Chapter 26 Trust
Trust
A few days later the last rock was moved, the salt water came rushing in up the channel, now lapping against my front door with the tide.
“You’re free now Lir.”
In an attempt to hide my childishly twisted face, I look down. Trying to hold a calm smile despite all my worries bubbling out at the corners of my downturned lips and in the edges of my welling up eyes. “You don't have to stay here with me now.”
“Yes, but even so—” I see that familiar intensity in his eyes, the storm rising in his irises. I can feel the surety in his solid palms as he cradles my face, his thumb holding back my tears just on the precipice of falling. “I will always come back to you, Andrea.”
Like his words are magnetized, I turn quickly towards him, the gray sea stretching an impossible distance into infinity.
Our hair whips around in the wind as we look out for a long time, tiny knots forming to connect our hair strands.
A physical embodiment of our heartstrings begging to not be drifted apart, so much so that even our physical flesh is attempting to bond together.
“I know you love me, but I have had a man love the sea more than me before, it’s no surprise to me if you never want to come back.” Looking in his eyes, both begging and apologizing, my voice cracks, “I would not fault you for it, Lir.”
With the upmost tenderness I tuck his hair behind his ear, breaking the bond between the tangled strands.
I take in his eyes, his face, his everything which I hold dear.
As if this could be the last time I look upon them.
His breath breaks into almost an amused chortle and my eyes dart up, my brow furrowing, “Are you laughing at my worries?”
“You saved me Andrea, and if you’ll have me—well, now I can’t stay away.” His head forward from laughing. “That is why I laugh at you, because no rocks, or waves, or anything else would keep me from you.” His arched nose presses into mine, our foreheads pushed together into a prayer, a promise.
He dips into the dark water, playfully diving deep down and popping back up to break through the surface.
I thought the sea was such a cold depressing place, but seeing him flip about so happily, it just makes me so over joyed to see a world that belongs to him with him in it.
Before I know it, he pulls me into the water, and he’s spinning me around too. In this small moment I too, feel free.
On the ledge of the rocks, he sets me down before disappearing into the dark water. Diving down once again into the moat to rustle around between the kelp and rocks.
“I have something for you.” He pushes into my palm a smooth object, warmed by his own body heat it fits perfectly into my hand as it has been carved custom with every callous of my palm considered.
I move the object back and forth relishing in its precise smoothness.
It is a blade, carved from what I assume is one piece of whale bone, the ivory surface more dense than any other scrimshaw I have felt before.
The bolster a series of overlapping carved knots, a close impossible solid weave leading into a curved handle fishtail that sways back and forth in a S shaped ellipses, a mermaid’s tail.
The texture of the scales provide grip so that the smoothness of the one piece knife will not slide out of my hold.
The blade and handle are each about three inches, not too large and thus it moves easily as an extension of my own hand.
He closes my fingers around the tail. “For you, to protect you. When I have to leave you like this, so that you will not be completely unguarded. From any Admiral, thugs or whoever else might run aground here.”
With our hands interlocked together in a knotted prayer, he squeezes there awhile. Lingering so long he is surely imbuing a protective spell into this sacred dagger.
“I’m going to come back to you.” He holds my face and I believe him, I really do. Grasping my hands he desperately tries to write those words into something tangible I can hold. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Wordlessly this time, he lowers into the water, my hands follow sending him off to his long lost home.
I watch as his tail splashes around, getting a little bit further away from me with every dive.
Soon, he’s just a speck on the horizon, still turning around to see me every so often.
I begin to drip dry on the shore. Just like when Eli would leave for months on the boat, waving to Lir feels like I’m saying goodbye indefinitely.
Each time I turn back to see if he’s still there, the island feels smaller and smaller, like the sea could easily swallow it all up whole.
That night when I sit doing my job, for the first time in weeks it feels like I’m actually at work. My days have felt so easy having a purpose, even if it was just chucking rocks into the sea. At night, it had felt so much less lonely when Lir was just a little look out the window away.
My light scans the ocean, over and over.
Tonight, I’m not just idly trying not to fall asleep, I am instead peering out across every square inch of water.
Scanning perpetually into the dark. If you held up my eyes and a hawk’s, you’d think it were the same picture.
I am pinpoint focused in on each slightly different wave.
From now on, is it going to feel like this forever?
If he never comes back, a real possibility even with his promises.
Am I doomed to truly become the old man who watches the sea, just hoping for a glimpse of that mermaid that made his heart flutter.
The ocean bubbles and moves in and out from between the rocks in frothing slow laps.
Soon the gray sheets of mist pull close towards my hideaway which my beam bounces through with little effort, echoing off of the shiny glimpses of wave crests that peak between the quilt batting that covers my night watch.
I begin to feel suffocated by it, like a wool turtleneck it feels like it’s creeping up my skin, yet the most unscratchable itch lives far back within my throat.
I hear the door knock.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
My lantern moves back and forth in wide swings as I run down the steps.
Skipping every other stair, losing a slipper on the way.
“Lir—“ I gasp, but stopping me in my steps is the undulating shadow of the front door in the wind which flaps the wood gently in its frame. The fog billowing like a blanket into my brick laid empty doorstep. I lock the brine laden handle, its mechanical noises echoing up through every twisting step. I even pull shut the deadbolt and slide the barrel across. It’s been so long since I’ve fully locked down this door, Lir would crack it open to call for me, guard it just below my stoop like some sort of statuesque gargoyle.
When Lir was here, there was no need for a lock.