The Mermaids Singing Read Online Free Page B

Woolworth’s. Plastic plates, saucers, cups, and a teapot with a rose pattern, which had begun to flake off from too much use. Gráinne prepared the pretend tea the way her grandmother did—scalding the pot, shaking in some oregano that represented the loose tea they’d drunk in Ireland. During tea parties, their kitchen would smell like a pizza parlor. Gráinne set places for her dolls, one for her kitten (who stayed because of the milk in her tiny saucer), and gave the least battered pieces to her mother. She always laid one extra place, reverently, opposite Grace, and left the chair empty.
    â€œWho’s that for, sweetie?” Grace asked once. “Is it for the pirate queen?”
    â€œNope,” Gráinne said, pouring the flecked green water into the tiny cups. “Dada.”
    The smell of oregano and warm milk turned Grace’s stomach.
    â€œYou still think Dada’s coming?” Grace whispered. Gráinne gave the empty seat a sugar cookie.
    â€œFirst he’s gotta escape from the mermaid pirates,” Gráinne said. “Will you take sugar?” she added, in her grandmother’s accent, holding a spoon out to her mother’s cup.
    Grace said nothing else the whole year during which Gráinne performed this ritual. Sometimes, watching the determination in the girl’s face as she laid the table for tea, Grace would shiver, and look toward the doorway, half-expecting their absent guest to appear. Gráinne never mentioned her father except at these tea parties, andGrace debated with herself about the best way to handle the subject. How do you explain something you don’t understand yourself to a three-year-old? A year later, when Gráinne lost interest in her tea parties—and, it seemed, her missing father—Grace was relieved.
    I should have talked to her then, Grace thinks now. Stephen has stopped rubbing her back, but he’s still here, waiting for something. She should have explained to Gráinne, or tried to, about why she left Ireland, about how one could feel trapped, captured, even where there were no pirates or mermaids. But she’d waited. And Gráinne had forgotten, never asked about her father except for an occasional, almost journalistic inquiry when she reached puberty—what color was his hair, that sort of thing. No more “Dada”—just a man about whom she was mildly curious.
    Now Grace’s pain is beginning again. Actually, it is always there—at different levels, from bearable to almost surreal—and at the moment it is escalating to a degree that will require the pills which keep her from thinking clearly. Soon, she knows, the doctor will give her a supply of morphine shots, which Stephen will have to administer. The pills no longer work the way they used to.
    Stephen knows from the sweat on her forehead, and from the way she begins to thrash against the sheets like a fish, that it is time to hand her the tablets. Time to help her sip the water which he leaves at room temperature, because cold liquids make her feel like her teeth are cracking.
    When the edges of the pain begin to smooth, she tries to think of Gráinne as a little girl again, to think of a time when she knew what she was doing as a mother, when she believed in the logic behind her lies. But it is herself as a girl she remembers instead, not as a whole being, but as a reflection in the scraps of what surrounded her. Herself next to a boy named Michael, whom for years she thought of as her brother, though she knew they weren’t related in any traditional sense. Michael had his own mother and father, but Grace’s mother was also his mother, in a way that no one had bothered to explain, other than to say she was his “nanny.” Which hadn’t made any sense to the young Grace.
    Grace’s own father was dead and had been dead, as her mother put it, for longer than Grace had been alive. Grace liked to imagine that