“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Oh, I thought you knew. I guess I thought it would upset you. Oh, I lost a stitch.” She stopped talking and counted the threads.

“It’s upsetting me now.” Ruth held her voice down, but there was tension.

“I already thought you were a force to be reckoned with, but they got them closed so you looked like everyone else and began to breathe through your lungs. You’ve never had trouble since then. Just those little scars.” She looked up. “Do you want to play Bingo?”

“No. No, I don’t. What did the elders say?”

“The doctors said it was a genetic throwback or something like that. Anyway, the elders said they had known of this. It’s happened before. Destiny is water for her, they said.”

There was an old story about a girl who came from the sea. Not just the sea of a mother’s womb, but really from the sea, to make the People into what they were to be. She had a hard life, for she had to live in water so much of the time. There was no modern medicine then, so she would have drowned in air. Every morning she rose from the sea and went to a bed where she looked like a normal human coming out of the house. But from the sea she brought knowledge. She came in with the sounds of the ocean and she sang them to the people. That’s how they learned the whales’ songs and also the ticking of coral. She protected the sea and the animals. The people kept her wet.

“You remember the story. She was a lot like you, always protecting the sea life. She could hear the fish from land. When she died, which unfortunately was too early, she returned to the sea cut in pieces, and each piece was eaten by the sea animals so the songs and the animals would continue. Not like Sedna up north where her fingers became the animals. It isn’t that old of a story. Could you get my green jacket? Are you sure you don’t want to go play Bingo?”

Her mother was lying, Ruth was certain, but too casually. Ruth took the jacket off the hook, noticing that the wall around the hooks was dirty with years of the touch of hands Aurora didn’t want to wash away. Hands of people who no longer existed.

“That’s about all I know, but I figured it explains your behavior. You always were a peculiar girl. You always were at water. Don’t think I didn’t know you would have been a true whaler’s wife.” Ruth, too tall for her mother’s mirror, examined her neck. What she’d taken for ordinary lines could have been scars. But she thought they were merely wrinkles until now.

“No, not there. They were in front of your ears. Isn’t it funny? You were the one with the gill slits. Thomas was the one who tried to stay underwater. It’s always like that. You never get what you want.”