by Trish Doller
Alex catches me looking. “What?”
“Are, you, um—is it okay that we didn’t—?”
He presses the tip of his finger to the middle of my forehead. “Only one of us was thinking and it was not me.”
“So, we’re all good?”
Alex grins. “You are here, right now, with me, so yeah … all good.”
Relieved, I return to my pre-parking-lot position with my feet out the window. Except this time I lie back on the seat, looking at him from upside down, and wonder if this is how my mom felt when she first met Greg. About how quickly someone can go from being a stranger to someone you feel as if you can’t do without. But mostly how, when I’m with Alex, I feel like a normal girl. Like my whole world is right here in the cab of this pickup truck and that’s enough.
I stay in this position—with my head against his thigh and his fingertips on my cheek—until we reach the Sunshine Skyway bridge over Tampa Bay. Bright-yellow cables angle down to the deck from two huge support pillars, making it seem like rays of sunshine are beaming down on the bridge. I scramble for my phone and Alex laughs. “Tourist.”
I reach back to give him the finger as I stick my head out the window like a happy dog and tilt my phone up to capture a picture of the bridge. The result on the screen is a series of slanted yellow bars with the vivid blue of the sea and sky in contrast.
“Can’t tell it’s a bridge,” Alex says.
“I know.” I press the button to put the phone to sleep. “But I’ll always know what it’s meant to be.”
The tops of my feet are splotched pink from the sun by the time we reach the next bridge, the one crossing over onto Anna Maria Island. Traffic slows to a stop as a pair of red-and-white gates block the road.
“Is that a drawbridge?” I climb back out the window, sitting on the door frame, to watch as the deck slowly tilts up to allow a tall white-masted sailboat to pass through. The driver of the car behind us revs the engine impatiently, as if it will somehow speed the boat’s progress. The sea breeze carries the scent of the tide and exhaust, and seagulls glide on invisible currents overhead. I take pictures of the drawbridge, a waterfront oyster bar at the side of the road, and Alex, laughing at me through the windshield.
“That was so cool,” I say, when the bridge is back in place and we’re bumper-to-bumpering our way forward with the rest of the tourists.
“You kill me,” Alex says.
The wheels of the truck rumble over the mesh grating of the drawbridge deck as we cross. I take a picture of the little blue bridge-tender building. “I’ve never seen a drawbridge before.”
“It’s just—you’re making me see through different eyes today,” he says. “It’s like everything is interesting to you.”
“Everything is interesting to me.”
“Then you”—he slides his arm along the bench seat behind me—“you’re going to love snorkeling.”
Alex parks in front of a dive shop just off Gulf Drive, the road that runs the length of the island. The glass front door is pasted with flyers for dive trips and upcoming certification courses, and a bumper sticker tells us that “a bad day diving beats a good day at work.” This is the kind of life I think my mom always meant for us to have, and even though my stomach flutters with excitement, I feel a little sad that I’m living it without her. Alex threads his fingers through mine as we go inside, and I push the sadness away.
A guy wearing a faded red T-shirt with the shop logo printed on the back is hanging dive masks on a display in the middle of the shop. He looks up as we come in.
“Hey, Alex!” He tucks a stray lock of long dark hair behind his ear as they shake hands and flashes me a grin. “Long time, bro. Good to see you.”
“You, too.” Alex introduces us. “Callie, this is Dave. He’s one of my dive buddies. Dave, this is Callie. She’s the girl I eat Drumsticks with in the middle of the night.”
“Never heard it called that before.” Dave laughs, making me blush. “Doing the wreck today, or the rocks?”
“Rocks,” Alex says.
“Nice choice. Viz has been about fifteen to twenty feet the last couple days. Should be lots to see. Maybe even some dolphins. Need gear?”
“I brought mine,” Alex says. “But Callie could use some, and maybe a suit if you have a spare.”
Dave sizes me up. “I think my sister’s stuff would probably fit. Hang on.” He crosses to a wooden door covered with white oval-shaped decals from different dive sites around the world. As he disappears behind the door, I wonder if he’s been to all of those places. He emerges with a mesh dive bag. “I’ve got a snorkel, a mask, fins, boots, and a shortie. Need anything else? Got water? Sunscreen?”
Alex nods as he takes the bag. “This’ll do it. Thanks.”
Dave grabs a disposable underwater camera from a counter display and hands it to me. “Take a camera, too. On me.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime. Listen, man, we’re doing a trip to Roatan in February. You in?”
Disappointment washes over Alex’s face, as if it’s seeping right out of his pores. He shakes his head. “Still working the boat.”
“No worries, bro. There will always be more trips.” Dave slaps his shoulder and turns to shake my hand. “It was great to meet you, Callie.”
“You, too.”
Alex is quiet as he throws the gear in the back of the truck beside his own dive bag and a small red cooler, and we turn back out onto Gulf Drive, heading toward the north end of the island. I wonder if he’s thinking about missed opportunities, too.
“What are the rocks?” I ask.
“The Spanish Rocks,” he says. “It’s a reef made from some limestone ledges along the bottom. Not sure why they call it Spanish Rocks, because it’s neither, but it’s been called that as long as I can remember. Anyway, it’s a good place to learn.”
Alex turns left into a tiny beachfront parking lot where a couple of divers in full wet suits are unloading tanks and fins from the back of their SUV. Something that resembles envy flickers across his face as they carry their gear to the beach, and I worry that he’ll be bored snorkeling on the surface with me when he could be underwater like them. He leans over and kisses me. “Ready?”
“I think so.”
We get out of the truck. While Alex takes the bags and cooler from the bed, I unbutton my shirt. He pauses, watching.
“Do you have to do that?” I ask. “You’ve seen me in my underwear before.”
He laughs. “I’ve seen you out of your underwear, too, but I haven’t seen you in a bikini yet. Consider me curious.”
The bikini is pretty basic—blue-and-white gingham checked with pale-green ties—but Kat declared it The One. The way Alex is looking at me now makes me wonder if she wasn’t right. “Happy now?”
“Absolutely.” His curls bobble as he nods. He leans forward to kiss me again and I come away with a rash of goose bumps, and I’m not sure if they’re from the cool breeze sweeping in from the gulf or his hands on my bare hips.
“The water temperature is about seventy-five, which is fine for splashing around in shallow water at the beach, but it gets cold when you’re in the water for an extended period of time, so this will help keep you warm.” He hands me a wet suit, but instead of being the full-body style the divers are wearing, it has short sleeves and thigh-length legs. “You do know how to swim, right?”
Mom taught me one summer at a lake in Indiana, and there was a lifeguard at the community pool in Michigan who let me in free so he could stare at my chest. Not that Alex needs to know about that. “Yep.”
We put on the suits at the truck and carry the rest of our gear down to the water. We leave the dive bags, beach towels, and cooler far enough up in the sand to keep them from being washed away. The borrowed boots are the right size for me, and once I have them on, we move out into waist-deep water to put on our fins. Tiny streams of cold trickle up my thighs, taking my breath away, and I have to stop to let the water in my suit wa
rm up.
“Oh my God, how do you do this every day?”
“This is a picnic compared to what I do.” He puts on his fins, and I watch and do the same. “There are a lot of mornings I’d rather stay in my warm bunk than jump into water this cold and then spend hours walking along the bottom of the gulf, most of the time against the current, cutting sponges off the sea floor. It’s hard work, but more than that, it’s boring and lonely. But calling in sick doesn’t pay the bills, and you’ve seen what happens when the harvest isn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
The tilt at the corner of his mouth absorbs my apology. “Warm enough yet?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now take your mask and spit in it.”
“Seriously? That’s a real thing?”
“It helps keep it from fogging up.” Alex spits in his own mask, smears the saliva around the lens, and then rinses it in the water. “And before you ask, I have no idea why it works. It just does.”
I do the spit-smear-rinse technique, then peer at him through the lens. He looks exactly the same. “How will I know if it worked?”
“If your mask starts fogging up, it didn’t work,” he says. “Then surface and do it again.”
“Now what?”
Alex positions his mask on his face. The strap mats down his curls where it circles around his head. He shrugs. “Swim.”
“But—”
He takes my mask and eases it down over my head, being careful not to tug my hair. When it’s centered on my face, he moves his hands away. “Does it feel okay?”
“How would I know?”
“It would feel loose here”—he gestures toward the sides near his temples—“or the strap might feel too tight around your head.”
“I think it’s good.”
He holds the U-shaped end of the snorkel out where I can see it. “So now all you do is put this end in your mouth and use it to breathe while you swim.”
I lift my legs and put my face in the water. The world goes green and quiet, except for the sound of my own breathing. At first I breathe too fast, as if I’m somehow going to run out of air, even though the snorkel connects me to the world’s supply. In shallower water, the sand is dotted with puffy brown sand dollars that look nothing like the bleached white ones we sell in the shop. Tiny minnows hover and dart just above the bottom, and prehistoric-looking horseshoe crabs bulldoze tracks in the sand. For yards, the only change to the landscape is the addition of larger fish and coral fans that look like lone trees in an underwater desert.
Then we reach the Spanish Rocks.
The reef is covered in green and red algae, and corals of white and yellow and even orange. The water around the reef is teeming with silver-striped fish, flashing in the muted sunlight and moving together as if they’re dancing to their own silent song. It feels as if the world has gotten so much bigger and I start to understand—if even just a little—why Alex doesn’t want to be confined to one small part of it.
“Oh my God,” I say into my mouthpiece, but the words funnel up through the snorkel and are lost to the sky above me. I stretch my arm out toward the fish, but the water is deceptively deep and I’m disappointed they’re not close enough to touch.
I lift my head out of the water and pull the snorkel away to catch my breath. Alex surfaces beside me as I push the mask up onto my forehead.
“Everything okay?”
I nod. “It’s just—this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. It’s—there are so many fish and it looks like they’re right there—” I know I’m babbling, but I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t stop. “—and I could touch them, but they’re too far away. And it’s so beautiful. I want to get closer. I want to see it all.”
His smile is so wide and through his mask his eyes are half-moons of happiness. “Diving is even better.”
“I want to do that.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever converted anyone that fast before.” Alex laughs as he slides his mask up and kisses me with saltwater lips. And this time it’s not my imagination, because mine are saltwatery, too. “Lucky for you, I happen to know a guy who can teach you.”
“Thank you for bringing me.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” He positions his mask over his eyes again. “We’re just getting started.”
I move my own mask back into place and lower my face into the water again. We swim together over the colorful reef, silently pointing out brown stingrays as they ruffle along the bottom, wings dancing like a dress on a clothesline. Alex dives down and brings back a crab that tucks itself up into the shell on its back, refusing to come out until it’s returned to its home beneath one of the ledges. On his next trip to the bottom, he returns with a sand dollar.
“Do you want to keep it?” he asks, when we break the surface.
I shake my head as I hand it back. I don’t tell him that I won’t need any souvenirs to remember this trip. “It might have a family that would miss it.”
He laughs. “You might be right.”
The sand dollar tumbles end over end through the water until it lands on the sand, and we continue along the reef.
Alex catches my arm and points at a brown shark moving at a lazy pace near the bottom. He submerges and swims toward the fish and I feel my heart slide up into my throat. Although the fact that Alex is swimming after it should be reassuring, I’ve never seen a shark anywhere but on television. It jets away, and when Alex comes up from the bottom, we surface again.
“How do you do that?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“Swim down like that.”
“You just hold your breath as if you’re in a swimming pool,” he says. “It’s exactly the same.”
“I’m afraid I’ll accidentally take a breath through the snorkel and drown myself.”
“It’s pretty unlikely,” he says. “When you’ve already got lungs full of air, there’s not really room for more.”
“I never thought about it like that.”
“Maybe start slow,” he suggests. “Draw in a breath, hold it, and just swim down until your snorkel is completely submerged.”
I try it once, then again, and it is exactly like holding your breath in a swimming pool. On my third attempt, Alex takes a picture of me underwater, my hair fanning out around me like sea grass.
“See?” he says. “Easy. Next time try to go a little deeper, until you’re able to gauge how long you can stay down. And with practice you’ll be able to stay down longer.”
We snorkel until the sun is high and warms my back through the neoprene skin, and I ache in places I never knew I had muscles. The swim back to the shore is easier with the waves pushing us from behind, but by the time we reach water shallow enough to stand, I’m trembling from exertion. Alex removes his mask and fins and walks the rest of the way to shore, shaking his head like a wet dog. Water sprays out in every direction as his curls spring back to life. I swim until my belly scrapes the sand, then flop on my back, letting the waves lap at my legs.
Alex laughs as he brings me a bottle of water from the cooler. “You look like a mermaid.”
“A tired mermaid.” The first sip is brackish from the salt on my lips, but the next is cold and clear, and I can almost feel it moving through my veins. “How do you say ‘mermaid’ in Greek?”
“Gorgóna. Or maybe, for you, seirína would be better.” I’ve never heard him speak the language before. “Deleázontas tous naftikoús stin katadíki tous.” The words flow easily, warmly. I love how it sounds.
“What does that mean?”
“Luring sailors to their doom.” He sits down on the sand beside me. “And then, in Greek mythology, there are nýmfes.”
“Nymphs.”
“Right.” He nods. “But they are more like sea goddesses.”
“I think I like the idea of being a sea goddess rather than someone who lures sailors to their doom,” I say.
“I can see that about you.” He shoulder-bumps me. Hi
s skin is warm against mine. “You don’t strike me as a vengeful mermaid.”
“Could I lure you into taking me to lunch?”
Alex laughs. “Den tha íthela na apogoitéfso tin theá.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint the goddess.” He ignores the sand on my skin as he kisses my temple, then moves into the water at my feet and removes my fins. “One of your more wrathful family members might try to smite me.” Alex lifts my leg and kisses the inside of my knee. Heat flashes through me like summer lightning. Remembering. He grins and I know we’re remembering the same thing.
“I’d never let anyone smite you,” I say.
He winks at me as he peels off my boots and helps me to my feet. “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that.”
“And here I thought I was your first mermaid.”
“Goddess,” he says. “You are my first goddess.”
As I follow him up the sand to the truck, warmth rises up in my chest. It’s silly, I know. Just a joke. But I kind of like the idea of being someone’s goddess.
Chapter 19
My shirt doubles as a cover-up, and my hair is knotted and thick with salt, but I’m not out of place among the sandy feet and dripping swimsuits on the patio of the beachfront snack bar. We order baskets of fried clams and shrimp at a pass-through window, and eat them at a plastic picnic table beside a group of tourists speaking a language neither of us can identify. Alex squirts ketchup on his french fries, oblivious to the trio of teenage girls who stare at him as they walk past. His bare foot rests lightly on top of mine beneath the table and he offers me a fried shrimp in exchange for one of my bigger clam strips. When we finish lunch, we return the borrowed gear to Dave at the dive shop and head back toward Tarpon Springs.
The combination of fried food, fresh air, and snorkeling takes its toll on me before we’re even through Bradenton, and I curl up on the bench seat to sleep, my head against Alex’s thigh.
I dream I’m a mermaid, my lower half a tail made of iri-descent blue and pale-green scales, washed up on a Florida beach. Around me, people are basking in the sunshine, playing Frisbee, and applying piña colada–scented sunscreen. I close my eyes, enjoying the kiss of the air and the warm sand beneath my back, until a shadow blots the sun. I open my eyes and Alex is standing over me with my old, familiar Hello Kitty nightgown in his hands. It’s only then that I’m aware that my top half is naked, so I pull the too-small nightgown over my head and squeeze my arms into the sleeves. Alex kneels down on the sand beside me and leans in to kiss me. His face morphs into Frank’s as the whiskers under his lower lip brush against my cheek, making me scream.