water women

CW: presumed death by suicide

The water is not still; it boils. The green-blue fades into muddy brown near the edges of the Great Lake, but out in the center, in the shadow cast by the towering wall of rock upon which stands the lighthouse, the water is deep and it is dark, and it moves.

Moira sits at the edge of the lake, grass poking and scratching at her legs. She dangles her feet in the water, kicking softly to keep any curious fish away from her bare toes. There is nothing to fear from the water this close to the shore. She can see the bottom, mud and silt stirred up by the gentle ebb and flow of the tide. 

She often sits here, listening to the crash of waves far across the expanse of the lake, on the other side where the land drops sharply into depths. The meeting of earth and water is rocky there, great boulders covered in moss and bits of shell, where the waves dash and break themselves and then dissolve into foam. Long ago, when Moira was only a very little girl, her grandmother used to bring her to the lake and play with her in the shallows and the cool, sweet grass along the banks. When they tired of playing, Grandmother would sit down on the boulders and tell stories about the water-women who went on land to find a human husband. “You always know them,” Grandmother would say, winking, “by their long, thick hair and the way they crave the taste of salt.” Moira would laugh, and kick her feet in the water. 

They always spent the whole day at the lake. Some days, Grandmother would dance on the beach. Some days, she would teach Moira all of the names of the clouds they saw passing overhead. Some days, she and Moira’s mother would sit with their feet in the water and sing –songs that were low and sweet or high and wild in turn. One day, Grandmother had kissed Moira, embraced Mother tightly, and then gone down to the lake by herself, where she flung herself from the top of the largest boulder and into the roiling waves.

When the sun begins to sink and the sky turns a dusky pink through the clouds, Moira draws her feet out of the water and stands up, dusting off the seat of her trousers. Her wet feet and ankles attract the bits of grass she has been pulling up all afternoon, strewn around her like a protective circle. She will have green-stained ankles by the time she reaches home.

“Moira!” 

That is Mother calling. She never comes to the lake herself anymore, but she always knows when Moira has gone. She has said more than once that she wishes Moira would stay away from the water, to which Moira always replies, “I know, I’m sorry, I can’t.” 

She tried, after Grandmother, to keep inland, tucked deep within the small town where even the cries of the water birds are dampened by distance and fog. But when she did not go to the water, the water came to retrieve her, and Moira had woken more than once knee deep in a pool of silvery blue under moonlight. So now when she feels the lake calling, she goes, and does not suppress the urge.

“Moira!”

She walks faster, and again, a little faster, until she is running up the path, over the hill, arriving at the edge of paved streets in time to meet her mother, who has come in their old jeep to pick her up. 

“There you are,” Mother says, relief straining at her voice. Moira presses her forehead to her mother’s collarbone and feels the thump of both of their heartbeats as one. “I made dinner,” Mother continues, leading them to the car. Moira climbs up into the seat and lets her feet hang out. No doors on Mother’s jeep.

“Is that man coming for dinner again?” she asks. Mother sighs as she drives.

“Yes,” she starts to answer, and Moira interrupts.

“That’s not fair! He has a house to go to, so why can’t we have any peace in our own home?”

Mother’s face is like the lake in a dead heat, flat and expressionless. “He is your grandfather, Moira.”

“Why do you keep letting him in?”

Her mother’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, and she stares straight ahead at the freshly-paved blacktop road as she answers, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Furious, Moira folds her arms and looks away from her mother until they reach the house where Moira has lived her whole life with her mother and grandmother. The grandfather who now seems to impose at every opportunity had kept a quiet distance when Grandmother was alive, staying up in his lighthouse most days and only coming down to see the trio of women every other week. Moira had liked him better then, been excited every time she saw his truck sitting in the driveway when Grandmother brought her home from school, despite the way it made her grandmother roll her eyes. The lack of schedule to his visits made them that much more appealing. Now that he appears in their kitchen nearly every day, all Moira wants is for things to go back to the way they were before.

Grandfather is sitting at the table when she enters the house. He stands up when she comes in and Moira glares at him. He glares back. The jolly grins she remembers from her childhood are long gone, replaced by heavy eyebrows and deep scowls.

“If you must make faces at each other,” Mother says tiredly, “please move out of the doorway first.”

Moira flushes red hot and moves. Grandfather, satisfied that he has won, sits down again at the table and scratches at the lacquer that Grandmother had once put on so the heat and grease from pots and pans wouldn’t stain the wood. Mother checks the stove.

“Dinner is almost ready,” she announces.

“Fine,” Moira says. “I have to take a shower.” She turns and runs up the stairs quickly, Mother calling behind her, “Be quick!”

She is quick, as quick as she can be with hair thick enough to tie a man’s wrists together. Water drips down her legs and forms tiny puddles on the bathroom tiles when she walks across the floor. Downstairs, she hears her mother and grandfather talking, quiet murmurs that nevertheless carry through the wooden beams of the house. 

Dinner is the fish chowder that Grandmother taught Moira to make when she was young, thick with salt. They eat without speaking, until Grandfather clears his throat.

“You should move up the hill with me,” he says. Mother drops her spoon, and Moira looks up from her bowl in horror.

“Now, don’t look like that,” Grandfather says to both of them. “I only mean that I can’t keep coming down here all the time, and there’s plenty of room up in the lighthouse for all of us. If you –”

“No one asked you to come down,” Moira says sharply, narrowing her eyes at him. “If it’s such a bother, then why don’t you just stay up in your old lighthouse and leave us alone?”

“Moira!” her mother admonishes, looking pained. Moira ignores her, scowling at Grandfather.

He frowns sternly. “I have to look after you girls,” he says. “And frankly, I can’t keep paying bills for two different houses.”

That doesn’t make any sense, and Moira looks to her mother suspiciously. “What is he talking about?”

Mother looks away, out the window that faces west, watching the moon rise. “Please try to understand it, Moira,” she says quietly. “He pays all of the bills for this house; he always has, even when your grandmother was alive.”

Mother never talks about Grandmother, and even Grandfather rarely mentions her. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that they had even been married at all. They had argued constantly whenever he came around when Moira was a child. She can’t recall a single affectionate touch between them. And she had always thought that Grandmother paid the bills, since Mother didn’t have a job and Moira’s father was long gone before she was born. After Grandmother leaped into the water, Grandfather had stood on the lake shore for a long time without speaking, and when her body didn’t surface, he had turned around and gone back up to his lighthouse. He hadn’t looked sad. He hadn’t looked like anything at all.

“She wasn’t reliable for things like that,” Grandfather says. “Your grandmother couldn’t be trusted with the little mundane things we all have to live with.”

Moira’s hand stings from slapping it down on the table. She is shouting before she even realizes that she is angry. “Don’t talk about her like that!”

Her mother and grandfather stare at her in shock. He recovers first. “Moira, I didn’t mean –”

“That’s why Mother keeps letting you come here? Because you technically own the place? That’s why Grandmother didn’t make you leave us alone, even though you were always awful to her?”

“Moira –” he tries to interrupt again, but Moira only speaks louder and louder, drowning him out.

“I heard you arguing with her all the time when I was little. You said that you couldn’t trust her. You made her miserable. She was so sad, and she tried so hard, and you just didn’t care! You hurt her! You hurt her, and that’s why she left us!”

It’s suddenly very, very quiet. Her lungs are too tight, her chest is pinching, she can’t breathe. Mother holds one hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Grandfather’s eyebrows are dangerously low, and his eyes glitter with something Moira cannot name. 

“I have to go,” she stammers, and she runs. She runs out the door and down the street, callouses protecting her bare feet from the concrete. She runs until the pavement turns into dirt and then into grass, until the town falls away behind her and the lake appears over the crest of the hill, shimmering indigo in moonlight.

She forgoes the grassy bank and runs along the edge of the water to the rocky side, where the evening waves toss and roll up over the mossy boulders and spill foamy white on the pebbled shore. She collapses onto the nearest boulder with heaving gasps, out of breath, and crying.

Mother and Grandfather find her there, not quite an hour later. The tears are cold on Moira’s face. Under the moon, the water moves.

“Grandmother belonged to the water,” Mother says, carefully inching her way over the boulders to settle next to Moira, feet dangling into the lapping waves. “That’s what your grandfather meant when he said she wasn’t reliable.”

“I know,” Moira replies dully. She feels wrung out, like an old dishcloth. Grandfather speaks up, voice carrying from the shore, faint like a dream, like a story about someone else, far away:

“She came from the lake, a long time ago. The lighthouse keeper found her on the rocks, shivering and naked and lost. He took her to his lighthouse and gave her his sweater and made her some soup. His hands were so warm, and she was so cold. When he asked her to stay with him, she said yes. And just for a while, it was enough.

“But she couldn’t forget the life she had lived in the lake, diving deep into underwater caves, searching for flowers that grew where the sun could not touch. Her lake was so much larger than other lakes, and it was special. She hadn’t explored every inch of it yet. How could she give it up forever?

“She tried though. Oh, she tried. Even when she fought with the lighthouse keeper and she moved down into the town to be closer to the water, she tried. For her daughter, and then later her granddaughter, she tried to keep to the land. But the longing for the depths became too great, and the waves called to her every night. One day, she told me, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I knew she’d held on as long as she could.”

Grandfather falls silent and Mother reaches out to cup Moira’s face in her palms. “She had to go, Moira,” Mother says. “She just had to.”

Moira believes her. How can she not? She turns to look at her grandfather, who stands on the shore and watches the lake with sad, lonely eyes.

She takes a shuddering breath and whispers, “I dream about the water, Mother.”

And Mother holds her close and presses her face into Moira’s long, thick hair and says, “I know, sweetheart. I know.”