by Xequina
Chapter 6
A House for a Mermaid
I usually walked home after school because my mom has odd hours, so I always stopped by the open drain before going inside. The mermaid wasn’t as afraid anymore since I started feeding her, plus I was making progress. She used to hide again after she ate, but now she stayed out and I could watch her. It was really hard not to reach a finger out to her, but I made myself sit still and just look.
Today she was out swimming around so I showed her the mermaid book. It had beautiful mermaids on the cover with flowing hair, but after glancing at it for a moment, she didn’t seem very interested. So I went inside and put my things down and changed before going back outside. I was allowed to play before dinner and I always spent that time watching the mermaid.
Sometimes the mermaid swam like I did in the summer, using her arms and doing side strokes, but she could also swim just by leading with her head and waggling her long body like a snake, her long, mossy hair trailing behind her. I noticed the skin of her tail was changing; it looked less like skin, glistening slightly with iridescence. She was growing.
“Mermary,” I said all of a sudden, and she looked up. I don’t know what made me think of it, but I thought it was a good name.
She swam through a branch from a tree that I found one day and put in her water. It was almost white, all the bark had fallen off. I realized Mermary didn’t really have any shelter except for those rocks and the mud at the bottom where she was always hiding. The book showed mermaids living in sea caves or sunken ships or a giant clamshell. What could I find for her to live in? I thought about balancing a flat rock over two other rocks, but what if it fell on her? Then I thought about a bottle, but was afraid someone might see it and recycle it with Mermary in it. I was still thinking about it when I saw my mother’s car turning down the block. It was time to leave the mermaid and go inside.
That evening as I was getting ready for bed, I picked up the orange helmet shell I had on my dresser. It had belonged to my grandmother, who had died. It was brown and a pretty peachy-orange color, with raised ridges and bumpy areas of white. On the back was carved the head of a lady with flowers in her long, wavy hair. When I was little, my grandmother told me the carving was called a cameo, and that it was the portrait of a little lady who used to live inside the shell. The inside was pearly smooth, and of course, it sounded like the ocean when I put it up to my ear. I thought it might make a nice house for the mermaid.
The next day I took it outside and put it into Mermary’s pool. She immediately swam over to it and swam around and around it, running her tiny hands over the carving and rubbing up against the natural bumps and ridges on the outside like a cat does with furniture. Finally she followed the smooth mouth of the shell and slipped inside. After a moment she came back out and looked up at me. It seemed like she was smiling!
I put rocks around the shell so it wouldn’t be so obvious it was there, in case someone passed by. Now Mermary had a perfect little mermaid house.
Chapter 7
Books and Movies about Mermaids
Some days I went to the library after school, usually when my mother could pick me up. I had started from the top of Mrs. Tanglewood’s list and crossed off titles after reading them. But sometimes I couldn’t find one. I finally showed her the list with the missing ones circled.
“Sometimes items might be checked out. Or they’re materials owned by other libraries in the system,” she explained. “I can order them for you.”
Some were books of fairy tales, some were mythology. A couple were whole books of mermaid stories. A lot I thought of as baby books that were simple or silly and were for small children, but most had nice, colorful pictures and I read them anyway.
Ms. Tanglewood showed me how to use the online resources on the children’s computer. There was a Children’s Encyclopedia where I looked up mermaids. It said they were a “fable,” which is a type of legendary story. There was also a thesaurus, which helps you find words of the same meaning. I looked up “mermaid” and found all the different names they’re called: sirens, water nymphs, nixies, naiads, simbi, and sea maids. In Ireland they were called merrows, in Mexico sirenas, and in Russia, rusalkas. Another dictionary called them “monsters.” Mermary was not a monster.
There was a lot of information on Wikipedia, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to trust everything it said. Mrs. Padma said it was unreliable, and there was a school rule that we couldn’t use it for our reports. It said Christopher Columbus had seen mermaids while he was exploring the Caribbean, and that there had been sightings of mermaids in countries around the world, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
There were a lot of mermaid movies on the list too. Some I’d already seen, like Disney’s Little Mermaid and Barbie’s Mermaidia. Some movies had mermaids in them, like Hook. I loved watching the mermaid scenes. Some looked so real I wondered if the film makers had found real mermaids to put in their movies.
What I thought was that mermaids probably co-existed with humans a long time ago, and that was why there were so many stories about them. But maybe humans drove them close to extinction, like we have lots of other animals, and the survivors learned to stay far away from humans.
One movie I saw was Splash, from the eighties, and I watched it with my mother. It’s about a beautiful mermaid who falls in love with a guy named Allen after she saves him from drowning. Her tail changes into legs when she goes on land, so no one can tell she’s really a mermaid. She finds him and they have a great time and fall in love. When people find out she’s a mermaid, government men grab her and put her in a tank in a secret basement laboratory where they perform experiments. The mermaid curls up at the bottom of the tank and starts wasting away. The scientist who revealed her secret is worried about her condition, but the head scientist doesn’t care and starts making plans to dissect her when she’s dead. That really scared me and I started crying. I just knew the same thing would happen to my little mermaid if they knew I had her.
“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “You know mermaids aren’t real.”
“But what if they are?” I asked. “What if someday, a real mermaid is discovered? They would put her in a laboratory to study her, just like in the movie.”
My mother sighed and said, “Well, that’s how we learn about nature.”
She said that like it was okay, but it wasn’t. She was a marine scientist, exactly the kind of scientist who would want to study Mermary. How would scientists like it if mermaids caught them, and put them in a cage and gave them a bunch of boring tests to see how smart they were? Or worse, force them to do silly tricks for food? People had rights; didn’t mermaids?
I knew it was only a matter of time before humans captured a mermaid to study, but I couldn’t let it be Mermary. I couldn’t tell anyone about her, ever.
Chapter 8
A Song for a Mermaid
It seemed like the mermaid started to be interested in me. She came out every day to see if I’d brought her anything, but after looking at me for a minute or so, she’d go back to swimming. I wished I could have more interaction with her. I had already learned Mermary was afraid when I stirred the water with the stick, so I didn’t use it anymore and just tried to be patient.
All the storm rain caused the trees and flowers to bloom, and one day I brought Mermary some blossoms I collected. When I sprinkled them on the water, the mermaid ate some of the petals, then played with them. It was fun to watch.
That weekend was warm. I took a walk and gathered some flowers and put them in the water for Mermary. As I sat there watching her, I started humming. The mermaid looked up.
Could she hear through the water? I hummed louder and the mermaid swam closer to me, so then I stopped humming to see if it made a difference. She waited, then went back to the flowers.
I wondered what Mermary would do if I sang a song. This was the kind of thing my mother did at her work, try experiments to see how the animals would react. When
I was in the first grade we learned a mermaid song, “The Blue Mermaid.” I started singing it.
The mermaid swam back to me, and this time, put her head out of the water. Even after I was finished, Mermary kept looking at me, so I sang it again. To my amazement, she started singing too! Not the words, she just sang “o-o-o-o-o” to the melody, and her voice was so pretty! She even sang while she was swimming on top of the water. At first it was the Blue Mermaid tune, then she started changing it.
Every day after that I sang to her first thing, and she always sang with me. If I learned a song in school that day, I would sing it for her. “Puff the Magic Dragon” was one of my favorites. One time after singing that song, I talked about what it meant, about the little boy Jackie growing up and leaving behind his toys. It seemed like Mermary was listening to me.
That’s how I started talking to the mermaid. I’d tell her what I did in school that day. I told her about my teacher and classmates. I told her about my mom and dad, and what they did at work. I started thinking about other things to tell her, like if something fun happened at school. And now when I gave Mermary food, I told her what it was, and how it grew, like “apricots grow on trees. That’s a tree,” and I would point to a nearby tree that she could see. Mermary would look at me with her big green eyes and look at where I was pointing, so we were communicating in a way.
Mermary’s mother probably would have taught her to talk if she hadn’t gotten separated from her. I wondered about her mother. What had happened to her? Had the storms separated them? Did Mermary have brothers and sisters?
“I wish you could talk,” I told Mermary.
She looked up and smiled.
Chapter 9
Conversation
The next day, I went out to see the mermaid and I said hello. Mermary came up to the surface and put her head out of the water.
“Hello,” she said back.
I was so amazed, I couldn’t say anything at first.
“How are you?” I asked, when I got over my shock.
The mermaid seemed to think. “I’m wet,” she said.
I laughed and clapped my hands. “You can talk!”
She clapped too. “I learned by listening to you. I didn’t know I could talk until I tried.”
So I started asking her lots of questions, like if she was cold in the pool and did she like living in the drain’s basin, and the shell. I realized that was exactly what my mother said scientists would do, so after the first time, I tried not to ask so many at one time. I didn’t want to tire her out.
After that we talked every day, and we’d always sing songs together. I asked if she had been born in the shell she was hiding in that first day, but she didn’t know. By now the shell had disintegrated.
“All I remember is that I was in this pond, and then one day you came. You were so big, I was scared.”
Mermary asked a lot of questions too.
“Are there others like me?”
“There must be,” I said. “That’s the only explanation of how you came to be.”
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know, they must be in the ocean because they’re definitely not in lakes or rivers, like they probably were at one time.”
Mermary also asked about her own environment, like where water from the sky comes from, or what the sun was. One day she told me, “An animal came and drank out of my pool. It had big eyes and pointy ears on top of its head. It was black and white and furry. What was that?”
“That’s the neighbor’s cat, Amigo,” I told her. “He’s a nice cat with people, but you’re not safe around him. Cats like to eat fish and catch small animals. When you see him, swim to the bottom of the basin and stay there until he goes away.”
Now that Mermary and I could converse together, I taught her the alphabet and numbers and the colors, and the names of the parts of her body and mine. I told her about the books I was reading, and now when I showed them too her, she was interested. Mermary was very curious, and I was giving her an education.
Chapter 10
Mermaid Facts
At school we were learning about the different classes of animals: fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Mammals are warm-blooded and nurse their young. Reptiles are cold-blooded, have scales, and usually lay eggs. Fish are cold-blooded, have gills and scales, and live in water. Amphibians are also cold blooded. They’re born from eggs, and start the first part of their life with gills and living in water. Then they develop lungs and legs and live both in water and on land.
This made me wonder what class mermaids were in. They weren’t a fish, but they weren’t amphibians either. Mermary had gills, but she also breathed air. Furthermore, Mermary might have come from an egg. When I couldn’t figure it out on my own, I waited until school was over for the day and handed a note to my teacher. I had written,
What class are mermaids in?
Mrs. Padma read the note and smiled. “They would be mammals that live in the ocean, like seals or dolphins. We know that because they have breasts and nurse their young.”
I thought about that as I walked home, but I didn’t think that was exactly right either. Sea mammals have hair, and don’t have scales. But Mermary had hair and maybe scales on her fish-part, because it looked iridescent, although she was still too tiny to tell. And then there was the eggshell, although that could have been blown into the basin from a nearby nest.
So then I asked my mother if there were any sea animals that had hair and scales.
“No. Animals with hair are in a different evolutionary class than animals with scales.”
I decided that mermaids must be in a class of their own, which of course hadn’t been discovered because scientists hadn’t found a mermaid yet.
My father was home that weekend. He was a physicist and was currently doing research in Europe. I went to the office supply store with him. While I was wandering around I found a stand of notebooks on sale. They were colorful and hardly any two were the same. I found a turquoise-green book with drawings of mermaids on the cover, and that gave me an idea. My mother kept notebooks about the animals they had in the research center so she could see their progress. I decided to do the same with Mermary. I had my own money from my allowance, so I bought it, along with a pen with bright green ink that smelled like limeade.
That night in bed, with the green pen and mermaid notebook, I started writing down what I knew about Mermary so far:
Mermary might have been born from an egg.
Mermaids can live in fresh water, but they can live in brackish water too.
Brackish water is fresh water that mixes with sea water, like at the area where a river pours into the ocean. I knew this because I tasted the water in the basin when I first discovered the mermaid. It was salty from the storms, but not as salty as the ocean. Then, when the water in the basin started going down from evaporation, I added water with the hose, and Mermary liked it.
Mermaids are omnivorous.
Mermaids can sing.
Mermaids can talk.
Mermaids are curious.
Mermaids are intelligent.
Mermaids have three fingers and a thumb.
Mermaids have webbed fingers.
Mermaids have gills and can stay underwater for a long time.
Most of what I was learning about Mermary would be from observation, like my mother did at her job. Now I understood why people studied animals and had to observe them over long periods of time. I thought about scientists observing a mermaid if they ever caught one. Once they realized mermaids could talk, they probably wouldn’t be patient, but get right into questioning her and making her take intelligence tests. I hated that idea.
I wondered why mermaids hadn’t been found yet. Was it because they were extremely good about hiding? Mermary’s coloring made it hard for me to see her in the drain basin sometimes, so maybe it was mermaids’ protective coloring that has kept them from being discovered. I wrote that down too.
I p
ut the notebook away in a drawer, under my things. I didn’t want my mother to find it and start asking questions.
Chapter 11
Aquarium
It was almost summer and the days were getting longer and a lot warmer. The water in Mermary’s basin was going down faster and I had to add water practically every day. Mermary loved to play in the water as it poured in from the hose, leaping out of the water and into the stream. I realized the basin was in the direct sunlight for several hours every day. On a really hot day, I put my finger in the water. It was very warm. Mermary was swimming slowly.
“Mermary, how is the water for you?”
“I like it for a while, but some days it gets too hot, and I can’t cool down.”
I noticed something else as well. She was growing. In fact, she didn’t go inside the helmet shell anymore, and it was probably because she didn’t fit.
I got an idea. I went inside and down to the basement, looking for an old aquarium we used to keep a sick lizard in. It was still there, dusty, but large, and more important, much deeper than the drain’s basin. I found my mother in the kitchen cutting veggies for our dinner.
“Mom, can I get a goldfish or something? I can put it in that aquarium we have in the basement.”
She put down the knife and looked at me.
“Yes, I think you’re old enough to be responsible for a fish now. I’ve noticed that you’ve been spending a lot of time looking into the open drain outside. An aquarium will help you to see the fish better.”
I hadn’t realized she’d noticed me hanging out by the open drain. We went into the basement to bring up the aquarium and she washed it for me. I was so excited about making a comfortable home for Mermary and getting a fish too, which would be as much for Mermary as for me. I went out to talk to her.