“Oh, it is good to see you, Miss Clara,” Mr. Peterman says, grinning, doffing his hat. “Nothing like a pretty girl to warm a man’s chilled heart and soul.”
“Hullo, Miss Clara,” Henry Donald says. His chapped cheeks redden further as he stares at his boots, the image of a schoolboy caught with a love letter. The poor fellow is forty years old and as shy as a fawn.
“There you are!” Auntie calls from the doorway. “Have you brought my special order?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Peterman replies. “It arrived at the store a week ago, but with the weather being such as it was, we couldn’t get up here till now.”
Auntie and I watch as the two men place planks from the wagon bed to the ground to form a ramp. At Henry Donald’s count of three, they lift a large wooden crate and carry it off the wagon.
“Where do you want it, Mrs. Amsell?” Mr. Peterman asks as he walks backward toward the cottage.
“Well, for now you can put it in the girls’ room,” Auntie says. She opens the door wide and steps aside. “Straight through there,” she says. “The room on the left just after the grandfather clock.”
With groans and scrapings of doorways, the Petermans reach their destination. I follow them, wondering what the box might hold—and where my sister is hiding.
Mr. Peterman takes a hammer from his belt and uses its claw end to pry off the top of the crate, and then to pry apart the sides. The wood falls away to reveal a six-foot-long metal tub, dark silver inside and painted pine-green on the outside.
“That’s a beauty,” Mr. Peterman says, patting the edge. “If my wife were to catch sight of it, she’d take a notion to get one for herself.”
“It is quite pretty,” Auntie says. “And it should do our Maren a world of good. She has troubles with her legs and feet, you see, and nothing makes her feel better than a good soak. Now come into the kitchen and have a nice hot cup of tea and some raisin cake before you go.”
After Auntie ushers Mr. Peterman and Henry Donald into the kitchen, I climb into the tub. Imagine! A bathtub! We have never had such a luxury, but have never wanted it, either. Our warm weather bathing has always consisted of joyful splashing in the creek, and in wintertime we squeeze ourselves into the washtub once a week. I imagine steaming water swirling about me, the scent of Auntie’s good lavender soap . . . and then I remember what Auntie said about Maren and her “troubles.” And I realize that this tub is not for baths. It will be Maren’s home, like a fishbowl for a half-fish girl.
Leaving the tub behind, and not liking it half so much as I had at first, I tiptoe across the hall to Auntie’s tiny bedroom. “There you are,” I say to Maren. She is lying on Auntie’s bed, wrapped in wet towels. Her eyes are half-closed. From the end of the towels protrudes a single silver-green fin. My stomach lurches. Without asking permission, I peel back the towels to look at what should be two feet and two legs.
“Oh, Maren,” I sigh. “My poor sister.” Tears fall from my eyes and splatter upon her fused-together legs, a single limb embellished with rows of small, glassy scales, like the ones that first appeared on her sides last summer.
“Don’t cry, Clara,” she whispers. Her voice is the swish of sea foam on sand.
“Your poor legs.” I stroke what used to be her pale calf.
“They hurt less now that they are one.”
I shake my head. I have no words. Carefully, I climb onto the bed and nestle beside her, my head on her damp shoulder. And silently I weep for her loss. For my loss of her.
“Hush, now,” she whispers in her gentle tide voice. “I must be what I am, dear, as much as it pains me to leave you.”
“If only I was already a stork, if only I had wings to carry me, I would fly until I found a cure for you. I would fly until my last feather dropped to the earth.”
“I know, sister. Hush, now. Can’t you hear the sea birds’ wings above us? Can you not hear the sailors singing as they unfurl their great sails? Can you not hear the low bellows of the whales speaking to their children in the deepest deep?”
No, I think. I hear nothing but the sound of my heart breaking into a million tiny pieces, each smaller than a single grain of sand.
Winter is long. Long, cold, dark, and tiresome. Not like our former winters, when we played checkers and knucklebones, made up two-person plays for Auntie’s amusement, sang songs beside the fire, and attempted to learn French and lacemaking (both the lacemaking and the French studies proved abysmal failures). Not like the evenings when we planned aloud our futures, futures that more often than not involved marrying handsome foreigners and living in fine houses built side by side, our tribes of happy children frolicking in our shared gardens. Not like the evenings when Auntie would tell us fairy stories and stories of her youth—which sometimes seemed to overlap and entwine. Those were cozy, lovely, snug times in our cottage home.
These winter months, Maren reclines in the bathtub, day and night. She spends hours smoothing her lovely hair with the tortoiseshell comb O’Neill gave her for her sixteenth birthday. Day by day, her hair changes, growing longer and more coppery, speckled with glittery flecks. It cascades in waves over her shoulders and floats on the surface of the water like tendrils of an exotic vine. Auntie wraps Maren from underarms to waist in lengths of bright cotton “for modesty’s sake,” for the mermaid girl is now fully fish from the waist down and has no use for dresses or skirts.
“Is there nothing more you can do?” I ask Auntie for the thousandth time as we carry empty buckets back to the kitchen. “Is there no possible way to make her human again?” The foolish questions spill from my mouth although I know full well what Auntie will say: Maren never was, and never will be, truly human. Nevertheless, I ask—because my heart and mind refuse to quit quarreling. Because love and truth are in a tangle that I wish to unravel.
“No, my girl.” Auntie shakes her head sadly. “And I fear that she will soon sicken. Mermaids belong in the ocean, not the bath. If only Scarff were here to help us. Surely he could find a way to take her to her kind. But, alas, it is February, and he never comes before mid-March.”
I bite my lower lip. If she had but an inkling of Scarff’s condition, she might truly despair. “We must try to keep her well until he comes, then.”
“Yes. I only hope that we are not causing her undue pain by giving her tisanes and potions to slow the change. Sometimes it is unwise to tamper with the inevitable.”
“I do not think she has much pain anymore. Whenever I catch her crying, she says it is only because she is homesick for the sea.”
We set the buckets down and sit at the kitchen table.