Chapter One

My favorite story when I was small, the one I begged for night after night, was “The Selkie.”

“That old story,” my mother would say. She’d say it in exactly the same tone of voice as when my father complimented her dress. Oh, this old thing, she’d say, her pale green eyes giving away her pleasure. “Wouldn’t you rather something new?” And she’d hold up a shiny book my aunt Sophie, my father’s sister, had bought for me. The Bobbsey Twins or, when I was older, Nancy Drew. American stories with an improving message and plucky, intrepid heroines.

“No, I want your story,” I would say. It was her story because she knew it by heart, had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from hers . . . a line of mothers and daughters that I imagined like the image of me and her when I stood by her side in front of the mirrors in the lobby.

“Well, if it will help you sleep . . .”

And I would nod, burrowing deeper into the blankets. It was one of the few requests I stuck to, perhaps because my mother’s initial hesitation came to be part of the ritual—part of the telling. A game we played because I knew she liked that I wanted her story, not some store-bought one. Even when she was dressed to go out and she had only come up to say a quick good night she would sit down on the edge of my bed and shrug her coat off her shoulders so that its black fur collar settled down around her waist and I would nestle into its dark, perfumed plush, and she, getting ready to tell her story, would touch the long strands of pearls at her neck, the beads making a soft clicking sound, and close he