The Mermaids Singing Read Online Free

pretending to be dead for twelve years? And you’re just showing up now?” Mrs O’Halloran looked at Stephen again. I was getting tired of this conspiracy shit, I really was.
    â€œNo, Gráinne,” she said. “I haven’t been pretending, your mother has. She wanted me dead, so.” She said it like it was nothing. As if she hadn’t just told me my mother had been lying to me for most of my life. I looked at Stephen. He was sitting down again, holding his forehead with one thin hand.
    â€œHow long have you known about this?” I said. He dropped his hand and looked up at me. He looked exhausted, too. It seemed everyone was exhausted but me—exhausted with me, maybe.
    â€œNot long,” he said.
    Well, fuck you both, I thought, but I couldn’t say it. I just left the two of them in the kitchen, went to my room, and slammed the door. I could hear my mother’s response in my head. Why don’t you slam it a little harder , she always used to sing after me. Maybe you’ll convince me your anger justified .
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    That night, after we had returned from the evening “viewing,” and Mrs. O’Halloran had gone to bed, I opened my door and walked across the dark living room. Stephen was lying on the couch, with a blanket covering his body and his feet sticking out at the end over the arm cushion. He’d let his long brown hair out of the ponytail and taken his shirt off. He had one arm flung across his eyes but I could tell he was awake by the careful way he was breathing. When I stepped up next to him, he peeked out from beneath his wrist, then sat up, swinging his feet down to the floor to make room for me on the couch. He was wearing his New England Conservatory sweat shorts, the ones my Mom always teased him about. (“What do a bunch of wimpy musicians need with gym suits?”) I sat down on the warm cushions, stretching my nightshirt over my naked knees, and Stephen sighed, attempting a sad smile. He smelled like he’d been drinking, and I saw on the table the bottle of whiskey my mother opened only when she had a cold. I could barely see his features, but I could fill them in from memory, I’d been looking at him for so long.
    â€œCan’t sleep,” he said, a statement for both of us rather than a question. He combed a hand through his hair. At the evening service, while we stood in the receiving line, I had focused on that hand, watching him clasp the palms of my mother’s friends and the long procession of her former boyfriends. I had felt that the motion of his fingers squeezing and releasing, was what sustained me, that it was his hand that was powering mine to do the same. I had never been to a wake before, never suspected that my mother would have wanted rosaries and little prayer cards. But she had decided on the arrangements; Stephen had told me so. Maybe she had even imagined me standing in that line, had predicted that when I shook hands with the priest I would have to listen to Stephen to know to call him “Father.”
    Mrs. O’Halloran had not stood with us, but sat in a chair by the coffin, staring at my mother’s body. Probably, I figured, she didn’t want to keep explaining herself to people.
    â€œI want to talk,” I said to Stephen. I knew if I sat there in the dark with him much longer, the quiet would become too thick and I would have to leave without saying a thing.
    â€œYep,” Stephen blurted out. “Okay.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me?” I whispered, conscious of Mrs. O’Halloran in the next room. “Why didn’t Mom tell me?”
    â€œI don’t know, Gráinne,” he said.
    â€œI don’t like her,” I said.
    â€œGive it some time.”
    â€œI don’t want to give it any time. I don’t want to give her anything. If she really is my grandmother she must be a horrible person because Mom obviously couldn’t stand her. She