“It didn’t have to be you.”
The wind whistled wild and shrill around the eaves of the house, invisible lips pressed to a vast, invisible instrument, and Meredith shivered and pulled the covers up to her chin again.
“There was no one else. It wouldn’t take your brother. The one who wields the key cannot be a man. You know that, Merry. Avery knew that, too.”
“There are other women,” Meredith said, speaking through gritted teeth, not wanting to start crying but the tears already hot in her eyes. “It could have been someone else. It didn’t have to be my mother.”
“Some other child’s mother, then?” the ghost asked. “Some other mother’s daughter?”
“Go back to your hell,” Meredith said, still looking at the wall, spitting out the words like poison. “Go back to your hole in the ground and tell your fairy tales to the worms. Tell them ‘The Fisherman and his Wife.’”
“You have to be strong now, Merry. You have to listen to your father, and you have to be ready. I wasn’t strong enough.”
And finally she did turn to face her mother, what was left of her mother’s face, the scuttling things nesting in her tangled hair, the silver scales and barnacles, the stinging anemone crown, and Meredith Dandridge didn’t flinch or look away.
“One day,” she said, “I’ll take that damned black book of his, and I’ll toss it into the stove. I’ll take it, mother, and toss it into the hearth, and then they can come out of the sea and drag us both away.”
Her mother cried out and came apart like a breaking wave against the shingle, water poured from the tin pail that had given it shape, her flesh gone suddenly as clear and shimmering as glass, before she drained away and leaked through the cracks between the floorboards. The girl reached out and dipped her fingers into the shallow pool left behind in the wicker seat of the chair. The water was cold and smelled unclean. And then she lay awake until dawn, listening to the ocean, to all the unthinking noises a house makes in the small hours of a night.
May 1914
Avery Dandridge had his father’s eyes, but someone else’s soul to peer out through them, and to his sister he was hope that there might be a life somewhere beyond the rambling house beside the sea. Five years her senior, he’d gone away to school in San Francisco for a while, almost a year, because their mother wished him to. But there had been an incident, and he was sent home again, transgressions only spoken of in whispers and nothing anyone ever bothered to explain to Meredith, but that was fine with her. She only cared that he was back, and she was that much less alone.
“Tell me about the earthquake,” she said to him, one day not long after he’d returned, the two of them strolling together along the narrow beach below the cliffs, sand the color of coal dust, noisy gulls and driftwood like titan bones washed in by the tide. “Tell me all about the fire.”
“The earthquake? Merry, that was eight years ago. You were still just a baby, that was such long time ago,” and then he picked up a shell and turned it over in his hand, brushing away some of the dark sand stuck to it. “People don’t like to talk about the earthquake anymore. I never heard them say much about it.”
“Oh,” she said, not sure what to say next but still full of questions. “Father says it was a sign, a sign from—”
“Maybe you shouldn’t believe everything he says, Merry. It was an earthquake.” And she felt a thrill then, like a tiny jolt of electricity rising up her spine and spreading out across her scalp, that anyone, much less Avery, would question their father and suggest she do likewise.
“Have you stopped believing in the signs?” she asked, breathless. “Is that what you learned in school?”
“I didn’t learn much of anything important in school,” he replied and showed her the shell in his palm. Hardly as big around as a nickel, but peaked in the center like a Chinaman’s hat, radial lines of chestnut brown. “It’s pretty,” she said as he placed it in her palm.
“What’s it called?”
“It’s a limpet,” he replied, because Avery knew all about shells and fish and the fossils in the cliffs, things he’d learned from their father’s books and not from school. “It’s a shield limpet. The jackmackerel carry them into battle when they fight the eels.”
Meredith laughed out loud at that last part, and he laughed, too, then sat down on a rock at the edge of a wide tide pool. She stood there beside him, still inspecting the shell in her hand, turning it over and over again. The concave underside of the limpet was smoother than silk and would be white if not for the faintest iridescent hint of blue.
“That’s not true,” she said. “Everyone knows the jackmackerel and the eels are friends.”
“Sure they are,” Avery said. “Everyone knows that.” But he was staring out to sea now and didn’t turn to look at her. In a moment, she slipped the shell into a pocket of her sweater and sat down on the rock next to him.
“Do you see something out there?” she asked, and he nodded his head, but didn’t speak. The wind rushed cold and damp across the beach and painted ripples on the surface of the pool at their feet. The wind and the waves seemed louder than usual, and Meredith wondered if that meant a storm was coming.
“Not a storm,” Avery said, and that didn’t surprise her because he often knew what she was thinking before she said it. “A war’s coming, Merry.”
“Oh yes, the jackmackerel and the eels,” Merry laughed and squinted towards the horizon, trying to see whatever it was that had attracted her brother’s attention. “The squid and the mussels.”
“Don’t be silly. Everyone knows that the squid and the mussels are great friends,” and that made her laugh again. But Avery didn’t laugh, looked away from the sea and stared down instead at the scuffed toes of his boots dangling a few inches above the water.
“There’s never been a war like the one that’s coming,” he said after a while. “All the nations of the earth at each other’s throats, Merry, and when we’re done with all the killing, no one will be left to stand against the sea.”
She took a very deep breath, the clean, salty air to clear her head, and began to pick at a barnacle on the rock.
“If that were true,” she said, “Father would have told us. He would have shown us the signs.”
“He doesn’t see them. He doesn’t dream the way I do.”
“But you told him?”
“I tried. But he thinks it’s something they put in my head at school. He thinks it’s some kind of trick to make him look away.”
Merry stopped picking at the barnacle, because it was making her fingers sore and they’d be bleeding soon if she kept it up. She decided it was better to watch the things trapped in the tide pool, the little garden stranded there until the sea came back to claim it. Periwinkle snails and hermit crabs wearing stolen shells, crimson starfish and starfish the shape and color of sunflowers.
“He thinks they’re using me to make him look the other way, to catch him off his guard,” Avery whispered, his voice almost lost in the rising wind. “He thinks I’m being set against him.”
“Avery, I don’t believe Father would say that about you.”
“He didn’t have to say it,” and her brother’s dark and shining eyes gazed out at the sea and sky again.
“We should be heading back soon, shouldn’t we? The tide will be coming in before long,” Meredith said, noticing how much higher up the beach the waves were reaching than the last time she’d looked. Another half hour and the insatiable ocean would be battering itself against the rough shale cliffs at their backs.
“‘Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,’” Avery whispered, closing his eyes tight, and the words coming from his pale, thin lips sounded like someone else, someone old and tired that Meredith had never loved. “‘Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep and full of voices, slowly rose and plunged roaring, and all the wave was in a flame—’”