Short Stories

This story first appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, issue 27, Spring, 1995

LEGACY

copyright 1995 by Nora M. Mulligan

I could never remember anything about my mother, not even the color of her eyes or the sound of her voice, and yet I know that I was four years old when she disappeared.

"Go on, Dreya," my father would say when I asked him about her, "don't waste your time talking about her. She's gone, and will never return." And there was something in his voice, something harsh as if he had been calling all day across heavy seas to someone who wouldn't answer. I learned when he had that sound to his voice that he would talk to me no more.

And all my older brother, Gareth, said when I would ask him was, "How can you not remember your own mother, when you were that old when she was gone?"

"Did she die?" I would ask him, as I would never ask my father. "Did she just leave us? What does Father mean when he says she disappeared?"

And Gareth would sound older than his years, and far older than I, and he would turn away from me, just as our father did. "She's gone, and that's all."

I remember that when I was seven or eight, and I wanted to go with my father in his boat, he turned on me with eyes like storms, and shouted at me as I had never heard him shout before. "Never! Never while I am outside of my grave will you ever set foot on a boat of mine, or of any man's!"

I remember I was so surprised that I couldn't even be afraid, and I asked him, "But why not? You take Gareth with you, and you took him when he was younger than I am now."

"That's different," he said in a quieter voice, but still with the anger in it like the sea. "He's my son, and he's a boy, and you're my daughter." He said something very quiet then, and I was not sure I'd heard him correctly. I thought he added, "My only daughter," but I could not be sure, then or later.

I was angry, and perhaps I stormed about it myself. I couldn't be angry at him long when under all the fury and the harsh words I could feel the sadness in him, and the loneliness, though I was too young then to name it for him.

He would not let me go swimming in the sea with the other children, either. He said it was because he was afraid I could hurt myself. I knew at the time that it wasn't the whole truth, for I was at least as strong as Brigid or Ella who were allowed to swim out to the ropes, and I was stronger than some.

It was then I asked Gareth, "Was it our mother was hurt in the sea, that Father is so afraid for me?"

"I don't know why he's so afraid for you," said Gareth, his face shuttered like the houses that are being left to the winds and the sea. He did know something, but he would never tell me.

And for the longest time when I was a child, my father would come home later than all the other men in the village. His would be the last boat to reach the shore, long after the other men had returned, and were in their homes, eating with their families. I knew he was sad, and angry sometimes, and I thought maybe he would not return at all, that he would give himself to the sea and the sea would take him as sometimes it took other men from the village. I'd be waiting up for him some nights, so tired I could scarcely see straight, but I thought if I weren't there at the window, maybe this would be the time he wouldn't come home. On those late nights, when he would come home, if I was still awake, he would take me and put me to bed silently, without a word of comfort, without any word at all. He looked different from the other men coming home from the sea: more tired, more beaten by the weather, and sadder, sadder as if he'd caught the most precious thing in the ocean, and lost it again. No matter what I asked or how I begged him, he would tell me nothing about his trips, or what it was he was looking for, and couldn't find.

The only other time I can remember my father screaming at me was one day when I was perhaps ten or so. There was a little gray trunk that he kept under his bed, wedged in behind all his fishing gear and the clothes he had worn out and needed to repair. I don't remember why I was being so thorough in my cleaning on that day, but I took everything out from under the bed, and I saw the box. It looked strange to me, and mysterious, and I was looking for the key that would open it. I brought it to my father, to ask him about it, and his face turned the dark red when he saw it in my hands. He tore it away from me as if it held the terrors of the other world, and all the time screaming at me for touching his things. He told me to never come into his room again if that was the way I would behave in it, and he scared me so much I never did come back into his room for more than a few seconds at a time after that.

It was only when I became older that I realized how lonely my father was, and how isolated. And I thought that maybe he should be looking for another wife, to keep him company when Gareth and I should grow up and leave. My father was a handsome man, and a good fisherman, and no one ever had a word against him for the way he raised my brother and me, and yet there was never a hint that any of the women in the village had any designs on him for a husband. I knew even when I was young and romantic that it wouldn't be my father reaching out and taking the first step. Whatever had happened with my mother had frozen something in him, and if he had ever been able to smile and laugh with a woman, he never did after my mother was gone. But it was strange the way the women in the village would not laugh and smile and make the effort with him. Sometimes I thought maybe they were afraid, a little, of the ice in him, and the loneliness. Or maybe they were afraid of what had happened to my mother, and that he was tainted with it, whatever it was.

You would think, in a small village like ours, that it would have been easy for me to find out about my mother from our neighbors. It was true that none lived especially near to us, but there were the men who fished with my father, and the women whose children played with Gareth and me, and saw us in church every Sunday. I thought, certainly one of them would be able to tell me about my mother, what she was like and what had happened to her. Certainly at least one of them would have a loose tongue sooner or later and let slip something by accident that I would manage to hear. And you can believe that I asked, in sly ways as well as outright. But no one ever gave me a straight answer. Over the years, I learned that my mother's name was Mary, that she had been from somewhere far away, never seen before she appeared at my father's house, that she simply disappeared one day and was never seen again, and no one knew what happened to her. One old man told me my mother was beautiful. One old woman told me that I resembled her. But that was all, and it was not enough for the hunger in me.

And when Seamus asked me to marry him, I accepted him, despite the hole in the heart of me. He was a good man, Seamus, a good provider from a good family, and I think he cared for me, and I for him. But I couldn't actually marry him and say the words and mean them, not as long as there was the question about my mother that was never answered.

It was my father who asked me, "Why won't you name the day? He's a good man, and loves you surely. Why do you stand in the way of your own happiness?"

"And how can I be marrying any man, when I have no mother to prepare me for the wedding, to tell me what a girl needs to know?" I asked him back.

"Your mother," he said, and turned away as if I had struck him.

I took him by the shoulder and turned him back to me. "My mother! My mother that I never knew and I can't remember! Why won't you tell me about her, now, now when I am to be a bride myself and perhaps a mother after? Can't you see why I need to know?"

I had never seen him look so old, so wounded and worn as he did then. "Dreya," he said, "there's nothing your mother could have told you about being a wife and a mother that could possibly help you."

"Is she even alive? Can't you tell me that much?"

"I don't know," he said. It was more than he had said all my life. "She is gone, surely, and will not return."

"Are you sure? Couldn't I call to her, or send for her somewhere, and maybe she would hear me?" It was the question I had been asking inside all my life, but had never dared ask him before.

"I wouldn't know where you could call," he said, and left me alone with my thoughts.

Then one night, I was walking along the beach. I found myself saying the words that were in my heart, to the moon, or to the sea, or to her. "She is somewhere," I said, "somewhere touched by your light or lapped by your waters. I never believed her dead, and I don't now. Tell her, then. Tell her that her daughter is grown, and soon to be married, and that I need her!" I started crying then, as if I were just four years old again, and without a mother or any comfort in the world.

I waited by the shore for a long time. I don't know what I expected, but I waited, and I hoped, and I was even disappointed when I went home cold to bed, though there was no reason I should have been.

I was embarrassed by the memory of how I had called to the sea, and had cried by the waves all alone, and it was some days before I went near the sea again. I had almost decided to name the day, and marry Seamus and put aside all the questions, once and for all. There were answers, and my father knew them, but I was sure he would never tell me what they were.

It was in that mind that I went walking alone again by the shore, close to the place where I had called to the sea for my mother, some days later. And when I saw the box by the rocks wehre the tide had washed, I thought little of it except that it was an interesting looking thing, and odd to find here. And there was, attached to the top of the box, a flower such as never grew in our village or anywhere within a day's journey of our village. Beautiful it was, and sweet, and when I inhaled, it was the scent of the sea.

Now I was very curious about it, and looked at the box more closely, and saw that there was writing on it. It was pale writing, as if it had been written long ago, and washed almost clear by the tide, but the more I looked at it, the easier it was to read. And the words were these: "My dear child, my Dreya, this is for you for your wedding." There was something written after that, but I couldn't make it out. Perhaps it said "Mother" and perhaps it said "Mary," but it looked like neither of those things and indeed it looked like no letters I had ever seen in this world.

There was no lock on the box. It opened at my touch, though somehow it had sealed all the water out, for the inside was dry as bleached bones. At first what I saw was the veil, a beautiful thing of white, like spiders' webs more than like any lace I knew, fine and pale and silky. I drew it out of the box with trembling fingers, awed by it. And then I saw the crown at the top of the veil. It was silver, not gold, and light in weight, and iridescent like the sun on the ocean on a clear day. I held the crown in my hand, and then it was that I remembered my mother. I could see her as clearly as if she were standing before me now.

She was a tall woman, with fair hair like silver itself, and in my memory she was out working in the garden when Gareth and I came running to her. She turned to look at us, the smile on her face even before she could see what brought us out to her. "And what is it you have?" she asked in my memory. How could I have lost her voice, the sound so warm and soothing like honey? How could I have forgotten the comfort of her, the way she lit up when she saw us as if we were treasures for her? I remembered it now, my eyes closed and the crown and veil in my hand.

I heard myself, too, my voice as the child I was. "Look at the pretty thing we found in the box in the wall!" I cried, and in my hands was a crown, like the one I held now. "We were thinking we'd use it in our play, and be kings and queens --" And then I stopped, for I saw the look on her face, and the smile that disappeared.

She reached for the crown with a trembling hand, and her eyes (they were green, darker than mine, but like them) grew wide and strange as she saw it.

"What's the matter, Mother?" asked Gareth, frightened, as we both were, at the change in her.

She said nothing then, but reached for the crown, and took it from my hands. I let it go as if it burned me. She didn't even seem to see us anymore. She drew a deep breath, and took the crown and put it on her head.

She turned away from us, without a word, without a sign that she knew us or loved us. She walked like a sleepwalker, or like one who had just awakened from a dream. Her steps were slow at first, and then they became longer and faster, towards the sea.

Gareth and I ran after her, calling to her, but she did not pause at the sound of our voices. Our father was coming back from the sea, from his boat, and he stopped in the middle of a word when he saw her, with the crown on her head. "Mary," he whispered. We were that close that we could hear him as clearly as if he had shouted to her. "Mary, I'm sorry," he whispered.

She was near to him then, and she stopped her walking and put her hand out to touch his face. He clutched at her hand as if he could pull her back, keep her from wherever she was going, but she pulled her hand away from him and her feet touched the water.

I screamed then. I remembered the scream. I was hoarse for a week after it. She heard me then, as she had not before, and she turned, the waters brushing against her legs. She looked at me, and Gareth, and our father, and there was a shine in her eyes like tears. She paused there for a minute, and I thought that maybe it would be all right, she would come back and be the same as she had always been before. But she did not come back. She tilted her head as if she could hear someone else calling her from the sea, and that was the end. She turned her back on us, and dived into the water.

I saw, and Gareth saw, and my father saw, that when she dived that time, her legs were no longer human legs, but a tail like a fish. She did not surface again.

My father cried after her like a madman, throwing himself into the water and calling her name, but it was no use. She was gone from us, and never returned.

My father had hidden her crown, and with it, her memory of who she was. I had found it, and restored her to her memory, but in the doing, I had lost my own memory of her.

And now she had given it back to me, my memory, and her crown. I turned it in my hands, thinking about it, and about the mother who had loved us when she didn't know who she was or who we were. The mother who still loved us even now. If I put on the crown, who would I be? What else would I remember? What voices would I hear?

I put it back in the box and hid the box. But since then, I have heard it calling to me. And one day soon, I will place it on my head, and maybe then I will find her, in the flesh, in the water, in myself.