Alice At Heart (7 page)

So tell me, would you save that child again, knowing the consequences
?

I stopped stock still in the middle of my own floor. The humming filled my head again. Lilith Bonavendier was speaking to me
again
. I groaned in defeat.

Yes, I would.

Then you’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Alice. And nothing to keep you here anymore.

You are my family in name only. I don’t believe in you
. I began frantically lacing up high black boots on my feet. Since high school, I’d made it hard for anyone to jerk my shoes off. Trembling in denim and Victorian leather, I walked out onto the cabin’s dark porch and pressed a switch. A hooded, tin light fixture cast its glow on the yard and the winter woods beyond. Two dozen steps behind me, below the sloping backyard of my house, the lake waited with dark, quiet appeal. I fought an urge to run down the bank, pull off my baggy clothes and strict shoes, dive in, and escape.

Car lights pierced the cold dusk.

The vehicles contained my aunt, plus about a dozen other Rileys—older ones, younger ones, men and women—stern upholders of the family’s hard, respectable philosophy. “You’ve humiliated us in public. This is the last straw. We want you out of here,” my aunt said. She stood there in my yard, a strong, stocky woman with my mother’s russet hair but nothing resembling any charm. She was about sixty, and my mother, I realized in passing, would have been a little more than seven years younger, if she’d lived. Suddenly I could see my mother—
Mother
, I thought of her, for the first time—in a way I’d never imagined before. Smiling and kind, loving and doomed. I’d heard glimmers about my aunt’s hard feelings toward her over the years. Duller and stauncher, my aunt had always been the family’s girdle, while my mother had been its crown.

“Did you hate my mother?” I asked. The question leapt out like a snake’s tongue. In the course of one day, I’d rejected an award, thwarted my aunt’s orders, been claimed by three clearly notorious women, and talked back. My aunt scowled and buttoned a long gray coat tighter around herself. The other grim Rileys traded grim looks.

“Were you glad she fell from grace?” I persisted. I was vibrating, picking up Lilith’s goading song and singing it myself.

My aunt’s face contorted. “She threw away her life. She had everything a girl could want. What happened to her was her own fault.”

“When I was born, did Grandmother and Grandfather Riley take me away from her against her will?”

That froze my aunt. The others shifted unhappily. I studied their faces, watching anger mix with embarrassment, and I saw the answer. My heart squeezed in on itself, then began to weep for ruined joy. “I see. She
did
want me, but they took me away from her. And she couldn’t bear it.”

I stepped forward, my voice rising with the movement. “Wasn’t that enough punishment?
You killed her
. Did you have to make my life miserable, as well?”

“You weren’t meant to be born,” my aunt spat out. “You’re a mistake of nature, you’re just a sickly thing, you’re nothing like a normal person, and you’re a lying troublemaker, to boot. Whatever happened in the lake between you and that little girl will cause gossip forever around here. And those females . . . those flashy women who waltzed into our business today—they can say whatever they want about being your kin. I don’t know, and I don’t really care. They only feel
sorry
for you, Alice. Or they want something from you. They figure you’re a celebrity. Yes. That’s it. That’s why they came, Alice. To see what they could get out of you.”

All of that was a possibility, of course. Here I was, throwing fuel on the funeral pyre of my only secure life, insulting the tepid indulgence of people who had cared enough to tolerate me for thirty-four years, and I couldn’t really defend three strangers who secretly claimed to not only swim with the fishes but to
be
fishes. I said nothing and began to sink inside my own skin.

“We’re going to buy this cabin from you,” my aunt went on, smirking at my fading defiance. “You’ve got some savings already, and with the money from this house you can start over somewhere new. Somewhere where people won’t know about you. It’ll be better for you and us, too, Alice.”

She was confiscating my home. My only familiar surroundings. Telling me, too, that I had to give up my job at the pet shop. Give up every road and byway, every shop window and face and faded country house and breath-strangling mountain vista, every face I knew and every person who shared my last name. I would be even more alone in the world—just weak, sickly, odd Alice, nobody and nothing, floating free on a tide of strangers and strange places.

I held out my hands, trembling. “I’ve done nothing to deserve this. Isn’t it possible to forgive me for being different and let me stay here? The talk will blow over. I won’t encourage people to notice me. I never laid claims to any miracles when I rescued the little girl. And I never asked for any awards.”

“Miracles? I don’t know
what
to think about you and your strange ways, Alice, but I’ll tell you this much: I
do
believe in miracles. But I believe in evil, too. And I believe
you are evil
.”

I put a hand over my stomach as I fought nausea.

An elegant female voice rang out, filled with disgust. “You’re motivated by nothing except petty revenge. And thus, your beliefs regarding Alice are absolutely meaningless.” Everyone looked around wildly, me included. Lilith stood in the light at the edge of my porch, facing my aunt and the rest of my tormentors.

She was naked and wet.

Her soaked silver hair was plastered over her, front and back, offering just enough modesty to reveal only glimpses of youthful breasts and the long, slim belly of an accomplished swimmer. Her soft, flawless skin, ivory and peach, glowed with diamond ankle bracelets and a thick pearl choker around her throat. Her body steamed in the cold air, lifting a silver mist around her. Lake water trickled down her body and limbs in caressing streams. She was absolutely calm, regal, totally in charge.

All the Rileys took several steps back. Real fear clotted their eyes. My aunt raised ruddy hands to her throat as her gaze hung on Lilith, and Lilith gazed at her. There was a long pause, tension gathering in the air like the carbon scent of ozone just before lightning strikes.

“
Be gone
,” Lilith ordered very softly and very clearly. “
Before I lure you into the lake
.”

Her innuendo filtered into the crowd like icy tentacles. I saw the horror of it snare people, raise the whites of their eyes, hold them very still. This was no dimestore threat, built on cheap theatrics. All of us standing there at that moment would have done whatever Lilith Bonavendier asked, including sink into the lake with her lithe hands around our throats.

Slowly she raised a hand and made a slight, shooing gesture, breaking the spell. My Riley kin flung themselves toward their cars as if released from a slingshot. My aunt fumbled as she climbed inside her vehicle, slammed the door, and locked the locks. So did the others. I watched in amazement as my aunt and the rest drove away quickly. My mother’s family disappeared from my life as if swallowed by the night.

I walked to Lilith in a daze. She looked at me and I at her, searching each other’s hearts and souls. I felt a surge of joy, but a lifetime of confusion and pain, and bitter pride made a hard shell for it. I didn’t doubt I was more than just Alice Riley now, but I would never believe I could be Alice Bonavendier.

“You want to turn me into someone who doesn’t exist,” I accused hoarsely. “ I’m not a mermaid. There’s no such thing.”

“My dear, whatever you want to call us is fine. But we do exist.”

“So my father was a
merman
?”

“Your father was the only great-great-grandson of Simon and Melasine Sainte Bonavendier, she of the Water People, as the Old Ones called themselves. And like all of us who are descended from her, your father was of her kind.”

“He lived in the water and sported a fine, finned tail?”

“No fins, I’m afraid, and no stereotypes. We are people, not fish, my dear.”

“Then I assume that we two-legged descendents of Melasine are, biologically and genetically speaking,
watered down
?”

She smiled beneath her cool eyes. “How droll you are. Such flowing wit. You realize, of course, that just meeting us has begun to change you? Your voice, your manner. You sense who you are, now, and you’re more confident.”

“You’re wrong. You have provoked my worst nature. I apologize. I’m not a sarcastic person.”

“My dear, no need to apologize. You think I’m absolutely delusional, and you’re trying to reason with me via humor. And I am humoring
you
because deep inside I recognize every bit of your urgent need to believe in us—and yourself.”

I took a step back. “I can’t live up to your fantasy.”

Lilith touched my face with the back of one hand. Even in the steaming cold, her fingers were provocatively maternal and warm. “You already have. Come to us whenever you’re ready. Just follow the water to the sea.”

Something or someone splashed in the dark lake. I jumped. A glimmer of porch light caught the emerging heads of Mara and Pearl. Their bare shoulders gleamed like wet porcelain. Their hair floated around them in graceful swirls. They were amazing, sensual, ethereal. Mara looked me up and down with disdain, but Pearl issued a reassuring smile. “Let’s go home, Alice. The water there is much finer.”

Mara raised a hand and tasted the lake on her fingertips. She grimaced. “Needs salt,” she said.

I stared at them, then Lilith. “I need to think.”

“You need to
dream
. You’ll float to us on your dreams,” Lilith replied. “Just as before.”

I turned, walked indoors, turned off the porch light, locked up, and sat in the darkness again. They left silently; I don’t know when.

Sometime during the night, I went out to my small backyard dock and stood there naked, grieving with deep loneliness and fear of the future, preparing to swim in my lake one last time, before the mob of Rileys returned. I spied a small gift box, which someone had set quite obviously on the edge of the dock’s weathered floor. I knelt warily and opened it. On a liner of dark silk lay the most beautiful emerald ankle bracelet. I opened a small, folded note tucked beneath it. Lilith’s handwriting was beautiful. Her message was clear.

Adorn your special feet and celebrate every step you take toward your true kind.

6

The term “mermaid” is literally translated as “virgin of the sea.” And thus I have never considered that popular term a particularly apt or complimentary name for our kind. To celebrate the water is to celebrate the consummation between water and earth, female and male. To have never experienced that unity is to be half-lived.

—Lilith

“So handsome. Look,
Senor
,” a nurse said, holding up the newest issue of
National Geographic
for Griffin to see. “You will look like this again when you are well.”

The woman propped the magazine on her hands with the pages folded to a story titled
Secrets Of The Mirabelle
. Griffin and his crew posed atop the deck of the
Sea She
with a deep-blue Caribbean sky behind them and the coral-encrusted cannons of a sixteenth-century French warship at their feet. The nurse looked from the picture to him with a sigh, as if assessing the sad contrast between the adventurer and the bedridden invalid. Griffin squinted at the magazine through swollen, bloodshot eyes, his face covered with black beard stubble, a sutured wound making a raw pink slash across the right side of his jaw.

“Handsome bastard,” he managed in a hoarse voice.

“Oh,
Senor
, yes. Yes, you will look that handsome again. And all the ladies who have tried to come here and visit you will be waiting.”

The woman didn’t understand. He didn’t give a damn how he looked, or whether his women came back to him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to live. “Take it away, please.” Sighing, the nurse folded the magazine and left the room.

His head diver came to see him the next day. “You know,” Enrique said in a thick Brazilian accent, “the men will wait however long for you to work again and go wherever you say. You know that.”

“Pay them and tell them not to wait. I’m done. I’m going home.”

He had no idea how he could salvage something valuable from his own life. He was very good at finding what the oceans had stolen from human kind, but not what they’d stolen from him as a child. He only knew he had to return where the fear took him, where the singing of the Bonavendier women in his painful dreams called him to go. He knew they might be deadly, the Bonavendier sisters. But he didn’t know about the other woman, the one who had saved him off the coast of Spain.

Alice. He only knew he had to go where he might find her.

Sainte’s Point.

Potential treachery. Enemies and allies.
The sinister unknowns that surround the Bonavendier legacy. The absurd claims
. Lilith sensed Alice’s thoughts as cold February turned to windy March and yet still, Lilith knew Alice couldn’t resist. Somehow she’d make her way to Sainte’s Point. It had only been three weeks. Nothing in a Bonavendier’s long life.

“Oh, Lilith, let us go back and get the poor child,” Pearl urged. “She’ll curl up and die from fear of us. We should just kidnap her and tame her by force.”

“I doubt we’d have much luck,” Mara retorted. “Oh, don’t worry; she’ll show up on our doorstep one day, needy and embarrassing, covered in baggy denim with her feet bound in those sadistic granny boots of hers.” Mara sniffed. “A fashion disaster.”

Lilith scowled at them. “We’ll leave her alone to make her own choices.”

In Lilith’s dreams, Alice coaxed herself along roads that followed the wild, rocky streams flowing south out of Riley down the mountainsides. She hesitated when she reached the foothills, easing worriedly past the huge electric dams and man-made conduits of Atlanta, then floating with the slow, lazy waters that stretched their fingers across the state’s coastal plain. Alice was sliding down the state of Georgia, drifting over the bony edge of the North American continent, flowing naturally to the Atlantic.