False Mermaid

No response. Nora switched the radio on anyway, speeding past the stations blasting bright commercial patter, finally landing on some traditional music, Raidió na Gaeltachta, the Irish-language station. Just what she was looking for. Not a word of English. No chance that they’d hear urgent updates about a nationwide search for a missing child. At least not in any language Elizabeth would understand. The tune ended, and the presenter began chatting away about the selection they’d just heard. Elizabeth’s head snapped around. She listened intently for a few seconds. “What is that?”

“It’s Irish. The language people speak here.”

Elizabeth considered for a moment. “I thought people here spoke English.”

“Well, yes—they do. But some people speak mostly Irish, especially in places like where we’re going.”

Elizabeth listened to the radio presenter again. “It sounds”—she spent a few seconds trying to dredge up the right word—“soft.”

Nora had to agree. Irish had always struck her as such an expressive, musical language, and she regretted not knowing more of it.

After four hours on the road, they were coming up on the outskirts of Donegal town. They stopped at a station shop and bought some anemic-looking sandwiches and crisps, apples and bananas, bottled water, and a few biscuits. Past Donegal town, the road wound down along the coast, and cut inland at Mountcharles. Elizabeth kept her face to the window. At Bruckless, it was time to take a break from driving. Nora turned off the main road, and headed down a quiet, wooded lane that led to a rocky beach. She parked the car at the edge of the wood.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s take our sandwiches down to the shore.”

Elizabeth looked skeptical, but followed her out onto a rocky peninsula that trailed out into Bruckless Bay. They sat on a pair of flat boulders and set out the sandwiches and drinks. The briny smell of seaweed filled the air—not the strong, rotting odor that sometimes came at low tide, but a cleaner, lighter scent. It was a mystery why some coasts were more malodorous than others. Nora pointed across the water to a house high up on the side of the hill. “See that house? It’s very like a place we stayed one summer when I was your age. Your mama would have been about six or seven.”

In fact, the more Nora studied the surrounding hills, the more she became convinced that this was the very place where the seal had rescued Tríona from drowning. It must have rained sometime during those summer weeks, yet Nora couldn’t recall even a single cloudy day. She and Tríona had spent hours climbing among the rocks, searching for sea glass and other treasure. That shard of blue-and-white delft in her treasure box had come from somewhere along this coast. Visiting the grandparents in Clare every summer was never a holiday in the usual sense. There were eggs to be gathered, cows to be milked, garden patches to be weeded, honey to be collected from hives. Here in Donegal, there had been no responsibilities, only endless days of exploring and make-believe. She had dreamt of shipwrecks all summer long.

“Look!” Elizabeth’s voice had an excited edge.

Nora shielded her eyes against the strong afternoon sun, and peered out over the water to see a dark head bobbing just above the calm surface. “I see it.”

The seal swam closer, evidently curious about the pale creatures stretched out on the rocks. As it drew near, Nora could see that the left side of the animal’s face was damaged. It regarded them with a single dark and glassy eye.

Elizabeth jumped to her feet and ventured as far out on the spit as she could go, feeling her way over the rocks, never taking her eyes from the sleek head in the water. Girl and seal studied each other with intense interest. The creature’s nose and whiskers twitched as it huffed the air for clues about the human child, and Elizabeth’s hand remained half-raised in a gesture of greeting. Then the seal began to spin, rising up out of the water in a joyful dance.

Nora watched, fascinated, thinking of all the instinctive, animal ways of knowing that humans had begun to forget as soon as they had words. After a few moments of silent communication, the seal’s head slid beneath the surface and disappeared from view, leaving only a circling eddy where it had been. Elizabeth stood searching the water for a few more minutes before she turned around. Nora studied her face as she trudged back up to the flat rocks.

“Were you saying something to that seal?”

“No!” Elizabeth’s newly exposed ears glowed bright red.

“It’s all right, Lizzabet. Your mother used to talk to them. She said they didn’t understand when she spoke English, but they seemed to have a bit of Irish.” Elizabeth looked up, as if she had just confirmed something that had lurked in the murky realm of suspicion for a long time.