An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant
Page 26
He turned at their footsteps. “Madre de Dios. Qué pasó?”
All of the people around them stopped chatting and looked at John and Tamarind, who stood just outside the church’s entrance. Their eyes, so lively only moments before, lost their dark luster and their faces closed in on them as anemone tentacles close around prey. A few of them stepped back, and ducking their heads, turned away. The ones that remained shifted closer together and watched John and Tamarind, their lips pursed and their arms around each other’s waist. Tamarind’s hand flew to her scalp before she realized what she was doing. She let it brush the prickly soft hairs at the top of its arc and then it fell back to her side.
John wrapped an arm across her shoulders. “When una mujer del mar casts off her tail, she cuts her hair to show that she has left the sea forever.”
“Es la verdad?” Jaime looked at her.
Tamarind nodded.
“So it’s done then, young one?” The scent of cloves parted the watchers and Ana leaned against a pew, her legs crossed at the ankles and a hand-rolled cigarette gripped in her left hand. Blood spattered the front of her blouse and the bird’s nest of white hair around her face lay matted against her forehead.
“Yes.” Tamarind turned to look at Ana and her chin lifted a little. She touched the Goddess at her breast without knowing that she did so.
Ana nodded and dropped the cigarette onto the tiled floor where she ground it with her toe. She walked over to them and stopped. Without looking at John, she brought her hand to the Goddess, holding it up and away from Tamarind’s chest so that the sunlight shone on the moonstone.
“She’s a powerful one, this one is.” She spoke so softly that only Tamarind heard her words.
Without warning, a laughing gull dropped from overhead and swooped alongside Tamarind, nipping at her chest. The delicate chain snapped and the bird continued flying through the open doorway into the sanctuary with the Goddess dangling from its beak. Tamarind cried out, lifting her hand at the same time. John lurched toward the bird as soon as his mind processed what had happened, but the bird escaped his reach. It flew on, flapping strongly as it navigated around the inside of the church; first, it sped toward the altar and then veered to the right as Sister Maria Margarita appeared in its path. It zoomed in a low curve toward the side of the sanctuary and continued on around the far side to come full circle at the altar. People crouching in the pews ducked their heads.
Tamarind kept her gaze on the gull and the Goddess in its mouth. John stood nearby, his attention also focused on the mad flight of the bird. Dark, steady energy crackled in the air between them. While they watched, the laughing gull’s wings flapped a little less strongly and its height wavered. Again, it circled the sanctuary in its desperate flight. As it came around toward them, Tamarind held out her hand once more. The bird shied from her hand and wobbled toward the middle of the church where Valerie stood. It tried to veer away from her, but as it tipped, the Goddess slipped from its beak. She caught the figure before it fell to the floor.
The laughing gull swung back toward the open doorway, its wings flapping unevenly. As it passed over Tamarind and Ana, it let out a cry like an apology and then it had gone through the dark frame of the door into the brilliant sunshine where the air currents lifted it up as easily as if it were ash from a bonfire.
“I think this is yours.” Valerie walked from the sanctuary to where Tamarind stood. She lifted the gold chain up and studied the break. “It looks like the clasp gave way. I can fix it easily.”
Tamarind nodded her head once and Valerie closed her hand around the Goddess.
“She’ll be ready in time for your wedding, and I’d like to give you two gold bands to exchange that I picked up in San Juan.” Valerie looked at John, who blinked. After a moment, he grinned. He looked at Tamarind, clasping her hand in his.
“Perfect.”
“Great! Sister!” Valerie turned around and called back up the center aisle to the nun, who stood in front of a table at the front of the church with a huge aluminum soup pot on it. “Go find Father! We’re going to have a wedding while we wait for the clean-up crews from the mainland!”
***
They got married on Playa Flamenco as the sun melted orange into the waves. Tree branches and bits of thorny acacia and cactus scrub had been cleared away and the white sand had been raked until it was smooth. Citronella stakes burned in a semi-circle around the wedding party and their flames danced in the growing dusk. John wore a pair of jeans and a t-shirt; Tamarind wore a blue batik dress purchased from the Mermaid’s Purse that afternoon and the repaired chain from which the Goddess hung, mysterious and radiant. Julie, the owner of the Mermaid’s Purse, presented her with a fringed black shawl decorated with huge flamboyan flowers that Tamarind draped over her head like a mantilla. They stood before the priest barefoot, their hands clasped.
During the brief ceremony in which they promised to honor each other before God and to love without end, Valerie and Sister Maria Margarita stood on either side of John and Tamarind with the gold bands that Valerie had given them. Chris, Pablo, and Teresa, John’s closest friends on the island, sat on woven blankets behind them. Twenty feet away to the west, Ana squatted alone on the beach and smoked a clove cigarette. Her green peasant skirt puffed around her spindly legs and her white hair tangled in the breeze. If anyone had glanced at her, they might have seen her lips moving as the priest spoke.
Afterwards, the sun dissolved into the water, leaving behind a rich red afterglow in the deepening blue of the horizon. Stars spread north and west in the wake of the advancing night, their tiny white lights revealed against the darker background. Ana unfurled herself and came over to Tamarind, who stood apart from John and the priest while they talked. She carried a small wooden box in her hands.
“I haven’t given you my gift yet, young one.”
Tamarind dug her toes into the sand; the warm grains yielded to her nervous prodding and covered her feet almost to the ankles.
“Ana, you don’t have to give me anything. Without you, I wouldn’t have any legs.”
“True, young one. But I still want you to have this. It’s a box fashioned from mangrove wood and this symbol on the top is a sacred mer symbol for the ocean. It’s inside this circle, which represents the earth. The mangrove has its roots in the ocean but isn’t of the ocean. You are like the mangrove in reverse. You may try to put your roots in the earth, young one, but you will always belong to the sea. Like the mangrove, you will always live in the border between the sea and earth.”
Ana’s clove-rough voice abraded Tamarind’s heart and she shivered even though the night was warm around her.
“I have imbued it with powerful spells for your marriage. Take it and remember me whenever you look at it.”
“Thank you.” Tamarind whispered as John stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.
Ana handed her the box without taking her eye from Tamarind’s face; the hasty dark shadowed the normally bright eye and blurred the edges of her features. Ana glanced at John and nodded slightly before turning away from them and heading toward the dunes edging the beach. In a few minutes, she’d disappeared over the slight rise to the path that led to the sand lot and then to Route 251 South.
“It’s time to go. The others want us to go with them to the Dockside for dinner. Chris stopped by there and asked them to keep some tables open. Since they’re the only ones with a generator, I’m sure they’ve got more business than they can handle right now. If we don’t go, they may just give our tables away.”
Tamarind still stared at the spot where Ana had disappeared. She cradled the box in her palms.
“Can I have a moment alone on the beach?” She didn’t turn to look at him.
She felt him stiffen and draw in a breath. She hummed, a faint throbbing that didn’t reach his hands on her waist. After a moment, he expelled the breath softly.
“Sure. I’ll be in the Jeep waiting.”
Tamarin
d waited for him to get to the other side of the beach before moving. Although the sensory pores on her sides had shrunk to almost non-existence with her final transformation, she still knew when he’d crossed over the dunes and gone out of sight. Setting the box down and dropping the scarf next to it, she tiptoed to the ragged edge where the waves lapped the soft white sand. Hitching her dress up to her waist and clutching it in her left hand, she knelt down.
Humming again, she traced her fingertips across the damp sand and sang low a mer parting song, the song sung when a loved one died or faced mortal dangers, such as from sharks or encounters with rogue mer. Or humans. The water rolled over itself in increasing intensity, foaming and washing toward her knees, adding its voice to hers in a rising crescendo until she’d finished and then it seemed to fade away, taking the sweet sadness of her words with it.
“My God, that was haunting.” It was Valerie. “Saying good-bye to your home, to the world that gave birth to you?”
“Yes.” Tamarind realized that her cheeks had grown wet with more than spray. “Mother Sea has blessed me and blessed my union with John. I can leave in peace now.”
Valerie came and laid her hand on Tamarind’s shoulder. “Always remember, Tamarind, that you carry the Goddess’s strength inside you. And that is no small gift.”
Tamarind said nothing, simply stared at the phosphorescent white cresting along the edge of the waves in front of her.
After a time, Valerie spoke again and her cheerful voice rang across the susurrus of the ocean. “Come! It’s time to eat your wedding feast where your friends will toast your happiness and fertility. And I must go transform John’s pathetic room into a bridal suite.”
***
As they flew northwest over Culebra toward San Juan two days later, Tamarind looked down at the island, which reminded her of a spiny lobster. Below them, on Playa Tamarindo, Ana’s knotty form squatted on the shore’s stony mosaic, but she didn’t lift her face towards their small plane. Instead, she stooped and reached, moving articles too small for Tamarind to distinguish, her arms spidery in their movements. Seaweed wove a loose web around her, forming an intricate bed for the unseen objects that she dropped. Tamarind sensed, rather than saw, a pattern to these tiny offerings, the way that memories sometimes hover at the edge of conscious thought, but the brilliant sky filled her mind instead. If she ignored the frame of the plane’s window at the edges of her vision and looked straight ahead, she forgot everything and flew with the sooty terns and brown boobies above the immense blue ocean.
Beneath them, Ana patiently worked. As the plane approached the far horizon, she sat back on her haunches and aimed her single eye on it.
“You’ll be back, young one. Mark my words—you’ll be back.”
Grounding Magic
Book Two
of
THE MERMAID’S PENDANT
Available February 14, 2013
on Kindle
Read whether Ana’s prediction that Tamarind will return to Culebra comes true—and whether Ana gets what she wants in a protégé in this darker, more complex tale where the young couple learns that true love requires more than magic for their marriage to succeed.