Home -

LaSirèn

By Erin E. Adams

When I try to wrap my lips around a story I’m not supposed to tell, it sours on my tongue. The only way to sweeten it? Name some truths before the lie. I am my mother’s first child. True. I have two younger sisters, Lovelie and Marie. True. We live on an island. Mostly true. Every piece of land, no matter how large, is eventually surrounded by water on all sides. This language is the lie. Everything arranges itself in my mother tongue first and then shifts into the one I’m using now: English. I’ve nearly forgotten all of my first language, Haitian Creole. I remember the songs. The melodies stayed because I memorized them long before I learned their meanings.

Lasirèn, labalèn. The sound of the sea was my first lullaby. Chapo’m tonbe nan lanmè. My father’s fishing songs were my second. M’ap fe kares pou lasirèn. Soon my mother learned that the musical phrases he mumbled were the only way to get me to sleep. Chapo’m tonbe nan lanmè. When my middle sister, Marie, was born, my mother said I sang his songs to calm her when she fussed. M’ap fe kares pou lasirèn. Chapo’m tonbe nan lanmè. By the time my youngest sister, Lovelie, came, the tune was all we had left of my father. We were the only ones he sang for. His songs reminded him of when he could spend days on the ocean without being tethered to the shore. In the end, the water didn’t take him. A land-dwelling woman two villages over did that. He left my mother with three girls singing his songs.

My mother never cried for my father. She poured herself into taking care of us. Feeding us. Teaching us. Cleaning up after us. I know she played with us, too, but I can’t remember how. No matter what games I conjure in my mind, I can’t find her in them. To me, she was too grown-up for that. But she was never too old to tell us stories. My mother loved to weave truths into a tale. Her voice would drop low and quiet, to make us lean in close. Never trust a woman alone in the water. She would raise her pointer finger in warning. She will have dark skin like ours and straight hair like theirs. Us and them. Those born on this island and those who crowned it the jewel of an empire. If she calls to you, run before she can speak. If you are fool enough to hear, you must do as she says. She always grabbed my hand at this part. Listen! Or she’ll snatch you and leave a shell in your place. The story goes on, but I always covered Lovelie’s ears after that part. She got too caught up in stories, especially if she’d heard them before, and would have nightmares for weeks. We’d heard enough to know the truth in the tale: tragedy can strike without reason and leave no meaning in its wake.

If you see a woman alone in the water, run before you hear her, but listen if she speaks? The story made sense to me then because I still had patience for childhood logic. An excuse to bend the rules. A riddle. Lovelie and Marie thrived on riddles. They would twist my words to stay up reading past bedtime. They’d logic away hours in the day needed to do homework and allot more time to combing the beach for shells. When they returned home they’d beg me to string the rainbow hulls into necklaces for them. I’d make the jewelry with a smile. I was too old to play like them. But I did play. That’s true. The necklaces? Also true. But that I made them without complaint every time? There’s the lie.

One day Lovelie came home soaking wet holding one dark abalone shell in each hand instead of my sister.

“We listened!” she cried to our mother. “On our way home—after collecting shells—we saw a lady alone in the water. She called to us, just like you said—she told us to give her one or she’d take all three. We listened! We gave her one shell, but she took Marie!” Lovelie’s face burned with tears and a harsh lesson: grown-up riddles usually aren’t very clever and rarely end well. What was meant by “one”—a shell or a child? My mother and I didn’t pry into this woman’s words because no matter their meaning, she took what my sisters were not willing to give. We looked for Marie but, as the days wore on, we couldn’t find her and she didn’t return. The woman in the water became the lie we told ourselves instead of the truth. Someone had taken my sister and no matter how long or hard we looked, Marie was gone.

After that, my mother only called me by my full name. Wideline. Our house became a list of laws. Unbendable. No going out after dark. No storytelling. No straying from our duties: school, home, and church. I longed for the one place I knew we’d never be allowed to return to: the ocean. I was forever tethered to the shore. My sister’s fate was unknown to me, but, sometimes, I foolishly imagined it was better than my own. Sometimes I miss the selfishness of being a teenager.

I kept the shells Lovelie brought home instead of my sister. They started to gather dust after the first month. After the second, I’d wipe them clean as one of my daily chores. On the first day of the twelfth month, one fell and shattered. I moved the shell that was left to the center of my dresser. At the start of the second year, the wood warped around it, making a cradle. It never rattled, or slid, or fell. It just lived there.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Three years to the day Marie disappeared I woke to a sound I barely recognized. Tap. Tap. The shell was rocking in the moonlight. Tap. Glimmers glanced around our room. But they could not penetrate the shadow that now stood in the corner.

If I were younger I would have screamed. Instead, I was more concerned about how close the shadow stood to Lovelie. My eyes focused and I stared it down, intent on making it melt away. Its arm reached for the foot of Lovelie’s bed. I sprang out of mine and pulled Lovelie from her covers. She started to fuss at me for waking her, but I softly put my hand over her mouth and shifted her eyes to the thing in the corner. The moment she saw it, she gripped me tight. The shadow took a step toward us and I pushed Lovelie behind me.

“Leave,” I whispered, not wanting to wake my mother. The shadow moved toward us again. I drew breath to scream.

“No!” The shadow thrust its hand into the moonlight between us. A dark rainbow washed over everything. Lovelie let my hand go as we both marveled at the colors. The shadow’s skin was dark, like ours, but its blackness was deep. It stepped fully into the moonlight. Webbed toes appeared first. Then long dark legs. Taut muscles rolled under the skin. Kelp wrapped around the lithe figure, like a dress. Long straight red hair, slick and wet, hung around its shoulders. The shadow’s face is what silenced Lovelie and me. We recognized it. It had grown longer, but the nose, lips, and heart-shaped visage were unmistakable.

“Marie?” Lovelie’s voice trembled with excitement. She peaked out from behind me, but I held her back. I’d finally seen the shadow’s eyes. They were entirely black and when it blinked, it did so with two lids.

“She came back!” Lovelie stepped out again.

“Shhh.” I wrapped my arm around her waist. “That is not Marie.”

“Yes, it is!” Of course, even in the presence of danger, my younger sister couldn’t help but argue with me.

“She told us to give her one or she’d take all three.” The thing spoke and it sounded like Marie. “I remember.” It couldn’t be her.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am . . .” The figure’s mouth slid into a sad smile. “I am not Marie, yet.”

“What?” I frowned so hard my brow ached. The thing claiming not to be my sister annoyed me like she would.

“I will be her soon.”

“Oh? And now?” I sucked my teeth. “Now, you are ‘Not-Marie’?”

Her jaw clenched as she considered the name. “Yes. That’s a good name for me.” Not-Marie’s smile faded.

The scent of Not-Marie filled the room. She smelled like the ocean.

Not a rotten fishy smell.

Not-Marie smelled like freedom.

I put myself back in front of Lovelie. “How did you get here?”

Not-Marie stepped toward us. I watched Not-Marie try to find the words. No. She knew them, but something about them . . . hurt. “Let me show you,” she whispered.

Lovelie’s nails dug into my arm as she gripped me with her whole body. Between her weight and my sweat, her nightdress was going to leave folded wrinkles in my skin. We followed Not-Marie out of our house and down the road toward the ocean. Soon the road became a trail. Fine sand mixed between the rocks, and the way forward thinned. In the dark, Not-Marie lit the way. A dull blue glow came from the once invisible markings on her flesh, adornments complementing the shape of her muscles. Dots heightened her cheekbones. Her eyes stayed black.

I shortened my steps forward. Lovelie trailed behind me like a shadow. Right before the trail gave way to the beach, Not-Marie turned sharply and started down a thin path I’d never seen before.

Watching Not-Marie as she moved, I spotted a familiar strangeness in her body. Puberty. Womanhood had arrived in me, achy, raw, and earthy. I hunched my back as my breasts grew and strained my clothing. Not-Marie stood tall and let womanhood drape itself over her with grace. I tried to walk like she did and it made my muscles ache. This creature reminded me not just of my sister, but of how my body had become a strange new vessel that housed my consciousness. I shook with effort and fear as we followed her. No, that’s a lie. The truth is, envy burned away any terror in me and curiosity pulled me forward.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Not-Marie pressed deeper into the brush. “We’re close.”

Balancing one foot directly in front of the other, we followed her through the trees. Soon we reached a cave. Not-Marie glanced back at us and then disappeared into the black. A dark hollow chamber loomed in front of us. I took the first step ahead. My feet found cool stones. I smelled the dark deep of the grotto before I saw it. Once we passed the entrance, we found that the cave wasn’t devoid of light. A hole at the top revealed a full moon. The silver rays reflected in the water. Unlike the pale blue of the ocean, these waters were so dark they were almost black. Shelves of rock carved out each layer, all the way to the bottom. Without a moment’s hesitation, Not-Marie leapt in. After our eyes adjusted, Lovelie and I approached the lip of the sinkhole.

Not-Marie wasn’t like a fish in the water, she was the water itself. The iridescent scales on her skin made her look like a trick of the light. She dove deep. I found myself counting my breaths. One. Her finned feet skillfully cut through the slow, thick currents. Two. She dipped further down. I could barely make out her form. Three. Her red hair was the only easy bit of her to spot. Four. In the water, it seemed to glow like long embers. Five. She barely left a ripple in her wake as she propelled deeper. Six. She reached a depth of the grotto that couldn’t be pierced by moonlight. Seven. Her glow was all that was visible. Eight. If you didn’t know any better you would think she was a bit of reef. Nine. Or kelp. Ten. Waving with the current. Eleven. She dove even further down. Twelve. A tiny bit of ember in the endless deep. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. She touched the bottom of the grotto. Seventeen. Her ember hair illuminated her face. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Not-Marie stared up at the two of us on land, and I understood. Depth. Time. Air. All that didn’t matter to her. I stopped counting.

With a few sharp, swift kicks, Not-Marie propelled her way back up. She emerged at a speed that made Lovelie and me lurch back. Slipping past the surface without a sound, she didn’t even make a splash when she reemerged.

“What are you?” I asked.

“Lasirèn!” Lovelie laughed in delight. The sound scattered over the stones of the grotto. Before I could stop her, Lovelie sat on a thin ledge and dipped her feet in.

Not-Marie rested herself against the rocky shore. “Yes.” As the answer flowed out of her, she relaxed. Someone finally said what she was unable to utter before. A riddle without words solved by Lovelie. Not-Marie raised an eyebrow in premature victory. She would need to do more to prove herself to me.

“You were a few steps away for three years?” I crouched next to Lovelie, putting myself in between her and Not-Marie.

“Yes, Widi.” She said my nickname like the Americans who built a well in our village after the earthquake: her Creole sat in the front of her mouth.

“Why?”

Her face contorted like before. “She told us to give her one or she’d take all three. I didn’t know I was haggling years, not shells. I’m done tomorrow. I won’t be like this anymore, and I wanted you to know.”

I frowned. “Who took you?” Lasirèn was the lie. I knew that. But I added up all the truths in front of me and . . . even if a sea creature was to blame, something was missing. “Who?” I asked again. If this was another riddle I needed to be the one to find the truth in it. Lovelie always got swept away in the story.

“I— I— I . . .” Not-Marie looked from me to Lovelie and back. Her mouth opened and then clamped shut. She tried another way. “She is— She wants—” Her whole body convulsed so hard that, for a moment, out of concern I reached for her. I stopped when I reminded myself that she was not my sister. “She . . . took me and—” Not-Marie grabbed ahold of the edge of the grotto to support herself. Her eyes welled with black tears. “I can’t tell you everything.” A trail of ink fell down her face. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell, it was that she couldn’t. Her tears stained the water. While her wet face should have calmed me, it enraged me instead.

“Where’s Marie?” My voice rattled in the cave. The harsh tone made Lovelie cover her ears.

“It’s me. I was—” Not-Marie’s body convulsed again. “It hurts, Widi. Please.”

My eyes burned as I blinked back my tears. “Manman still cries every night. She thinks we can’t hear, her but . . .” My words started to get thick from my sob. “You said you’d show us. Where is Marie!” Not-Marie reminded me of the nightmares Lovelie had. She reminded me of my mother’s unanswered prayers. The longer I looked at her the more my heart ached, not in sadness, but in rage. “Give her back!”

“Stop it,” Lovelie whined as she curled in on herself.

“It’s me!” The pitch of Not-Marie’s voice careened up like a bird. Her whistle tones pierced through me. With the word me, Not-Marie’s face contorted. The sides of her lips parted through her cheeks and back to her ears to reveal row after row of needle teeth. The wetness of her mouth made them glisten. The second lid of her eyes flipped over, turning her black eyes a foggy gray. Any familiarity I’d found with my lost sister vanished. My heart pounded in my ears. The truth of our situation hit me. My sister and I were in a cave with a monster. We listened to it. We allowed it to lure us with a story we told ourselves to make the pain of losing our sibling less. I sobbed. Snot ran from my nose and over my pursed lips. Both Lovelie and I were about to pay the price for believing the lie. Not-Marie lunged against the edge of the grotto.

“Marie, stop!” Lovelie crunched her little body against the ledge. Not-Marie didn’t listen. Her strong limbs easily propelled her out of the water and onto the land between us. I reached back to gain ground only to feel my hand latch around a stone the size of my palm. I craned back, ready to smash the stone into her face, but even with the teeth, the eyes, the scales—even though she’d agreed to her new name, Not-Marie still reminded me of my sister. Against all reason I shut my eyes to stop myself from bargaining. Marie. Not-Marie. Marie. Not-Marie. Either way I was about to be consumed by either the monster in front of me or the pain within me. I launched my hand forward. The stone twirled off my fingers. I opened my eyes in time to see it sail past Not-Marie’s head. She barely flinched. I braced myself.

Thunk! The sound of stone hitting flesh stopped us. We both turned just in time to see Lovelie reach for where the rock hit her forehead. Before her fingers could explore the new wound, her eyes rolled back and she tipped over the edge into the water. Unconscious, she plummeted toward the bottom. Not-Marie froze. I jumped in after my sister.

The moment I did, my feet were met by a sharp ledge of rocks. I pressed through the pain and dove. It had been three years since I’d been in the water and I nearly wept with joy as salt water bled into my clothes. My legs pumped with memory. I reached out for Lovelie with every stroke. Launching myself forward, I found a bit of grace and snagged Lovelie by the edge of her nightshirt. Looking past Lovelie, the grotto seemed to sink on forever. Just below Lovelie’s feet, faint tendrils of moonlight ended and the deep dark began. Looking up, I saw the surface was impossibly far away. Not-Marie’s dark face peered down at us from the surface. She watched us, but made no move to dive in or to help. My lungs burned. My heart throbbed in effort. Propelling myself up took twice as much effort as diving down, but my need to survive, out of spite, pushed me forward. I clawed my way up with my sister clutched in my grip. When I burst to the surface I inhaled water and air. My body coughed and gagged, but I used each movement to pull Lovelie up onto the shore.

A wide red wound bled from Lovelie’s forehead. Through the blood, I saw the flash of white bone. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing. I’d seen the fishermen get water out of a man’s lungs before, but I’d never done it myself. I pressed on Lovelie’s chest, hard, with both my hands. Then, I pinched her nose, placed my mouth over hers, and breathed into her lungs. I felt her chest expand. When I looked back at her face, she looked pale. I breathed for her again. Nothing. Panicked, I tapped her cheeks like I could wake her from a nightmare. A deep splash drew my focus. Not-Marie’s ember hair rippled in the water as she dove. This time when she reached the bottom, the red disappeared.

Alone, I kept trying to revive Lovelie. Press and breathe. Press and breathe. Each time she got colder in my arms, alone. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I was not going to lose another sister. As I tried to keep her with me the sounds of my efforts echoed in the empty grotto. Every second I fought against becoming what our mother warned us about: a woman alone in the water.

I was so focused, I didn’t even notice when Not-Marie returned and called to me. “Wideline?”

“Leave us alone—” My words caught in my throat. In the water behind Not-Marie was a woman. She had long, straight translucent hair and black eyes. Unlike Not-Marie, she didn’t even pretend to be human anymore. She smelled like deep waves. The kind you only see when you lose sight of land. Where you are small and infinite all at once. She slithered through the water toward us. I grabbed Lovelie.

She told us to give her one or she’d take all three.

I began to pry the riddle open. The woman hadn’t wanted the one thing we gave her, the shell. Instead she’d taken what she truly desired, Marie. All three? My heart pounded as it struggled to keep up with my mind. This was no happy reunion. Not-Marie wasn’t watching us, she was watching the creature behind her. The burn of betrayal stilled me. Like a grown-up riddle, it wasn’t clever and it didn’t end well. Lovelie had assumed the woman was asking for their shells. Not-Marie thought she meant years. The woman meant us. The three of us. The woman couldn’t grab Lovelie and Marie on her own. But, with time and training, Not-Marie was all she needed to get the three of us where she wanted us.

“She can help Lovelie,” Not-Marie lied. It sounded like the truth in her mouth because the poor thing believed it. The genuine joy in her smile told me she hadn’t yet put together all she’d done. Lovelie felt cold and heavy in my arms. Terrified but with no other choice, I let the woman approach. She pressed her ear to Lovelie’s chest. The woman’s cold hair splayed over both of us. The strands looked like tendrils of moonlight fading into the black of her skin. My breath slowed as I thought. She had us in the depths and she didn’t take us then.

“No-t th-ree,” the woman whispered. She waited, so that she could bargain. Another opportunity to trap us. “Fi-ve . . .” Her Creole sounded borrowed, like she was remembering phrases she knew long ago. I wondered if she ever played children’s games before she was a creature who played tricks on unsuspecting souls pulled in by her words.

“You promised to be fair.” Not-Marie’s voice sank into her chest. The woman held her unblinking stare on Not-Marie. She pressed her hand to Lovelie’s wrist.

“To save the ch-i-i-ild I’ll t-ake at least s-ix,” she croaked. “S-ix hun-dre-d.”

My stomach dropped. “People or years?” I demanded.

“FiveFive—Five years!” Not-Marie choked out as she tried to haggle. “Years! You mean years.” Her eyes widened and her breath caught as she gleaned the truth. She’d been allowed to visit us. Allowed to bring us here. The woman never meant to let her go. To a being like that, people and time were just another currency.

“Se-v-v-v-en hun-dre-d.” The woman refused to clarify. She was immovable. Not-Marie’s back curled in the shy way Marie’s would when she met someone new. Her hands shook the way Marie’s would when she couldn’t decide between sweets. Not-Marie ran through a strange set of human movements. Utterly childlike one second and a fearsome creature the next. With each one, she lingered in the human postures for as long as she could, but they made the muscles in her monstrous body ache. Not-Marie longed for land the way I did the sea. She told us to give her one or she’d take all three. The answer was in the ache.

Suddenly, my palms felt clammy and slick. It was only then that I realized that I had reached out and taken the woman’s hand.

“I’ll give.” I latched onto her slippery palm. “So you don’t have to take? If you save Lovelie, I’ll give you me.” I didn’t need to splice out time or terms because the answer was devastatingly simple. If I gave her one—if I gave her me—there was no need for her to take anything at all.

Her eyes met mine. “We h-a-a-a-ve a d-eal.” The words groaned out of her like an afterthought. She took her free hand and hovered it over Lovelie’s chest. Lovelie’s body arched toward her palm. Then the woman raced her hand up to Lovelie’s extended throat and flicked her fingers past her mouth. The water in Lovelie’s lungs flowed out. Violently full of life, Lovelie began to cough. Then, the woman wrapped a cold hand around my arm and snatched me below the surface.

I counted as we descended. One. Two. The coming morning light hit the grotto. Three. Four. Five. It revealed the truth. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Not-Marie’s scales began to fade. Ten. Her fingers and toes separated. Eleven. Her hair darkened, curled, and coiled on her head. Twelve. Though her face had lengthened, she was unmistakably Marie. My sister. Thirteen. Fourteen. With daybreak her time was done and mine began.

From here, I’m only able to cough out a few bitter truths and some better lies. Marie returned after three years away with no memory of where she’d been. Kidnappers must have taken her. Poor girl. Her memory folded over to protect her from the unspeakable. After a year, my mother finally let her leave the house again, but only to go to school and back. Sometimes she dreamed of strange fish and foreign shores. When Marie reached her first year of high school, the nuns discovered that she spoke perfect English, Spanish, and Italian. Fear made my mother weave a lie about my disappearance. She imagined that I’d run away with some boy, bound for an early pregnancy and the capital. When she felt brave, she whispered stories about the sea to herself as she cooked. True. Lovelie always had a scar on her head and a gap in her memory. True. Marie only ever remembered from that sunrise onward. True. I never missed my home because the memory was all I needed. That’s the lie.

For years, every full moon, my sisters snuck out to collect abalone shells from the beach. They walked to the grotto nearby. There, they held each other’s hands and dropped the shells into the water. They leaned over the edge and watched the dark rainbow hulls sink into the depths. They were always careful not to get too close to the surface or dip too far over the edge. Dangerous truth or sweet lie, the water in that cave was much deeper than it looked. It could suck them in and spit out a tale. Still, they watched and waited. And if they were patient enough, every time, right before the shells drifted beyond the reach of the moonlight, there’d be a ripple in the darkness before they disappeared.

Erin E. Adams is an American author, playwright, and actor. A first-generation Haitian American writer, she is most well known for her debut novel Jackal, a horror thriller set in her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Adams is also a dramatist and writer for theater.