The sound of a car’s tires crunching the gravel driveway came from outside. Through the window, Quinn watched a red Jeep pull up. A stranger. Quinn stepped to the side of the window where she couldn’t be seen. Her father was in town to use Wi-Fi, and her mother was asleep. A woman got out of the car. Maybe thirty or younger, jeans, navy down jacket, dirty-blond hair in a choppy pixie cut. Reporter? Probably. She seemed too . . . together, with the Jeep and all, to be one of the religious people. The woman glanced around and then walked up to the house. Quinn didn’t move. Shit, shit, shit. A knock came at the door. And again.
Quinn didn’t know whether she should wake her mother, or what, so she just stayed where she was, motionless.
Another knock.
When Quinn still didn’t answer, a business card came sliding under the door.
Quinn picked it up as she heard the woman’s steps go across the porch, back toward the Jeep.
Charlotte Lowell – Southaven Veterinary Services
Quinn opened the door, stepped outside. “Hello?” she called. The woman turned around and shaded her eyes.
“Hi,” she said. “Quinn?”
Quinn nodded. The woman walked back in her direction. She moved with purpose.
“You’re not Charlotte,” Quinn said. There was no way this woman was old enough to have published a book in 1978, which was the date on The Deeps.
The woman smiled, emphasizing her wide, curved cheekbones. “I was, last I checked. But you probably mean that I’m not my grandmother. And no, I’m not.”
“Did I . . . Are you the one I called?”
Charlotte nodded. “My grandmother’s been dead for a few years. Same name. People call me Charles, though. Childhood nickname.”
“Oh,” Quinn said, deflating. Charlotte Lowell, her Charlotte Lowell, was dead. “Sorry. I found the name in the phone book.”
“That’s okay. I tried to call back, but your phone line was down. I was out this way to check up on a patient, so thought I’d stop by.” She put her hands in her jacket pockets. “As long as I’m here, is there something I can help you with?”
Quinn shook her head. “Thanks for coming, but no.”
“I knew Meryl,” Charles said. “Does that make a difference?”
Quinn made coffee and brought it over to where Charles was sitting on the couch looking at the book about the Deeps. She said she used to have a copy but hadn’t seen it in years.
“I like your grandmother’s illustrations,” Quinn said, sitting in the chair nearest to her.
Charles nodded. “My house is full of her watercolors.” After a moment she put the book down and took a sip of coffee. “Whoa. You make a strong cup.”
“Too strong? I didn’t taste it.” Quinn had made herself mint tea.
“No, no. It’s good.” Charles took another sip, as if to prove she was telling the truth, then rested the mug on the table. “I know about your pregnancy,” she said. “And some of what’s been going on in the media. Just wanted to put that out there.”
“Oh.” Quinn rubbed her pendant. Of course this wasn’t a surprise, but it made her sick to think of Charlotte—Charles—having read those things about her dad and Ben. She wanted to tell her they weren’t true. But was she going to do that with everyone she talked to from now on?
“So,” Charles said, interrupting her thoughts. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Charlotte didn’t make the Deeps up,” Charles began. “Well, I guess she made up that name—the Deeps. But the story is an old island myth, legend . . . whatever. Not just here. Other islands around the world have similar stories. My grandmother knew it from growing up here, and she turned elements of it into the book.” She gestured at the copy on the table. “You know that feeling of the undertow pulling at you, or the current nudging you, or whatever?”
Quinn nodded.
“According to the myth, that’s the ocean spirits. The waves coming in are curious young spirits coming up on land to explore. The undertow is the older ones pulling them back out. According to the myth, that’s what causes the tides—the push and pull of young and old.” Charles gestured a forward-and-back motion.
“And supposedly, a long time ago, there were people—families—that had a connection to these ocean spirits, passed down through the generations. They lived on islands and considered the Deeps their friends. I think the way my grandmother told it, their veins ran with saltwater instead of blood.”
There was a flurry of movement in Quinn’s gut, as if the baby was jumping up and down the way Quinn’s heart was. Before she could ask any of her ten million questions, Charles spoke again.
“When women in the families were pregnant, their babies sometimes had two spirits—a human spirit and an ocean spirit. The mother would go swimming while pregnant and release the ocean spirit into the water. The ocean needed new young spirits for the tides to stay in balance, and humans needed the ocean to be healthy to maintain Earth’s ecosystem.” She reached for her mug. “That’s the basic myth.”
While Quinn’s mind and gut and heart were all in a frenzy, she also felt a strange sense of calm, a feeling that everything was settling into place. As if she was hearing things she already knew in her bones, but hadn’t been allowed to name. The mother releases the ocean spirit into the water . . . She remembered that silvery flash between her legs the other night, as she swam with the stars . . .
“So . . . do these families still exist?” she asked cautiously.
“The way you ask that is as if the myth were true,” Charles said with a smile, setting her coffee back down.
“Oh, um . . .” How much could Quinn divulge to this stranger? “Did your grandmother think it was true?”
Charles hesitated. “No. But your grandmother did.”
“She did?” Quinn said, not surprised in the least.
“Even though she grew up here, she’d never heard the myth until she saw a copy of Charlotte’s book when she moved back here as an adult . . . you know, after leaving your dad and his father. But once she read it, she said she recognized what she’d felt her whole life. She told Charlotte. Charlotte filled her in on the rest of the myth. And Meryl started putting pieces together.”
“What pieces?
Charles rubbed her chin. “I’m assuming from all your questions that you never got the letter.”
“Letter?”
“From your grandmother.”
Quinn shook her head.
Charles sighed. “I think we need more coffee. Tea, whatever.”
Quinn took a moment to bring their mugs to the kitchen, pour more coffee, add more hot water and another tea bag. Her hands trembled the whole time. There was a letter somewhere. A letter for her! Even better than the idea of finding a diary or something in those boxes. There was a letter that would explain everything.
She sat back down and handed Charles her mug. “There’s a letter?”
Charles nodded. “Meryl left it with Charlotte before she died.” She paused. “Charlotte gave it to your dad, to give to you when you were old enough.”
Quinn’s hope sank like a rock. “Oh.”
From the look on Charles’s face, Quinn could tell that she understood what she was thinking: The letter probably didn’t exist anymore.
“You didn’t read it, did you?” Quinn asked.
“No,” Charles said. “But Meryl wrote it at Charlotte’s, and I was there. She was . . . agitated. She kept saying, ‘It’s supposed to be beautiful. But she should wait. She needs someone to tell her.’ Honestly? I thought she was talking about losing your virginity.” Charles smiled again. “Later, after Meryl died, Charlotte confided in me that Meryl thought her first pregnancy was . . . was with the Deeps, not related to sex at all. She thought that families like hers had lost the story of the Deeps somewhere along the line, that most had probably moved off of islands altogether, and that no one told girls like her what was going on. She thought that those babies with twin spirits were actually conceived in the ocean.”
Quinn shifted forward in her chair. “But didn’t she get pregnant with her husband?”
“The first time?” Charles looked surprised. “With the baby girl who died?”
“Yeah.”
“No. She was only seventeen. She got pregnant while she lived here. She lived alone with her mother, and her mother was so upset about the pregnancy, Meryl had to move off the island in disgrace. She didn’t meet her husband until later.”
Jesus. “So . . . she was a virgin when she got pregnant? That’s why she thought it was the Deeps?”
“No,” Charles said. “She had a boyfriend. But . . . I guess, at the time, she’d been confused about how the pregnancy had happened. They’d used birth control or something.”
“Oh.” If Meryl wasn’t a virgin, she could have just been crazy, thinking that it was the Deeps. “So, you don’t believe any of this, do you?” Quinn asked.
“Like, actually believe it?” Charles said. “No.”
“You think Meryl was delusional?”
Charles stared off toward the windows. “I don’t know. I guess . . . I went to veterinary school, Quinn. I’m a science person. I’m not sure what was going on in Meryl’s mind, but . . . I do know that she had a difficult life. Her father dying when she was young, and then the pregnancy, leaving home, and the baby’s death . . . It took a toll.”
“Why are you telling me all this then?”
“I debated about it. But . . . I don’t know. I saw how unhappy your grandmother was, and I guess . . . I guess I thought . . .” She laughed. “I don’t know, Quinn. Maybe there’s some microscopic part of me that thinks, what if. You know?” She shook her head. “God, I can’t believe I just said that. I mean, I don’t believe it. I don’t. But . . . still . . . I got your phone message, and . . .” She shrugged. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“No!” Quinn said. “I’m so glad you did.”
They both turned at the sound of a car pulling up the driveway.
“Shoot,” Quinn said, standing. “That’s my dad.”
Charles stood, too, and pulled on her jacket hurriedly. “No offense,” she said. “But I’ve never really liked him.”
Gabe opened the door. His face went pale at the sight of Charles.
“Don’t worry,” she said to him. “I was just on my way out.”
“What are you doing here?” he said, voice icy.
“I called her,” Quinn said.
Charles rested a hand on her shoulder for a second. “Lovely to see you, Quinn. Take care.” She walked out past Gabe without even looking at him.
“I don’t want to know,” he said to Quinn as he shut the door firmly. “I don’t want to hear one word of the poison she’s been filling you with.”
“What happened to the letter Meryl left for me?”
“She was a sick woman, Quinn. And Charlotte . . . the older Charlotte . . . she wasn’t much help, indulging her.”
“Do you still have it?”
His silence was enough of an answer.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that she was a teenager when she got pregnant the first time?”
Gabe looked startled. “She was?”
“She was seventeen. Her mom sent her away.”
“I didn’t know that. I don’t know much about her life. My father never talked about her.”
“She wasn’t married yet. And . . . later, when she found out about them, about the Deeps . . . she thought she got pregnant in the ocean. She wasn’t a virgin, but still . . .”
Gabe appeared to be holding himself in check, eye twitching, jaw pulsing. Quinn didn’t let his expression stop her. She told him everything Charles had told her about the myth of the Deeps and about Meryl.
“Quinn,” he said. “Don’t you think we’d know if girls all around the world were getting pregnant without having sex? If they were getting pregnant in the ocean, for God’s sake?”
“No one’s going to know about me, right?” she said. “We’re not going to tell anyone. Also, Charles said lots of the families have moved off of islands. That they’ve lost the connection. Maybe it doesn’t happen much anymore.”
Quinn knew how this all sounded, of course. But the way she’d felt when she’d heard it, the way the words fit perfectly in the curves of her brain, in the chambers of her heart . . . Like water taking on the shape of its container, that’s how well the story fit inside of her. There wasn’t a way to explain how she knew it was true. She just knew.
“You’ll never, ever know how sorry I am that whatever . . . whatever trauma you experienced has led you here,” her father said, resting his hands on her shoulders. “All I want is for you to remember what you were like before all of this. In Brooklyn. When you were at school with your friends and happy and settled. That is who you are, Quinn. And who you still are. No one can take that from you. And we’re going to get you the help that you need to find yourself again.”
He squeezed her shoulders gently.
“Don’t you understand what’s going on here?” he continued. “You heard these stories when you were little. You wanted them to be true. You wanted friends. And now, in a time of crisis, you’re going back to this . . . fantasy. It makes perfect sense, Quinn.”
“So you won’t even talk about Meryl? And the similarities? How strange it all is? You won’t talk about it now, just like you never gave me that letter.”
He briefly looked toward the ceiling. “Someday,” he said, meeting her eyes again, “when you’re better, you’ll understand. You’ll see that everything I’ve done has been to help you. Mom and I . . . we love you. And we need you here, Quinn, in this world. The real world.”