May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (15 page)

“What does it look like?”

“A stick figure leaning back on its knees and waving its arms around.”

May laughed softly. “You’re right! Who names the stars?”

“Everyone, or at least every culture seems to take a crack at it. Aldebaran means
follower
in Arabic, which is logical, seeing as it does follow the Pleiades, but some have called it
the Driver
and I can’t remember, but the Babylonians, I think, called it
Fat Camel”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask them.”

“Fat chance.”

Hugh laughed at this. She wished she could have turned to see his face, but her eye was pressed against the eyepiece of the telescope. Then from the corner of her eye, or was it the lens, she caught a flitting silver shadow of something familiar—not a stick figure. It looked like the tail—her tail when she swam, glittering and sweeping through the night sky.

“I just saw something for a split second but it’s gone now.”

“A shooting star?” Hugh asked.

“No. I mean it’s not gone. I think I just nudged the telescope accidentally and now I can’t see it.”

“Let’s have a look.”

May stepped away and felt his hand steady her. They changed places. She readjusted the scallop comb in her hair. “That’s so pretty. What is it?” Hugh asked as she dug the comb just beneath the thick knot of hair.

“Scallop shell, I think.” Once again she felt she had said too much and tried to shift the conversation
back to astronomy. “What’s that constellation to the right of Aldebaran?”

“Did you know,” Hugh said, and softly touched the scallop comb, “that the scallop shell was worn by pilgrims in Europe when they made their journeys to the shrine of Saint James in Spain?”

What doesn’t Hugh know?
May thought. His knowledge seemed infinite. While she was thinking this she felt him edge closer to her. She could feel his warm breath brush her cheek. She was no longer looking at Aldebaran but down at the floorboards of the boat, afraid to look up at the sky or even to slide her gaze to the side. Her heart raced. It seemed to her that it was an all too human heart that was beating in her chest.

The palms of his hands gently stroked her cheeks, then cradled her head as he kissed her lips. The stars spun in the night. The world seemed to change in that instant. Nothing was where it should be or had been. The horizon might have swept up to the moon, and the moon might have changed color. With the first touch of their lips, the boundaries between their worlds dissolved. For May it was as if the stars
rearranged themselves and the constellations scrambled into new geometries that defied their names.

“The gifts of the night” was what Hugh called the stars, and they were nothing compared to the wealth of feelings that was growing between May and Hugh for each other.

Hugh not only knew about the science of the stars but he knew poetry. And that first night he recited a verse from memory by a poet she had never heard of named William Blake. The poem was about a “fair-hair’d angel of the evening.” Hugh promised to bring her a book of Blake’s poetry the next time they met, “since you are my ‘fair-hair’d angel.'”

“But I’m not fair-haired,” she said, taking a long, thick strand that had fallen from the scallop comb. “I’m not sure if red counts.”

“Of course it does,” he replied, and picked up the strand and pressed it to his lips. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not an angel, either.”

A shiver passed up her spine, and she gave a small shake. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

“Cold?”

“No, no,” she said in barely a whisper.
Not cold, but not quite an angel,
she thought.

When Hugh returned to the small dinghy dock in the village and neatened up the boat, he sat for several minutes, thinking. There was something so extraordinary about May. She had a quick mind, one of the quickest he had ever encountered. She was every bit as smart as any of the Radcliffe College girls he had met, and yet she’d received much less formal education. By her own admission there were long periods of time when she missed school because it was impossible to get to Bar Harbor from the lighthouse. And yet she had read the entire volume of Maury’s
Physical Geography of the Sea.
And she mentioned that she had been trying to teach herself trigonometry. When she’d given him the book, she’d apologized if
there were any scraps of paper still stuck between the pages.

But it was not simply her intellect that impressed him. There was something essentially mysterious about her. She was like the stars—alluring and yet ultimately unknowable. Even her hair was unique, a shade he had never seen. It was the color of cooling embers, full of subtle flickers, soft radiances. However it was her eyes, with their green intensity, that held the secret of her being, the mystery that was at her center. He had kissed her. He hadn’t meant to. But he did and it was … His thoughts drifted off. She was beyond words. He sighed and looked down. Something glittered on the floorboards of the boat. He reached down and picked it up. Was it a fish scale? How would a fish scale have gotten into the boat? He was the first person to sail it, the only so far. Well, he knew they scaled fish on the next pier over. So perhaps the wind just blew the scales around a bit. He was just about to flick it overboard, but something stopped him and instead he tucked it into his pocket.

“Y
OU SEEM MIGHTY PERKY,”
Zeeba said when May walked into the kitchen the morning following the dance.

“Oh, I guess it’s just summer coming on. Makes me feel good.”

Zeeba made one of her half sigh, half groan noises. It was a sound May often thought must be difficult to make for it seemed to come simultaneously from both Hepzibah’s chest and her nose. May made a habit of never responding to this odd noise. “I think I’ll go out and check the new chicks.”

They had ordered chicken eggs, which had been delivered four weeks before, and they had only just hatched. “They don’t need your tending them yet.
They’re just a day old. Don’t need to feed a chick ‘til it’s three days old.” Zeeba was right. May knew this. Just before a chicken hatches it draws into its stomach all the yolk of the egg from which it hatched. They arrive well fed. But May wanted to get out of the house. She wanted to relive those kisses of the night before.

Here it was summer—clear blue sky—and yet inside the lighthouse it seemed like the dead of winter. Zeeba had closed most of the curtains, for she said that the light hurt her failing eyes. Murky shadows crowded every corner of the house. Dimness lurked in every nook and cranny.

There were so many shades of gray. There was the bleak, leaden grayness of the lighthouse—repressive, gloomy, deadening. Then there was the clear gray of Hugh Fitzsimmons’s eyes. Lively, full of light, like a breaking dawn.

May went out to the chicken yard. The chicks seemed fine—twenty little hatchlings all softly bobbing about. She sat down and picked up one. Holding it in her hands, she could feel its rapidly beating
heart. It seemed to soothe her jumbled emotions about Hugh. She had never felt this way about any boy …
well, he’s not really a boy,
she thought.
He’s a young man and so is Rudd.
She might have liked Rudd well enough once. But now she could hardly believe she ever had. Why hadn’t she seen through Rudd’s confidence to realize it was really cockiness? Hugh was confident, too, sure of himself but never cocky. He could laugh at himself. She bet that Rudd could never do that. The question came back to haunt her once again —
What if Hugh knew that I am not quite human? Would he be sickened?
Suddenly it was as if the light drained out of the day. She could never tell Hugh Fitzsimmons who she really was. Never, ever.

And what if he doesn’t really like me at all? What if I am just a passing fancy, something to entertain him while he does his research in Maine? Then what matter would it make what I am?
There must be so many beautiful, fashionable girls in Boston, smarter than she was, more elegant.

That night, as she slipped into the water, she felt guilty. Was she swimming to her life or away from it? The sea was so still that the reflections of the stars barely shivered. But for the first time since her transformation, she felt a kind of loss. She was leaving behind the world that Hugh Fitzsimmons knew and entering one that he could never, despite all his learning, even imagine. She swam on slowly.

The two dolphins that now often swam with her were not swimming as close as usual. They seemed to sense that she was in no mood for play tonight. She needed to be alone, so they soon grew bored and swam off.

When she was well past The Bones, May rolled over on her back. She lifted her tail and studied it in a shaft of moonlight. Was it freakish? The scales climbed up over her hips and finished in a curve just beneath her navel. Would a human find her revolting? Would her shape, her form, disgust Hugh? She had never felt lonelier.

Yet she was not entirely alone. Once again she felt the two empty spaces on each side of her pressing in. She looked up at the stars and searched for the
Seven Sisters of the Pleiades. The moon was still young, so the darkness made the star cluster more visible. She found two of the sisters just rising on the purple line of the horizon.

“Have you ever loved?” She spoke out loud to them as if she expected the stars to whisper back to her. “Loved a human?” She swam through the night and into the clear gray light of the dawn.

A
WEEK LATER,
May was walking down the street in the village when she spied Rudd ahead. Abruptly she turned into a small lane to avoid him. She couldn’t forget his face from the night of the dance. The vacant space behind the eyes that made him—the words popped into her head—
less than human.
But was that not exactly what she was? A chill ran through her.

“Hannah!” She felt a tap on her shoulder. Surely it couldn’t be him. He had been at least a hundred yards away. She wheeled around, a seething fury rising in her. It was not Rudd but a tall, dark-haired man with luminous green eyes. But those eyes soon clouded in confusion. “P-pardon me,” he stammered.
“I mistook you for someone else.” The color drained from his face. He seemed suddenly fearful and wavered slightly on his feet. He was holding a small jug of something that he had apparently just bought at the chandlery.

“Are you all right?” May said. The man looked as if he were suffering some sort of attack.

“No! No! I’m fine. Really.” The color crept back into his face and he laughed, although it seemed rather forced. “It’s just that you do resemble another young lady—and—and I’m slightly embarrassed.”

“Oh” was all May could think to say. She was uncomfortable with the way he was regarding her. It was not offensive by any means, and yet it seemed slightly intrusive, as if he saw something in her? Once again, she was aware of a cool radiance that seemed to define those spaces at her sides. She looked at the man again. He didn’t seem like a shipyard worker; perhaps he was a yacht captain and that was why he had been in the chandlery shop. She looked at the jug.

“Turpentine,” he said. “Painter, you know.” His eyes were clamped on her face as if he were searching for
something, or perhaps attempting to convince himself that she was not the other girl. She suddenly realized that there was an odd familiarity about him. She had never seen him before, of this she was certain, but there was something about this man that resonated within her.

“Painter? Yacht painter?”

“Oh, no, portrait painter. I am doing a portrait of the Hawleys’ daughters.”

“Oh, summer folk,” she said, thinking of all the beautifully dressed girls who would soon be fawning over Hugh.

“Yes.”

There was nothing left to say. There never was much to say between island people and the summer folk, except if they served in their “cottages.” And a portrait painter did not qualify as a servant. May realized this. She knew of the Hawleys. They had a vast, rambling estate that was called Gladrock. She said good-bye and walked quickly down the lane. But she felt the painter’s eyes on her back the entire time.

Impossible!
Stannish Whitman Wheeler thought as he watched May turn the corner at the end of the lane.
How on earth could there be two of them?
As soon as she turned around, he knew it was not Hannah, although the resemblance was extraordinary. But he was a portrait painter. He knew faces. In the manner that cartographers could map an unknown continent and transpose a landscape, a topography, from the mysterious into the knowable, he could interpret the geography of a face and map it with his paints and brushes. The girl’s chin was a tad less sharp, but had the same slight dimple in the middle. Her cheekbones a degree or two higher. Her eyebrows did not sweep in with quite the same curvature. And the mouth? Perhaps a bit less generous. Yet she moved with the same fluid grace as Hannah.

And there was one thing he knew for certain. This girl, unlike Hannah, had already crossed over. She knew what she was. As if to confirm this she wore a scallop shell—the scallop of the Cailleach, found in
the deep open waters of the Atlantic, which rarely washed up on any beach. The word
Cailleach
meant
blue hag
or
veiled one
in Scottish folklore. And the pleated shell, which was almost pure white with reddish or blue tints at its edges, did resemble a veil or mantle like a nun’s wimple or a priestly stole.

God forbid,
he thought,
that a man falls in love with her as I have with Hannah.
“God forbid!” And this time he whispered it aloud.

He felt someone touch his shoulder and wheeled around. He was embarrassed to be caught talking to himself. He hoped this rugged fellow hadn’t heard him.

“Pardon me, mister, but did you see a gal with red hair pass this way?”

“Girl with red hair?” he repeated. Something about the man’s face unnerved him. “I’m not sure.”