by Ellen Datlow
The tattoo on her right forearm prickled with the cold, as if the ink had turned to ice on her skin, and Jenny rubbed at it to try to drive that chill away.
“It’s okay. I don’t need … it was just—”
“Fuckin’ peculiar is what it was,” the hostess said with a glance over her shoulder. She dragged open the door, put her free hand on the small of Jenny’s back, and gently guided her inside. “Have yourself a drink, at least. Take a breath. I’ll let you know when those guys are gone.”
“I’m supposed to meet someone,” Jenny started to say, as the door swung closed behind them.
The crack of impact made her cry out as she and the hostess grabbed hold of one another. Jenny spun, backing away, staring at the spider-web pattern splintered into the door and the smear of blood streaking the glass. Through the clear, unbroken glass toward the bottom of the door, they could see the seagull that had just killed itself trying to reach her.
“What the hell?” the hostess whispered.
She glanced at Jenny and for the first time that maternal concern vanished. Instead, the woman took a step away, as if to move out of the line of fire, in case of whatever came next. Resentment kindled in Jenny’s chest, mingling with anger and wonder and a kind of helplessness she’d never felt before. She stared at the hostess, infuriated by the idea that the woman was afraid to come near her.
Later, she would remember that moment and wish that she could make everyone as hesitant to approach her as the hostess had been.
Over the following days, it escalated quickly. Everywhere she went there were men and women who looked at her too long, watched her too closely. Not everyone—whatever the allure, it wasn’t universal—but enough to make her increasingly uncomfortable. Even small children rushed to invade her personal space. Out for a morning run, Jenny encountered Emma Brill, a friend from high school, who’d been walking her infant son in one of those fancy jogger-strollers. The moment the boy saw Jenny, he’d begun to cry, stretching his arms toward her as if desperate to be held. As if Jenny were his mother instead of Emma. For a few minutes, Jenny complied, just so she and Emma could continue their conversation—though it consisted of the same beats as most of her recent conversations, full of condolences and shared memories.
When she’d given the baby back, the infant had loosed a piercing wail, shrieking as he tried to hold on, his face turning purplish-red. Emma apologized, trying to soothe the baby. Jenny whispered her own apology, promised to talk to Emma soon, and started off again on her run, sneakers crunching on the sand and grit in the road. The baby shrieked on, inconsolable, and even when Jenny had outrun the sound, the wind would gust and carry it to her in small, lonely snatches, as if the baby would scream forever.
Gulls cawed and circled in the sky. As she ran along a narrow path just a few hundred yards from the ocean, small crabs scuttled out from the high grass and scrub. At first she ran over them, careful not to step on and crush them, but after half a minute she noticed they all seemed to be moving in the same direction—toward her—and she paused to look back the way she’d come. There were dozens of the little things, and more emerging from the grass. All of them were moving in her direction. The ones she’d passed had changed course to follow her.
A tremor of fear went through her. Jenny sneered at the emotion, angry with herself, and she started running again, part of her convinced she could still hear Emma Brill’s baby screaming for the loss of her. Her heart pounded and the tattoo on her right forearm went colder than ever before, as if the ice had slid deeper inside her, right along the tracks of her veins. She put a hand on it as she ran, taking peace from the contact, drawing comfort from the symbol there. For a little while it seemed like her thoughts became softer, and her feet carried her forward in a sort of trance.
The path branched to the right, toward the street that led to her neighborhood. A dozen steps toward home, gulls cawing above, twenty of them circling now, she staggered to a halt.
Three people waited along the path, the high sea grass waving on either side of them. One she didn’t know, but the other two were fisherman. Men who’d spent their lives at sea, who felt the call of it in their hearts the same way Tom Leary did.
Jenny backed away. At the split in the path, she took the other fork, picking up her pace. A gull darted past her head close enough that she had to duck, but she only ran faster, kept running without really thinking about where she might go, although in the back of her mind she’d known all along. She fled to the place she’d always run to when she was in trouble.
Home.
The cottage she’d been renting was only a few miles from the old Federal Colonial where she’d grown up, and now her run brought her onto a path that emerged two houses down from her childhood home. All the houses along Dunphy Road sat on a bluff, facing the ocean, with nothing but the street and a pile of enormous rocks separating them from the steep drop off the bluff into the water. Jenny sprinted along the road toward the front steps, heart already lightening.
A car rolled up beside her, slowing to match her speed, and then the tires skidded to a halt. Jenny turned, startled, to see Matt climbing out in that familiar uniform. She saw the pain and regret on his face as he walked up to her and her only thought was of her father.
“Did they … did they find his body?” she asked.
Tears welled in Matt’s eyes. One slid down his left cheek, and others followed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Seagulls fluttered down to alight on his police car and on the front porch of her house. Across the street, a woman had been photographing the ocean. A professional, with a camera strapped around her neck that looked as if it cost more than Jenny made in the average home sale commission. Now the photographer turned and gazed at her like Dorothy at the gates of the Emerald City.
“Where did you find him?” Jenny asked. Horror swept through her as she imagined having to identify her dad after his body had been in the water for weeks.
Matt grabbed her by the arms, held her tightly, and leaned in to breathe in the scent of her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
She started to protest and he nuzzled her throat, pressed his cheek against hers, kissed her forehead lightly.
“I can’t …” Matt said. “I can’t keep away. I just needed to come to you. Get lost in you.”
The words might have been romantic if not for his grip on her arms. If not for the hopeless look in his eyes and the fearful, desperate tone of his voice.
“Matt, no.” She tried to extricate herself from his grip. Took a step back, drawing him with her instead.
She saw the expectant look in his eyes, as if he felt certain she would understand. And the truth was that she did. Jenny said his name, looked down in frustration at the grip he had on her arms and saw that his hand covered half of the triple-spiral tattoo.
“No!”
She twisted her arms down and outward, breaking his grip, then stepped in and shoved him with both hands. Matt staggered backward, arms pinwheeling, and fell on his ass at the edge of the road. The gulls on his car took flight, darting toward her. Jenny spun and raced for the porch, took the stairs two at a time, lifted her arms to protect her face as the gulls there flapped up from the railing and came at her. She batted at them, heart pounding, fighting the scream that had been building inside of her.
Tom Leary’s wicker chair sat on the porch. Jenny picked it up with both hands and used it to shield herself, keeping it aloft with one hand while she plucked the spare key from on top of the lantern to the right of the door. Gulls cawed and pecked at the wicker.
Matt cried out her name and the plaintive tone in his voice made her own tears begin to fall.
The key scratched around the lock and she wanted to scream, but then it slipped in. She turned it, then grabbed the knob and gave it a twist. The door swung inward but the wicker chair caught on the frame and she released it. The gulls scrabbled away from the chair as it fell, just long enough for her to spin aro
und and slam the door, locking it from the inside.
Trying to catch her breath, she glanced at the tattoo inside her left forearm, taking comfort from her father’s name inked there. But she felt her gaze pulled toward that other tattoo, and only when she let her eyes shift to it did she find real peace.
A sound broke through her reverie, gulls clawing at the door. She looked up at the peeling paint, and the door shook in its frame.
“Jenny, please!” Matt called.
“Go away!”
“I can’t. God help me, I can’t.”
She turned and bolted up the stairs to the second story, then all the way to the third. At the front of the house, a bay window looked out at the sea, but Jenny had more interest in the yard below. With her left hand, she covered the spiral tattoo, soothing herself. From the vantage point at the window she couldn’t see the front porch, where Matt still pounded on the wood and gulls still roosted.
But she could see the road. She could see the cars and pickups that had pulled up there, and the men and women who had begun to gather, gazing up at her home with the sad eyes and heartfelt longing of people who knew the thing that so fascinated them would be forever out of their reach, that the thing they most loved could never love them back. Fishermen and tourists, the photographer and several small children who seemed to belong to no one, who seemed to have wandered away from their parents to follow the allure of something they would never understand, whether as children or as adults … they all wore that same look.
Jenny had her hand on the tattoo, knew she could take that peace with her wherever she went, but there would always be those who felt the same allure. She wondered about the talisman, where her father had acquired it, how deeply it had affected him. If it had killed him.
Though she knew the answer. Of course she knew.
She could remove the tattoo, of course, but she felt it just as others did. It called to her, soothed her, satisfied a yearning in her, and Jenny couldn’t surrender that. Not for anyone or anything.
Yet even as she understood that, she also understood they would never stop being drawn to her. She had to get out of there, could make it down the steps and out the back of the house. Her father’s old Harley was there, in the shed he’d used as a workshop forever. She knew where he hung the keys. She’d go. She’d do it right now, leave all these people behind, escape whatever drew them to her.
But she knew what drew them. Knew she’d never leave it behind, even if it weren’t inked into her skin.
Still, she couldn’t stay here.
She bolted. The Harley waited for her.
Beyond that, she didn’t know. Not at first.
The current of her life swept her out to sea.
Jenny had given up her rented house, put a For Sale sign in front of her childhood home, and entered a lease-to-own agreement on this starkly isolated spot on Comeau Island. There were twenty-seven other year-round residences on the island, but the nearest was half a mile through the piney woods from Jenny’s place. They weren’t the drop-by-for-a-welcome sort of neighbors. Nobody came to borrow a cup of sugar. People didn’t live on a remote island off the coast of Maine because they felt like being neighborly. The best she could hope for would be that someone would come to check on her if they saw smoke rising from her property that couldn’t just be the chimney.
These were the only neighbors she could allow herself.
Questions lingered. How long could she last out here? How long would the proceeds from the sale of the family home allow her to live without a real job? The money would be substantial, at least four times what this island cottage would cost to purchase, but it wouldn’t last forever. To many people she’d known, it would be paradise—nothing to do but read, watch movies, and gaze at one of the most beautiful views imaginable. But even heaven could become hell if you were a prisoner there.
The questions haunted her, but not as much as they might have. The tattoo on her right arm would turn cold as ice and she would cover it with her left hand and be suffused with that sense of peace for which she’d yearned her entire life. It soothed her, made the questions withdraw into the recesses of her mind. In those moments, her doubts and regrets seemed small and unimportant. When the gulls landed on the railing of her deck or came too close and she had to chase them off, even fight them off, even kill them when it came to that … she found solace in the infinite ocean inked on her arm.
Four days into her exile, Jenny stood on the deck again in a thick blue sweater she’d owned for years, the sleeves pushed up, her hair tied back in a ponytail. Coffee steamed from the same mug she’d used the previous three days and she cupped her hands around it, enjoying the warmth on that chilly morning. She glanced warily at the sky, watching for the gulls. By now she was familiar with their patterns, the way they would begin to diverge from their natural flight, circling closer and closer until they descended. She had fifteen or twenty minutes to enjoy the deck and the breeze, so she took a deep breath, sipped her coffee, and reminded herself how many people would trade anything to wake to this view every day.
The triple spiral on her arm sent the chill down to her bones and she smiled. Somehow that icy cold made the rest of her warmer.
Her view through the pines had a golden, early-morning glow. She’d walked down to the water on her first two days here, but yesterday she had not ventured out. It wasn’t worth the trouble to bring the baseball bat to deal with the gulls, and the crabs had proliferated between the first and second days. Several sharks had begun to patrol the end of her creaky little dock, and though she knew they could not come after her, still it gave her a shudder to see them gathering like that.
Jenny breathed in the aroma of her coffee, let it fill her head a moment before she took another sip. Gulls circled out over the dock, but there were more of them now, and several looped nearer to the house.
Another sip of coffee. Another pulse of ice from the ink on her arm.
She pressed her eyes closed and inhaled the smell of the ocean. When she opened them, she noticed something moving down by the dock. The rocks and sand seemed to be shifting, but it was too far away to see in detail. Jenny placed her coffee mug on the railing and slid her phone out of the band of her sweatpants, opened the camera function, and zoomed the picture.
The tiniest of sounds escaped her lips. Her hand shook and she almost dropped the phone, but she managed to steady her right arm—left hand over that tattoo, calming her.
The rocks and sand were moving, all right. Shifting and scuttling, covered with crabs large and small. Even horseshoe crabs. There were a few lobsters, dying on the rocks. A small octopus slithered across the sand toward the path, moving almost without moving, as if it glided in her direction by will alone. Down at the water’s edge, fish flopped in the surf like they had tried to come ashore.
Staring through the zoomed camera image, breath caught in her throat, Jenny scanned the path and the water’s edge again, but something at the upper edge of the image drew her attention and she tilted the camera up to see pale hands gripping the weathered boards, and then a dead woman hauled herself up onto the dock.
Jenny cried out. Dropped the phone. Heard it crack but reached for it anyway. Bumped it with her fingers so it skittered out of her reach and she had to follow it and pick it up, opening the camera again. Zooming again.
The woman on the dock wasn’t alone. A bald man in sodden, salt-bleached tatters crawled and rolled in the surf, managed to get onto his knees, and then stood. He turned and looked through the opening in the pines, straight up at Jenny’s house. Or he would have, if he’d had eyes. At this distance, even with the zoom on the phone, it was hard to tell, but they looked like nothing but black pits to her.
Out in the water, something moved. Not a shark fin this time. The top of a head, another man, walking toward shore, his white hair and beard tangled with seaweed.
Three so far, moving in like the crabs. Moving in like the gulls. People who’d been called by the sea and whose l
ives had ended in its depths, one way or another. Pale things, drawn back by an allure they’d never understood while alive.
Strangely calm, Jenny placed her cracked phone on the railing beside her coffee mug. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. She traced her fingers over the triple-spiral tattoo, that infinite wave, then clamped her hand down over it. The ink turned so cold it felt like teeth biting deep.
Tears welled in her eyes as that familiar floating calm lifted her and she took several breaths. If only she could have kept her eyes closed and floated in that peace forever.
Instead, she opened them. The gulls had begun to circle closer. The blanket of crabs scuttled up the path between the pines. The small octopus would be down there, gliding along with them, although she couldn’t make it out. The people, though … she didn’t need the camera zoom to see those figures stumbling in the shadows of the pines.
She wanted to give herself over to the ink. To the infinite sea. But she had been a fool to think that she could stay in one place and not have the lure intensify.
Jenny turned in a slow circle, looking past the pine trees and her new house, imagining what lay beyond it all, trying to think of someplace, anyplace, she might run. A flutter of wings made her spin around and she stared at the single gull that alighted on the railing between her coffee mug and her cracked phone. It stared at her, black eyes yearning.
She left the gull there on the deck, left her coffee and her phone and went inside, drawing the sliding glass door closed behind her. The house breathed, quiet except for the crackling in the fireplace. The wood smoke gave the whole place the scent of autumn, reminding her of better days.
The metal screen curtain on the fireplace slid back easily. Jenny took the little iron ash shovel that hung with the tongs and poker, and she rested it on top of the burning logs. Crouched there, she waited while the iron grew hot, waited as her knees began to ache. When the first gull hit the slider, she didn’t flinch. It happened many times a day and she’d learned to ignore the sound. Her gaze shifted to her left forearm. Her sweater sleeve had slid down to cover the tattoo there and she slid it back up so that she could look at her father’s name and wonder how it had come to this. Had he been searching for the talisman or had he brought it up from the sea bottom with his net or a hook? Had he cut open a fish and found it inside?
