The Long Way Home Page 11

  Hear my prayer, Saint Brendan, she prayed. Assuage my loneliness. Return him to me. Show mercy to me.

  The whispered words upon her lips, she felt the wind scraping in from the sea, harsh and cold, sending shivers down her spine, and the sea roared and crashed, and waves licked at her calves like a cold tongue. She continued along the shore, mindless of distance, heedless of time.

  Her eyes cast down, following only the restless advance and retreat of the surf, she was thus startled when she heard a footstep in the wet sand. She looked up just in time to see the nude form of a man, turning from her and leaping into the sea, a bounding splashing step, a second, a third, knees driving high, taut dark buttocks driving him powerfully into the surf, and then he dove, a graceful shallow plunge headfirst into the waves. Her vision of him was brief, but his form was immediately imprinted upon her mind. He was tall, taller than Calum even, who stood head and shoulders taller than most men in the village. His back had been muscled and firm, his shoulders broad and his waist narrow, with the powerful legs and buttocks of an athlete or warrior. His hair had been long, unkempt, wild, wet and dark black and pasted to his spine and shoulder blades.

  Brighid stared after him, waiting for him to surface, to rise up and gasp and splutter at the cold, to poke his head up over the waves and glance back at her. For long, long minutes Brighid stood and stared, with the cold brine pooling around her ankles with the inrush of the evening tide. Longer than anyone could hold a single breath. Had he drowned? Brighid moved deeper into the water, sucking in a deep breath at the icy ache at her knees.

  And then, far, far in the distance, she saw a shape breasting the water, leaving a V-shaped wake in the white-capped waves; a head, perhaps, ducking and rising back above the surface. Too far to tell for sure, but it could have been him. Or perhaps it was just a seal, startled away by his presence—they liked this stretch of beach, Brighid knew, because it was remote and rocky and contained tide pools where fish became trapped, and fishermen rarely ventured here, preferring other easier places to ply their trade. It suited Brighid, and it suited the seals as well, and she often saw them sunning their bellies in the distance, and as she approached they would bark and splash into the waves and surface only when they’d put a healthy distance behind them.

  A seal, or a man? From this distance, there was no way to know.

  Brighid was cold, now. The wind still blew damp with the day’s rain, and the surf was rough and angry, dampening her skirts even bound up as they were, and now her legs ached with the dull insistent throb of the sea’s icy teeth. She trudged through the encroaching tide into the damp hard-packed dark brown sand and then up to the dry tan sand, where her feet sank in and were engulfed by the relatively warm grit. She looked back, but the sea was empty again, except for the omnipresent gulls, hawing and wheeling, skreeing and floating head-on in the wind, riding the currents and crying their discordant discourse.

  She went home and stirred the fire into blazing heat to warm the ache from her bones, and ate the last of the mutton stew; she’d have to make more for dinner the next few days, which meant slaughtering another sheep, a chore she loathed. Her mind wandered, that night, as she drifted off to sleep.

  Calum was floating beside her. She was lost in the waves, drowning. She could feel her hair billowing in the sea currents, but she could breathe and he couldn’t. He was sinking out of reach, and she was weeping, soundless under the surface of the waves. Above, a storm raged; she saw the lightning flash, saw the vengeful churn of the sea. Calum reached for her, his fine blond hair a yellow cloud, his eyes all black, no white, no pupil, no life, and his mouth worked, closed and opened, speaking, pleading, and his hand reached, reached, reached for her but never could she grasp his hand and pull him to safety. Brighid woke as Calum drifted down into the inky depths, woke screaming his name, gasping in the dark silence of predawn.

  There would be no more sleep, she knew; she would meet him in the waves again if she tried to sleep. Instead, she lit her lamp and mended rends in dresses and darned the holes in her stockings and bided her time until it was light enough to milk the goats and put them and the sheep out to pasture. All the while, her mind was on the dream she’d had. Calum, reaching for her, sinking into the depths. As much a confirmation of his demise as she was likely to get, although she would never have admitted to such superstition out loud.

  Her nearest neighbor, taciturn old Mr. Malloy, had traded her some lobster traps for a few pails of milk, and had shown her where and how to place them, so she brought a large pail down to the shoals with her skirts tied high and her hair braided tightly to prevent tangles in the mischievous wind of the morning. Scrambling across the rocks and down into the thigh-deep pools, she hauled up the first trap, and found a trio of angry, tentacle-waving crustaceans therein; the next few traps were empty, and the last pair held four more each, which made for a tidy enough haul that Brighid made a mental note to bring Mr. Malloy some of her goat cheese, which was nearly done aging.

  With her lobsters ticking and clacking and climbing claw-upon-eyestalk in the bucket, Brighid picked her way carefully back across the spit of surf-slick rocks and then slid down a sandy embankment to the beach proper, and there pulled up short, breathless in fright and shock.

  A monstrous harbour seal was beached not half a dozen paces away, dark eyes wet and fixed on her, whiskers twitching. It was on its side, its tail in the surf, a flipper in the air waving listlessly. She set down her pail of lobsters and inched toward the seal; he—the mighty beast was a he, she was somehow certain—was staring at her. She could feel his gaze.

  Urrrr—Ur-ur-ur-urrrrrr. He sounded…weak. Troubled. In pain.

  Brighid—fearful of the size of the beast, which was well over six feet in length and weighed several hundred pounds, easily—inched incrementally closer, keeping her eyes on his. His wet skin was mottled dark gray, speckled with a spray of white spots around the base of his tail.

  A few inches closer, and Brighid was nearly close enough to touch him, should she reach out her hand. He growled again, a throaty rumbling that was somehow non-threatening. His eyes were round limpid pools of ink, shining and glimmering with emotion and intelligence. Closer and closer yet, and the seal did not move. Brighid knew she was being foolish. Seals were ungentle creatures, despite their playful reputation. Males could be territorial, and downright dangerous if threatened, and this close, Brighid was at his mercy. But his bark as she laid a trembling palm on the top of his neck was pained, a beseeching murmur. His flipper waved again, flopping listlessly back and forth.

  Brighid, shaking all over, moving slowly and keeping a wary, cautious eye on the beast, shuffled toward the wavering flipper. The seal shifted abruptly, rolling away from her, causing Brighid to yelp in fright and stumble away. But he made no other move so she crouched beside him, one hand on his slick, soft wet skin, trailing across his body as she examined him. There, underneath his flipper, was a huge, wicked, curved fishhook, all of a foot long, speared directly through his flipper and skin near his body. A nasty barb at the tip prevented the horrible hook from sliding out.

  “Oh my, you poor creature,” Brighid crooned. “You’ve been hooked, haven’t you?”

  Urrrrr…urr-ur-urk.

  “You just wait here, won’t you? I have just the thing.” She patted his thick neck. “I swear you can understand me, can’t you? I’ll be right back. Don’t you move, all right? I’ll help you.”

  Urrrrrrk-ur-ur-ur.

  Once again, his bark felt eerily and even preternaturally like an intentional response. Brighid shrugged off the shiver that shuddered down her spine. She snatched a lobster from the pail and tossed it toward the seal, who barked again, excitedly, and flopped toward the snapping, clicking crustacean, and then fierce canine teeth crunched and the lobster became a meal for the seal.

  Brighid shuddered at the sudden violence, but then turned away and ran as fast as she could up the shore toward her home. Up the dunes she scrambled, dune grass slicing a
nd prickling and stabbing at her calves. At the back of her little house—a small, snug, squat structure of piled stones and hand-hewn timbers and jagged, overlapping, mortared hunks of slate for the roof, built with love and skill by Calum and his eight brothers, most of whom lived several counties over, now, and couldn’t spare a month’s journey to help her—sat a huge old wooden chest, the wood rotting and the metal straps rusting. Within were Calum’s old tools: a hammer, an adze, a saw, a handful of nails…and a pair of thick-handled, blunt-jawed pliers, with enough of a blade to the jaw that it should probably snip through the barbed tip of the hook, if she could summon the strength.

  Along with the pliers, she fetched a strip of cloth and a jar of salve, and then jogged back down to the beach where the seal had been. Upon her return, she discovered that the seal had, in her absence, knocked over her pail of lobsters and devoured them all.

  “Oh, you naughty beast!” She scolded, with an amused huff. “You’ve eaten all my lobsters! That was meant to be my dinner, you know. Not very nice of you, was it?”

  Ur-ur-ur-ur. If a seal’s bark could be said to be almost apologetic, that one was.

  “Well, no matter. I’ll rebait them later, and catch more. I suppose you need them more than me, anyway.” She knelt beside him once more, set the cloth and salve to one side, and grasped the pliers in both hands, pinching the tip of the hook just beneath the barb in the heavy, bladed jaws. “Now, hold still, yeah? I don’t want to hurt you further. I may not be strong enough to cut through this.”

  She applied all the pressure she was capable of, but the pliers only bit in the slightest amount. Letting go, Brighid sank back into the sand with a huff. A moment’s rest, and then she bore down once more, grunting with exertion, feeling the hook give just a touch, this time. Unclenching the pliers, she examined her progress: she’d managed a pair of fairly deep divots on either side, but wasn’t even halfway through, yet. She rotated the pliers so the blades would sink into new spots, and bore down again. And again. Rotate back to the original location, and she squeezed the handle with all her might, sweat dripping from her nose, hands aching, the seal watching, breathing, not making a sound or moving a muscle.

  “Good boy,” Brighid murmured to him. “Nearly there, now. A bit more and we’ll have it, won’t we? Keep still a moment more, and I’ll have you patched up good as new.”

  It was more than a moment or two, but eventually and with much groaning exertion, Brighid managed to snap the ugly barbed tip of the hook away, and then carefully slid the hook back through the seal’s flipper. When the hook left him, the seal barked in pain, flinching away, rolling onto Brighid’s foot, throwing her to the wet sand, her ankle twisted.

  Immediately, he rolled away, flipper waving, whiskers twitching, barking in a low growl.

  “Oh it’s fine. I’m fine,” she said, pulling herself to her feet and brushing her shins and thighs clean of the sand. “A little twinge, is all.”

  Urrrrr-ur…ur-ur-ur. The seal flapped his flipper, and lurched toward her.

  He was bleeding profusely, she saw. She crouched and let him wiggle closer to her side. “That’s it, a little closer. You need to have that patched up or you’ll be a meal for someone else, with more teeth than you have, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? No, indeed.”

  She had a moment of self-consciousness, realizing she was talking to a seal as if expecting him to understand her and respond, but…it felt as if he could. And it wasn’t like she had anyone else to speak to, anyway, was it? Nor was there anyone to see or hear her folly.

  She scooped a generous palmful of her homemade healing salve and gingerly spread it over the jagged hole in the seal’s injured flipper, topside and bottom, and then wrapped the strip of cloth around several times, tying it tight.

  “There. It’s the best I can do, as I’m no nurse, nor a doctor for animals—a what would you call it? A veterinarian, isn’t it?” She stroked his wet fur from the top of his head down his back, and he growled in his throat, a pleased sound, it seemed to her.

  “If you want to thank me, bring me fish,” Brighid said, standing up and backing away. “With my husband lost, I have no one to catch fish for me, and I’m dead tired of mutton.”

  Urrrrrr! Ur-ur-ur. Urrrk ur. Flopping backward a foot or two, the seal then wiggled around to face the sea, tail flapping, flippers slapping at the damp sand. Brighid watched, feeling an odd kinship to the seal. A sense of…recognition, even. Familiarity, perhaps, although that was the most foolish notion she’d ever had, and well Brighid knew it. Yet the feeling persisted, and she couldn’t quite banish it.

  Splashing into the water, the seal dove and shot away, then leapt and splashed down, and then poked his head out of the water, eyeing her from a distance of a dozen or so feet out. She waved, a hand lifted, her copper hair fluttering in the breeze. An eyeblink only, but when Brighid saw him again, she would have sworn instead of a seal, she saw a man, treading water, just his eyes above the surface, long black hair spread out on the waves like spilled ink. Those eyes, staring at her, they were limpid and dark and intelligent, and familiar. Another eyeblink, and there was a seal’s tail spraying the sky with diamond-bright droplets, and then the sea was empty again.

  Taking her empty pail, Brighid returned home, built up her banked fire, and stirred the stew she’d made that morning.

  That night, she dreamed again.

  But not of Calum.

  Of him, that man she’d seen the day prior. His lean, hard, powerful body. The long black hair, the taut muscles. She hadn’t seen his face, but she knew he’d be as handsome as his body had been beautiful.

  Not that it mattered. It was all conjecture. But where had the man come from? Where had he gone? He’d swum away and hadn’t surfaced. A seal had, but…

  Stories her mother had told around the fire when Brighid had been a little girl bubbled up from deep in her memory.

  Selkies are real, Brighid, her mother had said, her dark eyes wide, firelight playing on her features. Of that I’m absolutely sure. I’ve seen one. I came across a woman on the beach, and when she saw me, she dove into the water and swam away and only a seal appeared. I saw her again another time, too. They’re real, Brighid. Don’t you let anyone tell you any different. You find one, you find the skin of a selkie left behind when they change, they’ll be trapped on the land and beholden to you for as long as you have it.

  She’d never really believed her mother’s stories, though. Fireside tales, a mother entertaining her daughter during the long lonely evenings. Not real, not true.

  But she’d seen it herself, a man vanishing into the waves, and only a seal appearing out in the surf. Could it be real?

  She woke restless, irritable. Hungry, and sick of mutton stew. Missing Calum. Hating the endless days alone, knowing Calum wouldn’t be returning, knowing she had a life in front of her that would be the same as the years since Calum shipped out: Alone, herding goats and sheep, fixing fences, doing everything alone, making her way as best she could, one day at a time, until she grew too old to do it all.

  She had fences to mend, sheep that needed shearing, wool that needed carding, and the garden needed weeding, but Brighid found herself instead wandering down between the dunes to the edge of the sea. It was another gray day, the sky heavy and leaden, the sea churning and wild and angry, petrichor thick in the air. Gulls surfed the wind currents, and sandpipers skittered toward the retreating waves, pecking at the slick wet sand and then darting away from the onrushing waves. Way out, far in the distance, a fluke tipped up out of the water and then dipped back down beneath the surly gray water, and then a plume spouted white skyward. The cry of the gulls was mournful, it seemed to Brighid, their harsh discordant caws striking her nerves. She wandered the shoreline, carrying her shoes, letting the bitter cold water lap at her feet.

  Yet, even after she’d wandered nearly half a mile away from her section of the shoreline, the water remained empty, the shore barren. Eventually she had to return home and atten
d to chores. Yet as she hammered nails into a fence post and carded wool and yanked weeds, she continued to feel at loose ends, vaguely unsatisfied for reasons she couldn’t pinpoint. She felt her loneliness more acutely than ever.

  Again that night, she dreamed of the man she’d seen. Wondered what his name was, where home was for him, what his voice sounded like. What his hands would feel like on her skin. She dreamed he was in her home, crouched before the fire, a blanket around his shoulders. She dreamed of his eyes, dark as the night sky, intelligent and still somehow animal, watching her as she fluttered around the house, cooking, cleaning.

  The next day, and the next, and every day for the following month, she wandered the shoreline just past dawn. She trapped lobsters, and thought of the seal who had knocked over her pail.

  And then, when she’d begun to give up hope of seeing the man or the seal again, she wandered down to the shore in the minutes just before sundown, when the sun was just barely peeking up over the horizon, and the air was still warm but swiftly cooling and the light golden-scarlet and the wind gentle in her hair. And there he was, the seal. Breasted upon the sand, his tail flicking at the waves as they skirled around him. She knew it was him. Even if the strip of cloth hadn’t still been tied around his flipper, she’d have known him. The preternatural way he stared at her with those limpid eyes. The way he remained still as she approached, just watching her, unafraid. Knowing, somehow. Welcoming, greeting.

  Brighid knelt in the wet sand a few feet away from him. “Hello again. Are you well? How’s your flipper doing?”

  The seal flapped the flipper in question, splatting sand, barking.

  She shuffled closer to him, reaching slowly and carefully. “I’m just going to slip this off you, now, okay?”

  Another bark and a flap, tail slapping. He was massive, this seal. It hit her all over again as she crouched beside him. Huge, long, heavy, powerful. Those teeth, when he barked—they flashed white and sharp. Predator’s teeth. He was still, however, as she unknotted the wet strip of cloth and tugged it off of him. He’d healed completely, with only a puckered scar remaining.