Page 49 of The Sirens

48

LUCY

APRIL 2019

Lucy looks in the mirror, running her fingers through the bristles of her hair. It’s getting longer, now, the blonde strands wiry. She tilts her head to the side, watching the pulse beat in her neck. The flesh there is only faintly ribbed. She touches the tender skin with its light crust of salt. Out of the window, she sees the blue thread of the ocean through the trees. Waiting for her.

She bends to the sink, splashes water on her face, closing her eyes with relief.

She lingers a moment before going downstairs, her fingers resting on the doorknob.

Her watch shows 10.28 a.m. – he’ll be here any minute now. Sounds filter from downstairs: the rumble of the kettle boiling, the plink of someone chopping fruit. Melody laughing at one of Dad’s jokes, the clatter of plates as Mum sets the table.

Mum. Dad.

Lucy catches herself.

It’s hard to shake twenty years of habit. Harder still to accept the truth of her family.

They’ve all agreed to take things one day at a time.

There’s a scratching at the bathroom door, and Lucy smiles when she opens it to find Dora Maar waiting outside. The cat tilts her head and meows, green eyes narrowed.

‘Coming,’ Lucy says, scratching her behind the ears.

Her heart flutters as she walks down the stairs, her hand sticky on the banister. The scent of croissants and coffee drifts towards her.

‘Goose!’ Her father, standing at the kitchen bench, turns. She is not yet used to the uneven twist of his smile; or the stubble of his scalp, its failure to hide the jagged scar from the surgery. ‘What do you think – this enough for six?’

He moves aside – his left side following his right, like a clumsy mimic – so that she can inspect the fruit salad he’s prepared. Amber cubes of rock melon, grapes, crisp slices of apple, rounds of banana. His fingers tremble on the knife, newly clumsy. She can see his pride in it, this task that would have been beyond him only weeks ago.

‘Looks great,’ she says and he grins, flushing with pleasure.

‘Don’t go overboard,’ her mother says from the table. ‘The boy was always a whippet, barely saw him eat a thing.’

‘I remember,’ her father laughs.

Lucy treasures the sound. It almost makes up for the waxiness to his face, the slight droop to the left corner of his mouth. She pushes aside the memory of how he’d looked in the water, haloed by his own blood. The little boat he’d hired had hit the reef, tipping him into the sea. He had knocked his head on the hull.

A traumatic brain injury.

He would have died, the doctors said later, if they hadn’t reached him in time. If they hadn’t dragged him to the shore, if Lucy hadn’t run – her neck stinging as her gills closed, air burning her lungs – to Cliff House, where she’d found her mother pacing up and down the veranda, red-eyed and white-faced.

There had been an air ambulance, and then long, fluorescent-lit weeks in the hospital, when none of them saw the sun for days at a time. At first, her father just slept, his cheeks sinking into cavities, hands thinning on the hospital blanket. When he did speak at last, his lips struggling around the words, it had been Lucy he’d asked for.

‘Goose,’ he’d said, the sound alien in his newly puckered mouth, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK, Dad,’ she’d said, even though he wasn’t her father, and it wasn’t OK, not yet.

But it would be. She believes that.

Lucy looks around for Jess. She’s outside on the back veranda, elbows resting on the balcony rail.

There’s a tension to her spine that Lucy has come to recognise as a sign of nerves. She’s seen a lot of it, lately. Jess has told her a little of the interviews with the police. The detectives accepted her version of events – that Hennessey had abducted Jess after she threatened to report his whereabouts and held her hostage in the cave. That he had told her to tell Melody that she was going away, had threatened to harm her friend if Jess revealed the truth. He had taken a knife from her kitchen and, later, held it to her throat. The struggle that had resulted in him falling to his death had also led to the loss of the knife, but the wounds to Jess’s face told their own story. As did Hennessey’s phone records – cell phone triangulation placed him at the cave on the day Jess said he’d abducted her.

When the last interview was over, Jess had disappeared to the ocean for hours. When she’d emerged, her body gleaming as she hauled herself up the staircase, the gills closing and the webbing between her fingers receding, there’d been a new, clean look to her face. As if something had been washed away.

‘Hey,’ Lucy says now, closing the back door softly behind her. ‘You OK?’

Jess turns to face her, smiling. She blows out her cheeks and then winds her hair into an unruly knot on top of her head.

‘Yeah. Just, you know. Nervous.’

Jess is still a little too thin, a little too insubstantiallooking. They’ve been sleeping in the bedroom together while the others have been staying downstairs, and Lucy finds herself waking in the night, as if to check she’s still breathing.

‘Do you miss them?’ Jess asked once, as they watched the moonlight ripple across the ceiling.

‘Miss who?’ ‘Mary and Eliza.’

‘A little,’ Lucy said, surprising herself. The first weeks, she hadn’t noticed their absence – she’d been at the hospital with Dad, and sleep had been stolen in gritty snatches. It had dawned on her gradually, the feeling of wrongness. Like turning around and realising you no longer had a shadow. ‘Yes.’

‘Why do you think they’ve stopped?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe because we don’t need them anymore.’

‘We don’t?’

‘No. Now we have the sea.’ ‘And each other.’

‘Exactly.’

Now, Lucy rests a hand on Jess’s back.

‘It’ll be OK,’ she says. ‘Anyway, if anyone should be nervous, it’s me. I’m about to meet my real father properly for the first time.’

Jess laughs, then frowns, turning back to look at the sea. The sky is cloudless, the water holding all its blue. In the distance, a seagull floats past. Lucy feels an ache for it, for the ocean against her skin. Later, she tells herself. When the others are asleep. They will wade into the water and let it change them.

Afterwards, as the night air dries her skin, she will sit here, on the veranda, and she will write. Of all the things they see in the shifting depths, where the Naiad lies broken on the ocean floor. The rusted ribs of chains, the rotted planks of the berths. Here a rosary, there the brass disc of a coin. And all around, the green silt of bones.

Four score women, whose stories have not been told, whose names have been forgotten.

She has the passenger manifest, the archives, the facts. The loom to weave a story around. She will write them back into history. Bring them to the surface, the light.

It doesn’t matter that she won’t be going back to university; that she won’t become a journalist. After all, there is more than one way to tell the truth.

She’s not proud of what she did to Ben, the violence of her hands around his throat. But in a way, she’s glad that it happened. It led her here, to this moment. To this new understanding of who she is, her place in the story.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jess says. ‘That we lied to you. I know what it’s like. Not knowing where you come from. Where you belong.’

Lucy puts an arm around Jess’s waist, squeezes tight. ‘But you do know,’ she says softly. ‘You belong to me.’

The crunch of tyres on gravel. Lucy’s heart jolts. She knows they should go inside. But she wants one more moment, standing here and looking out at the water, Jess’s body warm against hers. Just the two of them.

There’s the creak of the back door opening. Melody stands in the doorway, as if asking permission to break the moment.

‘Girls?’ she says. ‘Max is here.’