No. No-no-no. He loves me. He does. He must, I'm his daughter. My whole being squirms and thrashes and refuses to accept the idea that my father lied again. I fell victim to the child inside, the one who is reluctant to give up what she almost glimpsed. An internal battle sweeps me into a land of doubt. One side of me clings to hope, the other screams how stupid that is. They place a bet, and I listen to my father finish his speech, catching every word, my nerves atremble. One more second, and he'll say it. Another second, and it will come. I wait with abated breath. He stops talking. Not a single mention of love. Not a single tear. Maybe it's because he knows I'm alive, as alive as a siren can be. I cling to this thought. This must be it. He steps away from the microphone. Canosa and the other three women shuffle closer and begin their song, sorrowful, with drawn out vowels. I don't listen.

My father leans in for a kiss.

"Sorry I'm late, sweetie," he whispers over the song. "I had to arrange our voyage. It's taken care of, just endure this a little more." My doubts vanish. Guilt turns me inside out. How could I think he doesn't care? He does. He does. He was just busy.

"Canosa is here," I whisper back as quietly as possible. But of course, because of the stupid song, he doesn't hear me.

He stands, feigns crying into a fine silk kerchief, and steps aside, giving way to the shuffling mob; the mob of people who are related to me in some distant way and have either seen me only once at my mother's funeral, or in pictures, which, I don't know how they could have, because father never sent pictures to anyone. For some of them, this is their first time seeing me. In my family, we seem to notice each other only twice, when we're born or dead.

The choir drones on, something about afterlife.

It's a horde of hired strangers, paid to show up and make my funeral grand, streaming towards me in a line, leaning in one by one, burning my forehead with a mandatory kiss, whispering something that means nothing to me. I count thirty-two of them.

The song is finally over. The three choir singers silently trail after the crowd, but Canosa lingers. She is number thirty-three. Her kiss is as cold as ice. She promptly shuts the lid and leaves without a word.

Surrounded by darkness, I freeze, if it's possible to freeze even more in my state. What do I do now, break out? Or wait to break out from the boat, after being dumped into the sea, like my father said? I don't know whom to believe anymore. This whole funeral service strikes me as odd, as if done in a rush, without being properly rehearsed and carried out.

On top of it, I constantly fight the urge to sink into my memories about Hunter. I can't. It will disable me, rendering me useless.

The four pallbearers who brought me inside, close around the casket, silently lift me, and walk out of the Chapel, without a single word exchanged between them. They should be putting me in the hearse but they keep walking instead. It feels like they are taking me across the street. I hear the strum of moving cars. We must have crossed the Fremont Bridge. They trot along a path, the gravel crunching under their feet. They zigzag down to the water, to the marina where my father moors his boat.

I sway to the rhythm of waves. They must have made it onto the new boat. They proceed another twenty steps and then place me onto another elevated platform. I hear them saunter off as the funeral guests sashay in. The boat bobs and jitters with excited chatter. Everyone is ready to depart for my burial at sea. Canosa is too. She's nearby, I can feel her.

I have to tell Papa.

I claw at the silky casket innards in frustration. The last person steps on the boat. The captain shouts his signal, ropes rumble off, and the engine starts. I hear my father's voice directing people around, chatting with caterers, and organizing the event to his satisfaction.

As if on command, people hastily make their way about to find a free spot and sit down expectedly, ready for another dose of death-theater, free food, and alcohol. Their souls are in discord, a mixture of mild fear of the open water and a pinch of curiosity at the fantastic and the grand and the morbid—the deep ocean swallowing poor Ailen Bright who's only sixteen years old.

The boat grumbles its slow way through the canal. Gradually, city noises fade and we're on our way out to sea. It will take another couple of hours to reach the ocean at this speed, plenty of time to eat, drink, and be merry. Plenty of time for me to think about what to do next.

Break out of the casket early and freak out every single person on the boat, screwing up our Italy plans at the same time?

Or lay still and wait for this horrid party to end, wait for the final words to be delivered, for the casket to be thrown into the waves, and break out then, to meet Papa at the lighthouse like we agreed?

Or knock from inside when Papa is near, in hopes that he will hear me? Hope that he'll open the lid and listen to what I have to say? If he'll open it?

What other options do I have?

Oh, Hunter, I miss you. I miss you so much. I wish you were here. I wish I could talk to you. What did she do to your body? There isn't even a grave for me to come and visit.

His face splits into that familiar grin, dancing on the back of my eyelids. His words boom in my mind.

Hey, turkey! I don't need no stinking grave. I've got me a whole fucking ocean.

Hunter! I jolt, but I know it's only a vision, only my imagination. It morphs into his face, concentrated, puffing out curlicues of smoke under the bathroom ceiling.

His lips slowly move, delivering his question. Ever meet a real siren? He gives the joint another puff. Not the mythical kind. No. The girl next door. The killer kind. The one whose gaze never sits still. The way she walks, the way she talks...Every man wants a piece of her. Every man wants to hear her velvety song, the song to die for. Ever met one like that?

That's me. He was talking about me. It was always me, siren or not. How did I fail to see it until now? I have a voice, a powerful voice. I always did. I simply needed to turn into a siren to fully believe in it. I am the killer kind, the true killer kind. I know what to do. I can hum. I can sing. I can deliver my message through the water, turn the boat around, and make it dock. Elated, I inhale, but before a single note escapes my lips, Canosa proves to me who's the boss.

All at once, thunder explodes and the air condenses into heavy clouds that roll in at an abnormal rate, spraying the boat's windows with the angry foam of new rain and sea. I can't see any of it, but the noises deliver me an almost photographic picture. There is a general pause that I can only attribute to people glancing round in the wake of an impending catastrophe. Several women cry out, some soothe the few children who are there, men curse. At the same time, the yacht races toward the sea with a terrible speed, manned by Canosa's song and her insatiable hunger.

I hear it now. We both started to sing at the same time. Except, I only had the intention of starting, but she actually did it.

I have to tell Papa! Is he blind? Does he not see what's going on? The possibility of this being the plan all along rears its ugly head for the first time in my consciousness. I chase it away. It simply can't be.

Lighting strikes. More thunder rumbles. My casket shifts, in danger of sliding onto the floor. The yacht careens dangerously up and down, one second tilting its nose, another plunging into liquid madness at a forty-five degree angle. People gasp, the imminent explosion of terror in their gaping mouths, their frantic movements, and their quickened heartbeats, ready to flee. There is nowhere to go, however. I sense the enormous body of the ocean all around us. Their collective fear imprints in my mind like a single frame taken out of context, a snapshot of dread.

They shout. They yelp. The captain echoes commands to the crew.

"Let the feast begin," Canosa says into my ear, right into the gap between the casket's lid and its bottom part, to make sure I hear her.

In this moment, I understand exactly what price my father had to pay, for her to leave him alone. To leave us alone. His lack of surprise when I told him that she killed Hunter. All these preparations, all this being late. This is no funeral, no burial at sea. This is the slaughter of thirty-two innocent souls, to be snuffed out for the benefit of one. That's why I didn't recognize any of them. It's not family. None of them are. He hired strangers.

Thirty-two people are about to die because of me. An intimate knowledge of what dying really means grips me. If I were to be completely honest with myself, I would say that my suicide was never meant to be real—it was a cry for help. I never truly intended to die, I was stupid. A fake, a hot head, through and through. The lover of a good show. I wanted to do it for the spectacle, to make my father run to me, to make him say he's sorry, to see the pain on his face and have my last laugh. I wanted to hurt him the only way I could.

Tears well up and spill from under my eyelids into the coffin's darkness.

Turns out, it's not worth it. Turns out, I'm afraid to die. Turns out, it's death I ran from all along, balancing on the precipice of a dare, always one foot on the ground, never tipping so as to not upset my peculiar stance, never crossing the final line. Perhaps it's time I face it, for real. It's time I choose to stop running and stand for what I care about, what I lost. Stand for love. For love given freely, without asking for anything in return. Without fear of loss, without anger.

"Hunter," I say. "I love you."

"Mom, I love you."

"Papa..." I swallow. This one is hard. "I love you."

"Canosa," I begin, and can't finish.

She starts her deadly song. It rings clear, soars in one voice, amplified by her rage and hunger, reaching a tremulous crescendo. Five seconds is all it takes. Glass shatters, and with its brilliant tinkling, it relieves the pressure of anticipation into shouts and cries, first disjointed, then pulsing to a mortal rhythm. Souls whisk into oblivion amidst the forming fog. I can hear them leave their bodies, one by one. Hear bodies drop. Canosa is on a rampage. She grabs a victim, a man, I think, and shouts in his ear. He faints. She gobbles up his soul and moves on to the next. People cower, scream, ribbons of their souls escaping into her greedy animalistic mouth.

I decide to wait a few more seconds, wait for Papa to grab his sonic guns and blast her into nothing. He doesn't do it, confirming that this merciless butchery was part of his plan all along.

I'm done playing dead.

I hit the casket's lid with a terrible force and make a deep dent in it. The entire thing, all of its two hundred something pounds of steel, jumps up perhaps half of an inch and drops down with a dull thud. This produces more cries of terror from people.

The song abruptly stops.

"Make one more move, silly girl, and I will sink this boat, to have your father drown. Do you want to lose the last member of your family?" Canosa hisses into the gap under the lid, sweet as a charm.

I don't answer.

"No? Good. Then lay still and enjoy the show."

I want to scream, but not to her. I want to yell to Papa.

Please, don't do this! I know you struck a bargain with her and you're not going to stop her. If this is the payment for her to stay away, it's a terrible price to pay for your cowardice! You have to strike her, kick her out your life, once and for all!

Canosa's song turns to a throb of a single living being, an awful choir, as if a conductor directs a handful of tenors to contrast with the sopranos and the altos of the victims, creating an accompaniment to the feast, accented by cracks of thunder and rolling flashes of brilliant lightning. They part the dimness of my enclosure for a meager fraction of a second and disappear.

More rumbling. More rain. More death.

I boil with panic, unable to move, terrified of Canosa killing Papa, yet unable to lie still amidst this carnage of hired funeral attendees. There are kids. There are a few kids. I have to save them.

One more soul pops with a sickening splatter in the air. The song rises to a shrill, with a snap and cackling laughter. The sinister happiness of my kind, the Siren of Canosa, full to the brim, on her way to satisfaction at last. She's not done yet, there are about a dozen people still left alive on the boat.

A little girl cries, the one who asked her mom if my father was late. She runs up and clutches the casket's edge, her heart beating a million times a minute. Canosa jumps at her. That does it. I can't control myself anymore and let go.

"Noooooo!" I holler. I tense and smash my head, elbows, and knees outward, breaking the steel enclosure apart like an exploded bomb. Pieces of steel fly around me and settle on the floor, shreds of nude crepe float up—as if torn wings of some otherworldly creature—and slowly circle to rest.

I sit up amidst expensive epitaphic remnants.

There is momentary silence sprinkled with a layer of settling dust, pulsing with a frightened soul concerto. I'm surrounded with the chill of shock. Shock of the ocean flattening out to a calm reflecting surface. Shock of the sky going limpid. Shock on the little girl's face, standing a few feet to the right of me, miraculously unscathed, crouching between the clothed platform and the railing of the boat's tail. Shock on the faces of those who are still alive and not splayed on the aft deck in front of me, motionless. Shock on Canosa's face, her body rigid in her black dress, her hands using the edge of my platform for support as she turns her head back toward me. Shock on my father's face.

He stands at the far end of the deck, his back to the entrance into the salon, right by the teak access door, hands in his pockets. Shock has yanked him out of nonchalant watching of the chaos unfolding in front of him, as if it's nothing more than a Bosch painting; the one I had to study in art, a slimy grim depiction of hell, hanging in some museum in Italy. He acts as if he is on vacation, staring it down, bored out of his mind. Seeing bodies of dying people as images painted onto the canvas of his curiosity.

He's hiding something.

His face shifts like a film of water.

Time ceases to exist, and a second of quiet seems to stretch into an eternity.

Across the distance of thirty feet, bypassing frozen grimaces of terror, I look deeply inside his eyes and there I see the weak old man I glimpsed this morning, sorry and unhappy and scared. I look deeper, wade past years, stir aside entire generations, and there I find him, in the deepest corner of his burning soul, a little boy who doesn't know how to escape his desolation except to play in an imaginary world. He doesn't know how to make himself feel better, he is confused. He inflicts pain on others because it relieves his own hopeless pressure. By witnessing the suffering of others, he's shedding it, seeing it in multiple faces like in mirrors. His mother must have hurt him when he was very little, not once, not twice, but many times, and he learned to be numb and to hate women. This, this open participation in an execution, helps him unravel.

Helps him live.

I am his mirror. I get it. My bubble of hate bursts, my anguish evaporates in a fraction of a second. I relate to my own father fully. He's just a scared little thing. Like me. Like all of us. He's simply trying to survive, the only way he knows how.

"One minute of fantasy is better than nothing. Right, Papa? Is that why you're doing this? Is it?" I say. Only a few seagull shrieks and the drone of the ocean answer me.

Something is holding the crowd from erupting into yelling and screaming and panicking, holding it back. The weather agrees, and turns from foul to astoundingly still. All attention is on me.

I wipe my face from the dust and speed into my past, into a time when I wanted to sing so badly that I went to choir practice every day and worked myself to a sore throat. After months of vigorous practice, I invited Papa to my first performance, but he never came. I thought he forgot, I thought he didn't care. I wanted to sing as beautifully as my mother. Maybe then, I thought, I'd be able to sing him out of his constant anger. If only for one minute, I'd be able to make him happy, make him smile. He never smiled. I mean, of course he stretched his lips into a parody of a smile, to be polite, but it never felt genuine; it never was one of those shining expressions of happiness.

Now I understand why.

I want to reach out and hold him in my arms, tell him it will be okay. Tell him that no matter what he suffered, or who did it to him, there is still love all around him and all he needs to do is simply allow others to give it to him. Allow me to love him and to stop pushing me away. I realize I've been chasing the wrong goal. I wanted him to give me love, I demanded it. But love doesn't work that way. It only works if it's given freely, without asking for anything in return.

Love.

Love is so many little things. Love is offering your last water to the one dying of thirst, when you haven't had a drink for a week. Love is giving a warm bath to the one clad in filth, when you haven't had a chance to wash for a month. Love is the warming embrace of someone who is frozen in hate, like my father, even if it means cutting out my heart and placing it in his hands, watching him thaw as I myself wither into nothing.

The Greeks were right in their mythology. This is how it works. A true siren sings out of love. She dies if her song falls on deaf ears, and the one she intended to charm moves along, unperturbed, ignorant, oblivious. Because virtually nobody can resist a song of true love, that is why it's so hard to murder a siren. I was afraid to die, and singing to my father was my attempt as a newborn siren to make him cease to exist. I sang to kill him. I sang out of my anger, hurt, and hate. That was my mistake.

I needed to sing from a place of love.

"Papa? I forgive you," I say quietly, and by the sudden widening of his pupils, I know that he heard me. I slide down from the platform to stand.

"Mommy! Mommy! She's alive! The dead girl is alive!" The little girl screams behind me, waking everyone from their mesmerized slumber.

At this point, the time bubble pops and chaos returns to its boiling point.