Silvertongue

But not today. Today, you slept like the past fifteen years were the nightmare. You slept like it was waking.

Your day begins with sunlight, pleasant morning rays that ease you seamlessly from sleep to waking. You nestle under the covers a little deeper, warm and bright, before padding to the cold-tiled bathroom, barefoot and half-clothed. Our daily game of cat-and-mouse begins when you brush and floss your teeth, chasing me from gap to gap, almost drowning me in suds and spit. I always win.

After you use the toilet, you linger for a while, pacing. You worry the edges of your tongue with your molars. There are things you wish you didn’t remember that I can’t hide from you anymore. After two minutes have passed, you wring your wrists, splash your face again, and go downstairs.

For breakfast, you scramble the sea. Your chef once showed you the lobster tanks when you were young. You cried as they were put to boil, and they did, too. Now, we feast on caviar and crab without a second thought.

Today you bundle up, vicuña wool and mink, before you leave the house with salt still on your tongue. Your father sent a car. You settle in the back seat without a word. Outside the window, the landscape changes quickly, knobbly green hills becoming flaxen fields, bright sky fading gray. The smell of brand-new limousine gives way to sand and brine.

Here, the sea is yours. Or more properly, your father’s. Purchased in your name with his cash some ten years back when taxes bothered him more, this little strip of white sand and waves is cordoned off and full of cars parked right up to the tow. Usually on winter days, the coast is bare and gray, with only the tug of the tide whispering over the land. I like it more that way—you don’t clench your teeth as much.

Now that you are older, you do not visit this beach often. You don’t see much of your father when you can avoid it, and it suits you fine. But ever the dutiful daughter, you meet him every year under gray November skies and the auspices of cameras for the company holiday card, the reminder that his fishing empire is a family enterprise with family values.

Stepmother ten or twelve or twenty is here—you haven’t bothered to remember her name. She is windblown and bronzed, a picture from a summer catalog pasted onto these gray sands. She is a similar make and model to the last, which is to say, she looks very much like you. It used to bother you, the curve of your jaw, the sweep of your dark hair, your long, elegant eyelashes. The endless stream of wives were funhouse mirrors: you but a little taller, you but a little thinner, you but a little fleshier, you but a little more vacant around the eyes. He spent each one quicker than the last. You have grown numb, though. I swallowed your disgust.

Now you grit your teeth, and I peer out from between them. There are the people hired to make you and stepmother number-whatever look like fisherwomen Barbies, and there are the sailors who will operate the boat when the cameras aren’t looking, and there are the people who will line up the shots of you and your ravenous father and your umpteenth stepmother holding fish, reeling lines, and staring into the waves. The natural light through the clouds is good, dramatic and sharp, casting the world in silhouettes.

“Hi, Lilian,” you say to the latest edition. It isn’t her name. You do this with all of them, like tradition. Only this one plays along.

“Hello, Marissa.” Not even close.

You sneer at each other. Her teeth glint paper-bright. Your mother used to take in pretty girls like her, to turn them razor sharp. This one has no edge.

Once you set sail, your hair is arranged to look artfully windswept, lips puckered pink, all natural. The barren palms shrink behind you, and your stomach churns with the sea. When you swallow back bile, I gather by your tonsils, safe in your dark, soft throat.

We move out farther, until land becomes a memory.

Your father tries to make conversation, but all you can remember is the fish with the insect tongue, segmented and still, staring at your soul. Your father is watching you expectantly, searching your face for some response. You try to reply. I swallow your words.

When the ship drops anchor and forward motion stops, your head is spinning. You clutch the rail with pale knuckles. The water is dark, the sky is light, and you are turning green. When you vomit over the edge, your father frowns.

“You don’t get seasick,” he says. It is a fact in his voice. He is used to his statements becoming true through willpower and well-paid assistants.

You retch again. I cling tight to the acid film on your molars. Nothing but air comes out. In the water, filigrees of crab and half-chewed fish eggs mingle in the waves. As you watch, the scum of your stomach acid drifts away and sinks. You stay hunched over, lips still burning sour, but your nausea has worn off. You are hollow now.

“Water, Emily, get her water,” your father snaps at one of the assistants, or maybe your stepmother. You aren’t sure. Either way your hands are shaking as you accept a clear glass. You slosh some on your fingers. Rinse and spit, then down another gulp. Someone takes it away and you straighten, push away from the rail. You can stand on your own—you’ve got your sea legs back.

Around you, each face is slightly pinched, some with concern, some with disgust, some with irritation. You clench your jaw and brace your spine.

“I’m alright,” you say. I twitch.

Your father’s personal assistant comes forward with a tube of lipstick in an attractive shade of coral, clinical and bland, selected specifically to make you nonthreatening. This sort of neutral pleasantness has been your brand since you were small, and as your cherubic cheeks have matured to fine sharp cheekbones, as your lips and hips filled out, you’ve strived at every moment to retain universal appeal. Your picture on the holiday card must satisfy the workers and their wives. The balance is ever so much more delicate as a woman. Your mother looked like a lady and talked like a broad. We never met.

Once your lips are peachy bright and catalog-ready, the action shots begin. The camera drinks you in. Someone, an aide or a gaffer, tells a dilute joke about fish and basketball that would merit a groan on a good day. Instead, you laugh in shapes, your mouth open and round, your teeth a flash. Your father drapes his arm around your waist, another around the stepmother’s shoulder, and pulls you both in close. His fingers squeeze a hair too tight at the spare flesh beneath your ribs. You cannot squirm. I do instead.

You clamp your mouth shut, then force a gritted smile. As soon as the photographers call for another pose, you tear away. Your father approaches, but a stylist holds him back, saying that at least one glamor shot of you alone is good for the website, to show the company’s future. He nods, and so you linger gratefully, the wind billowing your hair, until the camera is sated.

The next photo requires props. From belowdecks, a man with rubber gloves brings up a cooler and sets it gingerly on the ground. Your father steps forward and lifts the cover, revealing a live bluefin tuna, constrained beneath a shallow layer of salt water. Stepmother flinches back, and you barely manage not to do the same. When your father picks up the fish, you swallow hard. Suddenly your tongue feels foreign and strange. You are unsure of its surface. If you think too much, you feel its phantom claws.

I wallow in your fear as it pools like saliva at the base of your mouth. There is too much to possibly swallow.

You try to smile as you look down at the fish, remembering it has paid your tuition and bought your clothes. It looks up at you, its hollow gaze upon your throat. Beneath the landlocked safety of your mammalian furs and wools, you shiver.

These shots won’t make it in, I’m sure.

Your father and his wife pose next, the lucky fish cast back to sea, and as they look hungrily into one another’s eyes you remember your mother’s voice. Rooms darkened when she walked in, but she glowed. When she opened her mouth, birdsong and flame came out in equal measure.

You are a candle-lark, burning low and close, with a voice like morning: fleeting, but steel-spun when it comes. Most days it doesn’t. I swallow it whole.

But I am fed fat now, swollen with fear and disgust and raw fish, and you are burning. Your silence is so brittle now that it has stretched too thin.

On shore you say a prayer of thanks that you have not yet sunk. The sun emerges from behind a cloud and bathes you in sudden warmth. The cars roll out one by one as soon as their drivers have paid your father their respects. Soon it is you and him and stepmother alone. She slides into the limousine without a parting word.

I bite your tongue. You let it bleed. I cannot taste your thoughts. When did you learn to keep them back?

“Stop,” you say. My hold is whisper-weak.

Your father turns. His eyes are tuna blue.

“What is it?” he asks, his voice uncertain now. You never command him like this.

“Come to dinner tonight,” you say, and I almost fall from your lips. “Alone.”

His left eyebrow shoots up but pulls the corner of his mouth with it.