The Mermaid Collector (14 page)

The light from the cooling embers was faint, growing fainter—so faint, Lydia might have thought it was Linus’s hands on her, Linus’s body coming over hers.

But this man smelled different, like woodsmoke and damp leaves.

She could feel Angus’s breath near; she knew he would kiss her.

“Do you love someone?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said, reaching her mouth. “Very much.”

THEY FELL QUICKLY INTO A
routine. But what else was there to do? Four more days passed, three more search parties being dispatched and returning without news. She and Angus spoke little during the day, sharing polite conversation at meals, glancing at each other when their paths
crossed, then coming together in the darkness, unmoving until dawn. Still, try as they did to keep their distance, Lydia feared the rumors had begun, a suspicion that was confirmed when Miles Keene came by one afternoon.

“I’m looking for Angus,” he said quietly when Lydia arrived at the door to greet him. She stepped back to offer Angus’s brother entrance as she always did, but Miles wouldn’t move, no matter that rain fell. He stood just outside the doorway, as if afraid to get too close. It wasn’t like Miles, this distance, this quick tone, these lowered eyes, but Lydia knew well enough what had come over him.

“He’s in the tower,” she said with a small smile that did nothing to change Miles’s fraught expression, but she hadn’t expected it would.

Miles nodded and left. Lydia watched him make his way down the path.

HE KNEW NO ONE WOULD
believe him, but the truth was that Angus hadn’t meant to fall in love with her. As he stood in the lantern room, working the rag over the lens, his mind thumbed through memories like the pages of a book, catching on passages. Had he known that first day, standing in the keeper’s house, meeting her eyes for the first time? Had he known then that he might care for her this way? He frowned, his circles on the glass growing smaller, slower as he considered it. No, he thought. And if he had, surely he had dismissed such feelings. He knew better
than to feel something for someone he couldn’t have. But then, to blame it on circumstance would have been false too. Taking her hand that day and helping her up into this very room he stood in now, standing beside her as she’d faced the vista of the sea, Angus had been stirred by her, deeply so, and the feeling had seemed almost binding, so intimate and startling that he’d wanted to reach into the air for it and store that fleeting sensation in his pocket like a souvenir, to keep and hold for the future. He and Lydia could have been the only two people in the world at that moment, and he wouldn’t have minded it. Confessing that, even in the quiet of his mind, filled him with culpability, yet he refused to accept any guilt. After all, he had done nothing wrong. He had only comforted someone who was hurting, doing what any compassionate person would do. That he loved her, that he even believed he could make her happy outside this fortress of white and light and salt didn’t change that.

Now as he looked out onto the lawn and saw his brother sweeping through the hedges, Angus knew his reasoning would mean nothing to anyone else. The truth he knew in his heart would be as firm as a handful of sand to anyone else who tried to hold it.

When Miles finally emerged from the opening in the lantern room floor, he said nothing, simply moving to the windows and looking out a long moment before he turned to Angus, his voice thick. “I was wondering how much longer you plan to go on this way.”

Angus kept his eyes on his task. “As long as it takes,” he said. “She can’t manage all this by herself. She can’t even bear to climb the stairs.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.” Miles dragged a chapped hand down his eyes, his cheeks, as if trying to rub the expression of dread from his face. He moved to the lens, his voice dropping. “People are talking, Angus.”

Angus worked the rag harder against the glass. “I care for her. It’s no one’s business.”

“Don’t be dim. You know how it is. It’s not right, your being here. Day and night.”

“He’s not coming back.”

“No, he’s likely not,” agreed Miles, his expression still strained. “But it doesn’t change that she’s a married woman and the two of you are…”

Angus’s eyes darted to Miles then, waiting for him to finish his thought and knowing what Miles meant to say but couldn’t bring himself to, the flush of color on his brother’s full cheeks explanation enough.

Miles sighed. “I know you care for her, Angus. Anyone can see that.”

Angus moved around the lens, eyes down, jaw set. Here it was, he thought, the moment where it would all change for him, the moment he couldn’t turn back from—grains of sand, feathers caught in the wind. Only he could grasp what was real now. “Tell Sarah I cut down that frame she wanted,” he said. “I left it against the house. It should fit now.”

Miles stared at his younger brother. Angus could feel his gaze, knowing without looking that Miles hoped for some sign that he might relent, and as much as Angus could never mean to cause his brother grief, he could no sooner relent now than he could fly over the water like a gull.

IT WAS MERRILL OWEN WHO
came charging up the road just before noon on Friday, his long face splotchy with excitement. He was so winded when Lydia arrived at the door, he couldn’t speak for several seconds, but of course he didn’t need to. Lydia knew at once.

“They’ve been found,” she said, breathless.

“Yes,” Merrill managed, wincing when he swallowed. “They’re alive. Thank God, they’re alive.”

P
RESENT
D
AY

THERE WERE DAYS IN THE
beginning, lots of them, when Buzz never really believed his luck. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been wanted by women before, but Ruby was by far the most dazzling woman he’d ever laid eyes on, and that she’d agreed to sleep with him even once would have been amazing enough.

One minute he’d been a mopey divorcé who’d taken the invitation of some old friends to meet at a folk festival in New Hampshire; the next minute he’d found himself
rendered speechless by a woman with frizzy blond hair and an enormous smile who had set up a table selling her paintings on the back of old license plates. Buzz had already decided he’d buy one, but then a little girl—her daughter, he suspected—had swooped in with her sales pitch, delivered between bites of brownie and a fierce stare over the top of her oversized sunglasses. Buzz had left their booth with five pieces. But he’d also left with the woman’s name (“Ruby—like the slippers”) and the plan to come back later that afternoon to see her again. She was thirty-five, she told him. And she’d just come out of a bad marriage. So had he, but he didn’t have any kids. She’d asked whether he liked kids, and Buzz had answered that he did, though when Ruby had asked him why he never had any of his own, he’d shrugged. It hadn’t been for lack of wanting; he had always enjoyed kids and had always liked being around them. But Beth had never seemed comfortable with the idea, and he’d let the subject fall away over the years.

“Sounds like you and she weren’t a good match. It’s not your fault,” Ruby had said then, her eyes so bright that Buzz had felt as if she’d lifted a weight off him with those simple words, as if she’d granted him some kind of absolution.

Later, they’d carried plates of barbecued chicken and coleslaw to one of the bonfires that would rage long into the night. She’d explained that they’d come from California, having always wanted to see the East Coast. (He would learn later that they’d been kicked out of their
apartment after Ruby had spray-painted the car of their salacious landlord and he’d threatened criminal charges.) He’d told them he had always wanted to see California but that he’d gotten only as far as Nevada and that he lived in a small town by the water.

And that was when Buzz had mentioned the mermaids.

“No way!” Tess’s green eyes had grown enormous on her small face. The night air was cold enough for a blanket—Buzz had found Tess and Ruby one. Ruby’s eyes looked like beads of amber in the firelight; he could have stared into them all night.

“Are the mermaids still there?” Tess asked, bursting.

“Maybe.” Buzz grinned. “You’ll just have to come visit me sometime and find out.”

“We could come back with you right now,” Ruby said, her expression so serious, Buzz had been speechless for a moment. Could they really do that? Surely Ruby had a job somewhere. Surely Tess had school to get back to—third grade, maybe fourth; he wasn’t sure how old she was. But when Buzz saw the pile of garbage bags that Ruby picked through that next morning to find them fresh clothes, he knew at once she and Tess hadn’t anywhere to get back to, and the desire to offer them a home, a safe place, was instantaneous—utterly irrational but fierce. He knew how it would look to bring them back to the Harbor, and he knew his sister would have a fit over it. What would he say? The truth was that even as he packed them into his
truck two days later, he didn’t know himself what had come over him. But was that so wrong? All he knew was that in the last forty-eight hours, he’d found someone who never once asked him if he ever planned to cut his hair or if he was sorry he’d gotten that tattoo of a raven on his right forearm. He had found someone who made him laugh, someone who made him want to make love again, someone who made the world seem kind and warm for a man who had spent a good portion of his forty-four years on it feeling anything but.

“It snows there, doesn’t it?” Tess had asked on their way up Interstate 95. Ruby had fallen asleep just outside of Portsmouth, minutes after they’d crossed the Piscataqua River Bridge into Kittery. But Tess had barely taken a breath since they’d left the festival. Buzz didn’t know kids could talk so much or so long without stopping.

“It snows,” he’d answered. “Some winters more than others.”

“It doesn’t snow in California.”

“Sure it does. In some parts, it snows a whole lot.”

“I thought you said you’d never been to California,” Tess had said.

“I haven’t. I still know it snows there.”

“So where does it snow?”

“The mountains.”

“Maybe,” she’d consented, but only after staring at him long enough that Buzz had looked away from the road to meet her leveled gaze. He’d had no choice but to chuckle
then, startled to see how someone so tiny could be so damn stubborn.

“What were you thinking, Buzzie?”

His sister, Joan, was the first to make her concern known several weeks later, after he’d settled Ruby and Tess into the trailer. Truth be told, Buzz had marveled at her restraint. His sister wasn’t one to wait to speak her mind when it came to his life choices. The three of them—he, Joan, and Frank—had come together to ask Buzz’s opinion on a new television, but Buzz knew it was only a ruse to get him alone.

And sure enough, as soon as he was delivered his coffee, as soon as he’d drizzled cream over the top and stirred it to beige, Joan had started in.

“I mean, really, Buzzie,” she said. “You bring this woman home, this woman who has a child—a
child
—and you think you’ll set up house? Just like that? For goodness’ sake, you don’t know anything about this woman. You met her at a music festival. Was she even sober? Were
you
?”

“Joan,”
Frank interjected disapprovingly. Buzz’s sister lowered her eyes, brushing lint from her skirt.

“Sometimes things just happen,” Buzz defended, his gaze moving to Frank. “Things you don’t expect.”

“Are you prepared to put this child in school?” Joan asked. “She has to be in school.”

“I’m registering her tomorrow, as a matter of fact,” Buzz said.

Joan glanced at Frank.

“It’s just so soon after Beth,” she said softly. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt again, that’s all.”

“It’s been a year, Joan,” Frank argued. “He’s divorced; not widowed.”

Buzz had smiled gratefully at his brother-in-law for that.

Later, after the conversation had finally veered onto a more pleasant road and they’d enjoyed a second cup of coffee, Frank walked Buzz back to his truck.

“Joan worries for you,” Frank said gently. “You know that’s all it is.”

“She worries, all right. She worries I’ll embarrass the hell out of her.”

“We both know I’m the one who could do that.”

Buzz nodded, looking down as he always did when Frank spoke of the accident. If people wondered why they were so close for being such different men, they need only have known of the confession Frank had revealed to Buzz just a few months earlier.

Frank had never intended his secret shame to be anyone else’s burden, but as he’d already learned for himself, people could find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Looking for a pen, Buzz had come upon newspaper clippings of a car accident outside of Chicago that had claimed the lives of two people and seriously injured another, articles about a high school student named Dean Grace who was a rising star in the world of competitive swimming.

When Buzz had confronted him about the discovery, Frank might have lied, of course. He could surely have brushed off the clippings, claimed they had belonged to someone else, claimed the boy had been a relative, a friend’s son, anything. But the truth was that Frank had been secretly wishing for a chance to relieve himself of the burden of his crime—and he knew there was no one he could trust more than his brother-in-law.

“I ran a family off the road, Buzz.”

“You what?”

“I wasn’t drunk. Nothing like that. I was reaching for the map and I
drifted.…
”

Buzz had stared a long while at Frank, his thoughts straining to put this information together. “What are you saying?”

“There were boys in the car too. Teenage boys. One was a champion swimmer. He was going to the Olympics. That was what all those articles said, anyway.”

“Oh Jesus, Frank.”

“I meant to stop right away; I really did. I drove back into town to go to the police, to get help, but I—I panicked. I thought of Joan, I thought of everything.…” Frank looked toward the window, where Joan and a neighbor were laughing over a stretch of rugosa bushes that separated their properties. “I got as far as Toledo before I pulled over at a phone—I couldn’t take it. They connected me to the area dispatch, and I told the officer that I’d seen a car in trouble. Crashed. He said they were
already on the scene, that there were fatalities, so I just hung up. I was in shock,” he admitted. “I’ve been sending the boys money every month. The older one knows everything. I send him money and he takes it. I’d give them everything I have if I could. It wouldn’t be enough, but I would.”