The Mermaid's Secret (4 page)

I rely on my hands to find my ankle, grab my leash, and pull my board to me. I slide on top of it as waves materialize before me. I paddle and duck dive through countless waves. Desperation drives me.

When I make it to the lineup this time, I'm panting from exhaustion. My nerves are shot.

Jay is the first one to return from his ride. “What's the matter? Set too small for you?” he says.

I don't speak because I don't trust my voice. I grab the rails of my board to steady my jittery hands.

Jay laughs. “Paddle home, girl.”

Tyler gets to the lineup next. Then Freddie and Josh. They're all smiles and adrenaline from their amazing rides.

In the lull between sets, everyone's conserving energy, except Jay, who can't keep his mouth shut. Sick waves and hot girls are his only topics of conversation. Every once in a while he looks my way, just to make sure I can hear how he rates all the single girls on Ne'Hwas, based on body and face hotness. As if it's up to him.

“I'd give Jess a five. Five and a half, tops,” he says.

Tyler laughs.

“I'd give you a ten, Jay,” I say, casting him a fake smile. “As in, IQ points.” I know it's not my best work, but my energy's low and I need to stay focused.

Now I'm in the primo spot in the lineup, which means I should have first dibs on the next set. In surfing, positioning is everything. You're constantly moving, paddling in for the smaller waves, out for the bigger ones. Keeping up with the tide. Traveling up or down the shore as the waves shift. A sandbar here, a dead spot there. It's a game of cat and mouse, always jockeying for the sweet spot, which is a small and elusive thing.

These guys don't give up the sweet spot for anyone. Especially a girl. They take the best waves for themselves. They're takers. Just like Trip Sinclair.

When the next set appears on the horizon, the chatter stops and everyone gets focused. I decide I'm going to take the first wave, no matter what. It's not the best strategy. The first wave is always the smallest, the least shaped, but no one else will go for it. I just need one wave, after all.

As the first sharp ridge comes closer, I spin my board, lie down, and start paddling. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tyler paddling out from the shoulder toward me. He's cruising fast. I pick up my speed a little, but if I go too fast when the wave is this far out, I'll be too far inside, and I'm not going to let that happen again.

I check the wave. Tyler, having more upper body strength, has caught it from farther out, and he's riding down the line.
Damn.
It's his wave. Fair and square.

I pull back on my board and spin around. Josh has the next wave and is riding right in the shoulder. Either I have to slow down to get behind him, and get pummeled by white water, or speed up and cut in front of him, where the wave is still green. Since I don't trust my noodle arms, I opt for white water.

Freddie takes the next wave. I watch him make a beautiful bottom turn, then carve a sharp switchback off the lip.

At the lineup, it's just me and Jay now, and the set is petering out. We both start paddling for the last wave. Technically, I'm closer to the shoulder, so the wave is mine, but Jay doesn't back off. He paddles harder. I paddle harder. As the wave rises up behind me, my board accelerates with it, powered by its energy. This is the feeling I live for. I pop to my feet and drop down the face. Just as I turn my head, Jay drops right in front of me. Our boards hit and I lose my balance. I fall. This time I get knocked under the water with more force than before.

“Asshole,” I scream when I resurface. Jay turns and salutes me with a smug smile across his lips. I'm so angry I could kill him. Why do the takers always come out on top? The Trip Sinclairs and Jay Delgados of the world?

The entire set goes by and I don't catch a wave. I don't even try on the next set. All the guys catch great rides again, except for Freddie, who paddles up next to me. “Tough day.”

“Yeah.”

“You'll get one,” he says. Freddie's older. I couldn't say for sure whether he's in his thirties, forties, or possibly even fifties. He seems old to me in the way that anyone beyond their twenties is. He's in those decades of life so impossibly far away from my own. “Clear your mind and commit to it,” he says.

I let his words move through me. Out here, your thoughts can only be on the surf. Not on the guys taunting you, or the people on shore, or the people you've lost, or your shattered life.

As the next set comes through, the waves pass, each one getting bigger and better. The fourth wave is perfect.

“All yours,” Freddie says.

I start paddling. The green face of the wave is rising fast and unbroken and I'm in the sweet spot. I take a few more hard strokes. My board accelerates with the energy of the wave. I pop up to my feet and take the drop down the face.
Perfect.

Then, I pearl.

The nose of my board goes under water and the tail goes up. I lean backwards to correct it, but the nose dives farther. I tumble headfirst over my board, the force of the wave rolling me in somersaults. Once again, I'm sucked into an underwater tsunami, desperate for air.

Of all the rookie mistakes! I haven't pearled in years. That's what beginners do when they don't have a clue how to position their weight on the board. I was on the perfect wave and I pearled!
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
What is wrong with me? I can't even catch a wave anymore.

A few more surfers have arrived and are paddling out the back, passing me in the opposite direction. More competition in the lineup. More alpha males to push me out.

There's nothing left to do but paddle home.
Girl.

I catch a wave of whitewash and ride it in, lying on my stomach the whole way.

As I walk up the beach, I turn around and see Jay, already sitting in the lineup, his yellow board making him stand out from the tiny, indecipherable row of surfers. He gives me an obnoxious wave.

I clench my right fist and raise it to the sky as I slap my bicep with my left hand. He can't mistake that for a friendly gesture.

What a waste of a session.
All that exertion and not a wave to show for it. I sit on the sand and catch my breath while the Nipon gang catches killer rides.

A seagull lands at my feet, black eye searching, then takes off. It flies over the beach, past the jetty, toward Tutatquin Point at the park. The granite face of the point glows a magnificent orange in the afternoon slant of sun. That silhouette is so familiar to me I could draw it with my eyes closed. The peak where Sheriff and Mom took Kay and me every Memorial Day for a picnic, Mom yelling at us not to get too close to the edge. The spot where Kay and I stood, feeling the wind in our faces, throwing pine cones over the edge of the cliff, testing out the laws of physics. Does the heavier object fall faster?

Right below it is the spot where Kay's body was found.

What was she thinking in those last moments? Did she know she would die, or did she hang on to a morsel of hope? What did it feel like to take that last slide into the sea?

I need to get out of my head. I need a wave.

I pick up my board, tuck it under my arm, and walk down the beach. I walk past the parking lot, past the seawall, past the last of the houses on Nipon Beach, past the sign for Wabanaki State Park, past the
NO SWIMMING
signs, past the
NO SURFING
signs, until I get to the field of granite boulders, sharp with barnacles.

The waves here are even gnarlier, breaking past a boneyard of submerged rocks. I study the sea for a while and notice a spot where the shoulder lifts up consistently to a sharp, triangular peak, where a hidden sandbar meets the force of water and directs it upward. Everywhere else, the waves close out. I watch for a few more sets, just to be sure. And every time, the peak forms in the same spot. Am I really going to do this?

I take a land bearing. If I line myself up with the tallest spruce on shore and parallel to the last rock outcrop, I'll be in the spot. These two bits of information will be invaluable when I start paddling out and get cold and confused trying to muscle my way through the break. I repeat it to myself: tallest spruce, parallel to the last rock outcrop.

I must be crazy. No one surfs Tutatquin Point.

But I need to catch a wave today. Today, I'm twenty-three years old. The thought of heading back to town and pretending to celebrate is too much for me. Right now, I need to get away. I need to escape. I need to feel something other than failure.

I climb over the jagged rocks.

 

F
OUR

It's low tide and Tutatquin Point bares her teeth like a rabid dog. Locals call it the boneyard because of all the ships that have run aground here over the centuries. Wooden schooners. Warships. Old steamboats. One luxury yacht with Trip Sinclair at the wheel.

It was high tide, Trip's lawyer said. He couldn't see the rocks. Not his fault, the lawyer argued. Head trauma. Couldn't be blamed for his actions, the lawyer spewed.

If you grow up on Ne'Hwas, you know the tides in your bones. They are the blood that pumps through your veins. We have the highest tidal range in the world—another highlight for the tourism brochures. They say that more water passes through the Gulf of Maine into the Bay of Fundy at every turn of the tide than the combined flow of all the freshwater lakes and rivers on earth. Twice a day, the water rises and falls over forty feet in the narrow end of the bay. Everyone here has a story of how the tide almost took them.

Mine happened when I was five, and Kay, eight. It was July. Hot as hell—I remember that. Sheriff and Kay were far down the beach, collecting shells in the tide pools—periwinkles, hermit crabs, urchins, that sort of thing. My mom and I were building a sand castle with a tall spire and a seaweed forest all around. I needed a shovel to dig a moat. My mom smiled and said that she would protect my castle from invaders. No, I said, I needed a moat. I was a willful child. She told me to stay put while she went to the car to find a shovel.

I didn't stay put, though. I walked down to the water to stomp in the wet sand. I loved how my feet would get swallowed by the sand whenever a wave receded. At first, I didn't know what was happening. The water swirled up around my knees, then my waist, then I was swimming in it. I watched a beach umbrella shrink into a tiny dot on the shore until it disappeared completely. I remember thinking, in my five-year-old mind, that the land was moving and I was staying still, and somehow that made everything feel safe.

I treaded water for as long as I could, and when my little arms and legs got too tired, I simply let go. Part of me knew I would sink and that it would be the end, but in fact, I didn't sink. I floated. The ocean cradled me. I felt like a cork, bobbing high on the surface, unable to sink. I was so comfortable floating in that clear blue water that I lay facedown and pretended I was a dolphin crossing the ocean to meet up with my dolphin family, twisting my mouth up to the sky when I needed to breathe.

By the time Sheriff reached me, I was half a mile off shore. I hadn't been scared the whole time, until I saw the fear in his eyes. I can only imagine what he must have been thinking as he swam toward me, adrenaline flooding his body, seeing his daughter facedown in the water. He later told me that position is called the dead man's float, that it's a survival skill and that he'd never heard of a five-year-old teaching it to herself.

He towed me back to shore. Kay wrapped her towel around me and gave me her prized shell from the day's tide pool treasures. When I saw my mother, her smile was gone. She hugged me for what seemed like hours, and later she fed me and Kay Popsicles that turned our tongues blue.

The next day, she disappeared for three whole nights—the first of her many spirit journeys. I always blamed myself for her disappearance. If only I'd stayed put like she said, instead of going into the water, everything would have been fine. She wouldn't have needed a spirit journey to wander away her sorrow, or guilt, or whatever it was that pushed her away that time.

I take one last look around before I hit the water. No one is here. No one to stop me. No one to rescue me if I get swept out to sea this time.

The water seems even colder now, but that can't be. It's the same ocean. I'm just chilled, my muscles fatigued and crying for rest. I should turn around, go home, let everyone sing me “Happy Birthday” like Matthew said. But I need to feel something other than disappointment today. I need to remember who I am. A survivor.

All-in,
I tell myself.

On a receding wave, I grab my rails and ride the rush of water out to sea. Granite grinds against the bottom of my board, gouging into fiberglass. The next surge of white water comes, and I brace against it. The force swings like a pendulum, carrying me seaward.

I do my best to aim for the narrow passages between rocks, but my paddle power is nothing compared to the mighty force of water beneath me. Incoming waves break against rock in unpredictable ways. A shift in the current swings my board around and I hit a rock broadside, my board taking a beating. Then another shift in current, another swirling eddy, and I'm pointed in the right direction, darting through a clear channel. I'm the pinball. The ocean is the wizard.

Somehow, I make it out of the boneyard in one piece.

Paddling out to the sandbar is easy, by comparison. But beyond the bar, the waves are even bigger than the overhead monsters at Nipon. I paddle and duck dive, paddle and duck dive, paddle and duck dive, my body emptying its entire reserve of energy.

In between the breaking waves, I look up and check my bearings.

Tallest spruce.
Yes.

Parallel to last rock outcrop.
Not yet.

My arms are numb with exhaustion and the wind howls in my ears as I fight against the waves. Jay's voice pops into my head,
You're out of your league.
My heart pounds. My breath is frantic.
Paddle home, girl.