Epilogue
Cora
One Year Later
The sign survived the winter. I check it most mornings when I come out to the dock. One upstate New York winter: four months of hard frost, two ice storms, wind that took three shingles off the Snack Hut roof. The sign held. The cedar held. The shell inlay held, both symbols still clear.
SIRENA & CO., it reads, the carved letters in their wave-stroke font.
Selkie-in-Training, below it, in my handwriting.
Both of us. Still here. Intact.
It's the second week of June, and summer has come back to Harmony Glen the way it always does. Not gradually but all at once, a Monday morning when the lake turns from steel-grey to a blue so clean it looks like the sky decided to lie down and rest.
The booking calendar is full through September. Every Saturday mer-magic session. Every Thursday night swim. The underwater photography partnership with Sera produced three sold-out gallery shows over the winter and has a waiting list for July that makes Sera visibly pleased.
I'm sitting on the porch with my coffee and the postcard that arrived in Tuesday's mail when Muir comes out with the second mug and sits beside me.
"From Rex," I say, and hold it out.
He takes it. The front is a photo of a wave, bleached and salt-washed, the kind of image that makes you feel the spray. He turns it over and reads.
His expression does something quiet and warm.
"She glows in the dark," he says.
"Hey Cora, I have a glow-in-the-dark girlfriend," I read, because I've already read it twice and feel the indignation requires additional airing. "Be chill. When have I ever been no chill?."
"I think it would be wise not to answer that," he says. "And also to avoid pointing out that you made a sound when you first read it."
"That was surprise."
"It was a specific kind of surprise."
"It was a totally chill sound of surprise.
I am genuinely happy for him." I take the postcard back.
Rex's handwriting is large and confident, the way Rex is large and confident, filling the space without apology.
She is extraordinary. Can't wait for you to meet her.
Missing you both. P.S., also in Rex's hand, underlined: The Ocean still talks
I look at the postcard for a moment.
Then I get up and take it inside and pin it to the equipment shed wall, next to the tide charts and the DEC certification copies and the laminated emergency protocols and the hand-drawn mussel map Phineas left last Thursday, which already needs updating because the eastern colony has apparently expanded again.
I stand back and look at the postcard in its place on the shed wall.
Met someone. She glows in the dark.
Rex. Who agreed to fake-date me with zero hesitation because I looked like I needed a lifeline.
Who told Muir I'd moved on before he knew who Muir was, with nothing but honest protective instinct.
Who sat beside Muir on a marina dock and said you were a coward and then stayed sitting beside him, which is what acceptance looks like in a were-shark.
Who cleared the dock in four minutes at the festival and walked away whistling and never asked for anything in return.
She is extraordinary, he wrote.
Of course she is. Rex would not have it any other way.
By ten o'clock the waterfront has come to life. The marina activity, the kayak rental queue, Finnbar doing something decisive with a net at the Monster Catch door, Phineas visible in the shallows near the north dock doing his morning survey.
Down the shoreline, where the public beach gives way to the grassy slope, Liana and Roarke have found themselves a patch of morning sun.
Liana is sitting on a folded blanket with her shoes off and a book open in her lap, which she's not reading because she's watching the water.
Her braided hair is loose today, the ends touching the blanket, and she has a woven bag beside her that almost certainly contains food she brought to share with anyone who passes, because that is simply what Liana does.
Roarke is sitting beside her, his considerable frame taking up its usual more-than-average amount of the available space.
Large and warm and settled, his long legs stretched out toward the water.
He has his work bag with him, which means he came from the clinic, which means Liana texted him and he rearranged his afternoon because it was a good lake day and Liana said so.
Nugget is in the lake.
Nugget stands at the end of the public swim dock, wings folded flat, tail moving in focused counterbalance.
He launches. The entry is committed, full-body, with complete conviction.
The splash reaches approximately the first row of the gathered audience on the shore, which is Liana and Roarke, who have relocated the blanket twice already and are showing no signs of relocating it again.
Underwater, he's quick and fluid, the copper-bronze parts of him catching the light in the clear shallows like a moving piece of sun.
He threads between the pickerel with focused interest. The fish have apparently acclimated.
Phineas, surfacing briefly from his morning rounds to observe this, looks thoughtful and then shrugs.
Nugget surfaces at the dock ladder, hauls himself out with the wings half-spread for counterbalance, shakes.
A full-body shake that sends lake water in a radius of approximately fifteen feet, which is why the blanket has been moved twice.
Then he stands at the end of the dock for a moment in the sun, scales gleaming, amber eyes scanning the audience with complete self-satisfaction.
Liana claps.
She does this every time, which is why he keeps doing it.
Roarke looks at his mate with the expression of a lion-man who has accepted the chaotic antics of the loves of his life.
I watch this from the Snack Hut doorway, waiting for the morning tour group to arrive, with Muir beside me and a tour manifest in my hand that I'm not looking at because it's impossible to look at a tour manifest when Nugget is doing his routine.
"Does he do this every time the weather is good?" Muir asks.
"Every time," I confirm. "Liana says Roarke introduced Nugget to swimming when he was still the size of a cat, and would splash in the town fountain. He has always had strong feelings about water."
"Roarke's moved the blanket twice."
"He'll move it a third time. He always does. He doesn't learn and he doesn't mind."
"That's love," Muir says.
"That is absolutely love."
"Morning group is coming," Muir says.
I look up. The shore path: six people in various states of preparedness, sunscreen applied in some cases more generously than others, one of them carrying what I recognize as a very expensive waterproof camera bag.
Sera is with them. She booked herself onto every mer-magic session through August and calls it research and I call it the reason our underwater photography program has a six-month waiting list.
"Ready?" Muir says.
"Always," I say.
He squeezes my hand once and goes to start the gear check, and I go to meet my people at the dock.
Muir
The tour group is good.
They always are, in June. The people who come at the beginning of the season are the ones who planned ahead, who researched, who wanted Harmony Glen specifically rather than a generic lakeside experience.
They arrive knowing what a sirena is and what it means to dive with one, and they go in the water with the specific quality of people who intend to be fully present for the experience, which makes the work a pleasure.
Sera is in her element.
She's a compact woman in her forties with the focused intensity of someone who has been making images of the natural world for twenty years and has never lost the capacity to be struck by it.
She surfaces from every dive with the same expression, a kind of recalibrated wonder, the face of a person who expected something beautiful and got something true, which are not always the same thing but are today.
She has a new housing for her camera, a wide-angle lens that I helped her spec out in February when the lake was frozen over and we were planning the season from her studio over coffee and printed gear catalogs.
The mer-magic session runs ninety minutes.
I work the safety perimeter while Cora leads the group through the north cove.
The light in there is still what it always was, the particular filtered green-gold of a sheltered freshwater inlet in morning sun.
I watch from the outside as she becomes what she is in the water, and the tourists become what tourists become when a sirena in her full form moves through the same water they are in.
They come up different from how they went in. They always do.
Afterward, when the group has gone to change and Sera is reviewing her shots, I run the gear rinse and check the equipment shed and make notes in the tour log.
Today's entry: Clear. Temp 22C at surface, 14C at depth. High visibility. North cove in morning light. Group engaged throughout. Sera working the wide-angle. I pause, then add: Osprey returned to the north pine. Has reconsidered the serving window. Provisional approval granted.
Cora reads the log sometimes. This will make her laugh.
I close the book and lean against the shed doorway and look at the lake.
It's mid-afternoon now, the sun at its highest and most generous, and the water is the color it gets on the best days of early summer.
Down the shore, Liana and Roarke are still there, joined by more townsfolk walking by who sit a spell with them.
Roarke has given up on the blanket entirely and is simply sitting on the grass with his long legs crossed, talking to his mate about something that makes her laugh.
I can hear it from here, clear and warm across the water.
Nugget is back on the dock end, performing his pre-launch assessment.
Cora finds me at the end of the afternoon, when the last group has gone and the dock is quiet and the lake has begun its evening transition from bright to gold.
The sign above the Snack Hut catches the same light. Sirena & Co. The cedar warm in the gold of it, the shell inlay gleaming, both marks clear.
Selkie-in-Training, below, in her hand.
I put my arm around her.
She leans into my shoulder.
The lake, below us, does the thing it does at this hour. Catches the light and holds it in the still places between the small chop, so the water glows from within, gold and rose and the deep blue that lives underneath both of those.
Tubig na may kaluluwa, she said, the first time she named it for me properly, on the dock in late August with the morning all around us and the whole future still being decided.
Water with a soul.
The lake shimmers once, long and low and pleased with the evening.
Somewhere behind us, Nugget launches off the dock for the last time today.
The splash is enormous.
Liana claps.
The sirena has her home.
The selkie has land worth staying for.
Thank you for reading Sealed With a Kiss.