Keep It Where They Can't Find It

"Outside," you say.

It comes out rougher than you mean it to. She blinks at you, slow, like a cat deciding whether to be offended. Then she slides off the stool and walks out, and the bar watches her go the way a field of sunflowers watches the sun.

You put a twenty on the bar. Sadie doesn't take her eyes off the door.

"Sadie."

"I know what she is," Sadie says, very quietly, and then she seems to hear herself, and shuts her mouth. She pushes the twenty back at you. "Go on. And Ethan? Don't go near the water with her."

The wharf at night is black planks and stacked traps and the smell of bait, and the harbor slapping at the pilings below. The squall has blown itself out. There are stars, sharp and cold, and a little sliver of moon. She's standing at the very end of the wharf with her bare toes over the edge, looking down at the water like it's talking to her.

You stop ten feet away. Close enough to talk. Far enough to grab a piling.

"Who are you?"

"Nerys." She doesn't turn around. "Nerys Merrin. Merrin is a name I took a long time ago because people kept asking for a second one. Nerys is mine."

"You pulled me out."

"Yes."

"After you sang."

That turns her. She looks at you over her shoulder, and in the dark her eyes catch the dock light and hold it, the way an animal's do. "You heard it."

"I heard it."

"And?"

You think about the cold, and the beautiful voice that wanted you to stop fighting, and how it slid off you like rain. You think about the people in The Gaff, how they went still when she walked in, all of them, Sadie and Ruel's cousin and the ferry captain. You didn't. You noticed her. Anyone would notice her. But you didn't go still.

"And it was beautiful," you say. "And I wanted to breathe more."

She turns all the way around. She's very close to the edge. Her wet dress clings and the wind lifts her hair and she doesn't seem to feel the cold at all.

"That isn't possible," she says. "You don't understand. That is the one thing in the sea that is always true. My sisters sing. I sing. Men come down to us. They always come down. I have sung to fishermen and whalers and pirates and a governor's son and a man who was swimming the bay for a bet, and they all came down, smiling, like they were going home." Her voice cracks on the last word, just slightly. "And you looked at me like I was a weather report."

"I didn't know what I was looking at."

"Nobody does. That's the point." She takes a step toward you, and you hold your ground, and she stops. "You're not afraid of me."

"Should I be?"

She thinks about it honestly, which is somehow more unsettling than if she'd said yes.

"Not of me," she says at last. "I'm the one who pulled you up. But my sisters heard me stop singing. They felt it. And when I left you on the sand, I left my coat."

"I have it."

"I know you have it." Something moves in her face, quick as a fish. "I could smell it on you in there. I need to see it."

Your house sits above the cove on the east side of the island, gray shingles and a crooked porch your father built, the boathouse below it on the water. You drive her there in the truck because she doesn't have shoes and the road is gravel. She sits very upright in the passenger seat with her hands flat on her knees, watching the headlights the way a kid watches fireworks.

"Never been in a truck?"

"I've been under several."

You decide not to ask.

You carry the coat inside from the cab, and she follows you in, and then stops dead on the threshold of your kitchen.

She stands there a long moment. She looks at the stove, the table, the fridge humming in the corner, the dishes in the rack, your father's old barometer on the wall. She reaches out and touches the doorframe with two fingers, carefully, like it might be hot.

"I've never been inside a house," she says.

"Never?"

"I've looked in windows." She steps in. Her bare feet leave wet prints on the linoleum. "It's smaller than I thought. And warmer. Is it always this warm?"

"I can turn the heat down."

"No." Very fast. "No. Leave it."

You lay the coat on the kitchen table. In the light it's even stranger: dark silver-brown, the fur so dense and soft it seems to drink the light, the inside a pale smooth hide like the inside of a shell. She comes to the table and puts her hand on it, and her whole body changes. Her shoulders drop. Her eyes close. She breathes out, long and slow, like someone who's been holding her breath since yesterday.

You wait for her to pick it up.

She doesn't.

"Keep it," she says.

"It's yours."

"It's how they find me." She opens her eyes. "On the water, my sisters can feel it like a bell ringing. If I wear it, if I take it back into the sea, they'll know exactly where I am. If it's here, in a house, under a roof, with you…" She takes her hand away, and it costs her. You can see it cost her. "It goes quiet. They can't hear it. Neither can I, quite."

"So you're hiding."

"I'm thinking." She looks at you across the table. "Hide it. Somewhere that isn't near the water. Don't tell me where. Don't let anyone touch it."

"Nerys. Who are your sisters?"

"Three of them. The eldest is called Morvoren." She says the name like it's a cold draft. "They'll come for you. Not tonight. But they'll come. A man who heard the song and lived is a thing that has never happened, and Morvoren does not like things that have never happened."

"What do they want with me?"

She doesn't answer. She looks at the phone lying on the counter, your new one, and then at the old cracked one beside it that you keep meaning to recycle. "What is that?"

"A phone."

"I know what a phone is. I mean what do you do with it? People in boats are always staring into them."

You pick up the old one, charge it with the cord from the junk drawer, and show her. Your number. The little box where words go. How to send. She watches your hands with total concentration and doesn't touch the screen until you put the phone in her palm, and then she holds it like a bird's egg.

"If they come," you say. "Or if you need anything. Text me."

"Text you." She tries the word out. "Will it work in the sea?"

"Nothing works in the sea. Half the island doesn't get a signal."

The corner of her mouth moves. It isn't a smile, not yet. It's the place a smile would go.

Then she's at the door. You didn't see her move.

"Where are you going?" you say. "You don't have shoes. You don't have anywhere to sleep."

"I have the whole sea to sleep in." She looks back at you once, in your kitchen light, beautiful and wet and impossible. "Good night, Ethan. Lock your window. Not because of me."

The screen door bangs. You go to it. The yard is empty. The path down to the cove is empty. Below, the water shifts black and silver under the moon, and there's no splash, no shape, no sound but the harbor.

You stand there until the cold gets into your socks.

Then the phone in your pocket buzzes once against your hip.