Fathom

by L. L. Standage

  “He says they can’t leave the house yet,” he said to me.

  “Why not?” I asked. He held up one hand to silence me so he could listen to Eamon on the line. I watched, gnawing on my lower lip and wincing with unease.

  “Right,” said Calder. “Yeah, we can get there. We will. Bye.” He hung up the pay phone. “Some detective named Mallory sent out a BOLO on us.”

  “Mallory? Detective Mallory?”

  “Yeah.”

  I scowled. “The man at the grocery store. The one who chased after us in his truck. He’s a cop. That has to be him. He’s probably Brock’s dad.” I sighed. “What’s a bolo?”

  “Be on the look out. Local cops think we’re crime suspects.”

  “Are the others all right?”

  “They’re all fine. We need to lie low until they can come and get us. Eamon said there’s an orange grove a few miles away. We can wait there. Uther’s going to try and get the BOLO lifted.”

  “I don’t get it. How can these cops be so corrupt?”

  “To them, it’s not corruption. It’s following orders. That Detective Mallory—he must have some authority.”

  “What are we going to do? This guy is almost as bad as Linnaeus.”

  “Don’t worry about him. He’s probably only paid muscle. As soon as he stops getting paid, he’ll stop chasing us. Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.” My nerves stole my appetite.

  “We’ll be here a while. I’ll get us something to eat for later.”

  We bought a bag of chips and a candy bar each. Not the most nutritious meal, but it was the best they had in the grimy gas station. The bagels they sold were as hard as rocks, and I wasn’t about to touch the hot dogs. They looked like they had been sitting on the rotating cooker for the last ten years.

  We walked in silence through the neighborhood, looking like a couple of beggars. A few people leered at us from behind their cockeyed window shades, but I wasn’t afraid. Instead, I found myself content to be exactly where I was.

  The bag of mail swung from one hand as I pretended to look at the houses we passed—but really, I was looking at Calder. He might have been moody and reserved, but he also had undeniably attractive qualities: selflessness, bravery, and brains—not to mention good taste in reading. Aside from being fist-bitingly cute, he had a protective, road-wise nature. Unlike Landon, he didn’t have selfish motives or treat me like he was doing me a favor when he spent time with me. As I watched him, I could tell he knew everything about our surroundings—ins, outs, escapes, and dangers alike. With him, I felt safe. And now that he was actually being nice, he was easy to talk to.

  Maybe he wasn’t such a cretin after all.

  “What?” He caught me looking at him.

  I looked away, my face burning. “Nothing.”

  After another half hour of walking, we came to the orange groves. Similar to the ones I knew in Arizona, it had citrus trees sitting squat and round in long, tight rows. Little green balls hung from every leafy branch, unripe and inedible.

  A high bank of dirt ran along the edge of the orchard. We sat down behind it and ate our unhealthy lunch.

  “I hope they come soon,” I said, though it was only half true.

  “We’ll be all right.” He finished his food, rested his back against the bank of dirt, and propped his elbows on his knees. “I don’t like waiting to be rescued either, but it happens sometimes.”

  I looked up at the tree whose branches lent us shade.

  “I wish the oranges were ripe.”

  “Me too,” said Calder. “Sounds pretty good right about now.”

  “At home, we have neighbors who have orange trees in their backyard. We get all the oranges we want during winter.”

  He looked at me with a confused tilt in his face. “In the winter? Where are you from?”

  “Arizona.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Makes sense. I’ve never been to Arizona.”

  “You’re not missing much. It’s too hot in the summer, too dry in the winter, and too cactusy all year around. I think Scotland would be a lot prettier.”

  “You’ve never been?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never been anywhere. Just Arizona and California.”

  “Well, you’ll have to travel someday. There’s a lot to see out there.”

  “Where have you been?”

  He shrugged. “All over.”

  “All over where?” I pressed with a smile. “All over North America? All over Scotland?”

  Calder looked at me and gave a small laugh. He paused a moment as if to read an invisible map in the dirt. “All over the world, really. The British Isles, er…Germany, Portugal” —he thought some more—“Australia, New York, Hawaii, Jamaica, Alaska…”

  My mouth dropped open. “Whoa. Is this all for mermaid stuff?”

  “Most of it.”

  “How do you afford all that?”

  “Uther. He’s quite, er, well off. Old money.”

  “Really?”

  “And our connections with merpeople. We help them out and they help us out. When they feel like it.”

  “Wow. What did you have to do to become part of the group?” Internally, I cringed. I didn’t want it to sound like I wanted to join up.

  “I didn’t have to do anything. My mum was part of the group. Eamon’s a good friend of the family. He said when I turned eighteen, I could help.”

  “Oh, right. Eamon told me about how all of you found each other.”

  I looked at the potato chip and candy bar wrappers in my fidgeting hands while the silence stretched on. I looked around for something more to talk about but all I could see were trees and dirt. Say something, Liv. Anything! Continue the conversation. But right as I opened my mouth to ask him which Harry Potter book was his favorite, he spoke.

  “Listen…” he said in a resigned tone. I looked up. He went on, “I might as well say it since we’re stuck here…”

  I watched him as he struggled with his words. He looked like he had an icky tasting cough medicine in his mouth and tried to muster up the courage to swallow it.

  “I’m sorry.” He spoke to the tree trunks.

  I leaned back again, astonished and feeling as though my candy bar had turned into a firecracker in my stomach.

  He continued. “I mean, for the way I behaved.”

  I nodded, my chest tight and my breath shallow. I bit the inside of my mouth. I couldn’t believe it. He was apologizing. I thought back on the things he said, the way he had hurt me. I didn’t want to forgive him so easily, but with an internal clench of irritation, I realized I already had.

  But he didn’t need to know that. He needed to prove he was sorry before he got any forgiveness from me.

  “Well, you were pretty rude.”

  “I was extremely rude. You didn’t deserve it.” He turned to look at me. “I’m not usually like that.”

  Grease and dirt and sweat smeared his face, but he looked at me. His eyes roved over my face as though he realized he had never truly seen me before. I drank it in like parched Arizona soil during a rare rainfall. Every curve in his hard face softened with humility. I wondered how on earth his former mermaid girlfriend had the nerve to turn away from him—to break this heart and never again see this face.

  I looked at the ground after I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I still can’t believe it though,” he said. “It’s weird. My brain has to rearrange everything I thought I knew over the last few weeks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you. I really thought…” He trailed off. “It was stupid.”

  “You really thought I was a mermaid.”

  He shrugged. Poor guy. Despite all the mean things he’d said and done, I kind of felt sorry for him.

  “Delfina said you were a mermaid. She said something about overhearing you at a supermarket, worrying about people finding out. And Samantha called you ‘mermaid girl.’”

  “That was just something
she started doing since the photo shoot. I never said I was a mermaid though.” I looked at the ground, trying to remember everything that happened since that day at the grocery store. “I was at the store with Samantha. I remember seeing Delfina because I thought she was weird. She kept staring at me. I had a little freak out when I saw my picture in the tabloid. Oh, and I was really thirsty at the time and drank a ton of water right in front of her. Maybe she misunderstood.”

  “Huh. I never knew about the picture.”

  I thought back on my conversation with Eamon on the beach.

  “I’m pretty sure Eamon said Delfina told you about it.”

  “She may have mentioned it to Eamon, but neither of them ever said anything to me about a picture. All she said to me was that you were one of them and that she’d get your help to take care of everything. She said, ‘Help from an inexperienced mermaid is better than human help any day.’”

  “Wow, really? That wasn’t very nice.”

  He chuckled. “Hasn’t knowing Cordelia taught you anything about merpeople?”

  “Seidon is nice.”

  “Seidon is not typical. Cordelia is. Delfina was probably even worse.”

  “Really?” I said with a laugh. “Just when you think you know a person.”

  He laughed. “Tell me about it. I still can’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “You! You stole the vessel. Then the file!” He shook his head with amazement. “I mean, I know I’m a complete idiot for not knowing who you really are, and I acted like an arse about it. But…you’ve never done anything like that in your life, have you?”

  “It’s a wonder I’m not dead in a gutter, huh.”

  “Pretty much.”

  I smirked, then smiled, and then nudged him. As I looked up at the sky, changing color with the waning of the day, I grinned again.

  “So, which Harry Potter book is your favorite?”

  He smiled too. “Guess.”

  “The Prisoner of Azkaban.”

  “You saw my paperback, didn’t you?”

  I laughed. “Did I guess right?”

  “You got lucky. I finished The Chamber of Secrets before coming out here and happened to bring my favorite one along. So, which is yours? No wait, let me guess. The Deathly Hallows.”

  “The Half-Blood Prince.”

  “Ah, it’s a good one.”

  “They’re all good ones.”

  He smiled. “They’re all good ones.”

  The sun had long since set when headlights playing along the orchard trees awoke me. I snapped my head up. I had fallen asleep on Calder’s shoulder. Okay, yes I was faking at first. He never pushed me away though. The thought pranced around my head like a pony in a three-ring circus until I really did fall asleep.

  “It’s alright, it’s just Uther,” said Calder when I jumped in panic. He offered me a hand. I grabbed the bag of mail and took his hand to help me up. I squinted from the brightness of the headlights.

  “You’re all right?” said Uther’s voice from the driver’s window. “You’re not hurt?”

  “No, we’re fine.” I climbed into the back seat while Calder sat shotgun.

  “We’d have gone back for the other car, but the police probably have the license plate number,” said Calder. “How far are we from the house?”

  “A good thirty or forty miles or so. Don’t worry, you did the right thing.”

  “We’ll have to apologize to Eamon for not getting his coffee creamer,” I said. Uther laughed.

  “You, jung frau, are more trouble than two mermaids put together!”

  I yawned, stretched out onto the back seat, and fell asleep.

  “Olivia…” I heard Calder’s voice. Mmm. He shook my shoulder. “Wake up, we’re back.”

  I opened my eyes. I was so tired I didn’t care if they left me to sleep in the back seat. My eyelids sank. Calder gently shook my shoulder again. I sat up, slid out of the car like a headless zombie, and shuffled into the house.

  The next thing I remembered was waking up on the sofa with a blanket over me. A faint glow of sunlight shone through the windows. The tables in the family room had once been a forest of wires and cords. Now they were cleared and empty, the computer equipment packed away. I felt a wave of sadness. So ended my summer in San Diego.

  The front door opened. Eamon and Calder walked in. Eamon held a plastic grocery bag containing a carton of coffee creamer. Both men greeted me when they saw me.

  “Sorry about the sleeping arrangements,” said Eamon. “You were so tired last night, you laid down on the sofa and wouldn’t be moved.”

  “Really?” I said, sitting up, rubbing my eyes, and wishing Calder would stop looking at me. My morning appearance was as revolting as my breath. I made an attempt at taming my hair.

  “Yeah,” said Calder, who tried hard to hold back a smile. “You were talking too. I tried to get you to talk more, but you wouldn’t.”

  My stomach contracted. “What was I saying?”

  “Nothing that made any sense. You called Uther ‘mum’ though.”

  I laughed.

  Eamon laughed too. “So…breakfast?”

  “You didn’t have any trouble at the store?” I asked as Eamon set the creamer on the counter in the kitchen and crumpled up the bag.

  “Not a whit. I think we’ll be fine for a while, as long as we all head out of town soon. We’ll make sure you and Samantha are safely on your way.”

  My heart sank back where it had sat when I first saw the computer equipment cleaned up.

  “Do we have to leave today?”

  “That was my original intention,” he said. “I thought about making up some fried potatoes, sound good?”

  It hurt to hear Eamon be so offhand about sending me home. I had begun to feel like a part of this strange household and its strange residents—a friend they could trust instead of just an unfortunate witness they had to protect. Now I was back to being the prisoner. The prisoner being extradited to another prison.

  “I know you want to stay,” Eamon continued, leaning his hands on the kitchen counter. “But I fear for your safety, and the rest of us are leaving California tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Splitting up for a while, until the next task comes,” said Calder from the kitchen.

  “Until the next mermaid is in trouble?”

  He nodded.

  “You guys will probably be glad to get rid of us, huh.” I spoke to the floor with an air of apathetic joking, afraid I’d sound like I cared too much.

  “Not at all,” said Eamon. “We were glad to have you.”

  “Liv?” I heard Samantha from the stairs. She came down a little further, saw me, and hurried the rest of the way to the couch. “I woke up and you weren’t in your bed! I freaked!”

  “I’m fine. Calder saved our lives. Again.” I looked up at him for a second. He returned my gaze with a half-smile. Sam glanced at him, then back to me and gave me a ooh, this has got to be good look.

  “Your mom called a couple times, by the way. And uh…you’ll probably want to freshen up a little, won’t you?” she said, then jumped up before I could reply and pulled me to my feet. She saw my filthy clothes for the first time. “Make that a lot.”

  Though I agreed, I knew this wasn’t her real motive. She wanted to know exactly, step by step, minute by minute, what happened between Calder and me yesterday.

  After calling my mom on Sam’s phone—in which I told her a whole lot of nothing—I had a shower. Then I told Sam what happened. Not a single gory detail withheld, from the second I had stepped out the door with Calder, until I had come home and dropped to sleep on the sofa. Sam lay on the floor of the bedroom, laughing her head off. I sat on her bed, combing out my wet hair.

  “You did the ‘falling asleep on the shoulder’ trick? Livvie-le-Skivvie! I have never been more proud of you.”

  “Keep your voice down, will you? I don’t want anyone to hear us.”

  She wav
ed a hand. “Seidon and Cordelia can hear every word even if we whisper.” She shifted to her knees. “So, I was right, wasn’t I? You like Calder, don’t you?”

  I heaved a long breath. It took a few lectures from Samantha and some near-death experiences for me to see it—not to mention, a major shift in Calder’s attitude toward me. It had become easy to talk and laugh with him. I grew to feel safe instead of self-conscious around him, and the way my insides leapt when I made him smile all chipped at the barriers I’d built around my heart. I did like him.

  I bobbed my head. Samantha clapped her hands and fell into giggles again.

  “I knew it. I knew it! Ever since we’ve been hanging around these guys, you haven’t taken your eyes off him.”

  “Shut up, that’s not true.”

  “Even when he was so mean to you…wow, you sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t you?”

  “Hey, he’s not mean anymore. And I didn’t plan for it. I didn’t want it to happen. It just did.”

  “Nerds of a feather, I guess,” she laughed. “Seidon and I knew it was only a matter of time.”

  “Yeah, thanks a lot for bringing him into this,” I said, giving her a little shove.

  “Oh, like you care. You should be thanking us. We’re the ones who made you go with Calder yesterday.”

  “Yeah, and if you ever bring up tampons in front of these people again, I’m going to kill you.”

  She laughed. “It was worth it. Does Calder like you too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe as a friend, sure. There’s never going to be anything more.” I sighed, full of disappointment I didn’t hide. I picked up an errant sock on the floor and threw it half-heartedly toward the suitcases. “I’m probably never going to see him again. We have to go home today.”

  Sam stopped laughing.

  “Today? Why today?”

  “We have to. Everyone else is leaving tomorrow. The group is splitting up until some other mermaid is in trouble again.”

  She jumped to her feet and tore open the bedroom door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Seidon!” Sam shouted in the hallway. I stood and went out too.