In Blood and Bone

I asked my father, once, to tell me about my mother.

He said he met her one day when he was playing by the sea when he was just a little boy. She was swimming in a cove sheltered from the wind by high, gray rocks.

"Isn't the water cold?" he asked her.

She just smiled and answered, "Not to me."

They played together all that day, and before he left her, he wished she would come to see him again. Every day, they met at the little cove, and every day he wished she would come to see him the next. And she always did.

They were married by the sea, and my father built her a house on the cliffs where she could look out every day and watch the waves roll and crash. He said she was never so beautiful as when she stood at the precipice, the wind whipping her hair and the seawater misting her face.

He said the sea was her blood, but the land was in his bones. So she stayed because he wished for it every day.

And that was all he would say about her.

The people in the village, of course, were more than happy to indulge my curiosity with their opinions, though the things they said told me more about them than about her.

"The prettiest girl I ever saw," said most of the men, and their wives pressed their lips together and scowled.

"Wistful and sad," said the kinder among the women, while the crones mostly whispered that she was "fae and strange," before they crossed themselves and started discussing the best way to prevent the 'good folk' stealing husbands and babies.

The vicar's wife was the most helpful.

"Your mother was never meant for this world," she said, "and after you and your sister were born, she just started to fade."

My sister...

My twin...

I had no memory of my mother, but I can clearly remember looking into the little mirror she kept on her dressing table next to a pile of pretty shells and sea glass and seeing two pairs of identical blue eyes looking back at me. Two heads of dark curls. Two small, round faces with rosy cheeks pressed tight together so they could both fit in the mirror...

The gossip in the village -- my mother was a popular topic for gossip, after all -- was that after my sister and I were born, my mother became sadder and more wistful (or stranger and more fae if you prefer) than ever. It was said that she became so sad that, one day, instead of wishing for my mother to stay with him, my father wished she could be as happy as he was. They say she kissed my father with tears in her eyes, then took my sister -- we were still just toddlers -- and dove from the precipice into the crashing sea below.

"Suicide," most people whispered. "So sad that she took the babe with her."

"Returned to her people," said the old ladies who still believed.

I didn't know whether to believe the story, but when I asked the vicar's wife about it, she just repeated what she said before: "They were never meant for this world."

I often stood on the precipice and watched the waves roll and crash. As I grew to womanhood, my father said I looked just like her -- like them -- when I stood there with the salty air whipping my hair and the sea spray misting my face. I imagined my mother as I stood there: a girl swimming in the chilly cove and playing every day with the boy who wished for her, a young bride with the sea for her blood, a woman with two little girls at her side...

When my father died, we gave him to the sea. He said she stayed with him because he wished for her, so when he died, he wanted to go to the sea in case she wished for him.

The men who rowed him away from the shore in a fishing boat swore that as my father sank into the darkening depths, they saw a woman's arms reach up and carry him away. They said the waves that broke against the hull of the boat carried the strains of a lament sadder and sweeter than all imagining, and they were weak with the grief of it for days afterward.

The women crossed themselves and gave their husbands talismans or sewed iron buttons into their men's clothes in case my mother returned from the sea in search of a new husband. Or, perhaps, in case her daughters went looking -- one to lure them into the watery depths, another to draw them up to the cliffs. I was carefully watched in case their tokens and talismans didn't work.

I retreated to my father's house on the cliff. I stood on the precipice and remembered and imagined and listened to the sea until I started to hear it -- the song in the water. The sea singing in my veins. The voice of the waves echoing in my heartbeat.  I watched until I started to see past the surface of the waves and began to feel the flow of the sea in my breath.

But no matter how long I stood and watched, no matter how completely the song filled my mind, how fully the sea flowed through my veins, how deeply I drew the mist into my lungs, my bones would not yield.

The land was in my bones.

Cliffs near Giant's Causeway
Photo by Bobbi St. Jean

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