Forget the Sleepless Shores by Sonya Taaffe

Author:Sonya Taaffe [Taaffe, Sonya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590212103
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2018-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

He did not think he was crying, but he had to touch his face to make sure. The dampness that came away on his fingertips was cool as spray, scattered up from the wave that had boomed beneath their feet on the last, hurting line; he swallowed its stony taste on his lips and said huskily, “Where did you learn that?”

Her hair was strung with foam, pearls that ran liquidly away. “I read it.”

“So you can read,” but his mouth would not hold the smile, bent the wrong way to his heart. “Where did— You can’t have—come ashore to see it, did you? It’s in print, but….” He had a sudden romantic’s vision of his daughter in a literary undersea: a wrecked galleon whose sails had gone to seaweed centuries ago, shelves still crammed with logbooks and maps and the leather-rotted, gilt-spined volumes of a gentleman’s library. Amused despite himself, Alex dried his face on his sleeve and let out his breath carefully. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone memorized Polyphemos except graduate students with too much time on their hands. And not even very many of those.”

“It was yours.” Now she looked away, and for the first time she mumbled like a sulky teenager, resentful of what her next words might reveal, or give away unknowing. “I wanted to.”

Of all the things he had to apologize for, and he said before he could stop himself, “I’m sorry.”

“Why? It was something of you.” But she slid down from the grainy rock, on her knees beside the tidepool in its spray-darkened lee: as though maiden’s hair and breadcrumb sponge were an oracle, sky-blue mussels clustered among browsing snails, the litter of shale and shell not yet scoured down to sand as clear beneath the water as under glass. A wave almost caught him as he followed, unraveling over the stone where they had sat; the tide coming in after its own. Without surprise, he heard her whisper, “It hurt to read.”

“It’s not about your mother.”

“I know.”

“The sea-nymph, Galatea….” He pulled one hand through his windblown hair, not too distracted to feel strands come loose between his fingers. Photographs from their marriage had always showed an odd couple, Annata in all her pre-Raphaelite voluptuousness, as tranquil for the camera as a triptych in oils, beside this wild-haired man with a thin, exasperated face, smiling as though he had been embarrassed into it. The mad artist and his muse, or so a stranger would have placed them. “You weren’t even born.”

“I know.”

His daughter reached into the tidepool and mostly to himself, Alex said, “I don’t want you to be hurt.”

For the third time’s charm, “I know,” and he was not sure that she did. Under the rippled water, her skin gleamed like a sand dollar through the clotted green weed, a drowned forest no deeper than her elbow; ringed with reflection where her hair trailed a miniature wake across the surface, threads of sunlight over the tidepool’s bed. There were sea mosses crumpled dark and pale beneath the shelves, patches of lichen in Chinese red.

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