Siren's Storm (21 page)

She laughed, and the sound was brittle on the wind. “Stupid,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“No, wait—what did I say? What was stupid?”

“Not you, me,” Gretchen snapped. “I should have known.”

“Known what?”

“Known that if I told you the truth, you’d think I was nuts.” Gretchen narrowed her eyes at him.

“I don’t think you’re nuts,” Will told her. He reached out and pressed her hand. Her skin was soft beneath his own.

She looked down at their intertwined fingers. Her hair hung over her face, half obscuring it.

“I’m just afraid,” Will said.

Gretchen’s eyes met his. It was strange to see that gaze, at once so familiar and so unfamiliar. There were
flecks of green in those blue eyes. It was as if you could see the whole world in Gretchen’s irises. Will wondered if he’d ever noticed that before.

He didn’t remember.

She placed her cheek against his chest, as if she was listening to the beat of his heart. Will placed an awkward arm around her shoulder, wondering what to say, what to do. “I’m afraid, too,” Gretchen told him.

“Jason might be okay. Just because they haven’t found a body—”

“They never found Tim’s body.”

Will was rocked with the truth of this. He was speechless.

Gretchen pulled back to look up into his face. “I—I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with—”

“No—” He held up his hand. “It’s true. Sometimes, I think part of me is still waiting for him to come back.”

“We could wait forever.”

“I know.”

They stood there like that for a while, both staring out over the water, flat as a blank page. “It’s so strange,” Gretchen said after a moment. “I was sleepwalking again last night. Here. At the edge of the water. Do you think that means something?”

“Out here? I thought Johnny was locking you in.”

“I must have climbed down the maple tree,” Gretchen said.

“So what are you going to do? Nail the window shut?” Will was kidding, but Gretchen didn’t laugh.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Gretchen,” Will said slowly, “who told you about Jason?”

“Asia did.”

“She did? She called?”

“She came by.”

“Is she still here?”

Gretchen’s eyes filled with tears, which mystified Will. “I—I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I just need to ask her—”

Gretchen shook her head. “It’s okay.” She ran her fingers along the rims of her eyes, then wiped the tears on her loose green jersey dress. “Sorry. I’m just … everything is making me cry today.” Tears welled in her eyes again, and Will pulled her into a hug.

“We’re going to get through this,” Will said.

Gretchen nodded her head against his chest. “I know,” she said. “I just wish I knew what was on the other side.”

The library was a small white Greek revival building that had stood at the center of town for two hundred years. Two incongruously thick columns guarded either side of the periwinkle-blue doors, holding up the tiny roof with Atlas-like drama. It could have been the library in any small town, except that the names of the authors who were scheduled to perform readings were the kind of names you saw in New York City, for a fee. Every author in the Hamptons wanted to appear there, both to show how “community-oriented” they were and to prove that they belonged in the famous-authors club.

The warm, slightly sweet smell of old books haunted the place. Gretchen used to drag Will here on weekday afternoons. They’d to go to the children’s section, at the back, where she’d poke around among the novels while he checked out nonfiction. Will had always liked
biographies, which made Gretchen roll her eyes. “Real life is boring,” she’d say. But not the real lives he read about. He’d gone through a period in which he read everything he could about Ernest Shackleton, an explorer whose ship became stranded in Arctic ice in 1915. He liked stories about survival.

The librarian didn’t look up from her computer screen as Will shut the door gently behind him. The library was nearly empty. A pouty boy with pale blond hair sat in a corner while his slim mother chatted on a cell phone. He reached for a book from the top shelf, and the mother’s gold bangles jangled as she snapped at him and frowned. The kid scowled. He looked freshly scrubbed, as if he were on his way to a photo shoot. Will felt sorry for him.

Asia was on the other side of the library, at a table near the windows. An open book was spread out before her, but she wasn’t reading. She was looking out the window. Will slid into the chair across from hers.

“I shouldn’t have left him on the bridge,” Asia said. Her face was dark as the sea beneath a coming storm.

She didn’t need to explain whom she meant. Will knew she was talking about Jason.

“Did you have anything to do with what happened?” Will asked.

“Not directly.”

“Not
directly
?” Will looked at her carefully. “Or no?”

She continued to stare out the window. “There are beaches, far from here, where, if you kick the sand at night, it sends up tiny green sparks. It’s just a
phosphorescent microorganism. Plankton, that’s all. But it looks like starlight at the edge of the water.”

“Am I supposed to know what the hell you’re talking about?” Will replied. He wrestled his voice into a hoarse whisper rather than a scream. “How about some clarity? Yes or no, Asia—did you kill Jason?”

Asia looked at him then with those crystalline green eyes. “No.”

“Did you kill my brother?” The words spilled out of him, sharp as tacks.

Asia’s green eyes softened. “No, Will,” she said gently. “No.”

Will’s tense body relaxed ever so slightly. He believed her.
Maybe I shouldn’t
, he thought,
but I do
.

Asia smiled sadly, and she pushed the book toward him. “Were you ever made to read this?” Asia asked.

Will flipped to the cover. It was a worn cloth-bound edition, the dust jacket lost long ago. Gold letters were nestled into the faded navy cover.
The Odyssey
, it read.

“Freshman year,” Will said. “I don’t remember much about it. Didn’t they gouge out somebody’s eye?”

A smile played at the corners of Asia’s lips. “The Cyclops, yes.”

“And didn’t Ulysses kill all his wives’ boyfriends?”

“They weren’t her boyfriends,” Asia corrected. “They just wanted to marry her for her money.”

“I guess I remember the bloody parts,” Will admitted.

Asia pointed to a passage near the bottom of the page. “Do you remember this?”

Will scanned the page.

“Read it out loud,” Asia commanded.

“ ‘First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them.’ ” Will hesitated. The words seemed to crawl over his skin, tickling up memories from the journal he’d read. He looked up at Asia, who was scowling out the window.

“Go on,” she whispered.

“ ‘If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.’ ” Will looked at her closely. “So what exactly is a Siren?”

“Siren, mermaid, naiad, Oceanid … there are many names,” Asia said. “Many names for the same thing.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“What we are? Who knows?”

“You’re not human?”

Asia laughed. “No.”

Will sat back in his chair. He looked at her carefully—her perfect skin, her luminous eyes, her silken hair. She did look almost unreal. Still, hearing it from her own lips made him feel a little dizzy. It wasn’t that he was surprised. It was more like he was relieved.
At least I’m not crazy. Or at least I’m not the
only
crazy one
. “So …”

Asia lifted an eyebrow.

“Do you have …” He shook his head, searching for the word.

“A fin?” she prompted. “Yeah. I guess.”

“No. No, I don’t turn into a fish or a bird. No, it doesn’t feel as if I’m walking on glass every time I take a step on land. No, I didn’t give my voice to a sea witch.”

“So what’s different about you? Do you have superpowers?”

Asia looked out the window. “We don’t die. If you consider that a superpower.”

“Don’t
you
?”

Asia’s expression turned a shade darker. “Not really.”

“You don’t die, ever?” Will had a hard time grasping that. He never used to think about death, but now it seemed like he thought about it all the time. He couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to never have to worry about that.

“Not that I know of. Perhaps we just have a long life span. Perhaps we’re immortal. None of us has ever died of natural causes, at least not that I know of. But we can be killed.”

“So—wait a minute. How old—”

Asia toyed with the frayed edge of the old book. “I remember many things,” she said. Her eyes met Will’s. “Many of these things.”

“That stuff in the book? That—”

“We have lived among humans for a long time. Some of us, like Calypso, even married among them.”

“
This
Calypso?” Will pointed to the book.

“The very same.”

Will thought that over, fighting the damp, clammy feeling that was slowly creeping up the back of his neck. He held his head in his hands and suppressed the desire to run screaming from the library.

“It’s hard to hear, I know,” Asia said.

“It’s hard to
believe
.”

Asia blew out a sigh. “Well do I know it.”

Silence pulsed between them like a living thing.

Will tried to collect his thoughts. The persistent sense of unreality that had hung around him ever since Tim died seemed to press in further.
If this is a nightmare, I wish I would just wake up
, he thought. But he didn’t wake up. And so, with a deep breath, he pressed on. “You knew Calypso?”

“She was my sister,” Asia explained. “We all are sisters.”

“Then who are the Joyces?”

“Who?” Asia’s expression seemed genuinely blank.

“You live in their house?” Will prompted.

“Oh.” Asia bit her lip, looked away. “Will, this town is full of empty houses. Every year I find a seaside town, and then find a place to live. If the owners return, I simply move on to another house.”

“What will you do it they come back and find you?”

“I can usually tell when the owners are coming back.”

“So the Joyces aren’t your family?”

“I’ve never met them.”

“So, no family. And there aren’t any mer-guys?” Asia laughed. “No.”

“So how do you …” Will waved his hands, and Asia lifted her eyebrows.

“Reproduce?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t. That is, we can have children … with humans. In the usual way.” She smiled wryly. “But those children are human, not our kind. None of us remembers our births, obviously, as you don’t remember yours. We’ve simply always been. But there are no new mermaids. When the last of us die …” Asia shrugged.

“Maybe there used to be mermen,” Will said.

“That’s what I think. Perhaps something killed them off. But I don’t know.” She breathed a gentle sigh. “You have no idea how frustrating it is to have no idea where you came from.” She traced her fingers in loops over the top of the table. “And you have no idea how terrifying it is to consider a death that’s so final. There won’t be any family left.”

“You’re the last?”

“Not exactly.”

“You’re going to explain that?”

“I’ll try.”

Will decided to let that go for a moment. “All right, so—do you have any other special powers? Can you breathe underwater? Are you like Aquaman or
something?” He tried to laugh, but it came out sounding strangled.

Asia turned her head and lifted her long black hair. There, behind her ear, were three black gash marks, like a dark tattoo. They quivered slightly.

“Gills,” Will whispered. He had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.

Asia nodded. “I don’t choose to live in the water. But I could. Calypso has.”

Will shook his head, dumbfounded. It took him a moment to gather his thoughts enough to ask, “And what else?”

“We’re very strong,” Asia admitted.

“Should we arm-wrestle?” Will joked.

“Only if you want me to rip your arm off.” Her green eyes glittered, and Will went cold. “Not that I would, of course,” Asia added.

“Uh, thanks, I guess.”

The mermaid chuckled.

But a new thought had occurred to Will. “So, that night—the cliff—”

“Yes.”

“Can you fly?”

Asia shook her head. “No. We can climb. And jump.”

“Jump,” Will repeated. “So—wait—”

“I was near the water already that night. I’d heard something.…”