The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey Page B

that hard a decision. I liked my job, and I would have missed that boy dreadfully. It didn’t occur to me, until after I was trapped, that the Willoughbys were never concerned with what was best for me. That was their way, sure, and I lived with it.
    I still wonder, at times, what my life would be like now if I had made it to the nursing college. I would have returned to the island just the same, but I believe other things would be different. It’s not Marcus I’d have married, though as good a husband you cannot find on God’s green earth. I might have had a more romantic, younger marriage, a house full of my own children, a career that kept my mind busy as well as my body. I am not the one to mourn over lost opportunity—your life is what you make of it, with God’s grace, the good and the bad. But still, I sometimes indulge myself and think, What if? What if I had never met that Patrick Concannon, had not gone dancing on that particular Saturday with Maeve and the girls, had not let myself feel what I felt or do what I did. What sort of woman would I be now?
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    He was a gorgeous fellow. Dark brown hair with shimmers of copper, forest-green eyes, tall, so tall I could rest my head below his neck. He was Irish, as well, which was an attraction for me. I liked my job, but I’ll not fail to admit that I was a bit lonely. Maeve was newly married and hadn’t much time for me—only occasionally it was that I had a night out like the one where I met Patrick. He was from Connemara, like us, except from the mainland; he was studying medicine at MIT. His accent was cultured, but still familiar to me. Especially when he slipped into the expressions of our county.
    â€œLet’s get pissed,” he whispered to me that first night at thedisco. “Show these Americans what proper drenkin is.” And he won me, so easily it’s a wonder I wasn’t ashamed of it sooner.
    He called for me every Saturday for two months. We had picnics on Boston Common, carriage rides around the city. He took me to concerts at Symphony Hall, to dinner in expensive Italian restaurants. He seemed to have loads of money for a boy from Connemara. When I protested at his extravagance, he told me he had a rich American uncle. I let him spoil me, let him hold my hand in the carriage, kiss me with his hips crushed into my stomach when he dropped me at my door. No boy had ever paid such attention to me. It made me feel beautiful, womanly, dangerous. I loved every minute of it.
    I was so taken that once, in the middle of a roasting August afternoon, I agreed to follow him to his dorm room in Cambridge. On a narrow bed covered with dirty linens, I let him lie on top of me, kiss my breasts, which he let loose from my blouse and bra. I still remember the look of my own breasts, large, white, and foreign, without feeling, like something he had borrowed from me, removed from my body for his amusement. Like the carved mermaids I’d seen as a child, their stone bosoms exposed and deformed looking. I let him keep going, thinking all along that he would stop, knowing in my mind that I was sinning but feeling as though it were happening to someone else. Like what I saw was being described to me in gossip of some loose girl on the island, and I was saying: She did what? You’re only joking!
    I was so convinced of my detachment that I was terrified when I realized we were both completely naked. Even when he entered me, and the pain seared through that inner flesh where I had never before felt anything—which I had hardly known was there—even then I thought: This can’t be happening. He was in and out of me, as though he was plagued with indecision; he was huge, he was hurting me, frightening me. At one point, near the end, he looked as if he might be having a stroke: his face welled up red and purple, his eyes bulged, he moaned as if in pain, as if something within mewas ripping him apart as well. Then he