Kitty's Mix-Tape Read online

  “I’m an uncle! I’m going to head up to L.A. this weekend to see them. Can’t wait. I have no idea what to bring—what do you give baby girls?”

  “Blankets and onesies,” the bartender said. “You can never have too many blankets and onesies.”

  “What’s a onesie?”

  Richard raised his fresh drink in a toast. “Congratulations, brother.”

  “You know what you should do?” Doug said, and Richard got a sinking feeling. “You should come with me. You’re going on leave—get the hell out of San Diego, come to L.A. with me.”

  “I am not going to hang around while you visit a baby.” He couldn’t borrow someone else’s family.

  “You have to do something,” he said. “You can’t just stay around here. You’ll go crazy. More crazy.”

  A soldier seeking his fortune. He didn’t even know where to start. He didn’t want to look at his hands.

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “I’d be lying if I said we weren’t worried about you.”

  God, it was the whole team, then. “Right, okay, I’ll find a place to go on vacation. Do something normal.”

  “Good.”

  Normal. As if it could be that easy.

  He didn’t remember learning to swim—he always knew. He did remember the day he noticed that none of the other kids at the pool had webbed feet and hands. He counted it a stroke of profound good luck that he never got teased about it. But everyone wanted him to hold his hands up, to look at them, to touch his fingers, poke at the membranes of skin, thin enough that light showed through, highlighting blood vessels. He loved to swim, and for a long time didn’t notice how sad his mother looked whenever he asked to go to the pool of their low-end apartment complex.

  They didn’t have much money growing up, and he joined the military because it seemed like a good way out, a good way up to better things. He was smart. ROTC, active duty, advanced training, special forces—it all came easily to him, and he thrived. He was one of those masochistic clowns who loved SEAL school. They trained underwater—escape and survival. One time, their hands were tied behind their backs; they were blindfolded, weighted, and dumped into the pool. They had to free themselves and get to their scuba gear. Terrifying, a test of calm under pressure as much as skill. Richard had loved it. He’d gotten loose and just sat there on the bottom of the pool for a long minute, listening to the ambient noise of everyone else thrashing, taking in the weight and slowness of being submerged. He’d been the last one out, but he’d been smiling, and his pulse wasn’t any faster when he finished than it had been when he started.

  “He’s half fish,” the trainer had declared, holding up Richard’s hand. “Your feet like that too, Fishhead?” They were. He’d graduated top of his class. His teammates still called him Fishhead.

  Richard got on a discount travel website and searched under “Last Minute Deals.” Belize—intriguing, but sounded too hot and too much like the equatorial places he’d been to recently for professional reasons. San Diego, ironically. Las Vegas, not on a dare. Ireland—ten days, rock bottom airfare and rental car.

  Cool, green, quiet. He could have sworn he heard his dead mother whisper, “Do it. Go.”

  Luck had gotten him back into the country in time to be at her bedside when the cancer finally took her. That was enough to make him believe in miracles. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine her spirit pushing him on. He booked the trip and wondered why doing so made his heart race.

  His mother only ever said two things about his father: he was Irish, and he was like something out of a fairy tale. Richard had figured this was a metaphor, that she’d had a wild fling in Dublin or Galway with some silver-tongued Celt who’d looked like a prince or a Tolkienesque elf. Gotten knocked up and came home. When Richard was young, he’d urged her to go look for him, to try to find him. He’d desperately wanted to meet this fairy-tale father. When his mother said it was impossible, he’d taken that mean to the man was dead.

  Ireland, then. Not because he thought he could find his father or get sentimental at some gravesite, or even because he wanted to. But because his mother must have been there, once upon a time.

  It would be going back to where he started.

  What he loved most about Ireland: how green this country was, and how close the sea was, no matter where he went.

  Dublin was a city like any city, big and cosmopolitan, though he found himself having to adjust his thinking—a hundred years was not old here. History dripped from every corner. He didn’t stay long, ticking off the tourist boxes and feeling restless. He picked up the rental car and headed down the coast on his third day.

  Ireland was having a heat wave. He rolled down the windows, let the smell of the ocean in, and arrived in Cork. Found a B&B at the edge of town, quiet. Went for a walk—these towns were set up for walking in a way few American towns were, a central square and streets twisting off it, all clustered together. Cork was a tourist town, shop fronts painted in bright colors, signs in Gaelic in gold lettering, just like in all the pictures. He still somehow found himself at a bar. Pub, he supposed. The patrons here were older. Locals, not tourists. No TV screens in sight. Low conversation was the only background noise. He ordered a Guinness, because everything he’d read had been right about that: Guinness was better in Ireland.

  “You American?” the barman asked. Two stooped, grizzled men who must have been in their seventies were sitting at the bar nearby and looked over with interest.

  Richard chuckled. Everyone had been able to spot him before he even opened his mouth. Maybe it was his jeans or his haircut or something. “Yeah.”

  “You looking for your roots? Family? Americans always seem to show up looking for their ancestors. Every single American has an Irish great-uncle, seems like.”

  “I’m just on vacation,” he said. “Enjoying the scenery.”

  One of the old men said, “What’s your name, son? Your family name?”

  “My mother’s name was Green.”

  “Huh. English. Could be from anywhere. Your father?”

  “I don’t know.” He gave a good humored shrug. “He was supposed to be Irish. But I don’t know his name.”

  The barman snorted. “Most folk looking for family at least have a name to go on.”

  “Sorry. Mom liked being mysterious.”

  “Hey,” the second grizzled old man said. “Hold up your hand there, son.”

  He got a sudden thudding feeling in his heart. The back of his neck tingled, the sort of thing that would normally have him reaching for his sidearm and checking on his teammates. But it was just him and the curiosity of some old men.

  He lifted a hand, spreading his fingers to show the webbing.

  The room fell quiet. Richard squeezed his hand shut and took a long drink of beer.

  “Son,” the second old man said, his voice gone somber. “You’re in the right place.”

  “The right place for what?” Richard muttered.

  “You know the stories, don’t you?” A couple had come over to the bar, the same age as the two men, their eyes alight; the woman had spoken. “The stories about hands like yours?”

  “It’s a genetic mutation.”

  The woman, short white hair pressed close to her head, shook her head. “It’s the stories.”

  “Can I get you another?” the barman said. He’d finished his drink.

  “No, it’s okay. I think I’d better get going—”

  The first old man put a hand on his arm. Richard went still. He felt trapped, but he couldn’t exactly shove the guy off. The man said, “Go south from here, past Clon and out to Glandore Harbour. That’s where you start.”

  “But what’s there—”

  “It’s very pretty,” the woman said.

  Nobody would say more than that.

  He knew the stories. He got a degree in English with his ROTC scholarship, he’d taken classes in folklore and mythology. Maybe looking for that fairy-tale father.


  It was a genetic mutation.

  Irish back roads were harrowing in ways Richard thoroughly enjoyed. Barely enough room for cars to pass, no markings, curving right up against hedgerows or stone walls, or to the edge of cliffs, promising a rolling plunge down if he missed the turn. Never a dull moment.

  The landscape was searing green, and the sea beyond was a roiling, foam-capped gray. He kept having to draw his gaze back to the road ahead.

  He approached Glandore, and the directions he’d gotten from the man at the bar and the actual available roads he encountered didn’t quite match up. But he could see the ocean the whole way down.

  That gave him his compass.

  The town itself was ridiculously picturesque, a perfect sleepy fishing village. Sailboats dotted the harbor. Richard kept driving to the far side of the harbor. Anticipation welled up. He thought he was going to keep his eyes open for a B&B, one of the cute little houses-turned-inns that seemed to cover the island. But he kept going. He wanted to see if the roads ever stopped.

  He wanted to get away from people, away from buildings and boats and civilization. Go someplace where he could be sure to be the only person for miles around. Then maybe he’d be able to think clearly. But the farmland, cultivated squares of fields and pastures, went all the way to the coast. People had lived on this island for a very long time.

  Eventually, he parked the car on the verge and walked out to where the roads and farmland couldn’t get to—broken cliffs where the waves had eaten away at the rock. There wasn’t any room for him to move, between the water and the land. That was all right. He made his way over stone ridges and crevices where he could, letting the spray of breaking waves soak him. A big one would wipe him right off the cliff side. He wouldn’t even mind. He could get washed away here and no one would ever know what happened to him. No one knew where he was, no one would look for him—

  Instead of letting himself fall toward the comforting waves, he inched further along the rocks until he found a spot where he could lean back, rest a moment, think.

  There were seals in the water. They were smaller, sleeker than the hulking sea lions living off the California coast. These creatures were elusive, blending into the color of the water. Domed heads would peek up from the surface, revealing liquid dark eyes and twitching, whiskered noses, then vanish. This—this was what the world might have looked like a million years ago, before people.

  A little further on, the cliff curved sharply into an inlet. He’d continue on, explore what was there, then maybe climb up to the top to see where he’d ended up. Maybe find a village and start asking around to see if anyone knew of a guy who’d knocked up an American tourist some thirty-five years ago.

  A hopeless quest for the fortune-seeking soldier.

  In the inlet, cut not more than twenty feet back, he found a boat. It must have been set on a narrow ledge of rock during high tide and left dry when the tide went out. A standard aluminum rowboat, the kind you’d take fishing on a lake. A niggling in the back of his mind was sad that it wasn’t one of the hide-bound currachs Ireland was famous for. Just as well. That would have been too perfect.

  He looked around for the boat’s owner, thinking maybe someone had come out here to fish, had gotten in trouble and needed help. Nothing—just him, the waves, and a couple of seals glaring at him from afar. He got to the boat and looked it over—it had been here a while. A pool of brownish water filled the bottom; a film of green scum clung to the sides. Algae, along with salt and water stains, discolored the outside of the hull.

  But a pair of oars still lay inside. The pool of water suggested the thing didn’t have leaks and was still seaworthy. However it had gotten here, the boat now looked to him like a challenge.

  With a lot of awkward bumping and banging, he managed to get the thing unwedged from the rocks and let it slide down to the water. He kept hold of the edge, scrambling over the crumbling outcrop to hang on to it while nearly falling over, and in, getting smashed up by the waves in the process. It was a fight, but a satisfying fight, and in the end the boat was in the water, drifting away from the cliff, and he was inside.

  No oarlocks for the oars, but that didn’t matter. First thing was to get away from the cliff. The waves helped. Once he was out and drifting, he made a perfunctory effort to bail out some of the water. He was already soaking wet; sitting in the stale pool didn’t seem to make much difference.

  Felt good to be out on the water, though. Out on the water with no job to do, just the sun and sky and the gentle rocking. He stretched out on what passed for a bench, lay back with his arms under his head. Maybe he’d take a little nap, see where the waves took him.

  That would be an adventure.

  The boat thudded, and he started awake. That was a collision, something hitting the hull from underneath. Doug or one of the other guys playing a prank during training, he thought. Except he wasn’t off Coronado; he was in the Celtic Sea off the coast of Ireland.

  It happened again, something slamming into the hull hard enough to make the boat jump. Dolphins playing? Maybe some of those seals. Some whale species lived in these waters as well. He leaned over the edge to look.

  Just gray water, chilled and opaque. He touched the surface, splashing his fingers in the sea.

  Hands reached up and grabbed hold of him.

  The hands came with powerful arms that pulled him over the side before he could take a breath. He splashed into the water.

  There were more of them, many hands grabbing his shirt, clamping around his arms and legs, and brushing fingers through his hair. He could just make them out underwater, like looking through a fogged window. Women, muscular and graceful, with flowing hair fanning around them in the water like seaweed. They surrounded him, curling their long, scaled tails around him in weird embraces.

  One of them, black hair rippling in streamers, wrapped her fists in the front of his T-shirt and pulled him close. He squinted to see her, but human eyes weren’t meant to see underwater. All he could see were their shapes, and feel them diving and circling, rubbing against him as they passed.

  He was dreaming. He’d fallen asleep and was dreaming. Or had fallen overboard and was drowning. That was okay, too.

  When she kissed him, he didn’t really care what happened next, but as his arms closed around her, the kiss turned into a bite, sharp pain on his lower lip that stopped being fun awfully quick. He made a noise; heard laughter, like the chittering of dolphins. When she pulled away, he tasted blood. Bubbles from his last breath streamed from him.

  She shoved him away and dived straight down. Her sisters followed her, ivory and silver bodies falling into the depths, propelled by muscular tails, stray bubbles trailing behind them. Then they were gone. Loose, limp, his body drifted up of its own accord. He broke the surface and took a reflexive breath.

  He didn’t appear to be dreaming. His lungs burned, and his eyes stung with salt water.

  He had no clue how far out he was. Treading water at the surface, bobbing with the waves, he looked around to get his bearings. That far-off strip of land, dark cliff topped with an edge of green, was where he’d been climbing. The boat was gone. Like it had been set out as bait and he’d taken it.

  In the other direction lay the low, rocky profile of an island, a spit of rock so low he couldn’t see it from the mainland, of a slate gray that blended with the color of the ocean, the skin of seals. This was closer, so this was what he aimed for, just to get out of the water and catch his breath.

  The rock wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t even that dry—likely, high tide would submerge it. At least the sun felt warm. He peeled off his T-shirt and wrung it out. Pausing, he looked around.

  The rock inlet was covered with seals. Writhing bodies humped across the rocks, slipping into the water then lurching back out, grunting, squeaking, barking. Dozens of seals, all looking across the rocks at him, blinking with large wet eyes, studying him. Out across the water, heads bobbed among the rippling waves, eyes and nostrils just
above the surface. The mermaids were there too, black- and brown-haired, mischievous smiles flashing.

  He was sure if he tried to make a swim for it, the mermaids would force him back if the seals didn’t. He was trapped. Captured. He smiled a little because training never covered a situation quite like this. Maybe he could wait them out. If he could hunt for a weapon, maybe he could make them back off.

  Then, the seals on the inlet parted. With raucous barking, the crowd of them moved away, some of them sliding into the water, some of them waddling aside and looking back, as if staying to watch.

  Three men appeared, standing on the inlet’s highest point. There wasn’t a boat around. They might have been hiding behind the rock outcrops. They couldn’t have swum here; they were dry—and naked, unselfconscious about their lean, tanned bodies. They looked like California surfers without the swim trunks. Muscular, rough hair, pompous smirks. Young guys with something to prove. And they held weapons—spears of pale wood tipped with what might have been broken shells, the jagged edges threatening, and bound with green fibers of seaweed.

  Richard wondered exactly what he’d fallen into here.

  “Hi,” he said, making the word a challenge.

  Two of the guys dropped their spears and ran at him. So that probably meant they didn’t want to kill him, at least not right off. Small comfort.

  Richard was ready. They would go for his arms, hoping to restrain him, so at the last minute he swerved, shoved the first aside, twisted to get out of the reach of the other. Threw his shoulder into a punch at the closest, rushed to tackle the second. They were strong, and fast, dodging and countering all his moves. He’d underestimated them.

  But they’d underestimated him as well.

  One stuck out his leg to trip Richard, a move he should have seen coming. He fell on the rocks and felt a cut open on his cheek, blood running. From the ground, he grabbed a loose stone, big enough to fit in his hand, with sharp edges. He saw his target’s eyes widen as Richard swung up. The guy ducked, which meant Richard caught his chin instead of the forehead he’d been aiming for. The spatter of blood was still satisfying, and the target had to pause a moment to clear his head. This guy’s partner was smart enough to stay out of range, so Richard threw the rock at him instead. He didn’t think he could lay the guy out, but it might buy him time.