Tides Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Tales

  Shoreline

  Secrets

  Summer

  Daughter

  Rescue

  Shoals

  Squall

  Pod

  Seal

  Heart

  Caught

  Waves

  Story

  Ledge

  Anchor

  Rising

  Source

  Light

  Ripples

  Sunset

  Undertow

  Line

  Cusp

  Link

  Gone

  Search

  Sinking

  Seek

  Chase

  Skin

  Found

  Truth

  Voice

  Change

  Ebb

  Harbor

  Land and Sea

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2013 by Betsy Cornwell

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Cornwell, Betsy.

  Tides / by Betsy Cornwell.

  pages cm

  Summary: After moving to the Isles of Shoals for a marine biology internship, eighteen-year-old Noah learns of his grandmother’s romance with a selkie woman, falls for the selkie’s daughter, and must work with her to rescue her siblings from his mentor’s cruel experiments.

  ISBN 978-0-547-92772-5 (hardcover)

  [1. Selkies—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Internship programs—Fiction. 4. Isles of Shoals (Me. and N.H.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C816457Ti 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012022415

  eISBN 978-0-547-92775-6

  v1.0613

  for Corey

  The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.

  —Isak Dinesen

  i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

  —E. E. Cummings

  PROLOGUE

  THE color at the bottom is so deep, there are few who would call it blue.

  There is light there—a little—for those who can find it. It shifts in the water, a vague, New England light. Just darkness unless you look carefully. If you want real light, you’ll have to stay on the surface.

  The Isles of Shoals have plenty of it, light that refracts off the salt-swept rocks and old whitewashed houses. Light that clinks its way over the waves like so much dropped and dented silverware.

  It will hurt your eyes to look, on those bright summer days. You’ll sit on the rocks until the spray dries and strings salt beads in your hair, but the brightness will eventually hurt.

  Be careful. That not-blue of the deepest water will call to you, a seeming balm for your stinging eyes. But it will surprise you.

  It’s the shallow water you really want, what the Old Shoalers call the inbetween. It’s that space between light and blue, land and sea, where the water is sometimes warm. The little fish swim there.

  Once you’re safe in the inbetween, you’ll wonder why you’d ever dare to broach the deep, with its hidden teeth and tentacles. You’ll reject the white sun and dry salt above. For a while.

  It’s the colors that will make you stray. They sing to you, the not-blue and the searing light, and no matter how tightly you tie yourself to the inbetween, eventually you will break free.

  No one swims only in the shallow water.

  one

  TALES

  NO one is happy in the inbetween,” said Gemm. “Not even selkies.”

  Wind moaned in at them through the windows. Gemm quieted, letting the weather have its interruption.

  Her grandchildren stared at her, wide-eyed, mugs of tea growing cold in their hands. It didn’t occur to Noah that he was far too old for these stories.

  Well, that wasn’t really true. The thought occurred to him—but in his father’s voice instead of his own, as too many of his thoughts tended to do. Gotta stop that.

  He glanced at his sister, Lo, seated next to him at Gemm’s kitchen table. She was still wrapped in the story, her face open with wonder. She pushed aside a black length of hair that had fallen over her eyes. Noah wondered if she felt too old for fairy tales, too. These days, Lo seemed to think she was too old for everything.

  Noah tapped the side of his mug. He hadn’t come to the Isles of Shoals to listen to fairy tales. He had an internship at the Marine Science Research Center on nearby Appledore Island, and starting tomorrow he’d work long hours there until he left for college in August. If he did well, this internship would be his first real step toward becoming a marine biologist—something Noah had wanted since the first time his father took him fishing.

  He remembered staring into the green water, watching a bluefish glint out of the murk and flash and fight as his father pulled it into the boat. The fish had been almost as big as five-year-old Noah, and he’d thought it was a monster, all metal-bright scales and spiked fins.

  Noah loved that monster. He was desperate to know what else lurked and slept and waited in the water, and he knew he’d spend the rest of his life trying to find out.

  That’s why I’m out here in the middle of nowhere this summer, anyway, he thought. He was choosing this dream over every other consideration, something he’d done many times before—maybe too many times. Noah remembered all the nights he’d stayed up studying, all the dances he’d skipped, all the time he’d spent alone—so much that he didn’t even mind, really, being alone. He kind of preferred it.

  He’d worked so hard just to get here. Starting tomorrow, he’d work even harder. He told himself he’d earned the chance to feel childish once in a while, to listen to a fairy tale without overanalyzing everything. He tried to slip back into the rhythm of Gemm’s story.

  “The land calls to the selkies, sings to them, promises of new knowledge and new joy. It whispers to them, and they cannot avoid its call.” Gemm poured a thin stream of milk into her tea. Clouds bloomed in the dark liquid.

  Noah closed his eyes and breathed in the ocean smell that filled his grandmother’s cottage. The beating, shuddering wind outside led him deeper into the tale.

  “They swim to the rocks and the beaches, and they shed their seal forms. They look like people, then. Humans.”

  The pale woman sitting beside Gemm—Maebh, she’d said her name was—took in a deep breath. The corner of her mouth twitched.

  “Selkies need the land as we need the deep ocean,” said Gemm. “They need it for its danger and its mystery. They come to the beaches and they sing. They sing to the ocean and the sky.”

  “Like sirens?” Lo asked. Noah knew she’d read the Odyssey in freshman English that year. He remembered reading it himself, but he preferred the part with Scylla and Charybdis, the two monsters on either side of your boat, with hardly any way to go between them.

  “A bit like sirens,” Gemm said, smiling. “Their songs are very beautiful. But unlike sirens, selkies don’t mean you any harm with their songs. They don’t sing to seduce or to kill. Their songs have nothing to do with anyone but themselves. They sing for the simple joy of it, and because of that, I imagine their songs are more beautiful than those of any siren.”
/>   Maebh and Lo both smiled at that.

  Noah couldn’t help staring at Maebh for a moment. It wasn’t just that her skin was almost paler than white, as if she hadn’t seen sunlight in years. He thought she must be about thirty, but something about her—the way she moved?—seemed much older.

  Maebh’s round dark eyes flicked toward his, and Noah lowered his gaze, embarrassed.

  “In this story,” Gemm said meaningfully, as if she knew Noah hadn’t been paying attention, “there is a young fisher-man, the handsomest in his village. Many women noticed him, wanted him—even loved him. But he never loved any of them back. Some said his true love drowned when they were children. Others said he was simply too proud, thought himself too special for any of the village women.

  “He enjoyed his life, his fishing, but he wasn’t satisfied. He often wandered the beaches at night, so handsome, but empty around the eyes. He brought a satchel with him to collect shells and sea glass and the like, but none of those things made him happy for long. He was looking for something—anything—that would satisfy him.”

  Maebh stiffened in her chair. Her large round hands twisted together in her lap.

  Gemm continued her story, unaware. “Once, just on the cusp of autumn, the young fisherman wandered on the beach very late into the night, and he heard something. It was a sort of music that trickled through the air, low and sweet and eerie. He started to run, rushing over the rocky shoreline, careening around boulders and tide pools, hunting the source of that beautiful sound.

  “He tripped and fell onto a patch of sand. Blood trickled down a gash in his cheek, and his hands stung with scrapes. But the pain in his body was already fading away, borne out to sea by the wonderful songs he heard. He had found the source of the music.”

  A slow, reluctant tear slipped down Maebh’s cheek.

  Now Noah’s mother’s voice came into his head. Your grandmother’s selfish, remember, she’d whispered to him, just before she and his father had left the island that afternoon. She’s always lost in her own world, and she’ll pay no attention to yours. And then she had hugged him, just a little too tight, and walked out the door in her cloud of department store perfume.

  Noah hadn’t really believed her. After all, Gemm had agreed to let Lo and him live with her for the summer—she couldn’t offer that much and be so very selfish. But now, seeing her rush on with a story that clearly upset her friend, Noah wondered. He watched Gemm while she spoke, willing her to look back at him.

  “The music came from a group of people standing on the shore. They looked like no people the fisherman had ever seen—certainly no one from his village. A tall, elderly woman led the singing, and the others—there were perhaps two dozen—danced or waded in the surf or lounged on the rocks and sang to the moon that loomed above them, pale as their skin.

  “It was one of these last that caught the fisherman’s eye. She sat on a boulder in the shallows, a small distance away from her companions. She was folded in on herself, resting her chin on her hands, and her hands on her knees. She sang in a clear, true alto that vibrated with some matching sound, some answering call, inside the fisherman himself.

  “He realized he had forgotten to stand back up after his fall. He pushed himself quietly to his feet, hoping the singers wouldn’t notice him. But then he saw, down by his shoes, the thing that had tripped him. It wasn’t a rock, as he had assumed, but something soft, yielding under his touch. It glimmered a little in the moonlight, like velvet—though the fisherman was too poor to have ever seen real velvet.

  “Once he held it in his hands, he recognized it: a sealskin, but larger and darker and finer than any the fisherman had seen before. He knew it must belong to a selkie. In that moment he knew who the singers were, and he knew what he must do.”

  Maebh covered her mouth, but they all heard her choked sob.

  Gemm stood and took Maebh’s hands in hers. She crouched down before her, so that their eyes were level. For a moment, they simply looked at each other. Then Gemm gently touched her hands to Maebh’s cheeks and brought their foreheads together—a gesture so intimate, it made Noah look away.

  His eyes settled on the photos that almost entirely covered the far wall. Their gold-painted frames glowed against the drab whitewash. A picture of Noah on the day he was born hung there, as well as the blurry photo of Lo that the Chinese orphanage had sent over a few months before her adoption. A formal portrait from their parents’ wedding held a prominent spot, too. There were a few bigger frames around the edges that displayed yellowing pages cut from old magazines. They were clothing advertisements featuring a much younger Gemm. Noah had forgotten that she used to be a model.

  Gemm looked beautiful in every one, but blank somehow, as if she’d been whitewashed too. There was something hollow in her brightest smiles. Noah thought about how she looked now: strong and weathered, present, happy. He preferred this Gemm, the Gemm he knew.

  Noah turned back when he heard the squeak of Maebh’s chair.

  “I must leave now,” she said in her faint, unplaceable accent. “It was wonderful to meet you, children. Goodbye.”

  Noah nodded at her politely and returned her goodbye. “It was nice to meet you, too,” he said, even though he really thought she was a little strange to sit so quietly all evening and then cry at a fairy tale.

  “Goodbye, Maebh,” Lo said, rising from her chair. She shook the older woman’s hand, and just for that moment, Noah thought she looked like a grown woman too.

  Then Lo turned to Gemm and asked, “You are going to finish the story, aren’t you?” Maebh winced a little, and the grown-up spell was broken. Lo was his bumbling little sister again.

  Gemm glanced at her friend and smiled sadly. “It’s getting late,” she said. “I’ll just show Maebh out.”

  Arm in arm, they walked outside.

  A gust of wind rushed through the open door and whistled over Noah and Lo. They found a warmer spot on the old pink couch by the stairs.

  “How can it still be cold in June?” Lo asked.

  Noah laughed and tossed her the nubby blanket that hung over the couch’s worn armrest. Their dad probably would have made a crack about Lo being insulated against the cold. She had been such a skinny baby, he’d say. Was New Hampshire really so much colder than China that she had to get fat just to keep warm?

  Noah tried to push down the anger that rose in his chest whenever he thought about his father and Lo. It was one more reason he was glad he could take them both away from their parents for the summer.

  Lo had a still, sad look on her face, and Noah guessed she was remembering their dad’s “jokes” too.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m hungry.” His back popped as he stood and stretched. He heard the door open again.

  “I’ve got just the remedy,” Gemm said, pushing the door closed behind her. She didn’t lock it—but then, thought Noah, why would she need to? Hers was the only house on the island.

  She pulled a bag of chocolate chip cookies from the cupboard. Noah pretended he didn’t see Lo close her eyes.

  Gemm opened the bag, and a sweet pastry smell puffed into the air. “I ordered these special from the mainland,” she said. “They’re from my favorite bakery.” She pulled a large, golden, chocolate-studded cookie out of the bag and offered it to Lo.

  Lo sighed. She took the cookie and stuffed it in her mouth, already looking guilty.

  “Not like that, sweetie,” said Gemm. “These are special. Savor them.” She took a small bite. “Delicious.”

  Lo’s tears didn’t quite come, but they shivered over her eyes like a rising tide. She wrapped the heavy wool blanket around her body and shuffled up the stairs.

  Gemm opened her mouth to call after her, then closed it again. She looked at Noah, and he shook his head. Gemm raised her eyebrows but turned away, saying nothing.

  Great, he thought. This summer is off to a perfect start.

  two

  SHORELINE

  SUMMER was coming, and
the islands were filling again.

  Mara’s shirttails spun in the wind, exposing, now and again, the strong muscles of her thighs. She tightened the knot on the length of frayed rope around her waist.

  There were maybe fifty people on the lawn in front of the Oceanic Hotel, more than there had been this time last year, she was sure. For at least the tenth time since she’d arrived on Star Island that afternoon, Mara wished she could join them. But it was a stupid idea—what would she have to say? Besides, her family didn’t like her to draw attention to herself.

  She wrapped her arms around her waist to ward off the June breezes, still cold when they really got going. The Isles of Shoals were rocky and sparse, without even a grove of trees to soften the wind. She could see nearly all of Star Island and the eight other isles around it: the hotel, the fishermen’s houses, the science center on Appledore, the lighthouse on White.

  She pulled on the hem of the buttoned men’s shirt she wore as a dress, wiggling her toes in her too-small sandals. She envied the tourist children their perfectly fitted clothes and shoes. Mara had only one outfit—she contemplated the word with amusement—that fit right, and it wasn’t much use on land.

  Smoke rose from a barbecue pit near the hotel kitchen. Curls of scent, bitter and fleshy and sweet, wafted over to her. She wished she could stay for dinner.

  She scanned the groups of people that wandered over the island. The youngest children toddled between cooing guardians with outstretched arms, and their older siblings played soccer or lounged on the grass with stacks of summer reading. Teenagers milled around the edges of things, laughing and whispering to one another.

  Mara took three steps toward them before she managed to stop herself. She knew the pleasure of a new friend wouldn’t be worth the risk it involved. Tourists tended to find her a little too charming, a little too “local color.” Her accent caused trouble, too. Better just to stay out of it.