by Sarah Porter
“I went after you, though I was endangering myself by doing it, though I had every reason to leave you where you were. I needed, more than anything, to keep hearing you sing, to keep feeling.. that forgiveness. You remind me of Marina sometimes. Crazy but so brave.. You'll be a very great queen, Luce, if you can just keep yourself from—from giving in to those desires, that longing, the way Marina and I both did. Every time I've ever looked at you I've wanted to warn you, but I couldn't, not without letting you see my own corruption. How could I possibly show that to someone so pure hearted? But, maybe, since you're so young...”
Catarina didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to. Luce understood all too well.
"Catarina...” This insistence that she would be a queen was ludicrous, anyway. Who would obey her? "I'll never be queen. Not of any tribe. I don't even want to, and I'm too weird for anyone to want me that way. You hear the stuff Anais says about me, like I'm just this complete loser freak...”
Catarina smiled, but when she tried to reach out and stroke Luce's hair her face abruptly contorted from pain. Luce was appalled with herself. How could she have forgotten that Cat's left wrist was broken?
"You still don't understand, Luce. You're such a child sometimes!” Catarina's voice was suddenly tight with agony, so Luce suppressed the urge to take offense at this. "I've been coming to your cave. I've been listening to you. And you're certainly the greatest singer I've heard since Marina died. I sometimes wonder if you might even be better than she was, and I never would have believed...”
Luce was embarrassed by this, and at the same time she hated to think that Catarina had been suffering for hours while she just slept and did nothing to help her.
“Um, Cat? I need to figure out a way to set your wrist. If I can find a couple of good pieces of driftwood and some net or something...” Luce’s words came out too fast.
Catarina smiled, although her pain made her smile tighten into a grimace. “That would be very kind of you, Luce. And something to eat? We’ll be able to talk—more calmly—once we’ve both had some dinner.” Luce nodded.
“Wait here. Try to sleep. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Luce felt nervous about leaving Catarina on her own, but there was no other way. They were both giddy from hunger.
***
It took longer than she’d hoped to find everything they needed. There were no mussels but plenty of oysters, so Luce found a plastic grocery bag strangling some seaweed and untangled it to carry them back. The seaweed looked good here, too, and the driftwood was easy enough, but for a long time she couldn’t find anything that would work as a makeshift wrapping for the cast. This was one time when it would have been helpful to have Anais’s piles of stolen clothes on hand. Eventually Luce decided that the snarled plastic grocery bags she saw here and there were the best thing she could find for now, and she tucked a few of them away with the oysters.
She had to tell Catarina the truth, Luce realized. If she could make Catarina accept that she’d already broken the timahk herself, in the worst possible way—that she’d actually rescued a boy, not just fantasized about it, that she was even guiltier than Cat was herself—then, just possibly, Catarina would get over her shame enough to let Luce travel south with her. She hated to think of how Catarina would look at her as she told the story, but still ... it was the only decent thing she could do.
Before she swam back into the high crevice between the cliffs, Luce paused to stare out at the sea, which was always so familiar even when it was strange, but where she was always utterly lost even when she knew exactly where she was. In the faintly dusky sky she could just make out a pale scattering of stars. She listened to their buzzing voices, which sounded like tiny metallic wings whirring to hold them in place; she thought the stars might be like crickets, singing with the friction of their bodies instead of with their throats. She thought that, after dinner, she might try to describe the sound to Catarina, and she turned between the cliffs carried by a sudden feeling of elation. A clean stroke of freedom would carry them both away from here.
The cave was empty. Luce called again and again, although the space was so small that there was no corner where her friend could possibly be hiding.
Catarina was gone, and Luce was all alone.
After a while Luce curled up with her head leaning on a rock, wondering why she wasn't consumed by despair. Instead she felt an inexplicable sense of peace. She was cradled in music. The rocks around her chanted like slow, growling bells, and each curl of the water stroked her fins with silky notes. She'd been so afraid of leaving her tribe, but she understood that she never would have heard the music resonating out of every crook of the world if she hadn't taken so many risks. She'd opened her heart to that music in solitude, and it had come to her. And even now that her tribe was broken, her friends dead or vanished, Luce realized the world's voice sounded hopeful, vital, full of the soft vibrancy of pure being.
Gently she sang back, letting her voice glide into complex harmonies with all the inhuman voices humming around her. A crystalline sphere of water floated up between her hands, raised itself nearer—Luce almost wondered if it could see her—then stroked against her lips. It felt like a kiss.
1. Each to Each
The last words he had absorbed were the ones about Lazarus, come back from the dead to tell everyone ... everything. That was all wrong, bogus. If you've seen death from the inside, Dorian thought, you keep your mouth shut. You don't say a word to anybody. They wouldn't understand you anyway.
“Dorian? Can you continue?”
He looked up, blank. Images of plummeting bodies still streaked through his head.
“ 'Shall I part...' ” Mrs. Muggeridge prompted. Dorian pulled himself up from terrible daydreams and forced his eyes to focus on the page in front of him. Acting normal was a way to buy himself the privacy to think not so normally. He found the line and cleared his throat.
“ 'Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?' ” His voice sounded too flat. He tried to squeeze more emotion into it, though the words seemed uninteresting. “ 'I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.' ” Now Dorian saw what was coming in the next line and started to panic. He struggled to suppress the memory of those dark eyes looking at him from the center of a wave, the gagging taste of salt, that unspeakable music. Did Mrs. Muggeridge have any idea what she was doing to him? “ 'I have heard the mer...' ” He choked a little. “ 'The mermaids singing, each to each.' ” Now there was an audible tremor in his voice, and something rising in his throat that felt like a throttled scream.
“Please read to the end.”
“ 'I do not think that they will sing to me!' ” Dorian spat it out aggressively and dropped the book with a crash. The rest of the students in the tiny class were staring, too shocked to laugh. But what did they know, anyway? “This poem is garbage! It's all lies!”
“Dorian...”
“If he'd heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn't be blathering on like this! He would be dead! Is this poem just trying to pretend that people don’t have to die?”
Mrs. Muggeridge didn't even look angry. Somewhere between alarmed and amused.
“If you could read on to the end, Dorian, I think you'll see that T. S. Eliot isn't trying to evade intimations of mortality.” Students started snickering at that. She always used such weird words. It was a mystery to him how Mrs. Muggeridge had wound up in this town. She was even more out of place than he was, with her dragging black clothes and odd ideas.
“No!” Dorian didn't remember getting out of his chair, but he was standing now. His legs were shaking violently, and the room seemed unsteady. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him carefully.
“Maybe you should step out of the room for a few minutes?” He couldn't understand why she had to react so calmly. It wasn't fair, not when she'd made him read those horrible lines. He stalked out of class, leaving his English anthology with its pages splayed and crushed against the floor. In the hallway he pressed his f
orehead against the cold tile wall. His breathing was fast and hungry, as if he'd just come up from under the deep gray slick of the ocean.
He could hear Mrs. Muggeridge serenely reading on. “ 'We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.' ”
He felt like he was going to faint. But at least the poem got something right. Maybe he'd survived the sinking of the Dear Melissa, but he still felt like he was drowning all the time. Every time his alarm clock went off, he lunged bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.
When the class finally poured out into the hall, he straightened himself and trailed after them to chemistry. It was such a suffocating, sleepy, ragtag school, with only sixty students and three teachers. His high school in the Chicago suburbs had been twenty times the size of this place. Everything felt crushingly small.
Other students turned to stare at the two men in dark suits standing near a drinking fountain, but Dorian didn't notice them. He was concentrating on fighting the wobbly sensation of the floor.
The men noticed him, though. Their eyes tracked him intently as he walked away, sometimes leaning on the row of lockers. A few minutes later Mrs. Muggeridge emerged, gray corkscrew curls bobbing absurdly above her head as she chattered to another teacher, the scarlet frames of her glasses flashing like hazard lights. “I suppose I'm behind the times. Apparently now it's politically incorrect to make your students read poems with mermaids that don't kill people. What a thing to get so upset about!”
The suited men glanced at each other and followed her.
***
Dorian kept trying to draw the girl he'd seen. If he could set the memory down in black ink, slap it to the paper once and for all, then maybe he could finally get her out of his head. He drew exceptionally well, but every time he finished a new picture he couldn't escape the feeling that something was missing. The drawing he was working on now showed a towering wave with a single enormous eye gazing out from under the crest. The eyelashes merged with curls of seafoam.
He couldn't understand why he hadn't been afraid at the time. The fear had come much later, after he was obviously safe, and the fits of nauseous terror that seized him were infuriatingly senseless. But when the ship was actually crashing, wrenching up under his feet, and people were dying all around him, he'd felt perfectly composed and confident.
He also didn't know where the instincts that had saved him had come from. If he'd done even one thing differently, he knew, he wouldn't be the sole surviving passenger of the Dear Melissa. He'd be as dead as the rest of them, as dead as his whole family. If he hadn't faced down that girl in the waves—or that thing that wasn't a girl, not really, but a monster with a beautiful girl's head and torso—if he hadn't sung her own devastating song right back at her, then it would have been all over. She would have murdered him without a second thought. But sitting under the cold fluorescent lights of the chemistry lab, he knew that singing in the middle of a shipwreck had been a bizarre impulse. Inexplicable. How had he known?
Who would have ever guessed that the way to stop a mermaid from killing you was to sing at her?
She'd dragged him out from the wreckage, swimming away with him clasped in one arm. They'd raced at such speed that the blood had shrieked in his head. The foam-striped water had rushed across his staring eyes. He'd struggled not to inhale it, and he'd failed again and again. Salt burned his lungs, and the cold water in his chest swelled into a bursting ache. But every time he'd thought that he was really going to drown, she'd pulled him up above the surface and let the water hack out of him, fountaining down his chin. She'd let him live. Only him, out of all the hundreds who'd set sail together.
She'd even spoken, once. Now that he had time to think it over, he realized one of the weirdest things about it all was the fact that she'd used English instead of talking in some kind of mermaid gibberish. Take a really deep breath, okay? We have to dive under again. Her voice was gentle and much too innocent-sounding for something so utterly evil.
He hadn't answered. He'd been too pissed off to speak to her, though now looking back, he realized that he hadn't felt nearly furious enough. He'd felt the kind of anger that would have made sense if he'd been having a fight with a friend, say. As if that monster with the silvery green tail was just a girl he knew from school or something. Worse, as if she was someone he liked.
She'd belonged to the pack that murdered his mother and father; his sweet six-year-old sister, Emily; his aunt and her husband; and all three of his cousins. He should hate that mermaid girl more than anything in the world. He should dream about dismembering her with his bare hands.
Instead he dreamed about her dark eyes watching him as he sprawled on the shore gagging up a flood of sour, brackish liquid. She hadn't swum off right away after she'd shoved him up onto the beach, and he'd had time to memorize her pale face and dark jagged hair set like a star in a gray-green curl of sea.
He dreamed about her song.
***
“Charlotte Muggeridge? We were wondering if we could speak to you for a few minutes.” The taller of the two men folded back his suit lapel to show her his badge. Mrs. Muggeridge goggled at him in absolute confusion.
“Anyone can speak to me!” She was alone with the men in the teachers' lounge. The grubby vomit orange sofas sagged in patches like rotting fruit. Inspirational posters urging them to strive for their dreams had faded to anemic tints of jade green and beige. No one sat down. Instead she swayed a little, staring from one glossy, polite face to the other. Both the suited men met her gaze with bland determination. Both had empty blue eyes and freshly shaved cheeks. “You can't actually be FBI! That is, of course you can speak to me, but ... I couldn't possibly have anything to say that you might find interesting...” She trailed off, then glanced up at them with new sharpness. “I hope none of our students is in trouble.”
“No one is in any trouble, ma'am.” Mrs. Muggeridge's eyes were darkening with a feeling of aversion for the tall man, though she couldn't justify her dislike. He was perfectly well-mannered. “There was an incident in your third-period English class?”
That bewildered her, again. “Certainly nothing I couldn't handle without help from the FBI!” She gaped at them. “Don't you have more important things to worry about than an outburst from a fifteen-year-old boy?”
“In this case, ma'am, we think it might be important.”
“A tenth grader didn't care for T. S. Eliot. Send in the feds!” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. The agents were glowering at her.
“Just describe the incident. Ma'am.” The politeness was slipping now.
“Well ... It was only that we were reading 'Prufrock' in class. We reached the closing stanzas, about the mermaids. And Dorian Hurst became very upset, for some reason. He jumped out of his seat and started yelling. But he's generally been a very good student since he enrolled here.”
The two men were obviously trying to keep their faces smooth and vacant, but something excited and a little disturbing started to show in the quick pointed looks passing between them.
“And what did Dorian say?” It was the smaller man speaking now. He had hanging jowls and a high, almost girlish voice. Mrs. Muggeridge thought it contrasted unpleasantly with his blocky gray face.
“He said that if Prufrock had really heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn't have lived to talk about it.” An eager twitch passed through the shoulders of the taller agent. He leaned in on her, and his blue eyes were as brittle as hunks of ice. But why on earth did he care? “It was a peculiar detail to quarrel with, but Dorian seemed very passionate about it. He accused Eliot of pretending we don't have to die.”
“I thought you said the name was Prufrock?” It was the shorter agent squeaking again. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him with fresh outrage.
“T. S. Eliot is the poet who wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'! How can you be so ig—” Mrs. Muggeridge stifled a number of extremely rude endings
to the sentence.
“Did he say anything else?” The tall man sounded bored.
“That was all I let him say. He was being disruptive, so I asked him to step out of class.” The shorter man's upper lip suddenly jerked up in sneer, as if Mrs. Muggeridge had just confessed to doing something extremely stupid. It was all too much for her. “Now, would you please explain why all of this is important?”
“We don't discuss ongoing investigations, ma'am.” The tall agent turned abruptly toward the door, rapping a pen against his mouth.
“Do you know anything about Dorian's family?” The short agent twittered the question in a shrill, malicious tone. His eyebrows arched suggestively. The tall one swung back around, shooting what was obviously meant to be a quelling glance at his partner, but the little man only grinned.
“His family? No, I don't. I think someone mentioned that he doesn't live with his biological parents, but that isn't so uncommon.”
“They're dead, is why. Sister, too. They all died in June.” He seemed to enjoy the look of shock on Mrs. Muggeridge's face. “Drowned.”
Mrs. Muggeridge felt her mouth fall into an O of dismay as the tall agent jerked his partner's arm and towed him from the room. She stumbled a few steps to the sofa and flopped down, leaning her head on her hands. “Oh, that poor boy!” She gasped the words out loud. “Oh, no wonder he was so upset!”
It still didn't explain why they were so interested, though. Not unless they thought Dorian was hiding something.
***
His father's second cousin once removed Lindy and her husband, Elias, had made it clear that they didn't want to keep Dorian permanently. They were too old and tired to cope with a teenager. It was just their bad luck that they happened to live right in the town where he'd literally washed up and that his parents had included their phone number on some form they'd filled out. The result was that Dorian had been left with them more or less by default. They reminded him occasionally that this was just a temporary arrangement until something better could be worked out, but since nobody else was exactly clamoring to take over as his guardian, he had the impression that he'd probably be stuck with them for a while. They acted skittish around him, mincing and whispering in a way that made him queasy and impatient. The only good thing he could say for them was that they'd at least followed the psychologist's advice to keep quiet about his connection to the sinking of the Dear Melissa. No one in his school knew he'd been on the ship, not even the principal, and he liked it that way. If everyone had kept asking him questions about it, he was pretty sure he would have gone insane.
