The Mermaid Collector (27 page)

“A hundred brushes and not a single pen,” Ruby had exclaimed as she’d scoured the paint-splattered drawers of her studio.

“You could always just
paint
the stars on a piece of paper,” Tess had suggested, nearly halfway through a bag of potato chips she’d brought down from the trailer, her
fingers traffic-cone orange from the powder, try as she had to lick them clean. She and Ruby had been living with Buzz for several months by then, and even if Tess wasn’t crazy about school or the kids in her class, she had to admit she liked living by the ocean, liked finding treasures on the beach such as mermaid purses and horseshoe crab shells. But most of all she liked seeing her mother smile so many days in a row that Tess would lose count, or cease to keep count at all.

“I think he looks like Poseidon,” Ruby said as she rummaged. “Don’t you think? His great big beard and that mane of red hair. I can just imagine him standing in the middle of a whirlpool, calming the seas.”

Tess could too maybe. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. Her mother had loved men before; she had loved them quickly and entirely.

“Do you like Buzz better than Eddie?” Tess had asked.

“Oh God, yes. Don’t you?”

“I didn’t like Eddie,” said Tess. “He yelled at me once because I ate two of his cookies. He showed me the empty slots in the tray.”

“He yelled at you?” Ruby stared at Tess, her face falling. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

Tess shrugged. “Because you said he was your destiny.”

“Eddie was born on the cusp.” Ruby sighed. “I didn’t know that when we met. I didn’t know a lot of things about him, apparently.” She moved then to the window with a
brush and a small dish of violet paint. She considered the petal pink wall just to the right of the frame, tilted her head, wrinkled her nose, then set down her first dot.

“Which star are you making?” Tess asked.

“All of them,” said Ruby. “If you want to learn the constellations, you have to know where they live in the sky. It’s not enough to pick out just one.”

Tess watched, enthralled, as her mother made careful dots with the paint. Only a few times did she lean over to double-check the placement of her “stars.” Soon, the wall was a mass of purple spots.

Ruby stood back, considering her work.

“Maybe we should label them?” suggested Tess.

“Oh, we can’t do that. Then it won’t look like the sky.”

“But how else will I learn them?”

“You will—you’ll see.” Ruby returned to add a few more stars. After a moment she turned to Tess and said quietly, “He wants to marry me, lovey.”

“That could be good, I guess.” Tess reached into her bag of chips, considering it as she crunched down on a handful. “So we could stay here a long time then, huh?”

“We could. We could stay here forever if you wanted to.”

“Forever isn’t real.”

“Isn’t it?” Ruby winked at Tess. “How do you know we’re not the two people on the planet who get to live forever? It’s as possible as anything, I think. Or maybe we’re more like the Phoenix, this one here.” Ruby pointed to the middle of the wall and connected the dots of the bird’s
wing with her finger. “Maybe we burn up and then get to start all over again in the morning.”

“I don’t like that one,” Tess said firmly. “I don’t want to burn up. I don’t want you to burn up, either.”

“We all burn up, lovey.”

“You and I won’t,” said Tess. “Promise me we won’t ever burn up.”

“Oh, I don’t know.…” Ruby looked to the window, smiling wistfully into the night. “I think it would be nice to go that way. Like a star. An explosion of light and heat and love. I really do.”

“Promise,”
Tess demanded again. And this time Ruby appeased her, no doubt hearing the panic in her daughter’s voice.

“I promise, lovey,” Ruby said. “You and I will never burn up like stars.”

But she had. As much as she’d promised not to, Ruby had burst out of Tess’s life without warning, and it was that singular broken vow that Tess had thought about over and over in the months after she came home from school to find the police at the cove. She saw Buzz first, standing with the state trooper, the skin above his beard the color of clam flat mud. Shaking her head, Tess went straight up to the trailer, dropping her books and her coat on the way, certain that if she could just keep walking, if she could keep Buzz from reaching her, then the truth couldn’t reach her, either. She called for her mother, louder than she might have needed. The trailer wasn’t big, but still she tore
through it; then she came back outside and marched across the driveway to the cottages. Buzz was there to head her off. “Come here, Tessie,” he pleaded, his voice like something heard underwater, liquid and blurry and faraway. “Come here, baby.”

“I need to find Mom,” she said. “I just need to find her and tell her something.”

“Tessie, you have to listen to me now.”

But she wouldn’t listen; she wouldn’t slow, either, not for anything. Never in all her life had Tess wanted to keep going as much as she did in that moment. Her heart pounded; her lungs burned. When Buzz finally caught up to her, she fought him for a moment, thrashing like a fish, until he managed to get both of his arms around her, stilling her like a top that couldn’t stop its spin.

For several days and nights afterward, they’d lived on the beach. Since Ruby’s body had not been found, Tess had refused to believe her mother was really gone. She had also refused to believe the letter Ruby had left in Buzz’s truck, and Buzz had not once argued the point. Instead, he had just dragged down the old tent and set it up wordlessly in a stiff wind.

“We should make a fire,” Tess said. “Just in case she isn’t sure it’s us, okay?” And he’d done it, building her a peak of flames that could have rivaled the lamp of the lighthouse.

They kept at it for almost a week, practically living out of the tent, bringing down their meals from the trailer—if
cold cereal and wrapped cheese slices could be counted as a meal—leaving only to use the bathroom or get more blankets. Buzz wrote a note to the school to explain Tess’s absence—not that they should have needed one, for Christ’s sake, he muttered, handing it to a neighbor’s daughter to deliver.

For three nights, Tess wouldn’t let Buzz close the flap, afraid her mother might call out and she wouldn’t hear, but when the temperature dropped to near freezing, which it often still did in early May, she consented to let Buzz zip them in snugly. He told her stories to distract her, but he would always drift off first, snoring deeply, sometimes weeping in his dreams.

But Tess would be wide awake. For hours afterward, once her eyes and ears had trained to the darkness, she watched the wind ripple the nylon, imagining each sweep of surf, each rustling of the hedges to be Ruby returned from her ocean adventure. In those moments, her senses became so acute, Tess swore she could hear the scurrying of hermit crabs halfway down the beach, their shell houses whispering trails through the sand. She felt more alive and more lifeless than ever—found and lost. But mostly, she just ached.

Now, nine years later, standing in front of the sculpture that would award her so much more than a three-hundred-dollar prize, Tess felt every bit as lost. For the last few hours, alone with her thoughts in the milky light of dusk, convictions had crumbled, stripped away like the
basswood beneath her chisel blade. Everything she’d held dear and firm now felt as rootless and tumbled as seaweed in the curl of the surf.

She’d wanted to believe—
needed
to believe—that her mother hadn’t been ill, that Buzz had pushed Ruby to do what she’d done, and that she, Tess, had every right to blame him.

She’d wanted Pete Hawthorne for so long, but why? Being his chosen one—even temporarily—had given her the acceptance the Harbor had always refused her mother. But was that love? Wanting him had made sense once, but as she stood there now, it wasn’t Pete she missed. It was Tom Grace.

She didn’t know how it was she could miss someone she barely knew, but she did. For all the years she’d craved adventure, now it seemed all she craved was someone who wore the same white shirt, who neatened the edges of sheets drying on the lawn, as if the man in the moon might look down and call him a slob. Women always fell for Dean, Tom had said. But Tess didn’t think she could. Not the way she thought she could fall for Tom. And it made no sense, not even the littlest bit. She thought how Buzz would wag his finger in her direction, his eyes flashing with satisfaction.

Regret rose up in Tess, fierce and biting, like something sour you couldn’t wash down. She thought of what Tom had said, how quick she’d been to defend Dean. She thought she knew what it was like to stand on the other
side of that glass, to have to be the one to pick up the pieces of someone who was determined to shatter. She didn’t.

She looked to the hill where she could just see the very top of the trailer, her tears rising, then overflowing. Buzz wasn’t the one she was mad at; he never was. But it hurt so much less to be angry with him instead of her.

Tess dragged her sleeve across her eyes and nose, the guilt and regret choking her. She’d been so unfair to Buzz, so terribly unfair.

She needed him to forgive her.

But maybe first, she needed to forgive herself.

AS THE LAST LAVENDER THREAD
of sunset was swallowed into the horizon, Wallace Mooney stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of his gift shop and gave the place a final look. Shelves were stocked, floors were swept, displays were tidy—six months of work that would be undone in a matter of minutes as soon as the doors opened the next day. Such was the first day of the festival. He’d come to expect it.

“Don’t know why we bother,” his brother, Terry, griped, emerging from the stockroom with one more box of sparklers. “It’s all gonna look like hell ten minutes after we open.”

“Let’s hope,” Wallace said.

“Supposed to be a full moon tomorrow night.”

Wallace nodded. “Heard that.”

“You remember what happened the last time there was one of them during the festival.”

“Of course I do.”

Terry chuckled. “Think Vera Blake does?”

“Now cut that out,” scolded Wallace, shoving Terry’s baseball cap at him. “She’d been drinking. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Maybe you’d rather it had been Mary Sturgis?”

“I mean it. One more word about it and you’re walking home.”

Terry Mooney chuckled as he set his cap over his thin white hair.

Wallace turned off all the store’s lights except the four bulbs in the window. The brothers stepped out onto the street, the night air crisp but still.

“A little cool tonight,” Wallace said, squinting up at the sky.

“No wind, though,” said Terry. “You know what that means. No wind, no chimes.”

“Listen to you.” Wallace turned the lock on the store and pocketed his keys, shaking his head. “You keep hoping, Terr.”

“I’m telling you, Wall. One of these days. One of these days, they just might show up again.”

Wallace grinned, his gray eyes pleating at the corners.

“They just might,” he teased. “And you, with that god-awful haircut.”

HENRY SHELTON HARRIS CAME INTO
the world on a warm May evening. He nursed well from the start, which relieved the midwife, a nervous young woman, barely older than Lydia, who lived at the end of the road. Soaked with sweat and feeling so drained that she believed she could have floated away if someone had pushed the sash up any higher, Lydia cradled her new baby in the lamplight, his tiny, crinkled body like a fiddlehead, refusing to unfurl.

She wanted to tell him over and over that everything
would be all right now. He was here and he was safe, and nothing would ever change that. She wanted to tell him not to mind the roar of the surf beyond the window, or the flash of light.

She wanted to tell him that no matter what came next, he would always be loved. Completely. More than he might ever know.

AS PROMISED, PEARL AND RACHEL
came within the week, arriving in sweet-smelling silk and velvet brocades.

“Oh, he’s perfection,” marveled Rachel as the three sisters stood around the bassinet, smiling down at Henry as he lay swaddled in sleep.

“What did you expect?” teased Pearl, gently pushing her older sister out of the way to get a closer look at her nephew. “What a color to that hair. It’s so dark.”

“Auburn,” said Rachel. “Like Uncle Teddy.”

“Yes,” Lydia agreed quickly. “You’re right. His was that color exactly, wasn’t it?”

“Not that it means anything,” Rachel added. “Babies rarely keep the color they’re born with. Oh, I love them all scrunched up this way in the beginning. Does he eat well?”

“Very,” said Lydia. “I nurse him every other hour.”

“Every other hour?” Pearl said. “When do you sleep?”

“She doesn’t, you ninny,” teased Rachel, smiling at Lydia.

Pearl rolled her eyes. “Modern medicine is absolutely
useless if it can’t come up with a tonic to make men produce milk.”

“Oh, Pearl,” scolded Rachel. “What of the neighbor woman, Lydie? Does she help?”

“Sarah’s been a lifesaver,” Lydia said. “She comes over daily to help with the wash. And she has children of her own to take care of. I’m indebted to her.”

“And Linus?”

It was the question Lydia had been dreading. In the days leading up to her sisters’ arrival, Lydia had recalled with piercing and painful clarity the state she’d been in when they’d last seen her. They’d observed her so fearful, so undone when she’d come for her visit—fled her home, truthfully. Maybe even fled her husband. Now she was calmer. She’d watched Linus hold their son, seen the flush of wonder cross his face, briefly washing away the tension he’d worn for so long. It was the silent absolution she’d been craving.

“It’s better,” she said, looking between them. “
He’s
better.”

Pearl stepped to the window, looking out at the tower while Rachel and Lydia stayed at the bassinet. “Whatever became of that young man who was helping you?” Pearl asked wistfully.

Lydia looked up, startled by the question. “He moved away,” she said. “He took a job at the cannery.”