May

by Kathryn Lasky

  The dolphins had found her where two minor gyres intersected. Unsure how long the chest would last, they drove her toward the nearest fishing boat they could find. But May felt for sure that there were others out there someplace. There were three mermaids carved on the chest. “They are my kin,” she whispered to herself, but this the dolphins did not understand.

  Snow had started to fall, big fluffy flakes descending quietly from the dark bowl of the starry night. An April fools’ joke, for she realized that this was the first of April. But snow along the coast of Maine in April was no surprise. What surprised May was that she still did not feel cold, not even cool. The irksome variations in temperature that she had felt on land, which would make her run for a shawl or chafe against a high-collared dress in the heat of summer, no longer seemed to affect her. It suddenly struck her that for all these years, she had been a rather clumsy visitor on land. She flinched as the very thought sent a momentary pain shooting through her. How could she return to that life? Pretending to be something she was not, surrounded by people who could never understand?

  May was not sure how long she had been swimming. The darkness had begun to fray until the sky looked worn, the thin light of dawn seeping into the new day. But she could not tear herself away and kept swimming until the last star faded into the final remnants of the night. There was a glimmering of pink, then gold on the horizon. The snow had stopped and there was a crispness in the air as she watched the sun rise in the east. And with this dawn, clarity of thought came to her as well. My kin might be on land still—like myself—or they might have died. But the second part of that thought was unendurable. She knew they were still somewhere out there, and so she returned to land.

  13

  THE HALF OF IT

  THE SHEETS FELT ODD and the mattress lumpy, but hadn’t they always been that way? May wondered as she awakened after a brief hour’s sleep. It was the absence of movement that struck her first—that billowing motion that had enveloped her all while she was in the sea; that absence as well as an odd sense of disconnection. When she had been swimming she felt fused with life, with Earth. There was a vital correspondence with all living things as if she were plumbing the most basic elements from which life arose. But she had left that liquid essence behind, and now the sheets seemed to scratch, the mattress felt lumpy, and just then there was that familiar caw.

  “May! May!” Zeeba’s voice outside her bedroom splintered the air.

  “What?”

  “Would you mind explaining something to me, young lady?”

  Young lady! May winced. She felt like calling back, “What do you want, old lady?”

  Zeeba was standing just outside her door and shoved it open now. “What in tarnation is that flying on the clothesline?”

  May looked out the window from her bedroom. She began to laugh. Her wet petticoat had frozen solid and was now dancing in a stiff breeze. Luckily her tail had quickly dissolved into two very human legs when she had returned from her miraculous awakening. She had peeled off the wet petticoat, put on her skirt, blouse, and calico jacket, and proceeded to hang the petticoat on the clothesline. It wasn’t wash day, and usually when only one garment had to be washed in cold weather, they hung it up to dry inside near the wood-burning stove. But May had wanted to be as quiet as possible when she returned to the house a few hours before and hadn’t thought twice about hanging it outside. She certainly didn’t want anyone finding saltwater stains on the wood floor.

  “I just rinsed it last night when I came back from the dance and hung it out to dry, Zeeba.”

  “Hrrumph!” was the only utterance she heard as Zeeba turned away and walked back to the kitchen.

  May couldn’t resist. “You must be feeling better. You’re up earlier than I am.”

  The creak of the floorboards stopped. She could imagine Hepzibah fuming now. To comment positively on Hepzibah’s health was to enter dangerous territory. Hepzibah did not take kindly to any sort of comments on the improvement of her health by anyone who was not a physician. She didn’t even like doctors to express too much hope. She preferred that they remain confounded or at least perplexed.

  May got up, dressed, and went about her chores as she usually did, but she was suddenly aware of how awkward everything felt, from the ground under the milking stool as she sat to milk Bells Two to the stairs winding up to the lantern room when she went to dust the lenses. She wondered if she looked odd doing these tasks. Did she walk funny? She felt very peculiar. There was that expression “like a fish out of water” — was that what she now appeared to be?

  When May had completed her chores, she knew she should go back downstairs, join her father for a mug of tea, and go over the shipping news, the accounts that listed any merchant vessels that might be plying the regular routes from Halifax to Boston or the reverse. But she was hesitant. Would he find a change in her? Were there any telltale signs of what had happened the previous night? When he had found her in that sea chest as an infant, did she have—she smiled softly to herself—a tail? Two days before, she would have been staggered and embarrassed if such a thought had crossed her mind, but now she wanted desperately to ask him — Did I have a tail? There were, after all, those glistening little ovals that she now knew were scales in the chest. She took a deep breath and started down the stairs.

  She slid her eyes cautiously toward the pine table where Gar was sitting. He was deeply engrossed in the shipping news and did not look up. But she did observe that her father seemed better than he had in weeks and had even put on his uniform. He was now freshly shaved, wearing his vest, jacket, and cap as he sat at the table, reading. He looked ready for lighthouse business.

  “Pa, is it time already for another inspection?”

  “No, de-ah, not for another month.” He looked up at her brightly, and she felt color rise in her cheeks. “They never get up here until first week of May. But you’ve been doing more than your share of the work these last weeks. My hip hardly gives me a twinge. So I’ll be helping out more. And I never seen you look prettier than this morning.” Something lurched in her stomach. “Dancing agrees with you.”

  Relief swept through her, and it was all she could do to refrain from saying, “Not dancing, Pa, swimming.”

  “Now, tomorrow,” her father continued, “I’m going to take you in on the skiff. I want you to be able to finish up school this term.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed nervously. Did this mean he was thinking about sending her inland when she finished her schooling? Had he picked up on something and wanted to get her as far away from the sea as possible? If Gar was trying to separate her from the sea, she would have to flee—flee to her true home and find her true kin.

  “Pa, don’t misunderstand, I want to go back to school, but I really don’t want to go to Augusta or Bridgeton when I graduate.”

  “Well, that’s not why I want you to go to school. You need to be with young folk—like you were at the dance.”

  A sigh issued forth from the corner of the kitchen where Hepzibah was rattling a spoon noisily in a glass of one of her tonics.

  “Yes, that would be nice. And, Pa, maybe I could help Miss Lowe at the library right in Bar Harbor. I mean, that would be good, wouldn’t it? I’m sure she needs help. And it wouldn’t be so far away, you know.”

  “Well, it’s a tiny library—not like in Augusta. So I’m not sure how much help she would need,” her father replied.

  May was now desperate to change the subject. “Funny about that snow. Not a flake of it stuck. Just April fools’, I guess.”

  “What snow?” Edgar Plum asked.

  “Late last night, almost at dawn. It snowed … didn’t it?” May asked nervously.

  “You were up?”

  “No, no,” she paused. “I must have dreamed it.”

  The rattling of the spoon in the glass stopped. Hepzibah turned around slowly and fixed her eyes on May. “You must have dreamed it because I was up. I got one of those terrible back cramps. The only way
to get rid of it is to wrap a hot brick, tuck it behind my back, and sit in that chair. I didn’t see no snow.”

  “You were up?” May said weakly.

  “Certainly was.”

  Hepzibah was up and hadn’t caught her coming back into the house? She rarely came into May’s tiny little bedroom on the landing a quarter way up the tower. But nonetheless May could have been caught returning. She must be careful when she went out again, which she planned to do as soon as possible.

  For May had formed a larger plan and knew that the time was approaching for a very long swim. A swim to find the Resolute. She had to figure out where in the vast Atlantic the bones of that ship lay. She needed to study the tracks of the sea, learn about them through Maury’s wind-and-current studies, and through swimming herself. She would have to build up her own strength, her stamina. But there was something else beyond her own abilities that was crucial for this swim. It was as if she were waiting for someone to go with her, accompany her. She did not want to go alone.

  After finishing her tea she returned to the watch room of the lighthouse and read Matthew Fontaine Maury. The book that had seemed so impenetrable to her the day before, she now read with a new understanding. Maury only wrote about the currents of wind and sea, but she had swum them. He had only thought about the tug of the opposing gyres and eddies off the New England coast, but she had felt them. He had his theories based on a combination of Scripture and mathematics, but she had been born to them. He had been a lieutenant in the navy, but she was a daughter of the sea, and she was determined to find her kin. Oh, Mr. Maury, she thought. You don’t know the half of it!

  14

  THE BONES

  EVERY NIGHT FOR THE NEXT WEEK, May slipped out to the sea. Each time she slid into the water she was overwhelmed by a powerful sense of belonging, finally being at home. She had no fears whatsoever. She had seen sharks, but they seemed to avoid her. She had become familiar with the grinding noise of the steamboat engines that brought people up from Boston to Bar Harbor and the slicing sound of a sailing schooner’s keel as it passed through the water. It did not take her long to learn the navigation routes of the larger vessels in order to avoid them. On one of her first nights, she had nearly ensnared herself in a herring weir. Ever since, she’d kept a keen lookout for the bobbing buoys to which the vast nets were attached. She swam every current between Egg Rock and Eastport and then down to Cape Rosier. These were distances of forty miles or more, but she could cover them in a night of swimming, especially if she took advantage of the tides and the normal currents.

  On the fifth night after she had crossed over she became aware of a slightly altered quality in the water on either side of her. It was as if there were pockets of air, voids in the water. At first she thought they were large bubbles of some sort, but they had no contours. She was most acutely aware of these spaces that flanked her body when she swam, but she had begun to sense them on land as well. She longed for these voids to be filled, to reveal themselves.

  If she understood the tracks of the sea, she might be able to determine where the Resolute’s wreckage could be found, even fifteen years after it went down. Had there been another sea chest? Three mermaids were carved on the one that Gar had pulled from the sea. Could that mean that there were two others beside herself? That she had sisters?

  There was one place her swimming had not yet taken her: The Bones, where the schooner had wrecked. She was afraid to go there, afraid of what she might see—dead men, their unseeing eyes staring dumbly into a watery eternity, their bones. Perhaps fish had scavenged their flesh. The idea was unnerving. And yet she knew that she must dive this wreck. She needed to understand how the currents might have disturbed it; how the fractured timbers from the ship could have been swirled away.

  One evening, a week after her transformation, May determined she would go. As she was approaching The Bones, she could see that rigging lines were still tangled around some of the rocks. She gasped when she saw a baby seal thrashing about in an eddy. He had been snagged by rigging and was now crying, his mother barking desperately.

  She swam close to the seal pup. His eyes were rolled back in his head. He was so exhausted when she approached that he didn’t even put up a fight when she tried to lift his snagged flipper. She treaded water with her tail, and sang a water song that seemed to come to her while stroking the pup’s head:

  “Hssshong goorahn lathem

  Prishamg lohrrinn nasquit

  Amara Blarring Blarrin”

  It was the watery language that she seemed to know without even realizing that she knew it. The words seemed to hearken to an old memory from the very beginning of her life, and she felt those spaces on either side of her begin to tremble. The seal pup grew calm, and May was able to free his flipper so he could swim back to his mother, who greeted him with yips and whimpers of relief. The mother seal tossed May a fish, but May was not hungry. Still she felt it wouldn’t be right to refuse it. She took a bite and giggled when she realized she was actually eating raw fish. It didn’t taste bad at all. Very fresh, but not bloody like rare meat.

  On her first dive down to the wreck she spotted the rudder stuck firmly into the sea bottom. But she still couldn’t see the hull, and the churning water kicked up screens of sand and mud. The currents were confused here, and there were more eddies than May could count. But she was patient. She anchored herself beside the rudder and decided to wait and watch. She had found that she could stay underwater for great lengths of time and only needed to surface for a few quick gulps of air. May knew that if she waited long enough, she would find a pattern to the seemingly confused currents.

  A large school of smelt arrived on the back eddy of one current she had been watching. Almost immediately she noticed them caught by another, stronger current that sucked them straight out from The Bones. She swam in that direction.

  It wasn’t long before she saw the hull of the ship rearing from the seafloor. It was half the hull, for as she recalled it had split in two just before it was raked off The Bones. The currents swirled in a counterclockwise direction, so the rest of the ship and its debris might have been carried south and west from this point. Had this happened to the Resolute as well? The letter mentioned a lifeboat being found south of Martha’s Vineyard. It was as if the ships were caught in a cross fire of wind and currents and their parts were strewn all over the ocean floor.

  But she soon spied the other half, the bow, not far from the aft part of the schooner. The bow was destroyed, but the aft section was amazingly intact. It sat up on the remnants of its keel and looked ready to resume life at sea. There were even portholes still intact. Slowly May approached the round windows. It was a miracle that the glass had not been smashed to smithereens. She was frightened to look in. What if there was a dead man? The captain had never been found. Suppose he was still sitting at his navigation desk? She swam closer, then pressed her nose to the glass. No dead man, but she almost swallowed a mouthful of water and choked. For what stared back at her was a pale face. Was it a specter? She raised her hand, and the specter did as well. She waved and then smiled. She knew that this was her reflection, and yet with the slight distortion caused by the water, she could imagine another being almost identical to herself. Once again she felt the tingle in those empty spaces and the song she had sung to the seal pup filled her head once more. She pressed her mouth to the glass and whispered, “Someone sang us the song. Someone really did.”

  The following morning, after she had finished her chores, May went down to the beach to gaze out to sea. She was thinking about the reflection in the porthole. Water, she knew, distorted light, bent it. This was not called reflection, but refraction. If she gave it time, she might better understand those mysterious shapes that seemed to swim beside her. She was thinking about all of this when she caught sight of a small day sailer approaching Egg Rock. The lines of the boat were unmistakable. It was a Phineas Heanssler craft. It must be Hugh—Hugh Fitzsimmons! He was actually coming for the bo
ok. She could not quite believe it. She had tried to banish any thought of him since the dance. But she looked out now and saw that sail with a bellyful of wind pulling him toward Egg Rock. Then it dawned on her: She had to get the book before he walked up to the lighthouse. There was no way she would let him inside. Zeeba was especially cranky today. And what would she think of a college boy from away? It would be like mixing oil and water.

  May took off and raced up to the path. She must get the book before he got to the dock. A few minutes later she was on the ramp of the dock, panting slightly, with the book in hand.

  “Hello!” she called when he was a few yards from the dock’s float. He let the sails flap as the boat coasted in.

  “Hello, May. Great day for a sail.” He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat—a summer-folk hat—that cast a slanting shadow across his face. “Can you catch my line?”

  He tossed her the painter. She jumped up, still with the book in one hand, and caught the tail end midair. “Good aim,” she said.

  “Good catch.” Even through the shadow she saw the flash of his smile.

  “I’d invite you up to the house but my mother’s not very well today. But we can walk around the island. It’s not very big.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  “Here’s the book,” she said, extending her arm. She did not look at him directly. She was unsure what to say next—how to continue the conversation.