At the bottom of the companionway, the door to the cabin stand ajar. Selkie must have heard the commotion, and Annie waits for her to emerge, to call to her husband, to peek out.
The cabin cruiser rocks on the heavying chop.
Gusts of wind slanting the rain,
whitecaps pitching,
land and sea gone gray as death.
At length, alert for surprises, she creeps down the ladder, pushes open the door with the point of the dagger, and passes through the galley into the sleeping quarters. Selkie is lying on her belly in a bunk, one foot in the air, wearing a pair of opaque pink panties. She’s leafing through a magazine, headphones over her ears. Annie’s captivated by the shape of her leg, the curve of her back. So like Mary in her carefree attitude, yet entirely unlike her in form. Plush and soft where Mary was lean and muscular. Annie steps inside the cabin and undergoes a dislocation. It’s as if she’s standing in a ruder cabin with dark, ill-fitted boards and a port whose glass is warped and bespotted with birdlime. The vision dissolves and once again the windows are narrow, the walls paneled, the bunk carpentered out of some polished reddish wood. Yet the shade of that other cabin persists and she thinks it may be a sign of more significant persistence. She recalls a Hindu sailmaker aboard the William who told stories of souls passing from one flesh to another, stories that charmed her with their easy, airy logic and caused her to rethink the moral oversimplifications of the Christian creed (not that she was ever a zealot)—it seemed just that the character of one’s life, as the sailmaker claimed, was a punishment for sins committed during a previous existence, that good be rewarded with perfect emptiness, that evil men be reborn as calves or suckling pigs, kings as chattels, and pirates as whores, all that was hard and strong in them made pliant and submissive.
Selkie turns onto her side and sees Annie. She registers the blood on his clothing. Her eyes drop to the dagger, sheathed in Klose’s blood. A look of fright occupies her face. She presses back into the corner of the bunk, breasts nodding, one hand clutching the sheet, the other braced against the wall.
“The money,” Annie says.
Tremulously, Selkie says, “In the galley. The cabinet under the sink. Please! Don’t hurt me.”
Annie half-turns, intending to investigate, but is struck by a more vivid dislocation—Mary, brown and naked, holding out her arms, inviting her into an embrace.
“Mary?” Annie says. “Is it you?”
She cannot believe it, yet neither can she deny the temptation toward belief—she wonders now if the things of herself she recognized in Selkie were intimations of Mary reborn in this harlot’s flesh. They shared a soul, she and Mary, though Annie owned the stronger half of it.
“Mary?” she says again, and her heart beats faster, as if those two syllables keyed the racing of her blood.
Selkie’s fear has been diluted by bewilderment, and Annie, uncertain herself, comes a step nearer.
“Do you not know me, Mary?” she asks. “It’s Annie.”
Bewilderment, again. And then a canniness shows itself in Selkie’s expression. Hesitantly, she puts a hand to her temple, the gesture seeming to convey that she’s experiencing an inner turmoil, that what Annie said has waked something inside her and provoked a fleeting recognition; yet it’s such an artificial gesture, it fails to convince, and the look of dismay that accompanies it accents this failure.
“Annie?” she says. “I…”
She makes a second pass with her hand, the fingertips just touching her cheek. A feeble noise issues from her throat. It appears she’s caught between grief and the memory of love, between her husband’s blood and a fleeting glimpse of another time.
Annie realizes that Selkie must have heard the story of Dagger Key from Klose and, confronted by this dangerous man with her husband’s blood on his knife, someone she must assume is deranged, she’s attempting to play a tune he’ll dance to—but that she’s acting is no proof of anything. Mary was always quick-witted. It may be she’s both acting and stirred by a memory.
Lowering the dagger, Annie sits down on the edge of the bunk, places her hand on Selkie’s thigh. A tremor runs through the milky flesh, but Selkie does not freeze up, rather her expression grows dreamy and unfocused; her eyes drift to Annie’s fingers, lying so near her quim. And Annie, possessed by yet another memory, re-envisioning the time when Mary first revealed herself and, lying back, let her knees fall apart to show Annie her rosy…Annie twigs aside the flimsy pink fabric and slides a finger along Selkie’s lips. Already moist. She cannot be, Annie thinks, so good at playing a part that her body would not betray her.
Selkie’s belly quakes, her hips bridge up off the mattress as Annie thrust two fingers inside her. The cabin shrinks around them. There is no corpse abovedecks, no history of betrayal. All that exists is the sounds of rain and wind, the rolling of the boat, the bunk. Lost amid the recollection of other days with the rain sawing and wind gusting hard, the William knocked about on a choppy sea, Annie cuts away the panties and lowers between Mary’s legs, Selkie’s legs, making play with tongue, teeth and lips, until Selkie’s outcry lights the sexual darkness and her thighs clamp viselike to Annie’s head. They lie quietly for a time. Annie rests her head on Selkie’s belly, her mind thronged with contraries, the urge to have done with this fancy contending with the desire to linger, to make of the day an idyll, or more than a day. After three hundred years, she has earned a bit of freedom, has she not? She exults in the taste coating her tongue, the scent cloying her nostrils. Then Selkie, Mary…she shifts away and sits on her haunches. Tentatively, she fingers the top button of Annie’s shorts and, when Annie doesn’t object, she undoes the buttons and slides the shorts down past her hips. Annie’s momentarily put off by the sight of a man’s yard standing to attention between her thighs and, when Selkie takes it in her mouth, it seems unnatural to know a man’s portion of pleasure. But in that milk-pale face she finds the lineaments of Mary’s darker, angular face. She closes her eyes, holds tight to the dagger and recalls a fiercer delight.
In the afterglow of sex, Selkie cuddles, her arm flung across Annie’s chest. She whispers, “Oh, Annie. It is you!” She, Selkie, claims to have been awakened by Annie, a process that began when she met him at the café. Met her, rather. It’s all so confusing! When she touched her hand, she had this curious frisson, a sense of there having been something between them. Does he remember that moment? Did he feel it, too? Ever since, bits and pieces of memory have leaked into her head. And then the kiss…She’s sorry about that. Alvin forced her to paint her lips with the drug. Of course, she was a willing complicitor. She hadn’t recognized Annie yet. Not entirely. But when they kissed, that’s when the memories really started to come. She can’t recall much about their time together, mere fragments, but she will remember, she thinks, with Annie’s help. And now, well, they’ll sell the cross and then they’ll travel, just as they always wanted. England and the Continent. Asia. Annie is charmed by this portrait of an ideal life and makes an affirmative noise, and Selkie, appearing to gain in confidence, prattles on about getting a little cottage somewhere, a home base. For the most part, Annie believes none of what Selkie says, yet she can’t discount it utterly, because Selkie’s physical reactions remind her so much of Mary’s. When Annie toys with her nipples, she shivers and gives a little musical sound that’s identical to the one Mary used to make. She thinks it strange that Selkie’s pillowy breasts would respond the same way as Mary’s, which were the size of onions. Yet all her soft cries and responses bear an astounding similarity to Mary’s and, as a result, Annie allows herself to be seduced by Selkie’s dream of the future, however calculated it may be. It’s as if the cabin has been crammed with the invisible furniture of another life…