Alice At Heart (6 page)

It was a little late for niceties, now that she’d been inside my head. I backed into an alcove fitted with floor-to-ceiling fish tanks—a dark, safe cave, I’d always thought, surrounded by bubbling water and friendly, swimming creatures. “I’m here,” I said in a voice that shook. “With the fish.”

The three women entered the shop’s main room with the gossamer grace of leaves floating on a stream. I straightened, clenched my hands by my side, and stared at them from my dim corner. They gazed back, the dark-haired one looking impatient, the redhead very kind and earnest, Silver Hair frowning at me with wistful eyes.

“Yes, I’m pathetic,” I confirmed quietly, and Dark Hair grimaced.

Silver Hair stepped in front of the other two like the queen of a small delegation. “No, you are simply—” she paused, searching for the right words—”simply unaware of your true nature.”

“And who are you, may I ask?”

“My name,” she said, “is Lilith Bonavendier.” She nodded toward the dark-haired woman. “This is my younger sister, Mara.” And in the other direction, toward the redhead. “And this is my second younger sister, Pearl.” She paused. I suddenly noticed that the fish, the mice, the hamsters, the snakes, the lizards, and the birds now faced
her
way. None of them moved or made so much as a peep. “And you,” Lilith Bonavendier went on, looking straight at me, “are our
youngest
sister.”

“Only our half-sister,” Mara corrected, then blanched when Lilith gave her a hard look.

I took a step back, pressing myself against a wall of aquariums. Like all the other small creatures, I gazed at the three women in hypnotized wonder. “What kind of game is this?” I whispered.

“Oh, Alice. Sisterhood is never a game.” Pulling something from a tiny silk purse bound to the waist of her exquisite pale suit, Lilith moved toward me slowly, as if I might bolt, which I might. She laid the offering on the top of short display shelf. “A photograph,” she said, “of your mother with our father.”

She stepped back.

I picked up the old snapshot. My hand shook. I gazed at my teenage mother, smiling on a sun-drenched Georgia beach beside a handsome, white-haired man. Both were dressed in swimsuits, her looking like a wholesome girl next door on the cover of a Beach Boys album, him looking fit and suave and incredibly desirable. And, quite possibly, fifty years her senior.

“This man,” I said, “could be my grandfather.”

“I assure you, he is not. Father was not an ordinary man. He was, after all, a Bonavendier.”

Mara added tightly, “Tell her exactly, Lilith. We Bonavendiers don’t look our age. Father was eight five when he died that summer.”

“But he didn’t look a day over fifty,” Pearl amended.

I laid the photograph down. “And if I may ask, how old are you-all?”

“How rude,” Mara said instantly.

“I am seventy and quite pleased to be so,” Lilith countered, nodding to indicate her own lithe form. She lifted a hand toward Mara, who yipped in dismay. “Sixty-five.” And Pearl, who laughed. “Sixty-two.”

I stared at them. Mara and Pearl couldn’t possibly be much older than I, and Lilith had the skin of a beautiful forty-year-old, despite the silver hair. Southern socialites are notorious for lying about their ages—gilding the magnolia—so to speak. But none ever claim they are thirty years
older
than common sense says is possible.

Remain polite about their delusions
, I told myself, staring at the floor to hide my alarm.
And just play along until you can escape
. “I see.”

Lilith watched me closely. “No, you don’t. We don’t live by the rules of ordinary people. You know that in your heart. You know anything I tell you may be possible. Look at me, Alice. Please.”

I raised my eyes to hers. Her expression softened. “Study our eyes. Gray-green, like the sea. Just like yours. An extraordinary color. Unique to our kind. To our family. Mara. Pearl. Look at her eyes. Let us all look straight into Alice’s eyes. And Alice, you look at
us
.” She paused. “All four of us standing here today are linked by the most amazing destiny. We have our father’s eyes.”

In the deepening silence between words, the pauses of reflection and emotion, the acidic wash of stark scrutiny and shock, in those spaces where the truth lives, I knew, I felt, I saw. But I shook my head.

Lilith Bonavendier immediately swept toward me with a knowing gleam in those amazing eyes—eyes I had seen in my own mirror. “
Alice
. Your father’s name was Orion. Orion Bonavendier. Our mother, the love of his life, had died not many years before he met
your
mother. He was still grieving, distraught—dying of a broken heart. Nothing could stop that.”

Lilith touched my face. “He met your mother when she came to work as a counselor at the children’s camp called Sweetwater Haven, on a brackish river along the mainland, not many miles from our island. This young counselor—your mother—was bright and beautiful, and we all appreciated how she drew our father out of his misery. I can’t say I’m proud he seduced her, but I’m sure he never meant to destroy her, Alice. And I am certain—in the depths of my dreams, in my soul, my instincts, my sisterhood with you—that your mother adored him, and she was only driven to disaster by her family once she returned here.”

“She drowned herself in the town lake,” I said grimly. “After she saw the web-toed mutant she’d birthed.”

This cruel assessment made the three women draw themselves up and frown at me. Lilith said with an incredulous tone, “Is
that
what you’ve grown up believing about your mother and yourself?”

“It’s the truth.”

“
No
. I have notes your mother wrote to Father. She was in love with him. She wanted to stay with him. She wouldn’t have rejected any child she had with him.”

“No mother can turn her back on a Bonavendier baby,” Pearl said. “We’re quite alluring, even in the crib.”

“You were taken away from her, Alice. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. That would have driven her to despair. I expect her family intended to place you for adoption.”

My thoughts whirled. I felt as if I was struggling just under the surface of shallow water, caught in a vortex. “You’re offering me a convenient rationale, I’m afraid.”

“I’m offering you the truth. Come with us, Alice. Look at the proof we can show you of your heritage. See where you belong.” She paused, her expression becoming supplicating and sad. “Accept our apologetic and sincere love.”

Love? I had
never
known love in my life, and the use of it as a lure from strangers enraged me. “Let me understand this,” I said between gritted teeth. “You’re saying my mother, a very young woman—not even out of her teens quite then—a small-town girl raised in a time and place where morals were very strict and the rules undeniably severe—you’re saying she was willing to give up everything for a summer seduction orchestrated by an eighty-five-year-old grieving widower? And I am supposed to believe she adored him—and wanted to bear his child?
Me
. And you actually
care
?”

“Yes. Absolutely. Listen to your instincts, Alice. Trust your faith.”

“Faith is a blind word, used to excuse every mistake.”

Lilith took a step toward me. “No. Alice, say what you will, but you do
want
to believe me.”

“This is all an elaborate defense for a tragedy that shamed you.”

“Yes, I’m ashamed we hurt your mother—and you. And yes, this is an elaborate effort to redeem that terrible crime. But, then, we Bonavendiers are an
elaborate
kind of being.”

“Oh, more than elaborate,” Pearl interjected brightly. Mara scowled at her.

Lilith put a graceful, opalescent-trimmed hand to her heart. “Our father—and yours—went out into the ocean one day and never returned. We found him later—his body. The dolphins brought him home. We were all heartbroken, including your mother. She left the coast immediately—returning here, to this town, to her family. I wrote to her kindly. She never answered. I learned later that she’d died. I also learned she’d borne a child. I was certain, of course, the child was Father’s. I was told the child had died, too, at birth.”

I exhaled a long, rattling breath. “Someone in the Riley family told you I died?”

“Your aunt.”

My mother’s eldest sister. Anger poured into me even more, a widening torrent. “My aunt.”

“I should have known better, Alice. I should have felt your presence in the world. I should have heard you calling. I’ve dreamed about you for years. Why didn’t I hear you singing before now? That’s a question I have to answer for myself.”

Because you didn’t care
, I thought cynically.
You didn’t want to be bothered with me.

“If I am going to believe any of this,” I managed, “then please tell me why we’re so different from everyone else.”

“You aren’t ready to hear that yet. You’re consumed with anger and pain and distrust. Come with us to our home, Alice, and learn about us, and learn about
yourself
. And then you’ll understand. And you’ll believe.”

“I prefer clear answers instead of vague promises.
Simple
answers.”

“That’s not possible. The truth, my dear, is far more complex than you’ve ever imagined—and far more wonderful.” She went on in her lovely voice, telling me that she and her sisters—
my
half-sisters, if I believed her—come from one of the barrier islands off Georgia’s coast, a small isle named Sainte’s Point. She said it has been owned by Bonavendiers since the late 1700s. “Our ancestor was a French privateer,” Lilith said.

“A pirate,” redheaded Pearl interjected eagerly.

Lilith silenced her with a stern glance. “A
privateer
in service to the American revolutionary government. He fought off a British warship that threatened an American village on the mainland. After the war—in return for his service—President Washington deeded him the small island across the cove from that grateful village. Our ancestor named the island Sainte’s Point. He settled there quite happily, bringing with him a quite
remarkable
wife.”

“And
she
is responsible for the very special circumstances that have existed in all her Bonavendier descendents ever since,” Pearl put in, shaking an elegant, webbed foot for mysterious emphasis. “Because she was a . . . ”

“
Shhh
.” Dark-haired Mara hissed at her.

Pearl’s eyes widened. She huffed.

Lilith gave both women a rebuking stare. They lowered their eyes. Lilith looked at me again. “Our family has so much lovely history to tell—so many traditions, so many proud memories. But, you, of course, simply need to know your own history at the moment.”

I took a deep breath. “If I do believe you, then tell me this much.
What kind of monsters are we
?”

Pearl sputtered. “Monsters?
Monsters
?”

“How dare you,” Mara hissed. “You weakling. You . . . you
pretender
.”

Lilith inhaled sharply. “Say no more, either of you.”

“But we’re
not
monsters,” Pearl cried, her expression wounded.

“Pearl, say no—”

“We’re
mermaids
!”

Silence. Pearl pressed her fingertips to her indiscreet lips. Mara gave me a slit-eyed glower, while Lilith watched me with quiet concern. Neither attempted to explain, correct, or dismiss Pearl’s claim.

“Oh,” I said. “Mermaids.”

And, moving as casually as I could, I left them there with the fish.

I am not one to accuse others
of frail whimsies and lunatic notions, considering my own strange afflictions and tastes, but the Bonavendier sisters were crazy. Not crazy in an evil way, I decided, or even a clinical one, but deluded, gently fantastical, dancing with moonlight. I never doubted that they and I shared the same freakish talents; I never seriously doubted we were blood kin. The difference, I concluded, was in defensive rationalizations and adjustments. I tried to be clear-eyed about my bizarre qualities. I mourned my oddity and went about my life as if it were a daily
mea culpa
for my unnatural ways. But the Bonavendier sisters were smug, vain, and wealthy, all of which grants lunacy the soft succor of respectability. They had designed a world for themselves in which lovely notions of mythological mermaidhood explained the unexplainable. They had clearly survived by designing their own fairy tale and inhabiting it.

I would not be taken in. Though I wanted to be.

That night, I sat in a small blue rocking chair in the deep-sea-themed living room of my cabin, my head in my hands, not a single light turned on, the darkness of early evening as tight as shut eyelids around me. I had no idea where the magnificent, insane Bonavendier sisters—my half-sisters, I did acknowledge repeatedly on instinct—had gone after I left them in the pet shop. As I rocked, head in hands, mourning the day’s events, I pushed my bare, webbed toes into a pile of seashells one of my e-mail correspondents had sent me. I’d arranged them prettily at the base of a water garden in a ceramic pot. I caressed my conch shells and sand dollars for an unwitting moment, then jerked my feet away.

Mermaid
. Then where were my iridescent scales, my transforming flippers and coquettish charm and subverted genitalia? In the water I was still two-legged Alice. And how was it that I came by my mermaid-dom through a father, not a mermaid mother? I shuddered at the Bonavendiers’ nonsense, hugging myself inside a thin white robe over plain white underwear. I was rooted in cotton reality, not silken dreams. The Bonavendier sisters could console themselves with ludicrous whimsies, but the world operated by harsher rules: We were genetic freaks, not mythological marvels.

“My father was not a merman,” I said aloud, just to assure my own intelligence.

The sound of several cars turning into my long driveway made me jerk to attention. I hurried about my dark cabin, changing the robe for an ankle-length denim skirt and oversized denim jacket, the kind of clothing I wore routinely, hiding myself inside a moving tent. I wanted to cry but had no water left in me. My life in Riley was ruined. All my efforts to get along, to be left alone, to be invisible, had been destroyed.