Monstrous Beauty (4 page)

His hands shook as he searched his coat pocket for another pencil. Finding the stub of one, he took a deep breath to calm himself, hunched over his journal, and began to record his observations and sketch the vision he still had of her. Tears came to his eyes, distorting the image on the page, dripping down the bridge of his nose. He clumsily wiped them away.

He sat working for an hour, until the light was nearly gone. There was a sharp sliver of a moon and the night was clear, but it would still be difficult for him to get to shore. He didn’t care. He would crawl over the boulders if he had to. He closed the journal.

“What were you doing just now?” A low voice came from the water.

He felt prickles along his scalp. For a few seconds he couldn’t say a word, though he wanted to. Had she been next to him the whole time?

“You came back.” His voice cracked.

“In a thousand years, only one other has called out to me,” she said.

A thousand years.
He turned his head in the direction of her voice and saw her faint aura. Her pale arms were crossed, resting on a block of granite, with her chin propped on top of one hand.

“Why was there water coming from your eyes?” she asked.

“They’re tears. They mean either great sadness or great happiness.” His eyes became moist again.

“Which is it for you now?”

He let out a laugh. “This moment is currently ranked first among the happiest of my life.”

She was silent. He waited, containing himself, though his body felt electrified.

“What were you doing before, with such care?”

“I was writing in my journal—recording what I saw.”

“Me?”

“Yes. And before that, mussels and crabs … and the loggerhead, the turtle. What did you do with it when you took it away?”

“I ate it. What will you do with the journal?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I intend to study the history of”—he could no longer say legends and mythical beings while she was within arm’s reach, could he?—“the natural world. I want to record what I see so that I might remember it forever.”

“You will not live forever.”

He laughed again, twice in nine months, and all in the last minute. “That’s right. But if I become good at my research, I might publish it so others may read it. Then it will be on earth for a long time—though not forever.”

She said quietly, “I will live forever.”

He could not imagine it to be possible.

“In truth I can be killed. Many of us have been killed. But left alone, I will not die.”

Many of us,
he repeated in his head. She was not the only one.

She was silent. The darkness had swallowed the outcropping so completely he could no longer see the ghost of her form. After a long minute he began to worry that she had slipped away. But then he heard the soft
splish
of her tail.

“There is no satisfaction in eternity,” she said. “There is only loss.”

He knew that the tide was rising and his time with her had to end.

“My name is Ezra,” he said.

“I am Syrenka.”

“Will you meet me here again, Syrenka?” He tried to sound calm; he mustn’t rush her. “There is so much I want to know.”

“I will meet you as often as you like, until you are no longer interested.”

He smiled to himself in the darkness and thought,
As if I were not in danger of losing interest in everything else.

Chapter 5

T
HE AFTERNOON OF
P
ETER’S GRADUATION
, with the windows rolled down and the music turned up in his truck, Hester felt it was truly the beginning of summer, and perhaps the end of an era. Peter and Sam wore suits and loosened ties, and Hester had on a filmy dress with a camisole slip. The weather was perfect: not too warm, not too cool. The rocks were in sharp focus along the shore and outlined by a crisp blue sky. Sam was wedged between her and Peter, singing along to the music, his voice a crackly blend of high and low despite his new six-foot frame.

“Letting the days go byyy; let the water hold me down!”

Hester’s eyes were drawn to the ocean. It was speckled with gleaming reflections of sunlight, winking at her like thousands of stars. Thoughts of the shore, sand, riprap, and the cave looped through her mind without her willing them. When the truck approached the picnic area along Water Street, she shook away the trance. “Guys,” she said impulsively, “let’s walk on the beach.”

“No way,” Sam said as Peter pulled into a parking spot. “That’s for old people. I’m getting fried clams with my droogs at Squant’s Treasure.”

“Peter?” Hester asked, getting out of the car, her heart already on its way.

“I can’t stay long, I have to go to a reception for an exhibit of old toys at Pilgrim Hall. My dad is letting them use my great-great-great-great-”—he counted on his fingers—“aunt Adeline’s doll.”

“A half hour,” Hester promised. “And you’re already dressed for the reception.”

“All right,” Peter agreed. “There won’t be much beach right now, but I’m with you.”

“See you at home,” Sam called, jogging toward the wharf.

Peter got out of the truck, tossing his suit jacket inside. He rolled up his shirtsleeves as he strolled across the grass. It was a relaxed, summery pace—the pace you might expect if aimless walking were the goal, if there weren’t a pressing need to get to the beach. Hester tried to restrain herself but wound up a step ahead of him anyway.

“Hey, Hester? About the party,” he said, mostly to her back. “I’m really sorry I said that stuff.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” she said over her shoulder.
Hurry,
she thought.

“You’re doing fine without my telling you how to run your life.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m a mess.”

“Then you pretend well.” They were almost at the stone steps. She skipped ahead and looked down toward the beach.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. The rocks near the shore were completely submerged but for their slick green tips. The narrow spit of sand still showing along the bluff glistened black and spongy.

Peter caught up to her. “Listen to me,” he said quietly, putting his hand on her shoulder until she turned to look at him. “What I should have said the other night is that you can talk to me about anything.”

“Thanks. I know.” She could hardly concentrate on what he was saying. “Look—it’s high tide. There goes our walk.”

“Technically we’re in flood tide. High tide will be at 5:05 today. And we can wade.”

“You know when the tide comes in and out?”

He looked at her over his glasses. “I work on a boat, remember?”

“But you didn’t today.”

He shrugged, starting down the steps. “The chart is on our fridge.”

At the bottom of the flight Peter took off his shoes and rolled up his pants while Hester unclasped her sandals. Peter opened the gate, and they waded into the cool water up to their knees. The wavelets lapped the shore, rhythmically but without urgency. The resistance of the water made Hester’s steps sweeping and unhurried. She began to feel calm. Sandpipers followed the leading edge of the waves with staccato steps, probing the wet sand near the bluff with their beaks.

“The tides are roughly on a twelve-and-a-half-hour cycle,” Peter said. “Which makes them move around the clock over a period of fourteen or fifteen days. It’s pretty complicated—it depends on the earth’s rotation, the gravity of the moon and the sun … even the shape of the bottom of the near shore. A tide calendar is the only way to get it right.”

Hester looked ahead to where the riprap began. The cave should be a little ways beyond that, but everything looked the same when the water was high.

“Is the hangout cave submerged now?” she asked.

“Mm-hm.”

“Have you ever gone inside?”

“Sure. I was sailing the pumpkinseed and the tide was going out, so I brought her ashore and poked around a little. How about you? Have you been?”

“Me? No.” She shook her head.

“I’m not sure what the attraction is. It was pretty dark in there, and kind of slimy. A couple of kids were smoking weed—I could hardly breathe…”

Hester had stopped listening. She was taken aback by her own response to Peter. Why had she lied about going in the cave? The sound of the stranger’s voice played back in her mind—expressive and intelligent. She remembered how irritated she was at first that he seemed so callous, but how quickly his manner had softened. By the time she left for home she had the distinct sensation that he didn’t want their conversation to end. And more: if she hadn’t been so rattled by the party and Joey’s aggressive advances and the fact of the voice belonging to a stranger, she might have been oddly tempted to stay longer to talk to
him
.

She looked out over the water. It wasn’t the first thing she had ever hidden from Peter. She had never been able to confide in him about her family history, and her private worry that she had a medical problem lurking in her genes. He knew that her mother had died after she was born, and that the doctors had never found a cause, but that was all.

Their families had been close, even before Susan’s death. After she was gone, Peter’s parents had been there—not only for Hester’s father, Malcolm, but for Hester’s late grandfather, who had lost his daughter in the same awful way that he had lost his wife. Grief had weakened him, allowing his leukemia to take over. The Angelns had helped care for them all, including Hester. Two years later Dave had been the best man when Malcolm married Nancy, Hester’s stepmom. A year after that they had welcomed baby Sam into the world, and little Hester had stuck by Nancy’s side for weeks, making sure she wouldn’t die.

But it had taken until high school for Hester to worry for herself. It had taken the possibility of falling in love.
Love.
A new and different feeling—initially pleasing, full of hope and desire. But then, after rational thought—bleak and melancholy. And pointless. The more she had turned the problem over in her mind the last few years, the more her future dilemma unraveled backward, to the present. Why start a relationship when nothing could come of it? Birth control was not foolproof, unless it involved surgery—something she’d have to wait years to contemplate. And how would she convince a doctor it was necessary, when she was a seemingly healthy young woman?

Love. Sex. Loss.
It was safest to avert the whole sequence.

Peter stooped to reach into the water. He came up with the shell of a large marine snail, but after turning it over and seeing the soft body retracted inside, he lowered it into the water again.

She knew he wouldn’t judge her if she told him her worries. But he might debate, he might press. And she had solved the problem on her own; she had found a private path that required approval from no one but her. It was simple and logical: stay single. It left no opportunity for failure. She would be happy with a career. She’d be a doting aunt to Sam’s kids someday. She didn’t want to be talked out of it.

They paused to look out over the water. A gull hovered above them, cocked its eye at her, and laughed, “uk uk uk uk,” before flying away. Peter looked up at it, and then Hester felt his eyes drift down to her. She had been quiet for too long.

“Did I ever tell you that my dad once saw a mermaid in the bay?” he said with a grin.

“Oh, God, I think so! Ages ago,” she snorted, grateful for the offer of levity. “Tell me again.”

“It was before I was born. She swam right alongside the boat, the way dolphins do. She was so white, the phosphorescent organisms in the water made her look like she was glowing green—you know, like the underside of a humpback? He thinks she was white because she lived at great depths and didn’t need pigments to protect against the sun.”

“It was probably a molting seal or something.”

He shook his head. “He knows the animals in the bay like the back of his hand.”

“I’ve read that the ancient mermaid legends all sprang up from manatee and dugong sightings. Mariners who were out to sea for years on end were lonely enough to imagine they saw women in the water. Dugongs have pale skin, and when you look down at them from a boat they look like they have a human head, because they have a sort of slender neck.”

“Horny mariners? Hester Goodwin, you have no sense of magic.”

“It’s historical, scientific reality.”

“So all those tales of men getting it on with mermaids…”

She nodded mischievously. “… Sailors trying to justify bestiality.”

“Now you’re just being gross.”

She laughed. They turned back. And suddenly she recalled a story she had never told him. A genuine secret she could share.

“Do you remember when we were little and my dad took us swimming at White Horse beach?” she asked.

“He took us a million times.”

“I mean the day I drowned.”

A sober look flashed across his face. “I remember. You were diving for bocce balls. You were fanatical about that game, like a golden retriever.”

“I made him throw the target ball…”

“It was light, so it flew way too far, and your dad yelled not to go after it, and you went under anyway, deep under, because you’ve always been ridiculously stubborn. And you never came up.”

“What they say about drowning is true. It was peaceful.”

He kicked gentle falls of water ahead of them.

“It was scary as hell.”

“Not for me. I didn’t feel any pain. I just forgot to hold my breath. I was still alive.”

“You coughed out this huge spray of water when your dad pulled you from the bottom. He took us to the emergency room, and you kept saying the whole way there that you were fine.”

Hester dragged her toes through the rippled sand. It was ice cold below the sun-warmed top layer.

“There was a woman down there with me.”

“What?” He stopped walking and turned to face her.

“Yeah, and get this: she was really pale. Like white-blond.” She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe it was one of Dave’s mermaids.”

“What did she do?”

“She put two fingers to her lips, as if she were telling me to be quiet. And then my dad was dragging me out of the water and she was gone.”