The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2011

The Mermaid Comes Home

(an excerpt from The Siren Dialogues novel)

Lisa Meltzer Penn

Every thousand years. Maybe five hundred. Maybe less. It all depends on one thing: where is the Siren? Is she carnate? I can’t make it through the waves without her. She is my light house, my sound house. I travel by voice alone. Can you feel my arrival impending? Is it cupped in your ear, is it whirled into the seashell of your consciousness?

Another thing: I need someone to find me. The one for whom I’ve waited generations. That’s where you come in. Are you ready? Will you be there? Will you pull me onto the beach for air? You might not understand the role you play, but please, be there. Please, pull me in. Don’t be afraid. Take me home. I won’t stay long. I won’t require much.

Rachel. I’m told that is your name. The sound echoes through the thin membrane that separates us. I won’t tell you mine, not yet. But I bear gifts – invisible till I surface, ethereal till I break through. You won’t be able to hold me for long, but I hope you know me and remember me. I’ve been a long time coming.

*

The wind and rain battered the island all night long. Morning came and Jasper stirred in his high loft bed overlooking the bay. He left the still-sleeping Rachel in a jumble of blankets and climbed down the ladder and out to his truck. The sky was gray and dull, as though weary of making weather.

The truck bumped along the rutted path between cottages. The ruts were deep with mud and the wheels slithered around them. Jasper tried to stay to center and not dig deeper. With one hand on the wheel, he tipped back a plastic bottle of soda water and drained what was left, bubbles running down his throat. Eventually the underside of the truck would rust—the salt and damp would have its effects. He stopped by the Dover cottage and jumped out. In the kitchen, he discovered a minor leak where the ceiling paint had bubbled up. He made a mental note to come back later with the proper tools and supplies.

The cottages in this section were mostly intact, a few things here and there that required his attention. He went into some and gave the rest a quick survey from the outside. It was still early enough in the season that not all the flaws had become apparent—old roofs, rotted porch steps, cracked door seals. Every family industriously closed up its house for the season after Labor Day, or by the end of duck hunting season at the latest, but it was never enough to completely stay the elements. Jasper walked toward the beach through the nearest break in the fragile dunes the community had built up in anticipation of the storms. Each fall, sand was scooped into the beds of trucks at a wide place and moved to one more narrow. They said they had to do something, try something. Still, the wind would howl, How dare you move my island? That is for me to do!

He tried to tell them not to bother—not the old timers but the younger ones, the weekenders, his generation eager to become men like their fathers. He’d grown up with them, but Jasper was the only one of the group who boated across in winter, until the ice made it impossible and he was forced to take the truck down the length of island to the one restricted bridge. He was the only one who stayed, not abandoning the island for the city after the allotted summer weekends and vacations.

Low tide had left seaweed and driftwood strewn across the beach. The sand was pounded down like a long, wet road. Jasper picked up a big branch tossed up by the waves and used it as a walking stick for a few paces before dropping it again.

What brought him to the island in the first place, what held him there after he finished college, were the voices of the trees, the wind and the water; they were simply home. He would not say it in that way to anyone he knew, not even to Rachel. Anyway, that wasn’t what mattered. The feel of the hammer against the boards and the rumble of the sander scraping the floors were what anchored him, made him part of the place. Everything was held up by stilts here, perched civilized, yet transferable to the wild, a place in-between.

He was a place in-between. He had slipped into this role of caretaker by habit more than intent. And so his friends were both amused by and beholden to him. He suspected they wanted to stay, too, but instead talked of responsibility—sitting behind a desk in the city, dashing through the subway to meetings. For them this place was a summer retreat, a vacation spot, no matter how coveted. Usually he was glad when they left, their cheap red wine, dirty jokes and posturing dissipating as the ferry pulled away.

And what was Rachel doing in this strange place? What was she even doing with him? He had her massage his forehead with her thumb as hard as she could, right above his eyes, and it was never enough to really reach him. For close to four years, most weekends, she’d been coming here. This was her first trip out that winter, still recuperating from surgery on a torn knee, a donor’s anterior cruciate ligament grafted onto her femur. Once, at the beginning, they had lain on the sand, heads on pillows of dune looking up at the night sky, and shooting stars came down in perfect arcs, too excited to stay up where they belonged.

Jasper walked the beach in the direction of the clubhouse, empty of its summer crowd. He noted an odd lump of flotsam piled near the water. Seagulls wheeled above him. The clubhouse was ancient and wouldn’t last much longer.

In the winter there were bills to collect—bills to spread out on the dining room table and muck through. Some of them were old. Cottagers sometimes pretended not to remember he had been there: for example, a woman in the middle of a messy divorce might sit on her hands and wait for her estranged spouse to pay. But they had to remember—he had fixed their roofs, replaced their linoleum. How could they forget?

And had he saved any houses? Really, there was no saving them.

Storms had cut away the sand at the legs of the houses closest to the beach, houses that, decades ago, stood hundreds of feet back. But now, at least at high tide, those houses were set almost in the water, the cement pilings vulnerable and begging. The truth none would speak of his own beloved island home was this: if a house was going to be taken, it was. Jasper extended the lease when he could. He could sometimes preserve a house long enough for a family to come out one last time, retrieve some of what was lost and say goodbye. They could try to start over again or go away and never return.

What would the builders think now? They had been careful to build far back from the waves. But it was a narrow, precarious island, a barrier between the ocean and mainland. Perhaps the builders would not have been surprised. The ocean had thrown the island into being millions of years before. Now it was kidnapping the sand grain by grain. Someday it would swallow it all back, long slippery tail of island straight down the gullet, and the storms would hit the mainland directly.

Jasper laughed. Then they would need more than just him to save them.

*

At Jasper’s house, Rachel stirred a bubbling pot of soup on the wood stove, then flexed her left knee as far as it would bend. It was slow going. Only a degree every few days. The cane, propped up next to her, was an awkward accompaniment. She couldn’t wait to get rid of it. Already the bulky black brace was optional.

In the crowded city, even potential muggers averted their eyes when they saw her, a young woman on crutches, and then a cane. She taunted them—she supposed that’s what it was—by calling out hello, something that was never done. It forced them to look up. People she passed with permanent crutches, canes and wheelchairs—and there were a fair amount in that busy population—they looked at her all right. And the looks weren’t all that friendly. They knew she wasn’t one of them, that for her this was temporary. They looked hungrily, as if she’d taken something from them. But of course she hadn’t. She’d taken only the donor ligament.

“You mean, the cadaver?” her friends kept asking. But Rachel persisted in saying “donor” until she almost convinced them it had been given freely by a living person. Who knew for sure? Maybe it was from one of those strangers on the street.

Rachel gave the wooden spoon one more tap on the pot, replaced the lid, then worked her way into coat and boots. She hobbled down the back stairs to look for Jasper on the beach. It felt good to be in fresh air after the rain, after the city. And she’d been called here, after all. By that irresistible voice that kept asking, and asking. Ever since the surgery, she’d been hearing it, a Siren’s voice beckoning her to the island.

On the beach the sand destabilized the cane. Rachel limped, stiff-legged, toward the clubhouse, the cane dangling uselessly. The walk took longer than usual, but here, time always seemed to expand and occupy its own space.

As she neared the clubhouse, she heard Jasper shouting at someone. “Hey!” and “What is that?”

“Jasper?” she called.

“Rachel!” shouted Jasper across the dunes. “Is that you? Come, quick!”

*

Stretched out in the seaweed, a woman was halfway out of the water, waves lapping over her lower half. Rachel watched as Jasper gripped her under the arms before the tide pulled back with a long whoosh. The sand was alive, the same substance as tooth and bone. Could this be the reason she had been called here?

Rachel trod toward them unevenly, the cane sinking into the sand with every hurried step—not wanting to come back up. She pulled the cane out and held it under her arm. As the water drew back, little holes popped open every few inches and Rachel remembered the nurse saying to her before they put her under, Relax, it’s like having a tooth pulled. Like nothing at all.

As the water drew back, she saw something else. Jasper got a better grip and pulled the woman all the way onto the beach. Rachel was almost to them. Her knee was aching.

The woman’s head rolled to one side and she coughed. Bits of seaweed and a gauzy sheath clung to her skin. Her feet emerged—another surprise. They were smooth and uncalloused, like a baby’s feet yet to touch the ground.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Rachel to herself. When the water had first drawn back, the strange woman had sported a tail. Rachel was sure of it. Had Jasper even noticed? It wasn’t green-scaled or jewel-encrusted like a cartoon mermaid’s, just brown, like seaweed, a color that wouldn’t stand out in a cold, murky body of water. Now the tail was gone, morphed mysteriously into two legs.

The mermaid was hers. She had to be. Rachel had been hearing the Siren’s voice calling for weeks now, ever since the donor’s Achilles tendon had been grafted onto her knee. The graft was still struggling to meld with her body, to become living connective tissue once again. It was painful, especially at night.

This mermaid-woman wasn’t much to look at, thought Rachel. She wasn’t sure what or whom she’d expected, but not this washed-up, waif-like creature with dark, close-shorn locks plastered to her skull, so still she was almost lifeless. Which was strange, because under different circumstances, for instance if the stranger were a statue or a painting, Rachel would have claimed with authority that she looked lifelike.

“She’s alive,” Jasper said, cradling the visitor’s head and checking her pulse. “Unbelievable. Is this the Siren you’ve been talking about, Rachel?” He asked the question lightly, as if he were making small talk.

“The Siren?” answered Rachel incredulously. “Of course not.” How could this be the Siren? Never mind, they would take her home. She was unlike the strange ligament Rachel couldn’t even see, could only observe modeled in colored plastic in the doctor’s office as he recited the name of each piece: anterior cruciate ligament, medial meniscus, patella, femur, fibula, tibia; lulling her with the nursery rhyme of it, the half-truth of it. A body wasn’t pieces.

They shook as much sand as they could out of an old blanket in the back of the pick-up, wrapped it around the mermaid, and laid her across Rachel’s lap in the cab, her head resting on Rachel’s shoulder. The struggling new tendon-turned-ligament in Rachel’s knee felt the mermaid’s weight pressing against it. Rachel held her steady. It was uncomfortable but not painful. The mermaid breathed air like it was new to her, in quick gasps, in disbelief, like a novice diver breathes underwater. It felt strange to hold her. Proof positive, meat and bone.

As the truck bumped down the muddy paths to the house, the mermaid’s wrapped feet slid against the steering wheel, almost sending the truck into a rut. Rachel gathered them back and held her more firmly. The woman was coming in now, for a little while, what the sea leaves. She was not the force, thought Rachel, relaxing against the stranger, but the subject.

Remember that, Rachel, came the voice of the Siren. Remember it when you look to me with your questions and thoughts, with your desires at the tip of your tongue.

“Who do you think she is, then?” asked Jasper. “We’ll have to get her to the hospital. I don’t know if the bridge is open.”

Rachel sighed, and the mermaid settled into her. “She’s someone who’s supposed to be here, I think. No hospital. Not yet, Jasper.” Rachel ran her hand along the side of the mermaid’s neck. So smooth. She felt the pulse of blood beneath the cool skin. Rachel thought of her Irish fisherman’s sweater, its dense weave that would let nothing through.

Do I have a tail, too? she wondered. Somewhere hidden? She’d always wished for a tail, to swing from the trees, for balance, for strength. But evolution had taken it away, bit by bit. Babies in their nine months in the womb went through all the stages of evolution that had taken their ancestors millions of years to traverse. In only a matter of weeks, the same length of time she’d been absent from the island, they reached recognizable human form. Until then, they retained a tail—for swimming in the womb when it was a vast dark swimming pool, before it began to close in. She had been there, too. Deep down her body could still remember. Then the cells kept dividing, the tail split into two legs, and they said goodbye.

The truck stopped behind the house.

“All right, then, Rach. Either way, we’d better get her inside. Let’s bring her up.”

Jasper lifted the woman out of Rachel’s arms and carried her up the stairs, Rachel following behind holding the railing, the cane forgotten in the bed of the truck. Jasper deposited the visitor on one of the twin day beds kitty-cornered in the living room and turned on the Coast Guard radio.

“I’ll take care of her,” Rachel insisted. She dressed the mermaid in a pair of clean long johns, top and bottom, and the cable-knit Irish sweater from the bottom of a drawer. Nowhere in a world with central heating would its tight weave be accepted, the woolen warmth buzzed off a sheep. On the island, on the mermaid woman, it was at home. On her, it might help heal.

Jasper brought in some blankets. “You’re sure?” he asked. Color was coming into the woman’s cheeks. Jasper knew enough basic first aid to see she wasn’t in shock. Amazingly. There was nothing on the radio. No reports of missing persons or boats caught in the storm. So he went back out again.

From the pot on the wood stove Rachel ladled out a thick bowl of vegetable soup, the potatoes and carrots soft and cubed. She’d spent the morning preparing it, peeling the carrots and chopping everything. She made a lot of soup there. She limped back to the end table and left the bowl to cool, spreading a wool blanket over the mermaid and lying down on the edge of the daybed with her. The mermaid’s skin was still ice-cold, but her head was warm. Rachel rubbed a towel along the dark, close-shorn locks. Though the eyelids still covered the eyes, the mermaid didn’t seem asleep anymore. Her breathing was more regular.

Up close, the face was so perfect and delicate! Somehow, Rachel knew the mermaid couldn’t have survived a storm like that alone. But how else? She swept her hand over the fine, damp hair. “Do you have a name?” she whispered. “Where did you come from?”

Rachel propped a pillow behind the mermaid’s head and spooned some warm soup into her lips, just broth, no vegetables. It trickled to the back of her throat, and she swallowed. And then the mermaid turned and slept.

That night Rachel tucked more blankets around their visitor. “I wish I could give you a name,” she said.

Jasper built up the fire. It would last a couple of hours into the night and then the bare wood beams of the house would do their best to hold onto the heat. But the heat would still escape.

At the built-in ladder to the loft bed, Rachel’s leg felt the soft jolt up each rung. She climbed with the normal knee bending, the other one at its strange, slightly bent angle. Once, before the knee surgery or even the tear that preceded it, she had climbed a metal ladder propped against the outside of the house and found Jasper leaning into a telescope, the legs of the telescope stand adjusted to the angle of the roof. The finely tuned lens took in all the heavens, all the stars too far away for anyone to ever touch or reach. But in the lean forward Jasper seemed to touch the sky.

This short, slow indoor climb to the loft bed presented the danger of ripping the graft from the titanium screws holding it forcefully to bone. She moved slowly, no scrambling anymore, carefully swinging the weak leg onto the bed. The high bed was always impossible to make properly, single size wool blankets pieced together in shades of gray, brown, and army green. One ferry trip across, she had brought out a queen-size comforter filled with goose feathers and down. It had disappeared into the twisted nest.

Rachel slid her body under the covers. Jasper was waiting for her, naked to the waist. No, naked all the way down. The layers of blankets had deceived her. She wriggled out of her clothes, her knee briefly protesting, and then the pile of blankets wrapped them in a cocoon.

“Is she asleep?” asked Jasper.

“Yes.”

“Someone might be looking for her,” he said. Then he reached over and started kissing Rachel’s neck.

Rachel sighed deeply. “We’ll see in the morning.” She’d waited so many weeks. When she stripped off the wool and down, when she peeled back all of her usual daytime layers of flannel and cotton, and everything that covered her up, she imagined she would stratum by stratum bare all her own history—boyfriends, mistakes, secrets, unmistakable joy, unequivocal sorrow. What was she, even beyond her secret self? If she continued to peel all the way to the cellular level, would all her former selves peek out, everyone she had ever been? If there were an eye that could see that deep.

Jasper’s hands moved down her, and finally what she rose into was the plane of perfect warmth, her body relaxed and whole and hers again, one body conjoined to the other all down the legs and up the front of their torsos, like lava seeping through. She rolled into him, animal. He moved inside her in the dark—her other self from the weeks in the city, from the hospital and the traveling and the thinking and the deadening pain and the doctors and nurses and the desperateness to get out and the wanting and regret—gone.

In the living room, the mermaid had whispered something to her, something so familiar in its sounds that Rachel could almost, but not quite, understand it.

“What?” said Rachel. “Say it again.” But the mermaid said nothing else, just looked at her with luminous eyes, then turned on the daybed and slept.

Now the darkness enveloped Rachel and Jasper’s bodies completely, and for the moment, at least, Jasper’s was the only voice she heard, the only body she was aware of. On weekends she came to the island and he was there. And the rest of the time he was absent, only in her imagination, not body.

By the next morning when they climbed down, the fire was dead and the mermaid gone.

Rachel plucked the fisherman’s sweater from the back of the daybed and put it on. She stared out the window over the bay. The water was a dappled slate, a hustle and chop of small waves, a puzzling reminder of something she’d put out of mind.

Baking apples and warming bread drew her back and she and Jasper ate omelets, French bread, apples baked with their cores hollowed out and filled with cider and cinnamon, better than a pie. The smell of the sweater on her body now was vanilla and cinnamon, honey and salt. Draped around her, it was a thank you. Or was it a message or request? Did the sweater now entitle her to the missing name? The mermaid could have been anyone, and yet, she was only a very specific someone.

But why had she come all that way, just to leave again? Rachel held the whispered almost-name to her, opened her mouth in an ‘O’ and tried to mimic the sound of it. She couldn’t. With a spoon she scooped out the sweet spicy insides of the last apple on the plate.

*

A single moment can hold a lifetime, came the voice when Jasper had left the house again. Wear the sweater, walk the paths. Find what you find. Your visitor is out there somewhere. And the Siren? Well, I am the Siren. Funny name; that implies I am the only one. I am the only one for you, Rachel. Come, now. Dip down. ◊