Tides (13 page)

Gemm smiled, as if she could tell that Noah knew Mara’s secret now. She felt even surer, then, that Maebh really had meant what she’d said. Gemm must have known about selkies for years.

“I think it’s past our bedtime.” Gemm still wore that knowing smile. She set down her now-empty cup. “Stay up as late as you like—you won’t bother us. Good night, loves.”

She took Maebh’s hand and followed her upstairs.

Mara took a deep breath and looked down at Noah on the couch. He looked back at her, his green eyes steady.

“So,” he said. “Are we telling Lo, too?”

Mara shivered. She’d wanted to tell Noah, and she could feel something welling up between them—something like trust. She’d felt it from the beginning, when she’d told him about Aine against her better judgment. She knew, though, as she was sure Maebh did, that it could never be entirely safe to tell their secrets, not to anyone.

But she hadn’t been thinking of safety when she’d first disobeyed her Elder, when she’d come on land alone, when she’d first talked with Noah. She already knew there were better things in the world than staying safe. She tried to keep telling herself that.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” she heard herself say.

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” Noah asked.

“Late for what?” Lo rose from the couch. “What do you think you know that I don’t, Noah?”

“I—”

“You’re so good at keeping your secrets, you don’t think I even notice.” Lo’s mouth trembled. “You do what you like, and I just sit by and listen, and there’s nothing I can do about any of it!”

It wasn’t just Lo’s mouth, Mara realized; her whole body was shaking. She listened more closely, and she heard something she should have noticed right away: the unsteady, irregular rhythm of Lo’s heartbeat.

Noah glared at his sister. “Get over yourself, can’t you?” he said, too loudly. “This is more important than your stupid pathological need for control—” He cut himself off.

Lo ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Mara was stunned. Couldn’t Noah tell his sister was sick? She knew that with his human senses, he couldn’t hear Lo’s heartbeat as she could. Still, if one of the younglings in her pod had gotten that weak, the signals would be screaming through her link.

A horrible thought struck Mara: maybe humans didn’t have links at all. There was no other explanation for Noah’s insensitivity. He’d been kinder to her, a girl he hardly knew, than to his own sister.

“That was wrong of you,” she said. “She’s hurting—can’t you see it?”

Noah’s head dropped like a chastised youngling’s. “Yes,” he murmured. “I know. I’m . . .” He sank farther back into the threadbare sofa. “I’m just tired of this.”

Mara felt guilty now, seeing the exhaustion spread over Noah’s face. “Tired of what?” She thought about what he must feel: the confusion, the worry for and anger at Lo, the anger at himself for losing his temper. The panic of learning that the world was so much larger and stranger than he’d thought it was.

“Everything’s so huge,” said Noah, “and so strange. I just wasn’t ready for it, I guess. And I didn’t think Lo was being fair, and I’m worried about her.”

Mara frowned. His words were so close to what she’d imagined he felt. Maybe humans did have links, after all. But they still weren’t in the same pod; they weren’t family. Mara would never be able to share the same link with him that she did with Ronan and Maebh and the others. She didn’t like how much that thought saddened her.

She heard Lo crying quietly in the bathroom, but Noah didn’t seem to notice. She knew humans had ears—she studied the looped shells behind his temples—but they didn’t seem to work as well as hers. She supposed her human and seal forms had more in common than she’d thought.

Mara walked over to the bathroom door. She pressed her hand against the door frame. “I’m sorry, Lo,” she said. “I have a brother too. Sometimes he’s horrible.” She felt a bit guilty for saying it, as if admitting Ronan wasn’t perfect would make him that much more likely to leave. But it was true, and she was sure Lo needed to hear it.

She focused on her voice, the sound humans always found so persuasive, so distracting. She hoped this wasn’t the wrong way to use it. “I’ll tell you, I promise. Please come out. I was hoping we could be friends.” That was true, too.

Lo’s crying quieted. Mara heard a sigh like a cramp relaxing. She pressed her hand to the door for another moment, then backed away.

She turned to Noah. He sat with his shoulders slouching and limbs hanging down, as if he didn’t have the will to hold them up anymore.

The bathroom door opened, and Lo crept out. Her face was flushed from crying, but she tried to smile.

“I already know,” she said, tucking a strand of hair reluctantly behind her ear. “I just—I was just mad Noah didn’t want to tell me.” Her eyes flicked toward her brother.

Noah stood. “You already know?”

Lo rolled her eyes. “Gemm and I talk a lot while you’re off at your job, you know. It’s not as if we stop existing when you’re not here.”

Noah sighed. He started to say something, then stopped and just shrugged. “I know. I’m sorry, Lo.” He stepped toward her and touched her hand.

Lo turned toward him and they embraced, the muscles in their arms straining. Noah’s eyes closed. Lo’s head rested on his chest.

Mara’s shoulder blades prickled with sudden desire. Grown selkies rarely touched without a real reason. Mara couldn’t remember putting her arms—or her flippers, for that matter—around Maebh or Ronan since she was a youngling. It was an unspoken rule: just as the sealskins kept them hidden and separate and special, so another skin of privacy wrapped around each of them and kept them secure even from one another. Suddenly the lack of a link between humans didn’t seem so terrible, if they could have this excess of physical linking in its place.

She thought of Maebh, whose hand had rested so easily on the small of Gemm’s back. She wondered how she had learned to share such physical affection with a human.

Lo looked at Mara. “Maebh and Gemm told me about you,” she said, “but if you want to tell me too . . . I’d like to know more.”

Mara nodded. It was long past dark, and she didn’t know how far Maebh’s goodwill would stretch tonight. “I’d like to, but I think I need to go home,” she said reluctantly. “Why don’t you come outside with us?” She pulled Noah’s big clean-smelling sweatshirt tighter around her shoulders. She didn’t want to delve into her reasons for wanting, so badly, to stay.

Noah frowned. “Wait—” He stopped. She wished he would ask her to stay. But if he did, she might not be able to say no.

Mara smiled at him. “I just thought . . . maybe it would be easier for her to see it. The way you did.”

She heard his heartbeat increase. Her own slowed in response, and she inched closer to him, hoping he would catch the rhythm of her relaxed body. At least, the parts of it that were relaxed.

He looked at her carefully. “All right.”

She stepped closer, reached down, and took his hand in hers. The hairs on her arms stood up. Her every nerve pushed and prodded her closer to his warmth.

But she stood straight, resisting. She focused on what she needed to say, all the while feeling each pulse through his veins echo into hers. She spoke to Lo, but her eyes stayed locked with Noah’s.

“Come with me,” she said, “and I’ll show you everything.”

twenty

L
O
couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She’d watched Mara climb down the cliffs beyond the lighthouse. She’d vanished into darkness for a moment, then emerged into a patch of moonlight on the water, holding something soft and dark. She cut gracefully through the waves. When she reached a rock a little ways out to sea, she slipped onto it as smoothly as if she were boneless.

Mara uncoiled the thing she carried, held the edges apart, and pulled it over her feet like stockings. Lo barely had time to notice the crescent tail shape that appeared before Mara’s legs were gone, then her hips, then her shoulders and face and hair, all encased in a velvet skin mottled silver and charcoal black. She slipped off the rock, an oblong, slick seal, and was lost to the darkness of the sea.

Noah had laughed. Under his breath, low, not a laugh of humor or derision or even joy. Lo knew what his laughter meant, because she felt the same way. He was laughing just to make some noise at the edge of this unfathomable, infinite ocean.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“Do you?” Noah turned to her. “I kind of feel as if I don’t know anything. But it’s almost nice.”

They managed to smile at each other a little. A few minutes passed before Lo could do anything but look at him and know he was looking at her too, and that he saw the same thing she did—someone already long known and loved. Someone familiar.

Then Noah sighed and cleared his throat, and Lo knew that with that sound he was bringing himself back down to earth. “I have something to ask you,” he said. “I got a promotion—well, sort of—at the Center, and they need someone to take over my old job.”

Lo had inherited enough of Noah’s hand-me-downs to know what she was dealing with. This was a bad job, and Noah had managed to weasel his way out of it. Still . . . as good as things had been with Gemm lately, she’d been bored on White. It would be nice to have something to do, some kind of purpose.

In the morning, she found herself stepping into Noah’s borrowed rowboat.

Noah took the oars in the stern, and Lo sat at the bow only a few feet ahead of him. He pushed out, and they began the short run across the harbor from White Island to Appledore and the Marine Science Center.

The islands looked different to Lo today, but she thought that was just because she knew things now that she hadn’t before. The waves pricked with light, and yesterday she would have been itching to draw them. Today she wanted to see into the depths, to peel back the skin of the waves and expose the secrets of the ocean inside.

Noah pulled them over the water’s surface too quickly. He tied off the boat at the pier and smiled reassuringly at Lo, then grabbed his backpack and set off for the Center’s front door at an easy jog.

Lo had to run to keep up. Sometimes his legs seemed twice as long as hers.

The Center was already noisy with activity when they got inside. A boy and girl, each probably a few years older than Noah, huddled on opposite ends of a long desk near the door. Lo saw the girl glance over at the boy. As soon as she turned back to her microscope, the boy looked at her. They back-and-forthed again as she passed, never meeting each other’s eyes. Lo laughed under her breath.

Still, she couldn’t help but see how pretty the girl was, how poised, how thin. A familiar cramp pulsed through her abdomen. Her cheeks burned. Lo thought she’d done better this summer, had stopped worrying so much about what every other girl looked like. She realized now that there had simply been no other girls to whom she could compare herself.

Except Mara. Lo wondered why Mara, who was pretty enough and obviously in great shape—she had climbed down those rocks in record time—hadn’t hurt her the way this blond girl’s beauty did. Maybe it was the way Mara so clearly didn’t care how she looked. She always had those old men’s shirts on and that tattered short haircut. Weren’t mermaids and things supposed to be vain? Maebh must spend hours on her elaborate braids, but Mara seemed to value function over form. Lo filed that observation away to ponder over later.

They’d reached the director’s office. Noah knocked on his door, the sound timid, almost reluctant. How scary was this Professor Foster, anyway?

The man who opened the door was tall, even taller than Noah, but not exactly what Lo would call intimidating. His white shirt was wrinkled, his glasses sat crooked on his nose, and he smelled like fish and formaldehyde. Still, his jaw was strong, and his smile was bright. He looked as if he could play somebody’s dad on a sitcom.

“Good morning,” he said. He fiddled with a large key chain, and a circle of luminous, dark leather on it caught Lo’s eye. It glowed with an almost patent shine.

She realized Professor Foster was watching her. She forced herself to stop looking at his key chain, and she smiled at him. “I’m here for the filing job,” she said. “Hello.”

His eyebrow curled up just a tiny bit. “I thought you were bringing your sister,” he said to Noah, his tone still carefully friendly.

Noah’s eyes flashed. Lo closed hers; there wasn’t much that could get Noah to raise his voice, but this was one of the things that usually could.

“This
is
my sister,” he said. Lo had expected him to shout, but his voice was low and icy. “Lo,” he said, almost whispering, “meet Professor Foster, the Center’s director.”

“Of course, of course,” said Professor Foster quickly, taking Lo’s hand and shaking it. His grip was very strong. “Forgive me, Miss Gallagher. Mixed-race adoption was not so . . . common in my day.”

Noah’s mouth gaped.

Lo spoke quickly, before her brother had the chance. “I was so glad to get this opportunity,” she told Professor Foster, smiling. “I’ve been wishing for something to organize. My brother never lets me in his room because he knows I’ll alphabetize his bookshelves when the impulse takes me.”

Noah let out a grumble that could almost have been a laugh.

“Well, we’re glad to have you,” said Professor Foster, “believe me. I think your brother can explain the filing system to you—right, Mr. Gallagher?”

Lo swept in again. “Of course he can. He already explained a lot this morning.” Which was true; Noah had gone over the system in excruciating detail over breakfast, and again in the
Gull.
But even if he hadn’t, she wanted to get him away from the director before he said something he’d regret.

She grabbed her brother’s arm and dragged him away from the office, down the corridor. “Nice to meet you, Professor Foster!” she called over her shoulder.

“I just need to say something to him,” Noah growled.

“No, you don’t.” Lo sighed. “You really, really don’t. You’ll just make him mad, and there’s no point. He really didn’t mean anything by it.”