The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

She sat on her rock, looking out over the lake, her back to the city that reared up behind her in a bewildering array of towers and lights. A half mile of water separated her island from Newford, but on a night such as this, with the moon high and the water still as glass, the city might as well have been on the other side of the planet.

Tonight, an essence of marchen prevailed in the darkened groves and on the moonlit lawns of the island.

For uncounted years before Diederick van Yoors first settled the area in the early part of the nineteenth century, the native Kickaha called the island Myeengun. By the turn of the century, it had become the playground of Newford’s wealthy, its bright facade first beginning to lose its luster with the Great Depression when wealthy land owners could no longer keep up their summer homes; by the end of the Second World War it was an eyesore. It wasn’t turned into a park until the late 1950s. Today most people knew it only by the anglicized translation of its Kickaha name: Wolf Island.

Matt Casey always thought of it as her island.

The cast bronze statue he regarded had originally stood in the garden of an expatriate Danish businessman’s summer home, a faithful reproduction of the well known figure that haunted the waterfront of the Dane’s native Copenhagen. When the city expropriated the man’s land for the park, he was generous enough to donate the statue, and so she sat now on the island, as she had for fifty years, looking out over the lake, motionless, always looking, the moonlight gleaming on her bronze features and slender form.

The sharp blast of a warning horn signaling the last ferry back to the city cut through the night’s contemplative mood. Matt turned to look to the far side of the island where the ferry was docked. As he watched, the lights on the park’s winding paths winked out, followed by those in the island’s restaurant and the other buildings near the dock. The horn gave one last blast. Five minutes later, the ferry lurched away from the dock and began the final journey of the day back to Newford’s harbour.

Now, except for a pair of security guards who, Matt knew, would spend the night watching TV and sleeping in the park’s offices above the souvenir store, he had the island to himself. He turned back to look at the statue. It was still silent, still motionless, still watching the unfathomable waters of the lake.

He’d been here one afternoon and watched a baglady feeding gulls with bits of bread that she probably should have kept for herself. The gulls here were all overfed. When the bread was all gone, she’d walked up to the statue.

“Our lady of the harbour,” she’d said. “Bless me.”

Then she’d made the sign of the cross, as though she was a Catholic stepping forward into the nave of her church. From one of her bulging shopping bags, she took out a small plastic flower and laid it on the stone by the statue’s feet, then turned and walked away.

The flower was long gone, plucked by one of the cleaning crews no doubt, but the memory remained.

Matt moved closer to the statue, so close that he could have laid his palm against the cool metal of her flesh.

“Lady,” he began, but he couldn’t go on.

Matt Casey wasn’t an easy man to like. He lived for one thing, and that was his music. About the only social intercourse he had was with the members of the various bands he had played in over the years, and even that was spotty. Nobody he ever played with seemed willing to just concentrate on the music; they always wanted to hang out together as though they were all friends, as though they were in some kind of social club.

Music took the place of people in his life. It was his friend and his lover, his confidant and his voice, his gossip and his comfort.

It was almost always so.

From his earliest years he suffered from an acute sense of xenophobia: everyone was a stranger to him. All were foreigners to the observer captured in the flesh, blood and bone of his body. It was not something he understood, in the sense that one might be aware of a problem one had; it was just the way he was. He could trust no one—perhaps because he had never learned to trust himself.

His fellow musicians thought of him as cold, aloof, cynical—descriptions that were completely at odds with the sensitivity of his singing and the warmth that lay at the heart of his music. The men he played with sometimes thought that all he needed was a friend, but his rebuffs to even the most casual overtures of friendship always cured such notions. The women he played with sometimes thought that all he needed was a lover, but though he slept with a few, the distance he maintained eventually cooled the ardor of even the most persistent.

Always, in the end, there was only the music. To all else, he was an outsider.

He grew up in the suburbs north of the city’s center, part of a caring family. He had an older brother and two younger sisters, each of them outgoing and popular in their own way. Standing out in such contrast to them, even at an early age, his parents had sent him to a seemingly endless series of child specialists and psychologists, but no one could get through except for his music teachers—first in the school orchestra, then the private tutors that his parents were only too happy to provide for him.

They saw a future in music for him, but not the one he chose. They saw him studying music at a university, taken under the wing of some master whenever he finally settled on a chosen instrument, eventually playing concert halls, touring the world with famous orchestras. Instead he left home at sixteen. He turned his back on formal studies, but not on learning, and played in the streets. He traveled all over North America, then to Europe and the Middle East, finally returning home to busk on Newford’s streets and play in her clubs.

Still the outsider; more so, perhaps, rather than less.

It wasn’t that he was unfriendly; he simply remained uninvolved, animated only in the presence of other musicians and then only to discuss the esoterics of obscure lyrics and tunes and instruments, or to play. He never thought of himself as lonely, just as alone; never considered himself to be a social misfit or an outcast from the company of his fellow men, just an observer of the social dance to which most men and women knew the steps rather than one who would join them on the dance floor.

An outsider.

A gifted genius, undoubtedly, as any who heard him play would affirm, but an outsider all the same.

It was almost always so.

In the late seventies, the current band was Marrowbones and they had a weekend gig at a folk club in Lower Crowsea called Feeney’s Kitchen—a popular hangout for those Butler University students who shunned disco and punk as well as the New Wave. The line-up was Matt on his usual bouzouki and guitar and handling the vocals, Nicky Doyle on fiddle, Johnny Ryan on tenor banjo, doubling on his classic Gibson mando-cello for song accompaniments, and Matt’s long-time musical associate Amy Scallan on Uillean pipes and whistles.

They’d been playing together for a year and a half now and the band had developed a big, tight sound that had recently brought in offers for them to tour the college and festival circuits right across the country.

But it’d never happen, Amy thought as she buckled on her pipes in preparation for the selection of reels with which they were going to end the first set of the evening.

The same thing was going to happen that always happened. It was already starting. She’d had to listen to Nicky and Johnny going on about Matt earlier this afternoon when the three of them had gotten together to jam with a couple of other friends at The Harp. They couldn’t deal with the dichotomy of Matt offstage and on. Fronting the band, Matt projected the charming image of a friendly and out-going man that you couldn’t help but want to get to know; off-stage, he was taciturn and withdrawn, uninterested in anything that didn’t deal with the music.

But that was Matt, she’d tried to explain. You couldn’t find a better singer or musician to play with and he had a knack for giving even the simplest piece a knockout arrangement. Nobody said you had to like him.

But Nicky had only shaken his head, brown curls bobbing. “Your man’s taking all the craic from playing in a band.”

Johnny nodded in agreement. “It’s just not fun anymore. He’ll barely pass the time of day with you, but on stage he’s all bloody smiles and jokes. I don’t know how you put up with him.”

Amy hadn’t been able to come up with an explanation then and looking across the stage now to where Matt was raising his eyebrows to ask if she was ready, then winking when she nodded back that she was, she couldn’t explain it any better. She'd just learned over the years that what they shared was the music—and the music was very good; if she wanted more, she had to look for it elsewhere.

She’d come to terms with it where most people wouldn’t, or couldn’t, but then there was very little in the world that ever fazed her.

Matt started a G-drone on his bouzouki. He leaned close to the mike, just a touch of a welcoming smile tugging the corner of his mouth as a handful of dancers, anticipating what was to come, stepped onto the tiny wooden dance floor in front of the stage. Amy gave him a handful of bars to lock in the tempo, then launched into the first high popping notes of “The Road West,” the opening salvo in this set of reels.

She and Matt played the tune through twice on their own and room on the dance floor grew to such a premium that the dancers could do little more than jig in one spot. Their elbows and knees could barely jostle against one another.

It wasn’t quite a sea of bobbing heads, Amy thought, looking down from the stage. More like a small lake, or even a puddle.

The analogy made her smile. She kicked in her pipe drones as the fiddle and tenor banjo joined in on “The Glen Allen.” It was halfway through that second tune that she became aware of the young woman dancing directly in front of Matt’s microphone.

She was small and slender, with hair that seemed to be made of spun gold and eyes such a deep blue that they glittered like sapphires in the light spilling from the stage. Her features reminded Amy of a fox—pointed and tight like a Rackham sprite, but no less attractive for all that.

The other dancers gave way like reeds before a wind, drawing back to allow her the room to swirl the skirt of her unbelted flowered dress, her tiny feet scissoring intricate steps in their black Chinese slippers. Her movements were at once sensual and innocent. Amy’s first impression was that the young woman was a professional dancer, but as she watched more closely, she realized that the girl’s fluidity and grace were more an inherent talent than a studied skill.

The dancer’s gaze caught and held on Matt, no matter how her steps turned her about, her attention fixed and steady as though he had bewitched her, while Matt, to Amy’s surprise, seemed just as entranced. When they kicked into “Sheehan’s Reel,” the third and final tune of the set, she almost thought Matt was going to leave the stage to dance with the girl.

“Again!” Matt cried out as they neared the usual end of the tune.

Amy didn’t mind. She pumped the bellows of her pipes, long fingers dancing on the chanter, more than happy to play the piece all night if the dancer could keep up. But the tune unwound to its end, they ended with a flourish, and suddenly it was all over. The dance floor cleared, the girl was swallowed by the crowd.

When the applause died down, an odd sort of hush fell over the club. Amy unbuckled her pipes and looked over to see that Matt had already left the stage. She hadn’t even seen him go. She tugged her chanter mike up to mouth level.

“We’re, uh, going to take a short break, folks,” she said into the mike. Her voice seemed to boom in the quiet. “Then,” she added, “we’ll be right back with some more music, so don’t go away.”

The patter bookending the tunes and songs was Matt’s usual job. Since Amy didn’t feel she had his natural stage charm, she just kept it simple.

There was another smatter of applause that she acknowledged with a smile. The house system came on, playing a Jackson Browne tune, and she turned to Nicky who was putting his fiddle in its case.

“Where’d Matt go?” she asked.

He gave her a “who cares?” shrug. “Probably chasing that bird who was shaking her tush at him all through the last piece.”

“I don’t envy her,” Johnny added.

Amy knew exactly what he meant. Over the past few months they’d all seen the fallout of casualties who gathered like moths around the bright flame of Matt’s stage presence only to have their wings burnt with his indifference. He’d charm them in a club, sometimes sleep with them, but in the end, the only lover he kept was the music.

Amy knew all too well. There was a time. . . .

She pushed the past away with a shake of her head. Putting a hand above her eyes to shade them from the lights, she scanned the crowd as the other two went to get themselves a beer but she couldn’t spot either Matt or the girl. Her gaze settled on a black-haired Chinese woman sitting alone at a small table near the door and she smiled as the woman raised her hand in a wave. She’d forgotten that Lucia had arrived halfway through their first set—fashionably late, as always— and now that she thought about it, hadn’t she seen the dancer come in about the same time? They might even have come in together.

Lucia Han was a performance artist based in Upper Foxville and an old friend of Amy’s. When they’d first met, Amy had been told by too many people to be careful because Lucia was gay and would probably make a pass at her. Amy just ignored them. She had nothing against gays to begin with and she soon learned that the gossips’ reasoning for their false assumption was just that Lucia only liked to work with other women. But as Lucia had explained to Amy once, “There’s just not enough women involved in the arts and I want to support those who do make the plunge—at least if they’re any good.”

Amy understood perfectly. She often wished there were more women players in traditional music. She was sick to death of going to a music session where she wasn’t known. All too often she’d be the only woman in a gathering of men and have to play rings around them on her pipes just to prove that she was as good as them. Irish men weren’t exactly noted for their liberated standards.

Which didn’t mean that either she or Lucia weren’t fond of the right sort of a man. “Au contraire,” as Lucia would say in the phony Parisian accent she liked to affect, “I am liking them too much.”

Amy made her way to the bar where she ordered a beer on her tab, then took the brimming draught glass through the crowd to Lucia’s table, trying to slosh as little of the foam as she could on her new jeans.

“Bet you thought I wouldn’t come,” Lucia said as Amy sat down with her stein relatively full. The only spillage had joined the stickiness of other people’s spills that lay underfoot.

Lucia was older than Amy by at least six or seven years, putting her in her midthirties. She had her hair in a wild spiky do tonight—to match the torn white T-shirt and leather jeans, no doubt. The punk movement had barely begun to trickle across the Atlantic as yet, but it was obvious that Lucia was already an eager proponent. A strand of safety pins dangled from one earlobe; others held the tears of her T-shirt closed in strategic places.

“I don’t even remember telling you about the gig,” Amy said.

Lucia waved a negligent hand towards the small poster on the wall behind her that advertised the band’s appearance at Feeney’s Kitchen this weekend.

“But you are famous now, ma cherie,” she said. “How could I not know?” She dropped the accent to add, “You guys sound great.”

“Thanks.”

Amy looked at the tabletop. She set her stein down beside a glass of white wine, Lucia’s cigarettes and matches and a half-filled ashtray. There was also an empty teacup with a small bright steel teapot on one side of it and a used tea bag on the lip of its saucer.

“Did you come alone?” she asked.

Lucia shook her head. “I brought a foundling—fresh from who really knows where. You probably noticed her and Matt making goo-goo eyes at each other all through the last piece you did.” She brought a hand to her lips as soon as she’d made the last comment. “Sorry. I forgot about the thing you used to have going with him.”

“Old history,” Amy said. “I’ve long since dealt with it. I don’t know that Matt ever even knew anything existed between us, but I’m cool now. ”

“It’s for the better.”

“Definitely,” Amy agreed.

“I should probably warn my little friend about him,” Lucia said, “but you know what they’re like at that age—it’d just egg her on.”

“Who is your little friend? She moves like all she was born to do was dance.” “She’s something, isn’t she? I met her on Wolf Island about a week ago, just before the last ferry—all wet and bedraggled like she’d fallen off a boat and been washed to shore. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and I thought the worst, you know? Some asshole brought her out for a quick wham, bam, and then just dumped her.”

Lucia paused to light a cigarette.

“And?” Amy asked.

Lucia shrugged, blowing out a wreath of blue-gray smoke. “Seems she fell off a boat and took off her clothes so that they wouldn’t drag her down while she swam to shore. Course, I got that from her later.”

Just then the door to the club opened behind Lucia and a gust of cool air caught the smoke from Lucia’s cigarette, giving it a slow dervishing whirl. On the heels of the wind, Amy saw Matt and the girl walk in. They seemed to be in the middle of an animated discussion—or at least Matt was, so they had to be talking about music.

Amy felt the same slight twinge of jealousy watching him with the dancer as she did in the first few moments of every one of the short relationships that came about from some girl basically flinging herself at him halfway through a gig. Though perhaps “relationship” was too strong a word, since any sense of responsibility to a partner was inevitably one-sided.

The girl laughed at what he was saying—but it was a silent laugh. Her mouth was open, her eyes sparkled with a humored appreciation, but there was no sound. She began to move her hands in an intricate pattern that, Amy realized, was the American Sign Language used by deaf-mutes.

“Her problem right then,” Lucia was saying, “was finding something to wear so that she could get into town. Luckily I was wearing my duster—you know, from when I was into my Sergio Leone phase—so she could cover herself up.”

“She took off everything while she was in the water?” Amy asked, her gaze returning to her friend. “Even her underwear?”

“I guess. Unless she wasn’t wearing any in the first place.”

“Weird.”

“I don’t see you wearing a bra.”

“You know what I meant,” Amy said with a laugh.

Lucia nodded. “So anyway, she came on the ferry with me—I paid her fare— and then I brought her back to my place because it turned out she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Doesn’t know a soul in town. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure she spoke English at first.”

Amy looked over Lucia’s shoulder to where Matt was answering whatever it was that the girl’s hands had told him. Where had he learned sign language? she wondered. He’d never said anything about it before, but then she realized that for all the years she’d known him, she really didn’t know much about him at all except that he was a brilliant musician and good in bed, related actions, perhaps, since she didn’t doubt that they both were something he’d regard as a performance. Meow, she thought.

“She’s deaf-mute, isn’t she?” she added aloud.

Lucia looked surprised. “Mute, but not deaf. How you’d know?”

“I’m watching her talk to Matt with her hands right now. ”

“She couldn’t even do that when I first met her,” Lucia said.

Amy returned her attention to Lucia once more. “What do you mean?” “Well, I know sign language—I learned it when I worked at the Institute for the Deaf up on Gracie Street when I first got out of college—so when I realized she was mute, it was the first thing I tried. But she’s not deaf—she just can’t talk. She didn’t even try to communicate at first. I thought she was in shock. She just sat beside me, looking out over the water, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as we approached the docks.

“When we caught a bus back to my place, it was like she’d never been in a city before. She just sat beside me all wide-eyed and then took my hand—not like she was scared, it was more like she just wanted to share the wonder of it all with me. It wasn’t until we got back to my place that she asked for pen and paper.” Lucia mimed the action as she spoke.

“It’s all kind of mysterious, isn't it?” Amy said.

“I’ll say. Anyway, her name’s Katrina Ludvigsen and she’s from one of those little towns on the Islands further down the lake—the ones just past the mouth of the Dulfer River, you know?”

Amy nodded.

“Her family came over from Norway originally,” Lucia went on. “They were Lapps—as in Lapland—except she doesn’t like to be called that. Her people call themselves Sami.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Amy said. “Referring to them as Lapps is a kind of insult.”

“Exactly.” Lucia took a final drag from her cigarette and butted it out in the ashtray. “Once she introduced herself, she asked me to teach her sign language. Would you believe she picked it up in two days?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Is that fast?”

“Try fantastique, ma cherie.”

“So what’s she doing here?”

Lucia shrugged. “She told me she was looking for a man—like, aren’t we all, ha ha—only she didn’t know his name, just that he lived in Newford. She just about had a fit when she spotted the picture of Matt in the poster for this gig.” “So she knows him from before.”

“You tell me,” Lucia said.

Amy shook her head. “Only Matt knows whatever it is that Matt knows.” “Katrina says she’s twenty-two/’ Lucia went on, “but if you ask me, I think she’s a lot younger. I’ll bet she ran away from home—maybe even stowed away on some tourist’s powerboat and jumped ship just outside the harbour because they were about to catch her and maybe take her back home.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Not a damn thing. She’s a nice kid and besides, she added as Katrina and Matt walked by their table, heading for the bar, “I’ve got the feeling she’s not even going to be my responsibility for much longer.”

“Don’t count on it,” Amy said. “She’ll be lucky if she lasts the night.” Although maybe not. Katrina was pretty, and she certainly could dance, so there was the musical connection, just as there had been with her.

Amy sighed. She didn’t know why she got to feeling the way she did at times like this. She wouldn’t even want to make a go at it with Matt again.

Lucia reached across the table and put her hand on Amy’s, giving it a squeeze. “How’re you handling this, Amy? I remember you were pretty messed up about him at one point. ”

“I can deal with it.”

“Well—what’s that line of yours? More power to your elbow then if you can, though I still can’t figure out how you got past it enough to still be able to play with him.”

Amy looked over to the bar where Matt was getting the girl a cup of tea. She wished the twinge of not so much jealousy, as hurt, would go away.

Patience, she told herself. She’d seen Matt with who knew how many women over the years, all of them crazy over him. The twinge only lasted for a little while—a reminder of a bad time, not the bad time itself. She was past that now. Well, mostly.

“You just change your way of thinking about a person,” she said after a few moments, trying to convince herself as much as Lucia. “You change what you need from them, your expectations. That’s all.”

“You make it sound easy.”

Amy turned back to her friend. “It’s not,” she said in a quiet voice.

Lucia gave her hand a squeeze.

The girl was drunk on Matt, Amy realized. There was no other explanation for the way she was carrying on.

For the rest of the night, Amy could see Katrina sitting with Lucia at the back of the club, chin cupped in her hands as she listened to Matt sing. No, not just listening. She drank in the songs, swallowed them whole. And with every dance set they played, she was up on her feet at the front of the stage, the sinuous grace of her movement, the swirl and the lift and the rapid fire step of her small feet capturing each tune to perfection.

Matt was obviously complimented by her attention—or at least whatever it was that he’d feel that would be close to flattered—and why not? Next to Lucia, she was the best looking woman in the club, and Lucia wasn’t exactly sending out “available” signals, not dressed the way she was.

Matt and the girl talked between each set, filling up the twenty minutes or so of canned music and patron conversation with a forest of words, his spoken, hers signed, each of them oblivious to their surroundings, to everything except for each other.

Maybe Katrina will be the one, Amy thought.

Once she got past her own feelings, that was what she usually found herself hoping. Although Matt could be insensitive once he stepped off the stage, she still believed that all he really needed was someone to care about to turn him around. Nobody who put such heart into his music could be completely empty inside. She was sure that he just needed someone—the right someone. It hadn’t been her, fine. But somewhere there had to be a woman for him—a catalyst to take down the walls though which only his music dared forth to touch the world.

The way he’d been so attentive towards Katrina all night, Amy was sure he was going to take her home with him, but all he did was ask her out tomorrow.

Okay, she thought standing beside Lucia while Matt and Katrina “talked.” That’s a start and maybe a good one.

Katrina’s hands moved in response to Matt’s question.

“What’s she saying?” Amy asked, leaning close to whisper to Lucia.

“Yes,” Lucia translated. “Now she’s asking him if they can ride the ferry.”

“The one to Wolf Island?” Amy said. “That’s where you found her.”

“Whisht,” Lucia told her.

“We’ll do whatever you want,” Matt was saying.

And then Katrina was gone, trailing after Lucia with a last lingering wave before the world outside the club swallowed her and the door closed behind the pair of them.

Matt and Amy returned to the stage to pack up their instruments.

“I was thinking of heading up to The Harp to see if there’s a session on,” Matt said. He looked around at the other three. “Anyone feel like coming?”

If there were enough musicians up for the music, Joe Breen, the proprietor of The Harp, would lock the doors to the public after closing hours and just let the music flow until the last musician packed it in, acting no different on this side of the Atlantic than he had with the pub he’d run back home in Ireland.

Johnny shook his head. “I’m beat. It’s straight to bed for me tonight.”

“It’s been a long night,” Nicky agreed.

Nicky looked a little sullen, but Amy doubted that Matt even noticed. He just shrugged, then looked to her.

Well, and why not? she thought.

“I’ll give it a go,” she told him.

Saying their good-byes to the other two outside the club, she and Matt walked north to the Rosses where The Harp stood in the shadow of the Kelly Street Bridge.

“Katrina seemed nice,” Amy said after a few blocks.

“I suppose,” he said. “A little intense, maybe.”

“I think she’s a little taken with you.”

Matt nodded unselfconsciously. “Maybe too much. But she sure can dance, can’t she?”

“Like an angel,” Amy agreed.

Conversation fell flat then, just as it always did.

“I got a new tune from Geordie this afternoon,” Amy said finally. “He doesn't remember where he picked it up, but it fits onto the end of The Kilavel Jig like it was born to it. ”

Matt’s eyes brightened with interest. “What’s it called?”

“He didn’t know. It had some Gaelic title that he’d forgotten, but it’s a lovely piece. In G-major, but the first part has a kind of a modal flavor so that it almost feels as though it’s being played out of C. It’d be just lovely on the bouzouki.” The talk stayed on tunes the rest of the way to The Harp—safe ground. At one point Amy found herself remembering a gig they’d played a few months ago and the story that Matt had used to introduce a song called “Sure, All He Did Was Go” that they’d played that night.

“He couldn’t help himself,” Matt had said, speaking of the fiddler in the song who gave up everything he had to follow a tune. “Music can be a severe mistress, demanding and jealous, and don’t you doubt it. Do her bidding and isn t it just like royalty that she’ll be treating you, but turn your back on her and she can take back her gift as easily as it was given. Your man could find himself holding only the tattered ribbons of a tune and song ashes and that’s the God’s own truth. I’ve seen it happen.”

And then he’d laughed, as though he’d been having the audience on, and they’d launched into the song, but Amy had seen more than laughter in Matt’s eyes as he started to sing. She wondered then, as she wondered now, if he didn’t half believe that little bit of superstition, picked up somewhere on his travels, God knew where.

Maybe that was the answer to the riddle that was Matt Casey: he thought he’d lose his gift of music if he gave his heart to another. Maybe he’d even written that song himself, for she’d surely never heard it before. Picked it up in Morocco, he d told her once, from one of the Wild Geese, the many Irish-in-exile, but she wasn’t so sure.

Did you write it? she was ready to ask him right now, but then they were at The Harp and there was old Joe Breen flinging open the door to welcome them in and the opportunity was gone.

Lucia put on a pot of tea when she and Katrina returned to the apartment. While they waited for it to steep, they sat on the legless sofa pushed up against one wall of the long open loft that took up the majority of the apartment’s floor space.

There was a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom off this main room. The kitchen area was in one corner—a battered fridge, its paint peeling, a sink and a counter with a hot plate on it and storage cupboards underneath and a small wooden kitchen table with five mismatching chairs set around it.

A low coffee table made of a plank of wood set on two apple crates crouched before the couch, laden with magazines and ashtrays. Along a far wall, three tall old mirrors had been fastened to the wall with a twelve-foot-long support bar set out in front of them. The other walls were adorned with posters of the various shows in which Lucia had performed. In two she had headlined—one a traditional ballet, while the other had been a very outre multimedia event written and choreographed by a friend of hers.

When the tea was ready, Lucia brought the pot and two cups over to the sofa and set them on a stack of magazines. She poured Katrina a cup, then another for herself.

“So you found him,” Lucia said as she returned to her seat on the sofa.

Katrina nodded happily.

He’s just the way I remember him, she signed.

“Where did you meet him?” Lucia asked.

Katrina gave a shy smile in response, then added, Near my home. He was playing music.

The bright blue fire of her eyes grew unfocused as she looked across the room, seeing not plaster walls and the dance posters upon them, but the rough rocky shore of a coastline that lay east of the city by the mouth of the Dulfer River. She went into the past, and the past was like a dream.

She’d been underlake when the sound of his voice drew her up from the cold and the dark, neither of which she felt except as a kind of malaise in her spirit; up into the moonlight, bobbing in the white-capped waves; listening, swallowing that golden sound of strings and voice, and he so handsome and all alone on the shore. And sad. She could hear it in his song, feel the timbre of his loneliness in his voice.

Always intrigued with the strange folk who moved on the shore with their odd stumpy legs, this time she was utterly smitten. She swam closer and laid her arms on a stone by the shore, her head on her arms, to watch and listen.

It was his music that initially won her, for music had been her first love. Each of her four sisters was prettier than the next, and each had a voice that could charm moonlight from a stone, milk from a virgin, a ghost from the cold dark depths below, but her voice was better still, as golden as her hair and as rich and pure as the first larksong at dawn.

But if it was his music that first enchanted her, then he himself completed the spell. She longed to join her voice to his, to hold him and be held, but she never moved from her hiding place. One look at her, and he would be driven away, for he’d see only that which was scaled, and she had no soul, not as did those who walked ashore.

No soul, no soul. A heart that broke for want of him, but no immortal soul. That was the curse of the lake-born.

When he finally put away his instrument and walked further inland, up under the pines where she couldn’t follow, she let the waves close over her head and returned to her home underlake.

For three nights she returned to the shore and for two of them he was there, his voice like honey against the beat of the waves that the wind pushed shoreward and she only loved him more. But on the fourth night, he didn’t come, nor on the fifth night, nor the sixth, and she despaired, knowing he was gone, away in the wide world, lost to her forever.

Her family couldn’t help her; there was no one to help her. She yearned to be rid of scales, to walk on shore, no matter the cost, just so that she could be with him, but as well ask the sun not rise, or the wind to cease its endless motion.

“No matter the cost,” she whispered. Tears trailed down her cheek, a sorrowful tide that would not ebb.

“Maraghreen,” the lake replied as the wind lifted one of its waves to break upon the land.

She lifted her head, looked over the white caps, to where the lake grew darker still as it crept under the cliffs into the hidden cave where the lake witch lived.

She was afraid, but she went. To Maraghreen. Who took her scales and gave her legs with a bitter potion that tasted of witch blood; satisfied her impossible need, but took Katrina’s voice in payment.

“A week and a day,” the lake witch told her before she took Katrina’s voice. “You have only so long to win him and your immortal soul, or to foam you will return.”

“But without my voice. . . .’’It was through song she’d thought to win him, voices joined in a harmony so pure how could he help but love her? “Without it. . . .”

“He must speak of his love first, or your soul will be forfeit.”

“But without my voice. ...”

“You will have your body; that will need be enough.”

So she drank the blood, bitter on her tongue; gained legs, and each step she took was fiery pain and would be so until she’d gained a soul; went in search of him who held her love, for whose love she had paid such a dear price. Surely he would speak the words to her before the seven days were past and gone?

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lucia said.

Katrina only smiled and shook her head. She could tell no one. The words must come unbidden from him or all would be undone.

Matt was late picking Katrina up on Sunday. It was partly his own fault—he’d gotten caught up with a new song that he was learning from a tape a friend had sent him from County Cork and lost track of the time—and partly from trying to follow the Byzantine directions that Lucia had used to describe the route to her Upper Foxville apartment.

Katrina didn’t seem to mind at all; she was just happy to see him, her hands said, moving as graceful in speech as the whole of her did when she danced.

You didn’t bring your guitar, she signed.

“I’ve been playing it all day. I thought I’d leave it at home.”

Your voice . . . your music. They are a gift.

“Yeah, well. ...”

He looked around the loft, recognizing a couple of the posters from having seen them around town before, pasted on subway walls or stuck in amongst the clutter of dozens of other ads in the front of restaurants and record stores. He’d never gone to any of the shows. Dance wasn’t his thing, especially not modern dance or the performance art that Lucia was into. He’d seen a show of hers once. She’d spent fifteen minutes rolling back and forth across the stage, wrapped head to toe in old brown paper shopping bags to a soundtrack that consisted of water dripping for its rhythm, the hypnotic drone only occasionally broken by the sound of footsteps walking through broken glass.

Definitely not his thing.

Lucia was not his idea of what being creative was all about. In his head, he filed her type of artist under the general heading of lunatic fringe. Happily, she was out for the day.

“So,” he said, “do you want to head out to the island?”

Katrina nodded. But not just yet, her hands added.

She smiled at him, long hair clouding down her back. She was wearing clothes borrowed from Lucia—cotton pants a touch too big and tied closed with a scarf through the belt loops, a T-shirt advertising a band that he’d never heard of and the same black Chinese slippers she’d been wearing last night.

“So what do you want—” he began.

Katrina took his hands before he could finish and placed them on her breasts. They were small and firm against his palms, her heartbeat echoing through the thin fabric, fluttering against his skin. Her own hands dropped to his groin, one gently cupping him through his jeans, the other pulling down the zipper.

She was gentle and loving, each motion innocent of artifice and certainly welcome, but she’d caught Matt off-guard.

“Look,” he said, “are you sure you . . . ?”

She raised a hand, laying a finger against his lips. No words. Just touch. He grew hard, his penis uncomfortably bent in the confines of his jeans until she popped the top button and pulled it out. She put her small hand around it, fingers tight, hand moving slowly up and down. Speaking without words, her emotions were laid bare before him.

Matt took his hands from her breasts and lifted the T-shirt over her head. He let it drop behind her as he enfolded her in an embrace. She was like liquid against him, a shimmer of movement and soft touches.

No words, he thought.

She was right. There was no need for words.

He let her lead him into Lucia’s bedroom.

Afterward, he felt so still inside it was though the world had stopped moving, time stalled, no one left but the two of them, wrapped up together, here in the dusky shadows that licked across the bed. He raised himself up on one elbow and looked down at her.

She seemed to be made of light. An unearthly radiance lay upon her pale skin like an angelic nimbus, except he doubted that any angel in heaven knew how to give and accept pleasure as she did. Not unless heaven was a very different place from the one he’d heard about in Sunday School.

There was a look in her eyes that promised him everything—not just bodily pleasures, but heart and soul—and for a moment he wanted to open up to her, to give to her what he gave his music, but then he felt something close up thick inside him. He found himself remembering a parting conversation he’d had with another woman. Darlene Flatt, born Darlene Johnston. Belying her stage name, she was an extraordinarily well-endowed singer in one of the local country bands.

Partial to slow-dancing on sawdusted floors, bolo ties, fringed jackets and, for the longest time, to him.

“You're just a hollow man,” she told him finally. “A sham. The only place you’re alive is on stage, but let me tell you something, Matt, the whole world’s a stage if you’d just open your eyes and see.”

Maybe in Shakespeare’s day, he thought, but not now, not here, not in this world. Here you only get hurt.

“If you gave a fraction of your commitment to music to another person, you’d be. ...”

He didn’t know what Darlene thought he’d be because he tuned her out. Stepped behind the wall and followed the intricate turns of a song he was working on at the time until she finally got up and left his apartment.

Got up and left.

He swung his feet to the floor and looked for his clothes. Katrina caught his arm.

What’s wrong? she signed. What have I done?

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not you. It’s not anything. It’s just. . . I’ve just got to go, okay?”

Please, she signed. Just tell me. . . .

But he turned away so that he couldn’t see her words. Got dressed. Paused in the doorway of the bedroom, choking on words that tried to slip through the wall. Turned finally, and left. The room. The apartment. Her, crying.

Lucia found Katrina when she came home later, red-eyed and sitting on the sofa in just a T-shirt, staring out the window, unable or unwilling to explain what was wrong. So Lucia thought the worst.

“That sonuvabitch,” she started. “He never even showed up, did he? I should have warned you about what a prick he can be. ”

But Katrina’s hands said, No. It wasn’t his fault. I want too much.

“He was here?” Lucia asked.

She nodded.

“And you had a fight?”

The shrug that came in response said, sort of, and then Katrina began to cry again. Lucia enfolded her in her arms. It was small, cold comfort, she knew, for she’d had her own time in that lonely place in which Katrina now found herself, but it was all Lucia had to offer.

Matt found himself on the ferry, crossing from the city over to Wolf Island, as though, by doing so, he was completing some unfinished ritual to which neither he nor Katrina had quite set the parameters. He stood at the rail on the upper deck with the wind in his face and let the words to long-dead ballads run through his mind so that he wouldn’t have to think about people, about relationships, about complications, about Katrina.

But in the dusking sky and in the wake that trailed behind the ferry, and later on the island, in the shadows that crept across the lawn and in the tangle that branches made against the sky, he could see only her face. Not all the words to Our Lady of the Harbour all the songs he knew could free him from the burden of guilt that clung to him like burrs gathered on a sweater while crossing an autumn field.

He stopped at the statue of the little mermaid, and of course even she had Katrina’s face.

I didn't ask to start anything,” he told the statue, saying now what he should have said in Lucia’s bedroom. “So why the hell do I have to feel so guilty?”

It was the old story, he realized. Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt.

“I’m not a hollow man,” he told the statue, saying what he should have said to Darlene. “I just don’t have what you want me to give.”

The statue just looked out across the lake. The dusk stretched for long impossible moments, then the sun dropped completely behind the horizon and the lamps lit up along the island’s pathways. Matt turned and walked back to where the ferry waited to return him to Newford.

He didn’t see Katrina again for two days.

I'm sorry was the first thing she said to him, her hands moving quickly before he could speak.

He stood in the hallway leading into Lucia’s apartment, late on a Wednesday afternoon, not even sure what he was doing here. Apologizing. Explaining. Maybe just trying to understand.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It’s just . . . everything happened too fast.”

She nodded. Do you want to come in?

Matt regarded her. She was barefoot, framed by the doorway. The light behind her turned the flowered dress she was wearing into gossamer, highlighting the shape of her body under it. Her hair was the color of soft gold. He remembered her lying on the bed, radiant in the afterglow of their love-making.

“Could we go out instead?” he said. “Just for a walk or something?”

Let me get my shoes.

He took her to the lakefront and they walked the length of the boardwalk and the Pier, and then, when the jostle of the crowds became too much, they made their way down to the sand and sat near the shoreline. For the most part, his voice, her hands, were still. When they did talk, it was to make up stories about the more colorful characters with whom they shared the beach, both using their hands to speak so that they wouldn’t be overheard, laughing as each tried to outdo the other with an outrageous background for one person or another.

Where did you learn sign language? she asked him at one point.

My cousins deaf, he replied, his hands growing more deft, remembering old patterns, the longer they spoke. Our parents were pretty close and we all saw a lot of each other, so everybody in the family learned.

They had dinner at Kathryn’s Cafe. Afterward, they went to the Owlnight, another of Newford’s folk clubs, but this one was on the Butler University campus itself, in the Student Center. Garve MacCauley was doing a solo act, just guitar and gravelly voice, mostly his own material.

You’re much better, Katrina signed to Matt after the first few songs.

“Just different,” he said.

Katrina only smiled and shook her head.

After the last set, he took her back to Upper Foxville and left her at Lucia’s door with a chaste kiss.

Thursday evening they took in a play at the Standish, a small concert hall that divided its evenings between repertory theater and music concerts. Katrina was entranced. She’d never seen live actors before, but then there was so much she didn’t know about this new world in which she found herself and still more that she hadn’t experienced in his company.

It was just past eleven by the time they got back to the apartment. Lucia had gone out so they could have the place to themselves but when Katrina invited Matt in, he begged off. His confused mumble of an explanation made little sense. All Katrina knew was that the days were slipping away. Saturday night, the lake witch’s deadline, was blurring all too close, all too fast.

When he bent to kiss her on the forehead as he had the night before, she lifted her head so that their lips met. The kiss lasted a long time, a tangle of tongues. She pressed in close to him, hands stroking his back, but he pulled away with a confused panic fluttering in his eyes.

Why do I frighten you? she wanted to ask, but she had already guessed that it wasn’t just her. It was any close relationship. Responsibility frightened him and perhaps more to the point, he just didn’t love her. Maybe he would, given time, but by then it would be too late. Days went by quickly; hours were simply a rush, one tumbling into the other.

She gave him a sad smile and let him go, listened to his footsteps in the stairwell, then slowly went into the apartment and closed the door behind her. Each step she took, as it always did since she stepped onto the land, was like small knives cutting through her feet. She remembered the freedom of the waves, of movement without pain, but she had turned her back on scales and water. For better or worse, she belonged on the land now.

But that night her dreams were of foam. It gathered against the craggy shore near her home as the wind drove the lake water onto the rocks. Her sisters swam nearby, weeping.

Late Friday afternoon, Amy and Lucia were sitting on a bench in Fitzhenry Park, watching the traffic go by on Palm Street. They’d been to the Y to swim laps and they each nursed a coffee now, bought from one of the vendors in the little parade of carts that set up along the sidewalk first thing every morning. The sky was overcast, with the scent of rain in the air, but for all the weather report’s warnings, it had held off all day.

“So how’s Katrina doing?” Amy asked.

An expression that was more puzzlement than a frown touched Lucia’s features. She took a sip of her coffee then set it down on the bench between them and took out her cigarettes.

“Well, they started off rocky on Sunday,” she said. “He left her crying.”

“God, so soon?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Lucia said.

She got her cigarette lit and blew out a wreath of smoke. Amy coughed. Sorry, Lucia said. She moved the cigarette away.

“It’s not the smoke,” Amy told her, lifting a hand to rub her throat. ‘Tve had a tickle in my throat all day. I just hope I m not coming down with something. ” She took a sip of her coffee and wished she had a throat lozenge. “So what did happen?” she asked.

“He didn’t show up for a couple of days, didn’t call—well, I guess he wouldn’t want to speak to me, would he?—but then he’s been real nice ever since he did show up on Wednesday. Took her to see your friend MacCauley over at the Owlnight, the next night they went to that production of Lizzie’s play that’s running at the Standish and earlier today they were out just mooching around town, I guess.”

“He really needs someone,” Amy said.

“I suppose. But knowing your history with him, I don’t know if I wish him on Katrina.”

“But at least they’re doing things. He’s talking to her. ”

Yeah, but then he told her today that he’s going to be away this weekend.” “That’s right. He canceled Saturday morning band practice because he’s got a gig at that little bar in Hartnett’s Point. What’s the problem with that? That’s his job. She must know that.”

Lucia shrugged. “I just think he should’ve taken her with him when he left this afternoon.”

Amy sighed in sympathy. “Matt’s not big on bringing his current belle to a gig.

I remember how it used to really piss me off when we were going together.” “Well, she’s heartbroken that he didn’t ask her to come along. I told her she should just go anyway—show up and meet him there; I even offered to lend her the money for the bus—but she thinks he’d get mad.”

“I don’t know. He seemed to like her dancing when we played at Feeney’s last weekend. Amy paused. “Of course he’ll just be doing songs on his own. There won’t be anything for her to dance to. ”

“She likes his songs, too,” Lucia said.

Amy thought of the intensity with which Katrina had listened to Matt’s singing that night at Feeney’s and she knew exactly why Matt hadn’t asked Katrina along to the gig.

“Maybe she likes them too much,” she said. “Matt puts a lot into his music, and you know how bloody brilliant he is, but he’s pretty humble about it all at the same time. He probably thinks it d freak him too much having her sitting there just kind of— her shoulders lifted and fell “—I don’t know, swallowing the songs.”

“Well, I wish he’d given it a try all the same. I’ve got to help Sharon with some set decorations, so Katrina s going to be on her own all night, just moping about the apartment. I asked her to come along, but she didn’t want to go out.”

“I could drop by your place,” Amy said.

Lucia grinned. “I thought you’d never offer.”

Amy punched her lightly on the arm. “You set me up!”

“Has she still got it or what?” Lucia asked, blowing on her fingernails.

Amy laughed and they went through a quick little flurry of slapping at each other’s hands until they were too giddy to continue. They both leaned back on the park bench.

“I bet I’ll have a better time,” Amy said after a moment. I ve helped bharon before. If she’s got anything organized at all, it’ll only be because someone else did it.”

Lucia nodded glumly. “Don’t I know it.

Amy went home to change and have a bite to eat before she took the subway north to Upper Foxville. Looking in the mirror as she put on her makeup, she saw that she was looking awfully pale. Thinking about feeling sick made her throat tickle again and she coughed. She stopped for some lozenges at a drug store that was on her way. They helped her throat, but she felt a little light-headed now.

She should just go home, she thought, but she’d promised Lucia and she couldn’t help but be sympathetic towards Katrina. She’d just stay a little while, that was all.

It was just going on nightfall when she reached Lucia s street. She paused at the corner, as she saw a small familiar figure step from the stoop of Lucia’s building and head off the other way down the street. She almost called Katrina by name, but something stopped her. Curiosity got the better of her and she kept still, following along behind instead.

It was easy to keep track of her—Katrina s cloud of gold hair caught the light of every streetlamp she passed under and seemed to reflect a burnished glow up into the night. She led Amy down to MacNeil Street, turning west once she reached it. Her stride was both purposeful and wearied, but always graceful.

Poor kid, Amy thought.

More than once she started to hurry to catch up with Katrina, but then her curiosity would rise to the fore and she’d tell herself to be patient just a little longer. Since Katrina didn’t know anyone in Newford—according to Lucia she didn’t even know the city—Amy couldn’t couldn’t figure out where Katrina might be going.

Where MacNeil ended at Lee Street, Katrina crossed over and went down to the bank of the Kickaha River. She followed the riverbank southward, pausing only when she came near the Gracie Street Bridge. There the fenced-off ruins of the old L & N sawmill reared up in the darkness, ill-lit, drowning the riverbank with its shadow. It took up enough room that a person walking along the river by its chain-link fence would be almost invisible from any of the more peopled areas roundabout. Even across the river there were only empty warehouses.

Amy started to hurry again, struck by the sudden fear that Katrina meant to do herself harm. The river ran quicker here, rapiding over a descending shelf of broken stone slabs from where an old railway bridge had collapsed a few years ago. The city had cleared a channel through the debris, but that just made the river run more quickly through the narrower course. More than one person had drowned on this stretch of water—and not always by accident.

Matt’s not worth it, she wanted to tell Katrina. Nobody s worth it.

Before she could reach Katrina, she came to an abrupt halt again. She stifled a cough that reared up in her throat and leaned against a fence post, suddenly dizzy. But it wasn’t the escalating onset of a flu bug that had made her stop. Rather it was what she had spied, bobbing in the swift-moving water.

The light was bad, just a diffused glow from the streets a block or so over, but it was enough for her to make out four white shapes in the dark water. They each seemed as slender and graceful as Katrina, with the same spun gold hair, except theirs was cut short to their skulls, highlighting the fox-like shape of their features. They probably had, Amy thought, the same blue eyes, too.

What were they doing there?

Another wave of dizziness came over her. She slid down the side of the fence pole until she was crouched on the ground. She remembered thinking that this way she wouldn’t have as far to fall if she fainted. Clutching the pole for support, she looked back to the river.

Katrina had moved closer to the shore and was holding her arms out to the women. As their shapes moved closer, Amy’s heartbeat drummed into overtime for she realized that they had no legs. They were propelling themselves through the water with scaled fish tails. There was no mistaking the shape of them as the long tail fins broke the surface of the water.

Mermaids, Amy thought, no longer able to breathe. They were mermaids.

It wasn’t possible. How could it be possible?

And what did it make Katrina?

The sight of them blurred. For a moment she was looking through a veil, then it was like looking through a double-paned window at an angle, images all duplicated and laid over each other.

She blinked hard. She started to lift her hand to rub at her eyes, but she was suddenly so weak it was all she could do to just crouch beside the pole and not tumble over into the weeds.

The women in the river drew closer as Katrina stepped to the very edge of the water. Katrina lifted her hair, then let it drop in a clouding fall. She pointed at the women.

“Cut away and gone,” one of the women said.

“All gone.”

“We gave it to Maraghreen.”

“For you, sister.”

“We traded, gold for silver.”

Amy pressed her face against the pole as the mermaids spoke. Through her dizziness, their voices seemed preternaturally enhanced. They chorused, one beginning where another ended, words molten, bell-like, sweet as honey, and so very, very pure.

“She gave us this.”

The foremost of the women in the river reached up out of the water. Something glimmered silver and bright in her hand. A knife.

“Pierce his heart.”

“Bathe in his blood.”

“Your legs will grow together once more.”

“You’ll come back to us.”

“Oh, sister.”

Katrina went down on her knees at the water’s edge. She took the knife from the mermaid’s hand and laid it gingerly on her lap.

“He doesn’t love you.”

“He will never love you.”

The women all drew close. They reached out of the water, stroking Katrina’s arms and her face with gentling hands.

“You must do it—before the first dawn light follows tomorrow night.”

“Or foam you’ll be.”

“Sister, please.”

“Return to those who love you.”

Katrina bowed her head, making no response. One by one the women dove into the river deeps and were gone. From her hiding place, Amy tried to rise— she knew Katrina would be coming back soon, coming back this way, and she didn't want to be caught—but she couldn’t manage it, even with the help of the pole beside her. Then Katrina stepped away from the river and walked towards her, the knife held gingerly in one hand.

As their gazes met, another wave of dizziness rose in Amy, this one a tsunami, and in its wake she felt the ground tremble underfoot, but it was only herself, tumbling into the dirt and weeds. She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her away.

It was late afternoon when Amy awoke on the sofa in Lucia’s loft. Her surroundings and the wrong angle of the afternoon light left her disoriented and confused, but no longer feeling sick. It must have been one of those 24-hour viruses, she thought as she swung her legs to the floor, then leaned back against the sofa’s cushions.

Lucia looked up from the magazine she was reading at the kitchen table. Laying it down she walked over and joined Amy on the sofa.

“I was tres surprised to find you sleeping here when I got in last night,” she said. “Katrina said you got sick, so she put you to bed on the sofa and slept on the floor herself. How’re you feeling now, ma cherie?”

Amy worked through what Lucia had just said. None of it quite jibed with her own muddled memory of the previous evening.

“Okay ... I guess,” she said finally. She looked around the loft. “Where’s Katrina?”

“She borrowed the bus money from me and went to Hartnett’s Point after all. True love wins over all, riest-ce pas?”

Amy thought of mermaids swimming in the Kickaha River, of Katrina kneeling by the water, of the silver knife.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I. . . ”

Amy didn’t know what to say. What she’d seen hadn’t made any sense. She’d been sick, dizzy, probably delirious. But it had seemed so real.

Pierce his heart . . . bathe in his blood. . . .

She shook her head. None of it could have happened. There were no such things as mermaids. But what if there were? What if Katrina was carrying that silver knife as she made her way to Matt’s gig? What if she did just what those . . . mermaids had told her. . . .

You must do it—before the first dawn light that follows tomorrow night. . . .

What if—

Or foam you’ll be. . . .

—it was real?

She bent down and looked for her shoes, found them pressed up against one of the coffee table’s crate supports. She put them on and rose from the sofa.

“I’ve got to go,” she told Lucia.

“Go where? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have time to explain. I’ll tell you later.”

Lucia followed her across the loft to the door. “Amy, you’re acting really weird. ”

“I’m fine,” Amy said. “Honest.”

Though she still didn’t feel quite normal. She was weak and didn’t want to look in a mirror for fear of seeing the white ghost of her own face looking back at her. But she didn’t feel that she had any choice.

If what she’d seen last night had been real. . . .

Lucia shook her head uncertainly. “Are you sure you’re—”

Amy paused long enough to give her friend a quick peck on the cheek, then she was out the door.

Borrowing a car was easy. Her brother Pete had two and was used to her sudden requests for transportational needs, relieved that he wasn’t required to provide a chauffeur service along with it. She was on the road by seven, tooling west along the old lakeside highway in a gas-guzzling Chevy, stopping for a meal at a truck stop that marked the half-way point and arriving at Hartnett’s Point just as Matt would be starting his first set.

She pulled in beside his VW van—a positive antique by now, she liked to tease him—and parked. The building that housed Murphy’s Bar where Matt had his gig was a ramshackle affair, log walls here in back, plaster on cement walls in front. The bar sat on the edge of the point from which the village got its name, with a long pier out behind the building, running into the lake. The water around the pier was thick with moored boats.

She went around front to where the neon sign spelling the name of the bar crackled and spat an orange glow and stepped inside to the familiar sound of Matt singing Leon Rosselson’s “World Turned Upside Down.” The audience, surprisingly enough for a backwoods establishment such as this, was actually paying attention to the music. Amy thought that only a third of them were probably even aware of the socialist message the song espoused.

The patrons were evenly divided between the back-to-the-earth hippies who tended organic farms west of the village, all jeans and unbleached cotton, long hair and flower-print dresses; the locals who’d grown up in the area and would probably die here, heavier drinkers, also in jeans, but tending towards flannel shirts and baseball caps, T-shirts and workboots; and then those cottagers who hadn’t yet closed their places up for the year, a hodge-podge of golf shirts and cotton blends, short skirts and, yes, even one dark blue captain’s cap, complete with braided rope trim.

She shaded her eyes and looked for Katrina, but didn’t spot her. After a few moments, she got herself a beer from the bar and found a corner table to sit at that she shared with a pair of earth-mothers and a tall skinny man with drooping eyes and hair longer than that of either of his companions, pulled back into a pony-tail that fell to his waist. They made introductions all around, then settled back into their chairs to listen to the music.

As Matt’s set wound on, Amy began to wonder just exactly what it was that she was doing here. Even closing her eyes and concentrating, she could barely call up last night’s fantastic images with any sort of clarity. What if the whole thing had just been a delirium? What if she’d made her way to Lucia’s apartment only to pass out on the sofa and have dreamt it all?

Matt stopped by the table when he ended his set.

“What brings you up here, Scallan?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Just thought I’d check out how you do without the rest of us to keep you honest.”

A touch of humor crinkled around his eyes. “So what’s the verdict?”

“You’re doing good.” She introduced him to her companions, then asked, “Do you want to get a little air?”

He nodded and let her lead the way outside. They leaned against the back of somebody’s Bronco and looked down the length of one of the village’s two streets. This one cut north and south, from the bush down to the lake. The other was merely the highway as it cut through the village.

“So have you seen Katrina?” Amy asked.

Matt nodded. “Yeah, we walked around the Market for awhile yesterday afternoon.”

“You mean, she’s not up here?”

“Not so’s I know.”

Amy sighed. So much for her worries. But if Katrina hadn’t borrowed the money from Lucia to come up here, then where had she gone?

“Why are you so concerned about Katrina?” Matt asked.

Amy started to make up some excuse, but then thought, screw it. One of them might as well be up front.

“I’m just worried about her.”

Matt nodded. He kicked at the gravel underfoot, but didn’t say anything.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Amy said.

“You’re right. It’s not.” There was no rancor in Matt’s voice. Just a kind of weariness.

“It’s just that—”

“Look,” he said, turning to Amy, “she seems nice, that’s all. I think maybe we started out on the wrong foot, but I’m trying to fix that. For now, I just want to be her friend. If something else comes up later, okay. But I want to take it as it comes. Slowly. Is that so wrong?”

Amy shook her head. And then it struck her. For the first time that they weren’t on stage together, or working out an arrangement, Matt actually seemed to focus on her. To listen to what she was saying, and answer honestly. Protective walls maybe not completely down, but there was a little breach in them.

“I think she loves you,” Amy said.

Matt sighed. “It’s kind of early for that—don’t you think? I think it’s more a kind of infatuation. She’ll probably grow out of it just as fast as she fell into it.” “I don’t know about that. Seems to me that if you’re going to be at all fair, you’d be just a little bit more—”

“Don’t talk to me about responsibility,” Matt said, breaking in. “Just because someone falls in love with you, it doesn’t mean you owe them anything. I’ve got no control over how other people feel about me—”

That’s where you’re wrong, Amy thought. If you’d just act more human, more like this. . . .

“—and I’m sure not going to run my life by their feelings and schedules. I’m not trying to sound self-centered, I’m just trying to ... I don’t know. Protect my privacy.”

“But if you don’t give a little, how will you ever know what you might be missing?”

“Giving too much, too fast—that just leaves you open to being hurt.”

“But—”

“Oh, shit,” Matt said, glancing at his watch. “I’ve got another set to do.” He pushed away from the Bronco. “Look, I’m sorry if I don’t measure up to how people want me to be, but this is just the way I am.”

Why didn’t you open yourself up even this much while we were going out together? Amy wanted to ask. But all she did was nod and say, “I know. ”

“Are you coming in?”

She shook her head. “Not right away.”

“Well, I’ve got—”

“I know.” She waved him off. “Break a leg or whatever.”

She moved away from the Bronco once he’d gone inside and crossed the parking lot, gravel crunching underfoot until she reached the grass verge. She followed it around to the lawn by the side of the building and down to the lakefront. There she stood, listening to the vague sound of Matt’s voice and guitar as it carried through an open window. She looked at all the boats clustered around the pier. A splash drew her attention to the far end of the wooden walkway where a figure sat with its back to the shore having just thrown something into the lake.

Amy had one of those moments of utter clarity. She knew immediately that it was Katrina sitting there, feet dangling in the water, long hair clouding down her back, knew as well that it was the silver knife she’d thrown into the lake. Amy could almost see it, turning end on slow end as it sank in the water.

She hesitated for the space of a few long breaths, gaze tracking the surface of the lake for Katrina’s sisters, then she slowly made her way down to the pier. Katrina turned at the sound of Amy’s shoes on the wooden slats of the walkway. She nodded once, then looked back out over the lake.

Amy sat beside her. She hesitated again, then put her arm comfortingly around Katrina’s small shoulders. They sat like that for a long time. The water lapped against the pilings below them. An owl called out from the woods to their left, a long mournful sound. A truck pulled into the bar’s parking lot. Car doors slammed, voices rose in laughter, then disappeared into the bar.

Katrina stirred beside Amy. She began to move her hands, but Amy shook her head.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

Katrina mimed steering, both hands raised up in front of her, fingers closed around an invisible steering wheel.

Amy nodded. “I drove up in my brother’s car.”

Katrina pointed to herself then to Amy and again mimed turning a steering wheel.

“You want me to drive you somewhere?”

Katrina nodded.

Amy looked back towards the bar. “What about Matt?”

Katrina shook her head. She put her hands together, eyes eloquent where her voice was silent. Please.

Amy looked at her for a long moment, then she slowly nodded. “Sure. I can give you a lift. Is there someplace specific you want to go?”

Katrina merely rose to her feet and started back down the pier towards shore. Once they were in the Chev, she pointed to the glove compartment.

“Go ahead,” Amy said.

As she started the car, Katrina pulled out a handful of roadmaps. She sorted through them until she came to one that showed the whole north shore of the lake. She unfolded it and laid it on the dashboard between them and pointed to a spot west of Newford. Amy looked more closely. The place where Katrina had her finger was where the Dulfer River emptied into the lake. The tip of her small finger was placed directly on the lakeside campgrounds of the State Park there.

“Jesus,” Amy said. “It’ll take us all night to get there. We’ll be lucky to make it before dawn.”

As Katrina shrugged, Amy remembered what Katrina’s sisters had said last night.

Before the first dawn light follows tomorrow night.

That was tonight. This morning.

Or foam you’ll be.

She shivered and looked at Katrina.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “Please, Katrina. Maybe I can help you.”

Katrina just shook her head sadly. She mimed driving, hands around the invisible steering wheel again.

Amy sighed. She put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. Katrina reached towards the radio, eyebrows raised quizzically. When Amy nodded, she turned it on and slowly wound through the stations until she got Newford’s WKPN-FM. It was too early for Zoe B.’s “Nightnoise” show, so they listened to Mariah Carey, the Vaughan Brothers and the like as they followed the highway east.

Neither of them spoke as they drove; Katrina couldn’t and Amy was just too depressed. She didn’t know what was going on. She just felt as though she’d become trapped in a Greek tragedy. The storyline was already written, everything was predestined to a certain outcome and there was nothing she could do about it. Only Matt could have, if he’d loved Katrina, but she couldn’t even blame him. You couldn’t force a person to love somebody.

She didn’t agree with his need to protect his privacy. Maybe it stopped him from being hurt, but it also stopped him from being alive. But he was right about one thing: he couldn’t be held responsible for who chose to love him.

They crossed over the Dulfer River just as dawn was starting to pink the eastern horizon. When Amy pulled into the campgrounds, Katrina directed her down a narrow dirt road that led to the park’s boat launch.

They had the place to themselves. Amy pulled up by the water and killed the engine. The pines stood silent around them when they got out of the car. There was birdsong, but it seemed strangely muted. Distant. As though heard through gauze.

Katrina lifted a hand and touched Amy’s cheek, then walked towards the water. She headed to the left of the launching area where a series of broad flat rocks staircased down into the water. After a moment’s hesitation, Amy followed after. She sat down beside Katrina who was right by the edge of the water, arms wrapped around her knees.

“Katrina,” she began. “Please tell me what’s going on. I—”

She fussed in her purse, looking for pen and paper. She found the former, and pulled out her checkbook to use the back of a check as a writing surface.

I want to help, she said, holding the pen and checkbook out to her companion.

Katrina regarded her for a long moment, a helpless look in her eyes, but finally she took the proffered items. She began to write on the back of one of the checks, but before she could hand it back to Amy, a wind rose up. The pine trees shivered, needles whispering against each other.

An electric tingle sparked across every inch of Amy’s skin. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled and goosebumps traveled up her arms. It was like that moment before a storm broke, when the air is so charged with ions that it seems anything might happen.

“What . . . ?” she began.

Her voice died in her throat as the air around them thickened. Shapes formed in the air, pale diffused airy shapes, slender and transparent. Their voices were like the sound of the wind in the pines.

“Come with us,” they said, beckoning to Katrina.

“Be one with us.”

“We can give you what you lack.”

Katrina stared at the misty apparitions for the longest time. Then she let pen and checkbook fall to the rock and stood up, stretching her arms towards the airy figures. Her own body began to lose its definition. She was a spiderweb in the shape of a woman, gossamer, smoke and mist. Her clothing fell from her transparent form to fall into a tangle beside Amy.

And then she was gone. The wind died. The whisper stilled in the pines.

Amy stared open-mouthed at where Katrina had disappeared. All that lay on the rock were Katrina’s clothes, the pen and the checkbook. Amy reached out towards the clothes. They were damp to the touch.

Or foam you’ll be.

Amy looked up into the lightning sky. But Katrina hadn’t just turned to foam, had she? Something had come and taken her away before that happened. If any of this had even been real at all. If she hadn’t just lost it completely.

She heard weeping and lowered her gaze to the surface of the lake. There were four women’s heads there, bobbing in the unruly water. Their hair was short, cropped close to their heads, untidily, as though cut with garden shears or a knife. Their eyes were red with tears. Each could have been Katrina’s twin.

Seeing her gaze upon them, they sank beneath the waves, one by one, and then Amy was alone again. She swallowed thickly, then picked up her checkbook to read what Katrina had written before what could only have been angels came to take her away:

“Is this what having a soul means, to know such bittersweet pain? But still, I cherish the time I had. Those who live forever, who have no stake in the dance of death’s inevitable approach, can never understand the sanctity of life.”

It sounded stiff, like a quote, but then Amy realized she’d never heard how Katrina would speak, not the cadence of her voice, nor its timbre, nor her diction.

And now she never would.

The next day, Matt found Amy where her brother Pete said she was going. She was by the statue of the little mermaid on Wolf Island, just sitting on a bench and staring out at the lake. She looked haggard from a lack of sleep.

“What happened to you last night?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I decided to go for a drive.”

Matt nodded as though he understood, though he didn’t pretend to have a clue. The complexities that made up people’s personalities were forever a mystery to him.

He sat down beside her.

“Have you seen Katrina?” he asked. “I went by Lucia’s place looking for her, but she was acting all weird—” not unusual for Lucia, he added to himself “— and told me I should ask you.”

“She’s gone,” Amy said. “Maybe back into the lake, maybe into the sky. I’m not really sure.”

Matt just looked at her. “Come again?” he said finally.

So Amy told him about it all, of what she’d seen two nights ago by the old L & N sawmill, of what had happened last night.

“It’s like in that legend about the little mermaid,” she said as she finished up. She glanced at the statue beside them. “The real legend—not what the Disney studios used for their movie.”

Matt shook his head. “ The Little Mermaid’ isn’t a legend,” he said. “It’s just a story, made up by Hans Christian Andersen, like The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and The Ugly Duckling.’ They sure as hell aren’t real.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“Jesus, Amy. Will you listen to yourself?”

When she turned to face him, he saw real anguish in her features.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “It really happened.”

Matt started to argue, but then he shook his head. He didn’t know what had gotten into Amy to go on like this. He expected this kind of thing from Geordie’s brother who made his living gussying up fantastical stories from nothing, but Amy?

“It looks like her, doesn’t it?” Amy said.

Matt followed her gaze to the statue. He remembered the last time he’d been on the island, the night when he’d walked out on Katrina, when everything had looked like her. He got up from the bench and stepped closer. The statue’s bronze features gleamed in the sunlight.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”

Then he walked away.

He was pissed off with Amy for going on the way she had and brooded about her stupid story all the way back to the city. He had a copy of the Andersen Fairy Tales at home. When he got back to his apartment, he took it down from the shelf and read the story again.

“Aw, shit,” he said as he closed the book.

It was just a story. Katrina would turn up. They’d all share a laugh at how Amy was having him on.

But Katrina didn’t turn up. Not that day, nor the next, nor by the end of the week. She’d vanished from his life as mysteriously as she’d come into it.

That’s why I don’t want to get involved with people, he wanted to tell Amy. Because they just walk out of your life if you don’t do what they want you to do.

No way it had happened as Amy had said it did. But he found himself wondering about what it would be like to be without a soul, wondering if he even had one.

Friday of that week, he found himself back on the island, standing by the statue once again. There were a couple of tattered silk flowers on the stone at its base. He stared at the mermaid’s features for a long time, then he went home and started to phone the members of Marrowbones.

“Well, I kind of thought this was coming,” Amy said when he called to tell her that he was breaking up the band, “except I thought it’d be Johnny or Nicky quitting.”

She was sitting in the windowseat of her apartment’s bay window, back against one side, feet propped up against the other. She was feeling better than she had when she’d seen him on Sunday, but there was still a strangeness inside her. A lost feeling, a sense of the world having shifted underfoot and the rules being all changed.

“So what’re you going to do?” she added when he didn’t respond.

“Hit the road for awhile.”

“Gigging, or just traveling?”

“Little of both, I guess.”

There was another long pause and Amy wondered if he was waiting for her to ask if she could come. But she was really over him now. Had been for a long time. She wasn’t looking to be anybody’s psychiatrist, or mother. Or matchmaker.

“Well, see you then,” he said.

“Bon voyage,” Amy said.

She cradled the phone. She thought of how he talked with her the other night up at Hartnett’s Point, opening up, actually relating to her. And now. . . . She realized that the whole business with Katrina had just wound him up tighter than ever before.

Well, somebody else was going to have to work on those walls and she knew who it had to be. A guy named Matt Casey.

She looked out the window again.

“Good luck,” she said.

Matt was gone for a year. When he came back, the first place he went to was Wolf Island. He stood out by the statue for a long time, not saying anything, just trying to sort out why he was here. He didn’t have much luck, not that year, nor each subsequent year that he came. Finally, almost a decade after Katrina was gone—walked out of his life, turned into a puddle of lake water, went sailing through the air with angels, whatever—he decided to stay overnight, as though being alone in the dark would reveal something that was hidden from the day.

“Lady,” he said, standing in front of the statue, drowned in the thick silence of the night.

He hadn’t brought an offering for the statue—Our Lady of the Harbour, as the baglady had called her. He was just here, looking for something that remained forever out of reach. He wasn’t trying to understand Katrina or the story that Amy had told of her. Not anymore.

“Why am I so empty inside?” he asked.

“I can’t believe you’re going to play with him again,” Lucia said when Amy told her about her new band, Johnny Jump Up.

Amy shrugged. “It’ll just be the three of us—Geordie’s going to be playing fiddle.”

“But he hasn’t changed at all. He’s still so—cold.”

“Not on stage.”

“I suppose not,” Lucia said. “I guess all he’s got going for him is his music.”

Amy nodded sadly.

“I know,” she said.