by A. L. Knorr
I pulled the envelope he'd given me from inside my jacket and handed it to her.
"What's this?" She took the pages out and unfolded them. She scanned the first paragraph. When she realized what it was she looked at me in shock. "The diary? He had it translated?"
"Just the part about Sybellen. Amazing, right?"
"Seriously." She shook her head and folded it up. "I'd love to read it when you're finished."
I stood and tucked the envelope back into my carry-on, planning to read it later in the flight.
There was no talk during take off, everyone was focused out the window and enjoying the view as Poland fell away beneath us. I held Mom's hand as I felt her anxiety climb along with the plane. She's indestructible and fearless, but stick her in a plane and she became a nervous wreck. "Try to sleep, Mom," I said.
She nodded and gave me a tired smile. She pulled the sleeping mask over her face and shifted to make herself comfortable. I listened as her breathing deepened. I hoped for her sake that she stayed asleep the entire flight home.
Another five minutes and I started not to feel well either. Concrete filled my limbs and chest, like there was a force that was trying to pull me down through the floor of the plane. My arms were made of iron and my head wanted to flop forward onto my chest. I felt my neck creak and groan under the compression.
So, now I knew. Flying did have an affect on my changed biology. I had a whole new level of appreciation for her hatred of flying. My eyelids drooped and a wave of nausea overtook me. I felt a headache creeping across my temples. I gave in to the heaviness, took a pillow and curled up in my seat using my mom's warm body to rest against. Within moments I slipped into a dense black cloud of unconsciousness that locked out the world.
"It's never going to happen, now just let it go already!"
A sharp voice startled me awake. I groggily opened my eyes and looked around, wondering if I'd dreamt it. I looked at my mom but she was still out. She had earplugs in.
Micah noticed that I'd been shocked out of my nap. "It was just Simon," he said. "Go back to sleep."
Curiosity fought drowsiness. My mouth felt like someone had been carpeting it while I slept. I took a big drink of water and felt slightly better. "What's going on?" I tucked my water bottle back into the seat pocket in front of me.
Micah shook his head, his face a mask of disapproval. He shifted in his seat and leaned toward me conspiratorially. He'd clearly been wanting to talk to someone about whatever was going on. "It's Eric. He's got this crazy idea in his head and he's been pestering Simon with it nonstop. I don't get it. He used to be so..." He took off his ball cap and scratched his head. "...rational. He was the guy we could all rely on to make smart decisions. You know, give the go ahead on the jobs that would net out in our favour. He was great at it. No one had better instincts than Eric. Aside from your mom of course, but she's a different story." He shook his head. "Now? He's turned into a huge risk-taker. Not a good quality for the analyst to have."
"What does he want Simon to do?" So far, my curiosity was winning out over the desire to lay flat on the floor under my seat.
"There's this legendary wreck in the North Atlantic," he explained. "It would be crazy expensive and dangerous to try and recover anything from it. Eric knows that better than anybody, but he's turned into some kind of cowboy."
"What's the wreck?" Whatever it was, it wouldn't be out of reach for my mom or I. As far as I knew, nothing in the ocean was off-limits for a mermaid.
Micah's face lost its derision and he looked like the goofy guy that I liked. "Oh, it's awesome. I mean, I get it, I'm a wrecker. The Republic is famous in salvage circles. It makes everybody salivate."
"The Republic? That's what it's called? What happened to her?" I took another swig of water, begging the cobwebs to clear.
"Everyone knows about the Titanic, right?"
I nodded. "Sure, everyone and their dog."
"Yeah, but it seems like only the dive community knows about The Republic. See, three years before The Titanic went down the White Star Line had another unsinkable ship. The RMS Republic. But in January of 1909, early one very foggy morning, The Republic was T-boned by another ship called The Florida, who had been lost in the fog and sailed 30 miles off course. Boom!" Micah hammered his fist into his palm, making me jump.
"Why wasn't it as big a story as the Titanic?" I asked, fascinated in spite of my pounding head and lead filled legs.
"Well, it might have been at the time, it was all over the news because The Republic was a palatial ship too, carrying a lot of very wealthy people and valuable cargo. But it didn't capture the public's imagination the way the Titanic did, because the loss of life wasn't nearly as bad. Once the Titanic hit the news..." He blew on his fingertips and dispersed the air out with his fingers, illustrating quite well that the story had gone up in smoke. "Nobody wanted to hear anything about anything else. It was all Titanic, all the time. So The Republic faded into history. Just like The Sybellen did."
"Where did she go down?" I wondered if my mom had ever been to the wreck site.
"In the North Atlantic, same as The Titanic," he said. "The Republic was just going the other direction, back to Europe."
"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 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 a 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?" 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.
Chapter 31
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 in
to 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.
"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 don't think I'm better, honey.” 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. "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. "Do you know what the salinity of Little Manitou Lake is?"
"No clue, why don't you enlighten me." I twisted the espresso maker closed and set 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 an identical tone and I laughed because I knew that she was doing that thing. She liked to deadpan phrases 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. Maybe 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 didn’t like where her hypothesis was taking us.
"It's possible, but I can also tell you that I met a siren named Aris 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 it’s got a lot of holes. 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 drown 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?
There was a knock at the door. A male voice yelled, "Courie
r!" 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.
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. 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. "Twins?"
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," Mom said, holding the door open.
"Ah.” 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," Mom said looking over my shoulder at the stamps. "Did we forget something in our apartment?"
"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."