The Mermaid

by Christina Henry

  He won’t be there. He’s not coming back. He’s never coming back.

  But no matter how many times she thought it, her heart refused to believe it was true, and running away from their home had not made her heart believe. He could be there even now, looking around the empty cottage with sad eyes, wondering where she had gone.

  The music grew louder, and now it was accompanied by the sound of heavy feet clattering rhythmically on the floor and the cheers and claps of the crowd gathered around. Amelia pressed her hands tighter to her ears, tighter, and the world began to bubble and sway beneath her clamped eyelids. Her skin was suddenly cold and damp. Her knees curled into her chest as she tried to make herself smaller and smaller: small as a mouse, small as a mote of dust, small as the wishes in her secret heart.

  Then she felt gentle hands at her wrist—big hands, masculine hands—pulling them away from her ears. The shock had her eyes flying open—Jack—but of course it wasn’t Jack.

  “It is you,” Levi Lyman said, and his face had some of the same wonder she’d seen when the museum visitors looked at the elephant. “How is it you’ve come to be here?”

  She felt a spurt of guilt—guilt for having sent him away without a second thought—followed quickly by panic. She’d been caught, caught here in this place, and now Levi Lyman would take her away to Barnum and they would put her in a cage. Everyone would come and see her and point and laugh and then men with knives would come and carve pieces from her flesh to study and she would never see the world or the ocean or her little cottage ever again . . .

  Amelia yanked her wrists from his hands and tried to stand, tried to run, but she was as weak as the first time she’d stood upon the shore. The noise made her dizzy, and when she gasped, she breathed in death and all the blood in her body rushed into her face and then emptied and then there was blackness and a voice calling far away, “Mrs. Douglas? Mrs. Douglas?” Someone gathered her up, gentle as a bridegroom, and then all was dark and blessedly silent.

  * * *

  • • •

  Amelia opened her eyes again to find herself the subject of some scrutiny. A dark-eyed little cherub with a head full of ringlets, perhaps eight or nine years old, stared at her with the fixed gaze of one determined to have answers.

  The very instant Amelia met this stare, the girl said, “Is it true you’re a mermaid?”

  “Yes,” Amelia said, without thinking. The child’s personality demanded the truth, and it hadn’t occurred to Amelia not to give it to her.

  “I knew it,” she breathed.

  Then the girl turned abruptly and ran from the room, shouting, “Mama! Mama! She is a real mermaid, I told you so!”

  Amelia realized she was on a rough velvet sofa, covered in a heavy wool blanket that made her sweat. She pushed herself up to a sitting position—slowly, very slowly—and marveled at how weak she felt. Almost immediately she wished she’d stayed prone, for the room tilted sideways and she had to lean back with her eyes closed again.

  Where was she now? The last thing she remembered was Levi Lyman staring at her in amazement. Was that little girl his child? He hadn’t mentioned a family; but then, Amelia reflected, they hadn’t exactly gotten to know each other at their last encounter. She’d been too busy being clever with herself.

  Amelia heard a rustle of skirts and peeked from beneath half-open lids at this new intruder. A pretty woman, a little careworn but dressed in the fashion of the respectable middle class, had entered the room. She held a toddler in one arm, a little girl who pulled on her mother’s bun-tucked braids with fat fingers. The woman’s stomach bulged—evidence of yet another child on its way. The woman’s hand was pulled by the insistent curly-haired moppet. The girl pointed at Amelia.

  “See, Mama, there she is,” the girl said. “Look at her eyes and you’ll see that she really is a mermaid. Uncle Levi told me she was, and she even said it was true.”

  “All right, Caroline, that’s enough,” the woman said, her face flushing a little when she noticed Amelia was awake and watching them. “Go along now to your room while I see to this lady.”

  “But I want to talk to the mermaid!” Caroline said. “I want to know how she changes into a fish and what her home is like under the sea and if she likes being a fish better than a girl or the other way around. If Helen can stay, I want to stay.”

  Caroline’s mother glanced at Amelia, then at her daughter, and seemed to decide it was better to let the girl stay than have an argument before a stranger.

  “Very well, but you must be quiet,” the woman said.

  She came toward Amelia then, with the slow, awkward progress of every woman carrying a baby. She gave a small polite smile and said, “How are you feeling now? I’m Mrs. Barnum, but you may call me Charity if you like. My husband is the owner of the museum.”

  Charity Barnum settled on a chair positioned near the corner of the sofa. Her older daughter curled on the floor with her head on her mother’s knee. The younger child wriggled in her mother’s arms, clearly dissatisfied with the lack of lap space available with her mother’s pregnant belly in the way.

  “You gave Mr. Lyman quite a scare,” Mrs. Barnum continued when Amelia did not respond to her first question. “It was all I could do to keep him from carrying you off to the nearest doctor.”

  Amelia heard the words but couldn’t make sense of them. From the moment Charity Barnum entered the room, Amelia was hypnotized by the roundness of her belly. Of course Amelia had seen pregnant women before—and babies and children, too—but always from a distance. She hadn’t any friends in the village and had never been so close to a human mother.

  There were, again, pregnant females among her own people, but that was so long ago she could hardly remember them. Anyway, that was before Jack, before the years of quiet wanting and heartbreak, before she sealed that unfulfilled desire closed so it couldn’t hurt her.

  Now this woman was before her, this sad-eyed woman who seemed drawn despite her plumpness, a woman with two children already expecting a third—a third!—and for the first time Amelia felt the green poison of jealousy in her veins. That one person should have so much and she nothing at all . . . it was almost too much to bear.

  Amelia wondered, if she’d had a child—a chubby little doll like the small one now toddling around the room—would that have assuaged her grief after the sea took Jack? If some part of him lived on, would she have stood on those rocks day after day searching for him?

  If she had not been there, waiting for him on a cliff by the sea, she certainly wouldn’t be here now, wondering if she should take a job as Mr. Barnum’s mermaid. There would have been no rumors about her, no accidental revelations of her real self to drunk fishermen.

  Mrs. Barnum gave a little cough. Amelia realized she’d been staring and woolgathering and let the silence go on too long.

  Oh, this was why she always had so much trouble around humans! There were endless rules to follow, and she didn’t know or care about most of them. It never bothered Jack if she took too long to respond to his question or if she was silent for many minutes. At home she’d never had to interact with anyone in a parlor, for she’d never been invited to tea or anything else. She knew how to be properly human just long enough to complete a transaction at the general store.

  “I’m feeling much better now, thank you,” Amelia said. This, she was certain, was the correct thing to say even if she didn’t feel better at all. One of the rules she did know was that truth wasn’t particularly valued in polite company.

  “I imagine you’re hungry,” Charity said, watching Amelia with an uncertain look on her face.

  Amelia wondered if she’d not put enough conviction into her statement about feeling better. It didn’t seem as though Charity believed her.

  “I’ve asked the cook to bring you some beef tea,” the other woman continued.

  Amelia stopped herself from
wrinkling her nose at the mention of “beef tea,” but only just. She didn’t know what it was except that it didn’t sound very appetizing. What she really wanted was some regular tea with lots of sugar in it, but she didn’t know how to ask for it.

  Amelia vaguely remembered some restriction on making such a request when you were a guest, and Charity Barnum had seemed so pleased to offer the “beef tea.” Amelia didn’t want to hurt her hostess’s feelings; Mrs. Barnum had the look of someone whose feelings were trampled upon with regularity.

  The mermaid cast about for something to say, as one was supposed to do. Her interactions in the village had been limited primarily to the purchasing of goods and conversations about the weather. She didn’t even know the state of the weather from this room as there were no windows.

  Luckily Mrs. Barnum rescued her by taking up the conversation again.

  “Mr. Lyman told me you are from Maine. Where are you staying while you visit New York?”

  Amelia stared at her blankly. “Staying?”

  She felt the first grip of panic then. Stay. Of course. She needed a room to sleep in, a boardinghouse or some such thing. That was what humans did. She knew this very well but had not thought of the necessity of arrangements.

  She had not thought of anything (she could now admit this when faced with all the things she’d done wrong) except escaping her cottage and her rocks by the sea and the emptiness of her life there. It wasn’t even that the place had been haunted by Jack. At least a ghost would have filled up the blank space.

  Amelia had run from nothing, run with the same impulsiveness that had her chasing that ship so long ago. There was no plan other than a vague idea of taking up the offer Mr. Lyman presented. Of course she should have had some place to stay. She could hardly return to the harbor night after night.

  Mrs. Barnum gazed at Amelia in expectation.

  “I’m staying with friends,” Amelia said.

  Mrs. Barnum’s expression told Amelia she didn’t believe this story in the slightest but was too polite to say so. The older child huffed loudly.

  “This is all very boring. When are you going to ask her about being a mermaid?”

  Charity Barnum’s eyes widened. “Caroline! You know better than to speak in such a way. Apologize to Mrs. Douglas.”

  Caroline’s chin jutted mutinously from her small face.

  Mrs. Barnum turned to Amelia. “I’m terribly sorry. We’re having some difficulty finding a nanny at the moment—you know how hard it is to find good help—and she’s accustomed to staying with me all day. I’m afraid that like many mothers I am a little more indulgent than I should be.”

  A blush rose in Mrs. Barnum’s cheeks as she spoke, and her eyes darted around the room. Amelia followed her gaze, took in the sparse furnishings, and realized they hadn’t the funds to pay for a nanny. Why this should be a source of embarrassment Amelia did not know—she and Jack had much less than this woman—but she was aware of the human custom that said discussing money was distasteful.

  She’d never thought so much about the differences between herself and humans. Jack had never made her feel as strange as fifteen minutes in this woman’s parlor had done.

  Charity Barnum watched her anxiously, waiting for Amelia’s polite reassurance that she was not offended by Caroline’s behavior. Again, Amelia knew that it did not matter so much if she was actually offended or not, just that she told her hostess it was fine.

  Before she had an opportunity to say a word, the child spoke again.

  “Mrs. Douglas? How can you be a mermaid if you’re a missus?” Her tone said that such things were not possible, and obviously this woman was a fake, because mermaids couldn’t be something so mundane as a “missus.”

  “Because a fisherman trapped me in his net when I was swimming in the ocean,” Amelia said, speaking directly to the girl.

  All the scorn disappeared from Caroline’s face. She approached Amelia with wide eyes, caught in the net of the mermaid’s story. “And when he caught you he kept you, and that’s how you became a missus?”

  Amelia shook her head. “No, Jack would never do such a thing, for wild things should be free and I was very wild.”

  Wild and young, Amelia thought. She didn’t look any older, but she was, and it was hard to think of that young and hopeful girl, the one who had walked so confidently into Jack’s cottage and expected him to love her.

  “And so he let you go?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes,” Amelia said.

  “But you fell in love with him anyway,” the little girl said, and took Amelia’s cold hand.

  “His eyes were so lonely,” Amelia said, and her voice sounded like it came from someplace far away, not inside her body.

  Caroline squeezed her hand. “And his loneliness made you sad.”

  “And made me realize I was lonely, too,” Amelia said.

  “So you fell in love and you were never lonely anymore.”

  Amelia’s face was wet then, though she didn’t know when she’d started crying.

  Caroline climbed into her lap and put her little arms around Amelia’s neck and rested her head against the mermaid’s heart.

  “And then he died, didn’t he?” the little girl whispered. “And now you’re alone again.”

  Amelia couldn’t speak. Her voice had gone away, back to a place where Jack was pressing his face against hers, back to the time when she could breathe him in.

  Caroline leaned back to look into Amelia’s eyes. “Don’t worry. You can be our mermaid and live with us and you’ll never be lonely again.”

  “Caroline,” Charity said, but soft and full of weeping.

  CHAPTER 4

  Levi stood outside the door, his back pressed against the wall. In his hands he held a tray with a dish of beef broth, rapidly cooling, and a small hunk of bread. He’d waylaid the cook on her way to the parlor and convinced her to give over the tray.

  He’d wanted an excuse to see her, though Charity treated him like a member of the family and would not have objected if he joined them without any specific reason. But his heart thrummed in anticipation as he took the tray from the cook; he didn’t think the mermaid would be able to hear it beating for her, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The sight of her in the museum had seemed an impossible thing: the illusory manifestation of his deepest heart’s desire rather than an actual happening. Until she was there, he hadn’t realized just how much he’d longed to see her. He had convinced himself that the visit to the woman on the rocks was nothing more than a minor adventure. If he dreamed every night of flashing fins and grey eyes rising from the water then at least those shadows were banished by the time he stood at his shaving mirror every morning.

  Even if he’d accustomed himself to the idea that she was really in New York, he couldn’t understand why. Why, after she’d sent him away without a backward glance? Could she have changed her mind about Barnum’s proposal?

  Could she have come to see you? a very small voice in the back of his mind asked.

  Of course not, the sensible part of him replied.

  But that little voice murmured behind his ear all the same as he lifted her fainting body and felt how thin she was, so thin. At the same time there was something strong and powerful under her skin and she smelled of the sea, of salt and storms and the merciless wind and monsters that rose from the dark.

  He knew then, without any other proof, that she was a mermaid, a real mermaid, and far from wanting her in Barnum’s tank, he wanted her to return to the ocean or to her cottage on the rocks or just go anywhere but there, for Barnum would take all of her magic and twist it out of her until the enchantment was gone, and Levi was afraid for her, so afraid.

  He didn’t know where to take her then. He couldn’t run through the streets of New York bearing a strange woman until he reached the harbor. What would he do when he g
ot there—toss her into the water and leave? Would the ocean heal her?

  A doctor, too, was out of the question. What might happen if the doctor examined her? Was her secret written somewhere on her body, waiting to be discovered? Levi saw that she had legs instead of a fin, of course, but knew nothing of how a change might be triggered. If a well-meaning assistant laid a cold compress across her forehead, would the mere presence of water make her change? What did he know of mermaids?

  Nothing, except that he knew he held one in his arms and the safest thing had been to bring her to the Barnums’ apartment in the museum. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was depositing her inside a cage and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Now she was there in Charity Barnum’s threadbare parlor, and he stood outside holding the tray, listening to the grief in her voice. As he listened, the dream inside him died a little, for anyone who loved her dead husband so much had surely not come all that way just to see Levi Lyman again.

  Hope would not leave him entirely, for hope is a clinging, tenacious thing, almost impossible to dislodge. She might not have traveled all that way for him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t convince her of his value.

  First, though, he had to keep her safe from Barnum. This couldn’t be like Joice Heth again. Levi wouldn’t let it be like that again.

  Levi straightened and went into the room with his face carefully neutral. He was a showman, after all. In that he and Barnum were two pod-peas.

  Amelia and Caroline were snuggled on the sofa like puzzle pieces finally united. Charity gazed at Levi as he entered, and he saw so many things in her eyes—bewilderment, disbelief, mild embarrassment. She had the red-nosed wet look of someone who would like to cry but is determinedly squashing that impulse.