Chapter 11
Neri
Two days since I kissed Rafe, and the cottage has gotten smaller.
Not literally. Literally it’s the same four stone walls, the same fire, the same beds we retreat to each night with elaborate casualness, his by the hearth, mine by the wall.
But something changed in the air pressure of the place, and now every ordinary thing is conducted through a charged medium.
He hands me the kettle and an electric current runs through my body when our fingers brush.
I re-wrap my ankle and I catch him watching.
We are extremely, professionally normal with each other, all day, both of us, and it’s the most exhausting work I’ve done in my entire life.
I’m postponing, he said. It’s not the same thing, but I can’t help but feel the sting of rejection.
The man kissed me like a homecoming and then pushed me away like he was afraid I’d think he was taking advantage of me. The idea is ridiculous, especially since I’m the one who kissed him in the first place.
But I do have some semblance of dignity left in me, so I’m not going to bring it up again. Unless he does it first.
My ankle is healing and my body is fed and rested, which means my brain has spare capacity again. I don’t think I’ll ever eat another mussel after we leave this island, but for now, I’m not complaining.
Dinner is done and Rafe is dozing by the fire, cheek on his fist, glasses shoved up into his hair. I’m at the window, watching the light go long and bronze over the meadow.
The water in the cove at dusk is the color of jewels and the sea whispers in my ears like it hasn’t in years.
I’m out the door before I can think better of it.
The path down through the meadow is easy on my half-mended ankle, grass caressing my calves, roses breathing their last warmth into the evening, and then the grass gives out onto the pale crescent of beach. The beach runs down, shell-strewn, rippled, to the waterline.
And that’s where I stop. Toes of my ruined shoes a foot from the reach of the softest little waves in Maine.
The cove is glass. The tide is turning, that held-breath slack where the last light lies along the surface in bands of rose gold. The entire universe is calm, and patient, like it’s been waiting for me for five years.
My whole body knows it. The pull is there.
It’s always there, it lives under my sternum like a second pulse, I’ve just been drowning it in so much work, it got tired.
But here, now, on this island, this close to the ocean and no excuse anywhere in reach, it isn’t just a pull anymore.
It’s a door, standing open, with everything that matters on the other side of it.
I want to move, but I stand frozen in place, with my arms wrapped around myself unable to leave the safety of the land behind.
Or maybe it’s my broken heart I can’t leave behind. I’m not really sure.
I don’t hear him come down the path. I just become aware of him beside me, an arm’s length away. I can see him from the corner of my vision, with his hands in his pockets, looking at the water and not at me, and we stand there while the bands of gold over the horizon turn to a deep amber.
“You know,” he says, at last, gently, like someone talking to a skittish little creature, “this is the closest I’ve seen you get to the ocean.”
“I was literally in the ocean a few days ago, remember?”
“Not voluntarily,” he agrees. “But now, you are.”
And that’s all. No question mark. He just sets the observation down between us on the sand, and leaves it entirely up to me. Something about that, the room he gives me, the incredible patience of this man gives me the final push I needed.
The door I’ve kept shut for so long opens on its own.
“I haven’t shifted in five years.” My voice comes out level, but there’s no missing the pain underneath it, even to my own ears. “Not once. Not for a full moon, not in a pool, not in a bathtub.”
He doesn’t move. The tide breathes and the iodine scent of the ocean caresses my skin.
“Everyone thinks mermaids just, do it. Like blinking. And we do. At least, I used to do it.” I watch the water instead of him, because I can’t do this facing him.
“From before I could walk, my mother would take me out past the kelp line in San Francisco Bay, where I grew up. On full moons, the whole mermaid community swims together, hundreds of us, thousands on the solstices, and she’d hold my hands in the swell, and … ”
Emotions swell in my throat and my eyes burn with unshed tears. I haven’t cried in so long, it takes me a few moments to recognize the feeling.
When I do, I decide to let it go. For some reason that defies all logic, I don’t care that Rafe sees me cry. Maybe it’s the Golden Retriever in him, maybe it’s the beauty of the ocean, oily and still as a painting.
But I let the tears fall down my cheeks and I keep going.
“She died. Five years ago in March. I was twenty-two, finishing undergrad three thousand miles away. After the funeral I went down to the bay at the full moon because that’s what you do, that’s how mermaids grieve, you give all your pain to the water.
The whole community was out. They left a space for me, right in the middle of the circle.
” The words are coming in easy which surprises me.
“And I stood on the beach and I reached for it, the shift, the way you reach for a light switch in your own house. And it wasn’t there. ”
Beside me, Rafe is giving me his total attention. The kind of listening you can feel on your skin.
“Not, it hurt. Not, it was hard. It wasn’t there.
Like the whole half of me that was her had been erased.
” My hand does something in the air, like mimicking the saddest magic trick of all.
“The doctors, and I saw all of them, mer-specialists, neurologists, a shaman in Half Moon Bay my aunt swore by, they all said the same thing with different letterhead. Suppression. Stress response. It happens, it lifts, give it time. It doesn’t last, they said.
There’s no recorded case where it lasts. ”
I laugh, one note, the ugliest sound this beautiful cove has ever hosted.
“Congratulations to me. I’m the recorded case.”
“Neri.”
“The pull never stopped, that’s the joke, that’s the actual joke.
” My words wobble and I don’t even try to hide it.
“Every time, it comes up under my ribs like a tide and it wants, and I stand at whatever window is nearest and I feel the whole ocean asking where I am. And I don’t answer.
Because what if I walk in and reach for the switch and the room is still gone?
Every month I don’t try, the room might still be there.
I’m Schrodinger’s mermaid.” My eyes are burning, my cheeks are wet and the horizon’s gone smeared.
“As long as I never open the box, I don’t have to solve the problem. I’m not broken.”
“Broken,” he says. Very quietly. The word I said to him on the boat without saying it.
The last of the light is going off the water, turning the sky a shade of the deepest, darkest blue.
“What else do you call a mermaid who can’t shift?”
I stop. Because he’s turned to me, and I make the mistake of looking at his face.
There’s no pity on his expression. I have an early-warning system for pity that can detect it through walls, and there’s none here.
What’s on his face is both worse and better: he’s just with me.
Fully, terribly with me, the way he was in the wheelhouse, believing me before the evidence.
His eyes are bright behind the glasses and his jaw is tight. Still, he doesn’t ask.
“Maybe this time would be different,” he says.
“Don’t.” It comes out cracked. “Everyone says that and it never is.”
“I’m not everyone, and I’m not saying it’ll work.
” He steps in, slow, and his hands come up and frame my face, his thumb brushing salty tears off my cheekbone.
“I have no data. But this is a different situation. There’s no one watching, no doctors, no deadline.
Just me.” His mouth crooks, helpless, even now. “And I’m on your side.”
The pull under my sternum rises like the tide coming back in.
Five years I’ve been avoiding this, terrified of what would happen if I tried again.
And the pull swallows me, and I am so tired.
Not sad-tired. Load-bearing tired. Tired the way a wall is tired but still stands.
The worst thing that can possibly happen is I try and I fail, and the only thing that would change is I’d finally know.
At least, I would still have Rafe with me. And Rafe has a bad habit of making every terrible thing a little bit better. A little bit more bearable.
I push on my toes and I kiss him.
Soft, once, deliberate, his lips parting in surprise. It isn’t like the cottage kiss, wild and impulsive. His hands tighten a breath on my face and then I step back.
I hold his eyes while I toe off my ruined shoes, strip the salt-stiff sweater over my head, step out of the wrecked trousers, down to my sports bra and underwear.
Nothing romantic about any of it, my knees are bruised and my hip is scraped and I don’t care.
Still, his breath goes uneven and he doesn’t say one word, doesn’t move one inch, just watches me.
I turn around and I walk into the sea.
Ankle-deep, the cold climbs along my shins like a question.
Then knee-deep. The sand shelves away soft and pale under my feet, and the water is slate and silver around me.
The pull is not a pull anymore, it is a roar, it’s five years of longing with their interest compounded, and I am shaking, both hands fisted, water to mid-thigh.
I stop reaching for the switch.
That’s the thing I do differently. In the end, the whole secret was this: I stop reaching. I stand in the Gulf of Maine at the turn of the tide and I let go of the door and the room and the reaching, all of it. I just let go.
Here. I’m here.
The ocean takes me at my word.
It comes up from the soles of my feet like dawn comes up, warmth where there should be cold, a loosening in every seam of me. The water goes bright, the whole cove blooms silver-green with a light that is coming from me, from my skin.
It’s the world’s easiest yes, and my body remembers.
My tail takes the last of the light and throws it back teal and rose and burning, scales sliding over me like a held note resolving.
My gills open silk-easy on my neck, and I go down into the dark cold glass of the cove, but the dark isn’t dark, my eyes were built for this, and the cold isn’t cold, nothing was ever cold in the water.
I hear the whole island underwater, the mussels ticking on their ledges, the sand hissing in the tide-turn, the vast slow talk of the swell against the outer walls, the sea whispering the same words it’s been all this time in my sleep.
There you are.
I answer with my whole body.
I don’t come out for a long time. I am aware, distantly, in the way you’re aware of the moon in the sky, of time passing, of the stars wheeling up over the cove, of a fire kindled small and stubborn on the beach, of a shape sitting beside it, wrapped in a wool blanket, keeping a watch with a total absence of complaint.
I breach and spiral and dive. I take the outer channel at speed and come back.
I float on my back in the middle of the cove with the entire length of me silvered in starlight.
And I cry. I cry for my mother, who held my hands in the swell, whose half of me was here the whole time, waiting under my sternum with the patience she always had.
I lose myself to the water. The sky goes gray, then pearl, then faintly, foolishly pink.
I come in with the small waves, and the shift back is as easy as the shift out.
The sea sets me down on my own two feet in the shallows like a dance partner at the end of the song.
Human legs, dripping, wrung out, scrubbed new.
My legs shake. My gills seal to silk seams on my neck.
The dawn air is freezing and I could not possibly care less.
He’s exactly where I left him, and he stands up at my approach and comes down to the waterline with a blanket open like wings.
Wool and woodsmoke and cedar close around me. He rubs my arms through the blanket, and his face, in the pink light, is wide open, awed and wrecked and sleepless.
Then he kisses me, salt and all, morning and all, and it’s the cottage kiss and the beach kiss compounded, and I feel it in the soles of my brand-new feet.
“You stayed all night,” I say, when there’s air in my lungs.
“There was a mermaid in the cove,” he says. His voice is gravel and wonder, and his thumb traces once along the seam on my neck, reverent, like it’s the best thing he’s ever been allowed near. “I wasn’t going to miss that for sleep.”
The laugh comes up through me from somewhere that’s been closed for so long, I’ve forgotten it was there.
And because I’m new, because the water’s still running off me and I can feel my own pulse in the tide, I ask the question straight, with a courage I didn’t even know I had.
“So. Are you going to run away this time?”
He grins. It goes all the way into the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, nerdy and sure and slightly feral, dawn catching in his glasses, and he pulls the blanket tighter around me, flattening my body against him.
He’s warm and tall, all hard planes and masculinity.
The push of an erection presses against the cold, wet skin of my stomach and another tide rises inside me, but this time, it’s hot and burning, spreading from that spot between my legs.
“No,” he says. “I’m done with that.”
This time, it’s him who kisses me.