Tides Page 7

  Hadn’t she been a little curious? Hadn’t she smiled at him when he put his finger to his lips and beckoned? She’d smelled fish on him, and she was so hungry from the days of fasting before the ceremony. Hadn’t she thought he’d feed her? Hadn’t she followed him willingly from the beach, away from the safety of her pod?

  Aine slumped down the wall until she was lying prostrate on the floor. Yes, and yes, and yes. She had gone without struggle. She had stopped fighting him long ago. Even her escape attempts were reduced to ramming her head against the window, and she knew she did that to knock herself out more than anything else.

  This, everything that had happened, was her fault. All hers. She didn’t deserve to escape.

  thirteen

  WAVES

  MARA took a deep breath, as if her courage were an organ that could draw strength from the air, like her lungs.

  Maebh stared at her, pretending patience. Her eyes were narrow and dark. It had been almost a week since they’d discovered each other on land, and Mara clearly couldn’t avoid explaining herself any longer. In fact, she could hardly believe Maebh had let her wait this long. Now they stood together in a shadowed cove of Cedar Island, and clearly Maebh would wait no longer.

  She wished she knew how to start. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, only anger and accusations sprang to her lips. She knew yelling at Maebh again would just make things worse. She would have to bear it—she would have to apologize if she ever wanted to see land again.

  But Maebh was on land too—how can she punish me? Mara shoved that thought away.

  She bowed her head to one side, exposing her neck, a sign of surrender even in this human form. “I’m sorry, Elder.”

  “I should hope so, Daughter.” Maebh frowned. “You can’t begin to understand the risk you’ve created.”

  A growl scratched at Mara’s throat, but she refused to let it out. “I know.”

  Maebh nodded at her. “Go on. You swear never to create such a risk again?”

  “What?” The growl escaped against her will. “What about your risk, Maebh? Can you promise to stay away too?”

  “I—” Maebh looked toward the lighthouse. “Just tell me: are you willing to give it up, or aren’t you?”

  Mara’s mind rushed toward two separate answers, leaving her torn and battered between them. She needed Maebh’s respect, her goodwill, if she was ever to become the next Elder. Maebh would never pass leadership of the pod on to Mara if she believed she would endanger it in any way—no responsible Elder would.

  But she couldn’t give up the land, the dry air on her humanskin, the bright, sharp colors of sand and grass and sky. She couldn’t resign herself to turning human only at the Midsummer ceremonies, to drawing out her life for hundreds of years as only a seal. She knew it was the change that made her age—every selkie knew that. Every time she shifted, seal to human, human to seal, she got a little older. She had been born seventeen summers ago, but she might look eighteen by now, or even twenty. If she kept changing so often, she’d barely live longer than a normal human like Noah.

  Noah—remembering him made her even less willing to give up the land. He was the first person she’d ever really talked to outside of the pod. Something about him had bothered her, made her balk at his offer of friendship; yet she’d thought of him often. She’d watched him from the ocean as he’d rowed through the harbor, as he’d run over Star Island in the afternoons. She needed another chance to be his friend.

  “No, Maebh,” she said, still not knowing if she’d chosen well. “I cannot give it up.”

  Anger—fear?—flashed through Maebh’s link to Mara, but it drained away almost as fast as it came. “Well. I cannot give it up, either.” She stroked the soft, black spikes of Mara’s hair. “Goddess help us, but we’re the same, you and I.”

  Mara didn’t need to speak. Her confusion overflowed, and Maebh’s face changed as it poured into her link. She was smiling.

  “I know you’ve been watching the boy. I know you wish to speak with him again.”

  Mara swatted Maebh’s hand out of her hair. “That’s not my reason.” But something twisted in her stomach.

  “You may continue to go on land, so long as you keep to your duties with the younglings—”

  “Of course—”

  “And so long as you tell the boy what you really are.”

  Mara stared at the Elder. It was strange enough that she wasn’t punishing her, but this? Maebh must have gone insane. “Weren’t we just speaking of—of risks? Maebh, I cannot tell him. None of us can tell any human—ever—what we are.” A horrible thought crossed her mind. “Maebh, did you tell that old woman?”

  Maebh nodded slowly. “A long time ago. In another case I would agree with you, but Dolores understands. Her grandchildren will, too. They will not betray us.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Maebh looked in Mara’s eyes. “That’s a story for a different time.” She paused, then nodded again. “Dolores and I are always honest with each other, now.”

  It was almost impossible for Mara to think that the old lighthouse keeper she’d resented for so long could be the same woman Maebh spoke of with such affection. She didn’t want to believe it.

  Maebh took up her sealskin and wrapped it over her legs. “You think I don’t understand,” she said. “I know.”

  She slid into the water and vanished.

  Mara looked toward the harbor. A fishing boat trolled its center, helmed by a man with a dark, full beard. And beyond him, a younger man steered a rowboat toward Appledore—Noah. His pale hair glinted in the thin morning sunlight.

  She waded into the water and slipped under. She coiled her sealskin over her feet and up her legs and torso. As her two skins melded and stuck to each other, she grimaced. The bones in her legs clicked and scraped and pulled together. She felt her skull shrinking. It hurt.

  She surfaced, blinking. Drops of water clung to her whiskers.

  She swam toward the boat, pacing herself to the stroke of Noah’s oars through the waves.

  She remembered Maebh’s stories of the sailor Noah. She supposed she must have learned them from the lighthouse keeper. Had the Elder really meant it, that she could tell her Noah what she was?

  She remembered more of Maebh’s stories, of other humans who had been good to them. The notion of trusting one of them, of telling a human the truth—

  I could tell him, she thought. We could know each other.

  But it was her turn to care for the younglings, and Noah was on his way to work at the Center now too. He would come home to White at the end of the day, at sunset, after he’d gone running on Star.

  At sunset she could come on land without guilt, without fear. At sunset she could talk to Noah again.

  fourteen

  STORY

  I DON’T know. I don’t know what to say to help her.”

  Lo stood still on the second stair from the top, at the edge of a puddle of windowed sunlight, listening to Gemm and Maebh’s hushed conversation.

  “It sounds as if you’ve helped her already.”

  “I just wish—” Gemm stopped and sighed. “I wish I could tell her about myself at her age. I wish she could know our story.”

  “Can’t she?”

  The urgency in Gemm’s next sentence made Lo lean forward to listen better. “What do you mean? Of course she can’t.” There was a pause, just long enough to be gentle. “I wouldn’t tell your secret like that, love.”

  Maebh’s low laugh bubbled through the air. “She already knows most of our secrets, doesn’t she?”

  Gemm laughed too, softly. “I know she does.”

  Lo wanted to stay there, listening in secret—but she couldn’t quite bear to eavesdrop on her grandmother. They’d started being honest with each other. Lo liked that.

  “Gemm?” she called, stepping into the sunlight. The warm wood, worn from so many years of use, felt almost soft under her bare feet.

  “Oh—” Her gra
ndmother turned from her seat on the threadbare couch, her long hand still clasped in Maebh’s broader one.

  “If you want to tell me whatever it is . . .” Lo frowned, trying to find the right words. “I mean, I really want to hear, but I understand if you don’t want to tell. But if you don’t want me to tell anyone else—I’m good at secrets. I mean, I haven’t even told Noah about—um—” She stopped, blushing.

  Maebh smiled. Her fingers moved against Gemm’s. “It’s fine with me,” she said, looking at Lo. “It was always the secrets that hurt us, wasn’t it? Not the telling of them.”

  Gemm looked at Maebh briefly, her eyes lined with something sharp and deeply pained. She turned to Lo. She opened her lips, then paused. “It’s a secret, true,” she said. “A bigger one than you already know. And the worst part—well, it’s my part in it, sweetheart. I don’t know what you’ll think of me.”

  Lo wasn’t sure what to say to that, but Maebh spoke before she could come up with a response.

  “We can’t control the way they think of us,” she said.

  Lo remembered the family Maebh had mentioned, and she wondered what they thought of her spending so much time away from them, with Lo’s grandmother. That girl with the short black hair Noah had brought home—she was a sister or cousin, surely, and she and Maebh had been so angry with each other. Lo supposed Maebh’s family couldn’t be an easy one, either.

  “All right, sweetheart,” said Gemm, moving over to make room for Lo on the couch. “Let me tell you another story.”

  fifteen

  LEDGE

  AROUND three o’clock, Professor Foster walked into the filing room, his hair mussed, his eyes bloodshot.

  “Mr. Gallagher.” He nodded at Noah. “Come to my office for a minute?”

  Noah swallowed. He wasn’t sure whether to be scared or elated. Maybe, he almost dared to hope, he’d get his mentor after all. If he didn’t mess it up. If he hadn’t messed it up already. Or maybe that was what was going on—maybe he was in trouble. What could he have possibly done? He hadn’t had anything the least bit important to do.

  He grimaced and followed Professor Foster back through the lab rooms. As he looked at the research assistants in their dirtied white coats, marking maps of the ocean floor or attaching tags to the feet of sedated gulls, he felt twinges of hope. The whole place functioned under a buzz of seriousness and activity. He just wanted to be a part of that.

  Professor Foster’s office was hidden around the corner from the Center’s main hallway. He unlocked the heavy, solid wooden door and waved Noah in before closing it behind him.

  Noah couldn’t help but think of the scorn in Mara’s black eyes when he’d held Gemm’s door open for her. He sat down a little too heavily in the padded chair in front of the desk.

  Half the far wall was covered in diplomas, awards, and photographs of the professor with this or that famous marine scientist—even, in one prominent photo, Jacques Cousteau in his wetsuit, smiling next to a very young Professor Foster sporting a brown ponytail. A single small window framed a view of the Thaxter garden and the ocean beyond.

  His desk, in contrast, had almost nothing on it. There was a slim, neat file folder, a closed laptop in the center, and a cup with a few sharp pencils. One frame stood there too, but it faced away from Noah. With so many famous people on the wall, Noah had to wonder who occupied the place of honor on the desk.

  Professor Foster clasped his hands together on top of the tan file folder. The edges of his mouth curved up in a smile.

  “I know I haven’t seen you much, and you probably feel like I’m brushing you off,” he said. “But to tell the truth, I would like to make you part of the team here, in a more real way than you’ve been so far.” His eyes were light blue behind his glasses, and their corners crinkled with sympathy. “I can’t offer you more money, but I—well, I know ambition when I see it. You’re ambitious, Mr. Gallagher. So am I.”

  All those weekends alone, all those extra classes, his friends back on the mainland spending the summer without him, flickered through Noah’s mind. He held in a sigh of relief. “Yes, sir.”

  Professor Foster looked back at the wall behind him. “You see how proud I am of my accomplishments.”

  Noah nodded.

  The professor’s shoulders hunched forward, and he spoke more softly. “However, Mr. Gallagher, soon all this ambition may come to nothing.”

  Noah blinked. “Excuse me, sir?” He felt as if the professor wanted to let him in on some secret, but he didn’t know what it could be, much less how he should react. It seemed that leaving the filing room might be more complicated than he thought.

  “You’re filing donations now, right?” He didn’t pause for Noah to confirm. “You’ve seen our funding history. You must have noticed how it’s drying up.”

  Noah nodded. He’d tried to avoid noticing, but when he was handling so many grant rejections and quarterly reports, it was hard not to see the general downward trend.

  “If we can’t get someone—the government, the big pharmaceuticals, commercial fishers—to notice us soon, to notice our work”—he ran a hand through his hair and blinked rapidly a few times; Noah began to understand why Professor Foster always looked so disheveled by the end of the day—“well, Mr. Gallagher, you won’t be the only one out of a job at the end of the summer.”

  Noah nodded. “But, sir, why are you telling me this? What can I do? I mean, of course I’ll do whatever I can to help.” Professor Foster had said he recognized ambition when he saw it. Surely he had to see how Noah ached and burned to be included in anything that would help him make that leap into really important research.

  Professor Foster smiled and folded his hands together on his desk again. “I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Gallagher. You’re too valuable to waste with puttering around in the filing room—don’t think I didn’t know that when I hired you.”

  Noah’s stomach twinged. Please, he thought. Please.

  “Look, I—there’s this ongoing project I’ve been working on, and I haven’t quite found the right assistant for it. It’s probably ridiculous of me to turn to someone so young, but you . . . I keep thinking of you in the back of my class, taking all those notes. So many of my college interns, they don’t seem to care about anything at all. I—well.” Professor Foster cleared his throat and looked down as he polished his glasses with his handkerchief. “How about you come to my house on the mainland sometime next week, and we can talk about the project? You must want to get away from the islands from time to time. What do you think of that?”

  Noah’s eyes widened. This was so much better than he’d even begun to hope for. “Oh, definitely—I mean, thank you for the opportunity, sir.”

  “Of course, we do still need someone to sort through all those files . . .” The professor exhaled slowly. “You don’t happen to know any organized, eager high school students willing to work for nothing, do you?” He chuckled. “Because nothing is all we’ve got.”

  “Actually, sir, I do know someone.” It was perfect—Noah knew it as soon as the idea occurred to him. “My sister, Lo, is going to be a sophomore, and she’s very organized. She’s living on White this summer too. She’d love the job.” Maybe a job would give Lo some distraction. Some time outside her own head would have to be a good thing. At least, Noah hoped so.

  The fluorescent light above them began to buzz. Professor Foster stood up and tapped it, which only made it louder.

  “That sounds perfect,” he said, sitting again. “Bring her in with you tomorrow, and I’ll get her set up. Then we can move you to the more important things, right?”

  Professor Foster held out his hand over the desk.

  Noah shook it, trying not to recoil in surprise from the hot, moist skin of his palm.

  Walking out into the faded sunshine that afternoon, Noah wondered if he’d finally gotten the internship he really wanted. His new job had to be better than the filing room, at any rate. He’d even gotten Lo a job. But he was su
rprised to find he couldn’t quite focus on any of that. There was someone else he kept wanting to think about, but he steered his thoughts away from her.

  He rowed to Star Island. As he stretched and got ready to run, his mind filtered out the buzzing excitement and anxiety he’d felt all day. Running was the only thing that could always do that for him.

  The ledge rose at the far edge of the island, straight ahead. He remembered diving into the water, then clutching at something smooth and white—the cool, sweet curve of Mara’s waist under his hands, the soft naked O of her mouth, the lilting in her voice.

  He ran laps until it was almost dark. Every time he passed the ledge, he convinced himself that he could push a little farther. Every time a wave crashed on the rocks, Noah reminded himself that it was only a wave and not a girl who didn’t, as it turned out, need any saving. He was gasping and wheezing with every step by the end of his run, and Mara was nowhere in sight.

  No—there was someone there, a dark head bobbing in the water twenty feet away. For a moment he thought he saw Mara’s shiny black hair, but it was only a harbor seal. It stared at him with large, unblinking eyes.

  Noah jogged to the other end of the island, where his rowboat was waiting. He pushed off into the water and glanced around the harbor, pulling the oars with tired, shaking arms. He felt foolish for thinking Mara might have been there again.

  The seal followed him. Its dark head faced toward White, bobbing like a buoy in the waves.

  He didn’t look back until he got home. But the whole time he rowed, straining toward the slowly growing specter of White Island, he could feel the seal’s eyes on him, watching.

  sixteen

  ANCHOR

  I WAS young, once too, you know,” Dolores began, smiling at her granddaughter.

  Lo settled next to her on the couch. She smiled back. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”