Meredith
Present Day
It had all happened so fast.
Every time Meredith ran it all through her head, her thoughts snagged on the metal music (loud and obnoxious enough to keep her awake) that’d been playing when she saw her mother on the beach, tinny and warbling from her phone like some fucked-up soundtrack. The sky had looked a mess of stars and the ocean a black, seething monster set to devour her mother, and all Meredith could do was run and swim, and in the end it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Her mother was gone, the word like a punch in the gut, bringing stinging tears. No, not gone. She’d left.
Meredith’s throat was raw with salt and screams, and every time she opened her mouth to speak, bile threatened to spill. In the days leading up to the funeral—miraculously arranged through the fog that settled over the house and followed Meredith at every turn—Alice became more and more afraid of the ocean, clamping her hands over her ears every time the sound of waves rushed over the bluffs. Though Art suggested it might give Alice some closure to actually see the water, to touch it, Meredith was terrified that the minute Alice was close enough, Judith’s body would wash up on the shore.
The morning of the funeral brought rainstorms and a skull-banging headache. Meredith barely had her eyes open when the pain started at the back of her head, radiating forward. Moving only made it worse. Her arm was asleep, trapped beneath Alice, who was curled into a question mark around a pink shell that she hadn’t let out of her sight since it happened. Taking extra care not to wake her daughter, Meredith pulled her arm out, inch by inch, until it was free. She rolled out of bed, arm burning as blood flow returned, and trudged to the bathroom. She left the door open in case Alice woke up. Alice had had a nightmare last night and made Meredith promise not to leave her side. It wasn’t a difficult promise to make. Meredith’s own nightmares had driven her from sleep more than once, and having Alice beside her was a comfort. As much as she’d tried to tell herself it was shock or the cold or some psychosomatic thing she didn’t have a word for, Meredith had seen something in the water with her mother.
Do you see her?
What she saw wasn’t a her. Wasn’t an anyone. It couldn’t have been. There was always shit floating around, garbage and coolers kicked off boats full of drunk college kids. Every time she thought about it, the thing in the water took a different shape, all of which she explained away. And if it did look like a girl—and Meredith wasn’t going to say it was—then it was only because there’d been water in her eyes. It was blurry, and it was probably just a reflection of her mother.
A small voice in the back of her head said it didn’t work that way.
She brushed the voice away. But it was dark. But she was freaked out. But…but…
A puddle had formed on the bathroom tile beneath the window. Rain leaked through where the latch wasn’t locked properly. She stuck a towel under the drip rather than try to fix the latch. She assumed that was how life would work now—things would break, and she would just let them be broken. Even the Thalia in the sink had given up, drooping under the weight of its blooms. The fanlike leaves were yellow-brown and crackled when she touched them. She ripped the Thalia out of the drain, roots snapping, and threw the thing across the room. She clawed at the drain, pulling up roots and leaves and fallen petals, pelting the lot at the wall, until a shard of dried root slipped under her nail. She cried out and, shaking, pried the shard out with her teeth.
After the pain subsided, she rinsed her face without looking in the mirror. She cupped handful after handful of water into her mouth, tears dripping into the water, salting it, until her belly ached.
“Mom. Help.”
Meredith wiped her face and spun around to find Alice, already in her black dress, which Art had picked out because Meredith couldn’t bring herself to, a brush dangling from a snarl in her hair.
“I tried to do it, but there’s too many knots.” She pulled on the brush to make her point. “Ow.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, kiddo. Here.” Meredith gently untangled the brush from the snarl and then worked the bristles through the knots in short motions until Alice’s hair was smooth and shiny. “There. All done.”
“Will you put it in a pony?”
“But you hate ponies.”
Alice held up her wrist. A black hair tie was wrapped around it. “Yeah, but you like ’em.”
Meredith carefully pulled her daughter’s hair into a high ponytail. She loved how Alice’s hair twisted into one perfect curl, and twirled it around her finger a few times before planting a kiss on Alice’s head. “I’ll be out soon.”
Alice returned the kiss, then frowned. “You’re not going to the beach, right?”
Something sharp poked from beneath Meredith’s ribs. “Why would I go to the beach?”
Alice shrugged.
Damn you, Mom.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Meredith said. “Promise.”
Alice studied her face, frowning harder. “You can’t promise.”
“Sure I can. Just did.” Meredith swallowed the hitch in her voice. “Go sit in the living room, ’k?”
Alice obeyed without another word but looked back over her shoulder twice before turning the corner to the living room.
Meredith leaned over the sink, resting her forehead on the porcelain. She had to get through this without breaking—not for herself but for Alice. She didn’t know how to explain what’d happened to Judith without anger spilling over into her words. Alice deserved better. She deserved to believe her grandmother was good and not selfish and loved her deeply enough to want to stick around.
Alice deserved—Meredith deserved—not to have to say goodbye.
***
She’d battled with herself over asking her wife (ex-wife, soon to be ex, whatever) to come to the funeral but in the end didn’t even tell Kristin that her mother had died. When Art asked, she justified it by saying it would be bad for Alice. He didn’t buy it, but that was okay because she didn’t either.
“You could use all the support you can get,” Art argued as they sat in the car, waiting for Meredith to be ready to go inside. “Even if it’s temporary.”
“I’ve got you. It was good enough before; it’ll be good enough now.”
Art pulled her into him. She buried her face in his scruffy, old-man neck and tried not to cry. She’d done enough crying in the last week to last her the rest of her life. She was dried out. Hollow. A husk.
She pulled away and glanced into the back seat. Alice had Meredith’s earbuds in, eyes glued to Meredith’s phone. “People have been leaving notes at the house.”
Art raised his eyebrow. “Notes?”
She nodded. “Stuffed in the mailbox and under the door.”
“Who? What do they say?”
“No idea. None of them are signed. Some of them start out like condolences. They say they’re sorry about my mom, but then they get weird.” She shifted in her seat. “They say the curse killed my mother and that if I don’t take Alice and leave, we’ll be next.”
Art was quiet for a beat. “You’re sure none of them are signed?”
“I’m sure.”
“’Cause those sound a little like threats.”
“I don’t think they are.” She shot a glance in the rearview to make sure Alice was still occupied. “I’m sure they think they’re helping, but all they’re doing is perpetuating the same bullshit. I almost prefer the juvenile witch crap to this.” She rubbed her temples, focusing on the throb in her head to keep the tears at bay. “My mother killed herself. She wasn’t killed by some curse or spirit or whatever they think. There is no curse. Bad things happen because people make terrible, stupid choices. That’s all.” She picked at a stain on her pant leg. “I wish people would just…stop.”
“I get it. I do. People are…complicated. Some of these folks who’ve been here a long time, they’ve seen a lot of bad. Sometimes it’s easier to say it’s a curse than to say there’s no reason at all.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“I don’t disagree.”
Sighing, she looked back at Alice again. Alice looked up and smiled weakly. Meredith winked, and Alice returned her gaze to the phone. “Kristin used to talk about visiting Mom. She was obsessed with the idea of being close to her, like her presence could magically cure the thing that made it impossible for me and Mom to get along. I thought it was sweet at first.” She paused, shaking her head. “Anyway, I fought her on it. Not just because of Mom, but because I didn’t want to come back to the cape at all. Kristin said my feelings about Mom clouded my perceptions of the cape. She said it couldn’t be all that bad here. When I showed her pictures, all she could say was how beautiful it was. But maybe that’s the function of beauty, you know? To keep the bad hidden away.” She paused. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to come home. I did. Too much, I think. That’s why I stayed away. Because what if it—what if Mom—didn’t want me back just as much?”
For a long time, Art was quiet. She regretted saying anything until he finally spoke. “It’s easy to remember the bad things. When you’re just looking at all the terrible that has happened, I can see why you would think that.”
“But you don’t.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Then why did she do it?” Her voice caught. “Why did she leave me?”
He scratched his chin. “It’s one of those…what do you call…self-fulfilling prophecies. That summer her brother was sent overseas, Judith started to fear the water. It didn’t make sense to me—she was all but born with gills—but she was convinced it would kill her someday. And then it did.” He shook his head. “But it was her fear that killed her. Not some curse.”
Except she wasn’t afraid that night, Meredith thought. She was relieved.
She told herself that was just how suicide worked. When someone decided to kill themselves, of course they felt relief when it was finally happening.
“Might as well go in,” she said.
Art patted her knee. “It don’t look that way now, but everything will be okay. Eventually. You and Alice have each other. You’ll get through it. Okay?”
She nodded. Took a deep breath. “Okay.”
***
The rain hadn’t let up, so they ran under pitiful umbrellas from the car to the door of the funeral home. Though they weren’t the first to arrive. Meredith spotted familiar faces mingling outside the chapel: the Parrishes who owned the bakery, Vik Nielsen, the man from her mother’s photograph, and others—the funeral director, a stout man with oversize glasses who’d perfected the sincere frown, led Meredith, Alice, and Art into the chapel to give them time alone before the ceremony. As she walked through the small crowd, she wondered how many of them had stuffed notes under her mother’s door. How many of them looked at her now with a mix of pity and fear.
“The flowers look great,” Art said.
Meredith agreed. The Thalias were Alice’s idea. She’d made Meredith promise to buy an extra one to replace the one she’d ripped out of the bathroom sink.
“Where do we sit?” Alice asked.
Art pointed. “Front row.”
Alice eyed the casket warily. It was closed, made of white pine with a bouquet of roses like a bloody wound on top, and empty. Before Meredith could assure her that she didn’t have to sit there, Alice walked purposefully for the pew, smoothed her dress, and sat, setting her folded hands demurely in her lap.
“She’s a good kid,” Art said. “You did good.”
“She’s been like this all morning. All week, really. It’s not right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m supposed to be the one comforting her. I’m supposed to be the strong one.”
“Says who?”
Meredith didn’t have an answer.
“She loves you. And kids are resilient. Let her help you.” Then, “You can’t protect her from everything.”
Without taking her eyes off Alice, she said, “Watch me.”
***
By the time the funeral director approached the lectern, only half of the small chapel’s fifty or so seats were filled. Every cough, shuffle, and half-hearted sniffle made it up to the front pew where Meredith squirmed under their watchful gazes. And they were watching. The word cursed came from somewhere in the back, making her stiffen. Alice slipped her fingers between Meredith’s. Ignoring everyone and everything else, Meredith focused on her daughter’s hand, her arm, the little freckles that dotted the outside of her wrist, forming an almost perfect star shape.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of—”
The funeral director was cut off by a loud bang at the back of the chapel.
“Oh God. I’m so sorry. Hang on, I’ll…”
Meredith turned around to see Vik righting a chair that’d fallen against a stone cherub. He kept looking up toward the front, smiling apologetically, then frowning in the direction of a redheaded girl of seventeen or eighteen who sat silently at the end of a back pew. Her pineapple-printed dress looked cut from a single piece of fabric, amateurish, with slightly uneven sleeves and dirty white flip-flops on her feet.
She kicked her leg out, blocking one of the chair legs, a childish smirk on her face.
“Move,” he muttered.
The girl rolled her eyes, relenting.
“Do you know her?” Meredith whispered to Art.
He shook his head.
Alice looked too. Her eyes went wide before her gaze snapped back to the front.
Meredith focused on Vik, trying to place him in the context of her childhood. Except her mother hadn’t had friends when she was young, and she definitely would have remembered this knockoff Sylvester Stallone routine.
The girl looked familiar, but Meredith couldn’t place her. Except…yes. The girl she’d seen walking away from Vik down by the museum. Or maybe not. She wasn’t sure. Meredith hadn’t seen the girl’s face then. Her mind was a mess. Her conversation with Art in the car had shown her that.
The funeral director cleared his throat, bringing her attention back to the front.
“To mourn the loss,” he continued, eyebrow subtly raised, “of Judith Bethany Strand.”
Alice squeezed Meredith’s hand. She squeezed back. They all three of them shared Bethany, Meredith after her mother and Alice after Meredith. Judith was named for a grandmother she never met. Meredith liked that they shared a name. It was about the only thing they seemed to share.
After the funeral director talked for a while, Art got up to speak. Meredith listened but didn’t absorb. Harried whispers in the back kept distracting her. Art spoke about forgiveness, about sharing a childhood with Judith and how he wished they could go back and rewrite some of the truth to make it better, or at least easier to remember. After Art, Carol Parrish said much the same thing, though most of it was hard to hear through her cracking voice. Others spoke, too, but by then Meredith’s mind was hazy and heavy and she just wanted to get out of there, away from that empty coffin and into bed, where she could stay until she could figure out why her mother had killed herself and why she chose to do it while Meredith was watching.
***
It’d stopped raining by the time the ceremony ended. A parade of cars, led by Art, Meredith, and Alice, wound through town up to Judith’s house, where trays of cold cut sandwiches, bowls of mayonnaise-based salads, and store-bought confections waited to be picked at in between awkward condolences. When they pulled into the driveway, Meredith noticed movement on the side of the house. At first, she figured it was someone from the funeral, though how they’d beaten her home was anyone’s guess. Then the person—a teenage boy with dark hair and big teeth—peeked around the corner of the house and quickly fell back.
Meredith jumped out of the car, ignoring Art’s shouting, and ran after the kid. “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
The kid bolted from the side of the house, followed by half a dozen more, all laughing. One of them flipped Meredith the finger. Another shouted something like Fish Witch. That was when the smell hit her—the same she’d smelled in the lighthouse that day.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
She rounded the side of the house and spotted it: a pile of old fish filets, some of them still in the grocery store packaging. Art caught up with her, already out of breath from the short run.
“For Christ’s sake,” he muttered.
Her body went hot and cold. She couldn’t be seeing this. The anger started in her belly, acidic and roiling, and moved through her, a physical ache. Her mother was dead, but even now she couldn’t escape the ignorance. The stupidity. The lighthouse stunt was one thing. The place was all but abandoned, and you had to expect kids to do stupid shit. But this was her mother’s funeral. Between the notes and this, it was enough to make her want to set the place on fire. To stand on the bluff and watch the entire cape burn. “I’ll kill them,” she said.
“Meredith…”
But she was already running, her flats smacking the asphalt. She’d watched them long enough to know they’d turned at the end of the block. She followed the same route, her heart pounding, only to meet another intersection with no way to know where they’d gone. She thought she heard laughter come from the right, but when she sprinted that way, she ended up at a dead end. Her nails dug into her palms as she screamed like some feral thing. Something wet dripped down her lip; her nose was bleeding. What was she going to do now? Spend the next hour peering into windows and around cars looking for a couple of kids? Adrenaline still pumped through her, making her hands and chest tingle, but she was just so tired. Tired of the stories and everything that came with it.
Casting one last look toward the houses lining the street—no open windows or guilty eyes peering out from behind bushes—she pinched her nostrils shut and walked back on trembling knees and aching feet.
Most people had gone inside by the time she got back to the house. She noticed a couple of tarps thrown over the pile of fish. Art was waiting in the front yard with Alice, whose trembling lip settled when she noticed Meredith watching. Vik stood next to them, talking to Art. Clutching the pink shell to her chest, Alice tapped Art’s shoulder and pointed to Meredith.
He jogged over, worry etching a few new wrinkles across his forehead. “Jesus, what happened to you?”
Vik followed, already pulling tissues from his pocket.
He’d filled out a little—the man in her mother’s photograph at least twenty pounds thinner and a decade younger—the buttons of his blue dress shirt straining against the makings of a beer belly, and there were twice as many crow’s-feet around his eyes, but his slicked-back hair and a touch of concealer under his eyes made it clear he wasn’t letting go of youth anytime soon. “Nosebleed?” he asked.
Meredith nodded, accepting the tissue, which she jammed up the offending nostril. “It’s no big deal.”
“Used to get them all the time myself. Figured it was just allergies. Weather. Something. Doctor said it was hereditary. Got so bad they had to cauterize the inside of my nostrils to keep it under control.”
Meredith had been offered the same procedure in her early twenties. She’d declined purely based on the description of the procedure. No one was going to stick something up her nose and burn it to hell, thank you very much.
“Vik’s son, Bobby, has been helping me around the shop,” Art offered. “Bright kid. Really…enthusiastic.”
“He’s at my ex-wife’s this week,” Vik said. “Otherwise, I would’ve brought him. Judith used to watch him when he was a little bugger, back when I was working full-time and his mom was running around with God knows who.”
“You’re divorced?” Meredith asked, her own impending split clawing its way to the front of her mind. “Was it hard?”
“Not as hard as it could’ve been, that’s for sure. She lets me see Bobby. He’s a good boy.”
“You okay, Mom?” Alice asked.
Vik crouched down until he was eye level with Alice. “And who’s this beautiful thing?”
“My daughter,” Meredith said. “Alice.”
Vik offered his hand. “Lovely to meet you, Alice. Have you been through the looking glass lately?” He smiled, all teeth.
Alice grimaced.
“Shy one, eh?” he said, looking up at Meredith with mild irritation.
“Sometimes.” Meredith grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her closer, adding, “She’s upset, obviously. We all are.”
Vik’s expression blanked, then softened. “Yes. Obviously.”
Alice shifted her weight, fingers clenching and unclenching in Meredith’s grip. The big girl facade was cracking.
Meredith nudged her toward the house. “Why don’t you have Art bring you inside for some juice and chocolate cake?”
“Cake for lunch?”
Meredith winked. “Just today.”
Alice smiled and then dragged Art toward the house.
“She looks just like you,” Vik said once Alice and Art had disappeared inside.
“I suppose she does.” She offered a grim smile.
They shared a beat of strained silence. Meredith had been on the other side of this more than once; she didn’t envy those looking for something meaningful to say in the face of death. She decided to relieve him of the responsibility. “I should go inside.” She pointed to her nose. “Get cleaned up.”
“Try corn.”
She frowned.
“Frozen. On the nose. It’ll stop the bleeding faster.”
“Thanks.”
She turned to head for the house, but he followed, cutting her off. He ran his fingers through his hair, and they came away shiny. He absently wiped them on his pants, which were bleach stained at the hems, probably from dragging them through the sand and ocean. He didn’t look like the fishing type, so she briefly wondered how they’d gotten that way.
He flashed an apologetic smile, exposing a rotting, black canine. “Hey, listen. Can I come by tomorrow? To talk?”
Something about his smile made her stomach clench. “Uh. Sure. About what?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and offered a weak smile. “Just some stuff that’s come up. Don’t worry about it today. I’ll come over. Bring the kid some more chocolate cake.” His smile widened.
It reminded her of the girl in the pineapple dress. The red-haired girl. Could she have been the same one who’d said those awful things to Alice? Had she been with her mother the day before she died? Suddenly it seemed like the red-haired girl was important, but how? Why? There was a link there, and somehow, someway, Vik was part of it. “Did you know that girl at the funeral? The one with the red hair?”
His smile dipped, but barely. “Klutzy thing that knocked the chair over? Nah. Why?”
She feigned a shrug, but her body was buzzing. “I didn’t recognize her, so I figured someone Art invited must have brought her.”
“Wasn’t me.”
Hesitating a beat, she nodded. “Okay. Just wondering.”
He looked like he was going to come in for a hug or a handshake, but the last thing she wanted was to let him touch her. She took a half step back. “Well.”
“Well.”
“See you.”
“Yeah. See you.”
Instead of heading for the house, which Meredith had expected, Vik walked to his truck, a rust-lined Silverado with tinted windows. He waved before climbing into the truck and starting the engine. She waved, too, then turned to go inside. A rock had lodged itself in her stomach, heavy, with jagged edges. Vik lied to her about the red-haired girl. She was sure of it. But why?
***
Later that night, Meredith held her own vigil in the lighthouse. After putting Alice to bed (with Art keeping watch in front of the television), she gathered a few tea light candles, a blanket, the last bottle of wine, and hiked through the dark, up the stairs, and into the light room where she wound the mechanism to start the light and then sat cross-legged on the floor with the bottle cupped in her hands like an offering. As she listened to the crash of the waves and the whistle of the wind through tiny gaps in the window frames, she struggled to conjure a good, happy memory with her mother, something to cling to in the future, something to tell Alice when she got older and forgot and wanted to know what Grandma had been like.
She shuffled through a dozen or more snapshot memories of her mother flinching away from a hug or watching Meredith from across the room, eyes narrowed and lips in a straight line, like she was waiting for her daughter to screw up. She remembered bedtime stories that told of monsters lurking beneath the water, just waiting for the right moment to snatch her, to eat her. She thought of the summer her mother ran away, a grocery bag full of canned goods, a roll of toilet paper, and a new package of underwear her only baggage. Dad had brought her home the next day. Mom didn’t speak for over a week.
Then, when Meredith had drunk half the bottle and the small tea lights had all but extinguished themselves, she thought of the moment in the ocean that night, when her mother had hugged her—really hugged her—for the first time. She drank the last of the wine in one long pull, realizing that her happiest memory was of the night her mother died.
Still holding the empty bottle, she stood to watch the light pass over the ocean. During the first few months of their relationship, when everything was exciting and the idea of their splitting up was laughable, Kristin had tried to teach Meredith French. As she watched the waves lap the shore, she remembered that the sea (la mer) and the mother (la mère) were a single letter different. It made sense that her relationship with both were equally as complicated. Ever since she was little, she’d felt called to the water. It was like the waves and the foam were their own language and she could understand it. Kristin used to call her a dowser. She could find the ocean with all her senses cut off. She didn’t have to hear or smell or see the water to know it was near. It called to her. As a kid, it was a special kind of torture, needing to be near the water but not allowed to go in.
You’re allowed now.
The thought wound itself around her head, her throat. She could walk straight into the waves and no one would stop her.
The light passed over the ocean, and a distant glimmer caught her eye.
Her stomach sank. The bottle fell out of her hand, smashing on the floor. For an instant, she thought it was her mother.
She held her breath for the light to pass again. It was too far away, and her breath had fogged the window, but she could swear she’d seen a face. A woman, with hair almost as black as the night and shoulders that glimmered in the red light, staring at her—through her—with eyes like black holes.
But then the light twisted around, and by the time it came back again, the woman—or whatever it was—had gone.