Cry of the Sea (24 page)

The silver tail flapped. It flapped again
much weaker than before. And then it was still. Nothing moved out
there but the buoy bobbing along the surface. For a moment it was
strangely silent on the beach, and then a small murmuring began in
the crowd as they began to conjure up bleak ideas of what was
happening out there.

I tried to tune the voices out. I didn’t want
to hear them say the mermaid was dead, and worse, that it had
dragged my dad and Carter down with it. I searched the shore for my
mom. She had broken through and was in the front of the crowd. She
stood there with her hands over her gaping mouth, staring toward
the spot where my dad should have been rising up for a breath any
moment. I watched her instead of the water. I couldn’t bear to
watch the water, and I knew her face would tell me what I needed to
know. Her eyes grew wide. Her fingers stretched up past her nose
and cheeks as though they wanted to cover her eyes but she wouldn’t
let them. Mom’s head shook slowly, denying what she was seeing.

My brain began to count. 3, 4... 7, 8... They
should be up by now. I dared to peek.

The two older guys finally got to the buoy.
They dove into the water like they saw something and thought they
could help. I hoped they weren’t too late. I looked back at my mom.
A million wrinkles crossed her brow.

Then the crowd uttered a collective,
“Oh!!!”

My mom’s hands had moved to the sides of her
head, fingers destroying her perfect hair. She was crying, but I
could detect a smile under it. That was all I needed. I spun around
to see the heads of all four men above the water. Two were on one
side of the creature and two on the other.

And then I gulped for my own breath, suddenly
aware that I’d been holding it probably as long as they had.

Together, the men swam back to shore. As they
got closer we began to see the outline of what they were
carrying.

“That’s not a mermaid!” some lady shrieked
from the crowd.

“What is it?” people cried out, desperate to
know.

I plodded a little deeper into the water to
get a better look. From what I could see, it was a creature about
four feet long and relatively thin. Its head had a high, round
forehead, and two flippers stuck out on both sides of the upper
torso. I bit my lip to keep from laughing and called back to the
onlookers, “It’s a finless porpoise.” The missing dorsal fin on
this breed of porpoise made its body long and slender, easily
mistaken for a mermaid tale at a distance.

The chorus of groans and jeers behind me was
terrifically loud. You’d think I just told them they’d lost the
lottery. They yelled things about how we’d played a trick on them
and were just a bunch of fakes and liars.

I shrugged at all of them and said only loud
enough for Gary and Ted to hear, “I haven’t lied about anything. A
finless porpoise along our shore is almost as rare a sighting as a
mermaid. If they knew that they’d still be snapping pictures.” The
boys, with soaking wet clothes and ruined hair, both gave me a look
like I was nuts and they waded back to the girls.

“You are so not worth this,” Ted said as he
passed me.

A few people from the mob stayed at the
water’s edge to see the porpoise—to make sure it wasn’t going to
turn out to be a mermaid after all, I guess. Most of them went back
to their towels and chairs to wait for another sighting. A handful
grabbed their stuff to leave, probably figuring that the whole
thing was a big waste of time.

Regina snapped her compact shut as I walked
out of the water. “Well, that didn’t turn out the way I hoped,” she
said, staying a few feet away from me so she wouldn’t get any
seawater on her as I shook my legs to loosen my wet jeans.

“Yeah,” Marlee agreed. “I really wanted to
see a mermaid.”

“So did everybody here, Marlee,” Ted said.
Then he turned to Regina. “Can we got get something to eat now? I
saw a doughnut shop when we drove through town.”

“No, silly,” Regina said, reshaping his hair
again as lovingly as she could. She worked her eyelashes and pouty
lips on him. He grinned wide. Did he really like that crap? “We’re
not done here yet. There’s more fun in store. Right, Junie?”

I winced.

Gary plopped down in the sand and put his
arms over his knees. “I still think this whole thing’s a fake. You
guys haven’t proven anything to me.”

Regina smacked him on the top of his head.
“You’re getting all sandy and are not going to be riding in my car
that way.”

“I’ll ride with Ted.”

I wandered away from them to wait for Dad and
Carter at the spot where it looked like they would be coming
ashore. Haley stepped up beside me.

“I’m glad your dad’s all right,” she said
quietly. “It got scary there for a minute.”

There she was—my old friend. I knew it was
only going to last for a moment, but it was nice to see her again.
I put my arm around her waist and dropped my head to her shoulder.
She wrapped her left arm around my shoulders and we stood like that
for the next couple minutes, until the men got close enough for me
to get to them and help tug the porpoise to shore.

It was a baby—very slender, only about four
feet long, with a deep blue-gray sheen to its skin that sparkled a
bit against the overcast sky. All four men dropped to their knees
as soon as they were out of the water. The two older volunteers
flopped to their backs.

“What can I do?” I asked. “Do you want me to
try to clean the oil out of its blowhole?”

“It’s too late,” Dad said. “He already
suffocated.” Dad caught Mom’s attention and beckoned her over.
“There’s nothing we can do for him now.”

Carter stood up and walked away from us, his
hands on his hips, his head back. I followed him.

“If I had just gotten here a couple minutes
sooner,” he grumbled. “Just a couple minutes, and we could’ve saved
him.”

“Carter, you didn’t know...”

He spun around. “I knew you were here,” he
said. “You were on the news this morning. The second I saw your
face I jumped in my car and headed over. But then on the radio one
of the reporters said that you told them Dr. Schneider was doing
experiments on the mermaids at his lab, so I thought I should go
there first. If I hadn’t, I would have been here sooner.”

“I didn’t tell them all that stuff about Dr.
Schneider. My mom did.”

I pointed at my mother who appeared to be
getting instructions from my father about how to share the facts
about the dead porpoise with the reporters behind her. I imagined
he was filling her in on what a rarity this particular animal was
and how the oil spill may very well have wiped out all the finless
porpoises on our coast. My dad is nothing if not very focused on
his goals. If Carter weren’t here, I’d probably be helping by
pulling up some extra details from Google on my phone that we could
throw at the press for extra sympathy. My dad knew deep down that
the press wouldn’t care about this porpoise, but he would convince
Mom to make this moment about the oil spill and not the
mermaid.

Carter shook his head at the two of them and
then gave me a half grin. I guess I hadn’t done anything to earn
one of his genuine golden grins yet. I longed for it, though.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll blame your mom then.” He nodded at the
porpoise. “Want to help me get this up to the truck and back to the
Center?”

He wanted my help! I almost chirped with
happiness, but I kept it under control. “Yes. Anything. I’d love to
help you... I mean, I really want to get out of here.” Well, I kind
of kept it under control, if you consider babbling like an idiot
some form of control.

I crouched down and wrapped my arms around
the tail. He lifted the head. The porpoise was heavier than it
looked, but nothing the two of us couldn’t handle. As we started
away, the two swimming volunteers got to their feet and asked if we
needed them anymore. We thanked them for everything they did.

“Check with my dad,” I told them. “I’m sure
he could use some help with what he’s doing, if you’re still
interested.”

They checked with each other through a
glance, and the older of the two rubbed the back of his neck. “Uh,
we really just went out there because we thought that thing was a
mermaid.”

Carter tugged me toward the ramp that led to
the parking lot to keep from saying something he shouldn’t. I said
thanks to the volunteers one more time and left it at that.

Haley chased after us. “June! Aren’t you
going to say good-bye or anything?”

Oh my gosh! I totally forgot she existed the
moment Carter showed up. Here, I’d been griping about what a lousy
friend she was, but I wasn’t any better.

“I’m so sorry, Haley,” I said. I gestured
with my shoulder because my hands were full of porpoise tail. “This
is Carter.”

Haley smiled and gave him an approving
once-over. “I thought you might be,” she said. She pointed at the
porpoise. “Where are you going? Don’t you need to be here for the
interviews and stuff?”

“We’re taking the porpoise back to the rescue
center,” I told her.

Haley’s eyes brightened and she hopped up and
down in the sand. “Really? Where the mermaids are being kept? Can I
go? Can I see them?”

Regina, Ted, and Marlee stepped up behind
her. “You’re going to see the mermaids? We’re totally going to be a
part of that.” Regina hit Ted to make him go fetch Gary from where
he still sat in the sand.

Carter began taking quite wide strides up the
ramp, and I had no choice but to try to keep up. It didn’t take
long before we were out of earshot of Regina’s crew. For a second
he craned his head back to look at me before focusing on where he
was going again. His forehead was so creased he could have passed
for 35. “Don’t they know?”

I felt a little sick to my stomach over the
way he said it, like I was some kind of jerk. “I haven’t really
talked to Haley much over the last couple days. And Regina’s kind
of the last person I’d tell anything to.”

“All of these interviews and the video on the
Internet, and you don’t bother to mention once that the mermaids
are missing? That’s kind of important,” he said. “Instead of having
people help us look for them, we’ve got a crowd of people filling
the parking lot at the Center, desperate to get inside and see
something that’s not there.”

“It’s that bad?” I asked. “I mean, I knew it
would get bad the moment my mom said that stuff about Dr.
Schneider, but it’s that bad already?”

“It’s only going to get worse,” Carter said.
“I didn’t even bother parking because I didn’t want all those
people bugging me and trying to push inside. I’m guessing Dr. S.
has the door locked so no one can get in there.” We got to the top
of the hill and Carter stopped and stared at the parking lot.
“Great.”

“What?”

“How are we going to get this thing to the
Center? Drape it across my back seat? Shove it in the trunk?”

I bit my lip before saying gently, “Well, it
is dead, Carter.”

He raised his eyebrows. “The smell will be in
there forever.” I stifled a laugh.

“What about my dad’s truck?” Carter nodded
and we took the porpoise over and dropped it in the bed. “I’ll get
the keys from Dad.”

As I dashed over to the ramp to head back
down to the beach, Regina and her club of popular dorks came over
the top.

“Oh! Were you coming back for us?” Regina
asked, her eyebrow cocked high enough to let me know she was fully
aware that I was not. “How sweet of you.” She put out her arm and
stopped me. Haley and her friends blocked my way.

“I need to get to my dad,” I told them. “I
need his keys to the truck.”

“Ted’s got a truck,” Regina said. She elbowed
Ted in the ribs, and he nodded.

“Uh, yeah. It’s over there.” He pointed at
his Dodge pickup in the lot. Then he looked at Carter with his arms
wrapped around the torso of the slick porpoise and the tail
dragging on the ground. “You want me to help you with that
thing?”

Carter glanced at me, shook his head slightly
in defeat and then waved Ted over. The two of them hauled the
porpoise into the bed of Ted’s truck.

“Damn, that stinks,” Ted said, wiping his
hands on his jeans.

Carter patted his stinky hands on Ted’s back.
“It’ll take a few washes to get it out of your clothes. Sorry,
man.” He walked away and signaled for me to come with him. Ted
picked at the shoulder of his shirt and tried to sniff how bad the
odor was while he made his way to the driver’s side of his truck.
Gary, with sand still stuck to the back of his pants, caught up to
him, while the girls all went to Regina’s car.

“We’ll follow you,” Regina said before
sitting down and closing her door.

Once we got into his car, Carter leaned close
to me and said, “I could lose her in a second and let them drive
around the rest of the morning with that dead porpoise. Can I?
Please?” I took in his devilish grin and bright blue eyes. I
absolutely would love to find a way to rid myself of the Student
Council posse and have some time alone with Carter. But I wriggled
my nose at him and sighed as my only response. Carter straightened
up and put his hands on the wheel. “Oh, fine. I’ll be good.” He
started the engine and led the pack away.

I took his joking as an invitation. “So,
you’re not mad at me anymore?”

He shrugged. “Oh, I wasn’t really mad at you.
Just disappointed.”

“I said some stupid things last time we were
together...”

“Let me put it this way,” he said,
interrupting me. “I think you’re right about not wanting to follow
in your parents’ footsteps. Go to San Diego. Become a Marine
Biologist like you want. You know why?”

I’m not sure I wanted to hear the answer. Was
it because he hated me? He didn’t want me around? I got on his
nerves?

“Why?” I said through the knot in my
throat.