The Beautiful Lost Page 19

  “That’s Gray Girl,” my mother said. “And her daughter Aurora.”

  “Is this the time of year whales have babies?” Billy asked. “Like Persephone?”

  “It varies,” my mother said. “We first saw this child a month ago, the morning after a wild display of the northern lights. So I named her for that.”

  “Aurora borealis,” Billy said.

  Mom nodded. “Gray was childless for so long. The other females would give birth to calves and she would keen. Her song was so high-pitched and mournful, full of grief.”

  “What happened after she had Aurora?” I asked, staring at the small calf nearly glued to her mother’s side.

  “Well, mothers miss their daughters—even before they’ve had them. There’s an empty space just waiting to be filled. So after so much waiting, she finally found peace.”

  “Did her song change?” Billy asked.

  “Listen,” my mother said. She flipped a switch on the console, and suddenly whale music filled the boat, coming from speakers overhead. There were chirps and trills—long, lingering notes that ranged from high to low and reminded me of my mother’s favorite Celtic fiddle music combined with the low notes of a horn, maybe a saxophone. The whale sounded peaceful, happy.

  “That’s live,” my mother said. “The hydrophones beneath the boat are picking up the sounds of Gray Girl’s contentment. She’s changed since she became a mother. This is a recording of how she sounded before Aurora was born.”

  Mom turned a dial, pushed a button, and a very different sound came out.

  She was right: It sounded like crying. The whale screeched, and screamed, and her voice finally fell into a low, low sobbing sound.

  The whale’s grief had jostled something in me. Gray had wanted to have a baby so badly, and now that she had one, her entire being had changed. And my mother loved these whales. And she was missing Persephone, waiting for her, loving Gray’s child and waiting for Persephone and hers, listening to their songs.

  Missing, waiting, child, song.

  I froze. Could Morgane’s vision of my mother’s love have been about whales, not about me?

  “Turn it off,” I said. “Please?”

  But my mother didn’t, and that feeling of dizziness overtook me, flipped me over. I lost my balance and crashed against the console. I must have hit the audio switch because the sound stopped.

  “Maia!” my mother said. I’d messed with her electronics, and she busily reset every dial I’d accidentally turned, every toggle I’d flipped.

  “What’s wrong, are you okay?” Billy asked, coming to me, holding me in his arms. I pressed my face into his shoulder. Was this attack a symptom of stopping my medication? The daggers were back, that falling feeling scary and strong. I heard my mother hurrying across the deck to us.

  “Let her go,” she said, but Billy didn’t. He held me closer, and I rocked against him.

  My mother grabbed my shoulder, pulling me away from him.

  “Hey!” Billy said.

  “Maia,” my mother said, ignoring him. It would have been almost okay if she’d hugged me, if I’d been able to glue myself to her like that baby calf, but she wasn’t letting me.

  “You erased part of the recording, and could have destroyed a lot more research there,” she said sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What got into you?”

  “I feel sick,” I said.

  “You don’t get seasick,” she said. “You never have. Just stare at the horizon. That will steady you.”

  And it did. Eventually. It helped that Billy was holding my hand, just out of Mom’s sight. Why hadn’t she wanted him to hug me? I guessed I’d been right the night before, that the sixteen-year-old me was very different from the thirteen-year-old, and the contrast was hard for my mother to handle.

  I had hoped I was over the withdrawal from the meds, but I still felt really bad. Mom wheeled the boat around, and we began heading south. She seemed upset with me—for messing with her console, getting dizzy? I was glad when Gray and Aurora dove out of sight, and I had the crazy, uneasy, unshakable feeling that I didn’t want to see Persephone and, if she’d in fact given birth, her newborn baby. It was bizarre, because no one had ever loved baby whales more than I did.

  “Wait, aren’t we going to your cabin?” I asked when it hit me that we were going in the opposite direction, back to Tadoussac.

  “No, Maia. We’re not.”

  “But why? Are we going to stay on the boat? Do you live aboard? You don’t really live in your cabin?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t live in the cabin.”

  My head exploded. The place I’d been picturing her for three years—did it even exist?

  “Is the cabin real?” I asked.

  “Of course—you saw the photos I sent. But it’s a very hard place to live with the work I do, the electronics I need. There’s no reception, and I always lose power—the receiver goes dead, and all the data from the hydrophones can be lost. You see how I get when I lose data,” she said, trying to make a joke about my nearly erasing the recording. But I couldn’t laugh.

  “That cabin is in the back-of-beyond,” she continued as we drove on over the water. “There’s no Wi-Fi up there, so I couldn’t even email the oceanographic institute—the people who fund my grant. Wait till you see my office, my studio. It’s fully equipped, state-of-the-art. You’ll understand why I had to leave it.”

  “Where? Where did you move?”

  “Tadoussac. You probably saw. That big white house above the dock.”

  I felt stunned. My mother lived in a mansion in Tadoussac, not in a remote cabin up the fjord. She had a cell phone. She had reception. She had power. She emailed the grant people.

  But she’d never called or emailed me. We wrote letters. Letters that took forever to send and receive.

  I tried to push the bad feelings away. We returned to the harbor and tied up. As Billy, my mother, and I walked down the dock, I told myself, I’m with my mother, we’re together again, she took me and Billy out in her boat to see whales.

  I wondered, a little, why I had to tell myself those things instead of feeling them. Was it because Mom was striding down the dock with the intense purpose I’d sometimes seen her do with my father, without a glance back at me, or without chatting or touching my shoulder, playing with my hair as we walked?

  And then there was the house.

  It was huge, painted white, with granite steps leading up to a wide porch. It had a steeply pitched roof and about a hundred dormer windows on the second floor. It looked very old, but pristine, the maritime equivalent of the mansions where the rich industrialists lived back in Crawford. The kind of house my mother had always disdained.

  We paused at the doorway.

  “Maia,” she began.

  “What?” I asked.

  She just shook her head. “Come inside. You’ll see.”

  This was the kind of town where doors could be left unlocked. My mother opened the door—as if the house belonged to her—and held it open so we could walk inside.

  My stomach churned. Everything felt so wrong.

  Missing, waiting, child, song.

  I had to admit the truth: Those words had referred to my mother and whales, not her and me.

  I’d thought that realization was the worst thing possible, but I was wrong.

  A man stood just inside the door. He was tall with graying brown hair and a beard, and he wore a blue button-down shirt and khakis—the kind of clothes my dad wore.

  My mother walked over to him, and the man hugged her, and she stood in the crook of his arm.

  “Maia, this is Drake. And, Drake, this is my daughter and her friend Billy.”

  “You made it,” Drake said. “Wow, Gillian said your dad told her you might be coming, but I don’t think either of us fully believed it. What a trek you’ve had.”

  I couldn’t speak. I don’t know why I’d never expected to see my mother with someone else,
not when my father was with Astrid, but I didn’t. I tried to smile, but my mouth wouldn’t move.

  “Maia would have done anything to get here,” Billy said, shaking Drake’s hand.

  “This is really where you live?” I asked, facing my mother.

  “Oh, Maia.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me last night? Why did we stay on the boat?”

  “I knew … all this would be hard for you.”

  All this: her lies? The fact that she’d woven a tale about a magical cabin in the wilderness? Or the fact that she was with Drake? We stood in a foyer gleaming with polished wide-board floors. I knew from history class that only the richest people from earlier centuries could afford floors made from such broad planks, that the wood came from the hearts of live oak trees.

  My mother and Drake huddled next to an antique grandfather clock, speaking quietly. The clock chimed five times slowly, drowning out their words.

  “Is this all right with you?” Billy asked me, very quietly.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Drake,” he said. “You didn’t expect him.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  I wanted to hug Billy, have him hold me close. It slammed into my mind that he’d been right—everything had changed the minute we’d gotten here. I wished we had kept going.

  The last chime rang in the air. I felt my mother’s and Drake’s gazes on us.

  “Let’s sit down,” Drake said.

  “Yes, please come in here,” my mother said, leading us forward.

  The living room was lined with bookcases. Massive gold-framed paintings of sailing ships—looking as if they belonged in a museum—flanked a large fireplace. Antique brass marine instruments shared space on the mantel with framed photos of people I didn’t recognize. Red leather armchairs, two sofas and a love seat covered with expensively faded red-and-blue paisley fabric, and valuable-looking Persian rugs and mahogany tables were everywhere. It was a room straight out of one of Astrid’s house magazines.

  For a moment I felt reassured. There was no way my mother would like a place like this. Maybe she stayed here, for cell reception and Wi-Fi, but this would never be her home.

  Windows with four panes over four panes faced the harbor. There was the private dock out front with the three boats tied to it: a Zodiac, a dinghy, and my mother’s boat. I figured the inflatable and small sailboat belonged to Drake. My mother, no matter what he thought, was really just visiting here.

  “You have a great view,” Billy said.

  “Thank you,” Drake said. “My grandparents built this place. We go back pretty far in this part of Canada. Both my grandfather and his father were ship captains.”

  Nailed it, I thought. The minute I’d seen this house, I’d known.

  “What kind of ships?” Billy asked.

  “My great-grandfather carried furs and timber from Eastern Quebec up the Saint Lawrence through the Great Lakes or down to New England.”

  Perfect, I thought. Drake was descended from the trappers—the Europeans—who had subjugated the Innu, brought disease to their communities, and tried to destroy their culture.

  “And his son, my grandfather,” Drake continued, “captained a steamer that carried goods from here to Boston.”

  “Are you a captain, too?” Billy asked.

  “Well, I have my license,” Drake said. “But I’m like Maia’s mom. I’m a scientist.”

  “What kind?” Billy asked.

  “Marine biologist. I fell in love with the sea when I was a kid.”

  “So did I,” Billy said. “I was a lobster fisherman with my grandfather.”

  My mother had been standing aside, listening. But now she stepped forward, right in front of Billy.

  “I wonder what your grandfather thinks of you leaving school and taking this trip,” she said. “I wonder if he’s as worried as Maia’s father and stepmother have been.”

  “He’s not,” Billy said.

  My mother and Drake waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

  “We have to have a talk,” my mother said.

  I prepared myself. She was going to tell me she’d called, or was going to call, my father. She was going to tell me she loved me, and was glad to see me, but she had to do the right thing and send me back to Connecticut.

  But she didn’t.

  “I know this is all coming as a surprise to you,” she said, walking across the room to face me, to look me straight in the eye. “It’s not how I wanted you to find out.”

  “I dreamed of you in the cabin. I thought that was why you couldn’t contact me.”

  “I know. Every step of the way I thought, ‘I should tell Maia.’ ”

  “Every step of what way? You mean when you met Drake?”

  “Well, I’ve known Drake a long time. We were in grad school together, and we did our first big oceanographic project together.”

  Okay, that was a long time ago. I did the math and remembered that I was in sixth grade when she’d gone away for weeks to do her fieldwork near the floe edge on Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic.

  “So then what do you mean? Every step of what?”

  “Oh, Maia,” she said, as if she felt total pity for me. Drake stood behind her, and the expression in his eyes was pure sympathy. It was so extreme I froze in fear. Was my mother sick? Were they about to tell me she was dying?

  “Tell me, Mom. What is it?”

  Billy had his eye on the door to the foyer, and I saw his mouth drop open. He walked close to me but didn’t touch me. He just stood by my side, invisibly propping me up.

  A young woman walked into the room. She looked a few years older than me and was nearly as tall as Drake, with braided brown hair and gold wire-rimmed glasses. And she was holding a baby—not an infant, but maybe a one-year-old. My mind did a million things in ten seconds and computed that the young woman was Drake’s daughter, and the baby was his grandchild, and that my mother knew I’d be upset because there was another daughter-like person in her life.

  “Maia, this is my daughter,” my mother said.

  “No.” I almost laughed. What a joke—the girl must have been in her twenties. I would have known about her. Unless—was it possible my mother had given her up for adoption? Had she had her before she met my father, before or during college, and known she wasn’t ready for motherhood? Where had the girl been all this time? Could it be like those stories you hear about where the child searches the mother out? Had this person found her up here in Tadoussac?

  The young woman handed the little child to my mother. My mother cradled her—I could see now that she was a girl, with curly blond hair and blue eyes, wearing a white T-shirt imprinted with a little pink whale, hearts coming out of its spout.

  “This is Merie,” my mother said. “Your sister.”

  “My what?”

  “Maia, we named her thinking of you,” Drake said. “For Merope, another star in the Pleiades.”

  My mother held her out to me, and I blindly took her into my arms. Merie gurgled, and clutched my hair with her tiny hands. Looking into her blue eyes, staring at me with fascination, was like seeing myself as a baby.

  I kissed the top of her head. I gave her my index finger, and she gripped it with stunning strength. Her tiny fingernails were just long enough to scratch me slightly. It didn’t hurt. She didn’t want to let go.

  When I handed her back to my mother, she had to pry Merie’s hand off my finger. Merie fussed as if she’d wanted to stay with me, and my mother bounced her and sang a song she’d sung to me:

  “Wynken and Blynken and Nod one night

  Sailed off on a wooden shoe

  Sailed down a river of crystal light

  Into a sea of dew …”

  I must have been in a trance because I certainly didn’t want to sing but heard myself joining in on the next part, a kind of familiar harmony my mother and I had perfected when I was about four, my voice coming out of my mouth:

  “Where are you goi
ng and what do you wish?

  The old moon asked the three

  Well, we’re going out fishing for herring fish

  That live in the beautiful sea …”

  “You loved that song,” my mother said, and Merie relaxed, gazing at me with a kind of sisterly wonder I’d never seen in anyone’s face before. She cooed now, reaching for me again. I let her take my finger, accidentally smearing blood on her hand.

  “Oh, Merie, my little sea star, did you claw your sister?” my mother asked Merie in her right arm, comfortably slung against her side. “Let’s go to the sink and wash it off, Maia. Merie doesn’t know her own strength. You were exactly the same as a baby. You were a little powerhouse.”

  She and Drake began walking toward the kitchen, but when we reached the foyer I took Billy’s hand and pulled him out the front door. He didn’t ask any questions. We ran across the wide porch, down the granite steps, and when we hit the ground we tore as fast as we could away from the sea captain’s house, away from my mother and Drake, away from the cutest baby I’d ever seen.

  Away from my sister.

  My half sister.

  My sister.

  I tried on all the names, but it didn’t matter. I’d loved her on sight, but her existence turned my mother into the world’s worst liar. Not living in the cabin was nothing, having a cell phone turned out to be no big deal, not compared with the fact that she’d had a baby and didn’t even tell me.

  She couldn’t stand the boring comforts of suburban life, the restrictions of our family, but here she was living in a fancy house with her new husband and daughter.

  Billy and I ran toward the quay, where Atik had been docked, but when we got there, the boat was gone. Two fishermen were unloading their catch a few slips away from where the boat had been.

  “Hey, do you know if Wolf left for good?” Billy asked.

  “No,” one of them said. “They’re out pulling pots. They’ll be back before dark.”

  “We can wait that long,” I said to Billy.

  “And then what?” he asked.

  “Just like you said. It was a mistake to come here. Everything changed. Only in a completely different way than I expected.”