Between the Land and the Sea

Chapter FOURTEEN

BUOY

When we finally arrived home I scrambled to slip into my swimsuit and pack my wetsuit, my hands clumsy with impatient energy. I made sure to include the gloves, boots and hood, remembering how my hands and feet got numb while surfing. Rushing Cruz out the door, I carried my bag while Cruz toted my surfboard down to the beach, dragging his feet. I marched my reluctant cousin across the sand to the waterline and looked around. There were a few beachcombers and someone throwing a stick in the water for an enthusiastic black lab. I left my things with Cruz and raced up the steps to the pier.

I flew down the weathered wooden planks and onto the wrecked ship. When I got to the fence I could see sea lions on the concrete chunks below and a thrill of excitement made my heart pound in my throat. I waited a few minutes for a strolling couple to clear the ship before I called out for her.

She appeared right away, her hair shining like a new penny in the sunlight.

“You came! ” she cried joyously.

“I’m going to get on my board and meet you out there, ” I said, pointing to a spot in the water clear of the ship and pier.

She nodded, and I turned and ran off the pier, bounding down the stairs and racing back across the sand to where Cruz was waiting on the beach. I know he was hoping that Lorelei wouldn’t be there, and his face fell when he saw the look in my eyes. I stripped off my clothes and hurriedly donned my wetsuit, this time adding booties and tucking the cap in the back. Cruz zipped me up.

“I don’t think I’ll be more than an hour, okay?” He nodded apprehensively, looking scared.

I grabbed my board and ran into the surf with it, duck diving under the waves the way Ethan had shown me. I paddled out to the area I had indicated and sat up on the board. She rose from the water immediately and we exchanged smiles. She held her head and shoulders out of the water, and I could see her powerful tail swish to and fro beneath her.

“What happened to your face? ” she asked me.

“It’s nothing, an accident, ” I said, reflexively touching my lip. “Lorelei, I need to know about my mother. ”

“Yes, ” she said, “Our sister. ”

“You mean that my mother is your sister? ”

“We are all sisters, ” she said.

“That makes you my aunt...”

“Aunt? ” she sounded puzzled.

“Yes, aunt– my mother’s sister is my aunt. ”

Her beautiful face registered no understanding. Maybe she was wrong about my mother.

Maybe I just happened to look like her. Maybe...

“Adria is my sister, ” she said. I nearly fell off of my surfboard when she spoke her name.

“Adria...” I was stunned, my head spinning.

“Where is Adria? ” she asked, “We miss her.” My god, I thought, she doesn’t know...what do I say?

“Lorelei,” I said gently, “She died just after I was born.”

“Died, ” she said with a little shake in her musical voice, “She is no more? ” Her face fell, and I knew she understood.

“No, ” I said somberly.

Her singsong voice took on a mournful timbre, “She left us for a human man. She saw him and said goodbye to us. After a while… she didn’t come back. ”

“I never even knew her, ” I paused for a moment, hot tears stinging my eyes. “What was she like? ”

“She was one of us, but she was different.”

“How? ” I asked, my head still reeling from the shock.

She smiled her wild gleeful smile, recovering from her moment of sorrow, “She liked to watch the people.” She looked over at the cement ship, “Pretty ladies used to dance and the sounds used to come from there. Adria watched them all the time. She was very sad when they stopped coming. ”

I thought about Stella dancing to the big bands. How could my mother have seen her, and then my father so many years later? That would make her over a hundred years old. It simply wasn’t possible; Lorelei must be confused.

I thought about my father, and wondered how he could have met my mother. I suppose he might have seen her the same way I saw Lorelei, but it was hard to imagine what would have brought him out to the boat– he never went to the beach if he could avoid it.

“What did she say about my father? ” I asked.

“She said she must leave us to be with him, ” she frowned, “She said she wanted some things she could only have if she left her sisters.”

“What things? ”

“Come with me to my hiding place! ”

She grabbed the edge of the board and began to propel it through the water. I laid down flat and held on for dear life. Turning back to look at the coastline, I saw Cruz’s tiny figure recede. I had taken this trip before, but mostly underwater and in a state of shock. We finally arrived at the remote spot.

We had learned about sea mounted weather stations in science class, so now I knew what it was. The buoy was anchored to the ocean floor and transmitting information about temperature, wind speed and wave action. It looked like a flying saucer, a floating disk with a small tower attached and an equal amount of bulk below the surface.

I imagined the meteorologists taking readings from this one. I wondered what they would make of it, ridiculously festooned with the debris of human life. In my research, there were tales of mermaids fascinated with people, collecting random objects. Guess they got that one right.

I looked around and could see nothing but ocean. I wondered how far out we went, two, maybe three miles? I doubted I could paddle it.

“Lorelei, ” I said nervously, “You will take me back soon, right? ”

“Look! ” she cried, holding up the bag Shayla had dropped in the water.

“My bag? ” Was that what she brought me here to see? She put it back on the buoy. “What about my mother? ” I asked.

“I have her favorite thing, ” she said, swimming around to the other side. She danced back, bobbing and twirling in the water. She held up the old weathered baby doll. Tears sprang to my eyes again. So she had wanted a baby.

“Lorelei, how many sisters do you have? ”

“Many,” she laughed and it sounded like musical bells, “Too many to count. And now I have you for a sister too. ”

“I’m your niece.”

“Niece? ” She seemed puzzled again, and then twirled and darted back around the buoy. I had the sensation I was dealing with a child, a capricious child. She popped back up, brandishing a bottle of blue window cleaner. This was starting to get surreal.

“Lorelei, How old are you? Lorelei? ” How could she be my aunt when she looked no older than me? She dove under the board and surfaced on the other side. “How did my mother leave...

did she grow legs? ”

“It is not allowed, ” she frowned, knitting her lovely brow together, “But she would not listen. ” She started frolicking around again.

“Lorelei! ” I tried to get her attention but she was back at the buoy. “Lorelei! ” She popped up on the opposite side of the surfboard, grinning, “I saw your human, ” she said.

“Who? ”

“The one you ride waves with. He’s a nice one.”

I thought about Ethan and the shark attack. I knew the answer but I asked it anyway, “Did you see him before that? ”

She laughed, “I like the wave riders. ” She whirled away to grab something else off the buoy.

This was getting ridiculous. I felt like I was trying to reason with a toddler.

“Lorelei!... Lorelei?... Can you take me back to the beach now? ” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I looked behind me into another pair of mermaid eyes. She looked very much like Lorelei, only there was a big difference. This one was angry!

Lorelei surfaced and her surprise quickly turned to fear.

“It is forbidden! ” The new mermaid screeched. She grabbed Lorelei by the arm and dragged her underwater. They were gone for a few long seconds until Lorelei shot out of the water like a leaping dolphin, followed by the angry creature that lunged for her tail, grabbing on.

There was an unearthly shrieking as they fought, their powerful fins churning the water into choppy waves. I was knocked off the board by the violence of their struggle and I tread water, trying to avoid their thrashing tails. I grabbed hold of the buoy, scooting around to the side opposite their horrible high pitched screams.

Then it was quiet. I moved around the buoy, peering down in the water for any sign of them.

I scrambled onto it, looking around for Lorelei.

Off in the distance, my surfboard was floating away on a powerful current. I cursed myself for not attaching the leash. I jumped in, desperate to retrieve it, but from the water level I could no longer see it. I scrambled back onto the buoy and it was gone. I circled the buoy, looking for any sign of the two mermaids, wondering what could possibly be going on under the deep blue waters. The minutes crept by like hours, and I finally had to admit to myself that they were gone.

It slowly dawned on me just how much trouble I was in. I was alone in the middle of the ocean, marooned on a buoy. Nobody knew where I was. I thought of Cruz, waiting frantically on the beach and I felt an awful rush of guilt. I kept praying that Lorelei would pop back up and take me home, but I had much less faith in her reliability than I did before. I could hear Megan saying “I told you so” in my mind. I remembered waving goodbye to Ethan.

I settled down on the buoy as the hours ticked away. Pushing aside some of the junk, I managed to get myself out of the water with my knees drawn up under me. I looked around at the bizarre mix of things Lorelei had gathered. In addition to her little collection, there were a good deal of bird droppings scattered about. Fighting back nausea, I tried not to put my hands on anything, but had to hook an arm on the rails of the transmitter to keep from falling off in the rolling water.

I contemplated setting out for shore, but I couldn’t see it and I wasn’t entirely sure of the direction. The sun began to set just as the fog rolled in, plunging me into complete blackness. I thought of Abby and Cruz, Evie and my dad. Tears rolled down my cheeks when I thought of Ethan, showing up to take me surfing, finding me missing.

I wiped my eyes and tried to think positively. Maybe a boat would come along, or maybe Lorelei would return to swim me back. It was hard to be optimistic in total blackness, and my thoughts turned dark. What if that other mermaid had hurt Lorelei? She certainly looked vicious.

I thought of their ghastly shrieks and shuddered.

I picked up the baby doll and wondered about my mother. She had wanted a human baby and it had killed her. I had killed her. Everyone always said I was lucky, but I certainly wasn’t lucky for her. Evie always said to watch out what you ask for because you might just get it. I had sure asked for it this time– stubbornly going out to see Lorelei against everyone’s better judgment.

I tried to make some sense of the way Lorelei had behaved. She was a strange mixture of young and old. She seemed to have no concept of family structure outside of sisterhood. I was reminded of a nature show I saw on TV once, about the social organization of a bee hive. The worker bees were all sisters, daughters of the queen. They had their own language and could recognize an intruder to the hive, even if it was another bee.

I wondered if mermaids were like that. I shuddered to think of a queen mermaid, for surely she would be far more fearsome than anything I could imagine.

I was thirsty. Thirstier than I had ever been. I was too nervous to eat lunch, so the last thing I drank was my morning coffee. I thought about Ethan’s warning about dehydration. I licked my salty lips. I was hungry too, but water was what I needed.

“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” I croaked, remembering little snatches of verse from a long ballad. My tutor in India had committed it to memory, and had recited it to me whole in his clipped, precise British accent– “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. I struggled to recite more of it, remembering the long saga of a horrific sea voyage. When I closed my eyes I imagined I was on the ghostly ship in the poem, suffering right alongside the stranded sailor.

The hours ticked by and the wind picked up. I was cold, but nothing like when Lorelei had dragged me out here the first time. I remembered that I had stashed the hood in my suit and I contorted around ’till I fished it out. It helped. At least I wouldn’t freeze to death.

Now that I knew my mother was definitely one of them I had a whole new set of questions.

My father could answer them, but I might not ever see him again. I tried to beat back that negative thought. My mother must have transformed herself into human form. All of the mermaid myths took on a new significance now that I knew the truth.

Almost all the legends contained tales of some sort of magical transformation. I wondered how that went. If she could change, could she change back? Could I turn into one of them? I trembled inside at the thought.

I tried to keep my gloomy thoughts at bay, focusing hard to fill my mind with memories of happier times. I recalled lighthearted days spent with Aunt Evie, exploring art museums and galleries in the city. Evie took great pains to expose me to as many of the world’s masterpieces as possible, encouraging my interest in art. We’d dress up to attend show openings and museum fund raisers, and I had to smile, remembering how artists and curators flocked around her, desperately trying to curry her favor. Being around Evie in public was a lesson in human nature.

The wind rose up again, blowing the fog away to reveal a bright moon and stars. I scanned the heavens, trying to remember the constellations. I found the great square of Pegasus, Ursa major and Ursa minor. Above Pegasus was Draco, the giant dragon snaking across the night sky.

I thought about all the mythology that went along with the stars. Myths, I thought. If mermaids could exist, then why not dragons or flying horses?

The silence was shattered when a whale surfaced next to the buoy, blowing a spray of air and mist ten feet high into the moonlit night. I scarcely dared to breathe lest I frighten it away. I should have been scared, but I felt a strong kinship to the leviathan, a fellow mammal all alone in the vast watery expanse. It was enormous, at least fifty feet, and it came so close to the bobbing buoy that I reached out and touched it, feeling its rough skin slide past my fingertips. It sucked in a breath of air through two blowholes that looked like nostrils.

Odd, I thought, I never knew that. I was so alone the whale felt like a friend, come to check on me. It rolled in the water, and I could see barnacles growing on its huge fins; it was a humpback. The whale slowly circled around the buoy, giving me the impression that it was curious about me. Our eyes met in the moonlight and I could hear its eerie song. I had the sense that everything was going to be alright, that some miracle might occur to bring me home. As the docile giant swam away, all my feelings of well-being vanished along with it.

The horizon grew discernibly brighter as the sun rose in the east. The sky was rosy with dawn, a beautiful sight that I was the only living soul for miles around to witness. I knew which direction was home now, but I was feeling weak, and I realized the strong currents would take me off course if I tried to swim for it. As the sun rose, I started to warm up, and my tongue felt dry and sticky. The muscles in my legs began to cramp, and when I tried to stand I grew lightheaded.

The wetsuit now became my enemy as I started to overheat. I took off the cap and booties to try and cool down. Unzipping the suit, I peeled it down to my waist, exposing my bare back to the scorching sun. The sun blazed bright red through my eyelids, and I sank back down to lean on the buoy. I felt like a starfish drying out on the beach.

I must have dozed off when I heard the cheerful sounds of dolphins splashing and chirping all around me. It’s my imagination, I thought, remembering the day the dolphins danced in a circle around me and Ethan. I wondered what it would feel like to be a dolphin, fantasizing about having the ability to swim so fast, to be so free... like a mermaid.

The noises continued, and when they intensified into a loud buzzing roar, I opened my eyes, surprised to focus on Cruz’s worried face.

I smiled blearily at the apparition, thinking it was a nice dream. I asked it, “Do you have any water?”