Marilyn’s sharpest memories were shaped like five in the morning, dark silhouettes moving across a cold house with curved, sleep-deprived back and cyclical possibilities. Her mother in this same house, padding through the kitchen in her thick socks as she packed. Coffee in the thermos, breakfast in the pail. She kept her boots outside the door, and Marilyn watched her from the loft in their little A-frame house, her body wedged between two of her brothers in the bed they all shared. One eye cracked open in the darkness to watch her mother move through the house like water.

At eighty-one, Marilyn still woke at five. Now, she slept in the bedroom below the loft that once belonged to her parents, the one where they’d made all their children and at least half their memories. Marilyn sat up, turned so her feet hung off the edge of the bed, and reached under the covers to pet her still sleeping golden retriever mix, Animal. Ani for short. The dog Alexandra brought over four years ago as a “short-term foster.”

Ani groaned and rolled over, away from Marlyn’s searching hand.

“You beast,” Marilyn muttered.

The coffee pot beeped. Alexandra had put it on a timer when she and Aurora moved in four months ago, ignoring Marilyn's expressed pleasure in preparing the coffee. Her crackling limbs and joints flowing through the motions of scooping the grounds, filling the water, the satisfaction of hitting “start.” She mourned her process again that morning until she heard bare feet on the ladder, smacking across the wood floors. Marilyn sighed and heaved herself off the bed as Ani gave another great snore.

“Don’t overwork yourself,” Marilyn said to the dog. Even with two humans around, she preferred talking to the dog.

She opened her bedroom door just as Aurora slipped out the screen door onto the porch, coffee in hand. Marilyn stretched her arms above her head as she walked, crossing the house to pull down her own mug: fisherwoman, it said, with a black and white silhouette of a tuna.

Marilyn famously caught a record-breaking tuna back in 1967, back when her husband, John, and his friends still invited her out on their boats. Her photo hung in every bar in Dennisport, her with the tuna, pretty in the way they were all pretty in photographs, even if they were just average in life.

Truthfully, Marilyn had never liked to fish. Ripping the fish from the water without even the promise of life on the other side was a violence to her, one she felt deep in her gut, a fist clenched around her primal instincts. She fished because it was the only way to be out on the open water. The beach, the docks, the swimming. It all filled her, but out there, she was no longer herself, no longer alone as the shore melted from view. Her mother had fished for survival, which Marilyn understood. She left at five in the morning and fished from the shore or dock, and was home by eight, in time to make breakfast, see her husband off. Then her work began, the great outdoor work of her mother’s hands to dismantle the fish’s life for their own. Marilyn’s mother whispered prayers over the fish’s bones as Marilyn watched in awe: obrigada, her mother whispered as she made expert cuts with her knife. Obrigada, irmã.

The tuna had fought. That’s what she remembered – how much stronger it was than her mother. How she’d spent a full morning with her lure in its bloody mouth, steadying her legs as it pulled and thrashed and fought for its life, and she refused to let go.

She’d been pregnant with Serena, then. She’d always imagined that her superhuman strength came from another life swimming inside her, giving her the ferocity to conquer the tuna, to be its fate. Ending its life as she created another.

The fishermen stopped asking her to come out with them after that. John sold her tuna and bought a house she didn’t like, too far inland. She had to drive to the beach from that house. She didn’t have the car most days, and it crippled the freedom her own two legs had always provided. John died, and Marilyn sold the house to pay for Serena’s college tuition.

She poured coffee into her mug as Alexandra groaned from the loft. Marilyn pushed through the screen door to join Aurora on the porch.

“You know your mother doesn’t like you drinking that, dear,” Marilyn said.

“Um, sorry,” Aurora was nine. During Serena’s long hospital stays last year, Aurora fetched them coffees from the cafeteria and took stolen sips on her walk back to the room. She just liked the taste, she said.

The screen door slammed behind them, and Alexandra shuffled out, barefoot and in pajamas with little golden retrievers. Marilyn had given them to her for Christmas, and they’d all had a good laugh about it. Alexandra took the coffee from Aurora’s hands and held it close to her chest, smiling. Aurora slumped down in her seat and crossed her arms.

“I know you’re an early riser, Gran, but do we need to see the sunrise every day?” Alexandra asked.

“I hear there are some nice apartments in town,” Marilyn teased. Alexandra smiled. Marilyn looked away. She’d been a lost girl, too, once. A motherless daughter adrift.

“Aurora, why don’t you go get Ani’s leash?” Alexandra said. “We’ll take her for a walk.”

The girl stomped inside, and Alexandra took her place in the rocking chair next to Marilyn.

“I have to go out today,” she said. “I can’t keep skipping my rotation. But I need to know you’ll be okay with her.”

“Please, dear,” Marilyn said. “It’s not my first rodeo. Or shark tagging trip. We’ll live.”

“I’m sorry,” Alexandra replied. “It’s just one thing to be at the center and another to be so far away.” Her eyes watered, and she took a long sip from her mug to hide it. “I don’t want to leave you guys.”

“If you have to go out, you have to go out,” Marilyn said. “I understand. We’ll be here when you get back.”

“Watching the horizon,” Alexandra joked.

“That’s me,” Marilyn teased drily. “The worried, waiting wife.”

She looked out over the grass – the wetlands, the marsh. She could hear the waves from her porch and could tell you about the conditions without leaving her house. It was unique to this spot. If she were standing the same distance from the ocean in Maine or Washington or Australia, she couldn’t tell you a damn thing.

“Good conditions,” she said. “Watch out for monsters.”

“Oh, Gran,” Alexandra said. “They’re just sharks.”

They both laughed.

Two hours later, Marilyn and Aurora trudged through the sand, Aurora in a hot pink floral wetsuit, and Marilyn in loose linen pants and a tee shirt she’d borrowed from Alexandra that said, “Sharks are sexy” in oversized bubble font. Marilyn carried a beach chair on her back, and Aurora carried their snacks and water and beach toys in a turquoise tote half her size.

When they reached the cool, wet surf sand, Marilyn set up the chair and laid out their blanket the way the adult was supposed to. A role she’d already played once that wasn’t supposed to belong to her. This was meant for Serena’s younger knees, her younger back. Serena was the one who was supposed to be the beach-going grandma at this point in their lives, not Marilyn.  Marilyn was supposed to be loafing around in her house.

Aurora was too far in the water, and Marilyn called to her: a little closer, dear, a little closer. The grief came in droplets.

She wanted to feel the water, so she walked back and forth on the wet sand while Aurora played her imaginary games, letting the water lap up onto her toes, the rhythm of her home whirling through her veins. She inhaled the salt and brine.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember. It was like this now. She had to decide to remember things. Memory no longer came in natural waves with experience – she had to choose to replay it like little movies, so she didn’t forget who she was.

Twenty-six and two-year-old Serena walks beside her, holding her hand. Marilyn lives for these moments, the two of them, just the two. A reminder of what would ever be and always was. Serena’s smooth toddler hand in hers, gripping her with fingernails that always needed to be cut.

Like a sea urchin, she’d joked, making fish faces and wrestling Serena’s chubby hands with a nail clipper.

A tiny hand in hers and Serena’s tiny body. Walking together because that’s where they belonged, the two of them and the sea, two sets of footprints side by side, for always, until one of them walked off into the ocean and never came back.

It was supposed to be her.

Sometimes, when Serena was a baby, Marilyn locked herself in her room in that inland house and sobbed about being away from the ocean, each day filled instead with bottles and chores and joy and profound dullness. She was drowning on land, and she begged to be swept away.

But for Serena’s whole life, Marilyn fostered a secret fear that one day, a current would find her daughter and sweep her out to sea instead. Her baby’s perfect body, taken by the water that formed her, pulled under and out and given to the ocean, to the fish, and she’d never hold that hand again. They swam and kayaked and sailed and every minute was love, and it was torture.

Serena died from ovarian cancer. A different current, a different water.

“Take me home,” she’d whispered in the end, her head pressed on Marilyn’s chest. The same water she’d been hearing all her life; swoosh, swoosh, boom. The sound from Marilyn’s porch, the sound of all the hearts she’d heard beating before she held them in her hands.

Take me home.

Take me to the sea.

She opened her eyes to see Aurora sprinting toward her, and for a second, her heart dropped. Then she remembered – running toward me, alive. She was not dead. Thank god, thank god. Obrigada, irmã.

“Look!” Aurora shouted, and held out her palm. In her hand rested a shark tooth, about the size of Marilyn’s fingernail.

“Oh!” Marilyn exclaimed. “Where did you find this?”

Aurora shrugged. “In all the rocks. I know what they look like, obviously.”

“Well, yes, but dear, you know we don’t usually find those here.”

“I’ve found tons of them in Florida and stuff,” Aurora replied, shrugging again.

Marilyn held back a laugh. A child of a shark scientist being wholly unimpressed by finding a shark tooth. On the beach in Cape Cod no less, where, to Marilyn’s knowledge, no one, in the history of her town had ever found a shark tooth.

“I’ve never heard of anyone finding a shark tooth here,” Marilyn explained. “The sand isn’t right for those types of fossils.”

“Mom will explain,” Aurora said. “I’m going to look for more.” Marilyn nodded, watching the girl run toward the water with her shovel and push it into the sand like a prospector looking for gold.

“I want to find a conch shell!” she called to Marilyn.

“I don’t think we have those here, either!” Marilyn called back.

Then again, who was she to question a child’s dreams, or what the ocean could deliver her? She followed Aurora to her spot and got down on her rickety knees. She began to dig.

“You know any good stories?” Aurora asked. “I like pirates, but Mom says they’re just criminals whitewashed by Hollywood. She won’t take me to the pirate museum.”

Marilyn laughed. “I don’t know pirate stories,” she said, filling her hands with sand. “Why, sick of sharks?”

Aurora glanced up. “Sharks and humans share a common ancestor,” she said, her voice official and mocking, like her mother lecturing a class.

“Agnathans!” Marilyn exclaimed. “I know that one. All vertebrae came from agnathans.”

Aurora smirked. “Look.” The pebbly sand she’d pulled back revealed another tooth, dark grey and slightly bigger than the last.

“Oh my goodness,” Marilyn mumbled. They dug, more frantically now, sifting through the rocks to search for teeth. A third, they needed three, then four. There should have been four.

The ocean caressed Marilyn’s toes. She felt stronger, somehow. Made of cartilage instead of brittle bone.

Marilyn didn’t like the fishing legends. They were all the same; women are cunning and vicious, the ocean is a mistress scorned, wives wait for their beloved sailors instead of charting their own course. Stories in superstition show beautiful women, tamed or tamable, wild or dead, only seen as sailors wanted to see them, a story centered around their own lust or desire or fear, a story projected instead of a story proclaimed.

The truth lived beneath the myths. The ocean with her secret depths, her life eternal and unconquerable. Anger cannot be tampered with, a shark cannot stop losing its teeth, and daughters must return to the sea.

What story to tell this child, who’d lost her grandmother? What story to tell the child to whom the ocean had always belonged?

“Do you know about the Sirens?” Marilyn asked. Aurora shook her head.

“Long ago in ancient times,” Marilyn began, “the waters of Greece were known for being extremely dangerous. Sailors died every day. Boats went out and never came back.”

“Why’d they keep sailing, then?” Aurora interrupted. “Seems kind of dumb.”

“It was,” Marilyn agreed. “But they wanted gold and glory. They didn’t listen to the ocean. So, after hundreds of years of disappearances and deaths, stories spread about the Sirens. The legend said the Sirens ruled over a narrow passage of the sea. They had beautiful, enchanting voices, so when people tried to pass, they’d sing their song and lure them to their deaths.”

Marilyn paused. Aurora sifted through the sand with her finger, brow furrowed, listening. Marilyn took a deep breath. Serena used to have that look. Serena walking beside her, her perfect legs, her perfect hands and cheeks and eyes. Her creation, who’d grown inside her from an agnathan to a girl.

That body was gone now. Her daughter’s miraculous body, her beating heart.

How could her body still be here, and her daughter’s body wasn’t? A daughter’s body was her mother’s body.

“After a long time,” Marilyn continued, “four women sailors got together and decided to confront the Sirens. By then, there were so many legends and stories. Men jumping to their deaths, tying themselves to the ships to resist. Everyone on land was angry. They wanted the Sirens dead and were plotting how to do it. But the women weren’t afraid. They thought, these Sirens, they wouldn’t do this for nothing. They must be protecting something. They must know something about that ocean that we don’t.

“So, they sailed right into the Sirens’ passage. And when they heard them begin to sing, they let go of their sails. The water thrashed around them, but they surrendered, they let the sirens guide them and were swept into the Sirens’ underwater home.”

“Hey,” Aurora said. She held out a third shark tooth, this one the size of Marilyn’s fingertip and blacker than a night out on the ocean. Aurora curled her fingers around the tooth, making a fist with all three inside. Marilyn watched the delicate bones in Aurora’s hands flex under her skin. What a beautiful child.

“Keep going,” Aurora said.

“The Sirens were half women, half fish–”

“With tails?” Aurora asked. “Like mermaids?”

“Of course,” Marilyn said. “The Sirens saw the women as their sisters. They told the women everything. All the wisdom of the ocean. Everything that ever was about the past, present, and future. The Sirens were the key to everything that ever lived. They were our agnathans, so to speak. The women told the Sirens about the plot to kill them, and so the Sirens made a plan; they put their knowledge into the women’s bodies so that they could pass it onto their daughters. That way, the Sirens’ knowledge would live on in secret, in the oceans inside of us all. And once their knowledge was safe, the Sirens disappeared.”

“What happened to them?” Aurora asked. “Did the people kill them?”

“They hid in the ocean,” Marilyn said. “They became predators, with sharp teeth and huge bodies. They hunted and lived for millions of years, protecting the balance of the ocean, protecting their knowledge and power with ferocity and silence. They could only hope that the four women, the ones who were brave enough to seek them, wise enough to learn what they didn’t know, had lived to tell their story, and one day, they could come home.”

“I like this story,” Aurora said. She drew her knees to her chest. Marilyn sat, the bottoms of her feet touching. She held her arms out, and Aurora crawled a few feet across the sand to get to her. She dropped the teeth into Marilyn’s hand, and Marilyn held them, their smooth, ancient lines.

There were no sirens, of course. Only sharks. Only our mothers and daughters from a stolen history, a lost odyssey, the unbroken true language of the sea.

Aurora curled into Marilyn’s lap and rested her head against Marilyn’s chest to hear the familiar swoosh swoosh of her heartbeat, a sound she’d heard from sixty years away. Marilyn hugged her great-granddaughter as tightly as she could. Her daughter’s body, in the daughter of a daughter’s daughter. Aurora’s tailbone pushed against Marilyn’s bony thigh, and Marilyn clutched the child’s hair; her ribs cracked open as the grief poured out in a wave, and she held on, held onto the hand she’d never hold again, the dream she’d relinquished because life had told her she must.

“Look,” Aurora said, pointing. “Do you think that’s Mom’s boat?”

Marilyn squinted out at the horizon. “It must be,” she whispered.

She held Aurora as the water washed over them.