Excerpt from BETWEEN THE TIDES - Part 1

LAINIE SMITH MORRIS:

Ethereal, elegant, talented. She is an artist on the fringe of the New York art scene, the mother of four children, Tom, Matilde, Claire and Jack, and the wife of Charles, a successful surgeon. Lainie loves life in the city and summers in Cape May. She is stricken when she gives it up so she and the children can follow Charles to a suburban life for his career move.

Excerpt – Part 1

The selkies are sea creatures, half woman, half seal. They wiggle out of their seal skins on the rocks to lie in the weak winter sun. One fisherman watched with his binoculars from his fishing boat and waited.

He loved the prettiest one!” Claire interrupts.

“That’s right, darling girl,” I say.

Jack sticks out his tongue. “Who cares about some stupid sealy lady?” he shouts.

I stop the story. “Jack, please sit down.”

Jack returns to the couch beside Tom, his big brother, who is on his iPad. Jack yawns and props his eyes open wide with his fingers. “Boring, Mom!”

“More! More!” Claire screams. She jumps off the chair and starts dancing around the den, waving her hands like flippers in her crazy water dance on land. “More!” she screeches.

Matilde, my solemn child, interrupts, “Mom, are you a selkie?”

I laugh and look out the den window that faces west. It is too dark to see anything. “No, darling girl, I’m not a selkie.”

“But you love the water and you swim every day. When we go to Cape May you lie on the jetties just like the selkies. You never answer us when you’re on the beach . . . it’s like you’re not even there. . . . Remember last February when—”

“Matilde, I am not a selkie.”

“Mommy,” Claire cries, “the sealy skin! The fisherman! Finish the story.”

Perhaps Charles is right and I ought to quit this tale. It isn’t Cinderella or Snow White; there is no prince with whom to live happily ever after.

“Mom?” Matilde is waiting.

“Okay . . . well . . . the beach is empty in December when the fisherman sees his chance. He sneaks up near the rocks and comes close to the prettiest selkie.”

“He takes her skin, Mommy! The man takes her seal skin!” Claire begins to sob as she always does at this part in the story.

“That’s true, Claire darling. The man takes her seal skin while she is in the icy sea. When she comes back to the shoreline, frantic to find her sealy coat, he is holding it in his hands. He tells her she has no choice but to go with him, without her coat she will drown. But he promises to love her forever, that they will marry and have a family. That’s the deal.” The “forever” part gets to me.

“And she marries him!” yelps Claire. She begins to dance again. “She marries him and they have babies!” Claire is the cheerful one; she bounces from one side of the room to the other. She passes Tom and Jack, who watch her as if she were an alien creature. I wonder if Jack and Claire will ever share a thought, an interest. Fraternal twins are not a matched pair.

“Until one day . . .” I look up. “Jack, are you listening?”

Jack covers his ears. “I don’t care about seals and babies. It’s gross!”

“A dull story for the boys,” says Charles. He is in the doorway, appearing out of nowhere, as usual. He is so stealthy, Charles, more burglar than surgeon.

The children race to him and grab at his arms and hands, his legs, anything that is their father. Except Matilde, who stays close to me.

“Lainie, how about another story? Something more realistic? You could read to them from Tom Sawyer.”

Matilde leans in toward my ear. “I know why you like the story. I know you’re a selkie. I saw your sealy skin.”

***

Susan Shapiro Barash has recently publisher her first novel, Between the Tides, under the pseudonym of Susannah Marren. Buy the book on Amazon today: https://www.amazon.com/Between-Tides-Novel-Susannah-Marren/dp/1250066735