The Seduction of Water Read Free Page B

Katherine Morrissey. She, and the man she was with, were registered under the names Mr. and Mrs. John McGlynn. The investigating officer who saw the registration guessed who it was because his wife was a fan of my mother’s who had read that she was missing and she recognized the name McGlynn because my mother had named her fantasy world Tirra Glynn.
    He’d come all the way from the city to show my father a charm bracelet, which my father identified as the gift he and I had given her for Christmas the previous year. They met in the library and I hid in the courtyard outside the library windows and listened to what was said. My father asked him if they had identified the man she was with, but the officer said they hadn’t found the man’s body. That my mother had died alone.
    For years after I could only fall asleep listening to the story of the selkie girl. I would ask my aunt Sophie, who took care of me after my mother left, to tell me the story.
    “That old thing?” she would say, using the same words my mother had, but meaning something else entirely, “That morbid story?” She said
morbid
the way she said
dirty
when I was little and tried to eat a treat that had fallen to the floor or a pastry left on the rim of a saucer by one of the hotel guests. Morbid thoughts were what I had when I wasn’t attending to my chores or going to bed promptly so she could attend to hers. Morbid was what my mother had been before she went away. But like my mother, my aunt could be convinced to tell me the story if she thought it would put me to sleep. I would fold the felted nap of the blanket against my cheek and imagine it was the fur collar of my mother’s coat and I would imagine my mother’s hands stroking my hair, just as the selkie’s daughter could feel her mother’s hands in her hair even as she slept. My aunt could tell the story word for word because, as I knew by then, it was the first chapter in my mother’s book,
The Broken Pearl,
but if I squeezed my eyes tight enough I still heard the story in my mother’s voice.

    “In the morning, when the selkie’s daughter awoke she was alone on the beach. She’d heard her mother’s voice in her sleep thanking her for returning her skin. ‘Now I can go back to the sea where I belong and where I have five selkie children, just as I have five human children on the land, whom you must watch over now. You mustn’t weep for me but instead, whenever you miss me, come stand at the water’s edge and listen for my voice in the surf. And on the first day of spring each year, and the last day of summer, you’ll see me as you know me now, a woman in a woman’s skin.’
    “The girl went back to her father’s house, determined to keep her promise to her mother even though every step she took away from the sea felt heavy, as if her feet were caught in a net that was dragging her out with the ebb tide. Even her hair, which had frozen in the night, seemed to drag her down. But still she went home and lit the stove and made the porridge and when her brothers awoke she explained to them that although their mother was gone, she would take care of them now, and that twice a year she would take them to see their mother again.
    “It wasn’t until later, when she still felt the weight of ice in her hair, that she looked in the mirror and saw her mother’s parting gift. She remembered her mother’s hands stroking her hair through the night. Her mother—who couldn’t knit a stitch, or tat lace, or even tie a knot—had woven a wreath of sea foam frozen into bright stone: caught in its net, a single green tear the color of the sea.”

    My aunt would turn out the light, then, and straighten the covers and smooth my hair away from my face. I’d feel her dry lips brush my forehead and then I’d be alone in the dark, listening to the sounds of the old hotel settling. On a windy night the beams and floorboards would crack and pop like logs in a bonfire and I’d imagine that the hotel