Chapter 3
Three
At one-thirty, Angie stood at the docks’ edge, fidgeting with her drysuit and obsessively checking that it covered her wrists and ankles. She shivered in anticipation of forty-degree water that would soon meet any exposed patches of skin.
Their last diver–and her dive buddy–was running several minutes late from an unexpected traffic jam crossing the bridge into the harbor.
Other divers chatted in a small group beside her, and their boat bobbed in tune with the waves, seemingly unfazed that they were to go searching for merfolk, of all things.
Angie’s leg kept bouncing in anticipation, only stopping when her phone pinged and distracted her. The guy she was seeing from college had answered her after two weeks of silence with a vacant,
hey, wanna come over tonight?
This was followed by the slanted-eye, coy smile emoji. The message was in response to her last text asking his plans for the weekend, and an inside joke. After four months, he hadn’t asked her to be his girlfriend, expertly dodging the question when she brought it up.
Thinning her lips, she blocked and deleted his number without a response then put the device away and strapped her diving knife to her ankle. The final diver arrived, suited up, and was now gesturing at her with frantic motions.
“Hey, Angie.” He jogged to her and retrieved his Heliox tank before tying his wavy hair back into a neat man-bun.
“Hey yourself, Stefan.” Angie watched him don his booties, depth gauge, and rebreather. Stefan was well into his fifties, yet Angie thought he passed for ten years younger. His hair was still a vibrant, glossy ebony, with skin like porcelain and a lively spark in his whiskey-brown eyes.
It must have been the cold water diving he did. He jokingly called it a preserving agent.
“Mermaids, huh?” Stefan snorted.
“Right? But my bàba wants to see if the footage is real. I kind of do, too.” Angie swung her pressure gauge and inflator hose over one shoulder.
“Either way, maybe we’ll see what in the Hells kind of creatures were on those videos.
Or where the fish are going. I mean, the fish that we actually eat. ”
“What do you mean?” Stefan stopped in his tracks. “Only the fish we eat are going missing? Others aren’t?”
“I came in earlier today to look at the reports from the last month, try to find a pattern of what kinds of fish we were getting and how many.” She set her jaw.
Their catches normally had an abundance of safe, sustainable king salmon, rainbow trout, and pollock, but lately— “We had a shit ton of bluefin tuna and rockfish, much more than usual.” Fish that her village tended to avoid.
“The mercury-drenched, prickly stuff that nobody around here really wants to buy.” Stefan finished for her.
“Maybe we’ll see if mermaids are really doing this.” The word mermaid hitched and broke as Angie spoke.
It still didn’t seem real to her that they were actually doing this.
“Alright. On the off-chance we find them, I want to tell Ken I saw them first. I’d like to know where the fish are, too,” Stefan remarked. “But fish matters aside, it’s good to see you. Been a minute since you’ve come out with us.”
She gave him a tight smile. He didn’t need to know that losing Māma was the reason she stopped diving.
The captain cupped his hands around his mouth, amplifying his voice so Angie, who was in the back of the group, heard it loud and clear. “All aboard! Let’s go!”
Holding her flippers steady, she followed the group onto the boat.
“You still diving out here on the reg?” Angie performed a final check, ensuring her dive computer was functional and felt for her flashlight resting snug in her upper pocket. Relief draped over her, and she relaxed against the boat’s bench, knowing everything was in place.
“Ken and I try to get out here every few weeks. I have to say, I’ve dived a lot of places, but I haven’t found anywhere as satisfying as here. We can’t get enough.” Stefan kept his eyes on the horizon, where the water line kissed the sky.
“Hubby’s at the dive shop?”
“He agreed to run the place today so I could come out. He’s trying to close on time.
We have the grandkids and Ken’s entire family is here.
” Angie caught the smallest of eye rolls from Stefan, even if his soft smile remained.
“They came all the way from the Philippines, so we’d feel terrible if we didn’t entertain them every hour. ”
The two chatted until the boat hit a bump in the water. Angie yelped in surprise and threw her hands forward on instinct even though there was nothing to stabilize herself with. She dug her feet into the deck so she wouldn’t topple over.
Had they hit a rock? Was the boat damaged, and their search was going to be over before beginning?
The other divers settled back into their seats and chattered amongst themselves, their nervousness palpable.
Angie looked around. No rock to be found.
Yet the seawater rippled with angry waves. A strong wind gust barreled through and walloped her face.
“Hey! What’s that?” Stefan pointed to the water. The other divers crowded around them.
A dark streak of scales appeared with two flowing, transparent caudal fins. The boat rocked again, a violent wave smacking the hull, and Angie clung to the sides to keep her balance.
The waters calmed once the tail vanished from sight.
Angie drew her head back, covering her mouth with her palm.
The other divers chatted in low murmurs.
She sat, resting her hands on her lap and took a deep breath so she wouldn’t still be anxious when she started diving and burn through her oxygen too fast. The bumpiness and waves appeared when the—merman?
Mermaid? Some other strange creature? —appeared, and calmed when it disappeared.
As if it carried the turbulent waters on its back.
She’d never heard of such a phenomenon. The sun and moon controlled the tides. Not sea creatures. Curiosity and bewilderment rose.
The boat slowed to a stop, and the captain killed the engine. Standing, the divers donned their tanks and congregated at the side of the boat.
“Guess if that was a mermaid, here’s our chance to find out,” Stefan muttered from beside her.
Here we go.
At the divemaster’s signal, they rolled backward and tumbled into the icy sea. Angie cracked the surface with a loud splash, screwing her eyes shut as icy hands surrounded her head and neck, squeezing with brute force.
The ocean was an icebox surrounding her for the next several minutes, until her body acclimated to the deep freeze.
Hanging weightlessly, she drifted sideways in tune with the current, and bobbed with her breaths.
They made the slow, uneventful journey into the depths.
A brush of freeze seeped through at her nape and grasped her entire body, and she clenched her jaw. The gentle splashing overhead faded into stillness, until the only sounds surrounding her were the rhythmic, soothing whoosh of air when she inhaled and exhaled.
It was quiet, tranquil, peaceful.
She reached out to brush through the algae beds stroking her belly and legs as she swam by and brushed away stray plastic fragments and the occasional cigarette butt and chunk of fishing gear floating about.
How she wished the ocean could return to its pristine majesty, without the pollution. The desire to take action was what drove her to pursue marine biology.
She checked her dive computer after descending further.
It registered that they were at four hundred fifty feet, close to the depth where the divers allegedly saw mer.
She made a sharp turn, trailing Stefan, and jotted down another mark on her dive compass so she knew how to return to the boat.
Her heart fluttered at the marginal possibility she’d see a mermaid.
A seabed lay ahead, and nestled within the sand, a school of halibut flitted about. Curious eyes at the top of their heads peered at Angie and Stefan. A salmon shark sailed overhead, its silver and ivory body lithe and graceful, a floating dancer moving in tune with the flow and currents.
More concerning, other fish were scarce: salmon, whitefish, pikes, arctic chars.
Her shoulder hit a hard bump, and with numb fingers, she fumbled around to turn her flashlight on.
It illuminated a gorgeous, deep sea coral formation, untouched by ocean acidification and warming.
It showcased vivid oranges and pinks and reds, fitted like a jigsaw puzzle.
Thankfully the coral was smooth. She would have hated to knock off the branch of a spiny one.
It would have hurt like hell, and she didn’t want to contribute to Alaska’s collapsing coral reef population.
Tapping her, Stefan gestured in front of him. Humanlike flesh zipped by, with broad shoulders, slender fingers, and a strong back. A tail followed, the shape similar to what she saw in the video and at the docks, its color indiscernible in the crushing blackness.
The creature turned around; a flash of maroon caught in her flashlight’s soft glow. Angie froze as her mind caught up to what she was seeing.
A merman.
What.
The.
Shit.
Mer were real. She gawped. He looked so human, at least, his top half. All those years she searched and searched, and now, a merman floated mere feet, or perhaps more aptly, tails away from her.
If the rebreather wasn’t stuffed in her mouth, her jaw would have dropped to the seafloor.
After she signaled to Stefan that she was going to follow, Stefan gave her the “OK” hand symbol. Angie pedaled her finned feet faster keeping her gaze trained on the strange mer.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Wanted to keep staring, studying. Admiring. With enough distance between herself and him, Angie lagged behind but kept the merman in sight.
He stopped.
A school of arctic char lounged ahead, and Angie went as still as the rocks surrounding her when a mermaid appeared from the dark, passing through her flashlight’s beam.
Her face was golden tan and beautiful, dark hair tied into elaborate braids crowning her head.
Stacks of pearls wrapped around her chest and neck like a jeweled turtleneck crop top.
She was breathtaking: a mermaid as depicted in the various fairytales Angie enjoyed reading as a child.
The mermaid’s glittering brown, doe-like eyes caught Angie’s, and Angie pumped her arms to scramble backward.
The creature motioned to the merman beside her. As if by some magnetic pull, the arctic chars followed, and the group picked up speed. Angie followed, but couldn’t get close even if she wanted to. They propelled like darts with each swish of their tails.
No, no, no. She couldn’t look away, but she was going to lose them any second now.
They plunged downward and vanished into the watery void. No matter where she looked, she found no trace left of them, or the school of fish. Her face slackened. They had to be here somewhere. They couldn’t just disappear, could they? Angie stared blankly into the unending abyss.
One thing for certain, the mer were hoarding fish. The big question was, why?
She gathered herself and swam back to Stefan, who gave her a thumbs-up, indicating they should head back to the surface.
Her skin tingled, and it wasn’t from the arctic waters. A pulsing shiver crawled down her spine as she held onto Stefan’s D ring, and they made their gradual ascent.
In the aftershock of the cold and seeing the mer, her extremities still hadn’t regained sensation. She needed time to wrap her head around what she witnessed with her own eyes.