by A. L. Knorr
"So, no one knows where she is and Eric wants to find her?" Even I knew that was a ridiculous proposition.
But Micah was shaking his head. "No, we know exactly where she is. She was found in 1981. She's less than 50 miles south of Nantucket. The wreck is sitting in about 270 feet of shark infested water and in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world." He shook his head, doffed his ball cap again and scratched his head. It was a gesture that had become classically Micah.
"What was she carrying?" I was fighting the heaviness hard now, I didn't want to miss a thing but my drooping eyelids disagreed.
"You name it, navy payroll and supplies, family heirlooms, disaster relief money that was headed to Italy. They'd had an earthquake or a hurricane or something. Rumours have it that she was even carrying gold bars for the Tsar of Russia. They estimate the cargo to be worth over $1 billion dollars today. That's what makes it such a legend. It's the richest wreck known to man." He leaned back in his seat, signalling that his storytelling was nearing its end.
He yawned, "We don't have the salvage rights anyway, that's why I don't understand Eric. Maybe he forgot that everyone else lost the right back in 2013. Ain't nobody else can make a claim for her now."
"Who got the salvage rights?" I asked, with effort. My own voice sounded slower and deeper than normal, like a record winding down.
"Martin Bayerle, that old pirate." He chuckled. "Another legend in the salvage community. He's the one who found her, and good on him. Mark my words, there'll be a movie made about that guy one day."
I had no idea who that was. "You think he'll be able to do it?"
He laughed, "I'm sure he'll try. He's in for a devil of a time though. Wrecks in the North Atlantic with all that salt and those currents..." He shook his head. "She'll be a pile of rubble and as fragile as tissue paper by now. Not to mention zero visibility and she's a monster that goes on forever. He could spend millions and years on her and still come up with nothing more than a handful of White Star teacups."
He tipped his head back and pulled his cap down over his face. He chuckled again to himself and then grew quiet. I wanted to pester him for more information, but my eyelids closed of their own accord. I gave in to the heaviness and slipped again under the black satin covers of sleep.
This time I did dream – of a palatial ocean liner sailing through thick supernatural looking fog and heading straight towards her invisible death.
Thirty-One
By the time we arrived home I felt like a rung out old dishrag. I swayed with exhaustion behind Mom as she unlocked the door to our trailer. We fell in the door and I fought the desire to curl up on the floor and sleep right there.
"Bed," Mom said, the word whooshing out on a sigh.
"Uh huh." This siren jet lag business was a crock. Before crawling into bed I sent Antoni the world's shortest text.
Home.
I didn't wait for a reply, I shut my phone off and crawled under the covers. My last thought was to kiss ever seeing Antoni again goodbye because I was never getting on another plane for as long as I lived.
Of course, I felt differently when I woke up. I opened my eyes and my first thought was of Antoni. My stomach twisted into a knot of misery and my heart ached. A hot tear escaped and left a trail from my eye into my hairline. I picked up my phone and saw that he'd written back.
Good. Glad you're home safe.
Thankfully, my exhaustion was gone. I looked at the clock and it took a moment for me to do the math. It was two in the afternoon. We had gone to sleep at three in the morning. So, I'd had almost twelve hours of sleep. No wonder I had to pee something terrible.
I brushed the wet tear track off my face and threw the covers back. I heard the front door slam and felt the trailer shake. Mom was already up. I heard her footsteps near as I pulled a pair of jeans up over my bare legs. I had been too lazy to even put on pjs and had fallen into bed in my underwear. She tapped on my door and poked her head in.
"You're up!" she said, her face alight. She looked like a different person from last night. Her skin was plump and bright and her eyes were clear. Her hair was damp.
"You look fresh as a daisy. Did you go for a swim?" I had a stab of regret that I'd been asleep and missed out.
"Yup."
"Feeling better?" I asked, pulling my hair up into a ponytail.
"Yup again. Two days of rest will do that," she smiled.
"Two days?" I froze, my hands over my head in mid-ponytail.
"Yes, m'lady. It's Thursday." She looked just the slightest bit smug. We had gotten home on Tuesday.
"Are you kidding me?"
"Nope. You've been out cold for about..." she looked at the clock on the nightstand near my bed, "...33 hours."
"What?" I was stunned. "How long did you sleep?"
"About 18 hours I think. Come have some brekky," she said over her shoulder as she left my room.
I went to the washroom first and then found her in our little kitchen. She already had vegetables chopped and had opened carton of eggs in preparation to make omelettes.
"33 hours," I said, shaking my head. "And I didn't even wet the bed."
Mom laughed, "Our bodies use water in a different way than humans, you could sleep for a year and you wouldn't wet yourself."
"Good to know," I laughed. "How is it that you're so much better at this mermaid stuff than I am?" I asked.
"I don't think I'm better, honey," she said as she lit the stove and put a generous pat of butter into a frying pan. "I think I'm just older and stronger. You've only been a siren for a little over a month now. And I have another theory, too. But it's just a theory."
"What is that?" I asked as I twisted open our stovetop espresso maker and scooped coffee grounds into the reservoir.
"I had my very first change at Little Manitou Lake where my mother had taken me on vacation. I was so young that I don't remember my life before being able to change but I do have vague memories of that vacation. So, while you were snoring the trailer down I had a thought and did a bit of research about that lake."
"Ha!" I gave a sarcastic laugh.
She chuckled along with me. "I know, I know. The world-wide web is not my favourite place to spend time." She finished cracking eggs into a bowl and started whisking them.
"There's the understatement of the century." Mom would rather wear her cursed diving gear than sit in front of a laptop.
"Do you want to know what I learned, or not? Ungrateful little cricket," she pointed the eggy whisk at me, drooling slime.
I turned away from the stove and opened my arms in a gesture of gentility, "Please, Dr. MacAuley. Do go on."
She poured the eggs into the frying pan and scraped the bowl out with a spatula. Ignoring my antics, she began, "Do you know what the salinity of Little Manitou Lake is?"
"No clue, why don't you enlighten me." I said, twisting the espresso maker closed and setting it over the flame.
"18%," she said, and looked at me with meaning.
My eyebrows shot up. "A salt water lake?"
"Yes, and it's pretty unique even by global standards. The Baltic, by contrast is only 1%."
Understanding dawned. "Holy shit."
"Yes, exactly. Don't swear." She said these two things in the exact same tone and I laughed because I knew that she was doing that thing that cracked me up. She liked to deadpan phrases that she'd overheard mothers saying to their kids and inject them into our conversations at opportune moments.
She finished making our dozen-egg omelette while I poured the coffee. We pulled chairs up to the island and ate while she explained her theory.
"I was born in Thunder Bay. We could have easily found a beach close by to enjoy for a holiday, but that's not what we did. We had no money for vacations in the Caribbean but she wanted the best for me so she took me to the closest, saltiest water she could find. Little Manitou is a day's drive from Thunder Bay. It's in Saskatchewan, which is not a place that people put on the top of their vacation list. May
be my mother knew that the saltier the water a mermaid has her first change in, the stronger that mermaid will be."
"You could also just be stronger because you're older and you've been swimming your whole life," I theorized, not sure I liked where her hypothesis was taking us.
"It's possible, but I can also tell you that I met a siren who was born in Iran. I met her in the British Virgin Islands before I came north and met your dad. I was really only a teenager myself. She was..." she paused, searching for words. Finally she just shook her head. "She was really something. It's rare enough to run into another mermaid, there are so few of us. We swam with each other for a whole week. I watched her pull up a huge anchor that was half buried in the ocean floor, like she was picking up a pebble off the beach."
"You couldn't do that?"
"Noooooooooooo," she said, astonished at my estimation of her power. "I'm flattered that you think I could, but there is no way I could do what I saw her do. I remembered thinking at the time that she was either stronger because she was older, or her parents had genuine love."
"How does that tie to Iran?" I asked, shovelling the last of my omelette into my mouth. I was feeling back to normal now, like the plane ride hadn't even happened.
"Well, she never told me exactly where she was born, but you know what's in Iran? Lake Urmia. It's a lake with a salinity that can be as high as 28%. Maybe her first change happened in that lake. And maybe she was born at a time when the salinity was higher than the 18% that I had my first change in. Maybe her parents had genuine love and she was born in super salty water."
"You think maybe the brackish water I was born in cancelled out the advantage your genuine love with dad gave me?"
She shrugged, looking at me from over her coffee cup.
"It's an interesting theory Mom, but its got a lot of holes in it. You don't know where in Iran she was born or what kind of life she led before you met her." If I was honest, I didn't like that her theory suggested I was inferior. After all, it was impossible for a mermaid to be born in freshwater at all. So if I was born in water with only 1% salinity, wouldn't that make me a bottom-feeder on the siren scale?
She sighed, "Yeah, I know. It just got me thinking about you being born in the Baltic and if that means something for you. Especially since you had to take water into your lungs and die in order to change. As far as I know, it has never happened that way for any other mermaid. As if its not stressful enough for a mermaid to have a child and then take her daughter away from her father and into the ocean, if she had to drown her daughter to incite the change..." she shook her head. "Well, lets just say the world would have a lot less mermaids. Maybe none at all."
I mused over her theory as we finished our coffee. If she was right, could spending more time in saltier water make me stronger? Or was I stuck with what I got because of where I was born?
Just then there was a knock at the door. A male voice yelled, "Courier!" and could be heard easily through the thin walls of our trailer.
I went to the door and opened it. A short man in a delivery uniform was mopping sweat off his forehead. He was standing to one side of the crack in the steps and looking down at it as though it was a ravine he could easily fall into and die. The sun and heat of the day came in through the open door and I understood why he was mopping his face.
"We haven't lost a soul down there yet," I said, and he looked up at me.
He wheezed out a soundless laugh as he tucked his kerchief into his back pocket. "I'm looking for..." he looked down at the clipboard, "...a Targa MacAuley."
"That's me," I said, just as my mom appeared behind me.
The courier handed me the clipboard and told me where to sign. His eyes darted from my face to my mother's, back and forth rapidly like a pinball. I bit my cheeks to keep from laughing.
"Twins?" he said, and I looked at my mom in surprise. No one had ever mistaken us for twins before. I knew my features had changed a bit since I'd become a siren but had they changed that much? Even though our colouring was nearly identical now, we still had our own distinct bone structure.
"Mother, daughter," my mom said, tilting her head and holding the door open.
"Ah," he said. He tucked his pen into his front pocket and handed me the package. He turned and went down the steps with exaggerated care and back towards his waiting delivery van. We went inside and closed the door.
"It's from Poland," my mom observed, looking over my shoulder at the stamps on it. "Did we forget something in our apartment?" she asked.
"Can't think what if we did," I frowned. I grabbed a pair of scissors from the drawer and sliced it open with the point of one blade. Under the shipping paper, the box was white and had an elegant logo in the shape of a 'B' that looked familiar. Where had I seen that logo before? An envelope taped to the box had my name typed on the outside of it. I opened that first.
The card said, Some things just belong together. And it was signed, Antoni. My heart trip-hopped underneath my ribs.
I lifted the lid and pulled away the tissue paper to reveal the mermaid dress. I gasped and picked it up. As the cool silk slipped between my fingers, my heart ached for want of Antoni; his face, his smile, his presence. "How did he know?" I said, and then I saw the look on my mom's face. "He wouldn't have known if you hadn't told him."
She gave a small smile and shrugged. "I was going to get it for you, but when he asked me for an idea for a gift it seemed perfect to come from him. After all, it was made in Poland and it will remind you of him. He ordered it after you sent it back and it hadn't arrived by the time we left, so he had to have it shipped."
I held the dress close to my heart and the bitter reality that I probably would never see him again began to sink in. He'd move on with his life and I'd move on with mine. He'd meet a girl, fall in love, get married, have kids, and probably take over Novak Shipping. And me? What did my future hold? Whatever way I looked at it, it was a future without Antoni.
Thirty-Two
"Have you had a chance to read the diary yet?" Mom asked as we cleaned up the kitchen together. Our kitchen was tight but over the years we'd figured out how to navigate around each other in our small home.
"No, I meant to read it on the plane but that went out the window when my body turned to lead. "I'll read it this week for sure."
She laughed. "Are you going to go see your friends this week?" asked my mom as we cleaned up the kitchen together.
"No, none of them are home yet. To be honest, I have missed them but I'm nervous about seeing them," I replied, rinsing the espresso maker.
"Because you're a creature of myth, now?" Mom asked.
"Yes. It was easy to keep it a secret that my mother is a siren, but somehow it seems a lot bigger now that I'm a siren, too. They know me, do you think they'll notice that I'm different?" Except for Antoni, people in Poland didn't really say anything about the changes to my hair, skin, and eyes. But my friends knew me far better. They were bound to ask me why I looked different. I wasn't sure what I was going to tell them, yet.
"Well I don't think you'll have to worry that they'll figure it out on their own. Mermaids are fairy-tale creatures; it won't even occur to them. But yes, I do think they'll notice that you're a bit different from how you were when you saw them last. Does it really matter though?" She went and sat down on one of the couches and picked a book up off the coffee table.
"What do you mean? Of course it matters," I said, unconsciously opening my hand outwards for emphasis and forgetting that it was covered in dish soap. Foam flew across the cupboards and floor. I sighed and bent to wipe the mess up.
"No, not really, they'll move on with their lives and soon you'll be just a fond memory for them. Speaking of which, when did you want to set out for the open ocean for good? We should probably talk about how best to make our exit without freaking people out."
I popped my head up from behind the kitchen cupboards I'd been cleaning and stared at her. She hadn't been looking my way. She had the coffee table boo
k about shipwrecks open on her lap and her half finished coffee in her hand while she was flipping through the pages with her other hand. When I didn't answer right away she looked over her shoulder at me.
"Honey? Why are you looking at me like I just grew another head?"
"You want to leave? Just like that?" I stood up.
"Well no, not just like that. I'd have to put some things in order first, sell the trailer, resign. Put up the front of moving house so we don't have a search party coming after us. Prepare an account for you so that down the road when you want to find a mate there'll be a bit money available to you." She chuckled, "It would be pretty awkward coming out of the water and not having any clothes or money."
I felt the blood drain from my face.
Her cavalier tone vanished. "Targa, you're scaring me. You look like a wax figure. What's wrong?"
I went to the living room and sat down on the chair across from her, my back erect. My hands were suddenly ice-cold. "Mom, I can't just leave. I don't want to leave everything, my friends, my school. It's my last year of high school this year."
She blinked at me for a moment. Then she closed the picture book on her lap, took her leg off the armrest and set the book on the coffee table with exaggerated care. She folded her hands in her lap and took in a deep breath. "What," she said slowly, with emphasis but as a statement, not a question.
"I can't believe you want me to just up and leave everything. What about my future? What about university?" My face suddenly felt as hot as my hands felt cold. I went from thinking I might pass out to feeling like I had a fever.
She blinked again. "University? Your future?" Her voice was incredulous. "You're a mermaid. Your future is out there," she pointed in the direction of the ocean. "Not here in some falling down trailer, working nine to five or being a housewife. You think you're going to be happy with life on two legs? What did you think, that you could just go for a swim a few times a week and then come home to your house and your bank account and cocktail parties with your friends?"