A criss, a cross
Blue thread, storm-tossed
Candles twitch, handkerchief
A mother’s stitch
A cut, snap snip
Nacreous moon, listing ship
Palm song sewn, set in quilt
Nimue was in the incubator, so Manon could not breastfeed, and it broke her heart, feeling her breasts fill and then expel the colostrum in agony, none of it going to her baby. Manon remembered thinking that everything was dripping, everything was bleeding, that the body truly was made mostly of water, and it was all coming out. Her nipples leaked milk; she was bleeding into her bandage gauze; she cried and cried. She sat a long, long time on the bath stool in the shower once, methodically squeezing the blood out of a maxi pad. When it filled with water and was heavy, she squeezed. The blood ran in rivulets down her legs. It filled again. Women never stopped bleeding, never, thought Manon.
According to the doctors, sirenomelia was always fatal. The legs could not be separated because the blood vessels crossed side to side. The organs were rearranged, misshapen, the wrong size. They wouldn’t last. Nimue had a kidney transplant in Boston at two and was on dialysis. She had two bags, one for urine, one for feces.
At home, Manon carried her daughter everywhere. When Nimue was slightly older, a favorite pastime of theirs was throwing seeds for crows off the back and front porches. Birdseed and bread crumbs and goldfish and cereal, the former Manon’s offerings and the latter Nimue’s. They did this so long and so often the crows eventually brought gifts back—pretty sea glass and mica and shells. Nimue lined her presents up by size in her room—dimes, acorn caps, a broken necklace clasp.
After Nimue died, Manon fed the crows less and less, the mother a black hole silhouetted against the violent apricot sky. The crows however continued to bring her gifts, every day, long after she forgot to feed them, long after she moved out, long, long after.
One morning they brought her a tiny green pearl earring.
Manon didn’t speak much when she returned to teaching almost four years after her infamous Mermaid Festival boat ride, where she went out in the boat with her daughter and returned home without her. She’d give the assignments and walk around, then sit at her desk and sew quilts or stare out the window. Her comments on the stories and poems were sometimes loopy and erratic, if she gave any at all. Mostly she just scratched a check in the corner to indicate the assignment was received and completed, no grades, no words. Everyone agreed she should have stayed away from work for a little longer, but no one could agree on what she should do instead.
“Boys, shut the fuck up,” she said to the Townsend twins one day while sipping her coffee, and the entire class went silent for an entire minute before they snickered en masse; it was well deserved.
She drank her coffee out of a mug covered in skeletons. The Christmas when Nimue was one, Jason gave Manon a coffee mug with pictures of dinosaurs. When filled with hot coffee, the dinosaurs’ skins faded away to the bones. The mug was never to be put in the dishwasher, but when it inevitably made it in, the dinosaurs—which were nothing but a thin film—crumpled up and disintegrated as they were boiled by the water. It happened in stages, because once the mug was accidentally in the dishwasher it was washed so from then on.
“What happened to the dinosaurs?” Jason asked one day.
“They went extinct,” Manon replied.
When she was pregnant, Manon sewed on her quilts every night. The first quilt she sewed was Nimue’s crib blanket. She sewed a panel from each of her favorite children’s stories, so her daughter’s crib blanket was a celebration of hungry caterpillars and little princes and hedgehogs in aprons. When she was pregnant with Nimue she also sewed “The Moorings of Mackerel Sky,” her first quilt depicting the mermaid legends of Mackerel Sky with the nine squares. Her rendition of the Kiss, where Nimuë embraced Burrbank underwater like he was her man in the moon, the central square, was her particular favorite. The seventh square’s portrayal of the Second Betrayal was toned down to just a net and hook and necklace, because as this was her first quilt, Manon was unsure how to best portray the drowning of the mermaid Nimuë’s brother.
The mermaids, as Manon was told it, and as she told it in class, were betrayed a second time by Burrbank and the humans. The First Betrayal was Captain Burrbank and Esmeralda’s kiss when Nimuë was pregnant with the Captain’s baby. However, the Second Betrayal was more terrible and violent, its consequences were more severe. One of Nimuë’s brothers was ensnared by a fisherman’s nets—supposedly the Terror’s, whose knots were inescapable. Growing tighter during the struggle, like the body of a python, the nets strangled the merman to death, and his necklace, containing a giant verdant pearl, a treasure coveted by the sea folk, was stolen and taken on land. Manon did not want to sew that violent death onto a baby blanket, so she left the merman out entirely but kept his necklace. She used the loveliest piece of sea glass as the pendant, sewing it on securely so that Nimue could never pull it off and choke on it.
Manon sewed whenever she was nervous about being a mother. She wanted to be a good one. The stitches helped soothe her; she could watch the stitches line up and somehow that meant everything would be okay. She stitched before and after that day on the water on Jason’s lobster boat, the day her daughter died and sank into the ocean.
Over the months, the quilts replicated themselves, one into the other, nine panels showing the mermaid tale of how Mackerel Sky was founded. In Manon’s dreams all she saw were mermaids; mermaids writhing in the water calling to her; mermaids singing their songs and beckoning. Down down down. So she sewed her quilts like her sails and raised them to the wind to keep from sinking.
Her quilts kept her warm on days she bathed herself in the snow and cold and rain.
Jason was a good husband, but at times he could be cold and hard. He didn’t know it, but after Nimue died Manon simply needed his hands, for she was held together like a spiderweb on grass. Had he just held her he would have held her together.
When she walked away from their marriage that April, in her head Jason was right behind her. In her head, he was calling her back. In her head, she had already turned around.
When she got into the car and drove away from their marriage, all those thoughts remained. Although it was April, there was still a foot of snow on the ground. She looked out at the winter and thought that such winters were the death and end of settlements.
When Nimue was alive, Manon also stitched children’s quilts based on stories. There were Maine stories, the story of Miss Rumphius, who scattered the lupine seeds and painted the Maine coast the colors of berry and lavender and olive, and the story of Sal she quilted in blueberry blue and sand, with berries and bears. But she always returned to quilting the story of Mackerel Sky and the moorings of men and mermaids over and over.
She stitched the lush body of Nimuë the Mermaid on the third square and thought of the legend of Captain Burrbank’s arrival on the beach. Manon always used the deepest greens and reflective blues for Nimuë’s hair, the colors of the core of the ocean, and she always depicted her with parts hidden, like the striptease of a burlesque dancer.
When Ichabod Burrbank landed to explore, he always sought the highest vantage point on the coast so he could survey the land and sea. Under the full moon, a giant heavy egg ready to crack, he came upon the cliffs. The air was clear and black with pinpricks of white starlight, but Burrbank was anxious, twitchy.
After dogging his ship for weeks, and saving him from the pirates, the Mermaid had been dogging his dreams still, her prow just on the edge of the gray foggy sea, just on the edge of his vision. She had sent two men from his crew into the sea. One more lost his mind. She made the crew nervous. But Burrbank could not stop thinking about her, about how she kissed him, how she tasted like wanderlust and the secrets of the deep.
As he surveyed the territory from what would become High Cliffs, a bald eagle stretched its wings perched on a magnanimous pine. Burrbank looked down to the beach below.
There, lounging on a rock, the moon illuminating her skin, her eyes shining like opals, the water rushing off her body, begging his hands and mouth to follow, was the Mermaid.
He wanted her like he had never wanted anything before, desperately, madly.
She smiled, vulpine.
And by the time he had climbed down the cliffs and made it to what would be known as Nimuë’s Perch, she had disappeared into the sea.
He built a lean-to on the Aerie and slept there that night, waking up every hour to search.
That lean-to become the town of Mackerel Sky.
Besides Burrbank’s cenotaph, the most decorated stone in Evergreen Cemetery was the cenotaph of little “Mermaid of Mackerel Sky” Nimue Perle. The flowers planted grew as large as the flowers delivered, Manon’s famous salmon lupines at either end. Nimue Perle had become part of local lore, had been on many regional television programs and on the national news twice. She was visited often, posthumously hosting parties, especially during the summer Mermaid Festival and the Day of the Dead. High school students and romantics kissed the little mermaid statue on the cenotaph for luck, especially against drowning and mad love.
Her cenotaph was kept clean and well-tended and somewhat close to Millicent Stowe’s grave. Derrick walked by it every Sunday on the way to visit his mother.
Manon did not visit the grave much, for she knew her daughter was still in the sea.
After the third visit to the sanatorium, Manon moved into an apartment on one of the Lone Docks. She couldn’t live anymore with Jason; he still blamed her. He didn’t understand. No one could understand. Manon knew she would never understand, so how could anyone else? How could anyone comprehend sitting on the back of a lobster boat cradling a dead daughter, and then giving her to a mermaid?
The day Nimue died, Manon sat good and long in Sheriff Badger’s car, in the passenger seat, door open, staring at the water through red-rimmed eyes—for hours, or for minutes, time was irrelevant. Desperation and despair played “Ring Around the Rosie” in her head, and a sick emptiness grew in her stomach.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. It can’t be, she kept thinking as her brain began pulling away from the horrifying, devastating reality that now existed for her.
A new thought came in, vicious, violent, galloping through the ballroom of her mind like one of the horses of the apocalypse.
You
bet
your
life
it
is