Salt and Sand by Ali McLafferty

Salt and Sand | Ali McLafferty

When Mrs. Minklewine came to Aunt Betty’s house, I hid outside the parlor door in Pa’s gas mask to listen to what they said about us.

“So good of you, my dear, to take in those two little orphans.” I knew that was Mrs. Minklewine, on account of her sounding like she’s talking through a noseful of bees. She’s got one of those beehive hairstyles, too, thick and fat and likely hiding something vicious. 

“Oh, Adelaide, it’s what any good Christian would do.” That was Aunt Betty’s voice. It sounded like dried-out corn stalks rustling in the wind.

“I heard,” Mrs. Minklewine said, her voice going low, “they’re both not quite right in the head.”

Aunt Betty sighed. “The boy’s all right. Samuel. Quite smart, actually. I caught him in my library last week, stealing books to read in his room. I’ve never pretended to be of a literary turn—my dear departed husband always said reading ruins a woman’s complexion—but I believe Dickens and Andersen are quite advanced for a nine-year-old.”

“But he stares. I’ve never seen a child stare like that before.”

“My dear, it is positively uncanny. I believe it is due to my sister keeping them locked up in that lighthouse their whole lives. Schooled them herself—well, not the girl of course—while Patrick tended the light. When he went off to war she was both lightkeeper and teacher.”

“But surely there were other children around. A small town nearby.”

“The lighthouse was on its own little island. The nearest town was thirty miles away, so they had to have food and such things delivered. The children spent their whole young lives stranded on that barren rock.”

I peeked through the crack in the door and saw Mrs. Minklewine give Aunt Betty an aren’t-you-just-the-sweetest-for-taking-in-the-orphan-freaks pat on the shoulder. 

“And the girl? What will you do with her?” Mrs. Minklewine asked.

There was another sigh. “Lord knows, Adelaide. Seeing her at my dinner table every day… well, my dear, it’s unnerving. She gives me gooseflesh.”

Mrs. Minklewine made a you-poor-thing hum in her bee-crammed nose.

“More tea?”

“Please. And another of those darling little strawberry cakes too.”

There was the sound of Aunt Betty’s long skirts rustling, and I looked up to see her scrawny body and sourpuss face coming through the parlor door. Through the gas mask she was all green-gray and blurry at the edges. She saw me at the same time and screamed so loud I was sure the neighbors could hear. Her teacup went flying in the air like a toy plane and smashed into a billion pieces on the tile floor.

“Merciful heavens, Samuel!” She put a bony-fingered hand against her chest. “What on earth are you wearing?”

I stayed where I was. My legs had fallen asleep, so I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. 

“It’s my Pa’s gas mask,” I said, and I heard my voice all hollow and muffled like a ghost.

“I know that,” Aunt Betty snapped. “Why on earth are you wearing it?”

“Pa gave it to me,” I said. “He told me to put it on whenever I smelt bullshit.”

Aunt Betty sorta blinked at me with her owl eyes, so I gave two really big snuffs.

After that she locked me in my room for about five hours and I didn’t get any dinner, except that Cordelia pushed a piece of bread under the door, and also a broke-off piece of candle because Cordelia doesn’t know that you can’t eat candles.

***

We did live in a lighthouse, but it wasn’t on a barren rock. It was on an island called Temissea, and it was the most beautiful place in the whole world. I’ve never been anywhere else in the world besides here, which is a town called Ironvale, and I hate it with all my heart because it’s gray and cold and everyone ripped out all the trees to put up houses that all look the same. It’s a hundred thirty-seven miles from the sea—I looked it up on a map—so it’s all dried out and dead. The only way I can hear the waves now is by sleeping with my ear pressed against a shell I took from home.

I know Temissea was the world’s most beautiful place ‘cause Mama told me so. She said “Let’s stay here forever, just us four and the gulls and the fish. I’ve seen the rest of the world and it’s nothin’ special, it’s turned sour from all the people filling it up. This is the last beautiful place on earth, and it’s ours forever.”

And then when the telegram came that Pa had died, and after she’d climbed to the top of the lighthouse and hung onto the iron railing and looked out to sea for a long time, the wind whipping her hair across her face, she said “Let’s stay here forever, just us three and the gulls and the fish, and nothing else can ever touch us.”

At night when me and Cordelia are supposed to be asleep in the separate rooms Aunt Betty put us in, Cordelia will sneak in and climb into my bed. She can’t walk and usually has a wheelchair, but she knows how to pull herself across the floor. So I wait until I hear her sliding down the hall and then I open the door and pull her up into my bed. I like to hold her in my arms and put my shell to her ear. And then I talk to her.

Cordelia can’t talk. She never could. Or not with real words, anyway. She has her own language no one understands, not even me. It’s a bubbly kind of language, gurgles and hums. She used to jabber all the time in Temissea, but since we got to Ironvale she just clams up ‘cause everyone looks at her weird. 

So I do the talking for us. I like to pretend I’m telling a fairytale, even though Mama said there was no such thing. “They’re all real,” she’d told me. “All of them. It’s just that people in the outside world, with their cars and their televisions and their radios, have forgotten that. Magic is real, Sammy. Wouldn’t it be a sad thing if the world was only full of humans? What a poor world that would be.”

“Once upon a time,” I always start my stories, “there was a magical girl called Cordelia.” 

This is what Mama always called my sister. Our “magical girl.” She always talked about Cordelia coming to us, like she wasn’t so much born as just arrived on our doorstep one day.

That night, after I got punished for saying ‘bullshit’, and after Aunt Betty finally unlocked my door so I could go pee, Cordelia crawled into my room and onto my bed. I ate the bread she’d given me—and licked the candle too, for good manners—and wrapped her in my arms.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a magical girl named Cordelia. She wasn’t like nobody else in the whole world, ‘cause she was magical and they weren’t. She lived in a tower with a magical fire the fairies gave her. As long as the fire stayed lit, she was safe.”

Cordelia gurgled and went tuh tuh tuh.

“But one day, the fire went out. And into the tower came four horrible goblins with grabbing hands.”

Cordelia whimpered, and I smoothed her hair.

“They took Cordelia to the Goblin Queen, who locked her in a castle. The Queen hated her, ‘cause she feared her magic.”

Cordelia went very still.

“But,” I said, rocking her a little, “There was also a prince. He’d always loved the magical girl, so he followed her all the way to the Goblin Castle. Then he took a mighty sword and smote the Goblin Queen. He carried Cordelia in his arms back to the magical tower. The fire was ashes now, but he told her to blow, blow, blow.”

Cordelia began to blow like she was trying to put out birthday candles.

“And the light returned.” I stared up at the ceiling and tried to swallow the sore thing in my throat. “And they were safe forever.”

Cordelia took her little hand and brushed it over my face. She likes to do this a lot. Her fingers brush over my eyebrows and slide down my eyelids, go round my nose and lips and tickle my cheeks. Mama once told me Cordelia can’t see all that well, so she probably does this to know what we look like.

Cordelia murmured in her bubbly little voice. Then she took my shell off her ear and put it on mine.

In the morning I woke up alone.

***

“I’m sending you to school today, Samuel,” Aunt Betty told me at the breakfast table. It was about two weeks after I’d listened in on her and Mrs. Minklewine. She’d taken my gas mask away, but I found it again under her bed ‘cause that’s where she always hides stuff. Aunt Betty is not very smart.

I froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

“School?”

“Yes.” Aunt Betty buttered her toast. She always puts the teensiest bit on her bread, so it goes scrape scrape scrape as she spreads it and it scratches at my ears. “It’s high time. I can’t believe my sister kept you out so long.”

Whenever Aunt Betty says “my sister” her voice sort of warbles. Sometimes when she thinks I’m not watching her face cracks like an egg. I can’t decide if Aunt Betty hated my Mama or loved her, but I think maybe it was both. 

“We don’t need school,” I told her. “We learned just fine with Mama.”

“Watch that tone, young man. Every child needs school. You need to be among other children, not just… ” She looked over at Cordelia, who was strapped to her chair so she didn’t fall over. Cordelia has a tough time swallowing, so she mostly eats pureed baby food. Right then she was painting her nose with it.

“Where’s Cordelia gonna be?”

Aunt Betty pretended she didn’t hear me.

“I said where’s Cordelia gonna be?” 

Aunt Betty flinched. “There is no need to speak as though I am deaf. The answer is none of your business.”

I felt like something cold had wrapped itself ‘round my neck.

“I think it is,” I said, “on account of her being my sister.”

“Trust your elders to know what’s best for her,” Aunt Betty said. She took a delicate bite of toast. 

“Is she gonna be here all day?”

A sip of tea.

“You’re gonna stay with her, right? You’re not gonna leave her alone?”

Scrape scrape scrape. 

“I said are you gonna leave her alone?”

Aunt Betty’s plate clattered loudly as she dropped her toast. “Young man!” she barked. “Don’t you dare raise your voice at me! Such manners. I am Cordelia’s caregiver, not you. I will decide what is done with her.”

What is done with her.

I gripped my spoon so hard it left red marks on my hand.

Cordelia was looking at me with her round eyes, baby food still on her nose. I smiled so she wouldn’t feel scared. 

“I made you a paper bag lunch,” Aunt Betty continued, her voice all soft again like nothing happened. “A sandwich and one of those cookies you like. I baked them last night.” For the teensiest second she looked up at me kind of strange, kind of hopeful. Then she grabbed her knife and dug it back into the butter. “The bag is on the kitchen counter. The school bus arrives in three minutes. Put your bowl in the sink now and make sure you arrive promptly.”

What I really wanted to do was throw the bowl at her nasty old face and unstrap Cordelia and run out fast as I could. But Cordelia is seven now and pretty heavy, and I didn’t know how far I could’ve gotten before she caught us.

The school bus ride was only the second bus ride I’d ever had in my whole life. The first one was when four men I didn’t know came to the lighthouse after Mama died and put me and Cordelia and a small bag of our stuff on a bus to Ironvale. I threw up four times on that ride. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that on the school bus with all those kids around, so I spent the whole time with my lips tucked behind my teeth. The other kids left me on a bench all by myself and just stared at me and whispered and giggled to each other. I recognized a few of them from when they’d ride their bikes past Aunt Betty’s house and gawp at Cordelia sitting on the grass. 

I decided right then and there I hated them. 

***

At lunch we ate on the playground, and I found the farthest corner from everyone else. I took Aunt Betty’s stupid cookie out and threw it to some ants, who got real excited.

“Hey.”

I looked up. There was a boy standing over me. He had yellow hair and fat freckles all over his nose. He was big.

“You’re the freak’s brother.”

I felt like someone had poured hot water all over me. I could feel my neck turning red.

“Guys!” the kid called out to others on the playground. “It’s him!” I looked for a teacher, but they were all smoking cigarettes in the shade and not paying any attention.

A whole gaggle of kids ran over and made a circle around me.

“How come your sister looks so weird?” a girl with a blue bow said, chewing the end of her braid. 

Another boy laughed, and I saw a big ball of pink bubble gum rolling on his tongue. “There’s somethin’ wrong with her face,” he said.

I felt my hands go all sweaty and rubbed them on my shorts. My sister is beautiful, I wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come out. And my ears and neck were so hot I felt like I had a fever.

“How come she don’t talk or walk?” the freckled boy asked.

The girl with the blue bow took her braid out of her mouth. “My Ma told me it’s on account of her drowning.”

I looked up at her quick, ‘cause I didn’t know how she could know about that. Then I saw her nose was kind of thin with flarey nostrils and I thought, I bet your last name is Minklewine.

“She drowned?” the boy with gum snapped it, all excited. 

“Yeah,” the girl said. “In the ocean. Her mom dropped her in.”

“That’s not what happened!” I burst out. All the kids looked at me, and I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw started hurting. “She crawled in.”

“She what?” another girl with two pigtails started laughing.

I didn’t want to tell them. I didn’t remember it all that well. It was sort of like remembering something you saw happen when you were underwater, and there was no sound and blurry images. Cordelia on the sand while Mama pulled in a big net of fish. Cordelia crawling into the water, splashing in it. I was too young to know this was bad, so I just watched her. Cordelia loved the water. She clapped every time Mama dipped her little feet in. 

Then a big wave had come, and she’d gone right under. I waited for her to come up, but the water went smooth again and I didn’t see her. 

I don’t remember Mama screaming but she probably did. I do remember her jumping into the ocean and searching all around. She dove in again and again, like a dolphin. And then finally I saw her push Cordelia above her head, and then she was dragging herself back onto the sand with Cordelia in her arms. 

Cordelia was blue and very still. Mama put her on her belly and pulled her arms up over her head, rocking her back and forth. And then finally a huge fountain of water just spewed out of Cordelia’s mouth, and the blue color started going away.

Since then, she’s always tasted of salt. I feel it every time I kiss her. And ever since then, she leaves trails of sand wherever she goes. Even here in Ironvale, hundreds of miles away from Temissea. 

“Maybe she’s dead,” the freckled boy said. “Maybe she’s a ghost that don’t know she’s dead. That’s why she’s so pale and doesn’t talk or walk.”

“She ain’t human,” the bubblegum boy said. “No way she is. No real person looks like that.” Then he tried to copy the way Cordelia talks, but he didn’t do it like she does, which sounds sweet and soft and pretty. He crossed his eyes and jutted out his chin and went “Uggghhmm, gooo.” 

Right then I thought of the story I’d told Cordelia about the Goblin Castle. I thought about the prince. And so I stood up and socked that boy right in the eye. He went down howling and I kicked him in the mouth. His gum went flying out.

I spent the rest of that day in the principal’s office. He took a thick wooden paddle to my buttocks and whacked me as hard as he could. It hurt like hell to sit the rest of the day, but I had to ‘cause Aunt Betty wasn’t home when they called.

So I spent that whole time worrying where Cordelia was, too.

***

A week later I was sitting with my gas mask outside the parlor door again.

Every time I wear that mask I think about Pa. I think about his wild red hair and how he used to let me sit on his shoulder. I think about how he held Mama in his arms and tilted her chin up to kiss her. I think about his face when he came home on shore leave a few months after Cordelia was born. He came in uniform, but before seeing her he folded it away and put on his old fisherman clothes, the ones that still smelled like him.

He’d looked surprised when he first saw Cordelia, and Mama looked a little scared. I was real small, but I still remember this. But I also remember Pa smiling and picking her up, and holding her little soft head close to his chest, and kissing her white cheek. 

He gave me his gas mask when he left that time. He said “Take this, son. It’s good to wear when you smell the bullshit.” He laughed, then got real serious. “Take care of that lil’ girl.”

Then he’d gone, and that was the last I saw of him.

In the parlor Aunt Betty was making a real good show of sighing and tsking like she actually cared a whit about us.

“What did they say, Betty?”

“That she’d be a good candidate. They can take her as soon as next week. And I can’t care for her, Adelaide. The older one, he’ll grow up and leave, eventually. But she’d be tied to me forever. I know she’s my niece, but… ”

“She’s not your child,” Mrs. Minklewine said. “You have no obligation, Betty. You’ve already done more than enough for her.”

“The treatment would help. It wouldn’t cure her, but it would help.”

“Does it… hurt? It sounds quite frightening.”

“They assure me it doesn’t. I saw them treating a young woman. I admit it was… unsettling. They strapped her to a chair and put a block in her mouth for her to bite down on. Then they applied electrodes to her scalp, and…”

There was a pause, and I knew Mrs. Minklewine was leaning forward like a vulture. I realized I was digging my fingers into my palms so hard that one of my fingernails had cut my skin and it was bleeding a little.

“And they say this works?” Mrs. Minklewine said.

“It makes them calm. I worried that if I put her there alone, away from her brother, she’d resist. They also told me it would stop her seizures.”

“Does she get those frequently?” 

“Ugh, my dear. Anytime she is near water. Bathing her is a nightmare. I don’t know how she lived by the ocean for so long.”

“She hates the water?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. She’s drawn toward it. It’s when we take her out of the water that she has them. In the bath she’s fine. But as soon as I lift her out, the seizure begins.”

“Interesting. One would think that after her first drowning as a baby, she’d be afraid of water.”

“Well, you know,” Aunt Betty said, “She was born in water.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“She was a mermaid birth. En caul, you know. Still in the amniotic sac.”

“Good gracious.”

“Indeed,” Aunt Betty said. “More tea?”

“Please.”

I felt so light-headed I wasn’t sure I could stand. But I stumbled to my feet anyway, ripped the gas mask off my head, and ran quiet as I could down the hallway before Aunt Betty could see me.

Then I hit the wall and slid down with my gas mask in my hands. I stayed there, just staring at the lines between the tiles, for a long time. I felt like all the bones had melted out of me. So many things were screaming in my head I couldn’t hardly catch my breath.

I didn’t know what “en caul” meant. I didn’t know what an “amniotic sac” was, either. But I knew what Aunt Betty meant. She said Cordelia was “born in water.” She said, “mermaid birth.” 

So that’s when I knew what she was. What she’d always been.

***

When Cordelia crawled into my bed that night, I wasn’t in my pajamas. I was wearing all my clothes, even my shoes. I had clothes for her, too, in a bag near my pillow. But when she first crawled in I just held her in my arms and put my shell to her ear.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “There was a magical girl named Cordelia. She wasn’t like anybody else in the whole world, ‘cause she was magical and they weren’t.”

Then I took a deep breath. “And she was a mermaid.”

Cordelia gurgled. I kissed her cheek and tasted salt.

“Cordelia loved the sea, but one night she saw a light shining down through the water. She thought it was a fallen star. When she swam up to touch it, she saw three humans on the island. They looked so happy. Cordelia knew that if she turned into a human she’d never be able to walk or talk. But she didn’t care. ‘Cause she’d fallen in love with the humans, especially the little boy. She wanted to be his sister and make him feel safe. 

“So one night, she pulled herself out of the water and gave up her fish tail for legs. In the morning the family found her lying on their doorstep. They loved her from that second on.

“On the magical island Cordelia always felt safe and loved. Even when her human father died, she wasn’t too sad ‘cause she knew he had fallen into the sea, and that he’d wait for her there. And even when her human mother died she still wasn’t too sad, ‘cause she’d asked for her ashes to be scattered in the water. So Cordelia knew she’d one day find her Mama there, too.

“But when they were both gone Cordelia started to feel the ocean pull her more and more. And when evil humans came to the magical island to take her and her brother away, she cried, and left trails of salt and sand the whole way there. She and her brother were brought to a witch’s house. Cordelia hated it. She wanted to return to the sea—but she couldn’t leave her brother. She loved him too much.”

I had to stop, ‘cause there were tears just gushing out my eyes and that sore lump in my throat was getting too big to talk around. Cordelia must have felt them splashing onto her face because she reached up and wiped them. I sniffed a few times, and held her tight.

“But the witch was dangerous, and she hated mermaids. She planned to cast a spell on Cordelia that would make her forget the sea forever.”

Cordelia went still. I sat up slowly and pulled one of her little dresses from the bag beside my pillow. She looked up at me with her big, glassy eyes.

“So one night her brother snuck her out of the witch’s house.”

Cordelia lifted her arms. I pulled her nightgown over her head and put the dress on her. Then I found her small feet and put on her socks and shoes, the ones she’d never walk in. 

Cordelia put her hands on my face, on my nose and mouth. “Thhh,” she said. “Blll.”

“I’ll be OK,” I whispered. “You’ve protected me long enough. I can take care of myself now. All that matters is that you’re safe.”

Then I lifted her into my arms—she was lighter than I ever remembered—and carried her downstairs.

I carried her all the way to the Greyhound bus station. And then I bought us two tickets with money I’d snuck out of Aunt Betty’s purse. 

The bus ride took six hours. The whole while I held Cordelia in my arms and thought about what it must’ve been like for her all this time, living in the human world.

When the bus finally arrived at the seaside station, I lifted Cordelia in my arms and carried her out. By then I was hungry, and she felt heavier. But I carried her all through the streets of that town, which I’d only seen once before. Almost everyone was still asleep, except for a few people opening up grocery stands. 

I carried her all the way to the beach. The sky was turning orangeypurple as the sun crawled up from the horizon. But I could still see the light of Temissea, blinking like a star.

I put her on the sand, and then I sat with her. She took fistfuls of it and sprinkled it all over her lap, laughing and laughing. She put some in my hair, and I smiled, even though I felt like I couldn’t hardly breathe. 

Then she started sliding on her belly toward the water. 

There was no one else on the beach. Just me, dead tired, sitting in the sand with my arms wrapped ‘round my legs. And Cordelia, sliding like a sea turtle down the bank.

When she hit the water she made a happy little gurgling noise. I watched as it lapped around her pale face and soaked her dress. 

Then a big wave came.

Bonus audio of Ali reading from her piece…

about the author: