We used to cage them in the tide pools, when they were still small enough to capture in our little hands. Pull them out and snap photos that we could pretend to sell to magazines just like Papa. Them, gasping for breath, unable to see, fins fluttering. We would photograph until they began to loosen, go limp. And then we would dunk them again, let them freshen up. Try again.
Our models, we called them. Smear some lipstick. Work it, girl!
And we would. I would steal a shade or two—plum and orange blossom, peach paradise and cherry cordial—from Mama’s stash. Mark up lips, suckers, beaks, or at the base of whiskers. We even styled their hair, if they had it, chopping indiscriminately with a broken conch shell, wrapping thick strands in sticks like curlers, weave algae or tie colored rocks into their locks.
Vogue, we called it. Mimicking Mama’s outfits, Papa’s old camera clicking, clicking away under my tiny fingers.
The magazine pages flip under my nails. Stop at a full spread. A little half-selkie child, his skin pulled partially down, hanging off what amounted to his waist. His face still shutters with pain, his fingers grasping for his skin as he curls almost in half in the photo. Antonia had just released him. She’d been ducking away, just out of frame, as I had snapped this photo that afternoon long ago. Quick, quick, before the skin was yanked back up over his face, his head, revealing nothing more than a seal. A plain, ordinary seal.
I let the magazine fall closed. I do not need the photo to be reminded of the vultures who desire to chase in our footsteps, all desperate to find what I’ve kept hidden since.
I suspect that dear Antonia had left it out for me on purpose. She likes passive aggressive commentary and out of all the photographs from our misbegotten, horrid, spoiled childhood, the selkie boy had been one she’d insisted we not sell. But then, she didn’t pay the bills. Any of them. Preferring to cavort and drain her memories with chemical imbalance and handsome distractions. A fact I could not completely blame her for.
A door down the hallway opens, shuts, and there comes the quiet footsteps of two people on carpet. Mama’s carpet, as this had been her house once. One of them, at least.
Antonia strides into the room, followed by a pale man, a man with dark hair that sweeps against his ears, a man with eyes piercing gray, a man wearing a pinstripe suit that reminds me of thin bars on a miniscule jail cell. I stand, heels sinking into the carpet as I let a warm smile suffuse my face, my overt attention on Antonia herself.
“Oh, love, you look dashing,” I say as I gather her into my arms, kiss her cheeks as she kisses mine. Yet, she does not look dashing. Not at all. Antonia looks drained. Her skin stretches taut and tight and fills with shadows, particularly under her eyes where our dreams manifest with bruising no matter who we might be or how much makeup applied.
In a breathless voice that only wavers slightly, she introduces me to her new beau, one William Tothersond. A photographer in his own right, specializing in underwater shots. Oh, I know where this is going long before we sit down to lunch on the veranda. I think I had been anticipating it even before I’d arrived. After all, Antonia and I had not left one another on good terms. She had left after our argument about the selkie boy’s photos with a sense of betrayed innocence, while I ...
Well, I had attempted not to give her much more thought than I must do when writing the checks.
“Antonia tells me you’re a photographer as well,” says William in an easy misdirect, using an uninterested smile and a gentle swipe of his napkin across his lips. “Showed me a few of your spreads. Incredibly evocative. I’m surprised you don’t have them framed.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
William pauses and Antonia closes her eyes as if praying for patience. Then William puts fork to plate once more, soufflé clinging to the prongs. “That’s right. You have how many homes? One in Spain? In the States? As well as this one Antonia uses. Could have them hung anywhere.”
“She doesn’t have any of them framed,” says Antonia.
“And if I did,” I admit, “Antonia would remove them.”
“That right?” asks William. “And why’s that?”
But he barely gives Antonia a glance, his attention glued to me, reminding me of the barnacles I’d popped free off a merchild, delicate scales coming with each of them with a sucking, ripping noise. The mer had released a gurgling as it reached for the tide pool. Antonia had designed a lovely swirl with the barnacles, along the mer’s neck.
That set of photos sold dearly a few years ago.
“Because she likes to forget how cruel we were as children,” I say, despite knowing that not to be the reason. It goads Antonia though, making her cast me a glance that is far too polite to be a glare. “Have you seen any of my other work? I have a penchant for pastorals.”
“I have, yes.”
And William allows me, for a time, to wax on about farmland and countryside and quaintness. Internally, I applaud him for his patience.
It is as dessert arrives, Antonia pressing down so firmly at the base of her wineglass that the tips of her fingers turn pale, that William segues once more toward merchildren and young selkies and infant leviathans.
“I’ve searched coasts and reefs for the types of creatures you’ve captured.”
“Have you?” I don’t even pretend to be interested.
“And I’ve come up short.”
“Pity.”
“But I’ve also noticed that you have ceased selling them as well. Why is that? There’s obviously a market for them.”
“As I’ve said, I’ve a penchant for pastorals.” I sip my wine with a daintiness that belies who I am.
“I’d love to go on a trip with you if you ever decide you need a break from your ... other photos. Trade a few secrets. I know of some amazing places. And I’m sure you do too.”
“One in particular, I’d imagine.” Before William could respond, I add, “I’m sure Antonia could take you. She was my assistant, helping set up the shots. In some ways, she’s more acquainted with my secrets than I am.”
The look Antonia gives me is frothing with scarcely controlled fury.
No. Not just fury, that would be assuming her emotions linear. That frothing hides something more, but I’m not sure what. And yet, when William laughs, his eyes crinkling with good humor and a large bite of raspberry torte disappearing inside his mouth to contain the sound, I honestly believe I’ve won.
I honestly believe, as I take my leave of them, once more kissing Antonia on her sallow cheeks though her kiss in return is dry and weak, that I have come out on top, my heels once more crushing the questing beau—hers or mine—who desperately wishes for fame and fortune, for notoriety on the backs of sea-children suffering. I relish in it even as I walk to my car and tell my driver to head away. I don’t dwell on Antonia’s strained appearance. I don’t concern myself with her nerves, her sallowness, or how she’d been ignored and talked over by her new companion.
But when I lie awake that night, images of frothing water preparing to crash up in a high tide to fill the tide pools once more, I remember that the frothing holds fear too. And Antonia had been afraid.
I have never been the best of sisters, so I do not immediately respond to the vague realization that Antonia feared William. I take my cameras and my self-righteousness and spend weeks on photos that don’t matter and won’t ever sell for more than a pittance in comparison to my childhood attempts. Because they’re not of children of the sea, pulled free from their havens, their nesting sites.
Photos of peaceful sheep grazing don’t titillate like the agony of a crying selkie holding a ripped skin. Rolling farmland does not spark that crushing horror as mer-siblings crawl over one another in a desperate bid for safety. Sweet blossoms and rippling fields just don’t have the power to wrench emotion in the same way that a pile of broken teeth next to a starving infant leviathan can.
I hold out, but tabloids do so enjoy their own bloody games of suffering and shock.
Photos of Antonia and William surface, over and over. Them dining out. Them on the beach. Them boarding Antonia’s boat, cameras and gear in hand. The headlines remain deliciously wrong, wondering whether more photographs of the children of the sea would be forthcoming. Ones to replace the outdated photos that still linger in centerfolds and articles that pretend to be scientific.
I ignore the headlines though and all the speculation on photos. I also try to ignore the way Antonia looks. The way her shoulders hunch. The way weight has flowed off her bones. The way she seems perpetually afraid, more so with every touch of William’s hand on her elbow, lips close to her ears, smile forever wide and welcoming.
I wonder that no one else notices. But then, we all do like to see what we want to see.
I send my first letter a month after my lunch with them. Get no reply. So I send another. And another. Each time, I never admonish Antonia, I know her too well to attempt reconciliation that way; I merely talk about my days, my life, and note that I hope she’s doing well, that her cats are healthy, that her love life is more so. I never mention William by name, this done partially from habit, as Antonia, like I, has rarely kept the same man around for long, and partially out of necessity, for I suspect my letters weren’t being read by a sole set of eyes.
When I finally receive a response, it comes from William himself. Unsurprisingly. And his manners are quite polite, even kind. Telling me how much he wishes that he could bring Antonia down for a visit, but “you know how she is, so fragile sometimes, so very fragile. Like she could just ... break like the waves across the shore.”
William must view himself as a shameless poet.
I wonder, idly, what he might be doing. Does he ply Antonia with drugs? Hurt her? Starve her? Emotionally batter her until Antonia could not leave for all the begging in the world? I know my sister well enough to know she hurt herself for what we’d done. It would not have taken much. A prod. A push. A word. Neither of us has ever seen a professional to talk this out, to remove the guilt laden across our shoulders. And no matter how much I’d tried to take on my own, my sacrifices had only ever seemed to make Antonia’s burden heavier.
Maybe I should have listened to her. Not sold that last photo. Or the ones before. Or any of them at all.
But I’d thought my back against the wall once Mama and Papa had died, debts clawing out of the woodwork, houses being sold off one by one. And when you’re a spoiled child of a famous photographer and even more famous model, you don’t know that the wall your back is pressed against is flimsy, easily able to be pushed down and ground under your strass-coated heels.
You have to learn that.
Yet, as I flip through those old photos, merchildren and selkie cries echoing in my ears, I weigh my moral obligations against my familial. A better person might sacrifice their sister to a monster for the greater good.
I am not a better person. My childhood attests to that.
So I mail back a letter welcoming William and Antonia to a little property in Maine. A tiny one. One that is surrounded by acres and acres of lovely conifers. One that stretches across a cold tidewater inlet. One that Antonia does not know exists. Or at least, she does not remember. She doesn’t touch the financials, after all. And she’s years younger than me. Had been too young then for an address to stick like the images of the tide pools.
As I lick the envelope closed, I wonder if William will show her the letter. I wonder if it will spark a panic attack. Or if she will simply not know what the address means. I have the letter posted and then use my time to travel there myself.
I guess ... I thought I could prepare for my betrayal.
Spring is late in Maine, as it always is. The season creeping up the coast, crawling on its slithering body, like alewives up the rivers, and leaving pollen dust and nests in its wake. So many nests. The children of the sea have so few places in which to hide.
I stand on the porch of the small vacation home Papa had built for Mama here, ignoring the rotting rope hammocks and their rain-wet, sagging pillows as I stare out past the rocky decline and the water beyond. The waves are merely hushes against the shore right now. Shush-shush, like a lullaby.
I breathe it all in and then hide away inside, finding that old camera—dusty and rusted now—that Papa had given me when I’d turned five. So much pain captured through its lens. Papa would have said that’s what the lens is for since shock and awe and suffering sell. Don’t just tug on the heartstrings, one must rip them out, chill them, twist and twine and braid them until no human could resist the ache that tingles through their body at the sight!
I blow the dust free, then cough. Set the camera down. Sift through the rest of the old memories stored in this house. Find one in particular that snaps like old leather under my fingers. Then I wait.
William is driving when he and Antonia arrive down the long, overgrown road, more mud on their car than in the road. He also steps out of his seat first, his eagerness muted, but visible in the light bounce in his steps and the smile he throws my way.
Antonia, though, does not immediately step from the passenger seat, her gaze dark and foreboding through the windshield as she stares at me. She knows. Of course she knows. I suspect she resents me. That’s fine. A resentful sister is a living one. And she’s all I have left.
“Cassia,” says William in greeting as he approaches, arms outstretched as if we are family. He presses his palms tightly against my shoulders as he leans forward and kisses my cheek. I don’t move, looking past him to where Antonia slowly unfolds from the car.
Her clothes hang off her, meaning she had not bothered to get them tailored in the past months. That sends a little shock of fear through my belly. Her hand shakes as she presses against the car door and attempts to close it behind her, but it’s almost as if she doesn’t think she can, like the effort would be too much.
“Oh!” William turns from me, as if following my gaze, and helps Antonia close the door. Then he continues to the back and pulls free a black bag, then another black bag, and another. I am not so foolish as to think he prioritizes his clothes.
“Antonia, it’s so lovely to see you.” I pull my sister close and wrap my arms about her, shivering at how thin she’d gone, how little of her there is for me to grasp. “I would ask how you are, but I suspect I know.”
She flinches and then sighs, leaning her frail weight against me. “I don’t want to be here,” she whispers. “We shouldn’t be here.”
I kiss her forehead. “You may stay in the house—”
“No.” She pulls away just enough for me to see the flashing in her eyes. “I’m not letting you do anything else alone. This is my past too.”
Those are words that twist in my gut. For yes, oh yes, I want her there. But no, oh no, I don’t want her hurt any more than she already is. Three years is a long time when you are five and eight; much less so when you are thirty-three and -six. I doubt that she will listen. I doubt it to my core and it kills me slowly.
“And I’m not letting him either,” Antonia adds.
The fervency in her voice kills me a little more. I turn as William approaches and lead them inside, through the hall, into the wide living space and its wider windows, and then finally out back onto the porch.
“This is it,” says William in an awed voice. “This is where they hatch. This is where you took those photos.” He’s almost gleeful.
Antonia stands behind him and her gaze is far more haunted as she stares out at the same scene with its shrubby growth, its rocky decline, and the sparkling water beyond whispering the lullabies of our youth onto the hardened shore. “William, we shouldn’t stay. I can hire a new charter ship and you can photograph—“
William raises a dismissing hand, cutting Antonia off without turning around to look at her. I want to smack him. But it’s not my place. Not my relationship.
“Antonia, why don’t you take our parents’ old room?” I offer. “Unpack in there?”
She opens her mouth and looks between me and William, then leaves without a word. Though the porch door slams a little harder than necessary, shaking the rotting hammocks.
“She’s right, you know,” I say. “You shouldn’t go down there.”
“So you can remain the singular expert on mer photographs? Composition-wise, there’s so much more that could be done. Your photos were amateurish at best and only sold for the novelty.” William shrugs. “And the fact that no one could prove them fake.”
“You shouldn’t go down there because what I did in order to get those photographs was wrong.”
He pulls his gaze from the shore. “I don’t plan on pulling them free from the water if I can help it. I’m going to set up surveillance, underwater cameras. Let the world see them move and play and feed in their own habitat.”
I snort. I can’t help it.
“I might not be a scientist,” he says with some irritation in his voice, “but I think there’s plenty I can do to further what you started.”
“Have you thought, just once, why I haven’t furthered what I started?”
He steps closer and I wonder fleetingly whether this is what Antonia feels when she’s alone with William, this trickle of fear that pitter-patters up one’s spine knowing that despite all appearances, he is something more than pleasing smiles. “I presume,” he says, “that you are simply buried in empathy for dying breeds.”
I don’t correct him.
“I’m surprised by you, Cassia. I thought for sure that you would be demanding me leave your sister alone. Beg me not to enable her vices. Threaten to cut her off so I might wander away. Or, at the very least, wish for me to have her seen by a doctor.” He pretends a contemplative look. “She does look like she needs it, doesn’t she? The tabloids are saying a hidden illness, but they think cancer rather than addiction. Which I, for one, find hilarious given stereotypes of people like you.”
I stare at him longer because I can’t trust myself not to explode in a fury. I count to five three times, calming. Then say, “If you have need of an assistant, I am more capable. I worry Antonia might not make the climb back up.”
I cook a fatty meal meant to layer and stick to Antonia’s bones. I leave snacks out as well and ignore the way she collapses on the living room couch, staring at nothing and yet seeing probably far too much. I pretend that evening not to hear William’s low voice swapping between berating and coaxing through their doors.
And in the morning, I am up first, waiting for William.
“Ready?” he asks, weighed down with camera cases.
“Just going to bring coffee to Antonia.”
“She’s sleeping.”
I pretend not to hear him and check on Antonia anyway, pressing my palm against her cheek until I sense her exhale. What had I thought? That William would have left her suffocated here in the bedroom? That I was doing this for nothing? But Antonia breathes still, so I leave her the coffee where she’ll be sure to see it.
I walk with William through the tall grass until it turns into a shallow cliff. The path once cut into the rock has been obfuscated, chunks cut out and crumbled while low bushes creep across.
“Ladies first,” says William on a laugh.
The path is familiar despite its abandonment. I sense echoes of my pounding feet running up and down as Mama called out to watch for Antonia and not to swim. She used to sit on the outcropping above with a book so she could call down to us whenever we strayed too far or splashed too much. Sometimes she’d fall asleep, slouching in her chair, wineglass in hand, but only when Papa was nearby, keeping a listen out, his own camera sometimes clicking.
There are pictures of Antonia and I playing among the tide pools. Somewhere. Evidence of our debauchery.
I’ve never wanted to find them.
By the time we make it to the shoreline rocks, William and I are both sporting scratches, him spending half the time with his arms above his head to hold his gear far, far from danger. I haven’t drunk from my thermos despite it weighing me down, the strap like fire digging into my shoulder.
We pause at the base of the shallow cliff, and there, William asks a strange question filled with a suspicion of my motives that I find ironic: “How many others have you brought down here?”
I glance at him, then go back to scrubbing clinging seedpods off my pants, my thermos bouncing against my hip. “There are a host of people who think my photographs were a hoax. And then there are others—greedy, single-minded, manipulative—who dog our heels, demanding secrets. Antonia doesn’t have answers though and most people move on.”
“Most?” He unzips a case, plastic and metal clinking as he preps a lens.
This time I don’t dignify his question with an answer and instead take a deep, steadying breath and walk out between the tide pools, barnacles and seaweed crunching and slipping under my boots. I shiver despite the warmth in the air.
The tide pools are wider than I remember, like they’d been clawed and pushed and opened in the intervening years since I’d been here. But inside, where it matters most, they are the same. I do my best to not look too deeply where the rock falls fast away into the depths and bits of clear egg-lining swim like loose jellyfish.
I stop between the pools, in a singular place where the rock has been scrubbed clean by high tide. There I close my eyes, just to take in the heat of the morning sun, the smell of the brine, the gentle swells of the lapping waves that had featured so heavily in my childhood summers. I can practically hear the crabs scuttling away, ducking further between the floating debris where the snails hide. I ignore the little pile of snail shells in the cracked divot between two sprawling tide pools. Or, I try to, unable to stop myself from wondering if it could be debris from a merchild feast.
“Is there a place where you suggest I start?” asks William.
I shrug. “It’s been almost twenty years. They might not even be here anymore.”
And then I stare at the sun reflecting off the water until my gaze goes watery. I hear him scrape across the rock. Hear the click of his camera, the rattle of poles, the rustle of his pants. Then, what I’d been waiting for: the rippling of water against a net and a gasp of astonishment and then ... the cough, the slight rumbling gag of water escaping small lungs that weren’t meant for air.
“Oh my God! It’s real. They’re real!”
His awe infuriates me. He’d wooed my sister, enabled her, hurt her, all on a chance the children of the sea were real. I turn, resisting the urge to push him in as he twists the net, bringing it closer to examine the wiggling merchild, a very young one by the looks of it.
It has seaweed-like hair, grown long and twining about its body. Snails and seahorses cling to fat locks. Its fingers stretch with webbing as it grabs a hold of the netting and begins to climb. I can feel those fingers pinch, the pads rough against my own skin in memory. The scales are dull, birthing gunk coating them still. A few weeks from now they would shimmer in the sunlight, will capture a fantasy feel better on camera. I know from experience. This early in the season though, the mer are still clawing their way free from eggs plastered to the sides of the tide pools and swallowing down their own casings for sustenance.
“Nasty little things, aren’t they?” says William. “Smell like death. Look like it too.” He keeps the merchild from dropping back into the water by giving the net a little shake to jar it, laughing as it struggles, tail vibrating in fear, the sound escaping its throat like a baby choking.
“We used to cut their hair,” I say as I slowly pick my way around the tide pool. “I had this broken conch that I would use to pry scales free and Antonia would lay them out in a design, as if they were falling off the mer as it crawled back to its nest.”
“You styled them? I’m not surprised the photos weren’t candid.” William lets the net sink partially into the water, the merchild burrowing in the base to keep itself as submerged as possible.
“We were cruel children,” I say, “But in our defense, we were just children and we thought it all normal.”
Papa’s photos of pain that his friends and colleagues raved over. Mama’s constant, overt suffering as she kept repeating that no one wants to see her smile, but rather her struggle. And the photos that had once graced each wall, each magazine cover, all of them evocative.
Because anguish sells. Pain creates empathy, conjoining humanity in collective suffering ... despite suffering never, ever being collective.
“What is your excuse?” I ask.
William snorts. “Don’t go moralizing on me now. I don’t plan on hurting them.” And he doesn’t, not really, as he twists and turns the net to watch the merchild.
“How about some candid photos then? Of the trip?” I pluck one of his smaller cameras from its case and have him in my sights—click, click—before he can give me an answer.
He sets about prepping a drop camera for a first good look and I capture each moment, each eager twist and pull. The computer goes dark for a second as he first drops the camera in and then the screen lightens enough to see the darting glimpses of tiny tails still trailing egg casing.
Despite myself, I step closer, crouch down to help ward off the sun’s glare to watch the screen. William twists the camera to get a close-up of a hatching in progress, the little merchild bent in half, webbed fingers opening and closing against the soft shell encasing it.
For a few moments, I forget about my childhood depravities. Forget William’s enabling and manipulations to reach this shore, to get this awe-inspiring sight.
Then he whispers, “How could you not have come back?” His arm is still outstretched, guiding the camera, but his gaze, like mine, is fastened on the screen, watching the hatching occurring in the depths of the tide pool. I wonder if he thinks we’re sharing a moment here. Something transcendent. Divine.
“Easily,” I say. I pull myself away from the screen. This shore still clings to our heels no matter where we go. The scent of dying fish not one I can escape from. I can’t scrub clean my skin. Can’t erase the agony we caused that is now scoured into millions of people’s minds. “I didn’t come back, because I’ve never truly left.”
“You cling to your guilt like it’s a fashion trend.” Antonia must live and breathe this disdain. It must claw at the wounds she already had open and festering.
Ripples accost the shallower tide pools that riddle the rocky shore, like the breath of the tide sucks at them. I stare at them, counting each as it bounces, willing myself strength.
“We killed one on accident,” I say.
William looks at up me. “It happens. You step on bugs every day.”
I flinch, then regain myself. “It was a selkie boy.” A flash of him in that magazine spread. “Very young. They crawl up here to hide, particularly during hatching season. We kept ripping his skin half-off to capture photos of him mid-change. The photos, so many of them, were blurry because he moved too fast. So we kept trying. And trying. Until finally, he began to change slower. And slower. Giving me enough time to photograph him. And then he just stopped changing at all. Stopped doing anything.”
“Sounds like the start of a serial killer,” says William with a snort.
“Then why aren’t you more afraid of me?” I ask.
I feel mollified that he at least gives me a contemplative look before he continues to guide his camera.
“That little selkie boy rotted on this shore. Eaten by crabs and pecked at by seagulls. Not even his bones were left when we arrived the following summer.”
William ignores me, leaning close to the screen, eyes squinting up as if it would better help to see the new life bursting from the depths below our feet.
“Except the skin.”
For a moment, William doesn’t respond. Then, slowly, as if realization dawns incrementally, William rises from his crouch, the computer and camera forgotten.
“You used it,” he says.
“Antonia did,” I correct. “She would dive into the tide pools, all gray skin and whiskers. Mama would look down and ask where she was and I would point under the cliff where our parents couldn’t see. Sometimes, she would sneak away into the waves, play with the other pups.”
“Amazing.” William’s eyes glaze, pooling with wonder.
“It was,” I agree. “Until Antonia realized all we’d done. She’d come back crying and I would hold her in the middle of the night. Because the other pups, they asked after their friend, over and over. That skin was the embodiment of all we’d done as children.” I let my voice drop to a whisper. “I don’t know why we never threw it away.”
“You still have it?” He vibrates with a glee that he’d managed to keep mostly muted until now.
“It came from anguish,” I say. The shore still hushes, lapping against the rocks, remembering a lullaby that never ends.
“Can you imagine what you could do with it though? Does Antonia ...”
He pauses, looking up at the outcropping. The house isn’t visible from here, but I have a sudden worry that Antonia is up there, watching. But when I check, she isn’t there.
“Antonia knew about the skin, all this time.” And he speaks as if of course we should have paraded that in the public sphere too. Of course.
“You’re not listening. The skin—to us, to Antonia—represents everything cruel we did. Every ounce of suffering we caused.”
“That you profited on,” he points out, digging in the knife that had come between me and Antonia.
“You want it then? You want a selkie skin? Getting your hands on their nests isn’t enough? Knowing that you could be famous from just video after video of merchildren hatching, glimpses of infant leviathans in the depths. That’s not enough for you?”
“It’s not as if I plan on hurting them.” Unspoken are the words: “like you.”
“No, you’ll save your hurting for humans, like Antonia. Is that supposed to make me confident in your character?”
He shakes his head, but in laughter at me. A laughter that reaches his belly, for his body shakes with it.
“Will you leave her alone? If I give it to you? Will you leave her be? Walk out of her life and let her heal?”
“I make no promises.”
Would I act differently, had he chosen to leave Antonia? I don’t know. I just ... don’t know.
Standing down here, next to the tide pools, a hatching merchild on the sun-glared computer screen, I feel as if I’m still that child who echoed her parents. Who, at eight years old, lifted a camera and click-clicked, thinking that suffering was beautiful.
“But if you don’t,” William adds, “I’ll make sure I never leave her.”
So matter-of-fact, so dispassionate. I shake for a moment, and pretend it is from the sudden breeze that sweeps in off the inlet. Then I unscrew the top of my thermos and carefully pull free the rolled skin, the scent of my childhood making me dizzy for a brief moment. Then I throw it at him.
“Have it then.”
The skin falls at the edge of the tide pool and William snatches it up, the dry skin tiny under his palms. “It’s smaller than I imagined.”
My voice is ice in the heat, a chill that shimmers between us. “It’s from a child. Or were you not listening?”
“And I just put it on?” He holds it up, gray skin dry, bits of it cracking where it’d been kept folded for so long. “Well?”
But I don’t answer. His questions don’t deserve answers anymore for he’d made his choice. I step around the tide pool, on the opposite side of his camera and start for the path back up.
Yet something makes me hesitate. There must have been a sound, a slight noise or shadow, for something makes me look up.
Antonia stands above us on the outcropping, looking for all the world like Mama in her final days. Frail and thin, white sundress fluttering in the wind. Like a flag of truce.
A truce for me? Or for William? For the merchildren hatching in the depths?
For the selkie boy who never returned to the sea?
And for a moment, a singular moment, I grow as cold as my voice had been.
Behind me, I hear William mutter. I hear him murmur and shuffle about, the skin crinkling like old leather. Then I hear him gasp. I hear him begin to struggle, scraping against the rock. Antonia bends at her waist, as if needing a better look, and I freeze, sure she’s about to rush down, to stop what William began with his cameras and computers … or what I’d began with that old selkie skin.
It kills me to think that I’ve just made things worse. That William will take his rage out on Antonia. That they will leave here, with everything William wanted in hand, with Antonia worse off, tortured for my constant selfishness.
But then ...
Antonia straightens. She looks out over the water of the inlet. I don’t know what she sees, nor do I look. Then she turns and walks away, past the space where Mama’s chair used to sit. In the set of her shoulders, I expect to see the same anger she’d exhibited the day I’d told her I needed to sell the selkie boy photos. She’d walked away then too.
However, this time, her pace is deliberate rather than angry, a choice rather than a concession.
And I know, in the cold depths of my heart where baby mer lay forever dead and dying, that she will still be there when I return. That we will sit together on the porch among the rotting hammocks of our youth. That she will, at least on some level, forgive me for putting our personal hell on display to the world.
Only when she’s out of sight can I move again. I turn, William’s struggles coming into focus, the rush of blood in my ears slowing, slowing ...
He is but a mass upon the ground, part seal, part human, jerking and rolling and spasming, kicking at his prized cameras, his precious gear. The computer falls into the tide pool and sinks fast. Fast. Playing its video feed for the depths until it flickers off-on-off.
“I used it after Antonia,” I say. He jerks toward me, one hand-flipper malformation reaching for me. “I almost died. And I was ... what? Eight? Maybe nine? I was only such a tiny bit bigger than she was and yet the skin didn’t quite fit.” I’d floundered in the tide pool, unable to breathe properly, my limbs an ungainly mess. “Antonia saved me then, clawed the skin off my back. But I don’t think she’s coming for you.”
William rolls, scrambling over the rocks toward me, splashing in the shallow spits of saltwater, algae scraping off in clumps under his choking, twisting body.
“But I was just a child. We were children, echoing tenets we no longer believe in. It’s truly a pity you don’t have that excuse.”
He makes an awful sound: a scream that is not a scream; a bark that is not a bark; a wail that reaches decibels across species.
Before I take the path to follow Antonia, I lift William’s camera and snap a photo. I look at the digital imprint, the sun’s glare making the screen hard to decipher, yet just enough is left to see what I’ve captured.
Anguish. That’s what is visible.
So I delete it, that he does not suffer for all the world to see.
