Page 62 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Soon enough, she reaches the shore where you first entered the sea earlier. No signal, no warning, no discussion. One moment you’re tunneling through the green, as close to a fish as you’ll ever get. The next she flings you from her with insane strength, strong as the ocean itself, and you’re cresting through the surf to wash up like beach detritus.
Air! Warmth! Dryness! Joy expands in your chest as you lie back on the sand, foam surging round your limbs and the blessedly warm sun soaking in. After those long minutes beneath the surface, the world above feels almost too bright, too clear; unnaturally hot and dry. As if the water were a place you halfway belong, now, having nearly died in it.
“Hello?” Sit up, look up; you’re alone. “Hey! Sea Sister, are you there?”Sea Sister.Why not. It’s a polite enough honorific, since you don’t know her name.
A glimpse of something pale and fast in the waves. Fleeing, or lurking? Scramble to standing, and leap back into the water, putting your head beneath it.
That moment. Where sound plunges into a muted dullness, where the raw noise of the atmosphere above is softened by the sea.
She’s there, your rescuer, your personal fantasy: a little farther away where the water is deeper. Watching you as if transfixed. The jiaoren seems startled, though she’s alien enough in appearance that it’s hard to read her expression.
“Sea Sister!” you call out again, this time underwater. Forcing your voice to make sense in a liquid environment.
She turns uneasy circles, giving a good view of her ravaged form. The rags that barely hide her bones, the feet and hands so unusually proportioned. She looks hungry, lonely, haunted; an isolated legend, living among ghosts. Yet she is inexplicably beautiful despite the monstrous traits and the painful starvation.
The jiaoren stops circling and swims toward you, cautious and hesitant. She seems to be waiting for something. An invitation, maybe?
“Swim with me again,” you yell underwater, expelling all the air from your lungs to enunciate-shout the words. Needing breath, you stand up in the chest-deep waves, gulp oxygen, and duck back down again. “We can be friends,” you plead.
She watches, unblinking and statue-still despite the fast-moving tide.
“Are you hungry?” you bellow, feeling stupid and rude for shouting, but it’s not possible to speak underwater otherwise. Assuming she can understand you at all. “Can I get you food?”
At your question, her face changes, lips drawing back and teeth clacking. A long, black tongue flickers, the surface of it covered in tiny suckers like an octopus’s tentacle. Her dark eyes squeeze shut, then reopen, and she drifts close, so close the tip of her nose brushes against yours.
Unwittingly, you gulp. Not afraid, exactly, but definitely intimidated.
She pulls backward, shakes her head, and smiles—or bares her teeth, you’re not sure which—as she takes your small, suntanned hand in hers, bony fingers rigid against your palm.
Come back tomorrow, Shore Sister.
Tomorrow, you mouth back, exaggerating the lip movements. Showing her you understand.
The jiaoren bares her teeth again, and flashes away. Faster than a motorboat, melting into the depths.
Despite her instruction, you climb out and wait around on the beach for a little bit anyhow, telling yourself it’s better to dry off. Trying to understand what’s happened to you, why it doesn’t faze you like it should. Ghosts are one thing; this experience was something else entirely.
Other people would be afraid, but the things you fear and the things you love have never quite lined up with the fears and loves of other people. Theisland, the beach—it’s like all of this was fate, like everything that has happened till now was just a series of steps allowing you to move onto this path, and meet Sea Sister.
Destiny is unfolding. You still don’t know what the future will bring, and hate to guess. But for the first time in years, that isn’t a worry.
The sun is setting, you are famished, and it’s a long trudge back. Time to go home, for now. It has been one wild day.
As you set off for the house, the small white cat watches you from the shadows, its whiskers quivering.
I watch, too, but you do not see me at all.
The walk back just about dries your cami and drawers, enough to throw on the shirt and loose slacks that you left on the sand. Conveniently, the longer clothes hide your scraped thigh (barnacles), scuffed shins (rocks), and scratched arms (monster claws).
Inside, your heart is broken open from too many new experiences, brain thrumming with awe and overwhelm. Lost in your own thoughts, you don’t pay attention to your surroundings for most of the walk.
The whitewashed walls of your house emerge quietly from the greenery as you draw closer to home, and it’s only when you’re a dozen yards away that you finally notice the low but audible murmur of talking. Something else, too: music playing.
What the hell.
Then you see her, through the front window. You see your mother.
Some of the ghosts are dancing and some are playing spirit instruments (where did they get those from?) in the background while Mami watches, hands clapping to the rhythm and a smile on her face. She bounces from foot to foot, not quite dancing. This is no traditional performance, but a modern dance, of the kind one might have found in a Shanghai jazz bar before the bombs wiped it away. You recognize the tune as one she used to hum sometimes, while doing her chores.
