False Mermaid

Elizabeth hugged the pack closer, guilty about the stolen book inside. She didn’t want the police to know she was running away.

“Can you tell me your name?”

Elizabeth shook her head. She couldn’t look into the officer’s questioning eyes.

“Were you supposed to meet somebody here? It’s okay—you can tell me.”

Elizabeth heard kindness in the woman’s voice, but maybe it was all just an act. They wanted her to say something, but she couldn’t tell them about her mother, about why she was running away. Telling the police anything would just make her dad angry.

When another cop approached, the policewoman stood up suddenly and spoke under her breath: “Christ, will you look at her? The kids they’re pulling get younger all the time. Bastards.”

What were they talking about? Nobody had pulled her anywhere. The other officer was talking into his radio, but Elizabeth couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was like they all spoke a foreign language. She looked over and saw the guy from the pickup sitting in the back of another squad car. Finally, the policewoman returned and crouched down beside the open door again.

“You’re a very lucky girl, Elizabeth—that’s your name, isn’t it? Your mom and dad were pretty worried about you. They’re on their way down here right now to pick you up.”

As the policewoman spoke, one thought kept circling through Elizabeth’s brain: She’s not my mother. She’s not my mother. I don’t care what anybody says. That witch Miranda Staunton will never be my mother.

5

After arriving back from their expedition to Port na Rón, Cormac was alone in the sitting room of his father’s house. Roz had gone upstairs to shower, and the house was quiet but for a steady wash of water down the exterior drain. The single high-button shoe at the house still plagued him. If Mary Heaney ran away, as her husband suggested, why would she have gone without one of her shoes? Women in her circumstances weren’t likely to have had more than one pair; they probably counted themselves lucky to have shoes at all. On the other hand, if she had regained her sealskin and returned to the sea, as the local legend allowed, the whole subject of footwear was academic… And why was he wasting time trying to reason it through?

Remembering what Roz had told him, he roused himself from the fireside chair and began to peruse the photographs hanging on the walls. His great-aunt Julia must have been a schoolteacher at one time; one picture showed her with a gaggle of pupils—all bare knees, freckles, and ears—outside Carrick National School. The pupils were in focus, but Julia Maguire appeared as a hazy specter in a dotted dress, as if she’d set the camera and not made it to her place in time for the shutter. It was the only image Cormac had ever seen of her. Another photo was a study of gaunt, dark men in long overcoats standing outside a church door, looking for all the world like a murder of crows. The photograph was labeled in pencil at one corner of the image, Father’s Funeral, 1956.

Cormac began to inspect the photos that hung on the opposite wall: crisp black-and-white images of standing stones up the Glen, the cliffs at Bunglas, modest homes of fishermen in Teelin. There were several of Donegal fiddle players—John Doherty, whom Cormac recognized from television, and a pair of middle-aged men, one dark, one with a shock of white hair and thick glasses. They were both playing fiddles, standing back to back. Francie Dearg and Mici Bán, read the caption. There were also, as Roz had noticed, many close-up shots exploring the wet, curious faces of seals. Each of the seal pictures was captioned as the others had been, at the lower right corner, and in the same old-fashioned script as the letter he’d received from his great-aunt. So she had been something of an amateur photographer as well as a schoolteacher. Suddenly Cormac understood all the brown glass bottles in the windowless garden shed built onto the back of the house—her darkroom.

He ventured into his father’s bedroom. A chest of drawers stood before him—large, heavy, and dark, like all the furniture in this house, a legacy of the generations of Maguires who had been born and died here. It occurred to him that when his father died, he would become a part of that legacy as well. Scraps of shadowy lives a generation or two back, a few random details, that was all most people could reasonably manage. The rest faded into obscurity. Opening the drawers felt vaguely wrong, but he told himself that it was important to find out more about the old man in order to communicate with him. He was rationalizing, of course, unable to admit the curiosity that had consumed him for the past three years, growing in strength and intensity ever since Julia Maguire’s letter had arrived in the mail.