Page 48 of The Sirens

47

LUCY AND JESS

SUNDAY, 17 FEbrUARY 2019

Jess is holding her daughter’s hand, feeling the beat of her pulse.

Her daughter.

For twenty years, she has not allowed herself to look at Lucy properly. She has turned her gaze away from her daughter’s eyes, so like her own. The delicate bones of her skull. The fragile wrists. The skin with its angry thirst for the sea.

Twenty years, each a score on her heart.

In this moment, Jess knows only these things for certain. She knows that she cannot shed the past, the choices she made or didn’t. Her failure to keep her daughter safe.

She knows that she loves her daughter, a love as vast and furious as the tide that, even now, seeps into the cave.

The sea is rising with the storm. Soon, the rocks that lead to the cave will be submerged.

‘Take my hand,’ Jess says to Lucy now. The sea laps its way inside, weeds brushing against Lucy’s skin. Darkness, but for the white curls of the water, the glimpse of sky beyond the cave, rent by lightning.

Lucy hesitates, looking at Jess’s outstretched fingers with their shining pleats of skin.

Jess is asking a question, Lucy knows. Asking her to choose.

She takes her hand in answer.

In the water, Lucy feels herself bloom.

Her throat opens and she is breathing: she can feel the water nourish her, the sweet sting of the salt. She stretches out her hands in front of her, marvelling at the webbed flesh. Her blood beats like a drum. She kicks her legs, feels the power in them, the beauty.

Ahead of her, Jess moves with the tide, her body at one with the sea, her hair a dark, drifting halo. Lucy sees the dance of the coral, throbbing pink and bright in time with the current. The silver dart of fish, the elegant shadow of a stingray.

Above, she knows, the storm rages: ashore, trees bend and sway, the leaves crackle with lightning. The wind picks up the sand in great billows, whips the waves white.

But here, all is peaceful, time slowed to the space between her heartbeats.

Jess swims by her side. Lucy can see herself in the way that Jess glides through the water. The scoop of her arms, the kick of her legs.

My mother.

For the first time, she allows the words to fill her heart.

Her mother turns to look at her and smiles.

This , Lucy thinks. This is my place.

What does she care for the world above? For green-gold light, the prickly warmth of a cat on her lap, the sweet drift of banksia on the evening air?

At first, Lucy thinks the shadow is the curve of a wave, or perhaps a reflection of the darkening sky.

But then she hears the whirr of the motor, cutting through the peaceful beat of the tide.

For a moment, Jess thinks that time is looping back on itself. That she is not moving through the sea with her daughter by her side, but crouched trembling in the mouth of the cave, baby cradled to her chest, the boat roaring towards her.

No.

Jess reaches out and takes hold of Lucy’s hand, pulls her closer so that they swim as if one creature. They must go deeper, to the places the light can’t reach.

They must keep the promise. Take up the mantle, take up their place in the ocean’s trenches and tides. Cast the net with their song.

She thinks of Cameron, of his body drifting somewhere below.

She can still feel the kiss of the blade at her throat, can still smell his sweat, pungent with fear. He held her down so that she was half over the lip of the cave, the wind tearing at her. She was waiting for the siren call, certain it would come at any moment. The song that would wrap itself around Cameron’s body and pull him to the deep.

But it had not come.

Desperate, she had sunk her teeth into his forearm and his grip on the knife had loosened.

It had been a simple thing, then, to wrest it from his hands and drive the blade into his gut.

Later, after she had rolled his body over the lip of the cave and watched it fall into the sea below, the blood spreading out around him, she had heard it at last. The singing.

It was coming from herself.

After, she’d lingered in the cave, hungry for the sea. Her body yearned for it, even as her mouth soured with the last of the biscuits they’d taken from the house, nothing to drink but plastic-tainted rainwater. But she’d been frightened to let go of herself, once and for all. Frightened that she would look up at the water’s surface with its elusive glitter of sun, tortured by all she’d left behind. The feeling of a brush in her hands, the smell of paint and linseed. Melody’s laugh; the gentle timbre of her mother’s voice on the phone.

And, most of all, the chance of seeing Lucy again.

Now, with her daughter by her side, there is nothing in the world above that can possibly keep her.

She tugs on Lucy’s hand, feels her blood drop as they go deeper, seeking darkness.

And then a new sound. The crack of fibreglass on rock. The motor cuts out, and there is the suck of a boat turning on its side, rolled by a wave, and then something is falling through the water, wreathed in silver and white.

A man, his oilskin jacket billowing around him.

Lucy feels the water ripple across her skin. Something has broken the calm. Ahead, fish scatter, registering an intruder.

She feels the twist of Jess’s body next to her and follows her gaze. A man, drifting towards them, mouth open to the sea.

Her body shrinks to just one thought, one word.

Dad.

She lets go of Jess’s hand and kicks, propelling herself towards him.

It’s him. The man who stole her from this place, who pulled her from the cave like she was his to take. The man who took her child from her and raised her as his own.

That’s who Jess sees, in the blank, open eyes, the blood lifting itself in ribbons from his head. In the hands, outstretched and limp, trembling with the current.

But she also sees her father.

Her father, who recorded her first word in a notebook that he treasures, even now. Who held her hand in his own when she took her first, uncertain steps. Who pulled her from the sea – twice – because he wanted to protect her, to keep her safe. Because he could not bear to let her go.

Her father who named her Jessica. A gift from God. Her throat closes.

She swims.

Lucy is already there, one arm around his ribcage, the other flailing wildly for Jess to come, to follow, to help.

And Jess is kicking hard, catching him around his waist and pushing him up, up, up, towards light and air.

She had asked Lucy to make a choice. But sometimes, there is no choice.

There is only love.