The Mermaid's Secret (16 page)

I don't even realize how angry I am until I look down and see that my hands are shaking. I feel adrenaline coursing through me. I think about Trip Sinclair and the apologies that will never come. If I stay here any longer, there's no telling what I will do—or rather more accurately, what the animal in me will attack. A breeze blows in and I catch the briny scent of the sea, the wild, green stench of seaweed and sea life decomposing on the shore. I need to get out of here.

But first I swear to myself that I will make Trip pay for what he did. I'm not like Matthew; I can't leave the past behind.

 

F
OURTEEN

My penance to Harold continues the rest of the week aboard the
Mack King
, with its piddly tips and buckets of oily mackerels. To make matters worse, two back-to-back hurricane systems have kicked up in the Caribbean this week, sending high seas all the way up the East Coast, which means we're averaging about five chunk blowers on every trip. Only a handful of them make it to the rail in time. I spend more time mopping up puke than flipping burgers.

Being kept away from Matthew is the worst part of my punishment. I want to ask him about his visit with Alice and hear every detail of his life story. I want to talk about the past and the future, and figure out what a relationship with Matthew could be like. When I close my eyes at night, I think about his biceps and his smile, and the way his eyes sparkle when he calls me Creary.

I find myself thinking about him all the time, anticipating when I'll see him next. Each morning I search the docks for him before my boat heads west and his heads east. And I wonder if he does the same for me.

The one good thing about working on the
Mack King
is that the day ends at two o'clock, and I can go surfing.

*   *   *

All this obsessing over a boy has me feeling a bit out of my skill set. I need an expert. Luckily Sammy is lying on the couch watching a cheesy romance when I get to the apartment.

“What do you think of Matthew Weatherby?” I ask, lifting her feet onto my lap to steal a spot on the couch.

“Gorgeous,” she responds immediately. She sits up. “Deep, too. Like there's more to him than just beer and fishing.”

“He visits the nursing home every week,” I say.

She sits up. “I think I just had an orgasm.”

“You're demented.”

“Seriously, I'd do him in a second. If I weren't dating Spencer, of course. Youngest commercial captain on Ne'Hwas. Island legend. And he's got that quiet, smoldering, captain thing going on. Like he's about to rip his shirt off any minute and reveal a perfectly ripped six-pack.” A smile breaks across her face.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“So what do
you
think of Matthew Weatherby?”

“I've always thought of him as a big brother,” I say.

“Erase that image from your mind.”

“He's only here for the summer. What's the point of getting into a relationship if he's just going to leave and head back down south?”

“The point is … he's hot. He's here now. And you need to get laid.”

I can always count on Sammy to say it like it is.

“Thanks for your insights,” I say.

“Are you going to do him?”

“Not today,” I say, although I am kind of wondering the same thing about the future.

*   *   *

Once Sammy leaves for work, I decide to go surfing, but this time I don't tell her where I'm going. She doesn't need to worry about me. Besides, who's to say that I'll be able to go back to mermaidville again? Maybe the magic is gone. Maybe I'll chicken out. Why would anyone want to go into a world where so many things want to eat you?

Just in case the portal is there, and just in case I decide to go through it again, I dig through my old scuba gear and grab a dive knife. If I decide to go, I'll be prepared.

It's a beautiful day and there are a few people climbing the rocks at Tutatquin Point as I paddle out through the boneyard. They're tourists, so they won't think anything of a surfer going into unsurfable waters. They won't question why I have a dive knife strapped around my arm. They won't even blink when they see me paddling through a maze of jagged rocks and eddies even though there's a perfectly good surfing beach just a mile away.

To be safe, I wait it out once I'm past the break. They'll lose interest. Surfing is an exciting spectator sport. But watching surfers miss wave after wave after wave gets boring pretty fast. As an hour goes by, the tourists leave, the tide comes in, and the waves build.

When the last group leaves the rocks and heads back into the pines, I paddle for a wave.

I'm not afraid anymore. I've never had such an easy time catching and taking the drop on an overhead wave. My confidence is back. I'm stronger, more agile. I suspect it's a lingering side effect of the first two times I've gone through the barrel. Like one of those fitness regimens they advertise on TV that promise a “new you” in thirty days. That, but on speed.

Paddling is easy, and right away I feel the rush of the wave beneath me. In one swift move I pop to my feet and take the drop. The sheer face of the wave spreads out in front of me. I carve a bottom turn and get into the pocket. I hope the wave will transform me again. I hope I'll get another chance to enter that magical realm. Despite the dangers—the crippling hunger, the pitch blackness of night, the shark—I need to be out there again. Something in me feels like “out there” is where I belong. “Out there” is better, more real, more like home to me than my life on land.

The wave curls around me, and I'm inside the barrel.

I ride it all the way over the sandbar and past the boneyard to shore, every bit as impossibly as the last two times it happened. It's a good thing no one is on the shore when I feel that first gasping breath, that sensation of drowning on land. No one sees me stash my board behind a thick stand of pines, run into the ocean, and disappear beneath the waves.

*   *   *

My tail seems even longer this time, my movements more graceful. I stop and listen for the vibrations, subtle shifts in electrical fields, infinitesimal sounds and smells that drift on the current, letting me know if predators are nearby.

My eyesight is a little better, too. Things are only blurry in the distance. Up close, I can see the ridges of sand swept north to south by the long reach of the Atlantic currents. I can make out the fine detail in my scales, right down to the spectrum of colors they capture. Greens and blues deep underneath, reds and purples on the shimmery surface. My other senses are more finely tuned, as well. A fluttering down my sides tells me a school of mackerel is nearby. I can taste the distress of an injured lobster in a trap. I can hear the difference between a diving bird like a cormorant and a jumping fish like a salmon.

And sharks, well, they're the loudest silence in the ocean. I can feel their absence.
She's
not near.

I swim by Smith's Point and peek above the soft waves at the mansions situated regally above the ridge. Somewhere up there, Trip Sinclair is playing tennis is his white whites, drinking expensive wine, wooing women, and getting away with murder. A guy like that wouldn't last five minutes in the wild sea. Money buys you nothing out here.

I decide to find food right away. Swimming through miles of open ocean burns through more calories than anything in my human life, and I don't want to run out of energy again.

I swim east, toward open Atlantic, then parallel to land. There are lobsters in traps all along the coastline, marked with bright buoys on the surface. I follow the vibrations to a trap with two lobsters in the interior compartment. Lobster traps haven't changed much in the last hundred years. All that keeps them in the trap is a funnel-shaped net that's easy to enter and hard to exit. Carefully, I reach in and pull one out. It's as easy as robbing a candy store. God knows I had my share of shoplifting experiences growing up. Small things. Gum. Rocky candy from the counter at the grocery store. A CD from the used-record store. But this doesn't feel like stealing. This is survival, and these traps are in my world, not the world of men.

Since it's molting season, the lobsters have soft shells, which makes them easy to slit apart with my knife. The meat is tender and delicious and I wonder why they never serve lobster raw like they do tuna or salmon.

I eat both lobsters and head to the next trap. I plunder a few more traps until I'm stuffed.

I'm about to head home, when, in the distance, I hear singing. It gets louder and closer, until a pod of dolphins emerges out of the blue.

At first it's their sound that mesmerizes me. Each dolphin has a distinct voice with a range of noises. There are high-pitched squeals, clicks, whistles, calls, grunts. Some of the voices are sweet and childlike, some are relaxing, some insist on being heard. Some sound like words, others like emotions.

The dolphins swirl around me and nudge me with their fins. I don't know what aggressive behavior in dolphins looks like, but these guys seem like they just want to play. They blow bubbles at me. They bob their heads. One of them lets me pet her smooth skin and presses her snout into my hand. They are the friendliest, most fantastic creatures I've ever seen in my life.

Nothing Professor Sherwood ever taught me could prepare me for what happens next. They each introduce themselves to me, their individual names specific and unique.

I try to tell them my name. “Jess.” But it comes out sounding muffled and ugly, and this makes the dolphins laugh. They try to repeat my sound. It almost sounds human, but coming from them, it's more musical than any noise I could make.

They swim around me, watching me, chatting. Frolicking.

Another pair of dolphins joins us, and when they get closer, I can't believe what I see.

They each have a bikini top in their mouth. One yellow, one red, just like the ones that have disappeared during my transformations from human to mermaid. Something tells me these dolphins are frequent visitors to Tutatquin Point.

When the dolphin holding my yellow top swims up to me, I try to grab it, but the dolphin darts away. The dolphin with my red top takes his place. He swims inches from me, then dives away before I can grab my bikini. The little rascals come back again, teasing me with my missing bikini tops, getting close to me but never close enough.

Since they enjoy the game of keep-away so much, I play along, grabbing for my bikinis as they pass from dolphin to dolphin.

The other dolphins find this funny and laugh hysterically. They take turns doing corkscrews through the air and zipping past me. They dance pirouettes around me, wave their pectoral fins, swim upside down.

I get the feeling that I'm being tested. They wanted to see what kind of swimmer I am, so we dive down and I swim in the middle of their group. They speed up; I speed up. They slow down; I slow down. They swim fast and close together, clicking and squeaking, but never colliding. We resurface and I do my best to match their jumps and dives and twirls, although I'm not nearly as graceful as them.

I marvel at their physical skill, their complexities, their total synchronicity with one another. I follow them for a while, until the dolphins finally slow down. All at once, they swim away, a school of sardines off in the distance calling them to hunt.

They are gone as suddenly as they appeared, and I'm all alone.

As I swim east, back toward Ne'Hwas, the bottom suddenly plummets over a deepwater canyon and I realize I must actually be heading west. I hang on to the edge of the underwater cliff, my hair fluttering behind. Below me, hundreds of pollock congregate in a huge school. They look like birds gliding on drafts of wind. I think about how stoked Matthew would be to discover a hot spot like this.

I decide I'll find a way to lead him here. My gift to him. I just need a land bearing.

As I swim to the surface to find triangulation points on land, a terrible cry stops me. It sends a wave of grief through me. Immediately, I know it's a humpback. I don't know how I know. It's that primal animal brain in my primal fish body. But it's unmistakable. The sound of the humpback is sharper than the sound of pilot whales, or sperm whales, or right whales. It's got more depth than any human language. It's filled with emotion.

And it's heartrending.

I stay under and follow the sound to a shallow ledge. The massive gray shape of the whale looms in the hazy water. Its head is pointed downward, its white fins stark against the blue water. It rolls in slow circles as it groans a melancholy song. As I get closer, I see what all the fuss is about.

A baby humpback is pinned to the sand, trapped underneath an enormous fishing net. The animal is leaning on its side. It thrashes its tail, but the net is heavy and thick and unmoving. I understand instantly that the moaning whale is the mother. Her baby is in danger.

But it's not just something I see with my eyes.

I can feel her despair like a deep pain in my chest, in my heart. The pain immobilizes me. I understand something else about this creature: She makes no distinction between her baby and herself. There is no “I.” There is only “we.”

The smell in the water is acrid. It smells like despair.

I look around. Larger whales circle nearby. They're males. From the distinctive stench of hunger in the water, I can tell they want to feed. They aren't as connected to the baby as the mother is. They want to feed and mate. Typical men.

But the mother is singular in her purpose. I feel her desperation, and without even thinking, I swim toward her. As I get close, her massive eyes land on me. With a wild grunt, she charges at me. Thirty-five tons of mama bear heading my way.

I try to communicate with her.
I can help.

But she is too distraught to communicate.

I keep swimming. She keeps charging.