The Mermaids Singing Read Online Free Page A

wanted her dead.” I stopped at that word, dead . It was coming up so often now, a small, flat, unanswerable word.
    â€œThat doesn’t mean she’s a horrible person, Gráinne. She was a mother, Grace was a daughter. Shit happens. Competition, resentment, personality clashes. You can’t understand because your Mom’s always been your best friend.” Stephen blushed.
    Until she started dying , we were both thinking.
    â€œShe can’t make me go,” I said. “She can’t just take me to another country. It’s probably not even legal.”
    â€œYou don’t have to go right away. Take some time to talk to her before you act like you’re being kidnapped.” I didn’t answer that, just sat seething and hating him for a moment. But when I glanced over he looked so tired and miserable that I felt an odd stirring that swished away my hatred. I plucked at the seam of the couch cushion.
    â€œCan’t I just stay with you?” I whispered. I’d been thinking that sentence, and dreading it, for months.
    â€œOh, Gráinne,” he said, like he was about to cry, and he turned and put his arm on the back of the couch behind me. “I’m not your father, Gráinne. I couldn’t be your father. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old musician. I don’t know what your mother saw in me, but it certainly wasn’t a substitute dad for you.” When he’d shifted, theblanket had fallen, exposing the outline of his long leg in the darkness. I was watching it and, without thinking, moved my own smooth thigh so it brushed against the hair on his.
    â€œBut I thought—” I started. He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me very slightly away.
    â€œDon’t, Gráinne,” he said. I had heard that before, my name like a scold coming out of the darkness. “I was your mother’s boyfriend. Your mother’s boyfriend. Nothing more.”
    I felt like my insides, which had been numb for days, were splintering apart with his voice, slicing their way to the surface. I stood up, my legs hot and weak, and walked with effort over to my bedroom door. Won’t you miss me at all? I thought. Won’t it hurt you when I go, too? But the room was silent. “Nothing more,” he had said.
    In my room, lying curled up like a cat on my bed, I listened for hours to the faint sniffling and shuddering of breath that was Stephen, crying about something, with his face in the sofa.

CHAPTER 4
Grace
    â€œI think Gráinne wants something from me,” Stephen says. He’s rubbing Grace’s back, running his palms up and out, like waves over her skin. He has to rub gently now, because if he presses too hard she feels as though her organs are being bruised. She can hear the tide coming in on the beach, and she wonders if Gráinne is swimming in it.
    â€œGrace, are you listening?” Stephen says.
    â€œGráinne’s fine,” Grace says. Stephen’s rubbing loses its rhythm; he has never been able to talk and move his hands at the same time. As if all his coordination goes into playing the piano, and he doesn’t have the concentration for the tasks which are left over.
    â€œShe’s angry all the time now,” Stephen says. “I think she’s afraid of being alone.”
    â€œShe won’t be alone,” Grace says, rolling away from him.
    â€œI thought maybe she was looking for a father,” Stephen says, barely petting her back.
    â€œShe’s done fine without a father for twelve years,” Grace says. “She likes you, Stephen, but I think you’re underestimating her.”
    â€œMaybe,” Stephen says. What he means, she can tell by his tone, is: Maybe you are.
    When she closes her eyes, Grace can see her daughter clearly: three years old, sitting at the scarred wooden table in their first apartment in Brighton. She threw tea parties with the set Grace had bought for her at