Cry of the Sea (11 page)

“We’re going to come in there with you,” I
told her. I didn’t think she could understand my words, but she
seemed soothed by my talking to her. I climbed up the ladder again
with my face and head still exposed, talking the whole time. “See
what we’re doing? We’re coming up here and then we’re going to get
inside. Watch Carter. He’s at the top.”

Carter put his mouthpiece in, stepped over
the top of the tank and slipped into the water up to his chest,
holding on to the top of the tank to keep his head above water. The
mermaid instantly backed away from him. Her eyes widened in alarm,
with her arms out in front of her warning him to keep at a
distance.

I leaned way over to the side of the ladder,
to make sure she could see me. I kept smiling and talking. “It’s
okay. That’s Carter. You met him this morning, too. Watch me put my
mask on.” With my left foot on the ladder on the outside of the
tank and my right foot on the ladder inside the tank, I balanced
and used my hands to put my hood and mask back on. I made sure she
was looking at me the whole time, and Carter stayed very still.
“See?” I said. “It’s still me.” I put the mouthpiece in my mouth
and finished getting into the tank.

The mermaid continued to shy away from us,
waving her arms and tail to keep us from getting too close. Carter
and I remained still for a long time, patiently waiting for her to
realize we were not there to harm her. I couldn’t talk once I got
under the water, so I couldn’t use my voice anymore to soothe her.
I just hoped she understood that we were there as her friends.

Looking right at her, I concentrated all my
thoughts toward her.
Shhhh. It’s okay. We’re your friends. We
want to help you get the sticky stuff off.

After a few minutes, the mermaid stilled. I
swear I heard in my mind a voice other than my own. The sound of it
was a soothing acceptance of what was going on. It wasn’t a word
like “okay”, but I understood it as though it was a word, and I
knew it came from her.

The bubbles coming out of the oxygen tanks
caught her attention and her eyes followed them as they drifted
upward. Her webbed fingers flickered as though she wanted to touch
them. I nodded at her and swiped at some of the bubbles coming out
of Carter’s tank, making them scatter. This made the mermaid lean
in close, and when I nodded again, she swam over to us and did the
same thing. Soon she was swimming above us, swishing her hands
through the bubbles and trying to catch them. For the first time, I
saw the creature smile.

The mermaid had teeth, I noticed, very short
and flat teeth. No incisors for biting. No extra-large molars for
chomping. She probably didn’t eat meat. With teeth like that, she
might eat only sea vegetation or maybe even plankton. The smile was
pretty. The white teeth sparkled beneath her silver-blue lips. She
even had dimples.

While the mermaid was distracted by the
bubbles Carter reached out a hand to touch her tailfin. She pulled
her body away fiercely and headed back to her safe side of the
tank. I looked at Carter and shrugged. How could we get her to let
us touch her? He tapped his head, a signal that he had an idea.

Tenderly, he took my hand in his own. A
tingle went straight up my arm and made me slightly dizzy. If we
hadn’t been in a tank of water, I would have thought he might be
lifting it for a kiss like in those movies based on Jane Austen
books. However, instead of kissing me, he held my hand with one of
his and used the other to pull a terrycloth rag out of the pack
around his chest. Ever so gently and slowly, he started moving the
cloth back and forth across my hand and lower arm. We watched the
mermaid’s reactions carefully all the while. Gradually, she got
closer and closer to us to see what we were doing. I was careful
not to act nervous. I even smiled, nodded, and hummed to convey to
the mermaid that this cloth felt good on my hand.

Timidly, the mermaid stuck out her hand. The
webbing between her fingers was pronounced, but so was the clotting
of oil. Carter let go of me and took the mermaid’s hand as sweetly
as he could manage. He lowered the cloth to her hand and pressed it
to her hand so that it wouldn’t hurt. The mermaid accepted the
sensation and let him continue to dab at her hand.

I knew that Carter would have to rub harder
than that to remove the oil, and she might not like that. I thought
it would be a problem, but he was very patient and took his time
with her. He shifted from dabbing to a soft rubbing with the cloth.
I took out a cloth and copied what he did to mermaid’s other hand
and forearm. The mermaid seemed to like the feeling. She even
squirmed and giggled a bit as though it tickled.

Then, as gradually as possible, we both
increased the pressure of the cleaning so that the mermaid would
accept the touch. It worked. She even waited eagerly when we had to
throw the oily cloths over the top of the tank and pull out clean
ones from Carter’s pack. Although it took nearly an hour, we
finally removed a fair amount of the oil from the mermaid’s skin.
The luster of her silver skin returned, and she shimmered as she
moved.

I had to take extra time around her face and
jawline, because the oil was thicker there. As I dabbed the cloth
around her neck, the strange bumps that circled her neck began to
loosen. It frightened me at first, but as the oil wiped away I
realized that the bumps weren’t part of her. They were shells,
strung together as a necklace. Once free, she put up her webbed
fingers and rubbed her neck and smiled at me with an expression
that made me feel that she was both glad that the necklace wasn’t
strangling her any longer and pleased that it hadn’t broken. I
wondered where she had gotten a necklace like that, and how she had
managed to put it on.

Time was running out for our oxygen tanks, so
we threw our last cloths over the tank and moved to the ladder to
climb out. The mermaid followed right behind me and actually held
onto the bars of the ladder as if she would climb up behind me.
When I got to the top, she let go and popped her head out of the
water for a second to watch me straddle the tank and get completely
free of the water. Needing to breathe, she dove back under. I
joined Carter on the floor, and we removed our masks. As he
gathered up the cloths lying on the floor, I took one last look at
the mermaid by slipping between the tarp and the glass.

She was right there, waiting for me, fondly
touching the glass of the aquarium in front of me. She already
seemed to be missing our presence in the tank with her.

“Carter, look,” I said.

I moved over and let him slip behind the tarp
to stand next to me. The joy in his eyes was unmistakable.

“Amazing,” he said.

It was warm and cozy together under that
canvas tarp. It reminded me of the forts Haley and I used to build
under our kitchen table, except I never felt tingles all over my
skin when I got under there with her. Carter’s arm pressed against
mine. My heart raced.

“Wow,” I agreed with him. “That was so
incredible. Have you ever felt anything like that before?”

There was this fraction of a second when he
turned his face to me, but then he corrected himself to look in the
tank again. He shifted his weight to his other foot, and broke the
connection between our arms. “I had to get in a tank with a dolphin
once. That was really cool, but this tops it by a mile.”

I smiled at the mermaid, who smiled back at
me. “Do you think we should feed her something? She might be
hungry.”

Carter nodded. “I was thinking she’s probably
a vegetarian.”

“I thought so too, because of her teeth.”

Carter left me under the tarp and headed for
some cabinets at the far end of the examining tables. I pulled back
the tarp and watched him pull out a plastic bucket. “This might do
the trick.” He hauled the bucket up the ladder. Reaching into the
bucket he pulled out a wad of wet seaweed. “Let’s see if she likes
this.”

He dropped some of it into the tank. The
mermaid glanced up at it, seemed to smell it with her flat nose,
and swam up toward it. Grabbing a piece with her fingers, she put
it to her mouth and sucked on it. She grimaced and shook her
head.

“I don’t think she likes it,” I said.

But she ate it. Carter dropped some more in
for her. “She may not like the taste, but she knows it’s good for
her. I’ll talk to Dr. Schneider about it and see if he has some
better ideas for her diet.” Carter straightened the tarp over the
aquarium and then joined me at the stools around the closest
table.

“You’re good at this stuff,” I said. “Are you
learning it at school?”

“Some of it,” Carter said. “Most of it I
learn by doing.”

“What’s your major?” I asked.

Carter hesitated. “For the moment it’s
Biology. They don’t have a specific Marine Biology major at
Washington. I’ll probably go somewhere else for my Masters.”

“You’re going all the way for a Masters?”
Ugh. I didn’t want to suffer through that much education. I wanted
to get it over with and start working.

“They say you have to have a Masters to have
a real career anymore. A Bachelor’s isn’t enough.” He smiled and
shrugged. “Unless being an assistant is all you want.”

Darnit! I guess this means I will have to do
that much college. How depressing.

“I might even go for PhD. Then I could be the
one to head up a Marine Biology department at Washington. Wouldn’t
that be great?”

I sneered and shook my head. “Actually, that
doesn’t sound great to me at all. I have no interest in teaching.
What I want is to be in the water with the animals. Helping them.
Healing them. I want more experiences like the one we just had with
that mermaid. I want to fill my life with successes, not teach
about the successes of other people.”

Carter raised an eyebrow. “I guess that’s a
way to look at it.” Then he walked away from me and tossed the wet
cloths in a basket next to the cabinets. He pulled a couple fresh
towels out of the cabinets and handed one to me while using the
other to dry his hair.

“Come on,” I said, patting my face with the
towel. “You can’t tell me that what we just did wasn’t something
you’d like to spend your life doing. You were great with her.”

“Thanks,” he said. “You too. You really have
a knack for it.” But apparently that was all he had to say about
that, because he completely changed the subject by asking, “You
decided where you’re going to school next year?”

Nice way to deflect the focus.

“I was thinking about San Diego,” I
answered.

“Good school,” he said. “Far away
though.”

“That’s one of the benefits.”

Carter shrugged and turned away from me at
that point. “I guess,” he said distantly as he popped his towel
into the basket and closed the cabinet doors. From all appearances,
he was done with this conversation.

Did I say something wrong? Why would he care
where I went to school? Did he have a thing against San Diego?

All of a sudden my face began to heat up. Did
I just totally blow it with him? Here he had been going on about
how great Washington was and how he wanted to stay here forever and
teach at the college and all that. And I had to go and blabber
about how much I couldn’t wait to ditch this place. I knew at that
instant Carter would never ask me out. What was the point of
starting something up with a girl who was just going to leave once
summer arrived?

“Carter, I...” But I didn’t know what to say
or how to take it back. Carter didn’t even look at me when I said
his name.

“Hey kids.”

The double doors banged open, bringing me out
of my misery. Dad entered still wearing his rubber boots with sand
plastered to them. The sun had darkened his face, and his stringy
hair was pulled back in a tail behind his neck. He looked worn
out.

“Things done at the beach, Dad?” I asked.

He groaned. “It’s a mess, but the worst of it
has been taken care of.”

“They didn’t bring nearly as many animals
here as I expected today,” Carter told him.

Dad shook his head. “The initial spill
poisoned anything close to it. Just about all of those creatures
died. Over the next few days you’ll see more that might actually be
saved.” He brushed my wet hair back over my ears then edged past me
and peeled back enough of the tarp to get a peek at the mermaid.
“How’s she doing? Any better?”

“A lot better,” I said. “Carter just fed
her.”

Carter held up the bucket. “I’m still trying
to figure out what she likes. Kelp wasn’t a big hit.” He put the
bucket back into the cabinet. “Can’t say I blame her. I only like
seaweed when it’s wrapped around sushi.”

That almost brought a smile to my dad’s weary
face. Leaning against the glass, Dad took off his boots and rubbed
his smelly feet. “Is Dr. Schneider in?”

“He’s in his office,” Carter said. “He’s been
studying books and Internet sites all afternoon for some kind of
clue to her existence. He wants to link her to some other existing
animal. You know, as a product of evolution.”

“I don’t think he’ll find what he’s looking
for,” Dad said, turning his attention back to the mermaid in the
tank. “At least not in any science-related site. People have been
talking about mermaids for thousands of years. They are scattered
throughout all the mythology of the world. Why would they be in so
many stories if they never existed until now?”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. I hated
it when he tried passing mythology on like some kind of hidden
truth. “Everyone knows that the original conceptions of mermaids
were based on sightings of dolphins, porpoises, and manatees.
People didn’t know what they were. There’s even that Irish legend
about the woman who is a seal when she’s in the water and a human
on the sand. People gave human attributes to these sea creatures
that behaved in intelligent ways. Over time those attributes added
up to be the mermaid legends.”