair is still stringy and ragged from the ocean water last night, and I have scrapes from the sand on my legs that I didn’t notice before. I sigh, tie my hair into a ponytail, and open my bedroom door—

  “Whoa. What happened to you?” Anne says before I have time to process where she’s sitting. I blink blearily—she’s at the bar, eating a gigantic bowl of cereal, hair wet but combed out from a recent shower.

  “Nothing. I mean…” I sigh, shaking my head. “A guy fell off the pier. I ran down to the beach to help.” We don’t lie to one another as a general rule—after Jane’s power developed, there was no point, since she could read our minds. Still, omitting the truth about Naida seems so, so much simpler right now.

  “Wow,” Anne says. She looks over at Jane, who’s sitting on the couch with her legs drawn up.

  “Did he survive?” Jane asks.

  “He’s fine. I went with him to the hospital.”

  “You can do that?” Jane says. “I thought only family could ride with the paramedic. Was he hot?”

  “The paramedic?”

  “No, the guy you saved,” Anne says, even though Jane asked the original question.

  The guy I saved. There’s that word again, saved. I try to ignore it, thinking instead about Jude’s face. He had long eyelashes, I remember that, and hair that was streaked from the sunlight to become the exact color that some girls pay money for. Handsome, though? He was nearly dead.

  “No one’s hot when they’re drowning,” I argue, walking into the kitchen to scrounge up my own breakfast. Anne took the last of the cereal, so I start making a peanut butter sandwich.

  “And anyone stupid enough to fall off the pier isn’t hot at all,” Anne says. “I prefer smart guys.”

  “That’s so not true,” Jane argues.

  “It is! The guys we pick up don’t count. I’m talking, if I were going to fall in love, it’d be with a smart guy,” Anne says, rolling her eyes at Jane. “Think you’ll be in the newspaper?” she continues.

  “I doubt it.”

  “What if he’s, like, a millionaire’s son, though? And you saved him,” Jane says, twirling her hair. “Maybe then we can afford a real apartment instead of this place.” She gestures at our suite. It’s really not that bad—it is an apartment, practically. It’s just that it’s still in a dorm, a fact that Anne and Jane find incredibly irritating. Actually, they find school in general irritating—why learn math when you have secret powers?

  “He wasn’t a millionaire’s son. Don’t get excited. He’s a musician from Lake City, he’s broke—”

  “You read him? While he was drowning? Get anything interesting?” Anne asks.

  “No. I didn’t even mean to read him, it just… happened,” I say, taking the first bite of my sandwich and shrugging.

  “See, if you used your power more, you’d learn to control it,” Jane says in a voice that makes me want to yell at her. She’s right, though—they can control their powers better than I can, in large part because of their nights of “practicing.”

  But regardless of Jane’s voice, I don’t yell at her or Anne—and they don’t yell at me. In fact, we don’t fight, really. We just disagree. Not like Jude—he fights with his family, all the time. Or, fought with them. He doesn’t talk to them
anymore. I didn’t see exactly why—I pulled away from him too quickly. I wonder about his family, about who would have told them if he’d died last night.

  Who would have told my sisters if it’d been me?

  Jane grabs my arm. “Oh, god, Celia, you’re so morbid,” she moans, releasing me.

  “Hey,” I snap, leaning away. Panic rises in my throat—did she see Naida?

  “Relax, you weren’t answering Anne’s question, and I just wanted to know why,” she says, shrugging, like she merely pulled my hair.

  “What question?” I ask, glaring at Anne, who I’m pleased to see looks frustrated with Jane. She shakes her head before speaking.

  “I was asking if you’re going to see him again. The guy you saved,” she repeats.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Because you saved his life! He owes you a—what’s it called? A blood debt.” Anne’s eyes are glimmering, like we’re writing a story instead of discussing someone’s drowning.

  “He’s not bad-looking, either,” Jane adds. I turn to her, and she giggles. “You were still thinking about his face! I didn’t mean to. He’s not, like, movie-star hot, but he has that sort of indie look going for him.”

  “Go see him,” Anne insists. “What else do you have to do?”

  “You know I don’t like to talk to people I’ve read!”

  “Which probably explains why you only talk to us,” Anne answers.

  The thing about Anne is, she doesn’t necessarily win an argument. She just wears you down, beats at your edges until it’s easier to give in than it is to fight her. And she’s not wrong—I don’t really talk to anyone other than my sisters. She just doesn’t understand that it’s with good reason. Why would I talk to people, get to know them, when the slightest touch means knowing their strongest memories? Sometimes it’s not terrible, I guess, when the strongest memory is something beautiful, but so often it’s not…. I’ve told Anne this before. She doesn’t understand, though, and so she’ll wear me down instead of trying. What can I say? She was the firstborn of the three of us. Maybe that’s why she’s the strongest.