Chapter One: Grace

It is only at night now that she has the strength to wander. Rising quietly, so as not to disturb her lover, Grace pulls a sweater over her pajamas, slips her feet into running sneakers. Stephen had bought her the sneakers to wear in the hospital after she refused to put on the regulation blue foam slippers. She is not a runner but she likes the height of them, the curve of the soles which roll her forward like a boat lifted by waves. She wraps a scarf around her gruesome bald head.

She passes through the cottage quickly, without looking at the tacky furniture -- leftovers from someone else's life. Stephen had rented this place so Grace could be near the sea. Sometimes she calls it "the hospice," in an attempt to be the blunt, witty sort of dying person she would like to be.

She goes first to the water, down the damp sand and over to the barnacle rocks, which she climbs gingerly, still surprised by the weakness of her limbs. She wants to stand on the rocks, dive into the cold water and swim the pain away, but she can only sit, watching the moonshine catch the waves, feeling the salty damp seep into her clothing and skin, breathing it; it is thick and familiar in her damaged lungs.

The sea does not speak to her in the daytime. When Stephen manages to coerce her into a walk, the sunlight, harsh on her yellowed skin, distracts her. The beach feels dangerous with Stephen, because of the way he clings to her elbow, guiding her over shells and rocks, assuring that the foamy tide does not wash against her fragile ankles. On these walks she feels like a captive, like a creature held just out of reach of her watery home. She wants to shake him off, as passionately as she used to want to creep into his body because his hands on her skin were not enough. She hides the impulse to push him away, tells herself it is the cancer that makes her feel this repulsion. Though it is not the first time she has felt like a prisoner.

On the nights she escapes, the sea becomes hers again; the rhythm of the waves aligns itself with the thrust and ebb of her heart. She looks over the silver water and imagines another beach across the Atlantic, an Irish shore, the landscape a mirror reflection of this one. There, the wind in the coves was a chorus of the island mermaids, who moaned with the hopes of capturing a sympathetic man. She used to swim there, that moan in her blood, longing to leave. Now, though she has been gone from Ireland for twelve years, it is appearing to her, dropping in heavy folds, swallowing her present life. She thinks how odd it is, that the strongest convictions, like possessions, can lose all meaning when you are dying. Everything that she thought she was about has slipped from her, and the things she never wanted are clinging to her memory like the seaweed in the crevices at her feet.

Her mind is a collage of faces. She sees her mother, whose early wrinkles looked like crevices in rock, whose mouth was constantly clamped in a stern line, who always fought to keep her face expressionless. Grace hated that blank face, she raged to get it to register something -- even anger -- anything. Now she misses her mother, longs for her like a lonely child. But she escaped from that face and it's too late now, she believes, to ask for it back.

Another face her husband's, an Irish man. Though she has spent several years trying to erase him from her memory, his features come back to her in perfect detail; he glows like a stubborn ghost when she closes her eyes. She wonders why she ever left, why she can't remember what went wrong between them. He was kind, she knows. Had that not been enough? It means more to her now, kindness.

When she feels her body crawling toward sleep, far too soon, she goes back to the cottage, slips into its silence. She opens a bedroom door, checks on her daughter -- a teenager who sleeps like a child, her limbs sprawled, mouth gaping, the sheets twisted like vines around her ankles. The glinting black curls on the pillow are her father's. At one time, Grace might have righted the bedding, smoothed the masses of hair away from her daughter's face. But tonight she only stands there, afraid of waking her. They avoid each other now, these two, as intensely as they once clung together.

She closes the door, walks across the dark living room. At a table in the corner she sits, switching on a miniature desk lamp. There is an old typewriter here, a stack of crisp white paper beside it. She winds a sheet through, and types out a note, flinching at the sound of keys, like gunshots in the night.

Gráinne, she types.

Please pick up cereal and matches if you pass by the G. S. today. If you have any clothes that need washing -- and you must by now, kiddo, unless you plan to keep wearing those stinking jeans -- give them to Stephen, he's going to the laundromat.

--Love, Mom

She props the note on the refrigerator with a lobster-shaped magnet. She doesn't know why she continues to compose these strange communications, why she cannot say anything she really feels. She wants to ask her daughter if she's all right, wants to know what she does all day ant half the night when she's away from the cottage. But Grace has lost the ability to ask anything. Once. she had prided herself on speaking bluntly, honestly to her daughter. Only recently has she admitted that she's been ring all along. She lied by never telling Gráinne about the people she had left behind them: Gráinne's grandmother, her father, her family. Grace used to think that she was all chat Gráinne needed. Now she feels guilty, inadequate, resentful. She is dying, her daughter is living on, and they hate each other for it. They cannot figure out what to say. So they leave notes--hanging them on the refrigerator like sheets of hieroglyphics that neither one of them knows how to translate.

With barely any energy left, her body disintegrating into exhaustion, she sets a place at the dining table. Plate, salad place, napkin, two forks, two knives, a spoon at the top . A water glass glinting in the moonlight from the window. She has made too much noise, because Stephen opens the bedroom door and calls to her. He thinks that she lays this place for him or for Gráinne, for breakfast, but it's for neither. It is the extra place she always set as a child, a tradition she copied from a book about an old Irish castle, a book about found in her mother's drawer. At the castle, an extra table setting was always laid for the Gaelic queen Granuaile, even if she wasn't expected. A pirate and a warrior, Granuaile was known to appear without warning at the gates with her crew of hungry sailor, assuming she'd be welcomed. Long after Granuaile had died, the castle staff continued to leave a place for her, not wanting to offend the spirit of such a woman.

Grace hasn't thought to see Granuaile's place in years. Once, she did so with a childish hope that she wouldn't be able to sail off with the queen after dinner. Then she grew up, and grew to believe that only she could save herself. She performs the ritual again now--the instinct, long dormant, has risen with an ease that frightens her. She no longer believes in pirate queens, in safety. But she can think of nothing else, save those useless little notes, to leave behind her in the night.

She follows the sound of Stephen's voice, returns to the warmth of the bed, the resented comfort of sleep. As she drifts off, Stephen's solid body pressed against her bony back, she listens to the waves, eternally crashing on the beach, hushing, calling, their currents drawing her body away and pulling her mind backward.

The foregoing is excerpted from The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022