Chapter 12
MUIR
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has specific requirements for commercial dive operations in protected freshwater systems. San Pedro Eco-Tours has been operating on the correct initial certification and the optimistic assumption that the night-swim and specialty package documentation would sort itself out eventually.
Cora's relationship with paperwork: genuine good intentions, indefinite timeline.
I've been working through the backlog for two weeks.
It's some of the most satisfying work I've done all summer.
Cora finds this bewildering. She stands in the cabin doorway Wednesday morning with her coffee and loose hair, watching me with equal parts gratitude and mild suspicion, like she's waiting for the permits to turn out secretly terrible.
"You actually enjoy that."
"I'm going to thank you right now." She comes in, sets her coffee down, and kisses me on the side of the head with the easy unselfconsciousness of someone who's decided they're allowed to do this.
She goes back to the Snack Hut. I go back to the permits.
The expansion happens in increments.
The first new offering is the mer-magic package—a guided underwater photography session for small groups, certified divers, led by Cora in her sirena form with me running safety and the camera rig.
I spend a week in early August configuring the underwater housing and testing the lighting with a local artist named Sera who does nature photography for the Harmony Glen tourism board.
After her first test dive, she surfaces and says, "I need you to set aside every Saturday for the rest of the summer. "
Cora negotiates the contract from the Snack Hut counter with a lumpia in one hand and the booking spreadsheet open on her laptop. Sera agrees to everything. The lumpia makes Cora look relaxed and in control, which she is.
The first Saturday package sells out in eleven minutes.
The second new offering is the night swim—a late-evening guided experience for non-divers, paddleboard and kayak, under the stars.
I write the safety protocol. Cora writes the story script: lake lore, local supernatural history, the particular quality of Harmony Glen's water after dark when the sprites are most active.
We run the first session on a warm Thursday evening in early August with a group of eight. I watch from the kayak guide position as Cora's voice carries across the dark water and the tourists in their life vests go from politely interested to genuinely enchanted.
The night swim sells out. The second session has a waitlist.
Finnbar provides three additional boat rentals per week for the expanded operation with zero ceremony but noticeable pleasure. He has strong feelings about the lake being properly used—respectfully, by people who know what they're doing, with appropriate equipment.
He informs me of this when I come to arrange the rental terms, standing behind his Monster Catch counter in his Monster Catch polo, his paint-coloured horse head carrying the expression of a glashtyn satisfied with a business arrangement.
"Good operation," he says. From Finnbar, that's a standing ovation.
Phineas begins a route-scouting service I haven't asked for but that becomes, within a week, entirely indispensable.
He swims the dive areas ahead of each session and leaves a hand-drawn map on the equipment shed shelf.
Where the mussel colonies are expanding, which pickerel are in which formation, whether the indigo sprites have relocated to the southeast channel, what the water temperature is doing at depth.
The maps are drawn in careful hand with waterproof marker on the back of old tour flyers.
They're more accurate than anything I could produce with survey equipment.
When I try to pay him, he looks at me with his wide yellow eyes and says the lake is his waterway too and he's simply sharing information about it.
"Buy him a bag of good peat moss," Cora says. "He grows it for his composting operation. It's the thing he actually needs."
I buy him three bags.
The note I get back from Phineas, written on the back of a mussel observation record, says only: thank you, the east channel has a new school of largemouth bass, thought you should know.
The driftwood arrives on Sandbar Island in the second week of August.
I find it on a low evening tide when Cora and I have paddled out to the sandbar for no particular reason except that it's the kind of evening that asks for it.
Warm and slow, the lake flat calm, the sandbar accessible and low, its pale sandy expanse catching the last of the sun while the shadows of the mainland pines stretch long across the water.
The driftwood is ash, pale grey, water-smoothed, with the particular quality of wood that's been in the lake long enough to become something other than what it was.
It's roughly the right size. Two feet long, six inches wide, the grain running clean and clear beneath the weathering.
I pick it up and carry it back to the mainland and put it in the equipment shed.
I spend the next three evenings at the workbench after the tours are done, when Cora is closing up the Snack Hut or running her after-dark lake conversations with whoever the lake is talking to that evening.
I have a set of carving tools that live in the shed's lower drawer. I brought them from Scotland. They're old tools, well-used, comfortable in the hand.
I carve SIRENA & CO. in a typeface I've been developing in my notebook. Clean letters with just a suggestion of wave in the horizontal strokes, the kind of lettering that reads as professional at a distance and shows its handmade quality up close.
I sand it. I treat it with linseed oil to protect against the lake humidity and the morning mist and all the weather that a lakeside sign will face.
On the morning I finish it, I carry it to the Snack Hut and set it on the counter.
Cora comes in from the dock, her black hair in its working braid, her green San Pedro shirt salt-dampened at the hem from the early wade she does to check the shallows.
She's carrying a dive log and a travel mug and the slightly distracted expression of someone running the morning's logistics in her head.
She looks at the sign.
She stops.
She doesn't say anything for a moment.
"Sirena & Co." she reads, quietly.
"From the driftwood on the sandbar. The grain was good."
She runs her thumb along the lettering. The wave in the horizontals. The ash grain running below the carved lines like water below the surface of a calm day.
"It's beautiful," she says.
Something in me settles.
"Where do you want it?" I ask.
She looks at it for another moment. Then she picks up the black marker that lives on the Snack Hut counter beside the specials board, and she writes, in her own handwriting, in the space below my lettering: Selkie-in-Training.
She holds the sign up.
"Front of the hut," she says. "Above the serving window. Where everyone coming down the shore path sees it first."
I'm balancing on the short ladder with the sign and the bracket hardware. Cora is below me on the dock, reading the level and telling me when I have it straight, which I don't quite achieve on the first two attempts because the fascia board is slightly warped from an old storm.
"Left," she says.
"I moved it left."
"More left."
"Cora, if I move it more left it will be at an angle."
"It's already at an angle. Move it left."
Sali the water sprite surfaces through the dock gap.
She takes in the scene—the sign, the ladder, the ongoing negotiation—with wide-eyed attention. She hauls herself onto the dock and stands at approximately knee-height and tilts her head at the sign.
"Pretty," she announces.
"Thank you, Sali," I say. "Cora, I moved it left."
"It's still not—"
Sali climbs the ladder rungs below me and reaches up and places both small hands on the sign bracket and adjusts it with firmness.
Beat of silence.
"That's straight," Cora says.
Sali looks at me. Obviously.
I drill the bracket into place.
Sali settles herself on the ladder rung and produces, from some pocket of her form, a length of lake weed. She begins braiding it into my hair with focused concentration.
"Sali," I say.
She doesn't stop.
"Cora."
Cora is laughing. Full face, completely off guard, leaning against the dock railing with her mug held at a slight angle because she's forgotten to hold it straight. The laugh carries across the water—further than it should, warm and real.
"It's very decorative," she says. "Leave it."
"I'm not leaving it."
"I think it suits you."
"Cora—"
"Selkie-in-Training," she reads from the sign. "Sirena & Co." She looks at it, still smiling. "It's good, Muir."
I descend the ladder—Sali relocating gracefully to the dock surface, still braiding, now working on a second length of weed—and stand back and look at the sign above the Snack Hut serving window.
SIRENA & CO.
Selkie-in-Training.
The letters in their carved wave-stroke font, the ink of her handwriting below mine, the ash grain of Sandbar Island driftwood holding both together in the morning sun.
Cora comes and stands beside me, her shoulder against mine. Sali is working on a third length of weed. From the direction of the Monster Catch shop, Finnbar has appeared in his doorway, looking at the sign with the expression of a glashtyn assessing something of quality.
He gives a single nod.
"I'm not changing the name of the answering machine message," Cora says.
"I know."
"It still says San Pedro Eco-Tours."
"That's fine. It's still true."
She looks at me sideways. "You're very reasonable about this."
"I've been working on it."
She makes a sound that's half laugh and half something warmer, and leans into my shoulder. Sali ties off the seaweed braid with a small satisfied sound. The lake below the dock is very blue and very still.
Sirena & Co.
An ordinary day in the middle of the week.