False Mermaid

The patients at her mother’s clinic were mostly immigrant mothers and children, and Nora had seen firsthand how they struggled with a strange new language, with poverty and bureaucracy and bigotry, with the bitter Midwestern cold. Many had survived so much worse, in home places ravaged by famine, genocide, endless war. She had always thought it no great mystery that her mother could imagine what had really happened to Tríona, while her father, insulated from human contact in his sterile, air-conditioned laboratory, could not. She watched her mother check the door to the hallway once more, and then steel herself, apparently to deliver bad news. “Nora, there’s something I haven’t told you—”

“If it’s about Miranda, Mam, I already know.”

“How did you find out?”

“Does it matter?” Her mother’s bewildered expression forced a confession of sorts. “All right—I was here last night, outside. I overheard you and Daddy talking.”

“Nora, why didn’t you come in?”

“It was a shock, hearing about Miranda, and then to find out about their trip to Ireland—”

“I wanted to tell you, Nora. I meant to tell you.”

“I know, Mam. Please don’t worry.”

“I don’t understand, Nora. If you were here, where did you sleep last night?”

“I got a little apartment. I didn’t want to put you and Daddy out—”

“Put us out?”

Nora could see the hurt in her mother’s eyes. “We both know it’s for the best, Mam.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t know anything anymore. There’s something else—” Eleanor’s voice dropped to a whisper. She glanced down the hallway again to make sure the door to the study was completely shut. “Will you come upstairs?”

Nora followed her mother up the back stairs from the kitchen, wondering what all the secrecy was about.

Once inside Tríona’s room, Eleanor sank down on the bed, taking up the chambray shirt Nora had left there. She began absently smoothing the faded material. “My God, I’d nearly forgotten this poor old thing. Your father wouldn’t get rid of it, even after it was threadbare. I was going to peg it out, but Tríona wouldn’t let me—” She lifted the material to her cheek, pulled back through its subtle fusion of scents to intimate memories of husband and daughter—lost, just as Nora had been, in an intensely private past.

After a moment, Eleanor spoke: “This is the only place I can still see her. I come in here every few months, thinking it’s time we started to clear away—I mean, really, how many jars of shells and stones does a person need? But when I touch anything, I think, ‘Tríona must have seen something special in this; she picked it up and saved it for a reason.’ And so I put it back. And everything stays just as it was.”

She had never heard her mother speak like this before. Nora crossed to a trio of antique apothecary jars resting on the window ledge. The nearest was filled with shells, the other two with sea glass and stones—all collected during their summers in Ireland. Every year, Tríona had smuggled home additions to her odd collections. Nora lifted the first lid and took out a conical shell—a black-footed limpet—turning it over and admiring all the varicolored stripes. “I tried to explain to her once, about all the different types of limpets. And do you know what she said? ‘I don’t need facts about everything, Nora. I just like the shapes and the colors.’”

“You’ve always tried to make sense of the world—that’s just the way you are, love. It’s your nature. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m sure Tríona didn’t mean what she said as criticism.”

Nora returned the shell to the jar and crossed to sit beside her mother on the bed.

“I know you believe we treated you differently,” Eleanor said. “And I suppose we did, in a way, because you were so different, you and Tríona. Not just from each other; from your father and me as well. Sometimes I couldn’t fathom where either of you came from. What all mothers have to wonder, I suppose.” She reached out to touch Nora’s face. “Every time I look at you, even now, I see you the second after you were born—such a shock of dark hair! I see you at six, at eleven, at fourteen, twenty-five. And the curious thing is that this package, this outward form that is you—it changes; it actually never stops changing, but the essence—” She laid her hand upon Nora’s breastbone. “The essence of who you are—that has never altered, not ever, from the time I carried you inside me. I’m not sure why I find that reassuring, but I do.”