[story] breathing underwater
author: mina li (isanah)
e-mail: codename.mina.li [ at ] gmail dot com
"I'd like to go back to the beach again," Mom says, after she decides to stop treatment. "Just one more time, before I go."
"Go" is what she and Katie use instead of "die" or "pass away." It makes Katie feel better about it, as if Mom is going to go off somewhere and still come back, instead of having only months to live.
"All right," Katie promises, "then that's what we'll do. We'll spend a weekend up there, just you and me, as soon as I can get some time off work."
But when you're an attending physician, time is rare as gold and twice as precious, and Katie finds herself pushing back that weekend, from June (the water will still be cold), through July (too many people over for fireworks), up until August (tourist season is still in full swing, maybe it'd be better to wait and have the beach to themselves, right?)
Katie is hoping for September, sometime after Labor Day, when suddenly Mom develops a high fever and is rushed to the hospital.
This time, she doesn't come back home.
Never swim out into the open waters, the pod elders constantly warn him. There's always a chance a boat could be passing by, with men who'll stop at nothing to hunt you.
And for a while he's content to listen to them, to float carefree in the narrow bays that the boats never seem to find. When the weather is warm he waits until twilight to drop his skin and watch the sun sink into the horizon, and can't think of anything he'd want more.
Eventually, though, the bays become poky and cramped, and after a time he's had his fill of sunsets, so when the weather turns cooler, he sneaks off with his friends to the open waters, where there's nothing but the endless sky above them, where they can swim to the edges of the earth if they want. Besides, he can't remember the last time anyone saw a boat out there, especially around this time of year, so it's all theirs for the taking.
The elders won't even know they're gone.
After the funeral, Katie packs two suitcases and several boxes and drives east with only her GPS and Mom for company.
Well, Mom's ashes, to be more precise, buckled in the passenger seat with the urn lid taped down in case of any sudden starts and stops. It might look weird, but she can't bring herself to put the urn in the back along with the boxes and the laptop.
They're finally getting to go to the beach, even though it's for much longer than a weekend and Mom won't be able to enjoy it. "Take as much time as you need," Melissa had said, when she'd told her about Mom. "Don't worry about us." Katie still feels bad about leaving her co-workers for at least a month, especially when they're all swamped and flailing, but Melissa's words, after she'd apologized for the bad timing, echo in her head: "It's always bad timing, where deaths in the family are concerned."
She arrives at the summer cottage around mid-afternoon, after four hours on the road, only stopping halfway for gas. The sun shines brilliantly in a clean, cloudless sky, and the first thing that hits her when she steps out of the car is the wind off the sea, fresh, salty and a little fishy.
You can't have her, Katie tells it silently, unbuckling the urn and cradling it in her arms. Not until I've said goodbye.
One moment he's racing with his friends and the next there are ribbons of red blood unfurling in the water, cloying and metallic. He watches as the fastest seal sinks, dazed, a leaking hole in his head. When he dares to break the surface, he sees a boat with men holding those sticks that kill without ever touching their victims, and he ducks back underwater just in time to see another hit.
It's when he tries to swim away to safety that the nets close in on them, hauling them up and out into the open air and onto the boat, where his flippers tangle uselessly with the mesh. He hears the sound of stomping feet and the nets are lifted away, and for one brief moment a tiny spark of hope flares within him. Please let us go, he silently begs, let us go and I'll never swim out into the open waters again, I'll keep to the narrow bays like I ought to, so please, please--
The fastest seal is still alive, but only barely, when the men fall upon him with their sharp, gleaming knives to cut his skin away from his body.
"Well, here we are," Katie says, setting Mom's ashes on the dining table. Her voice rings loud in her ears, filling the entire place, and she grimaces at how it makes the cottage sound empty, inhospitable.
It feels so much smaller, too, now that she's no longer a kid. The shelves, veiled in their protective plastic sheets, are filled with paperbacks and what Mom called "bric-a-brac": coral, starfish, sea glass, and sand dollars. On the mantle are Dad's ship-in-a-bottle, a conch shell, and a photo framed in driftwood, from back when Katie was eight.
Seeing her younger self and her gap-toothed smile makes her throat tighten, and she can't stand it, being the only one left, even though she's thirty now and damn well able to live on her own. It's not fair: bad enough that Dad died when she was in med school from a stroke, but the doctors had told Mom she had six months, and she died after only three.
If only she could have held on longer. The hospital was beginning to get a breather then, not much of one, but enough that Katie wouldn't have felt bad about asking Melissa for a weekend off.
Just one weekend, that's all Katie had wanted. And now it's too late.
Tears prickle her eyes, and she wipes them away, turning on her heel and rushing out of the house before she starts to drown in her grief.
Outside, the sea glitters a cold slate blue in the afternoon sunlight as she trudges along the beach, her jacket her only protection from the autumn chill. It's not enough, but her scarf's back in the house and she can't stand the idea of going back and getting it.
Foam fizzes on the sand, inches from her sneakers, and she remembers how she used to jog barefoot in the surf to try and keep cool in the summer because some stupid teen magazine wrote about it, but she'd stopped after stepping on some glass that hadn't been smoothed over quite yet. That was one thing you had to be careful about, walking on this beach: it was always washing weird stuff up, like that goddamn glass or animal bones. One year there'd been a shipwreck, some old whaling vessel from back in the fifties, that had washed up, mostly driftwood by the time it reached the shore.
Suddenly she catches sight of something out of the corner of her eye, a figure, spit up by the sea. When she turns to look she sees a man--no, a kid, really--his dark hair plastered to his head, shivering and stark naked, trying to climb onto a rock.
Holy shit is all that comes to mind before Katie breaks into a sprint, tugging off her jacket.
"Hey!" she shouts. "Hey, are you okay?"
Without his skin the water is bitterly cold, but he swims on, trying to put as much distance between him and the boat as possible. His legs struggle to kick against the current and he longs for his seal's flippers.
The sea does not like him so much now that he is human.
There is no time to mourn what he has lost by leaving his skin on the boat. It is all the men want--he can still see the pile of damp fur on the deck and his friends hacked to pieces, only to be tossed over the railing.
The selkie's lungs burn with exertion and he resurfaces for air. As a seal, he can go for miles on a single breath, but in this weak human form he has to keep going in and out of the water or drown.
When he finally reaches land, it is the tide that washes him ashore, exhausted and shaking. Sand scrapes his skin raw as he pulls himself onto a rock with boneless arms. Suddenly the world above water is unbearable to him: the light stings his eyes and the wind howls in his ears. He can make out a voice in it, wavering in and out, and when he looks up there's a woman running toward him, urgent concern written on her face.
"Help," he croaks, "help--"
The woman wraps something rough and scratchy around his shoulders, her thin-lipped mouth in a tight line. "Okay," she says, her voice almost as scratchy as his not-skin, "okay, I've got you."
As soon as they get back inside, Katie wraps the boy in blankets and sits him on the couch. Hypothermia is a very real possibility, what with being in that water without anything on.
"I'll make you some tea," she says. "That should help warm you up."
"What is ‘tea'?" the boy asks.
Katie blinks. "It's something you drink," she replies carefully.
"Drink?"
Oh, God. "Wait--wait there." She heads into the kitchen to fill the kettle, trying to quell the rising panic in the pit of her stomach, along with the many, many questions that are turning up on the tip of her tongue. Besides what's your name and where are you from, she'd like to ask him what were you doing out there? and did you hit your head?. Maybe she'll need to take him to the ER--something else is there, just beneath the immediate issue of making sure he doesn't freeze to death or catch pneumonia, but whatever it is, it's probably beyond her field of expertise.
When the kettle whistles she's got a mug ready, with a little bag of chamomile waiting in it. She finds some honey in the cupboard, dark amber and clumpy, and she adds a spoonful to the mug, because the sugar in it will warm him up faster.
"All right," she says, coming out of the kitchen, "hold that in your lap for a minute and wait for it to cool." When she wraps his hands around the steaming mug, she notices, much to her alarm, that there are pale perfect webs between his fingers, soft as newborn skin, all ending at the first knuckle. She's seen nothing like it before. Most cases of syndactyly only have some fingers fused together, that much she knows, sometimes all of them, but never with this freedom of movement.
"What happened out there?" Katie asks quietly.
The boy mutely shakes his head and some of the blanket falls away, revealing a bony shoulder and the outline of his sternum. Gently, Katie tucks it back into place. He's too thin for her liking, as if he's been starved, but there are no bruises or cuts on his skin, although in the light it has an odd bluish cast.
"You know, I'm a doctor. I make people better," she adds, seeing the boy's confused gaze. His large eyes are a clear gray-green, the color of waves just before they crash on the sand. "Maybe if you tell me what's wrong, I can try and make you better too."
He opens his mouth, about to say something, and then shuts it, but not before Katie catches a glimpse of sharp pointed teeth. Then he takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"There's nothing you can do to make me better," he finally says.
Later, when the woman has left him alone to rest, the selkie wonders if maybe it would have been better if he had died on the boat with his friends.
Everything up here is wrong. His legs are as useless on land as they are in the water, unable to go for more than a few shaky steps before collapsing underneath him. The shapeless not-skins the woman wrapped around him are heavy, scratchy and tangle unpleasantly around his body, and he can't even pretend he's floating on his back, not with the way he's sinking into this "bed" like a stone, with no current washing against his skin.
At least the woman's kept the sun out of the place. It was nice to sit in its rays for a short while, and beautiful enough when seen from underwater, but above the surface it burns bloody orange even when his eyes are closed.
He can hear her still, all footsteps and muttered singing, punctuated every now and then by a thud. It irritates him, how even a whisper hurts his ears in this thin dry air. There is nothing soft or smooth up here on land. Even the woman isn't all that soft, with that dark fringe of her hair hanging over the oval of her face like a shadow and that low scratchy voice.
But the woman is kind, he knows that much. And she's all he has right now, in this wretched place, since he can't ever go back home to his pod, to his sea.
When sleep finally comes for him, he dreams of swimming in endless water that's red as blood.
In the morning, the boy's hair has dried to a mop of unruly brown curls, and while his skin is still cool to the touch Katie finds his vital signs to be much better than yesterday, so she digs in her suitcase to find something for him to wear.
Dressing him proves difficult. Katie realizes that he's never worn clothes before, from the way he tries to tug off the T-shirt and sweatpants she gives him. His skin is smooth and strangely hairless--the clothes are probably irritating him, but there's no way in hell he's walking around naked, at least not in front of her. (He hates the flip-flops even more.)
Breakfast is instant oatmeal because the boy needs something easy to digest and because it's all Katie has on hand right now that's nutritious. He can hold a spoon well enough, once Katie's shown him a few times, although drinking from a cup is still tricky for him.
She feels uneasy about leaving him alone by himself, so after they eat she guides him to the car and they drive into town for groceries and clothes. The boy comes along meekly, legs wobbling as he holds onto Katie's arm for support.
They're walking to the market, Katie going over a mental list of what to buy (fruits, veggies, milk, meat and bread for starters) when the boy abruptly lets out a sharp, frightened cry, cowering against her.
"What is it?" Katie asks.
The boy says nothing for a long time, but finally points with a trembling finger, and when Katie turns her head to look she sees the docks, lined with bobbing boats.
There's nothing to worry about, she's about to say, they're just boats, and then that's when she sees it, a clear membrane sliding across each eye as if blinking away tears.
And suddenly the puzzle pieces all come together. Of course he's never drank liquid or worn clothes before. Of course boats would scare him. If she's right about where she thinks he's from, boats are one of the most dangerous things in the world.
"Okay," she tells the boy softly, giving him a stiff awkward hug, "we'll find another way to the market. Come with me."
They reach a compromise when it comes to the clothes--he's to wear them when they go into town, shoes and all, but here, in the house, he doesn't have to wear a shirt unless it's cold. He has to wear pants, though, both the inner and outer pairs, except when it's bedtime.
"Why only bedtime?" he asks. "I feel better without them."
The woman--Katie--takes a breath, fumbling with her words. "Because that's how things are done up here," she says.
It's not much of an explanation, and he finds it ridiculous, but Katie clearly finds his nakedness unnerving, so he keeps that to himself. (He hasn't told her his name, not because he doesn't like her, but because his human voice and tongue can't form it properly. Maybe he'll have to find a name to use here, but Katie hasn't asked him yet, and he's not sure he's ready, anyway.)
Once they get home she sits him down on the large soft sponge that's not a bed, same as the day before. In front of him there's a wooden slab on legs, and on top of that there's a smaller slab that's black and shiny. He watches as Katie opens it up, revealing a glowing rectangle. Seconds later sound is coming from it, something jagged and sharp, along with a man's singing that scrapes against his ears like gritty sand, his voice scratchier than Katie's or anything else he's heard since leaving the sea.
He huddles over, pressing his head against the couch to try and muffle the broken-shell singing, but when that doesn't work, he gets up, tottering over to where Katie is to try and get away from it.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
She's in front of what looks like a wooden shell, split up into many neat chambers all on top of one another, taking more slabs out (although they seem softer than the ones in front of the sponge) and putting them into another, smaller shell.
"I'm packing up," she replies, and as she takes out more slabs he notices that her hair is threaded with white here and there, like moonlit ripples. "I need to put everything away and get it back home, or in storage."
"Home? But isn't this your home?"
"No. It's...it's where I used to stay, sometimes, with my parents. When I was a kid." Katie's mouth tightens into a thin line, as if she's in pain.
"Where are your parents?"
"Gone," she says, and not a word more.
They fall into a routine as the days go by.
After breakfast, Katie works on packing up the house, going from room to room. She leaves the boy to his own devices, mostly, although she checks in from time to time to see if he needs something.
The boy learns to eat and drink from plates and cups by himself, to walk unassisted. Every afternoon, just after lunch, Katie takes him by the hand and they go for a walk along the beach. Although the boy goes without shoes, he doesn't try to wade in the surf. Instead, he stares at the water with a look between yearning and trepidation.
Katie hasn't tried to ask him about his past yet--he would be understandably hesitant, especially if she's right about him being from the sea. The questions she had still linger, at times: what are you? and why did you come here? and do you ever want to go back home? But she can't bring herself to ask him any of them, not when she has that same reluctance with talking about Mom. It's not that others don't mean well, but instead of getting used to the stricken looks, murmured condolences and hugs, she's gotten so sensitive that when anyone else asks about Mom, she has to brace herself.
This is the one thing Katie understands about him, all too well.
One day, the selkie asks Katie: "Why do you have your laptop make music all the time?" (So many new words to collect, and all of them so hard to remember.)
Katie looks up from the sink, mildly surprised. "Oh," she says, "It helps pass the time. Makes things a little easier to do." Despite her smile, there's a strained note in her voice that reminds him of when he asked about her parents.
"You don't like it?" she asks. "I can turn it off, if you want." Without waiting for him to answer, she goes over to her bedroom, where the laptop is, and soon the music stops.
"There we go," Katie says, "nice and quiet."
And it is nice, a blessed calm silence after all that noise that still hurts, even if it's not as bad as before. He basks in the stillness that soaks into the house, in hearing nothing but the gulls and the crashing waves outside.
But after a few moments he hears Katie muttering to herself, low and agitated, followed by a sudden loud clatter and curses. He ignores it as they subside, but soon after there's a sharp bang and Katie is heading to her bedroom again while rubbing her knee.
"God, I need some music or I'm going to go insane!" She emerges with a tiny metal slab with a white cord that splits into two halfway, each end tipped with a small bulb. The selkie watches her put one bulb in each ear, and when she presses the slab, the tension in her face dissolves instantly.
As she goes back to her work with contented humming, the house suddenly feels empty and a little lonely in all the restored quiet.
For Katie, music makes the house feel less hollow and haunted--without it the silence threatens to smother her. Somehow, hearing it for too long is much too unnerving for her.
Thanks to her mp3 player, soon her ears are filled with the jangly guitars and heavy drumbeats of her favorite band, and little by little the emptiness retreats back in its corner and her head clears. Relieved, she returns to the task at hand, which is sorting out the bathroom. Some of the stuff she's found inside the drawers and medicine cabinet has got to be older than she is: a tube of lotion, yellowed with age, a can of hairspray, a bar of soap so old it's got blackened cracks running down its length, and a dried-up-sponge, among other things. Things like these she throws away, but an unopened jar of rosewater hand cream and some candles she finds hiding in the shelves she decides to keep, and so they go into a box.
She's pouring some suspicious liquid out of a bottle that reads "Dettol" when the music abruptly cuts out. A quick check of the mp3 player screen reveals that the battery is low, and she grunts, frustrated.
"Dammit! I thought I charged this thing last night!" Either she forgot or it's just getting old, although it's more likely she forgot. Charging the mp3 player is like locking the door every morning before going to work: so automatic that it's easy to forget to do it.
The boy looks up as she comes out of the bathroom once more. "What's wrong? I thought you wanted to listen to music."
"I can't," Katie says. "It...it..." She struggles to explain the concept of charging devices for a few seconds, tapping the mp3 player with a finger. "It's out of energy. It...well, it needs to be fed."
"Oh." The boy gazes at her with a thoughtful frown. "What will you do, then?"
Katie shrugs helplessly. "I'll just have to deal until I can use it again," she says, and heads into her bedroom to plug it in. It's only for a couple hours, she tells herself, so suck it up until then.
She goes back into the bathroom again, where the bottle sits on the counter, half full and its bottom dark with silt, and returns grimly to emptying it, making a list in her head of other tasks to try and keep out the ringing silence: rinse out the bottle, put it somewhere for recycling, clean the cabinet, tackle the big drawer, tackle the shelves, dust everything...
Then something cuts through her frenzied mental chatter: a soft voice, high and clear, singing a song without words. It reminds Katie of a breeze blowing in through the curtains, of warm amber sunbeams, of lazy soap bubbles floating in the air. Somehow it eases her nerves, smoothing back wisps of hair from her brow and taking her face in both hands, as if assuring her things will be all right.
Shyly, she stands in the doorway, listening to the boy sing. The melody renders her spellbound: she's never heard anything like this before--hell, nobody has, probably--but somehow she feels like there are bits and pieces she knows, just out of reach.
Nevertheless, it's one of the most beautiful things to ever reach Katie's ears, and when he's finished, the last note lingers between them like faint mother-of-pearl iridescence, and as that fades, she realizes she is feeling much better.
"Thank you," she says. "That helps."
The boy nods, and she sees him smile for the first time.
Human food, to the selkie, has myriad textures and flavors. Some are completely new to him, like "sweet" (apples and peaches), or "crunchy" (popcorn). There is fish, too, but up on land humans don't eat it as is, instead cooking it over the stove, either covered in breadcrumbs or in thick stews with cream and vegetables. (When he asks Katie about not cooking it, she shakes her head and tells him he could get sick if it's not fresh.)
"What did you usually eat besides fish?" she asks.
The selkie doesn't answer. Instead, he searches for that hard shell called a bucket, and once he's got it, he takes Katie by the hand and leads her outside onto the beach, still not saying a word.
He wades gingerly into the water, where it's still shallow, and Katie soon follows, taking off her shoes and socks and picking her way after him. After a time they come to some rocks, left high and dry by the tide, and he points at a crevice that is brimming with periwinkles.
"These are good," he says, and puts them in his bucket. He lifts up a strand of kelp, inspecting it, and adds a few handfuls to the bucket too. Another rock has a group of mussels clinging to its face, and he and Katie busy themselves with peeling them off. The bucket isn't all that full when they're done, but as they keep walking along the shoreline they find more rocks, and soon the bucket is so heavy that both of them need to carry it together.
"You don't need to cook these," he tells Katie. "They're fine just on their own."
She wrinkles her nose, watching a periwinkle wriggle out of its shell. "I'll pass."
"You're still going to cook them?" the selkie asks, dismayed. "They're fresh, aren't they?"
"Well, you can eat them raw if you want," Katie says. "But I like my shellfish with a little white wine. I guess the kelp would be good with some dressing."
He sighs, shaking his head. "Don't ruin good food."
"You have your ways, I have mine," Katie replies lightly.
Almost everything is in boxes now. Whether or not they're packed properly or in a messy jumble depends on each individual box. Otherwise, the house is empty, save for the kitchen and bedrooms.
The past few weeks have gone quickly between taking care of the boy and sorting out the house, and yet her life back home working in the hospital seems like a distant memory now, another time in another world.
Most of what's in the kitchen are things she needs, save for a little spiky plant sprouting from a conch shell. She'd found it in a kitschy shop last week and bought it on impulse--no need for soil, and only needed a little water every few days, which was just about perfect for her lifestyle, anyway. The boy seemed to like the plants too, so he also has one, growing out of a sea urchin.
"Are you going to come back here, after you've gotten everything out?" the boy asks.
Katie shakes her head, handing him a wet fork to dry. "Dunno. This was mainly Mom and Dad's place. It's not really the same without them. And I don't think I can really get time off once I go back home..."
"Why not?"
"You know how I'm a doctor?"
The boy nods. "You make people better," he says.
"Yeah. Well." Katie soaps up a pair of spoons. "It's hard to get time off when there's so many people who get sick or hurt, because I need to try and make them better. And I've only been a doctor for a year or two, so there's still a lot for me to learn."
The boy's eyes grow wide with alarm. "But if you're not coming back, then what will you do with this?" He gestures vaguely at the entire house.
Katie shrugs as she hands him the spoons. "Sell it, maybe. Depends on how much it'd go for on the market." Maybe not that much, though, given the storms that battered the coast in recent years. If things keep going this way, sooner or later this town will be underwater.
The spoons clatter onto the floor, but when Katie asks if there's anything wrong, the boy doesn't answer.
Later that night, when Katie is asleep, the selkie slips out of the house and onto the beach. After so much time on land, the nighttime sea looks dangerous, even in the light of the full moon, but he wades in anyway. The waves lap against ankle and knee and thigh, cold and biting against his human skin, but he grits his teeth and keeps walking.
The sea is his home. Surely it will take him back even without his seal skin. What is he to do after Katie leaves the house for good? Life up here is so difficult, so complicated. Without her, he is as good as done for. What else can he do but try and return to the life he does know?
Once the water is deep enough, the selkie takes a breath and plunges his head under. Maybe if he swims far enough, he'll get everything back: skin, whiskers, flippers and all. But except for the muted roar below the surface, the sea feels wrong to him, the taste of brine strong and bitter on his tongue and the current threatening to pull him under until he drowns.
Maybe it would be better if he drowned. He'll never see his pod again, and even if he did, what good would he be without his skin? He'll never be able to swim properly, much less race with his friends, all dead and gone. What's the use of waiting for death?
Something takes him by the waist, pulling him back toward shore. He struggles, trying to break free from its clutches, but whatever it is holds fast until he's dragged back onto the beach, dripping wet and coughing.
Katie looms above him, distressed. "What the hell were you doing?" she asks.
"Why should you care?" the selkie snaps back. "You're going to leave me anyway."
"For the last time," Katie says, toweling off her wet hair, "I'm not leaving you."
The boy huddles miserably inside his blankets. "But you said you weren't going to come back here."
"Well, that doesn't mean I'm not taking you with me." Katie plops down on the couch next to him, rubbing his back soothingly. "I was going to do that all along."
The boy's eyes grow wide. "You're going to take me home?" he asks.
There is so much hope and awe in his voice that it breaks Katie's heart. "Of course," she says, with a reassuring smile. "I can't leave you to fend for yourself here." She glances down at the boy's webbed hands thoughtfully.
"I'm glad," the boy says, "because I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Were you trying to go back to your own home?" she asks. Her own hands fly to her mouth immediately once the words are out; they hang between the two of them uneasily in the empty living room. She's known, for a while, that he comes from the sea, but it's only now that she's dared mention it out loud.
But to her surprise, the boy nods. He stares into Katie's face with those large green eyes, as if searching for something. Then he leans back a little, apparently satisfied.
"I was racing with my friends out on the open waters," he begins. "We weren't supposed to go out there--it's not safe, the elders said--but we did, anyway. There was a boat, and the men on it, they caught us in their nets and started cutting away the skins. The rest went back into the water."
"Oh my God," Katie breathes. "How did you even--how did you get out of there alive?"
The boy smiles at her sadly. "All they wanted was my skin, so I gave it to them."
"But now you can't ever go back home," she says.
He shakes his head in agreement. "No, I can't."
"Why can't you keep this place?" the selkie asks. "You stayed here with your family before, didn't you?"
Katie's brow furrows. "Yeah, but that was when I was still a kid, for the most part." She lets out a sad little sigh, running her fingers against the back of the couch. "You know," she says, as if sharing a secret with him, "Mom and I, we were supposed to come here, one last time, before she...passed away. Died."
The selkie doesn't say anything, waiting for her to go on.
"She was very sick by then, but that was all she wanted, just a few days up here, in this house. So I said ‘all right, as soon as I can get some time off of work, we'll drive up here, you and me.' But I couldn't find any time, not with work, and she..."
Katie turns her hands palms up, and exhales, pained. "She was gone, just like that. And I thought she'd still be around by the end of the year."
Something catches the selkie's eye: that one picture, resting on the mantle, framed in gray-brown driftwood. "Is that her in there?" he asks, pointing to it. There are three people in the picture: a man, woman, and little girl on the beach, all wearing wide smiles.
Katie blinks. "Yeah, it is." She gets up from the couch, taking the picture from the mantle. "This was from a long time ago," she says, sitting back down. "I was eight when they took it." She points to the little girl's face, and the selkie sees the resemblance hiding within her plump cheeks and missing teeth.
"And those are my parents." She points to the man and woman. The woman looks more like Katie does now, with the same dark hair and oval face, but there is a light in her while Katie is always hidden in shadows.
"They had this place for such a long time," Katie says, her voice growing scratchier with distress. "It was here, even before I was born. I was never alone in this house before, but when I came here, I just couldn't stand it, how empty it is, because they're gone and they've left me here all alone and I...I..."
A drop of water falls on the glass, and another, and yet another still as her shoulders begin to shake. She wipes her eyes furiously, but the tears keep coming down, and within seconds she is sobbing.
The selkie has no words, so instead he leans into her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, and holds her tightly against him. For a moment Katie tenses, stunned, but soon she is crying again, so he holds her even tighter and waits for her to stop.
In the morning, the two of them wade into the water, hand in hand, to scatter Mom's ashes. They pour easily from the urn, most of them disappearing straight into the waves, but a little stays behind for a time, floating above the surface in a hazy cloud that shimmers in the newborn sunrise.
They stand there for a while, looking out toward the sea one last time, and that's when Katie hears something in between the crash and fizz of the surf:
Thanks for coming back.
But nobody is there except for herself and the selkie, his cool hand wound around hers, and soon the cloud of ashes grows thinner and thinner until it, too, vanishes into the breeze. When the last few wisps are gone, they turn around and leave the water without so much as a backward glance.
It's all right, Katie tells herself. They have each other now, and even if it doesn't completely replace what was lost, it fills the emptiness somewhat, and that is enough.
the end
A/N: Title is taken from the Metric song of the same name, which had a hand in inspiring this story.
Many thanks go out to the friends who volunteered as betas--I couldn't have done it without your help!
e-mail: codename.mina.li [ at ] gmail dot com
"I'd like to go back to the beach again," Mom says, after she decides to stop treatment. "Just one more time, before I go."
"Go" is what she and Katie use instead of "die" or "pass away." It makes Katie feel better about it, as if Mom is going to go off somewhere and still come back, instead of having only months to live.
"All right," Katie promises, "then that's what we'll do. We'll spend a weekend up there, just you and me, as soon as I can get some time off work."
But when you're an attending physician, time is rare as gold and twice as precious, and Katie finds herself pushing back that weekend, from June (the water will still be cold), through July (too many people over for fireworks), up until August (tourist season is still in full swing, maybe it'd be better to wait and have the beach to themselves, right?)
Katie is hoping for September, sometime after Labor Day, when suddenly Mom develops a high fever and is rushed to the hospital.
This time, she doesn't come back home.
Never swim out into the open waters, the pod elders constantly warn him. There's always a chance a boat could be passing by, with men who'll stop at nothing to hunt you.
And for a while he's content to listen to them, to float carefree in the narrow bays that the boats never seem to find. When the weather is warm he waits until twilight to drop his skin and watch the sun sink into the horizon, and can't think of anything he'd want more.
Eventually, though, the bays become poky and cramped, and after a time he's had his fill of sunsets, so when the weather turns cooler, he sneaks off with his friends to the open waters, where there's nothing but the endless sky above them, where they can swim to the edges of the earth if they want. Besides, he can't remember the last time anyone saw a boat out there, especially around this time of year, so it's all theirs for the taking.
The elders won't even know they're gone.
After the funeral, Katie packs two suitcases and several boxes and drives east with only her GPS and Mom for company.
Well, Mom's ashes, to be more precise, buckled in the passenger seat with the urn lid taped down in case of any sudden starts and stops. It might look weird, but she can't bring herself to put the urn in the back along with the boxes and the laptop.
They're finally getting to go to the beach, even though it's for much longer than a weekend and Mom won't be able to enjoy it. "Take as much time as you need," Melissa had said, when she'd told her about Mom. "Don't worry about us." Katie still feels bad about leaving her co-workers for at least a month, especially when they're all swamped and flailing, but Melissa's words, after she'd apologized for the bad timing, echo in her head: "It's always bad timing, where deaths in the family are concerned."
She arrives at the summer cottage around mid-afternoon, after four hours on the road, only stopping halfway for gas. The sun shines brilliantly in a clean, cloudless sky, and the first thing that hits her when she steps out of the car is the wind off the sea, fresh, salty and a little fishy.
You can't have her, Katie tells it silently, unbuckling the urn and cradling it in her arms. Not until I've said goodbye.
One moment he's racing with his friends and the next there are ribbons of red blood unfurling in the water, cloying and metallic. He watches as the fastest seal sinks, dazed, a leaking hole in his head. When he dares to break the surface, he sees a boat with men holding those sticks that kill without ever touching their victims, and he ducks back underwater just in time to see another hit.
It's when he tries to swim away to safety that the nets close in on them, hauling them up and out into the open air and onto the boat, where his flippers tangle uselessly with the mesh. He hears the sound of stomping feet and the nets are lifted away, and for one brief moment a tiny spark of hope flares within him. Please let us go, he silently begs, let us go and I'll never swim out into the open waters again, I'll keep to the narrow bays like I ought to, so please, please--
The fastest seal is still alive, but only barely, when the men fall upon him with their sharp, gleaming knives to cut his skin away from his body.
"Well, here we are," Katie says, setting Mom's ashes on the dining table. Her voice rings loud in her ears, filling the entire place, and she grimaces at how it makes the cottage sound empty, inhospitable.
It feels so much smaller, too, now that she's no longer a kid. The shelves, veiled in their protective plastic sheets, are filled with paperbacks and what Mom called "bric-a-brac": coral, starfish, sea glass, and sand dollars. On the mantle are Dad's ship-in-a-bottle, a conch shell, and a photo framed in driftwood, from back when Katie was eight.
Seeing her younger self and her gap-toothed smile makes her throat tighten, and she can't stand it, being the only one left, even though she's thirty now and damn well able to live on her own. It's not fair: bad enough that Dad died when she was in med school from a stroke, but the doctors had told Mom she had six months, and she died after only three.
If only she could have held on longer. The hospital was beginning to get a breather then, not much of one, but enough that Katie wouldn't have felt bad about asking Melissa for a weekend off.
Just one weekend, that's all Katie had wanted. And now it's too late.
Tears prickle her eyes, and she wipes them away, turning on her heel and rushing out of the house before she starts to drown in her grief.
Outside, the sea glitters a cold slate blue in the afternoon sunlight as she trudges along the beach, her jacket her only protection from the autumn chill. It's not enough, but her scarf's back in the house and she can't stand the idea of going back and getting it.
Foam fizzes on the sand, inches from her sneakers, and she remembers how she used to jog barefoot in the surf to try and keep cool in the summer because some stupid teen magazine wrote about it, but she'd stopped after stepping on some glass that hadn't been smoothed over quite yet. That was one thing you had to be careful about, walking on this beach: it was always washing weird stuff up, like that goddamn glass or animal bones. One year there'd been a shipwreck, some old whaling vessel from back in the fifties, that had washed up, mostly driftwood by the time it reached the shore.
Suddenly she catches sight of something out of the corner of her eye, a figure, spit up by the sea. When she turns to look she sees a man--no, a kid, really--his dark hair plastered to his head, shivering and stark naked, trying to climb onto a rock.
Holy shit is all that comes to mind before Katie breaks into a sprint, tugging off her jacket.
"Hey!" she shouts. "Hey, are you okay?"
Without his skin the water is bitterly cold, but he swims on, trying to put as much distance between him and the boat as possible. His legs struggle to kick against the current and he longs for his seal's flippers.
The sea does not like him so much now that he is human.
There is no time to mourn what he has lost by leaving his skin on the boat. It is all the men want--he can still see the pile of damp fur on the deck and his friends hacked to pieces, only to be tossed over the railing.
The selkie's lungs burn with exertion and he resurfaces for air. As a seal, he can go for miles on a single breath, but in this weak human form he has to keep going in and out of the water or drown.
When he finally reaches land, it is the tide that washes him ashore, exhausted and shaking. Sand scrapes his skin raw as he pulls himself onto a rock with boneless arms. Suddenly the world above water is unbearable to him: the light stings his eyes and the wind howls in his ears. He can make out a voice in it, wavering in and out, and when he looks up there's a woman running toward him, urgent concern written on her face.
"Help," he croaks, "help--"
The woman wraps something rough and scratchy around his shoulders, her thin-lipped mouth in a tight line. "Okay," she says, her voice almost as scratchy as his not-skin, "okay, I've got you."
As soon as they get back inside, Katie wraps the boy in blankets and sits him on the couch. Hypothermia is a very real possibility, what with being in that water without anything on.
"I'll make you some tea," she says. "That should help warm you up."
"What is ‘tea'?" the boy asks.
Katie blinks. "It's something you drink," she replies carefully.
"Drink?"
Oh, God. "Wait--wait there." She heads into the kitchen to fill the kettle, trying to quell the rising panic in the pit of her stomach, along with the many, many questions that are turning up on the tip of her tongue. Besides what's your name and where are you from, she'd like to ask him what were you doing out there? and did you hit your head?. Maybe she'll need to take him to the ER--something else is there, just beneath the immediate issue of making sure he doesn't freeze to death or catch pneumonia, but whatever it is, it's probably beyond her field of expertise.
When the kettle whistles she's got a mug ready, with a little bag of chamomile waiting in it. She finds some honey in the cupboard, dark amber and clumpy, and she adds a spoonful to the mug, because the sugar in it will warm him up faster.
"All right," she says, coming out of the kitchen, "hold that in your lap for a minute and wait for it to cool." When she wraps his hands around the steaming mug, she notices, much to her alarm, that there are pale perfect webs between his fingers, soft as newborn skin, all ending at the first knuckle. She's seen nothing like it before. Most cases of syndactyly only have some fingers fused together, that much she knows, sometimes all of them, but never with this freedom of movement.
"What happened out there?" Katie asks quietly.
The boy mutely shakes his head and some of the blanket falls away, revealing a bony shoulder and the outline of his sternum. Gently, Katie tucks it back into place. He's too thin for her liking, as if he's been starved, but there are no bruises or cuts on his skin, although in the light it has an odd bluish cast.
"You know, I'm a doctor. I make people better," she adds, seeing the boy's confused gaze. His large eyes are a clear gray-green, the color of waves just before they crash on the sand. "Maybe if you tell me what's wrong, I can try and make you better too."
He opens his mouth, about to say something, and then shuts it, but not before Katie catches a glimpse of sharp pointed teeth. Then he takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"There's nothing you can do to make me better," he finally says.
Later, when the woman has left him alone to rest, the selkie wonders if maybe it would have been better if he had died on the boat with his friends.
Everything up here is wrong. His legs are as useless on land as they are in the water, unable to go for more than a few shaky steps before collapsing underneath him. The shapeless not-skins the woman wrapped around him are heavy, scratchy and tangle unpleasantly around his body, and he can't even pretend he's floating on his back, not with the way he's sinking into this "bed" like a stone, with no current washing against his skin.
At least the woman's kept the sun out of the place. It was nice to sit in its rays for a short while, and beautiful enough when seen from underwater, but above the surface it burns bloody orange even when his eyes are closed.
He can hear her still, all footsteps and muttered singing, punctuated every now and then by a thud. It irritates him, how even a whisper hurts his ears in this thin dry air. There is nothing soft or smooth up here on land. Even the woman isn't all that soft, with that dark fringe of her hair hanging over the oval of her face like a shadow and that low scratchy voice.
But the woman is kind, he knows that much. And she's all he has right now, in this wretched place, since he can't ever go back home to his pod, to his sea.
When sleep finally comes for him, he dreams of swimming in endless water that's red as blood.
In the morning, the boy's hair has dried to a mop of unruly brown curls, and while his skin is still cool to the touch Katie finds his vital signs to be much better than yesterday, so she digs in her suitcase to find something for him to wear.
Dressing him proves difficult. Katie realizes that he's never worn clothes before, from the way he tries to tug off the T-shirt and sweatpants she gives him. His skin is smooth and strangely hairless--the clothes are probably irritating him, but there's no way in hell he's walking around naked, at least not in front of her. (He hates the flip-flops even more.)
Breakfast is instant oatmeal because the boy needs something easy to digest and because it's all Katie has on hand right now that's nutritious. He can hold a spoon well enough, once Katie's shown him a few times, although drinking from a cup is still tricky for him.
She feels uneasy about leaving him alone by himself, so after they eat she guides him to the car and they drive into town for groceries and clothes. The boy comes along meekly, legs wobbling as he holds onto Katie's arm for support.
They're walking to the market, Katie going over a mental list of what to buy (fruits, veggies, milk, meat and bread for starters) when the boy abruptly lets out a sharp, frightened cry, cowering against her.
"What is it?" Katie asks.
The boy says nothing for a long time, but finally points with a trembling finger, and when Katie turns her head to look she sees the docks, lined with bobbing boats.
There's nothing to worry about, she's about to say, they're just boats, and then that's when she sees it, a clear membrane sliding across each eye as if blinking away tears.
And suddenly the puzzle pieces all come together. Of course he's never drank liquid or worn clothes before. Of course boats would scare him. If she's right about where she thinks he's from, boats are one of the most dangerous things in the world.
"Okay," she tells the boy softly, giving him a stiff awkward hug, "we'll find another way to the market. Come with me."
They reach a compromise when it comes to the clothes--he's to wear them when they go into town, shoes and all, but here, in the house, he doesn't have to wear a shirt unless it's cold. He has to wear pants, though, both the inner and outer pairs, except when it's bedtime.
"Why only bedtime?" he asks. "I feel better without them."
The woman--Katie--takes a breath, fumbling with her words. "Because that's how things are done up here," she says.
It's not much of an explanation, and he finds it ridiculous, but Katie clearly finds his nakedness unnerving, so he keeps that to himself. (He hasn't told her his name, not because he doesn't like her, but because his human voice and tongue can't form it properly. Maybe he'll have to find a name to use here, but Katie hasn't asked him yet, and he's not sure he's ready, anyway.)
Once they get home she sits him down on the large soft sponge that's not a bed, same as the day before. In front of him there's a wooden slab on legs, and on top of that there's a smaller slab that's black and shiny. He watches as Katie opens it up, revealing a glowing rectangle. Seconds later sound is coming from it, something jagged and sharp, along with a man's singing that scrapes against his ears like gritty sand, his voice scratchier than Katie's or anything else he's heard since leaving the sea.
He huddles over, pressing his head against the couch to try and muffle the broken-shell singing, but when that doesn't work, he gets up, tottering over to where Katie is to try and get away from it.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
She's in front of what looks like a wooden shell, split up into many neat chambers all on top of one another, taking more slabs out (although they seem softer than the ones in front of the sponge) and putting them into another, smaller shell.
"I'm packing up," she replies, and as she takes out more slabs he notices that her hair is threaded with white here and there, like moonlit ripples. "I need to put everything away and get it back home, or in storage."
"Home? But isn't this your home?"
"No. It's...it's where I used to stay, sometimes, with my parents. When I was a kid." Katie's mouth tightens into a thin line, as if she's in pain.
"Where are your parents?"
"Gone," she says, and not a word more.
They fall into a routine as the days go by.
After breakfast, Katie works on packing up the house, going from room to room. She leaves the boy to his own devices, mostly, although she checks in from time to time to see if he needs something.
The boy learns to eat and drink from plates and cups by himself, to walk unassisted. Every afternoon, just after lunch, Katie takes him by the hand and they go for a walk along the beach. Although the boy goes without shoes, he doesn't try to wade in the surf. Instead, he stares at the water with a look between yearning and trepidation.
Katie hasn't tried to ask him about his past yet--he would be understandably hesitant, especially if she's right about him being from the sea. The questions she had still linger, at times: what are you? and why did you come here? and do you ever want to go back home? But she can't bring herself to ask him any of them, not when she has that same reluctance with talking about Mom. It's not that others don't mean well, but instead of getting used to the stricken looks, murmured condolences and hugs, she's gotten so sensitive that when anyone else asks about Mom, she has to brace herself.
This is the one thing Katie understands about him, all too well.
One day, the selkie asks Katie: "Why do you have your laptop make music all the time?" (So many new words to collect, and all of them so hard to remember.)
Katie looks up from the sink, mildly surprised. "Oh," she says, "It helps pass the time. Makes things a little easier to do." Despite her smile, there's a strained note in her voice that reminds him of when he asked about her parents.
"You don't like it?" she asks. "I can turn it off, if you want." Without waiting for him to answer, she goes over to her bedroom, where the laptop is, and soon the music stops.
"There we go," Katie says, "nice and quiet."
And it is nice, a blessed calm silence after all that noise that still hurts, even if it's not as bad as before. He basks in the stillness that soaks into the house, in hearing nothing but the gulls and the crashing waves outside.
But after a few moments he hears Katie muttering to herself, low and agitated, followed by a sudden loud clatter and curses. He ignores it as they subside, but soon after there's a sharp bang and Katie is heading to her bedroom again while rubbing her knee.
"God, I need some music or I'm going to go insane!" She emerges with a tiny metal slab with a white cord that splits into two halfway, each end tipped with a small bulb. The selkie watches her put one bulb in each ear, and when she presses the slab, the tension in her face dissolves instantly.
As she goes back to her work with contented humming, the house suddenly feels empty and a little lonely in all the restored quiet.
For Katie, music makes the house feel less hollow and haunted--without it the silence threatens to smother her. Somehow, hearing it for too long is much too unnerving for her.
Thanks to her mp3 player, soon her ears are filled with the jangly guitars and heavy drumbeats of her favorite band, and little by little the emptiness retreats back in its corner and her head clears. Relieved, she returns to the task at hand, which is sorting out the bathroom. Some of the stuff she's found inside the drawers and medicine cabinet has got to be older than she is: a tube of lotion, yellowed with age, a can of hairspray, a bar of soap so old it's got blackened cracks running down its length, and a dried-up-sponge, among other things. Things like these she throws away, but an unopened jar of rosewater hand cream and some candles she finds hiding in the shelves she decides to keep, and so they go into a box.
She's pouring some suspicious liquid out of a bottle that reads "Dettol" when the music abruptly cuts out. A quick check of the mp3 player screen reveals that the battery is low, and she grunts, frustrated.
"Dammit! I thought I charged this thing last night!" Either she forgot or it's just getting old, although it's more likely she forgot. Charging the mp3 player is like locking the door every morning before going to work: so automatic that it's easy to forget to do it.
The boy looks up as she comes out of the bathroom once more. "What's wrong? I thought you wanted to listen to music."
"I can't," Katie says. "It...it..." She struggles to explain the concept of charging devices for a few seconds, tapping the mp3 player with a finger. "It's out of energy. It...well, it needs to be fed."
"Oh." The boy gazes at her with a thoughtful frown. "What will you do, then?"
Katie shrugs helplessly. "I'll just have to deal until I can use it again," she says, and heads into her bedroom to plug it in. It's only for a couple hours, she tells herself, so suck it up until then.
She goes back into the bathroom again, where the bottle sits on the counter, half full and its bottom dark with silt, and returns grimly to emptying it, making a list in her head of other tasks to try and keep out the ringing silence: rinse out the bottle, put it somewhere for recycling, clean the cabinet, tackle the big drawer, tackle the shelves, dust everything...
Then something cuts through her frenzied mental chatter: a soft voice, high and clear, singing a song without words. It reminds Katie of a breeze blowing in through the curtains, of warm amber sunbeams, of lazy soap bubbles floating in the air. Somehow it eases her nerves, smoothing back wisps of hair from her brow and taking her face in both hands, as if assuring her things will be all right.
Shyly, she stands in the doorway, listening to the boy sing. The melody renders her spellbound: she's never heard anything like this before--hell, nobody has, probably--but somehow she feels like there are bits and pieces she knows, just out of reach.
Nevertheless, it's one of the most beautiful things to ever reach Katie's ears, and when he's finished, the last note lingers between them like faint mother-of-pearl iridescence, and as that fades, she realizes she is feeling much better.
"Thank you," she says. "That helps."
The boy nods, and she sees him smile for the first time.
Human food, to the selkie, has myriad textures and flavors. Some are completely new to him, like "sweet" (apples and peaches), or "crunchy" (popcorn). There is fish, too, but up on land humans don't eat it as is, instead cooking it over the stove, either covered in breadcrumbs or in thick stews with cream and vegetables. (When he asks Katie about not cooking it, she shakes her head and tells him he could get sick if it's not fresh.)
"What did you usually eat besides fish?" she asks.
The selkie doesn't answer. Instead, he searches for that hard shell called a bucket, and once he's got it, he takes Katie by the hand and leads her outside onto the beach, still not saying a word.
He wades gingerly into the water, where it's still shallow, and Katie soon follows, taking off her shoes and socks and picking her way after him. After a time they come to some rocks, left high and dry by the tide, and he points at a crevice that is brimming with periwinkles.
"These are good," he says, and puts them in his bucket. He lifts up a strand of kelp, inspecting it, and adds a few handfuls to the bucket too. Another rock has a group of mussels clinging to its face, and he and Katie busy themselves with peeling them off. The bucket isn't all that full when they're done, but as they keep walking along the shoreline they find more rocks, and soon the bucket is so heavy that both of them need to carry it together.
"You don't need to cook these," he tells Katie. "They're fine just on their own."
She wrinkles her nose, watching a periwinkle wriggle out of its shell. "I'll pass."
"You're still going to cook them?" the selkie asks, dismayed. "They're fresh, aren't they?"
"Well, you can eat them raw if you want," Katie says. "But I like my shellfish with a little white wine. I guess the kelp would be good with some dressing."
He sighs, shaking his head. "Don't ruin good food."
"You have your ways, I have mine," Katie replies lightly.
Almost everything is in boxes now. Whether or not they're packed properly or in a messy jumble depends on each individual box. Otherwise, the house is empty, save for the kitchen and bedrooms.
The past few weeks have gone quickly between taking care of the boy and sorting out the house, and yet her life back home working in the hospital seems like a distant memory now, another time in another world.
Most of what's in the kitchen are things she needs, save for a little spiky plant sprouting from a conch shell. She'd found it in a kitschy shop last week and bought it on impulse--no need for soil, and only needed a little water every few days, which was just about perfect for her lifestyle, anyway. The boy seemed to like the plants too, so he also has one, growing out of a sea urchin.
"Are you going to come back here, after you've gotten everything out?" the boy asks.
Katie shakes her head, handing him a wet fork to dry. "Dunno. This was mainly Mom and Dad's place. It's not really the same without them. And I don't think I can really get time off once I go back home..."
"Why not?"
"You know how I'm a doctor?"
The boy nods. "You make people better," he says.
"Yeah. Well." Katie soaps up a pair of spoons. "It's hard to get time off when there's so many people who get sick or hurt, because I need to try and make them better. And I've only been a doctor for a year or two, so there's still a lot for me to learn."
The boy's eyes grow wide with alarm. "But if you're not coming back, then what will you do with this?" He gestures vaguely at the entire house.
Katie shrugs as she hands him the spoons. "Sell it, maybe. Depends on how much it'd go for on the market." Maybe not that much, though, given the storms that battered the coast in recent years. If things keep going this way, sooner or later this town will be underwater.
The spoons clatter onto the floor, but when Katie asks if there's anything wrong, the boy doesn't answer.
Later that night, when Katie is asleep, the selkie slips out of the house and onto the beach. After so much time on land, the nighttime sea looks dangerous, even in the light of the full moon, but he wades in anyway. The waves lap against ankle and knee and thigh, cold and biting against his human skin, but he grits his teeth and keeps walking.
The sea is his home. Surely it will take him back even without his seal skin. What is he to do after Katie leaves the house for good? Life up here is so difficult, so complicated. Without her, he is as good as done for. What else can he do but try and return to the life he does know?
Once the water is deep enough, the selkie takes a breath and plunges his head under. Maybe if he swims far enough, he'll get everything back: skin, whiskers, flippers and all. But except for the muted roar below the surface, the sea feels wrong to him, the taste of brine strong and bitter on his tongue and the current threatening to pull him under until he drowns.
Maybe it would be better if he drowned. He'll never see his pod again, and even if he did, what good would he be without his skin? He'll never be able to swim properly, much less race with his friends, all dead and gone. What's the use of waiting for death?
Something takes him by the waist, pulling him back toward shore. He struggles, trying to break free from its clutches, but whatever it is holds fast until he's dragged back onto the beach, dripping wet and coughing.
Katie looms above him, distressed. "What the hell were you doing?" she asks.
"Why should you care?" the selkie snaps back. "You're going to leave me anyway."
"For the last time," Katie says, toweling off her wet hair, "I'm not leaving you."
The boy huddles miserably inside his blankets. "But you said you weren't going to come back here."
"Well, that doesn't mean I'm not taking you with me." Katie plops down on the couch next to him, rubbing his back soothingly. "I was going to do that all along."
The boy's eyes grow wide. "You're going to take me home?" he asks.
There is so much hope and awe in his voice that it breaks Katie's heart. "Of course," she says, with a reassuring smile. "I can't leave you to fend for yourself here." She glances down at the boy's webbed hands thoughtfully.
"I'm glad," the boy says, "because I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Were you trying to go back to your own home?" she asks. Her own hands fly to her mouth immediately once the words are out; they hang between the two of them uneasily in the empty living room. She's known, for a while, that he comes from the sea, but it's only now that she's dared mention it out loud.
But to her surprise, the boy nods. He stares into Katie's face with those large green eyes, as if searching for something. Then he leans back a little, apparently satisfied.
"I was racing with my friends out on the open waters," he begins. "We weren't supposed to go out there--it's not safe, the elders said--but we did, anyway. There was a boat, and the men on it, they caught us in their nets and started cutting away the skins. The rest went back into the water."
"Oh my God," Katie breathes. "How did you even--how did you get out of there alive?"
The boy smiles at her sadly. "All they wanted was my skin, so I gave it to them."
"But now you can't ever go back home," she says.
He shakes his head in agreement. "No, I can't."
"Why can't you keep this place?" the selkie asks. "You stayed here with your family before, didn't you?"
Katie's brow furrows. "Yeah, but that was when I was still a kid, for the most part." She lets out a sad little sigh, running her fingers against the back of the couch. "You know," she says, as if sharing a secret with him, "Mom and I, we were supposed to come here, one last time, before she...passed away. Died."
The selkie doesn't say anything, waiting for her to go on.
"She was very sick by then, but that was all she wanted, just a few days up here, in this house. So I said ‘all right, as soon as I can get some time off of work, we'll drive up here, you and me.' But I couldn't find any time, not with work, and she..."
Katie turns her hands palms up, and exhales, pained. "She was gone, just like that. And I thought she'd still be around by the end of the year."
Something catches the selkie's eye: that one picture, resting on the mantle, framed in gray-brown driftwood. "Is that her in there?" he asks, pointing to it. There are three people in the picture: a man, woman, and little girl on the beach, all wearing wide smiles.
Katie blinks. "Yeah, it is." She gets up from the couch, taking the picture from the mantle. "This was from a long time ago," she says, sitting back down. "I was eight when they took it." She points to the little girl's face, and the selkie sees the resemblance hiding within her plump cheeks and missing teeth.
"And those are my parents." She points to the man and woman. The woman looks more like Katie does now, with the same dark hair and oval face, but there is a light in her while Katie is always hidden in shadows.
"They had this place for such a long time," Katie says, her voice growing scratchier with distress. "It was here, even before I was born. I was never alone in this house before, but when I came here, I just couldn't stand it, how empty it is, because they're gone and they've left me here all alone and I...I..."
A drop of water falls on the glass, and another, and yet another still as her shoulders begin to shake. She wipes her eyes furiously, but the tears keep coming down, and within seconds she is sobbing.
The selkie has no words, so instead he leans into her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, and holds her tightly against him. For a moment Katie tenses, stunned, but soon she is crying again, so he holds her even tighter and waits for her to stop.
In the morning, the two of them wade into the water, hand in hand, to scatter Mom's ashes. They pour easily from the urn, most of them disappearing straight into the waves, but a little stays behind for a time, floating above the surface in a hazy cloud that shimmers in the newborn sunrise.
They stand there for a while, looking out toward the sea one last time, and that's when Katie hears something in between the crash and fizz of the surf:
Thanks for coming back.
But nobody is there except for herself and the selkie, his cool hand wound around hers, and soon the cloud of ashes grows thinner and thinner until it, too, vanishes into the breeze. When the last few wisps are gone, they turn around and leave the water without so much as a backward glance.
It's all right, Katie tells herself. They have each other now, and even if it doesn't completely replace what was lost, it fills the emptiness somewhat, and that is enough.
the end
A/N: Title is taken from the Metric song of the same name, which had a hand in inspiring this story.
Many thanks go out to the friends who volunteered as betas--I couldn't have done it without your help!