The Sea Wife (Romance on the Go)

by Naomi Clark

  “Get out then,” he said.

  “No!” Nessa kicked out, slamming her bare foot into his kneecap. Adrian grunted and staggered back, colliding with a small nest of tables against the wall. The glass lamp on the top table hit the floor, shattering and scattering rainbow-colored shards across the pale wood. The noise brought Murdock racing back into the hall, barking and prancing around Nessa and Charley.

  “Eejit dog!” Adrian straightened up and grabbed him by the collar. “You’re just out to ruin me today, aren’t you?”

  Another time, Charley would have laughed. The three of them would look insane to an outsider: Adrian wrestling with the dog while she and Nessa sprawled on the floor amidst upturned tables and smashed lamps. But all she wanted to do was cry. Nessa’s skin had to be in this house somewhere, and they were no closer to it than they were back on the beach. Next to her, Nessa trembled with anger, face flushed as red as Adrian’s.

  “The dog’s not ruining anyone,” Nessa said. “You’re the thief, not him.”

  He cast her a dark look, but before he could speak, a door banged somewhere upstairs. Anguish crossed his face now. “Get out. You have to get out!” He pointed at the front door, almost begging.

  Nessa stood, helping Charley up. “No.” She tilted her chin defiantly. All the anxiety in her was gone, washed away and replaced by a tide of righteous anger. Charley wanted to kiss her. She settled for echoing her pose, arms folded across her chest, facing Adrian squarely. The sudden panic on his face told her he was trapped.

  Good.

  “Adrian?” A woman called down the stairs, sounding tired and confused. “What’s the noise?”

  At the sound of her voice, Murdock started another round of happy barking. Adrian slumped, letting the dog go. Murdock raced up the stairs and Charley heard the woman murmur a surprised greeting. Seconds later, she appeared at the foot of the stairs, a short woman with a tangle of reddish-brown curls and the same hypnotic brown eyes as Adrian. And as Nessa, Charley realized with a jolt. The woman took in the scene, gaze raking over the girls. She started on seeing Nessa, and Charley felt Nessa flinch too.

  The woman said something in Gaelic, voice shaking. Nessa answered and the woman burst into tears.

  “Adrian! What have you done?”

  He ran to her, pulling her into a fierce embrace. “I did it for you, Ma! You’ve always said… And after everything he put you through…”

  She pushed him away, just enough that she could study his face, and smiled a heartbreakingly sad smile. “You stupid boy.” She hugged him again.

  Charley felt strange, as though she was going to float away. She laced her fingers with Nessa’s and whispered, “What’s going on?”

  Nessa never took her eyes off the woman. “She’s a selkie, Charley.”

  The woman nodded at them over her son’s shoulder, tears streaking down her cheeks. “My husband found me on the beach, years ago. We fell in love and I thought … I thought I could give up the sea. But when I wanted to go back…”

  “He burnt the skin,” Adrian said, voice poisonous. “He stole the sea from her and he made sure she could never go back. Bastard.”

  “Adrian,” she said quietly, the single word telling a lifetime of sorrow and anger.

  “That’s awful,” Nessa said, “but stealing my skin won’t fix it.”

  “She’s right, boy,” the woman said, wiping her eyes. “I wish it would, but a selkie’s skin is her own. You can’t steal another person’s soul, can you?”

  Something seemed to give way inside Adrian. He shrunk, defeat making him younger and more vulnerable. “I thought…”

  “Get her skin,” his mother said, stroking his hair. “Even if it would work, I wouldn’t take it.”

  He slunk upstairs. The woman reached out to Nessa, and Nessa went to her arms as if she was Nessa’s own mother. “I’m sorry,” Nessa said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I never thought I’d see my own kind again,” the woman said, stroking Nessa’s hair with the same tenderness she’d shown her son. “It’s been so long.”

  “Why?” Charley asked. She felt awkward, as though she was interrupting something far more intimate than two strangers embracing. “I mean, why couldn’t you see other selkies? Even if you can’t shapeshift, surely you can still swim?”

  “First, I was too ashamed. We aren’t supposed to love humans, or marry them and bear their children. Then I was too afraid. I’d vanished without a word – what if everyone was angry or hated me? And then it was just too painful, after he burnt my skin. I couldn’t bear the smell of the sea, the sight of it. Couldn’t look at everything I’d lost.” She released Nessa. “I’m Una. I’m sorry Adrian put you through this. He feels it too, you know. The ache.”

  “Is that why selkies aren’t supposed to marry humans?” Charley asked. “Because the children can never shift?”

  Nessa and Una nodded, and Charley’s eyes stung. It seemed cruel and Adrian’s desperation suddenly made sad sense. He would never have the ocean the way his mother once had, but he’d tried to give it back to her. “Isn’t there anything we can do? Anything that would help or…” Charley trailed off, feeling ridiculous even as the words left her mouth. If there was anything, Una would have done it already.

  Hopelessness stole over her as Adrian came back down, Nessa’s skin folded in his arms. She cried out, snatching it from him and hugging it to her chest. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged, sulky and closed-off. “Go on then, piss off.”

  “Adrian!” Una slapped his shoulder, the blow too light to really be an admonishment. “After what you did, how dare you talk to her like that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nessa said. She buried her face in the seal skin, inhaling deeply. When she raised her head, her eyes sparkled. “We’ll leave you to … be.” She took Charley’s hand, leading her outside with one last, wistful smile for Una.

  Once outside, Nessa released Charley and ran until she reached the end of the street, until the scent of salt filled the air again, and then she stopped, head lifted to the clean spring skies, and wept.

  Alarmed, Charley caught up to her, sliding her arms around her so Nessa was pressed to her chest, the skin clutched between them. “It’s okay. It’s okay, we got it back.”

  “I know, leannán.” Nessa kissed Charley softly. “Just like you promised.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “I want to help them.” Nessa glanced back down Kilduff Lane, toward Una and Adrian’s house. “And I can’t.”

  Chapter Five

  Nessa and Charley parted ways as the afternoon wore on and tide changed. Nessa would swim back to her colony, rolling wildly through the waves, her fright past and her world restored to its rightful order. Charley would go home and spend the evening with her mother, chatting about university, work, the future, all those safe, cozy topics.

  That was the plan, anyway. As they kissed goodbye, Charley knew Nessa carried the same aching melancholy she did for Una and Adrian. Would Nessa really relish her dives and twists through the ocean with the sight of Una’s tears so fresh in her mind? Could Charley focus on safe, cozy conversation with Adrian’s anger etched in her memory? Neither of them said so, but Charley knew the day was haunting them both.

  “See you tomorrow?” she asked Nessa. They stood holding hands in the sand dunes overlooking the beach, wind rustling through the sea woodworm so it sounded like the plants were whispering to each other.

  Nessa smiled. “Of course.”

  They kissed, deep and hungry, but briefly. The promise of tomorrow kept Charley from pushing Nessa down into the dunes and satisfying that hunger. She watched Nessa race light-footed over the sandbanks and down the shore, watched until she was out of sight amidst the crashing gray waves. A tiny part of her worried Nessa wouldn’t come back after her scare today.

  And who would blame her? Selkies were not supposed to fall in love with humans. Until today, Charley had never really thought about why. She’d as
sumed it was simply a selkie’s old wives’ tale, like catching cold if you went out with wet hair, or cheese before bedtime giving you nightmares. It might be good advice, it might not be. It didn’t matter. It just was, a part of the culture you almost instinctively knew, it was so deeply ingrained.

  But now she knew better. Men did burn selkie skins to keep their sea wives landlocked, and selkie children were forever trapped, longing for a life they couldn’t have.

  When she got home, the house was rich with the smell of baking bread and bitter coffee. Charley gravitated to the kitchen and found her mother staring out the window, a pot of coffee at her side. She silently crept up behind Fiona and flung her arms round her. “Surprise!”

  “Charley!” Her mother whipped round to return the hug, beaming. “Welcome home. How was your day? Catch up with all your friends?”

  “All the important ones,” Charley said. She took the coffee pot and made herself a cup, adding sugar and cream. She’d never understood people who could drink coffee black. “How was work?”

  Fiona was a nurse on a psychiatric ward, so work was usually some combination of strange, heartbreaking, or funny. She did what she always did when Charley asked her – shrugged, smiled, and said, “Work was work. More importantly, how is my genius daughter’s Master’s going?”

  That was it. The signal for catching up, for talk of essays and oral presentations, ideas and plans, and what-ifs and when-I … the talks they’d been having as long as Charley remembered, because her mother had always been the first person she brought her dreams and hopes to, and her mother had always pointed to the front door and said, “go and make it happen.”

  Dusk fell and the sky turned violet, and mother and daughter ate homemade walnut bread, drank cup after cup of coffee, and talked as if they’d been apart for years. It filled Charley with warm contentment, like a cat basking in summer sunlight, and the question slipped out before she even realized she was going to ask it.

  “Mam, do you ever get people on the ward that you know you should help, but you can’t? You can’t do anything that would help, but you can’t stand doing nothing either?”

  Fiona frowned at her over the top of her coffee. “Where’s that come from?”

  Charley hesitated before answering. Fiona didn’t know about Nessa, although she knew Charley had a girlfriend. She’d only asked once when Charley was going to bring that girlfriend home for her to meet, and Charley had simply said, “one day.” Fiona had been content to leave it at that.

  “A friend of mine, at uni… She’s … going through a really rough patch and I know nothing I can do will fix things for her, but it’s so hard to just watch her hurting.” Charley picked at the crumbs on her plate, wishing she could explain properly.

  “Well,” Fiona said, “sometimes you don’t have to do anything to help, you know? Just being there and saying you understand they are hurting, that can help. Some people aren’t looking for a solution, Charley. They’re looking for empathy.”

  ****

  Midnight came and the day still weighed on Charley. She lay in bed, listening to the song of the ocean and she thought of Nessa’s fear when her skin was taken, her crushing relief when it was returned. She thought of Adrian’s hopeless act and Una’s sad acceptance. She thought of all the things she could never do with Nessa, the world Nessa could never show her.

  She’d often thought about that. She’d wondered how it would feel to plunge into the water, let it swallow her up and carry her away. What the world looked like through Nessa’s eyes, swimming with shoals of fish, darting in and out of underwater caves. She’d taken some diving lessons here and there, hoping that one day at least she could get some feeling for a selkie’s life. Maybe when she finished her Master’s there would be time to take it up again.

  Something spattered against the window and she jerked upright, heart racing. The sound came again and she realized someone was throwing pebbles. She opened the window cautiously, sticking her head into the cool night breeze to see Nessa standing in the garden, wearing the dress Charley had given her earlier.

  “Ness! What’s wrong?” A dozen scenarios flitted through her head, all of them dark and dangerous.

  “Nothing. Come down,” Nessa said in a stage-whisper. She could have screamed at the top of her lungs and Fiona wouldn’t have woken up – she always slept like the dead after a long shift, no matter how much coffee she drank. But Charley liked that Nessa was trying to stay quiet and hidden. There was something romantic and daring about it. She wished she could climb out the window and down a ladder of ivy to meet her, just to complete that feeling.

  Instead she hurriedly dressed and went out the front door. Nessa was waiting for her and she pulled Charley in for a sweet, salty kiss. “Evening, leannán.”

  “What are you doing here?” Charley studied her lover, saw the gleam of excitement in her eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “Maybe nothing. But maybe something beautiful.” Nessa grinned, clutching Charley’s hands. “Want to come and have an adventure, leannán?”

  ****

  Nessa took her back to Kilduff Lane and Una’s house. Charley slowed as they approached, apprehension fluttering in her throat. “Ness, what are we doing?”

  “Trust me,” Nessa said. She ran to the front door and rang the bell, pressing over and over again until Charley slapped her hand away, worried they’d bring the whole street out.

  “It’s after midnight. They’ll be asleep.”

  “Not for long.” Nessa smiled wickedly.

  Sure enough, Adrian cracked the door open, looking ready to lash out. When he saw them, surprise and suspicion flashed across his face. “Bloody hell, what now? I said sorry—”

  “Wake up Una,” Nessa said, riding over him. “We’re going to the beach.”

  For a second Charley thought he’d slam the door in their faces. She would have understood perfectly if he had. But he didn’t. He stared at them in the glare of the security light, his eyes narrowed, lips pressed hard together. She could almost see him turning Nessa’s words round in his head. Eventually, he nodded and Charley released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

  Ten minutes later, Una and Adrian were on the street with them, both looking disheveled and confused. Charley was sure she looked the same.

  “The beach?” Una said. “Why?”

  “Have you ever been down there? Since…” Charley trailed off. Was it okay to mention her lost skin? What was the etiquette for such a tragedy?

  Una shook her head. “I can’t. It’s too painful.” She turned to Nessa. “You understand, don’t you?” Anxiety made her voice quake.

  “I do, but I need you to come now, Una. You have to trust me.”

  Una and her son exchanged glances. He shrugged. She sighed. “Can’t break a heart that’s already broken, I suppose.”

  Nessa squeezed Charley’s hand, her excitement palpable. “Trust me,” she said again.

  Chapter Six

  Moonlight turned the sand silver and cast sparkling points of light across the water. Charley clung to Nessa as they picked their way through the sand dunes and down to the shore, shivering as the cool ocean air hit her.

  Adrian and Una hung back. Charley heard Adrian murmuring soft encouragement to his mother as they walked, heard the note of fear in her replies, although the words themselves were lost in the wind. Whatever Nessa was planning, Charley prayed it wouldn’t hurt Una further.

  Nessa almost skipped down to the shore, chanting, “Come on, come on!”

  Charley didn’t dare let her buoyancy infect her, but she couldn’t stop the thin thread of wonder creeping through her. Like Nessa appearing on her doorstep in the darkness, there was something romantic about the beach at night, shadowed and silvered and alien.

  At first she thought the shapes at the water’s edge were rocks, but they were too smooth and there were too many. It wasn’t until Una cried out in shock that Charley realized what they were walking toward.

 
Seals lounged on the shore, rolled in the sand, and dipped in and out of the waves. Charley had never seen so many. Great boisterous bulls, and playful pups with watchful mothers. Out to sea, she saw them plunge in and out of cresting waves, sleek and graceful. Charley’s heart rose until she thought it would burst up out of her throat. She gripped Nessa’s arm so hard she knew she’d leave bruises.

  “Is this your family?” she asked Nessa.

  Nessa was too busy laughing to answer. Sheer joy bubbled out of her, irresistible and beautiful. When Una stopped dead, shock glazing her face, Nessa grabbed her, tugging her toward the throng of selkies.

  “This is for you, this is your birthright,” Nessa told her and Adrian. “I know you can’t shift, but you were born in the water, Una. It’s always going to welcome you home.”

  Charley glanced at Adrian. The hope on his face brought tears to her eyes, and she reached out to him. He took her hand and they ran down the beach together, just behind Nessa and Una. Suddenly they were at the heart of a circle of selkies, all barking and wailing their eerie songs. Nessa dropped to her knees and flung her arms around one of the seals. She beckoned to Una, who crept forward like a thief fearing capture.

  The seal barked encouragingly at her and Una knelt in the sand, offering a shaking hand out to him. Then he wasn’t a seal, but a man, dripping wet and crowned with seaweed, opening his arms to Una. Her cry now was one of wild delight and she flung herself into his waiting embrace.

  Charley and Adrian stood at the edge of the circle, a pair of seal pups sniffing around their feet. Adrian watched his mother with a mix of love and worry. “This is her real life,” he said. “This is what he stole from her.”

  “It’s yours too,” Charley said. She gave him a little shove. “Someone here might be your cousin or grandparent…”