Ana still slept inside. She hadn’t come home until nearly dawn. Tamarind had returned last night from Isla Encantada to find the cinderblock house dark and empty. At first, she’d been relieved that Ana wasn’t there to catch her in her clothes and makeup, but she’d managed to hide them away and scrub her face with saltwater and still Ana hadn’t returned. She sat for a while in the moonlit doorway studying the constellations that John had taught her. Mer folk also had names for the stars, but they’d grouped them differently and identified these groups with way stations undersea. There was the Great Coral Passage, the Deep Blue Hole, and the Cave of the Ancestors. Viewing them last night had brought saltwater to her eyes.
Humming, she studied her bare feet. Over the past few weeks, calluses had grown on the balls of her toes and her heels. Even though she continued to find the ground rough and the pavement painfully hot, she still couldn’t tolerate wearing shoes. John had often teased her about looking like an urchin and when she’d finally asked him how bare feet made her look like the prickly sea creature, he’d only laughed.
“No, not that kind of urchin, silly. I mean a child who lives on the street without anyone to care for her.”
So that’s how John saw her: an unloved orphan.
After another couple of hours, Tamarind decided to go inside to get something to eat. She brought out some plantain chips and a jar of peanut butter with a spoon. John had also laughed at her craving for salty snacks and asked her if she smoked pot. When she got upset after learning that pot was a name for an illegal plant that some people smoked, he quit teasing her.
She’d finished the bag of plantain chips when she heard a throat being cleared behind her and smelled a familiar scent of clove.
“You were out late last night.” Tamarind didn’t look around at Ana.
“Uh-huh.” Ana sat down next to her. “It happens. How’d your date with Jesus go?”
Tamarind shrugged. “Fine. It was fine.”
“That doesn’t sound so positive.”
“I don’t know if I can do this, Ana. The best part of the evening was when John watched us dance together. After he left, I spent all my time keeping Jesus’ hands away from me. He’s like an octopus. It was exhausting.”
Ana bit her thumb, her clove cigarette balanced between her first two fingers. Smoke caressed her forehead. “You only have to put up with him once, young one. Then you’re free of all men.”
Tamarind opened the jar of peanut butter but eschewed the spoon that she’d brought. Sticking her forefinger into the jar, she scooped out a large dollop and licked neatly at it.
“Raimunda reminded me of someone.”
Ana dragged on her cigarette. “Oh, yeah?” Smoke streamed along with the words.
“Yeah, but I don’t know who.” Tamarind twisted the lid back on the jar and looked at Ana for a moment. “John looked like thunder when they left together. I don’t think he’s with her anymore.”
“And you think maybe he’ll come to his senses and be with you now?” Ana laughed. It was a choppy, rough sound. “I wouldn’t bet my legs on it, young one. The sooner you forget him, the better off you’ll be. Mark my words.”
Tamarind shrugged again and stood up. “I’m going for a swim. My throat’s as dry as a piece of driftwood this morning.”
Ana watched Tamarind trudge up the path toward the beach. She wore only a white t-shirt and shorts. After being briefly tamed the night before, the long kinks of her copper hair reveled at the sun’s familiar touch. Her legs, where they showed below the fabric of her shorts, had grown as gracefully muscular as a dancer’s. She watched until Tamarind had disappeared from sight and then she smiled.
Tamarind continued on down toward the playa, but she had no intention of swimming beyond a quick sustaining dunk. After wetting herself completely, she shook out her hair and then dried most of the saltwater from her skin and hair. Already, she felt less parched and stiff. She pulled John’s t-shirt back over her head and stepped into the shorts. She glanced toward the secret path to see if Ana had followed her, but the old woman had not. After a moment, she knelt down and arranged several rocks on the shore at the outlet of the path, humming a bit while scooping handfuls of seawater over them. If Ana should happen to walk this way, she would forget why she’d come to the playa and have a strong urge to return to her house. It was the best Tamarind could do on Ana’s own turf.
She got up then and hurried toward Tamarindo Estates and the road toward 251. By the time she reached Posada La Diosa, she felt dry and worn out even though it was only mid-morning. Her feet and calves ached from her haste.
Valerie sat outside on her patio next to the canal, drinking coffee and twisting wire jewelry. Behind her, a yellow and black bananaquit fluttered around the feeder that Valerie kept filled with sugar water. On the pavers at her feet, a black cat lay on its side licking its front paws in the sunshine. Tamarind watched the tiny bird for a moment and the ache in her legs disappeared. Then, drawing on the water in the canal to restore her further, she hummed a purr to the cat, which stopped licking and looked at her. It blinked once and purred back.
“That’s a pretty amazing trick you have. You’re a pretty amazing girl, aren’t you?” When she looked at Tamarind that way, Tamarind thought Valerie knew her secret. “Want to help make some pieces today?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Tamarind sat down and began gathering necessary bits and tools. Valerie had plenty of wire, but her store of polished stones had grown low and nothing appealed to Tamarind. She picked up some wire and began twisting a figure anyway. She could add a stone later.
“Do you know someone named Raimunda?”
Valerie snipped a bit of wire before answering. “No, can’t say that I do. Why, should I?”
Tamarind bit her lower lip and twisted a tight spiral. “Well, I thought you might if John’s been bringing her around here.”
“Ah, that’s what this is about.” Valerie put her piece down and took a sip from her coffee. “Last night, he brought someone home but I heard her screaming at him not long after they got here. I don’t think she stayed long.”
She watched Tamarind deftly twist two arms and a head for her Goddess.
“There aren’t any good stones here.” She fingered the pile in front of her. “Of course, some might tell you to go ahead and put in any old stone you find and what you’ve got will be good enough. I say you have to wait for the right stone for your Goddess to be polished and set carefully into Her form. The love and care you take will be nothing short of pure magic. But I think you know that, don’t you, Tamarind?”
She held up the Goddess that she’d been working on. In its belly was an inferior stone, dull and pockmarked.
“See? This one doesn’t have any power with the wrong stone. Now take this stone here.” She picked up a dull blue one. “This stone looks rather unimpressive in its current state. But I can tell by its shape and color that it’s actually rather rare. It’s a blue moonstone. Blue moonstone symbolizes the water signs in the zodiac. It’s supposed to make wearers more receptive so they recognize the truth and to bring them dreams. It’s also said to calm emotions so two lovers can see their future together without fear or pain.”
She paused and looked steadily at Tamarind.
“You know, I think you should have this one, Tamarind. If you’re patient and wait for it to be polished, you may find that this moonstone is exactly the right stone for your Goddess.”
Valerie slipped the milky-blue stone into Tamarind’s palm and closed her fingers around it. “Just take care of it, Tamarind. Something this rare won’t come across your path again. I know it.”
Tamarind looked into Valerie’s eyes. Swallowing hard against a dry throat, she nodded and squeezed the blue moonstone even tighter. She would keep the promise of this stone against her heart as long as necessary.
Sixteen
John felt the solid presence of the hills between the Pittsburgh airport and the Fort Pitt Tunnel as his fr
iend Stefan’s car climbed and plunged. Once through the tunnel, his gaze embraced downtown—“dahntahn” in the vernacular—and the point where the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers met to form the Ohio. As they passed over the Monongahela, he could see the dark bulk of Three Rivers Stadium across from the Point State Park. He’d missed so many of the Pirates’ summer home games.
The drive from the airport to Stefan’s place in Squirrel Hill took only half an hour; Stefan asked no questions and John volunteered nothing. They chatted about inconsequential things, the latest gossip in the CS department, the incoming first years, the big grant won for a robotics project. They headed to the Squirrel Cage where Stefan’s favorite waitress, the one John used to tease him was his soul mate, brought them hand-formed hamburgers and black-and-tans. Pittsburgh residents and grad students filled the booths of the dark bar, their cigarettes and chatter comforting to John. He’d had no idea how fond that he’d grown of this former steel town or how much he’d missed its coffee houses and bagel shops. When they’d finished dinner, he urged Stefan to cross over Murray Avenue to the Eat’n Park for dessert.
Stefan’s last roommate had graduated in May and he hadn’t yet found a new one. John viewed the available bedroom, which was still furnished in low-budget melamine from the popular Swedish furniture store, and thanked Stefan for letting Zoë dump his clothes and books there. He’d get the rest of his stuff from storage later, after he’d had time to get back into the groove at school. Dropping his bags near the door, he went over to the window facing the street and opened it wide to the muggy August evening. He stood inhaling the mingled smells of exhaust and baked motor oil and listening to the sounds from Murray Avenue where people laughed and talked at outdoor tables or walked between restaurants and shops. Underneath it all the sound of cars washed like the waves on Culebra’s beaches. He’d returned to the place he belonged, but he’d left his soul behind.
When he lay down on the bed’s bare mattress, no dreams graced his sleep.
***
As soon as John walked onto the Carnegie Mellon campus, he saw his advisor. Steve appeared surprised to see his errant graduate student—and exceptionally happy. His surprise at seeing John lasted about two minutes, long enough for John to cross the quad to the main entrance to Wean Hall.
“Hey, John! You have impeccable timing,” he said when John got within five feet of him. “I’ve been working on a funding application for ARPA and it would really help our cause if you update your Web site with the digital stills and video from the mission.”
As nearly all his colleagues did, Steve constantly sought sources of funding and the Defense Department’s Advance Research Projects Agency proved to be one of the best.
“Yeah, no problem. What’s the timeframe like?”
“Paul Stoddard is visiting next Monday so you don’t have much time, John, but I think you could get something decent together by then. We don’t have to show Paul much—he’s got the capacity to make a leap or two, if we can just show him the outlines of what you’ve been working on. I had this idea just yesterday after I poked around your Pitt-Woods Hole site and I wanted to talk with you about it.”
“Go ahead.” John trailed Steve through the lobby of Wean. “Oh, hey, wait. I’ve got to get a cup of coffee here. It’s been months since I’ve had a good cup of Joe.”
Steve kept talking while John ordered. “You’ve got a lot of great images from the Puerto Rican Trench, John, but they don’t give a big picture of the place. I mean, this trench is five miles below sea level and what you’ve got is a view from a few hundred feet above it.”
“So what’re you proposing? I’m not sure how my expertise in networked RAID and streaming video is very useful for presenting the image data.”
Steve ordered a decaf latte from the cart. “Well, no, you don’t have the expertise—yet. But I think you should go talk with Ken Abel in the computer-vision group. What I’m thinking is that your image data might be the source for a modeling program that puts it all together into bigger segments.”
John sipped his coffee carefully; it burned his tongue nonetheless. “This sounds like a helluva lot of work. What happened to the work I was planning to do on my proposal?”
Steve gripped his own coffee and looked squarely at John. “Look, John, I’m not one to give anyone advice on how to live his life—what’s done is done. But let’s face it: you’ve been gone for nearly five months and now you’ve got to do a little extra to redeem yourself. Six months ago, I could’ve let you stick with your original plan. But now, I think you’d do well to labor on something a little more glamorous, if you know what I mean.”
John adjusted his backpack higher onto his shoulder. He could feel his chest tightening, his esophagus narrowing. What Steve was suggesting—no, ordering—was that he write a less evolutionary research plan and jump into a riskier technical challenge, one that might not result in a feasible working solution in the end. He said nothing for a few moments, instead focusing on breathing. A faint humming echoed in his memory and his chest released. When he and Steve made it to the Networking and Storage Lab, he spoke.
“Okay, you’re the boss. There’s a faint chance that I could actually write a proposal before Black Friday.”
“That’s the ticket.” Steve opened the lab door. “Nothing like a high-stakes deadline to get the old adrenaline pumping and the mental juices flowing. I’ll ping you in a few days to see how it’s going.”
A week later, John, ensconced in his office in the bowels of Wean Hall, had begun tackling the new thesis proposal when his friend Puneet poked his head into the lab.
“So it’s true—you have returned from paradise! They say all good things must come to an end and here you are slaving in the dungeon already.”
John grinned. “You know Steve, Puneet. He can drive a slave with the best of ‘em. Besides, there’s a corollary to your saying: eventually, you have to pay the piper. And that’s what I’m doing.”
Puneet walked into the lab and stood next to John’s chair where he could see John’s monitor. “Yikes! Don’t tell me you’re working on a proposal.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you. But don’t act surprised when Catherine posts the date for my proposal talk before the end of the semester.”
“So soon? Man, you’re setting a bad standard for the rest of us. How long have you been here, anyway?”
“This will be my fourth year.”
“What’s your rush? Don’t you have another semester or two before you’re really under pressure to propose?”
“Not after taking a five-month vacation—at least, that’s how it’s perceived around here.”
“Oh.” Puneet drew out the sound as if it were a three-syllable word. “Look, I know you’re busy, but maybe you could come up out of your underground dwelling and go to lunch with me. It’s a glorious day outside and you don’t see too many of those in Pittsburgh.”
“No, you don’t. Where should we go?”
“Mad Mex.”
They walked into Oakland and spent most of lunch talking at length about what it was like to run away from research for a while.
“I don’t know what happened to me, Puneet. There was something about Culebra—I don’t know what exactly. I just found myself sitting for long hours staring at the surreal blue ocean. I even wondered if I could open up a microbrewery there and turn the local soda, el Tamarindo, into a wicked Snake Island Ale. Still sounds like a good idea, actually.”
Puneet grinned. “No doubt, John, no doubt. That idea is definitely enticing.” He toyed with his fork, tilting it this way and that so that it threw light shards onto the ceiling. “Especially when code won’t flow. Or you despair that you’ve chosen a topic that’s just another math problem, one only pointy-eared geeks care about.”
“You’re not afraid of that, are you?” John let his voice register his incredulity. For all his surface levity, Puneet was one of the most focused, most disciplined, graduate students he knew. “Don’t be.
What you’re working on will protect our country’s most important secrets.”
“Me? I’m just building a more elegant lock for network security. That’s enough to make me want to take up auto mechanics sometimes.” Puneet laid the fork next to his plate and looked at John. His dark eyes, usually dancing with humor, were direct and sober. “John, you don’t have to run away to an island in shame and frustration. You’re going to help advance what science understands about the oceans. That’s monumental, if you ask me.” He paused. “So, tell me, what are you planning to propose?”
Puneet listened as John described the raw data he’d collected in the Puerto Rico Trench and his original plans to write special algorithms for storing and retrieving it over a high-speed network. When he heard Steve’s revised standard for what constituted proposal-level work his eyes widened, but he said nothing until John had outlined the problem and described how he’d solve it.
“That’s good, John. You sound like you’re jumping in with both feet. But I think you’ve got a bigger technical problem than how to build a system that enables both quick-and-dirty analysis on-board ship and more detailed analysis after the survey is over. Those are really two sides of the same issue. No, the problem is more fundamental than that. I’m not a geologist and I don’t know what the current state of knowledge is on the seabed, but I wouldn’t bet that a generic algorithm is going to allow you to filter out all the noise from your video so that you can cleanly model the Trench landscape.”
John frowned and pushed his plate away from him. “I guess that is a naive approach to take. But I should think the geologists have a pretty good idea what most of the noises are so all I have to do is pick Dave Gibbons’ brain and write a few more algorithms. I’m not saying it’ll be a piece of cake, but I’m not worried it’s impossible.”
Puneet nodded. “You’re probably right. Still, I’d be prepared, if I were you, for a few surprises along the way. The oceans are the last great, uncharted territory on Earth. I don’t think we know a tenth there is to know about them. That’s why what you’re doing is so valuable.”
An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant Page 19