Tides Read online

  “I was born here, on the Shoals. My mother was the keeper of the White Island Light for more than thirty years.” She looked out the window at the light. “I was lonely sometimes, growing up here—as I’m sure you’ve been, at least a little—but I loved it. It was like living inside a story.”

  Dolores felt Maebh’s hand slip around hers. She grasped it tight. She closed her eyes and let herself remember.

  She spent a lot of time on her own back then, on White Island’s pebbled beach or perched up in the lighthouse. She called it the Witch Tower, and she liked to sing out from the top while her beautiful mother lit the beacon. She thought they were both princesses, her mother and she, under a spell, maybe. Living in a story.

  Dolores read a lot, to pass the time on the wave-swept island. Her mind traveled through lots of big, wide, imaginary worlds, while her body stayed in its little isolated corner of the real world. It never occurred to her not to believe in certain things, things that mainland children knew weren’t supposed to exist. Things like ghosts, or witches, or selkies.

  Dolores and the Shoals suffered through near-constant storms every winter. She couldn’t have left her mother’s cottage to meet other children even if there had been other children to meet—which, except for the tourists in summer, there usually weren’t. She learned to be good at being alone—reading, singing in the lighthouse—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lonely.

  Her mother had a little red rowboat, just like the one Dolores would lend to her grandchildren many years later. She took it out on spring days when the water turned calm and jewel-clear. With a sandwich and a few novels, she could spend the whole day letting the sea sweetly rock her. She had a little anchor to drop so her mother wouldn’t worry.

  She always stayed in Gosport, the small harbor between the Shoals. Past the isles, the water got much deeper, three or four hundred feet. Her anchor wouldn’t reach that far, and her mother had told her to stay in the inbetween.

  She was lounging in her boat one April afternoon, the year she would turn eighteen. It was a sunny day, but she still had to wear a pea coat and hat to protect her from the wind. April just barely qualified as spring at the Isles of Shoals, and that was by a New Englander’s definition.

  She had a lovely lunch tucked away in a net sack. The first supplies had come to the Oceanic Hotel that weekend, and Mother always ordered her personal groceries so they could be brought over on the same boat. Dolores had a fresh orange that smelled wonderful and promised the beginning of a summer free from vitamin C tablets, warm bread with a scraping of luxuriously soft cheese, and thick slices of sausage from the pantry. In her hunger that morning she had taken too much, so she decided to use some of the sausage as bait. She always carried a little fishing rod in hopes of catching their supper.

  She dropped the hook, line, and bait into the water, tucked the base of her fishing pole between her knees, and opened a crumbling, salt-crusted paperback. She read for hours without feeling time pass at all.

  Something tugged at the line, gently, but with enough force that she felt it through her overalls. Young ladies on the mainland wore skirts, she’d been told, but overalls and the wool long johns that went underneath them were essential during island spring.

  That tremor on the line puzzled her. Usually when a fish went for the bait, it grabbed on and made a run for it as soon as it had the morsel in its teeth. Not so here—just a little tap, and the line was still again. On the other hand, it seemed like more than a simple bump against a piece of kelp, and the water was far too deep for her line to be grazing the bottom.

  Dolores set her book aside and peered into the water. In winter, the Shoals water was darker than it was in summer. The ocean was hibernating, waiting for the sun to come back before it could wake up and sparkle again.

  She squinted into the sleepy depths, and at first she saw nothing at all. Then a silvery glint, dim, ten feet down or more, flashed up at her.

  It was big, even bigger than the stripers or bluefish that could snap the line and get away with the bait. Dolores’s small rowboat began to feel very small, indeed. She felt a bit like the bait herself.

  The glint shrank, went deeper, and then it began to rise. Had Dolores been a normal child, she would have been terrified when she realized what she was looking at. As it was, she was simply relieved that it wasn’t a shark.

  It was a seal, but by the time it emerged from the water, it was a girl.

  She was Dolores’s own age, or perhaps a little older. Her arms moved subtly in the waves, curved and foam-white. Her face was round and very pale, and her lips were pale too, with a silver shine. Her black eyes were large and wide, a little farther apart than most people’s, and her irises in particular were so big, Dolores could hardly see the whites. Her eyelids were silver gray when she blinked. She had mounds of black hair twisted back against her head in intricate knots and pierced through with spikes of what looked like bone, and with long blue pieces of sea glass. She smiled at Dolores, and her teeth were impossibly white and slick and smooth.

  Not knowing how to react, Dolores followed the example of her favorite fairy tale heroines: she offered to share her meal with the mysterious girl. She smiled her most winsome island-girl smile and tore off a chunk of her bread. She held it out over the edge of the rowboat, squishing it in the tight grip of her smooth, still-childlike fingers.

  “Want some?” she asked. “It’s good.”

  The girl took the bread eagerly, and Dolores saw that her fingers were slightly webbed. Her palms were even paler than her face and neck. She ate ravenously but stayed perfectly at ease in the water as the waves slipped around her, rocking the little boat. She looked up and around while she ate, at the sky, the lighthouse, the rocks, and the blinding spots where the spring sun dappled onto the water. Mostly, though, she looked at Dolores.

  Dolores looked right back, struck at last with the wonder before her. “My name is Dolores Mochrie,” she whispered.

  A spell had been cast.

  “Gemm—” Her granddaughter’s voice brought Dolores back to the present.

  Lo’s back had stiffened. She stared, unblinking, at Maebh.

  “Gemm . . .”

  Maebh took her hand away from Dolores’s and reached for the knitted shawl she’d tucked at her side. It was wrapped around something—her sealskin, silver and dark, with a softness you could feel just from looking at it. She held it carefully, the slight webs between her fingers trembling. Her hands steadied as she took a breath, and then she looked up at Lo. They regarded each other cautiously.

  “It is all right,” Maebh said. “I’m not so different from you as you might think.”

  Lo shook her head. “No. It’s not that. It’s just . . .” She stopped.

  “It’s so much to take in, I know,” Dolores said. “But as I said, Lo—as we said—I think secrets are worse. You’ll see.”

  Lo kept staring at Maebh. She nodded, slowly.

  Dolores returned to her story.

  They sat in the dark, on the shoreline, their legs almost touching. The edges of waves washed over their feet.

  Maebh had followed Dolores to White Island after their shared meal, vanishing behind the cliffs with a dark bundle in her hands and returning wearing a faded, old-fashioned summer dress. She’d murmured that she didn’t mind the cold.

  The two girls hadn’t spoken much, but they stared at each other almost unceasingly. Dolores’s mother made small talk with them over dinner, then told Maebh she was happy to see another young person on the islands, and that she was welcome to stay until her own mother wanted her back. She went upstairs to sleep, and Dolores and Maebh became the only waking souls on White.

  Dolores had burned with questions all afternoon, but she couldn’t ask them in front of her mother. Now that she was alone with Maebh again, though, it was hard to make the questions come.

  Thankfully, Maebh spoke first. She smiled and asked shyly, as if the question might be foolish: “Do you know about selkies?”


  Dolores shook her head. “Not much. But I believe in them.” Carefully, so that Maebh wouldn’t notice, she snuck her knee a half inch closer to her new friend’s. Warmth rested in the air around her skin, and Dolores could feel it now.

  Maebh smiled. “Well, that’s something, at least.” She sighed and leaned back on her hands. “I don’t know what to tell you first.”

  “Tell me everything.” Dolores winced at the sound of her own voice, so much rougher than Maebh’s.

  “Well, usually, you know, we look like seals. But we can look like people, too . . . I suppose you know that.” Maebh laughed, and for a moment Dolores wondered if the other girl felt as nervous as she did. Her own self-consciousness surprised her, but she told herself it was only that she wasn’t used to making friends.

  “I don’t really know,” Maebh said softly, “if we’re more seal or more human. The Elders say we’re not like humans at all, but . . .” Her voice trailed into silence.

  Dolores leaned in to hear her better—and, perhaps, simply to be closer to her.

  Maebh’s voice came back, a little stronger now. “We have to change form, though, to grow up. When the moon is full, the Elders bring the younglings—our children—to shore, and they teach them the old songs and how to shed their skins. A selkie could live forever if she never changed, but she’d never grow any older, either.” She glanced at Dolores, and the look in her eyes made them both shiver. “So far, I like growing up.”

  Dolores stared back at her, unwilling to move.

  Maebh sucked in her breath and looked down. “Besides, the moon ceremony is beautiful, the ritual of it. We spend the whole night dancing and singing and praying to the Goddess—we see her in the full moon.”

  “The moon?” Dolores had never really prayed to anything before. She’d always preferred magic to gods.

  “Oh, yes.”

  They looked up together. Clouds lay across the sky in stripes, dividing the moon into blurred halves.

  Dolores felt wind on her face, in her hair. The clouds shifted, and the moon grew whole. She shivered.

  “Here.” Maebh’s arm wrapped around her shoulder.

  “Thanks.”

  Maebh nodded, silent.

  Their legs were touching now, and Dolores could feel a tingle of water around her ankles. The tide was coming in.

  They met nearly every evening, after that. They started lighting the beacon together, and Mrs. Mochrie was grateful for their help. They stayed up by the light and talked to each other until Maebh had to go back to the sea.

  “Look how dark it is already,” said Maebh one evening in the beginning of November. “What’s the point of your daylight saving time, anyway?”

  Dolores shrugged. “The harvesters need it.” She joined Maebh at the window and looked out with her. “Besides, it’s not quite dark yet. The sky’s got a bit of purple in it.”

  The beacon rotated behind them. Every ten seconds, they had to squint.

  “Are we blocking the light?” Maebh asked. “I don’t want to be responsible for any sunken ships.”

  Dolores laughed. “The light’s too strong for our bodies to block it.” She nudged Maebh’s hip with her own, trying to pretend it didn’t mean anything. “You’re not a siren, Maebh. You won’t sink any ships.”

  Maebh tilted her head, looking at her friend. “You could be a siren.” She gestured over her head. “That long red hair . . .”

  “Wait. Are there sirens here too?”

  Maebh smiled. “Not here but the Elders tell us stories. They are supposed to be so beautiful, their hair long and bright and curling.” She grabbed one of her own black locks and frowned at it, crossing her eyes. “I’ve always been jealous of siren hair.”

  “Oh, but I like yours,” said Dolores. “Mine’s never so shiny. And your eyes—your eyes are pretty too.”

  She reached up, carefully, slowly. She touched her thumb to the corner of Maebh’s eye. Neither of them breathed.

  Dolores said, “Tell me more about sirens.”

  Maebh opened her mouth but didn’t speak. She reached down and clasped Dolores’s hand.

  Before she had time to tell herself not to, Dolores leaned in and met Maebh’s open mouth with her own. She felt a smile on the other girl’s lips and traced it with her tongue.

  The beacon flashed past them, sending its unbroken beam over the sea.

  seventeen

  RISING

  NOAH finally looked behind him once he’d landed at White, but the seal had vanished. He tied off the boat and stepped ashore.

  The island smelled fresh in the half-light of dusk. He breathed in deep, imagining the cells in his lungs expanding. The last rays of sun turned the lighthouse’s chipped white paint a dripping, translucent orange. The tips of the grasses and leaves lit up like sparklers.

  He started walking toward the cottage—he wanted dinner, and to check on Lo—but something pulled him back. He’d never seen the island in light like this before, and it wouldn’t quite let him go.

  He moved through the twinkling landscape, seeking the cool expanse of the ocean beyond.

  White Island had its own cliffs, more dramatic than the ledge at Star. They ran up from the water in rough vertical lines that looked out of place against the organic curve and swirl of the sea. He sat down at their edge, letting his feet dangle. The evening breeze ruffled through his hair.

  The seal appeared. It lumbered onto a flat rock at the base of the cliffs, about thirty feet below where he sat. Noah didn’t know how he was so sure it was the same seal—but he was. It faced away from him, but Noah was still afraid the seal might notice him watching. He couldn’t get over the notion that he was invading its privacy. He swung his legs up and rolled onto his stomach at the cliff’s edge, resting his chin on his crossed arms.

  The seal’s shoulder blades rolled beneath a smooth layer of blubber, its body moving like the swell of the tide. It pulled its head up and to the side, straining toward the sky.

  And then its skin began to peel away.

  It slid slowly, reluctantly down in wet rolls and furrows. A nascent form emerged: a mop of black hair, round, narrow shoulders, a soft and flexible torso. She rested a moment, the sealskin slipping around her hips. Then, with a flick of her tail, the rest pulled away. Her legs gleamed.

  Noah’s palms began to sweat. His life rewound to when he was six and Dad told him Santa Claus wasn’t real, and that moment was reversed—not erased, but made into a lie. These things were real; they were possible. A heady feeling of infinite magic washed over him. He was the little boy Noah again, the child who believed every star was a UFO coming to take him away.

  Selkie. He couldn’t stop repeating the word, turning it over and over in his mind like a smooth stone, selkie, selkie. Mara was a selkie—what else could she ever have been? No human girl had ever acted as she had with him. It was all part of her supernatural spell, no doubt. He was onto her now.

  “Mara!” he yelled.

  She jerked around, covering herself with her empty sealskin. She squinted up at him. “Hello,” she called back. “Stay there!”

  Noah dropped his head between his arms. Too much was happening. He couldn’t take it all in.

  Before long he heard Mara’s soft footsteps behind him. She sat down, dressed in another oversize men’s shirt—white this time, with no belt. She wasn’t carrying her skin.

  “Hello,” she repeated.

  Noah stared at her.

  She sat down beside him. “I’m sorry you found out like that,” she mumbled, almost shyly.

  Noah snorted. “As if you didn’t mean for me to.”

  “What?” Mara frowned. “I saw you head toward the cottage, so I came here to change. I was going to knock on your door.” She looked down at her toes, which, Noah noticed for the first time, were slightly webbed. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Christ, Mara—” He stopped. “That is your name, isn’t it?”

  She looked wounded. “Of course,”
she said. “Maelinn Mara, sworn as daughter to Terlinn Maebh.” She stuck out her arm in a stiff imitation of human handshakes.

  Noah didn’t move. “And you are a selkie.” He wanted to hear her say it.

  “We have many names,” she said, “but, yes, that is one.”

  They sat close together, their legs almost touching. Noah scooted away a little.

  “Wait.” He remembered Maebh’s reaction when Mara had walked into the cottage. “Maebh is your mother?”

  “Yes,” said Mara. “She is also the leader of our family, our pod. She is the Elder.”

  “Yeah, well, she doesn’t look it.” Noah recalled Maebh’s smooth, youthful face. “I figured she was your older sister, or your cousin or something.”

  Mara shrugged. “We age differently than you do.”

  “Okay, fine,” said Noah. “That’s not really what I’m having trouble with here.” The wind blew too harshly across his hair. He shivered.

  He forced himself to look at Mara, to pretend she was only the young woman he’d met a week ago, not some fairy-tale monster who had just shed her skin before his eyes.

  Her feet were long and angular, and they turned out from her legs like dancers’ feet. Like a tail. Her legs were strong and toned, but smoothed over with the layer of softness he’d felt when he’d first caught her in his arms. Her thighs and torso were hidden under the loose, thin shirt she wore, but his hands recalled the softness there all too well, too.

  Mara wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. Even the translucent webbing between her fingers dimpled into tiny bumps.

  Noah realized she was cold. He unzipped his sweatshirt and, leaning over until he could feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek, he draped it around her shoulders.

  Tentatively, she smiled at him.

  She was still the girl he’d met before. He couldn’t deny it, much as his brain balked at the idea. Part of him owned that truth and saw how human she was—even if she didn’t fit the technical definition.