Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [91]
Margrethe gestured for him to come forward. She put her finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she whispered. “They are sleeping.”
He walked toward her, watching her, and stepped into the dim light from the torch.
She nodded to him, pointing to the baby. “She is beautiful,” she whispered.
Christopher hesitated, then turned and looked at Lenia with the child in her arms. Despite himself, despite the discomfort he felt under Margrethe’s gaze, his whole face softened.
He looked back at Margrethe, radiant.
She watched him with a mixture of relief and sadness. “Go ahead,” she whispered, and she saw that he was almost in tears.
He bent down and touched the baby’s tiny hand, which automatically gripped his finger. Laughing, he leaned over and kissed her cheek, ran his fingers through the shock of pale hair.
He has no idea, Margrethe thought.
The baby opened her eyes then and looked up at Christopher. She let out a loud cry, and immediately Lenia was awake, sitting up and holding the baby to her.
The wet nurse stood and said, in a low voice, “I think she might be hungry, madam.”
Lenia looked frightened but let the woman gently take her child from her arms. She looked up at Christopher and then to Margrethe, and back again, as the wet nurse quietly left the room.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
She nodded, attempting to smile.
“I thought … Would you like to call her Christina? It was the name of my grandmother.”
She nodded again, smiling softly now, so dazzlingly Margrethe had to look away.
How could she have even thought she might compete with this creature?
“Christina,” he repeated.
Margrethe watched the two of them, paralyzed by the intensity of the emotions moving through her. So much pain and euphoria, a sense that, even though her own heart was broken, the world could contain such beauty and magic she almost could not bear it. What did her own pain matter, in the face of that?
“I will let you rest now,” he said to Lenia. “I will return later to look in on you and Christina. My daughter.”
Lenia nodded, and, with an awkward smile at Margrethe, Christopher left the room.
They both watched him go, then turned to each other.
Margrethe felt tears beating at her eyes. The next thing she knew, she was crying, big, fat tears rolling down her face.
“I am so sorry,” she said. She felt Lenia’s hand on her own, saw her expression through the blur of tears. “I did not know it was you. It never occurred to me it could be you.”
Lenia kept her hand on Margrethe’s, moving her fingers back and forth.
“You brought him to me,” Margrethe whispered.
Lenia shook her head, so faintly that at first Margrethe thought she imagined it.
“I thought you brought him to me,” Margrethe said. “And that I was meant to love him.”
Lenia just stared up at her with those blue eyes.
“Do you remember me? You brought him to me. We spoke on the beach. I would …” Her voice broke. “I would have given anything, to see your world. And then you … Now you’re here. I don’t understand.”
Everything seemed to crumble, all around them. The sight of the mermaid, with her pale, wounded skin, bloody and tired from birth, made human, dulled down, broke Margrethe’s heart completely.
“I believed in beauty, in magic, because of you … I thought …”
Margrethe remembered then, the way Lenia had looked at him that first day. The radiant love on her face. It was what Margrethe had wanted, too. To feel like that. The way the nuns felt, trembling with love.
“You saw him in the sea. You must have … loved him, to save him. You loved him. He is only alive because of you. And now I have … I just didn’t understand. Is that why you cannot speak? They say you have no tongue. Is it … Is that how you were able to come here?”
Lenia nodded then, never taking her eyes off Margrethe’s.
“You traded your voice, your tongue, and your tail, for human legs?”
Lenia nodded. She opened her mouth, and