Chapter 2
Two
Angie sat glued to her MacBook the next evening, fingers moving over her mouse scroller and keyboard, scouring her pre-downloaded e-textbooks for information on the mysterious fishtail.
The house was unnervingly quiet now that it was just her and Bàba in the spacious five-bedroom home.
As it did at times in her childhood, the isolation was getting to her.
The feeling that the rest of the world, including her old friends who left Creston, moved on while her little village was frozen in time.
Back then, she eventually grew used to her own company, that of her family’s and their handful of school friends, and select workers and residents in her secluded village with a population of just over two hundred.
That sentiment changed when she went to Wasilla to work at a marine animal rescue center after high school, followed by Washington for college. Having people around all the time stifled her at first, but she soon began to enjoy meeting new people, especially in bustling Seattle.
Now it was just her and her thoughts, and occasionally, the isolating feeling still jarred her, as it did now.
Her mind stayed focused on the blood red tail shimmering under the sun’s glow. It wasn’t a whale’s tail. Nor a dolphin’s or porpoise’s.
So, what the Hells was it?
It had flickered over the water so quickly, as if the tail’s bearer had come up for a brief glimpse of the world beyond the surface and abruptly changed their mind. The size, color, and shape didn’t belong to any fish native to Alaska.
Angie scratched her head. Scouring through her pre-downloaded e-textbooks turned up nothing.
A hesitant mewing broke the silence, followed by a brush of soft fur against Angie’s shins. “Lulu! I didn’t know you were in here.” Her black and white cat curled around her ankles and rubbed her cheek on her leg, whiskers tickling her skin.
“Coming out to explore?” Angie leaned down to scratch the fur between her ears. Lulu ducked away from her hand and meowed again, louder this time, and Angie took it as a cue that she was shouting for breakfast. “Okay, okay, coming.”
Lulu scurried toward her food bowl on the opposite end of the sizable home, and Angie’s feet creaked the floorboards to keep pace.
Her cat stared with unblinking sapphire eyes as Angie grabbed a can of dry food from the countertop, taking her time in scooping out the kibble and ignoring Lulu’s attempts at pressuring her.
The bell above their front door jingled, signaling that someone had entered, and she tossed the empty can into the trash.
“Beibei?” Bàba approached, calling her by her childhood name, “precious girl.” Angie walked into the foyer to say hello, in time to see him leave his boots by the door. He slid into his house slippers.
“You were at the docks? I didn’t see you leave.”
“Yes, I was called in at zero five hundred,” Bàba replied.
Angie’s lips pulled into a half smile. Bàba was a retired Chief Petty Officer of the U.S. Navy, and she always thought that though he left the military ten years ago, the military never left him.
He walked across the living room to wash his hands at the kitchen sink with a distant gaze.
Angie knew the look, where he spoke to her but his mind was elsewhere.
“I received some interesting information, and I needed to see for myself.”
“Really?” Angie leaned against the wall, folding her arms.
“Other docks have started shutting down because of the lack of fish. Some of those workers are coming to us, so we’ll have fifty new workers starting tomorrow.”
Angie raised an eyebrow. Bàba was always generous with his time and resources, but–
“How are you going to afford paying fifty new workers’ salaries?”
“Beau and Emily are footing most of their pay.” He referred to Creston’s mayor and his wife.
Beau had served with Bàba in the Navy, and the two had remained friends even after they returned to civilian life.
“One of the transplants is their son, Luke.” He reached into his pocket.
“Second thing, divers and boaters in the area have reported seeing animals appearing to be human from the waist up and fish from the waist down below five hundred feet.” Bàba’s eyebrows came together, his expression thoughtful. “Quick glimpses, nothing more.”
“Are–are you sure?” Angie sputtered, rubbing one eyebrow. “That’s ridiculous.”
Her mind flickered back to Bàba’s stories of old legends passed to him from his parents, and their parents before. Yet without proof that they had existed in the first place, they were nothing more than fishermen’s tales.
There had to be a rational explanation. Maybe they had seen manatees or their cousins, the dugongs.
She also knew they didn’t swim this far north, or at those depths.
“Maybe there are more predators in the area driving the fish away. Or there’s something poisoning them.” If they were dead, the waves would have pushed their floating bodies ashore. Another thought occurred to her. “The tides might be changing, and they’re seeking refuge elsewhere.”
Or, could merfolk be the predators? She pursed her lips.
The notion went against every book she read on them and every drawing she’d seen, against her town’s old legends that the fish-folk were kind and patient creatures who healed ailments with their hands and once lived in peace with the sea’s children and humans before their disappearance.
“I didn’t believe it at first, either. Asked them to stop making things up. Merfolk haven’t been seen around here in over three centuries. But they showed me this.” Bàba offered his phone to Angie. A frozen clip displayed on the screen.
His hand shook as Angie took the phone and hit the “Play” button, bracing herself for what she might see.
A blurred and grainy recording started. Muffled breathing came through the phone’s speakers, the unmistakable, hollow-sounding inhales and exhales through diving regulators.
Through the soft green night vision, coral formations appeared and a leatherback sea turtle glided by, darting into the dark when the camera moved closer to it.
Angie squinted, waiting for the supposed merfolk to come into view.
Five seconds later, a long, scaly tail brushed by, and the camera shook as if the person holding it nearly dropped it in shock. Another tail followed.
What the Hells?
At first glance, it appeared to be a large fish slicing through the water. Then she saw human-like hands held at their sides, webbing reaching halfway to their fingers’ first knuckles.
The camera tumbled out of the diver’s possession, and they reached to grab it before it disappeared into the depths.
Her arm tingled as she handed the device back to Bàba. “No way.”
“Told you.” He stuffed his phone back into his pocket.
“I’m sending out a group of divers tomorrow afternoon to take another look around, see if they can find anything else.
If this is real, and if it truly is—” He stopped, taking a deep breath before continuing, “Merfolk taking our food supply, we will need to deal with them directly. I’ll let you know what they find. ”
“Wait, Bàba.” Angie grabbed his arm before he left. “Let me go with them.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday. Don’t you want the whole weekend?”
“No, I want to go. I haven’t done a dive since I came back home, and I miss it.
” She struggled to process what she’d seen on the video, and wanted to see for herself in person.
Angie admitted, “Makes me think of Māma.” At the mention of her, Bàba’s shoulders dropped, a forlorn shadow crossing his face.
He pushed his glasses further up his nose and rubbed his five o’clock shadow, wrinkles forming around his eyes.
“Okay. I will look at the conditions of the sea tomorrow and plan a quiet time to go out. But expect to be there around thirteen or fourteen hundred.”
Angie nodded. “You got it.”
The next morning, she gathered her scuba gear from her closet: flippers, drysuit, hood, BCD vest, booties, snorkel mask, and fins. Before leaving, she double checked her gear to ensure she didn’t forget anything.
Her chest tightened, and she sucked in a gulp of air, hands hovering over her mesh diving bag.
Behind their portable UV lights which they used to simulate sunlight for winter’s unending dark, a chest full of her childhood belongings sat in partial view.
Angie reached for it, pulling out a drawing of merfolk she made when she was eight.
A school of them, swimming without a care in the world, complete with raggedly drawn green stripes she hoped depicted seaweed.
She held the picture close to her heart.
It was a simpler time. Her family and friends didn’t understand her interest in mythical fish-creatures, as they dubbed merfolk, but she didn’t let them deter her from believing.
Her ten-year-old self was so sure mermaids still existed somewhere in the deep blue sea, and she would prove everyone wrong.
Of course, over a hundred dives later, she never found a trace of them.
She continued diving in Alaska and Washington’s lakes and oceans over the last thirteen years, but lost interest in mermaid hunting and stopped believing in their existence after entering high school, preferring to focus on her studies and friends.
Shaking the memories away, Angie put the drawing back in the chest and slammed the closet door shut. Intrigue and fury and anxiety played a three-way tug-of-war in her mind.
A pull came from deep inside her, a speckle of hope sprouting that the divers were wrong, and the video was fake.
So many years of failed searches. She had failed. If merfolk had turned up some years earlier, and if they truly had healing powers, she could have saved Māma.
A swell of resentment rose, and she pinched her lips together and zipped her dive bag closed. She caught a finger in it and hissed, jerking her hand back.
When she was thirteen, she scuba dived to search for mermaids. Now, she was twenty-four and about to go diving for mermaids again.
The irony wasn’t lost on her.