I awoke to bright daylight coming through the pink curtains and a delicious smell wafting under my door. The smell was both exotic and familiar—cinnamon and bay leaf and ginger and something else I couldn’t name—and it made my stomach growl.
I was still sore, which became painfully apparent as I turned my head to see the clock; it was two in the afternoon. But I no longer felt shaky and fragile, even though the prior night’s events seemed as close and as real as ever. I could still recall the terror I’d felt before sinking underwater. I could still feel Leo’s arms around me.
Thinking of Leo, wondering if he was already on his fishing trip, I carefully eased myself out of bed. Pulling up my pajama bottoms, I noted that the scratches on my legs were, thanks to Mom’s application of Neosporin, starting to heal. I hobbled downstairs, the mouthwatering scent growing stronger.
I found Mom in the kitchen, standing at the counter and surrounded by ingredients. There was a bowl containing scrubbed red potatoes sitting beside freshly shucked ears of corn and a cutting board laden with pink shrimp. A large silver pot full of water was bubbling away on the stove.
When I entered, Mom turned to me, and I saw that her eyes were red with tears. I felt a tremor of alarm, remembering how she’d told me the news of Isadora’s death. Then I noticed that she was in the process of chopping an onion.
“You’re up,” Mom said, setting her knife down and coming toward me. She wiped her hands on her apron and regarded me cautiously. “How are you feeling?”
“Much better,” I replied. “I needed the sleep.” I smiled cautiously at Mom; she didn’t seem angry now, and she hadn’t last night, when she’d returned from bidding farewell to Mr. Illingworth. But she hadn’t mentioned Leo. I nodded toward the pot, knowing that if my thoughts lingered on Leo, I’d start crying. “What are you making?”
“Low-country boil,” Mom replied, turning back to her ingredients. “I thought you could use some hearty regional cuisine. This is an old classic. My mother used to make it, and so did my grandmother before her.”
“It smells amazing,” I said, joining my mother at the counter and surveying the various potions she had going at once. “What do you put in it?”
“Everything.” Mom laughed, and I realized what joy cooking brought her. “Potatoes, corn, sausage, shrimp. Oh, and Old Bay seasoning—that must be what you’re smelling. That gives the boil its extra kick.” Mom glanced at me sideways and said, casually, “Do you want to watch?”
“Actually,” I said, suddenly curious and eager to throw myself into an activity that felt real and solid, “can I…help?”
Within minutes, I was learning how to peel and devein shrimp and I was, to my surprise, not remotely grossed out. There was something satisfying about working with my hands, something almost scientific about the process. Mom and I worked side by side in perfect rhythm—like two surgeons, I thought—with Mom passing me a knife and me handing her an ear of corn at different intervals.
When all the ingredients were prepared and could be added to the pot, I watched in near awe as they cooked, each element breaking down, influencing the other. The potatoes grew redder, the shrimp paler, the corn a bright sunshine yellow. Cooking, I realized, was not unlike chemistry. Both arts were, ultimately, about change.
By the time the boil was done and Mom and I could eat, I had almost forgotten about the animosity that had existed between us over the past few days. Cooking had bonded us again, and we smiled at each other as Mom cracked open a cold beer for herself (the first I’d ever seen her with) and I spooned our portions into Isadora’s china bowls. Then we sat down across from each other at the round kitchen table.
We began eating in friendly silence; the smoky boil, with its mix of flavors and textures, tasted as heavenly as it smelled. Between this and grits, I was taking quite a liking to Southern cuisine. When I complimented Mom on the dish, she grinned and said graciously, “I had an excellent sous-chef.”
“So you used to eat this growing up?” I asked around a mouthful of red potatoes. The steam rising from the food seemed to be the very breath of the past. In it, I could taste nostalgia and memory and history—both my mother’s and Selkie Island’s.
Mom nodded, nibbling on an ear of corn. “All the time. Isadora—well, I know I’m not one to lavish praise on her, but she made a mean low-country boil.” Mom got a far-off look in her gray eyes, and I flashed onto an image of her, young and sitting at this table with Isadora, the two of them eating the mess of corn and sausage and shrimp. I felt the same chill I had felt yesterday when I’d discovered the letters in the black trunk.
I cleared my throat and wiped my hands on a napkin. I simply had to tell Mom what I’d found in Isadora’s closet—she’d discover it anyway once we started packing everything up.
“Mom?” I began, a little nervous. “Speaking of Isadora…”
Mom sighed, putting down her demolished corncob. “Miranda. I know what you’re going to ask me,” she said.
My stomach jumped. “You do?” Once again, I thought of Wade’s psychic-mom theory.
Mom nodded and gazed at me solemnly. “And it’s high time I told you why your grandmother and I were estranged.”
Oh.
I nodded, new curiosity flaring up in me.
Mom took a sip of beer, then looked at me. “It’s a long story,” she warned.
“That’s fine,” I said. I had nowhere to go, and stories were starting to grow on me.
“It all started before my eighteenth birthday,” Mom began. “My seventeenth year was tumultuous. My father passed away from a heart attack, and Isadora decided that we shouldn’t come to Selkie Island anymore. She threw all her energies into planning my debutante ball. And my wedding.”
“You were a debutante?” I asked Mom, smiling.
Mom rolled her eyes, her cheeks coloring slightly. “I never quite made it that far, but yes, that was the plan. In Savannah society—high society—when a girl turns seventeen or eighteen, she has her ’coming out’ at a ball, or a cotillion. Cotillions are very lavish affairs, almost akin to weddings. And long ago, the debutante tradition had much to do with a girl being of marrying age. Of course, Isadora made sure that I had the double whammy. Once I turned eighteen in April, Theodore Illingworth and I were to be married that summer. There would be no college for me, and Teddy and I would move into the carriage house on the Illingworths’ Savannah property.”
“How did you even meet Mr. Illingworth?” I asked, wanting to fill in the holes. I thought of him in our foyer last night, how different he had seemed to me in that moment. “How long did you date?”
Mom shrugged, fussing with the label on her beer bottle. “We grew up in the same neighborhood in Savannah, Ardsley Park, and we both summered here on Selkie. We were both the youngest in our families. As far as our mothers were concerned, it was a no-brainer that we’d end up together.” Mom was quiet for a moment, studying her beer bottle, and then glanced up at me. “But I didn’t love him,” she said softly.
What about now? I wanted to ask. Still, I kept the question to myself, knowing Mom had more to say.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she sighed. “For a time, I was happy with Teddy. He was a true gentleman, and he treated me very well. But he didn’t quite understand my interest in science and medicine. I think he found me a little strange.” She smiled knowingly at me. “And by my eighteenth birthday, I was fed up. I hated how my whole life had been mapped out for me, every last detail. I hated how predictable everything had become, how all my friends dated all my other friends, how all the girls wore the same sandals every summer, attended the same parties on the boardwalk. I began to resent the rigid structures of my life—the rules that were to be followed at all times.”
The way Mom was speaking made me think of how I had unleashed my story on Leo yesterday—again, a faucet, a shower spout, came to mind. The memories and old truths were pouring out of my mother at last.
“I had other interests and desires,” Mom sa
id, meeting my gaze. “I had told Isadora, at an early age, that I wanted to be a doctor and she had chucked me under my chin and told me I could marry one. That was Isadora to a tee—she was whip smart, you see, but she had long ago made peace with her station in life. And she saw no reason why I shouldn’t follow her lead. Isadora always played by the rules.”
No, she didn’t, I thought, but I didn’t speak.
“Without telling my mother, I had applied to college—and not just any college, but to a college up north,” Mom continued.
“Yale,” I filled in for her, and she nodded.
“Y is for Yankee,” she said with a smile. “Isadora had very little regard for Yankees. She was one of those Southern women who referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. Her youngest daughter going off to study in the wilds of Connecticut—there couldn’t be a worse fate.
“So I told her. I received my acceptance letter from Yale on the day before the cotillion, and I marched over to my mother and told her. I told her I was sick of it all, the closed-mindedness, the lack of opportunities. I had my acceptance letter in one hand, and in the other I held my debutante ball gown. And I handed the gown to Isadora. I told her I had no use for it anymore. I told her to call off the ball. And the wedding.”
“What did she say?” I asked, trying to envision the showdown.
“She was horrified, of course,” Mom said, looking a little pleased and regretful. “We had a terrible argument. She told me I was going through a rebellious phase, that I’d come to my senses. I didn’t, obviously.”
“Is that when you stopped speaking?” I asked, leaning toward my mother.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Mom said, tracing a circle on her icy beer bottle. “When I went on to Yale, and met your father, and eventually married him—that’s when the real rupture happened.” Mom smiled, her expression suddenly fond. “Your father,” she added, looking at me, “was unlike anyone I had ever met. He was brash and loud and he broke rules all the time. Of course, that’s probably what led to our divorce. If I’d been speaking to Isadora at the time, I’m sure she would haven’t been able to resist chortling, I told you so.”
“Isadora didn’t approve of Dad, huh?” I asked, smiling, too. Just thinking of my father—my funny, blunt, Yankee father, not a merman at all—filled me with a comforting sense of normalcy.
“Are you kidding?” Mom laughed. “My senior year, I dared to bring him home for winter break, and the fights Isadora and I had about him are legendary.”
Mom paused, eying me, and I wondered if she was thinking—as I was—of our recent fights. I remembered how, yesterday, she’d cut herself off in the middle of scolding me about Leo. How she’d glanced at the photos on the mantel. Had she been thinking of herself and Isadora having a similar argument about an inappropriate boy?
Had Mom realized—the most frightening realization—that she was turning into her own mother?
“I think,” Mom went on, putting her chin in her hand, “that Isadora just couldn’t accept how far I’d strayed from her and from everything she believed in.” Mom chuckled, shaking her head. “You know, Coral told me that Isadora even hung on to my debutante gown for safekeeping, as if I was going to change my mind someday.”
Something stirred in me, a lightninglike realization.
“What did your dress look like?” I asked, and Mom raised her eyebrows, understandably thrown by my question. “CeeCee’s influence,” I deadpanned, hoping that explanation would be enough.
“It was quite pretty,” Mom replied, her eyes misting over again. “It was cream colored, with these small pink roses trailing down the side. It actually broke my heart to give the dress up, but I knew I had to stand strong.” Mom shrugged, not aware of the way I was gaping at her.
My heart and my mind were racing. The dress in the trunk was Mom’s debutante ball gown. Isadora had hung on to it for all these years. But why had she hidden it? And why did it share a hiding place with her letters from Henry Williams?
Mom was saying something else about Isadora’s reaction, but my thoughts were on those letters. Even though so much had happened since I’d read them yesterday, they were still fresh in my mind. And, as I had done with the passages in Llewellyn Thorpe’s book, I started piecing fragments together, fragments that I had seen but hadn’t quite absorbed.
Like the fact that Isadora had written those letters about a year before Mom had been born.
Like the fact that—oh, my God—Henry Williams was, according to the address on the envelopes, and to Daryl Phelps’s letter, Henry B. Williams.
Henry Blue Williams.
Mom’s name was Amelia Blue. That was what people had always called her until she got to college, she’d said. Before she’d decided that just plain Amelia was easier. That was what people on Selkie Island called her now.
I could barely catch my breath. Had Isadora named her youngest daughter Amelia Blue as a tribute to the man she’d loved? Or had she given her that name because Henry Blue Williams had been Mom’s…
“Miranda?” Mom asked, and I realized that she’d stopped talking—and that I had pushed back my chair and was hugging myself. I could feel how huge my eyes were, and there was gooseflesh on my arms. Mom stared at me with naked concern, and repeated my name.
“Mom,” I burst out. “Isadora kept your debutante gown. It’s in a trunk in her closet upstairs. Along with these—letters. Letters that Isadora wrote to a man named Henry Blue Williams.”
I waited for my mother to ask me what on earth I was talking about. But instead, her face grew pale and her eyebrows came together.
“They wrote letters?” she asked softly.
“You know about him?” I asked, a shiver going down my back.
Mom nodded slowly, pressing her fingers to her temples. Then she looked at me, fear and hesitation in her eyes.
“Mom, tell me,” I pleaded. I already felt I knew what was coming.
“You see,” Mom said, and she surprised me by reaching across the table to put her hand on top of mine, “a lot of truths came out in those fights I had with Isadora. During one argument, I lost my patience and lashed out at her, saying that her dramatics had driven my father to an early grave. And she told me”—Mom paused, and took a big breath—“she told me that my real father wasn’t Jeremiah Hawkins but a man named Henry Blue Williams. She didn’t say where he was from, and I didn’t want to know the details. I wasn’t even sure if she was lying or not—Isadora loved to spin fanciful tales.”
“I think he must have been from Selkie Island,” I said, my heart hammering. “A local.” And quite possibly a merman.
Which meant that Mom—
Which meant that I—
My head swam. The kitchen began to take on a hazy, otherwordly quality. Was that why Leo had been drawn to me? Why I loved the ocean? Why my toes were webbed? I knew Mom wasn’t a mermaid—I’d seen her swim enough times to know that—but maybe the traits got watered down through the generations. Or maybe my own children would be…
I couldn’t think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families—our ancestors—are our identities. Biology is destiny.
I’m not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I’d seen him. Maybe I wasn’t who I’d thought I was, either.
“That—you know, that makes sense,” Mom said quietly, pulling me out of the quicksand of my thoughts. Her eyes were tear-filled and her bottom lip was trembling, but the sight didn’t frighten me now. “My God. All this time, I had no idea—none at all—why Isadora left The Mariner to me. Yes, I loved Selkie Island, but so did Coral and Jim, and she never quarreled with them like she did with me. But…”
“Maybe this house is your birthright in a different way,” I offered, feeling choked up as well. And maybe Isadora wasn’t such a monster after all. I didn’t dare utter those words, although I could tell, from the look dawning in Mom’s eyes, that she was starting to think that, too.
>
“You know something, my love?” Mom squeezed my hand. “You’re too smart for your own good.” She let out a big sigh, then dabbed at her cheeks with a napkin. “I’d like to see those letters sometime,” she added softly, glancing up at me.
I nodded, suddenly looking forward to sharing that discovery with my mother. Maybe there was even more in those letters that would teach me things. “I mean, we have to pack them up soon, don’t we?”
“Oh,” Mom said, smiling at me. She set down her napkin and sighed. “That was the other thing I meant to tell you.”
“What?” I asked, feeling a new twinge of nervousness. I wasn’t sure how many more revelations I could handle.
“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I’ve decided not to sell the house,” Mom said. “We’re keeping The Mariner.”
“We are?” I gasped. It was true that the signs had been there: Mom suddenly losing interest in packing and organizing; the conversation I’d overheard between her and Daryl Phelps. “Why did you change your mind?” I blurted, and offered the first thing that came to my mind. “Is it because of Mr. Illingworth?”
Mom looked at me, startled, and then she blushed—a full-on blush that, for some reason, made me grin. “In part,” she said, glancing down at her half-eaten food. “In part because of Delilah and the other friends I’ve reconnected with here. It’s funny how people change in life, Miranda. I was so certain about things when I was your age. I had such strong opinions about the kind of people that Teddy and Delilah and my mother were. I wrote them off. Now…after so many years…well, some people are worth a second chance.”
Like Linda, I thought, surprising myself.
“Like Leo,” Mom said, doubling my surprise.
I blinked at her, overwhelmed.
Mom smiled at me, her eyes beseeching. “I know I was a little harsh with him,” she told me. “I’ll have to apologize to him the next time.”
The next time. Relief and disbelief hit me like a wall of water, so powerful that I caught my breath. There was going to be a next time. If Mom and I were keeping the house, that meant we’d be back on Selkie Island.