Call of the Selkies

 

by Llewellyn McEllis

paintings that lingered on after he was gone.

 

Despite living in the middle of farm country Pennsylvania, all of my father’s paintings were of the sea in its many guises. Each painting was a tiny piece of him that he’d left behind, the only goodbye note before he mysteriously disappeared that afternoon while I was at school. Every night after he left I sneaked into his studio, stood in the half-dark of the setting sun and tried to decipher the messages he’d left me. Orange slices of sunset slanted through the blinds behind me as I watched the raging sea roil inside the canvas. Alive and overwhelmingly real, in the silence I could hear the distant call of gulls as the waves smashed like fists upon the shore.

 

Eventually my mother put a lock on the door and gave me a stern lecture about putting the past behind us. She did it just to punish me. She was jealous that the paintings spoke to me, but more afraid that I might discover some hint about where he’d gone. Maybe she worried that I would follow and forget her just like he did. She hid the key so well that entry was impossible. I didn’t cry, or fight her though I needed to. I wanted to scream and tear the smug look from her face, but instead I acted like I didn’t care. She took away from me the last physical connection I had to my father, and for that I could never forgive her.

 

It wasn’t long after she locked the door that I began to dream myself inside the paintings. Drifting from wave to wave, surrounded by a host of sleek, grey seals, whose joyful song soared high above the waves. Around and around the seals swam in an ancient spiral dance, and then my father appeared from the edge of the circle, young again, younger than I’d ever seen him even in photographs, but his eyes always gave him away. He smiled, and it was a real smile.

 

“It’s time to come home,” he said.

 

He held out his hand, and I grasped his fingers, but as he disappeared beneath the water, the waves pushed me upward every time I tried to follow. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t follow where he went, as though the sea itself kept spitting me out. One by one the seals all disappeared and darkness drew the sun away. Alone, buoyant, wave over wave of salt musk and hundreds of miles between me and dry land, I laid back and floated beneath the endless stars while moonlight rippled silver sheets over my ocean bed.

 

 

During my freshman year at college, I drove home with a friend I’d met named Cameron on a day I knew my mother would be at work. It felt horribly sneaky and wrong when I broke the lock off of the studio door and smuggled my father’s paintings out one by one. We laid them carefully in the trunk and back seat of Cameron’s Geo Metro, and drove back to Pittsburgh feeling triumphant and free.

 

“She’s gonna go ballistic when she finds out.” I swallowed the moment of guilt that hovered in my throat and avoided my own reflection in the visor mirror.

 

“When my parents divorced, my mom loaded all of my dad’s stuff onto a raft and floated it out into the middle of the pool where she set it on fire and watched it burn,” Cameron remembered.

 

“My parents never divorced,” I told him.

 

“You mean he just left?”

 

I watched the dirty-honey lights inside the Liberty Tubes skim by us in a blur. “Yeah, sort of,” I whispered. “But, I think he had to.”

 

Vague memories of their late night fights echoed the same blame and hatred night after night.

 

“You think you own me, but I could walk away.”

 

She laughed at him. “Walk away then, Callum, but you know as well as I do, you won’t be able to live without it.”

 

“Then you’d better hope I never find it.”

 

I never understood what they meant, what he couldn’t live without, but after he left I just assumed he’d either found it, or decided to fight like hell to prove her wrong.

 

I had the paintings matted and framed as I could afford to, and then I hung them on the walls of my studio apartment. I studied them for hours, waited and listened for clues and answers, but nothing came. They didn’t seem to resonate with the same energy as they had in his studio. The sea remained silent; no birds called in the distance. The rush and life had left the canvas, and I only had my dreams.

 

 

It took my mother a week to discover what I’d done, or maybe it just took her that long to work up the courage to confront me. I guessed by her tone that while she’d never admit to it, she had visited that room in secret herself, viewed those paintings in hope that they might speak to her of his whereabouts. Perhaps they provided her with simple comfort, the memory of him being all that was left for either of us.

 

She was already screaming when I picked up the phone. “You had no right, no right, Rhiannon! You bring those paintings back to this house.”

 

“No,” I remained calm. “They’re mine now. He would have wanted me to. . .”

 

“Don’t you dare tell me what he would have wanted. You have no idea.”

 

“I am keeping them, Mother.” Embittered rage gripped me so tightly that my emotions took over, and I said the only truly hurtful thing I’d ever said to her. “You drove him away from me, and now you want to take away all I have of him.”

 

A rare silence followed during which I was afraid to speak at all. My mistake realized, I waited for her reaction. Several minutes passed, during which I wondered if she had hung up on me, if she would ever speak to me again, if at that very moment she was crying silently and wishing it had been me who disappeared from her life, and not my father.

 

“Fine.” She said at last. Her voice was calm, but there were so many intonations in that one word—conveyed, but unspoken. “If that’s how you really feel, you take them.” She made a strange noise, like she had swallowed a part of her own soul with those words. “I hope they make you happy, though lord knows the man was incapable of thinking of anyone other than himself.”

 

“Mom, I didn’t mean to suggest. . .”

 

“No, no,” she said. “I know what you meant. I know that you blame me. You don’t even have to say it. I could always see it in your eyes,” she stammered just a little bit, as though every ounce of her confidence had been thrown into that one moment. “And you know what? Maybe it was me who drove him away. Maybe I never deserved him at all after all I’d done to keep him with me, but it had nothing to do with you.”

 

“Mom. . .”

 

She would hear no more. She said goodbye before she hung up, but after that she called less and less, until the lines of communication all but withered completely. Even when I came home for the rare and occasional visit, things were never the same. I had spoken my true feelings, declared her unworthy, and she would never trust me enough to let herself get close again. We became strangers, or maybe we had always been strangers, and my father was the only link of familiarity between us. Nevertheless, this new distance hurt. Suddenly all of her efforts seemed geared toward alienating me, and eventually it worked.

 

She did visit my apartment in the city once after the emotional outing between us, but the strain on our relationship coupled with the presence of his artwork all around her was too much.

 

“It’s like he’s everywhere.” She crossed her arms, the smoke of her cigarette curling around her left hand like a bracelet before it spiraled up around to mask her face. She looked from one painting to the next and shuddered. “Like he’s watching over you all the time.”

 

“Maybe he is,” I shrugged.

 

“You should be so lucky,” she murmured.

 

She spent the rest of her short visit in the kitchen, the only room in the house that did not have some reminder of him. We went shopping then, visited some of the sights, and made a late day of it. Strange how we got along, I thought, even then. It almost felt like we were mother and daughter again instead of two strangers held apart by the man who left us both behind. For a moment I thought there might be hope for us, but then the hour grew later. We pulled up to my building, and I reached across the car to touch her.

 

“It’s late, Mom, too late for you to drive back. Why don’t you stay? You can start out early in the morning.”

 

The excitement of our day together quickly faded. “No, I really do need to get home. I’ve got important things to do tomorrow that simply can’t wait.”

 

“Come on, Mom. By the time you get home. . .”

 

“I need to be getting on the road, Rhiannon. It’s been a lovely day, but I have to go.” She had that look about her, the crazed denial she had thrown at me when she’d first locked up my father’s paintings.

 

“All right,” I reached for the door handle. “I just thought. . .”

 

“Here, let me open the trunk so you can get your packages.”

 

How quickly she had changed, the wall she’d built between us resurrected in the wake of a single suggestion.

 

I laid awake that night and tried to make sense of the entire situation. Their old arguments played over and over again like old sitcoms, and the more I tried to make sense of it, the less sense it made. I stared at the ceiling and realized that there was not a single night from my childhood that didn’t feature one of their fights. Now that I was old enough to hash through it most of their fights revolved around the same three things: her selfishness, his need to be free, and me.

 

I reflected on her arguments and discovered rather uncomfortably that she often sounded jealous of me, as if I were some other woman he chose over her and not their daughter. The thought rippled through me like a wave of nausea. She had always hated that he loved me, hated that he could give love to me so freely, while she had to beg for it like a dog.

 

“What makes her so special?” Her rage echoed through the night followed by what could only be the hollow crash of physical struggle: her coming at him, him throwing her into the wall where she remained pinned until he’d said his final piece.

 

“She doesn’t hold me here against my will, Marianne!” He said with an ache like tears distorting his tired rage. “She doesn’t hold my love against me.”

 

“If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t even be here! You never think of that, you never think of me or anything I’ve done for you!”

 

“Why should I?” His roar shook the whole house. “Why should I care for a deceitful, thieving woman who only thinks of herself, her own needs? If you wanted me to love you, you should have never taken me. . .”

 

I’d never heard the end of that sentence as it was drowned out by the crash of some object being thrown, by her screaming, her incoherent reply.

 

But his words haunted me.

 

“She doesn’t hold my love against me. . .dishonest. . . thieving. . .”

 

What did it mean?

 

 

My mother died unexpectedly the year I turned twenty-nine, and though it didn’t occur to me at the time as ironic, fifteen years to the day had passed since my father had gone. The police said it was an accident. A slick spot in the road, her car went over guide-rail, into the water, and she’d drowned. An accident. I knew better. She had never gotten over him, never forgiven herself for whatever it was that drove him away. I had failed her, and somehow I started to think it was my fault he’d left us.

 

Her death brought me home again for the first time in seven years. Nothing about the house had changed, but she had obviously slacked off on her housekeeping. A layer of dust covered everything in the living room, as if to suggest she hadn’t even set foot in that room in years. Only the kitchen showed signs of life—a dirty plate, two glasses, a fork and a spoon sat in the sink, a half finished crossword puzzle left on her placemat, the pen laid slantwise across the page. I visited my bedroom, which hadn’t changed since the day I left for college, and then stopped outside the door of what had once been my father’s studio.

 

The door and frame were both still splintered from where I’d broken in, and it swung open freely as I pushed forward. Empty silence filled the room, along with the faded smell of mineral spirits, oils and old canvas. I drew in a deep breath, and then allowed my shoulders to collapse as I let it go. Sunlight slid through the dusty blinds and warmed my arm. I turned my back into it the way I used to as a girl and closed my eyes. I envisioned one of his paintings with my minds eye. It was the dark one in which the black clouds split apart and bled white sunlight across faintly rippled, endless sea. I drew my arms around myself and listened for the familiar rush of waves that always seemed to accompany his paintings, and somewhere in the distance a gull called. Water broke over the rocky shore in a splendid rush of white noise, spraying salted mist into my face.

 

Yes! I was there, in the place his paintings had always taken me, but without the paintings. Was it the room? Had he left some part of himself in the room?

 

A throat cleared behind me, startling me out of my meditation. The twitch of nervous surrender in my solar plexus send shivers through my body as I spun around to find a young man in a reluctant gray suit standing just to the left of the doorway.

 

“Hello,” I stepped toward him.

 

He came into the doorframe, his abashed shame at discovering me in a rare, yet peaceful moment colored his face a pale shade of pink that brought out the grey in his eyes. “You must be Ms. Seaford,” he guessed and extended his hand in greeting.

 

“Rhiannon,” I said.

 

“Pleased to meet you, I’m Kent Babcock, the realtor,” he said. “We spoke on the phone.”

 

“Yes, I remember. The appraisers were here on Tuesday,” I told him. “They faxed me their assessments, and I’ve had a termite inspection.”

 

“Fantastic,” he nodded. “We’ll just take a once over those documents and get started this under way.”

 

I started toward the door, and as he turned down the hallway toward the stairs, I glanced once more over my shoulder into the empty studio. There wasn’t a trace left of my father in that room, not even so much as a speck of paint on the wall or the carpet, but for a single moment, I heard the whoosh of waves washing over rocks, and then I closed the door behind me.

 

Selling the house felt like the right thing to do. There were too many bad memories to try and hold onto it, and one by one I began boxing those memories up. Clothing, books, knick-knacks, and furniture, all of it went to local churches and the Salvation Army. There was so little of my father left in the house that I was surprised to find one of his tattered old flannel shirts tucked half under my mother’s pillow. I tugged the flannel out and drew it into my face. I took a deep breath of the fabric, thinking I might still be able to smell him, but there was nothing left of his essence, only the faint reminder of her subtle rose perfume.

 

It took about two weeks to clear a lifetime’s existence from the house, leaving only the attic. I had never been in the attic, which could only be entered through the closet of my father’s studio. The stairs unfolded downward by a pull-string and a horrendous yawn of the tired springs that held it in place. A light cord dangled at the top of the stairs, and when I tugged it a tired light spilled over yellowed-cobwebs and the thick dust of long forgotten memories. I stumbled past a box of moth-eaten baby clothes and paused to browse through a stack of old photographs. Evidence of my parents in a rare state of bliss shown through in cracked black and white, the edges fragile and disintegrated with age. Every photograph seemed a dream, all smiles, no fear of losing one another, no worries, only love. I had never seen evidence of their happiness before, but I had assumed it must have existed. Something must have drawn them together and inspired them to get married. He had his eyes on her in every photo, and an awestruck grin lit his entire face. They were all dated in early 1970, just a year before my birth, and the guilty notion that I had destroyed their happiness surged through me like pins and needles.

 

I dropped the photographs back into their box and narrowed my blurred gaze over a pile of haphazardly strewn boxes filled with old coats and clothing from a time I hardly remembered. The stacks blocked an old trunk, half-hidden and draped in tattered, pink curtains. I recognized the curtains from my childhood, but as I pushed the boxed out of the way to further inspect it, the real mystery of that trunk became far more intriguing. A solid padlock, rusted with age, hung in the front, but there was no key in sight. I jiggled, but it was no use, and so I went back downstairs to find the pile of keys I had collected while cleaning out the house. There were about nine keys in that pile, all of them found in drawers or niches throughout the house, but I had deep suspicion than none of them would open that trunk. I scooped them into my hand and dropped them into the pocket of my pants, also grabbing the keys that had been retrieved from my mother’s car after the accident.

 

Returning to the attic, I knelt in front of the chest and brushed the accumulation of cobwebs and dust from the exposed surface. I pushed the curtains aside and lifted the heavy padlock into my hands. I tried first the nine odd keys, but none of them worked. I examined the collection on my mother’s key chain. Her house key, a mailbox key with a small slip of white paper marked 723 taped across the top. I tried several of her other keys with no luck before I finally came upon a tarnished brass key so worn that the company name had been rubbed away over time. It seemed too small for the lock upon examination, but it plugged perfectly into the opening, and turned with ease. The tumblers sprang free with a loud thunk.

 

It dropped down heavily into my waiting palm. I turned, and then slid it through the hole, scraping the metal on the way through. I peeled back the latch, and as I lifted the lid of the trunk it seemed to sigh. That breath brought with it a strange yet familiar smell. Salt, damp, rich but not earthy. . . no, it was the sea, or at least how it had always smelled in my dreams. Rich and pungent, distinct from any other smell, and yet I’d never even been to the sea.

 

My own shadow obscured my view once the lid was halfway lifted, so I leaned to the side to shed some light upon the treasure within. There was only one thing inside the box, some kind of fur coat, or maybe a suit. I wasn’t sure at first which, so I allowed the lid to drop back on its hinges and reached inside to touch my prize. It was soft as old leather, and somehow still damp. How could that be, since there was no telling how long whatever it was had been sitting in that chest just waiting to be discovered. As I gathered the folds in my hands and drew it out into the dusty, attic air, the strange odor grew even stronger. Somewhere outside of myself, or perhaps it was inside, I heard the roar of waves, a gull’s cry on the wind.

 

Its full length was nearly two feet longer than I was tall, but just holding it out and opened, there was no mistaking that it was some kind of skin, a seal skin, I realized. I wasn’t sure if it was the humidity of the attic combined with that overwhelming smell, but suddenly I felt faint. I backed into a broken chair, the skin still clutched in my hand, and tried to catch my breath.

 

“She doesn’t hold me here against my will, Marianne!” An ache like tears distorted his tired voice. “She doesn’t hold my love against me.”

 

The paintings. They had all been of the sea, vivid, lifelike depictions of his greatest love and passion, his deepest longing. Yet year after year she refused to let him take us there.

 

“If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t even be here! You never think of that, you never think of me or anything I’ve done for you!”

 

Rolling waves followed one after the other, and he held his hand out to me.

 

“Why should I care for a deceitful, thieving woman who only thinks of herself, her own needs? If you wanted me to love you, you should have never taken me away from the sea. Every day, how I miss her, how I long for her. Can’t you see you’re killing me?”

 

My mind rushed as the force of the ocean rang in my ears. I was awake, but dreaming, memories of the sea pushing me away, refusing to take me into its arms.

 

“And you call me selfish!”

 

“I never took anything from you that you didn’t offer, Marianne!” he cried. “You should have never stolen my skin. You should have never taken me so far away from the sea.”

 

His skin.

 

I looked down at the strange, inhuman thing in my hands, the shell of his reality, his being. Suddenly all the dreams made sense, and the paintings were like maps. He had been reaching out to me with them, had been calling to me all those years, and I finally knew what I had to do.

 

 

Author’s Bio

Llewellyn McEllis is a freelance writer, poet and editor from Northeastern Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She has been published most recently in The Warren, Strange Horizons and Demon Minds. For more information, please visit her online writer's group, http://www.circleofcrones.com

 

Picture courtesy of stogafy at dreamstime.com

© 2007 eMuse-zine

The content of this site may exceed what some deem as suitable for those under 15 years of age. Warnings are placed on stories with content over T15 as set forth in our guidelines. Parents/Guardians are responsible for monitoring the viewing of their children.                                                              Terms Of Service/Copyright...

Sure, I had memories, golden days in the park when he couldn’t push me high enough on the swings, summer afternoons wading through the creek catching crayfish, and how his knowledge of the stars could easily turn a sleepless night into adventure. He sang me ancient lullabies in a language I never learned, and his bedtime stories came from the heart, not the pages of a book. I knew that I got my green eyes from him, the red sheen of my hair from his mother’s grandmother, and the freckles from his brother, Owen, whom I had never met. Yes, I had more than enough memories to carry me through, but it was his

Next story....