The Underneath

by Kathi Appelt

  Stars, even a sky full of them, don’t put out much light.

  “Blue moon,” Keeper said, “hurry.” On the other side of the sand dunes, the rolling breakers fell, soft against the sandy beach. She looked up again at the stars. Were they the same ones that had watched her mother swim away when she was only three years old? She felt B.D. lick her knees.

  “Seven years,” she said to the dog. “We have to find her.”

  He thumped his tail against the bottom of the boat.

  All those years Keeper had waited for her mother to swim back to her, had stood at the water’s edge and looked out, searched the tops of waves, scanned the horizon, waited and waited and waited. But now she couldn’t wait any more. Only Meggie Marie could stop the universe unto itself from coming undone. B.D. scratched a spot behind his ear with his back foot. “If she doesn’t come back . . .” Keeper let the sentence trail off into the damp air.

  Would her mother even recognize her? She grasped the cold charm again. She was counting on this charm, the last thing her mother had given her before she swam away.

  Keeper was also counting on the carved figurines tucked beneath her bench in an old shoe box. “Gifts,” she said. But they weren’t for Meggie Marie, her mother. Instead, she looked out at the small dark waves of the pond and spoke, “For you, Yemaya.”

  “Woof,” woofed B.D. His tongue washed her knee again.

  She scratched the fur beneath his jaw. “We’ll be back soon,” she promised. “Before Signe wakes up.”

  At the thought of Signe, Keeper swallowed hard. Signe would never, ever, not in a million years, approve of Keeper and B.D. being out here alone in the middle of the night. And even though Signe had never told her so, Keeper knew that she did not believe in mermaids. Not in selkies or lorelei or water sprites or meerfrau.

  Please, please, please? whined B.D.

  Keeper’s heart thumped against her rib cage in a chant: hurry, hurry, hurry.

  Like an echo, the dog’s tail thumped against the floorboards. Keeper sat back in the boat, snug against the pier, and waited for the tide to finish rising, waited for the full moon to finally pop above the horizon and turn the tide around and pull her out, pull her out to sea, take her to her mermaid mother.

  “Come on, moon,” she said. The charm hummed against her chest. The water rose.

  “Yemaya,” she whispered into the darkness. “Help us.”