Seven Tears into the Sea

by Terri Farley

  A sudden gust caught the tail of my slicker and blew me. I slipped, got a slanted view of the path to my right and a rock ahead of me, but I didn’t fall. I sat down hard, slipped a few inches, and closed my eyes. No seals called in panic from down below. Maybe they’d sensed the danger and gone.

  I could go home.

  I trudged through the near-darkness, slashed by wind and rain, wishing I’d left on the lights. I was almost to the cottage when I heard shouting from the beach.

  Wind snatched their words, but I thought I saw Roscoe and Perch. Soaked more than rain could manage, they’d obviously been in a boat. And capsized.

  I wanted to burst into my cottage and lock the dead bolt. I didn’t want to hear what they were shouting, scared and pale, looking back toward Little Beach as if something was after them.

  “Don’t go down there!” Roscoe yelled. “He’s got his dad’s skinning knife. Jesus, he’s killing everything!”

  My mind stopped.

  Killing.

  No.

  “It capsized our boat—”

  “This big-ass seal, then the shark—”

  Perch grimaced, on the verge of tears. “It’s bleeding all over the beach.”

  I realized I was holding both sides of my head. Covering my ears or steadying my brain, or both. But I felt detached, as if I hovered above my body, noticing they didn’t ask for an ambulance or a ride somewhere. Not that I could have given them one. My car was at Nana’s with a flat tire. They quit staring at me and ran for the highway.

  “—too late,” Roscoe screamed.

  The storm took the rest of his words, but I wouldn’t have believed them.

  “Jesse!” I screamed as lightning flashed overhead.

  I rushed down the driveway. Water lapped over it. I splashed, slipped, and then stumbled on toward the sand dunes. My hair was plastered to my head, and I could barely see past the rain.

  Nothing lay bleeding on the beach. Those ugly, awful liars. I heard my own panting as I ran down the beach, to the water, drenching myself to the knees as I squinted to make sure Jesse wasn’t there, tossed on the waves.

  He’d washed up, farther down the shore.

  Naked and bleeding, he lay beside a seal skin that looked like a length of ruined black velvet.

  Oh Jesse. I’d wanted proof, but not like this.

  I believe, I believe, I believe it.

  Was this some Celtic deity’s way of convincing me he still ruled?

  I fell on my knees beside Jesse.

  “Gwennie, the shark took Zack. All the blood drew it, but Zack’s dead.”

  Dizziness threatened. First out of relief. Jesse was alive. He could talk. For a second I even felt sorry for Zack, cruel as he’d been. But then I looked down.

  “All the blood,” Jesse had said. All the blood was his.

  Dark red and undiluted by the rain, it ran from a slash across his chest. I pressed both my hands over the wound. They weren’t big enough to cover it.

  “Gwen, stop. I’m … okay.”

  He was not okay.

  Could I run to Nana’s for her car? Get him to a hospital? What would happen when they tried to type his blood, and God, was there time?

  “I’ll take you to the cottage,” I said. I didn’t know how I’d carry him, but I knew I could.

  “I can walk,” he said. “Take my skin.”

  Mouth open, rain hammering on my head, I stared at it, half-awed, half-disgusted.

  “It’s the most important thing, if you want to help me—” he said.

  I did. Every muscle fiber I’d ever trained and strained would obey me tonight. I grabbed the skin, wedged my shoulder beneath Jesse’s, and we started home.

  That night, candles took the place of electricity, and magic replaced medicine. On a blanket thrown on my wooden floor, Jesse told me to link my hands, side by side like the sunrise shell he’d given me, and rub my palms on his wound.

  “Like the story,” he gasped.

  But he’d never finished the story. I didn’t know what to do, but I linked my hands together, lowered them on that awful wound, and I tried.

  Tears started into his eyes from the pain, and I cried too. I was hurting him, helping him, both at once, and my heart would break if his pain didn’t stop.

  In only moments, it did. The blood beneath my hands grew less slick, then powdery, until only a bruise remained. I watched the pulse beat in his neck, making sure Jesse only slept.

  Denial wouldn’t work anymore. My heart had known from the beginning that Jesse was a selkie. My head had been more stubborn, but I was sitting on my floor, next to a man I’d healed with my own hands. A black skin lay beside him. His skin.

  I gazed toward my living room window. That fierce storm had softened into a warm summer night as soon as his bleeding had stopped.

  I could accept this enchantment or choose to be blind.

  I took the afghan off my couch and covered him. My hand stroked his forehead again and again, recording each touch in my fingertips so I could hold the feeling forever.

  When Jesse’s brown eyes opened, he asked with purely human sarcasm, “Now do you believe?”

  I silenced him with a kiss.

  The kiss lasted. It had to. What if there was never another?

  But finally I began searching for explanations only words could give me. Except I couldn’t find them. I don’t think they existed.

  “I believe you’re a selkie. And you always have been? Even that night?”

  He nodded. “I told you. You called me with your tears.”

  “But not this time.” I thought of the quiet cove, the mother sea lions, and how he’d appeared behind me, basking on a hot rock.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He took my hand, the hand that had healed him. He didn’t hold it like a boyfriend this time. He was restraining me, as if I’d strike out.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said.

  “I’m not!”

  “You’re going to be,” he said with a regretful laugh.

  I waited, because maybe I wasn’t so brave after all.

  “We come ashore to mate,” he said.

  I didn’t pull away from him, because that wasn’t the scary part. I could tell there was more coming. And it would be worse.

  “Jesse?” I knew I had to ask, but I couldn’t.

  I had to see his face when he answered me.

  I settled back on the blanket and touched his smooth golden cheek.

  “The rhyme—it’s at the center of this, right? That ‘mayhap seven years,’ what does it mean? What does it really mean?”

  Not what I think it does, please, Jesse. This time I made him read my eyes.

  His head dipped. He kissed the side of my jaw, and then he looked into my eyes.

  “It’s how often I can come back to you.”

  He might as well have stabbed me too.

  “No,” I said. “But if I—if we”—I closed my eyes to say it—“if I’m your mate, then you can stay. Right?”

  “No. I can come back,” he said.

  “No?” I cried as if he’d broken a rule. “I don’t believe it. Seven years. That would mean, after this summer, I’d be twenty-four before I saw you again. Then, thirty-one”—I kept counting on my fingers—“thirty-eight, forty-five, fifty-two! Jesse! Fifty-two. If we had kids, they’d be grown. I would have wrinkles around my eyes from staring out to sea, watching for you. I could die, and you wouldn’t hear of it for years.”

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed his eyes, and I took it for hope.

  “But you don’t know. You’re not sure, are you?”

  “It’s the way it will be, Gwen.”

  “But you haven’t done this before,” I said as a cold infusion rushed through my veins. “Have you?”

  “Never, never!” He held me to his chest. It had been torn and I’d healed it, but what was happening to me couldn’t be healed. Even he couldn’t stand looking at my eyes.

  Ple
ase help me. I appealed to God, the universe, anyone, or anything. And Jesse felt it and thought of something.

  “I could try to stay,” he said. Desperate excitement edged his tone. “Hide my skin. Don’t tell me where you put it.”

  I went still, holding my breath. I thought of those woodcuttings that showed selkie wives staring out to sea. Children clung to their skirts, but the selkie wives turned their longing faces to the waves. Could I do that to Jesse?

  Yes, I could, a voice vowed in my head.

  He’d offered to stay. I hadn’t forced him.

  “But I love you.” I was crying now for real, and my hands were shaking.

  “And so, I’ll stay.” His chin jerked upward, but even as it did, his eyes took in the ceiling, the walls, the closed door and windows.

  I love you.

  And so I’ll stay.

  So simple and so wrong.

  I love you, so I’ll let you go. I’ll let you be who you really are.

  That was the right answer. It would poison my life, but it was true.

  I came up with excuses, with ways to cope. We could live in a house with a swimming pool. Or on an island. Our house would have open walls so that the wind could blow through. I’d seen that in pictures of homes in Hawaii.

  Before I could speak, Jesse clenched his fists.

  “Burn my skin,” he demanded. “That way I could never go back.”

  “Jesse, no.” I thought of lions in the zoo—caged.

  “But I love you,” he said.

  Wild celebration should have risen in me. In a way it did, but it made the torture worse.

  “Gwen, you must destroy it. Otherwise, I’m too weak.” He looked furious as he went on. “I tried it last night. I decided to stay at the fire until dawn, not return to the grotto for my skin, not go into the water until I’d seen you again. And maybe if you’d been there, but you weren’t and I gave in.”

  Just like I “gave in” to breathing when he brought me to the surface after that long underwater kiss?

  He had no choice.

  “I’ll always want to go back, but I want you more.”

  For now, I thought. In time, he’d hate me.

  “If you were going to go,” my words came rasping from my throat. “When—?”

  “Soon,” he said, looking eager and awful, at once. “I’m not sure, but I’ll know when it’s time.”

  It was already dark. How long did we have? Weeks? Days? Hours?

  He kissed me then, a rough and passionate kiss. He did love me, but if I kept him captive, would I ever again hear him laugh?

  Had I heard my favorite laugh in all the world for the last time?

  “There’s this thing I keep thinking, Jesse. So often, you don’t know when it’s the last time, and you can’t really appreciate—”

  “It’s for the best, Gwen.” He sounded unyielding. “If you knew it was the last time, how could you stand it? If I were holding you for the last time, how could I ever let you go?”

  For years I’d practiced not crying. I could make myself stop. So I did.

  “We’ll try it out tomorrow.” I cleared my throat and made my voice sunshiny. “Maybe I’ll change my mind. Maybe I’ll find a perfect hiding place for your skin, but for now—”

  He followed my gaze as I looked at the strange black fur beside him.

  “I’ll take it down to the grotto,” he said, then he tried to joke, too. “If Thelma came over to see how you fared in the storm, it would be just a little bit difficult to explain.”

  He laughed, but it wasn’t his real laugh. He bundled that length of satiny skin under his arm and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

  I opened the door for him and heard a fluttering in the blackberry bushes.

  “What is it?” Jesse asked.

  “The swallows?”

  It was actually still light outside. After all, it was Midsummer, the longest day of the year. I squatted and I saw wings.

  “Look!” I said. “They didn’t die. You know, I saw them making test flights, but I didn’t think …” I shook my head. “I guess they were almost ready.”

  “Ready enough,” Jesse said, and then he jumped off the deck, to the ground.

  He was still naked. Someone might see him. But I refused to waste the time it would take to find him clothes that would fit.

  “You’ve got five minutes to get there and back,” I told him. “So, hurry.”

  Jesse didn’t say good-bye.

  He ran toward the Inn, then turned left toward the Point.

  Before those five minutes were up, I knew he was gone.

  I can’t say what changed. The waves’ crack at their peak sounded just the same. So did their searching whispers as they rushed ashore. The air still smelled of salt and kelp and summer, but I felt a new stillness.

  I sat on the step until twilight turned black. Then I went to find my broken sunrise shell.

  Even as I picked up the pieces from the floor, I couldn’t blame Gumbo for breaking it. In fact, it wasn’t broken.

  It’s true that the two halves were no longer hinged. They weren’t clinging to each other, but each was a cream-colored wing with a rosy flush inside.

  I held one half in each hand. If I took this shell across the room or across the universe, and the other one stayed here, they’d still be two halves of a whole, and anyone would know they belonged together.

  The selkie dove deep. He banked around a thicket of kelp, arrowing toward Mirage Point. Only when his lungs burned did he burst up with unwavering certainty. He shattered the surface into a million silver drops, aiming for dawn’s glimmer, then crashed nose down between the waves.

  In the moment spray turned to water, he’d seen her. Gwen. He knew she’d waited the night for him, then accepted the truth. He wasn’t coming back.

  It was dawn as he returned to the surface, shaking droplets to a haze around him.

  Gwen balanced on the cliff’s edge. Her bathing suit was a defiant red splash against the fog.

  Did she hate him or love him? From here he couldn’t read her eyes.

  He swam back and forth, prowling, anxious, far enough away that she would not see him if she looked.

  Gwen stood straight, resolved. As if she had nothing to lose.

  That night seven years ago, he’d watched Gwennie stand straight, arms covering her ears, standing tiptoe in her child’s white nightgown. Then she’d changed her mind and walked the path to Little Beach.

  Now Gwen was no child.

  This time she would leap.

  He swam closer, chest moving prowlike through the waves, unable to look away. Over her head, her fingers pointed like the tip of the candle flames that had burned around them last night.

  She looked down, trusting herself to read the waves’ language. Her knees flexed. A rippling pool shone blue amid foaming waters, and she aimed for it. The balls of her feet launched her up and out. An afterimage of scarlet hung on the air as the sea swallowed her.

  My sea. My home. A cruel being would go to her now. But he could not.

  Eyes wide, he dove in time to see her arch away from the ocean’s floor. Bubbles streamed from her mouth. Her hair fanned, red amber. Her smile was victorious as she kicked toward the surface.

  In seven years she might decide sea and shore needn’t stay separate after all.

  In seven years he would return to wait. And hope.