May

by Kathryn Lasky

  “You see, Hannah, I think if we can find this wreck we can find out where we came from, and—and …” She hesitated, for it seemed wrong to raise false hope. “And find out if there are others like us.”

  “You really think there are others? Could be others?” Hannah asked.

  “I am sure that we have another sister. I think we are destined to find her as we seemed destined to find each other.”

  “Maybe she will come to us, as I came here to you.”

  “Maybe, but maybe she won’t, and what about our parents?” May asked.

  “They most likely died in the shipwreck, don’t you think?”

  “But who were they?” There was an urgency in May’s voice.

  “Yes, who were they?” Hannah said softly. “All these years I thought I came from nowhere, really. When other girls at the orphanage would daydream about their parents — oh, how they daydreamed—I never uttered a word because I dared not dream. Imagine if I had said my mum was a mermaid or my father a merman. They would have shipped me off like Miss Lila to the loony bin.”

  “Never mind what other people think. I know how to find this ship. There’s a current we can catch. It’s off Grand Manan. We have to go a little bit out of our way to catch it, but it’s worth it.”

  May bit into one of the cookies Hannah had brought as she conjured up that stream of water that flowed south. “These cookies are wonderful, by the way.”

  “Mrs. Bletchley is the best cook.”

  “And she doesn’t mind you taking food?”

  “Oh, no. She’s always pressing snacks on us.”

  “What’s it like being in rich people’s houses?”

  “It’s complicated,” Hannah said.

  “Complicated how?”

  “We all have to know our place. Mr. Marston has a whole chart that explains who’s where in the order of things and what our jobs are.”

  “Are they nice, though—the Hawleys—except for that girl you told me about, the crazy daughter?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, people at my level in service never really talk with them that much. We’re not supposed to. Except, of course, for Ettie. She talks to anybody or anything. She’ll talk to a tree.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. I caught her, one day, talking away as if this spruce were a person—saying it should grow some limbs lower down so she could climb up easier.” Both girls burst out laughing. “Ettie is a character, and she makes her own rules. But tell me more about this current you discovered.”

  “Well, I think it spins off from the Gulf Stream. It will boost our speed by twice, at least, maybe even three times.”

  “How fast can we go in the current—as fast as the Prouty?” Hannah asked. May cocked her head and looked at Hannah with surprise. “Why are you looking at me like that, May Plum?” Hannah asked, and bit into her cookie.

  May had to remember that Hannah had only been swimming a few days. She didn’t really know her own power. “Hannah, we can already go that fast!”

  “We can?”

  “I’ve tested it.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.” May told her about when she had gone out nearly to Nova Scotia and came back racing an eagle.

  “It’s this,” May said when she finished the story, and flipped the flukes of her tail up from the water. “All our power comes from our tails. Amazing, isn’t it, that our two spindly legs could change into something so powerful?”

  “So now tell me more about the Resolute.”

  “Well, I’ve had this plan from when I first went into the closet where the sea chest was. I think the next step in the plan, now that I found you, is to go to the Resolute. I think I could have done it by myself but … well …” She reached out her hand and took Hannah’s. “I didn’t want to go alone.”

  “I understand,” Hannah said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to, either.”

  May smiled. It felt so good to be understood completely. She continued explaining about the steps of the plan that had come to her when she found out that Zeeba and Gar were not her parents. “It was a horrible moment in so many ways when Zeeba came out with that. But it was good, too. It freed me.

  “I told you how I figured out that I was found in the sea chest and that Gar had hidden it away in this little closet up in the service area to the lantern room? It’s not like I had never noticed the closet before, but I had just never thought about it. I can’t explain, but I sensed that if I could get into that little closet there was something in it connected to me.”

  “Well, you were surely right about that.”

  “The thing I can’t figure out is why I was found in it and not you and—and —”

  “Our other sister,” Hannah said.

  “Yes. Wouldn’t it have made sense to put us all in one sea chest?”

  “Maybe it started to leak. Maybe the three of us weighed too much and they had to put us in something else.”

  May’s eyes brightened. “Heavens! I never thought of that. That would make perfect sense, of course. And then we floated away in different directions — me to Maine, you to Boston?”

  “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, you guess? Isn’t that where the orphanage, The Home for Little Wanderers, is? You wandered to Boston, or floated there.”

  “I suppose. But where did the third baby go? You’re absolutely sure there is a third?”

  “Yes, absolutely. I feel her,” May said firmly.

  “But how can you feel something that’s not there?”

  “The way I felt you before you came to Bar Harbor, before you crossed over.” May paused. She swept her hand slowly down her side. “You were like a space here, a shape beside me but empty. And then after we met the emptiness swam away because you were here.” She reached out and touched Hannah’s hand.

  Hannah had grown very still. “I think I know what you mean. There has been something pressing just lightly against my sides ever since I came to Gladrock. Now this side feels fine.” She touched the right side of her rib cage. “But there is something still there on this side.” She made a cradling gesture with her left arm.

  “It’s her,” May said quietly. “She’ll come. I know it. But we don’t have to wait for her. We can swim to the Resolute soon. So that by the time she comes we might know more.” May looked around the cave. “I like this place. I like it so much. It can be like our little house.”

  “I always dreamed of a little cottage by the sea. When Mrs. Larkin, at the orphanage, asked me what I would do with the money I earned from working in service to a fine family, I told her that I would buy a cottage by the sea. But this is much better, isn’t it?”

  “Much.”

  “I wonder, though, would it be too cold in winter? Could we even swim in winter?”

  “When I crossed over it wasn’t summer. And we’d had very cold weather, but I didn’t really feel it that much. It’s odd, but I rarely feel cold.” Her mind flashed back to the night on Mount Abenaki. In the deepest part of the night Hugh’s teeth had almost been chattering. For it was cold on that mountaintop, and yet it hadn’t really bothered May that much. She stopped herself from thinking about that night. She couldn’t anymore. The word—that loathsome word cordially—rang in her brain, not like a thunderstorm but rather a doleful tolling. She focused on Hannah instead. “So two nights from now we’ll meet here and set out for the Resolute.”

  “Yes, May. Oh, yes!”

  May left and Hannah watched her swim off. Hannah, too, had thoughts she wanted to push from her mind. She recalled her last meeting with the painter Stannish Whitman Wheeler. She knew she loved him deeply. She thought he loved her. Dare she ever tell May that she not just suspected but really knew that he was mer as well, or rather had been? Her last meeting with him had been so frightening. He knew she had crossed over. His words rang in her ears as if he were in front of her in the cave.

  “Listen to me, Hannah!” he had said. “Right now you can go back and forth between two wor
lds. But it will not be this way always. In a year, at the very longest, you must make a choice. You must be of one world or the other!” And then when she refused to believe him he had said, “It is true. I am living proof. You can never go back!”

  33

  THE HMS RESOLUTE

  IT’S LIKE TRAVELING through a starry night made of water, not air, May thought. The phosphorescence of the water spun by them like galaxies. There were times they were swimming so fast that May felt as if her body were sliding out ahead of her mind. The current swept them through the night sea, and when they broke through the surface and leaped high to catch a gulp of air even the wind was with them and pushed them farther until they dove back down to that starry river.

  “We’re getting closer,” May said.

  “Already?” Hannah asked.

  “I told you it would be fast. Now we’re going to have to swim out of the current or we’ll be swept by.”

  As they swam from the current it felt as if the whole world had slowed.

  May might have thought that it was the charts and Maury’s book combined with her own instinct for currents that had guided her this far. And in part that was true. But now another guidance system that had nothing to do with reckoning was set into motion. It was the Laws of Salt. Independent of any compass, it pulled one toward the long-lost shadows of kin.

  They were very near. May felt it, and soon Hannah felt it as well. They barely needed to speak as they slipped through the water. Angling their flukes slightly this way or that they honed in on the sea grounds of the wreck. Soon a shape rose from the grassy seafloor. The HMS Resolute. Its hull loomed like a ghostly vision. Although logically they knew it could no longer sail, it seemed driven by a spectral wind. A large halibut, with its strangely skewed face in which the eyes seemed to slide off to one side, swam out of a gaping hole in the bow. The dark portholes emerged like the sockets in a dead man’s skull, and yet there was a strange beauty to the ship.

  Both May and Hannah put on a tremendous burst of speed.

  But they suddenly stopped short in the water, and twining their tails around each other they locked arms. For the first time they shivered. But it was not with cold. A face drifted above them—a face just like theirs.

  “It’s—it’s …” Hannah could not complete the thought.

  “Our mother,” May said, swimming up toward the figurehead that extended from the bow. Although most of the paint had long worn away the features were unmistakable. They both touched their chins at the same time and felt the slight dimple in the middle. The cheekbones were rounded and high like theirs and the mouth had the same generous lower lip and delicately bowed upper one. Her neck curved down to her shoulders, and the artist who had carved the figurehead had modestly let tendrils of her hair cover her breasts. But her midriff was bare and just beneath her navel, where her pelvis began, were finely carved scales. May had seen figureheads on the ships that plied the coastal waters all her life. They were most often of women, sometimes of men—usually kings or military heroes and sometimes gods. But this face was instantly recognizable to May and Hannah, for it was so similar to their own faces.

  The girls entwined themselves around her, caressing her hair, brushing the hardwood curves of her face, her neck, her lovely shoulders. Did they imagine that she heard their voices, felt their tears, their kisses, their longing? That her wooden eyes gazed down on them and saw them? There was a strange mingling of joy and profound sorrow. They had found what they had lost. The figurehead was the connection they had longed for, but the broken hull of the ship hovered over them like the shadow of an ultimate disconnection and all that could never be recovered.

  Despite years of being polished by the ocean there were still vague traces of paint on the figurehead’s face. The deep green of her eyes, the brilliant red hair, the flush on her cheeks, and the ripe rosiness of her lips. Their hearts were broken, and yet they felt a mending taking place within the deepest part of their beings. They belonged to her. They had been born of this woman. They were her daughters. And for now that was all they needed to know.

  They swam through the interior of the hull. In the aft cabin, which was mostly destroyed, they found an overturned navigation desk. This must be the captain’s quarters. “Look, a comb like yours!” Hannah said, picking up a scallop shell that was in a half-open drawer of the desk. “It must have been hers.”

  “Take it, Hannah, you should have it.”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet of you.”

  “I already have one. Don’t be silly.” But in truth she did want something of her mother’s. She wondered if she could find anything, just any little thing.

  She swam over what must have been a bed. There were little cubbyholes above the head of the bed where things could be stored. She reached into the first one and found a chambered nautilus. The creature inside did not take kindly to being disturbed. The next cubbyhole was blocked by a starfish. But in the third one she saw what appeared to be a flattish rock propped up. It was wedged in tightly and it took her a good deal of time to dislodge it.

  “What is it, May?” Hannah said, swimming over.

  “I’m not sure.” May replied.

  “It looks broken.”

  “Yes, it does. But look at that feathery design on it. Like a lily.”

  “Do you think it belonged to our mother? It’s so pretty. Maybe it was a keepsake of hers.”

  May looked up for a moment as the shafts of silver light from a full August moon illuminated the beautiful design on the ancient rock. “Yes, a keepsake. I’m sure!” May said, and smiled at Hannah. “It’s our mother’s.”

  34

  WHITE SQUALL

  MAY KNEW THAT HUGH must have returned by this time, but so far she had not heard a word from him. She tortured herself with visions of him dancing at the fancy parties of the summer people. Again the word cordially ran through her brain. How could he have said that to her, after their night on Mount Abenaki? The more she thought about it, the more tarnished the memories became. She was caught between terrible anger and deep regret.

  She loved Hannah, but love for a sister was different from the love she had or thought she had with Hugh. How could he have been so hurtful? Hugh’s coldness cut deeper than anything Rudd had ever done.

  The question May kept asking herself was that although she had found part of her family would she ever have one of her own—have children, a husband? She had found the sea, but was increasingly certain she had lost everything else.

  Later that afternoon, May was up in the lantern room trimming the wick of the lamp, when she began to hear the slap of the wind around the eaves of the roof and saw the railing on the circular deck outside the lantern room shake. She looked out. She found the clear sky alarming. There was not a cloud in it. She went to the window, and the water was being whipped to a froth. Then May let out a small yelp.

  “What in the name?” Hugh! Hugh’s boat was heading toward Egg Rock.

  No! Dread welled up within her. Suddenly there was a demonic whistling sound, and the windows of the lantern room began to shiver. She watched transfixed as the small sailboat heeled so its spars were parallel to the sea. He has too much sail up!

  There was a haunting familiarity that flooded through her. Six months before she had stood clinging to the piling on their dock and had watched a man drown. She had never swum before, never entered the water at all, and yet she had known she could. She watched horrified as the boat went over.

  “White squall!” Gar shouted up the stairs. And indeed the entire world had turned white, as white and as impenetrable as a thick fog. The surface of the sea was foaming, and the wild wind scraped off the curling crests of waves and flung the spume into the air.

  May raced down the stairs. “Where you going, May?” But she did not bother to answer. “May, don’t be a fool. That wind will scrape you right off the island!”

  “What’s that fool girl doing?” Hepzibah said as Gar came back in the house. “She flew out of her
e like a bat out of hell.”

  “Shut your mouth, you old witch!” Gar seethed.

  Zeeba sank back in her rocker, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  But May was racing down the path. Her father stood in the doorway. Within seconds her figure disappeared into the thick white.

  35

  “YOU ARE THE WORLD!”

  MAY MOVED THROUGH THE WATER as she had never moved before. It was odd that not that far from the surface it was calm, a different world. She sliced across the seafloor to where she thought the sailboat had tipped. She soon saw its spars upside down in the water. It must have capsized completely, but where was Hugh? Then she saw him a few yards from the boat. He was trying to swim back to it to hang on. She surfaced to get some air and caught sight of a surfboat! They had launched one from the rescue service and it was closing in on Hugh. But then to her horror as it drew closer she saw only one oarsman, and that oarsman had shipped his paddle and was standing up on the bow of the boat with Lucky! Rudd!

  He raised the harpoon and was about to launch it directly at Hugh’s chest as he swam—swam toward the surfboat. Swam toward his own executioner. The next few seconds were a blur for May. She only remembered jetting high out of the water, plunging back in just beneath where Hugh swam, and the next thing she knew she had him. The harpoon cut through the water, barely missing them both. She surfaced briefly. Hugh’s eyes were closed. But he was still breathing.

  The swirling whiteness of the squall had cleared. The wind abated, but there was Rudd, still in the boat, with yet a new harpoon in his hand. He was scanning the surface, looking slightly bewildered. May had her arms over Hugh’s chest. She was gripping him from behind and his head obscured hers. It only took Rudd an instant to spot him. He set down the harpoon and began rowing again toward them. The wind was behind him and he was making good time. There was only one choice left for May. She had to take Hugh under. She took an immense breath of air, then pressing her mouth against his, she dove deep. She felt the air stream out of her at a slow, steady pace, then inhaled some back from his mouth into hers. She had to be his lungs as long as they traveled together beneath the surface, out of sight of Rudd. Breathe, breathe, Hugh. Breathe.