I hardly know who I am anymore.
I walk to the white dresser against the far wall and run a finger along the surface. A collection of items lie scattered like fragments of a story: vanilla perfume that once belonged to Penny’s mom, beach pebbles and shells in a dish, her favorite books by John Steinbeck and Herman Melville and Neil Gaiman. Her past rests unprotected in the open, so easily stolen. I can make these things mine. I can make her life mine. This home, this bedroom—including the boy asleep on her bed.
A photograph is tucked at the bottom corner of the mirror above the dresser. I pull it out. It’s an image of a woman floating in a tank of water, a fake mermaid’s tail fastened at her waist to conceal her legs. Men are gathered in front of the tank, staring in at her while she holds her breath, her expression soft and unstrained. She is a lie. An invention used to sell tickets at a traveling carnival.
I am her. A lie. But when the carnival closes for the night—all the lights flicked off and the water drained from the tank—I do not get to remove my fabric mermaid fin. I do not get to have a normal life outside of the illusion. I will always be someone else.
My deception has lasted two hundred years.
I place the photo back at the edge of the mirror and rub my palms over my eyes. How did I become this thing? A spectacle. A sideshow curiosity. I didn’t want any of this—this prolonged, unnatural life.
I blow out a breath, keeping the tears from seeping to the surface, and turn to face Bo, who’s still asleep.
He twitches on the bed then opens his eyes, as if he felt me watching him in his dreams. I flick my gaze away to the window.
“You all right?” He sits up, pressing his palms into the mattress.
“Fine.” But I’m not. This guilt is burying me alive. I’m choking on it, suffocating, swallowing down mouthfuls of each gravelly lie.
“Did you go outside?” he asks.
I touch my hair, wet from the rain. “Just for a minute.”
“To Gigi’s cottage?”
I shake my head, pulling in my lips to hide the truth. “I just wanted some fresh air.”
He believes me. Or maybe he’s only pretending to believe me. “I’ll stay up for a bit so you can sleep,” he says. I start to tell him no then realize how exhausted I am, so I crawl onto the bed, knees drawn close to my chest.
But I can’t sleep. I watch him standing at the window, looking out at a world that I don’t belong in.
The sun will be up soon. The sky made new. And maybe I’ll be made new too.
*
Three days whirl by in fast-forward. Rose comes to the island to check on Gigi—her freed prisoner. She brings forgetful cakes from her mom’s shop: blackberry mocha and sea salt caramel with crushed pistachio.
She tells us that Davis and Lon are searching for Gigi, that they’re worried they’ll get in trouble if she goes to the police and rats them out for keeping her locked up in the boathouse. Somehow no one seems to suspect that she might be on Lumiere Island, secretly incarcerated in one of the cottages.
Bo spreads out books on the floor of his cottage each evening, fire blazing, his eyes watering and tired from reading late into the night. He is searching for a way to kill the Swan sisters but save the bodies they inhabit—a pointless endeavor. I know things he doesn’t. And I, secretly, am hoping for a way to keep this body forever.
I read books too, curled up on the old couch, the wind rattling the cottage windows. But I’m looking for something else: a way to remain, to exist above the sea indefinitely—to live. There are legends of mermaids who fall in love with sailors, their devotion granting them a human form. I read about the Irish tales of selkies shedding their sealskins, marrying a human man, and staying on land forever.
Perhaps this one thing is enough—to fall in love? If love can bind something, can it also undo it?
On the eve of the summer solstice, Bo passes out beside the fire with an open book on his chest. But I can’t sleep. So I leave his cottage and wander up to the orchard alone.
From the rows of trees, I can just barely make out Mom—Penny’s mom—standing out on the cliff’s edge, the shadow of a woman waiting for a husband who won’t return. Seeing her out there, alone, her heart cleaved in half by pain, I could easily let the grief buried inside this body rise up to the surface. Not only are memories stored in the bodies we take, but emotions as well. I can feel them, resting broad and deep inside Penny’s chest. If I look too close, if I peer into that darkness, I can feel the gaping sadness of losing her father. My eyes will swell with tears, an ache twisting in my heart, a longing so vast it could swallow me. So I keep it stuffed down. I don’t let that part of the host body overcome me. But my sisters have always been better at it than me. They can ignore whatever past emotions have ruled the body, while I tend to feel the sorrow and grief creeping through my veins, up my throat, trying to choke me.
I stop at the old oak tree at the center of the grove—the ghost tree, its leaves shivering in the wind. I press my palm against the heart carved into the trunk. I stare up through the limbs, a theater of stars blinking back at me. It reminds me of the night so many years ago, lying beneath this tree with the boy I once loved: Owen Clement. He held a knife in his hand and carved the heart there to mark our place in the world. Our hearts bound together. Eternity pumping through our veins. It was on that same night that he asked me to marry him. He had no ring or money or anything to offer except himself. But I said yes.
A week later my sisters and I were drowned in the harbor.
INQUISITION
A gust blew in through the open door of the perfumery, scattering dead leaves across the wood floor.
Four men stood in the doorway of the shop, muddy boots and filthy hands. Stinking of fish and tobacco. Against the stark white walls and the air tinged with the delicate intermingling of perfumes, their presence was alarming.
Hazel stared at their filthy boots and not their faces, thinking only of the soap and water she would need to scour the floor clean once they had left. She did not yet realize the men’s intent or that she would never see the perfumery again.
The men grabbed the sisters by their forearms and dragged them from the shop.
The Swan sisters were being arrested.
They were hauled down Ocean Avenue for everyone to see; fat drops of rain spat down from the sky; muck from the street stained the hems of their dresses; the townspeople stopped to gawk. Some followed them all the way to the small town hall that was used for town meetings, a gathering place during bad storms, and occasionally but quite rarely, also for legal disputes. A squabble over a missing goat, disagreements over dock anchorage, or property lines with neighbors.