The Mermaid's Secret (33 page)

I dive again.

My human sickness is gone, replaced with animal strength and speed. My legs are not wobbly and weak. I don't feel pain. The shackles of fever from the last twenty-four hours have fallen away and something else in me roars to life. Like a majestic white shark, I swim beneath the boats, hunting for the black hull of
Sea Nymphe
.

These world-class racing yachts are no match for my speed. I pass two more boats, until I see the black hull leading the pack.

I swim up to it and peek above the surface in the trough of a wave. The water is a million shades of black and gray, mirroring the stormy sky. The words
Sea Nymphe
in gold cross the transom directly in front of me. The boat leans on its side. The men on deck work the winches. Vibrations run up and down my spine, sensing the stress of wind against canvas, halyards clanging on metal. The boom of the mainsail stretches across the width of the boat. A broad reach.

I can see him from behind. Trip Sinclair is standing at the big chrome wheel on the stern, commanding his boat. Enjoying his life. Winning his race. Winning everything. Getting away with murder.

Why does he get to live? Where is the justice in that? I let the rage rise up into my animal brain.

I hear Matthew's voice: “
Let it go, Creary.
” I hear Sheriff's voice: “
Don't do anything stupid.
”

And I push the voices away. I let my body do what it wants to do.

Attack.

The boat slows down as the crew prepares to tack. In teams of two, they crank the winches, man the lines, attend the sails. Like a hive of ants, everyone is busy with their task. The boat heels to starboard. All eyes are ahead; no one is looking astern. Now is my chance.

As the
Sea Nymphe
makes a hard turn, I speed up staying just below the surface. When I'm an arm's length away, I kick hard to catapult out of the water. I fly through the air and land with a thud against the sleek transom.

The yacht's high-tech design leaves nothing in the way of a barrier between the driver and the stern rail. All I need to do is grab him. I get one hand around his ankle, then the other. Startled, he looks behind and a split second later I pull him down.

In a heap, we roll off the transom. It happens so fast, no one notices. All hands are on deck.

Trip hits the water a second after me.

Clenching his ankles in my fist, I dive down.

He's wearing a thin flotation vest over his rain jacket—one of those high-tech gadgets that's more buoyant than it looks. He slips out of my hand and springs back up to the surface like a fishing bobber.

He claws at the surface, arms flailing. He tries to yell for help, but the
Sea Nymphe
sails ahead. A few seconds later, the cry “Man overboard!” sends the boat into a frenzy. In the water, I can hear every little sound. The mainsail is lowered. Someone takes the wheel. A voice hails an S.O.S. on the radio.

I break the surface next to him and quickly unbuckle his life vest. His eyes dart wildly, blind with panic. I yank the vest off him and toss it out of reach. Without it, he's mine.

I get him in a bear hug and dive under, putting as much distance between us and the
Sea Nymphe
as I can. Aware that every passing second is a cruel mix of panic and agony for Trip.

Just like it must have been for Kay as she crashed into the rocks of Tutatquin Point, wondering why she had ever trusted this man.

Under water, Trip tries to break free. His motions are clumsy. I can feel the erratic currents of his struggling body down my sides, in my spine. His vibrations mark him as easy prey—the type sharks go for. Thinning the herd. Keeping the balance in the ocean. Helping the species survive.

I let Trip go. He kicks to the surface, takes a breath, and I pull him down again. I swim him out to the open Atlantic, let him go, let him breathe, pull him down, swim, let him go, let him breathe, swim. Again and again. I let the fear burn deep inside of him.

Each cycle takes him farther from his boat, farther from his perfectly calculated racecourse, from the world where he's the master. This is my world now. Human rules don't apply.

I let him go again, and this time he doesn't scramble to the surface. He's suspended in the water, five feet below. I poke him in the ribs, but he doesn't respond. His eyes are closed, his skin pale. He's a limp rag doll.

I feel cold seawater rush through my gills. Around me, the ocean closes in, the edges of my vision turn bleak and murky. All is silent except for the thoughts in my head.

They are human thoughts. The kind that will escape me in my mermaid future. They are too loud to ignore: What have I done? When did murder become so easy for me? Am I a monster? A human? Or am I simply an animal? Is it okay to kill if you're an animal? Does it give me the right to vengeance? No. Not even animals kill out of revenge. They kill to survive. This is murder. Is this who I am now? Is there any way back to humanity after this?

There are tears in my eyes that are quickly stolen by the sea. Off in the distance, I hear the rumble of an engine.

I grab Trip by the arm and lift him to the surface. His face is pale against the dark ripples of rain. My lungs fill with air as the water flushes out. I put my ear to his mouth, but he doesn't breathe.

I tilt Trip's head back, put my mouth over his, and blow. Rain beats against my neck and head. More boats are near. Their engines send roaring vibrations through the water.

It takes five breaths. Water gushes from his mouth and he coughs.

Through the fog, I spot the white hull of the police boat. I whistle the way Sheriff taught me and Kay if we were ever needed help. Those old police tricks ingrained in us.

I whistle again. This time the police boat kicks into idle. Trip coughs, still struggling to breathe. I whistle one last time. The police boat turns toward me and Trip. As it breaks through the fog, headed toward me, I dive under water.

From below I push Trip's body to the surface, cradling him in my hands, just as my mother did all those years ago when the rip tide took me to sea and I dreamed I was swimming with dolphins to their magical kingdom.

I stay completely submerged as the boat pulls alongside Trip's body. Someone reaches over the gunwale and lifts him inside. I can hear the clanging of the oxygen tank on board, another officer hailing headquarters on the radio, Trip coughing.

From under the water I see someone lean over the gunwale again and peer down. Although the rain smears the surface of the water, obscuring the image above me, I know the slant of his shoulders, the gesture of a finger on the bridge of his nose.

Sheriff looks at me and I look at him. He blows me a kiss then disappears back into the boat.

I watch as the police boat cuts through the fog and rain toward home.

 

E
PILOGUE

One year later

The surface of the ocean is like velvet today. Soft ripples spread across the Atlantic as the morning sun dances across the cerulean sky. This is a friendly sea. It will change again with the tide. An afternoon breeze will blow in. Waves will roar. Sharks will come out to feed.

I can feel a vibration pulsing through me now. A bass thump deep in my solar plexus.

Lady Gaga.

“Turn down the music,” I yell to Toby, who's got his portable waterproof speakers on full blast again. He's a sophomore from some college in Wyoming who had never set foot on a boat until this month, when he flew to Cape Cod, slung his regulation rucksack over his shoulder, and boarded the SSV
Sipayik
. As a kid from Wyoming who grew up around cattle and mountains, he'd never been on a boat in the ocean before. He didn't even know that the SSV stands for Sailing School Vessel.

To be fair, neither did I, and I've been surrounded by ocean all my life.

Toby turns down the volume and gets to work labeling samples for the plankton splitter that we'll run in the wet lab later today.

Most of the kids on the boat don't know what to make of me. They call me the dolphin whisperer because every time I'm on bow watch, pods of dolphins appear out of nowhere. Whether it's four in the morning or eleven at night, the dolphins find me, leaping into the air, dazzling all on deck with their acrobatics. I don't tell anyone that I can feel the presence of all the life below; their hearts beat through me like the warm salt air.

How could a group of scientifically minded college students understand something as mystical as that? They've all taken the straight road here—high school, college, semester at sea, then on to graduate school for marine sciences. My road has veered and twisted like the bends of an ancient river.

I can't imagine my life any other way. It's my destiny to veer. To wander. To transform. It's what led me to my extraordinary summer. It's how I witnessed firsthand the majesty of the great white, and felt the bond between mother and baby humpback.

I wish I could use some of that magic to help me get through organic chemistry next semester, when we set sail for the Virgin Islands, but something tells me I'm going to have to rely on coffee and late-night study sessions instead.

It took some doing to get a spot on this boat. I'm paying my way on a special work-study program. I'm the steward, which is a fancy word for galley girl. They normally don't hire students as cooks, but they made an exception for me, thanks to a nudge from Trip Sinclair, who sits on the board of trustees for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. After surviving a serious boating accident for the second time in his life, Trip felt that it was time to turn his life around. His encounter with the mysterious creature (was it rabid dolphin, he wondered?) made him take stock. Somehow he felt that what had happened to him during Regatta was karmic retribution. At least that's what he told Sheriff aboard the harbor police boat that day, when he finally acknowledged responsibility for Kay's death. He told Sheriff he was sorry. He told Sheriff Kay deserved better. And while he didn't go quite so far as to turn himself in on voluntary manslaughter charges, he promised to do right by our family. When my name came up on the sea semester program, I was even awarded a long-term contract to work on the boat and complete my missing college coursework through an independent study program.

Sammy thinks it's awesome. She made me promise to keep an eye out for any particularly tasty college guys who might be interested in spending their summer break on Ne'Hwas.

I look at my watch and see that it's time to get breakfast on the table, so I leave Toby to his specimens and head down to the galley.

First, I stop in the chart room.

Matthew is bent over the chart table with a kid named Rachel, from Virginia, who wants to earn her captain's license and run a boat of her own someday. He's teaching her how to plot a nautical course with a parallel plotter, compass, stopwatch, and number two pencil. The way sailors navigated the world long before electronics.

Matthew looks up and smiles at me, the lines around his eyes like those of a child's drawing depicting rays of sunshine. I smile back. We've gotten into a nice routine working on the boat. The captain and the galley girl.

At night, when homework is done and everyone has finished their stations for the day, and students are hanging out in the main saloon, playing cards or watching old movies on the VHS player, I tell them the legend from the Upriver People, about two sisters who had to make a choice: this world or the one below.

The older sister, Sipayik, was good and obedient and chose to climb out of the water with legs and live on land for the rest of her days. I tell them that I picture her as a bit of a nerd, always doing the right thing, like my sister. I bet Sipayik always had her nose in a book. She probably never snuck out of the tepee after dark or cheated on her vocabulary tests by writing the answers on her forearm. She probably won all the awards at school, dated the richest guy in the village, and planned to take the world by storm.

I hope she did.

I hope that Sipayik lived a full, happy life.

The younger sister, Ne'Hwas, was wild, and she couldn't ignore the wildness inside of her. She jumped into that cool, blue water and decided never to leave it.

I wonder what became of Ne'Hwas. I think about her often these days. Was she happy? Did she find love? Or did she lose herself to the wildness of the sea? I wonder, too, about my mother, and whether I'll ever get to see her again. I find myself searching. It might be a trick of the eyes, or a gust of wind on the water, but every once in a while I catch a flicker of purple, a flash of a smile.

*   *   *

As I'm cracking the morning's eggs into a bowl, Toby sticks his head into the galley. “Jess, there are humpbacks! Come see!” I run up to the quarterdeck, where the entire crew and all the students are gathered. Cameras and binoculars are aimed out to sea.

A family of humpback whales breach in the distance.

“Do you think they're watching us, too?” Toby asks.

“Yes, I do,” I say.

Matthew lifts his sunglasses over his forehead and gives me a wink.

“All right, everyone back to their stations,” Matthew says, replacing the sunglasses. “This boat won't sail itself.”

I linger by the railing. Matthew walks up and puts his arm around me. “Feeling homesick?”

I wonder, momentarily, which home he means. “No. We'll be back on Ne'Hwas for Thanksgiving. Sheriff's already texted me five times to make sure we're coming.”

“Does this mean ham sandwiches for Thanksgiving dinner?” Matthew asks. The crescent scar below his eye disappears into his smile.

“Don't worry. Sheila's going to help him cook.” The police dispatcher with the heart of gold has become a permanent fixture in his life. It makes me happy that he's not alone.

A gust of wind whistles through the shrouds of the ship. I can feel the salty air on my skin.