Alice At Heart (8 page)

One day very soon, the knowing waters would deposit her at Sainte’s Point.

The Bonavendier sisters
have staked their claim on the currents of my life and my future. They want me to believe that mystical merfolk swim in my bloodstream, and thus that I am far grander than I have ever believed myself to be. In return, I desperately demand proof that love can redeem lost souls and that the world is truly a place where miracles and mysteries are as real as the fertile oceans.

I am not holding my breath.

Mermaids giggle at me in my dreams.
You couldn’t possibly be one of us, Alice Riley—not one of the world’s mystical undines, hailed in song and literature throughout history and in every culture of the planet. Mysterious, confident, alluring, a queen of the vast deep. Not you, you scrawny, fearful, two-footed thing, hiding in a cheap motel on dry land. And we do mean hiding.

I am sitting in a small motel in the middle of the Georgia. I have gone to ground in the state’s flat navel, burrowing like a crab. For the past two weeks, as February has given way to March, I’ve huddled in my room, surrounded by my jeering, mythological phantoms, fighting motion sickness even when I’m not moving. I trim my impossibly determined hair every morning, and I take long soaks in the bathtub, pining for water. My life is in tatters. I am
bereft
, in every melodramatic sense of that fine old word. I’m an arcane woman floating in a sea of strangers with normal toes. I got this far on my journey to the sea, but now I’m hiding, yes.

You’re a fish out of water
, the mermaids laugh.

I prefer to think of it as being stranded on high ground.

You see, I don’t own a car. Before the upheaval in Riley, I had never spent a night outside the town. Never rented a hotel room. Never ridden in a cab, a commuter train, or any other public conveyance. I’m a swimmer first, a walker second, a traveler, never.

When I left town, I shivered through the two-hour bus trip from Riley down to Atlanta as mountain roads gave way to busy interstates and my past disappeared behind me. I carried my trappings of selfhood inside two small boxes of clothes, books, and seashells in the bus’s cargo hold. When the bus chugged into Atlanta, I stared in amazement at the skyscrapers closing over above me, then at the hoards of people and honking cars, the jigsaw puzzle of one-way streets and wide boulevards, the smell of gasoline and sardine-packed humanity, the endless, bone-dry pavement. Atlanta was a beached whale, and I was not going to set so much as one webbed foot into its rotting maw.

“I want to buy another ticket and stay on this bus, please,” I said to the driver. “I’ll go as far as this bus goes.”

He was a thickset, fatherly black man who didn’t appear unkind, just busy. He stared at me with a puzzled look. “This bus terminates in Macon. That’s only another hundred miles. “

I got out a map I’d bought. Macon was perhaps halfway to the sea. It made a medium dot near the center of the state, while Atlanta was a large, starred dot in the state’s upper third, like the off-center eye of a cyclops. I could deal with Macon.

“Sir, can I at least change buses there and go on to the coast?”

“Sure. Change buses, change direction, or change your mind.” He smiled.

Too late for any of the latter, I feared.

I traveled on.

When we arrived in Macon, he set my boxes on the sidewalk at the bus station, and I looked around worriedly. Macon was much smaller than Atlanta, but still a city. I crept into the station, studied the schedules and routes, and discovered a horrible problem. No buses ran to Sainte’s Point. Of course I knew Sainte’s Point was an island, unreachable by vehicles other than boats, but I’d expected to arrive right across from it, at least, and knew I could swim the rest of the way if need be. On the map, it was a sliver of green across from the coastal town of Bellemeade. Bellemeade was merely a pinpoint tucked into a coastline so frayed with coves, saltwater marshes, river deltas, and inlets it resembled a ragged apron hem. Judging by my thumbnail assessment of map distances, the next larger town-dot, where a bus would deposit me for certain, was twenty miles inland. I imagined vast stretches of farmland and pine forest and alligator-infested swamp between there and Bellemeade.

I panicked. My bus driver spotted me sitting on a bench inside the station with my map crumpled in my hands and asked me gently if I was all right. I was too embarrassed to admit my dilemma. Of course, I would never simply pick up a phone and call Lilith for help. Not that she needed a phone, considering her mind-invading talents.
I’m not meant to go the island
, I told myself.
This is a sign
.

“Sir, can you tell me how to get to some kind of inexpensive lodgings around here? And how to call a cab to get me there?”

The driver sighed. “Miss, haven’t you ever been anywhere, before?”

I shook my head. “Only this far.”

“You’re some kind of angel who’s been dropped here to explore, aren’t you? I saw a show about your kind on TV. I think it was on Oprah. Or maybe Montel. You got a look about you. Not quite of this world.”

I dropped my gaze and hid dismay.
Not an angel. Maybe an angelfish
.

He gave my stricken silence a gentle grunt. “I’ll drop you off at a good motel myself, soon as I get this bus ready to head back to Atlanta.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” he countered, apropos of nothing. When I looked at him curiously, he said, “You must be an angel. You make me think of music and the ocean. And I like those things.”

I looked away and said nothing. I’ve become a shameless survivor, feigning angelhood when I am, in fact, just a lost soul who refuses to call Lilith Bonavendier to come and get me.

I have decided to go no farther than Macon.

So I’m reading the local newspaper, trying to work up my courage to apply for a job at a pet store, and making lists of apartments located near ponds, lakes, or even small creeks. I eat the motel’s vending machine crackers and cans of vegetable shortening I buy at a convenience store next door, run by a kind family of Mexican origin. I speak to them in fluent Spanish—languages come to me as easily as breathing—and they are quite friendly to me.

“A person can lose her voice so easily when no knows how to listen,” the mother of the family confessed to me in her singsong words. “Sometimes I become so quiet I can’t even tell myself what I am thinking.”

I couldn’t agree more.

7

Pull to and fro, Row men, row! Keep your eyes upright and your ears shut tight! The devil’s in the sea but he won’t get thee! Pull to and fro, Row men, row! The devil looks up from the depths below!

—
Ballad of the Merfolk
, British sailors’ song, 18th century

The nurse’s aide wasn’t more than twenty-five—not quite young enough to be his daughter, Griffin decided, but close. Apparently her main duty was to touch him as often as possible. She was pretty, with bright blond hair, and looked as if she belonged not in the ponderous Victorian confines of Randolph Cottage but in a smoky urban club, some dark, loud place where goateed college boys sucked pacifiers and traded small packets of pills beneath retro 1950s diner tables. Her typical work outfit consisted of snug little sweaters cut low enough to show cleavage and tight black pants with a little flair at the ankles. The pants stretched just enough to emphasize every flexing inch of her, front and back. She smelled of good perfume. Her name was Kelly. She spelled it Kellee.

On the average day, she managed to caress Griffin five or six times through his pajamas, always as casual as a kitten strolling by. She practically crawled atop the big old-fashioned bedstead with him, fluffing the dozen fat pillows that propped his broken leg, his broken arm, his still-sprained back, his still-stiff neck. She brushed her fingers across his thighs, or his stomach, the side of his jaw, and, hell, he noted, even his good knee. Some morbid sense of humor compelled him, and he began tallying the come-ons in a small notebook.

An efficient male nurse named Ben helped him with his baths, his medications, and trips to the john. But Kellee fetched and toted, brought him books to read, kept his water pitcher full, artistically arranged meal trays he barely touched, and tried to give him erections.

That didn’t work either and worse, he didn’t care that it didn’t work.

“No, thanks,” he told her gently and cupped a scarred, pale hand around her face. She cried and left the room.

Griffin, who had never had a problem with either the obvious reaction or the obvious follow-through to female attention, laid a pillow over his groin. From then on he spent the time gazing, hollow-eyed, out a large window that faced BellemeadeBay. Randolph Cottage sat on a spit of sand dunes two miles south of the bay’s namesake—Bellemeade—the village Simon Sainte Bonavendier had rescued from an English warship during the Revolution.

Griffin was an avid historian, so he knew every detail. The cannon battle between Bonavendier’s ship and the English had taken place right off the cottage’s shores, just inside the bay’s narrow mouth, bracketed by the island on the oceanside and this jutting peninsula of sand dunes and sea oats on the bayside. Bonavendier had cornered the English warship there, pounded it with cannon fire, and let the villagers of Bellemeade finish it off.

Behind Randolph Cottage, buried under dunes, lay the coquina foundation of FortBellemeade. Two cannonballs—one from Bonavendier’s ship and one from the fort’s artillery—graced massive newel posts at the foot of the cottage’s staircase. One of Simon Sainte Bonavendier’s own swords—a gift to Randolph ancestors who had commandeered that fort—hung in the cottage’s living room.

Randolphs and Bonavendiers. Land and water. They had been allies then, but the friendship had faded over the generations. Randolphs were merchants at heart, Bonavendiers, pirates.

On the clearest March days, Griffin could see across the bay to Sainte’s Point. The island made an ethereal blue-green strip on the horizon. He knew that a mile beyond it, beneath the jagged waters of the open Atlantic, pieces of his parents’ sailboat still lay on the ocean floor. Pieces of his childhood. Only the island stood between him and that place, and he was grateful.

Our kind will go
the way of unicorns and dragons. Reduced to fantastic illusions, dismissed by science, forced into hiding. It is so much easier for people to believe nothing extraordinary exists in their own nature.

On the cusp of a new millennium, with magical technology folding the world in on itself, Lilith diligently wrote in a large journal atop a slender, gilded desk in her private office. Her great-grandparents had salvaged the delicate writing desk from a wrecked French cargo steamer in the mid-1800s. The steamer’s journey had begun somewhere off the coast of Europe, and it had been heading for one of the Randolph estates near Savannah. The desk was rumored to have belonged to Napoleon.

The Randolphs suspected but had never proved anything. The Bonavendiers considered the desk a small commission for rescuing the rest of the steamer’s cargo, not to mention the passengers and crew.

Lilith knew precisely where remnants of the steamer’s hull lay off the island’s shoals, alongside the shells of other vessels once employed by Randolph Shipping. One of her many projects involved cataloging all the romantic and tragic ships that had sunk in the island’s arms—some modern, some ancient, some fact, some merely lore.

She had dutifully researched her family’s diaries and letters and had explored the underwater wreck sites herself, of course, like many Bonavendiers before her. Now she meticulously entered locations, circumstances, how many passengers were rescued by Bonavendiers, and how much property. She wasn’t compiling the journal to brag about the family’s reputation for wit and bravery in the old times, before ships circumvented the island’s deadly shallows via satellite tracking systems and computer-aided navigation charts. Nor was she gossiping about the goods they’d plucked from hapless brigands and schooners and steam-powered paddlewheelers and diesel tankers during two hundred years of Bonavendier history on Sainte’s Point. She was writing it all down as a gift for Alice and Griffin. Whether they knew it or not yet, they understood the desire to bring back what the sea would give and forgive.

One page of the thick leather journal remained blank except for a few small notations at the top.
The Calm Meridian
, she had written quietly, followed by the date of the small sailing yacht’s demise: November, 1967. Thirty-five years ago. She had listed three passenger names: Undiline Randolph, Porter Randolph—the parents. Griffin Randolph—their young son, and only survivor. She included the latitude and longitude of the wreckage, and a brief description of the scattered woods and metals that had once comprised the handsomest and fastest luxury sailing yacht on the Georgia coast. Beneath it all she had written this small epitaph.

God rest your sweet soul and forgive Porter for his cruelty, dear Undiline.

She stood resolutely and closed her journal. Beyond her parlor’s louvered Spanish shutters and hand-blown English windowpanes, the first balmy hint of spring put a tinge of green on the massive maritime oaks on the front lawn leading to the cove. Seagulls and pelicans shared squatting privileges on the cove’s docks. Dolphins surfaced like gray-blue cats arching their backs. Barret kept a ferryboat named the
Lorelei
ready to leave at a second’s notice. Thirty minutes of peaceful passageway would take Lilith and her sisters across the bay to the mainland whenever they wished.

Alice would arrive at the coast any day now, and they would go immediately to welcome her in style.

But it was time to welcome Griffin home, first.

“Thank you, Barret.”

“You’re most welcome.”

Barret offered a brawny hand as Lilith stepped from the
Lorelei
’s broad, mahogany deck onto the dock at Randolph Cottage. The tall, stocky German, dressed in dapper khakis, a thick wool sweater, and a mink cap with earmuffs, took a small, finely engraved wooden box into his arms, then limped onto the dock. “I should carry this for you, Lilith.”