8 Mermaids’ Tears
8
Mermaids’ Tears
Maybe it was because I was there and not somewhere else.
Maybe because it was too late to run away.
Maybe because deep down, I hoped to find the answer I was looking for. Because I’d heard a million times that life was unpredictable, that everything changes when you least expect it, and I wanted to believe that was good. So I stopped running away from it.
You can’t escape what you are unless you try to pretend you’re someone else.
Maybe I’d spent too much time pretending.
I opened my eyes and looked at the ocean. A cool, soft breeze, smelling of algae, caressed my skin. I could taste the salt in the air on my tongue. I walked to the shore, opening my senses to the space around me. Soon, colors, sounds, and aromas enveloped me. It was as if I were looking at the world for the first time. And I loved what I saw. An isolated, untamed part of the planet.
I walked for a long while. The soft sand of the beach gathered in undulating dunes that led to a cliff of bloodred rock. I climbed to the top and looked down, panting. Below me was an endless pebble beach. Stretching as far as the eye could see, it was lashed by foam-capped waves.
A gust of wind knocked me backwards. In the north, the afternoon sky had turned gray. The beach was empty except for a house that looked tiny in the distance and a few surfers in their neoprene outfits. I jogged down a path to the shore.
The water bubbled as it rose around my feet. It was chilly but bracing as I waded through it. I found a shiny red stone among the pebbles. I bent down to pick it up and it twinkled in my fingers under the sunlight. It looked like glass.
“Nice job. You don’t usually find them that big.”
I shouted in surprise and looked up to find a woman grinning at me. Where the hell had she come from?
“Sorry if I scared you,” she said.
“No problem, I just didn’t see you coming,” I said, standing up straight.
The first thing I noticed about her was her dark hair with coppery tones, which fell to her waist. Her skin was slightly tanned, her eyes turquoise green. She was pretty in her baggy white dress, which was thin and gave a view of her body. I couldn’t say exactly how old she was. Her face was girlish, timeless, despite her crow’s-feet.
Ethereal , I thought as I looked at her, bewitched.
She pointed to my hand.
“What are you going to do with it? It’s perfect.”
I looked at the pebble, not understanding what she meant. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
She seemed surprised at my question. “Oh, when I saw you, I thought you… You don’t know what it is?”
“A stone?” I guessed.
The amused gleam in her eyes only confused me further. “It’s a mermaid’s tear,” she responded.
A what? Did she mean a mermaid-mermaid, like a woman with a fish’s tail and a crab for a best friend? Look, I’ve got an open mind. You never know, after all. I believed in the tooth fairy until I was eleven, and I’m ashamed to admit I still gaze longingly at the fireplace when Christmas comes. Who am I to judge anyone for what they do or don’t believe?
“A mermaid’s tear? You mean like…a real mermaid?” I asked, feigning indifference.
She laughed a sweet, musical, throaty laugh. Her accent was French, not the usual accent of the French Canadians or the islanders. Hers was much softer.
“No, dear. People have different names for them: mermaids’ tears, sea crystals… They’re actually just bits of glass thrown up by the ocean. My name’s Adele, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Harper.”
“Nice to meet you as well, Harper. I haven’t seen you around here.”
There was kindness, but also caution in her approach.
“It’s the first time I’ve been to the island. I got here yesterday on the last ferry. The, uh…the yellow house in Old Bay belongs to my sister.”
She nodded, and her shoulders relaxed. I don’t know why, but my answer had relieved her.
“Yes, I know it. It’s a beautiful place. My friend Molly used to be the owner. She inherited it from her parents and turned it into a cute little bed-and-breakfast, but then she got sick and had to put it on the market. Poor Molly. She left us not long ago.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, it was a major blow for all of us who knew her. She’s the one who taught me how to look for mermaids’ tears.”
I smiled awkwardly, unsure what else to say, thinking maybe our conversation was at an end, but she continued to study me with no apparent thought of going anywhere.
“Why do they call them that?” I asked to break the silence.
“There’s a legend behind it…”
A gust of wind hit, blowing up sand around us, and I blinked to keep it from getting in my eyes. Another, more violent one followed, and the waves rolled in up to our calves. When they broke, the sound was deafening, and I noticed the white and gray clouds rushing across the sky. The weather was getting worse.
“Are you in the mood for a tea? I live in the blue house on the cliff. It’s close by. And it’s been forever since Sid and I had anyone over. It would be nice to talk with an outsider for a while.”
“Who’s Sid?” I asked, surprised at the invitation.
“My husband.”
I didn’t think it was a good idea. I knew nothing about that woman or her husband. Think of all the stories that begin with an innocent invitation and end with a girl chained up in a basement. Okay, sometimes my imagination gets the better of me. But it was getting windy. I should probably go back home before it gets worse and I can’t , I thought. But then the image of that empty, lonely house with no distractions depressed me.
“It would be a pleasure to have tea with you,” I responded.
Adele’s house was deep blue with white window frames, two stories, with an attic and a dark slate roof. From outside, it was hard to tell how bright and spacious it was inside. I followed her to the kitchen and sat at the table while she put a kettle on the stove and brought out two antique-looking cups from a cabinet. On the counter was a jar of butter cookies. She served a half dozen of them on a plate.
Outside, over the roar of the wind, I heard a rhythmic pounding, as if someone were cutting firewood or maybe felling trees. Inside, I heard the ticking of a clock. Adele, I realized, didn’t mind long silences the way some people did. As for me, they made me nervous.
When I was with other people, I felt I simply had to fill the air for reasons even I didn’t really understand, and when I had nothing interesting to say, that only made it worse. Often, my mouth kept moving even when my mind told it to close. I could feel this about to happen again as I started to tell her how pretty her house was, but she cut me off with a mysterious expression on her face.
“Legend has it that mermaids are born with the power to control nature. They can change the ocean’s currents or the direction of the wind. They can even provoke storms. But Neptune, the god of the sea, forbade their doing it. One cold, tragic night, a horrible tempest was unleashed, and a ship traveling the ocean found itself in the midst of a hurricane. The captain and his loyal sailors fought the wind and waves for hours to stay afloat. He remained at the wheel, and not even the tearing of the sails or the creaking of the masts broke his nerves. Finally, a powerful wave struck and he lost his balance and fell into the sea.”
She paused when the kettle started to whistle, taking it off the stove and pouring the boiling water into two cups with tea bags. When she sat back down in front of me, she put two lumps of sugar into hers. Then she continued. “A mermaid had been watching the captain from the distance, admiring his strength and courage. Never before had she seen a man so daring, and she fell in love with him without realizing it. When she saw him struggling not to drown, she felt forced to break Neptune’s rule, and she calmed the wind and the waves, allowing the captain to make it back to his vessel safely.”
I was enraptured by her tale and the sound of her voice, and a strange feeling that I had seen Adele before grew in me as I listened.
She continued, “Neptune found out what the mermaid had done. Angry, he exiled her to the furthest depths of the ocean, never allowing her to surface again. She accepted her punishment and swam far away from the captain who had stolen her heart, crying endlessly in despair, eaten up by sorrow. And ever since that day, her glimmering glass tears wash up on the shore as an eternal reminder of her love.”
She stirred her tea elegantly, with a smirk. Once again, I told myself there was something familiar about her.
“What a beautiful story. It’s so sad though!”
“I got so angry the first time I heard it. I thought it was so unfair what happened to the poor mermaid, and that she didn’t rebel or fight back. But later I came to realize there are times when love just doesn’t have a future, and you have to make sacrifices, and those sacrifices are another form that love takes. We think if you love someone crazily, that’s enough to overcome all obstacles, but it isn’t like that. Sometimes, painful as that is to admit, there’s just nothing you can do. The mermaid and the captain didn’t even belong to the same worlds. There was no future there. She knew that. But still, she sacrificed herself for him.”
“And the man never knew she existed or how much she had done for him,” I whispered. Then I took a sip of tea, thinking about what all that had meant. “Why are we women so stupid? We fall in love and turn into idiots. It’s like ‘Okay, goodbye, brain!’”
Adele observed me from behind her long black lashes. “I sense some resentment behind those words, and I must say, you’re very young to be talking that way.”
I shrugged. “You’re never too young to have your heart broken.”
“That’s true.”
There was warmth in Adele’s curiosity, and I wondered if she saw the same things in me that I saw when I looked in the mirror. I was like an eggshell, cracked, empty, but I longed to be full of something, and not just neediness. I worried she’d end up asking me about that broken heart, and I hurriedly changed the subject, setting my crystal on the table. “So this is just a piece of glass?”
“That’s right. Before plastic was invented, almost every container people used was made of glass: bottles, plates, glasses, jugs, lamps. And lots of those things wound up in the ocean. Not to mention all the ships that sank at different times with their cargo of alcohol. Just think of all the bottles of beer, whiskey, and gin that ended up down there… The sea currents break them into little pieces and slowly polish them. One like yours”—she pointed at the table—“might take thirty or forty years to get to that shape and wind up on the shore. Some of them are centuries old.”
“That’s incredible!”
“Yeah. They can be very valuable, depending on the color. The gray ones, or pink or red. They’re getting harder to find, too. There are fewer and fewer of them left. What washes up on the beach now is mostly plastic.”
“What do people want with them?”
“They collect them, make jewelry out of them, decorative objects, all kinds of things.”
“So that’s why you asked me what I was thinking of doing with it,” I said, picking it up and rubbing it between my fingers.
“That’s right.”
“How do you know so much about all this?”
She winked and stood. “Come here, I’ll show you something.”
I followed her through the house to an open door on the second floor. When I walked into the room, what I saw took my breath away. It was full of jars of sea glass in every color imaginable. In the center of the room was a square table with tools, glue, wire, a tiny anvil, a magnifying glass, and boxes with tiny compartments with even more bits of glass inside, organized by size. An unfinished piece was on another table under a window, and there was a glass case with finished jewelry: rings, pendants, bracelets…
“You do all this?” I asked, unable to believe it.
She blushed. I could tell she was proud of what she did. And she was right to be. Every object I saw in there was a work of art. On the table I found a nearly finished bracelet. The silver bezel holding the crystal was minutely shaped to match its form. She smelted and molded the metal herself. I couldn’t hide my admiration.
“You’re a true artist!”
She tried to wave me off. “I’m an artisan at best. But I do enjoy my work.” Then her face lit up. “He’s the artist.”
I turned around and found a man covered in sawdust and wood shavings who was looking at me with curiosity. He must have been well over six feet tall, and his shoulders were nearly as broad as the doorframe. His hair was black and straight and shimmered under the bandanna tied around his head.
“Honey, this is Harper. We met on the beach, and I invited her up for a tea.”
“Hi,” I said, a little reserved.
“Happy to meet you. I’m Sid, Adele’s husband.”
He offered me his hand, and I shook it.
“Sid’s a sculptor. He carves wood. His creations are the real artworks in this house.”
Sid laughed.
“I’m the more modest of the two of us,” he said.
Adele’s expression showed feigned irritation, but it was evident that she loved him deeply. Their back-and-forth went on for a few minutes and ended in a kiss that I looked away from to give them their privacy. Sid said a pleasant goodbye and went to make a coffee for himself before returning to work.
“I adore that man.” Adele sighed.
“You make a wonderful couple.”
She tried to shrug off my remark, but admitted she felt incredibly fortunate to be with him, and also that he’d been a hard man to win over. That seemed strange, because Adele’s personality was irresistible. She was a good storyteller, and as she walked through the room chatting away, I found myself more and more enchanted with her.
I looked at the photos hanging on the wall, some of which showed a much younger Sid. He was a member of the Mohawk nation, as evidenced by the flag he was waving in one of the snapshots. There was a long history of the Mohawk people fighting for their rights to the land they had tended for time immemorial.
I stopped in front of another black-and-white photo, peeking closely, with the persistent sense that I knew her from somewhere. And then I remembered, and yelped with surprise. It was her! My goodness, that teenager posing with a César Award was her!
My heart was racing as I turned around, and I hoped I wouldn’t faint.
“You’re Adele LaCroix!” I exclaimed, hardly able to speak. “I loved your movies when I was a girl. I loved-loved-loved them! I loved you!”
“Thank you!”
“I saw your first movie when I was nine, and right away you became my favorite actress. I bought every magazine you were ever in.”
“How sweet of you.”
“Jeez, I know I’m acting like a lunatic, but I can’t help it! It’s you!” I shook my hands in the air. “I cried so much in that movie where you became an orphan… It meant so much to me back then.”
“That was my favorite.”
“Mine too! I just admire you so much. I even wrote you a letter. Did you get it? I mean, I’m sure you didn’t. Why would I even think such a thing… You must have gotten millions of them.” Please, God, shut me up. Make my mouth stop moving. “I swear I’m a normal person. It’s just that…it’s you! I’m sorry, I promise I’ll be quiet now.”
Adele burst out laughing.
My legs were shaking. My whole body was. I tried and failed to suppress a nervous giggle. I couldn’t stop looking at her. I was in the same room as my girlhood idol, I was in her house, I’d even had tea with her.
OMG!
She watched me patiently, with a pleasant look on her face, while I grew increasingly embarrassed by my childish response. Taking a deep breath, I tried to act like an adult who wasn’t dying to get her autograph.
“I hope you don’t mind the question, but why did you stop making movies? You utterly disappeared.”
She sat on a stool and seemed to size me up, as if not sure whether it was worth it to respond. Finally, she motioned for me to sit down beside her. I almost ran over as she began: “I just lost interest in it. I mean, it’s more complicated than that. My mother was an actress, my father was a director, and everyone just took it for granted that I’d follow in their footsteps, but with time, it stopped making me happy and turned into something almost mechanical, thoughtless. I was acting, but there was no passion in it, you know? So I quit. This wasn’t the life I wanted; it was the one the people around me wanted for me. And that wasn’t fair.”
“Did your friends and family support you?”
“Not at first. They thought the glamour life was all there was, and couldn’t understand how a person might want anything else. They were worried about the press and what people would say about me. In the end, it’s all about sensationalism and how many newspapers they can sell, and no one cares if what they write is actually true.”
“Yeah, I remember the headlines,” I said softly.
“They published horrible things, stories about airplane crashes, rehabilitation clinics, unwanted pregnancies… I just tried to laugh it off. What else could I do?”
“How’d you wind up here, then?”
Her facial muscles relaxed.
“Some scenes in my last movie were filmed here. And I fell in love with the place, the people. I met Sid. He’s the most wonderful man in the world.”
“Was it love at first sight?”
The question made her blush a little.
“For me, it was. I had never seen a man as…impressive as him.”
“And you stuck around to be with him? I think my heart’s going to explode!”
She rested a hand on mine. I was so surprised by the gesture, I flinched. When she noticed this, Adele squeezed tightly.
“I’m sorry to disillusion you, but it wasn’t quite like that. Nothing happened that time. It couldn’t yet, and I knew that. The filming ended, and I went back to Paris, back to my life, the debut, the parties. But I realized that wasn’t me, and all I could think about was how I’d felt here. Happy. Free… Like myself. Three months later, I came back to stay.”
“What a story!”
“It’s not a story, it’s my life,” she responded, content. Then she stood and walked a few steps, as if she couldn’t be still for too long. “So what about you?” she asked. “Where’s home for you?”
Before I could tell her, a shutter struck the window, frightening me. The wind’s whistle was almost deafening. I waited a few seconds for my pulse to slow back down.
What had she asked me? Oh, right!
“I live in a rented apartment in Toronto, but I’m from Montreal.”
“That’s far from the island. Are you here for vacation?”
“No. I mean, sort of. It’s a long story.”
She could sense the worry in my voice, and she leaned her head to one side before saying, “I love long stories.”
I shrugged.
“The fact is, this trip was sort of out of the blue. I should be back home, taking care of things at my internship and getting ready for the upcoming semester, but my grandmother died not long ago, and since then, it’s like the whole world has stopped. Everything’s falling apart.” I paused to take a breath of air. “She brought me up, and…”
Adele’s once cheerful demeanor changed all at once, and she grabbed both my hands. “I’m so sorry, Harper. I know what it means to lose a loved one.”
“I miss her so much.”
“Of course you do, dear.” She wiped away a tear I hadn’t been able to suppress. “Come on, let’s go sit in the living room where we’ll be more comfortable.”
I followed her to a yellow sofa in the middle of the room facing a fireplace. I sat next to her, feeling abashed that I’d fallen into the same old trap of giving explanations no one had asked me for, personal details I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear. I was always justifying myself, and I hated myself for doing it. I hated that constant need for approval.
Keeping my trap shut, that was the simplest, easiest way to avoid others’ judgments. But for some reason, I had never learned how to do it.
“Sorry I asked. I didn’t want to upset you.”
Her soft voice was comforting. I cleared my throat before responding.
“Don’t apologize. You’re being so sweet. You barely know me and you opened your home to me. Besides, I asked you first. It’s only normal that you do the same.”
“Yeah, but don’t feel forced, Harper. You only have to tell me what you want. But if you do feel like talking, I’m not a bad listener.”
Adele seemed genuinely worried, and I smiled, trying to ease her mind. I told her in broad strokes about my situation. Something told me she understood, and I started to feel she could see who I really was, and this feeling grew the more I confessed to her.
“I need to make an important decision, and I’m hoping to find the answer I need here. That’s it in a nutshell.”
As she thought over what I’d said, I brought a hand to my chest, nervous. I’d heard what I thought was thunder far off, and clouds were starting to cast shadows over the light flooding through the windows.
“I hope you find your answer, too, Harper. I wish I could give you some good advice, but I’m someone who made a lot of mistakes before I managed to make the right decision.”
“How did you know it was the right one, though?”
“Because it made me happy. It was as easy as that.”
“I’m scared, Adele. I’m scared of being wrong.”
“Dear, we’re all scared of making mistakes. I am, still, because even the right decision may not be the most sensible one, and just because it’s right for now doesn’t mean it always will be in the future. It may only make you happy in that moment. And maybe that’s enough, but still, it’s normal to worry about that. Fear is natural—it keeps you on your toes, it pushes you to struggle, to survive. The problem is when fear turns into panic. Panic attacks the fragile parts of you. It can smell them out like a predator, and it eats you up inside because it knows you’re weak and can’t fight back. And it’s easy to just let life drag you along, but if you get caught in the current, you might drown.”
What she was saying made sense, and that weakness she spoke of, that current, was something I could feel in myself. That panic was paralyzing me. It had been there forever, like a worm inside an apple. From the outside, the apple looks perfect, but when you cut it open, you can see it’s full of holes and starting to rot.
I wanted to cry, but instead I tried to put on a happy face. I rebelled against my sorrow, stopped slumping over, raised my chin up as if defying my own insecurities. They wouldn’t get the best of me. Not this time.