The Mermaid

by Christina Henry

  All at once she understood that to spurn the sea was to spurn Jack, too, for the sea had delivered them to each other.

  That very night, Amelia had returned to the cove where first she changed from mermaid to woman. She was filled with the same anxiety and excitement she’d felt the first time. Would she still be able to change, or would the enchantment that allowed her to pass freely between sea and shore have expired when she rejected the ocean?

  Amelia was so consumed by this that she didn’t notice the man alone on his boat, the stranger who saw her shed her clothes and dive into the water. She was so delighted that her fin still formed from her human legs that she swam to the surface and broke through, arcing her body into the night air so every last scale of her secret was revealed to the moonlight.

  It was only later, when the women of the town closed around her like schooling fish that she discovered she had been discovered—and more importantly, that the people of the town had known for some time. Their careful denunciation of mermaid stories had kept Amelia safe for many long years.

  And yet somehow despite this a man was standing on her cliff asking for a cup of tea.

  A man with her story in his eyes. A man she would not have noticed if he was jumbled into a crowd. He was of average height, with brown hair and brown eyes and a clean-shaven face. He carried a suitcase, and something else—exhaustion. The man appeared weary to his bones.

  Amelia reflected that as he had likely walked all this way from town, he probably was exhausted. Cold, too—she noticed the fine trembling of his hands and the way he tried to disguise the puffs of breath that told her he was in distress.

  “You can come in,” she said abruptly.

  She moved past him and toward the cottage. He seemed taken aback by the sudden movement. Amelia heard him scrambling behind her, as if he were afraid she might change her mind and leave him there.

  Amelia wasn’t the least curious about his purpose—that she’d discerned the moment she saw him—but she was curious about his drive. What could have pushed him all this way? Was he a reporter from a newspaper? And why was his accent so different from the others who lived nearby?

  She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she’d never left this very small area since she’d come to land. That she’d swum thousands of miles of ocean to get here hardly seemed noteworthy.

  Jack had grown up here, been more than content to stay here, and so Amelia had, too. The foreign sound of the man’s voice was an abrupt reminder that there was more to the world than northern Maine. It was also a reminder that she’d once followed a ship with the intention of seeing all the world and all its wonders, and she never had seen more than this corner of it.

  Amelia entered the cottage, poured water from the basin into the kettle, then stoked the fire hot. All the time she was aware of the man’s eyes on her, watching her.

  But it would not be her who asked why he had come. She was under no obligation to make things easier for him. He could state his purpose, or gape at her, or leave. Whatever he chose was nothing to her.

  Finally he cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have a stove.”

  She straightened and gave him a long look. “Mister, I can see I don’t have a stove.”

  He cleared his throat again—that was a habit that would grate on her in no time if he didn’t quit it—and said, “It’s just been a long time since I’ve seen anyone cook over a fire.”

  “A stove is still a fire,” she pointed out. “Only one enclosed in iron.”

  She might have added that it seemed foolish for Jack to buy a stove when a fireplace worked just as well. She supposed if she cared about such things he would have gotten one, but she didn’t. She didn’t care about stoves or parasols or whatever such things Mr. Parsons tried to tempt her with at the general store. Amelia had only ever desired two things—her freedom and Jack’s love.

  “Ma’am,” he began.

  “It’s customary to introduce oneself when meeting someone new,” she said.

  The man flushed from the collar of his shirt all the way up to his hairline. She went about taking down the tea chest and the sugar—Amelia loved sugar in her tea, the more the better—and the teapot and cups. While she did all this, the man appeared to pull himself together.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve gone about this all wrong. My name’s Levi, Levi Lyman, and I’ve come here from New York City with a proposition for you.”

  She nodded in acknowledgment. “My name is Amelia Douglas. Perhaps you already knew that, or perhaps not. Perhaps you came all this way because you’ve been listening to stories carried by a foolish fisherman.”

  The red in his cheeks deepened. “I confess, Mrs. Douglas, that it was a rumor that brought me here to you.”

  Amelia pulled the whistling kettle from the fire and poured the water into the teapot. “And what, exactly, did this rumor say? That I go out at night to dance with Satan and keep myself young forever? That I am a witch who came from nowhere and the children of the village must keep away lest I eat them?”

  As she repeated the words she’d heard whispered behind her back, she felt something long unacknowledged—they hurt. It hurt to have her neighbors think so poorly of her, and even if their opinion had changed, the old unease lingered below the surface, reminding her always, always, that she was not the same as them.

  She could walk like them, and dress like them, and speak like them, and even take one of their names, but she was not one of them. She came from the sea, and humans would always sense the strangeness in her even if they didn’t know why she made them shift uneasily, or why they didn’t want to spend too long looking directly into her eyes.

  “I did hear such tales of you,” Levi Lyman admitted.

  Amelia passed him a cup of tea and indicated the sugar. Her placid face indicated nothing of what roiled inside her. “I’m surprised you’ve the courage to come and take tea with a witch.”

  He said, “I haven’t. I’ve come to take tea with a mermaid.”

  She put several spoonfuls of sugar in her cup and stirred. “You seem to have traveled a long way for nothing. I am only a fisherman’s widow, and I haven’t seen any mermaids frolicking in the Atlantic from my cliff.”

  “Naturally you would not if you were the mermaid in question,” Mr. Lyman said.

  Amelia felt a prickling of warning. This man would not be laughed away or sent off with a flea in his ear. Somewhere, deep beneath his too-casual manner, there was determination. Even worse, there was a kind of belief. Belief was more dangerous than all the tale-telling in all the pubs of the world.

  Humans, Amelia knew, would do anything for belief. They would proselytize from the highest mountain for belief. They would collect like-minded people and form mobs for belief. They would kill one another for belief. She must break that belief before it had a chance to fully flower.

  “Mr. Lyman,” she said, quite calm. “Mermaids do not exist. Nor do unicorns or dragons or sea monsters or witches. They are stories told to children, or by the inebriated—who are often the same as children, as you may know. I’m sorry you’ve come all this way following a silly story, but it is just that—a story.”

  Her tone made it clear that she thought him very much a fool for believing it.

  “Mrs. Douglas,” he said. “You may or may not be an honest-to-goodness mermaid, but it doesn’t matter. P. T. Barnum can make you a mermaid, and make everyone in the world believe that it’s true.”

  Amelia frowned. “Who’s P. T. Barnum?”

  “P. T. Barnum is a purveyor of wonders, a seller of miracles, a showman of the first order. Mr. Barnum’s museum in New York City is filled with treasures, many never before seen by the viewing public.”

  “Ah, I see. Mr. Barnum is what we call a snake-oil salesman,” Amelia said, her lips curving. After all of this the man was nothing but a representati
ve for some huckster!

  Levi Lyman plowed on, seemingly oblivious to both her interruption and her contempt. “Mr. Barnum has sent me to ask you, Mrs. Douglas, to come to New York City and perform in the museum as his mermaid.”

  “Perform,” Amelia said, her voice flat. “You mean put myself on a stage in a costume like a dance-hall girl.”

  Amelia did not despise dance-hall girls, for she was well aware that it was a life many women were forced into against their will. But she also knew that most folk thought of such performers with contempt, disgust, and superiority. Amelia knew how to pretend, how to behave in the accepted manner of the humans around her, and the humans around her expected her to be a “good Christian woman.” A good Christian woman would never lower herself to perform, and her scathing tone communicated this.

  Mr. Lyman’s face shifted. “You would not be performing, precisely. Rather you would be . . . an exhibit.”

  Amelia raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Barnum wishes me to exhibit myself? He presumes much.”

  Her intonation of “exhibit” absolutely dripped with scandalized outrage.

  Mr. Lyman seemed to have lost his thread. She could see him grasping about for it, trying to reembroider the words that had come out wrong. “Well, you see, what Mr. Barnum would like is for you to, er, swim about in a tank . . .”

  “Wearing, I suppose, a costume that no decent woman should wear in public.”

  Amelia was rather enjoying herself now. She observed the shifting calculations in his eyes, the increasing desperation to climb out of the hole he’d inadvertently dug. Soon enough he wouldn’t know why he’d come here in the first place. Then, Amelia thought, she could be rid of him. And perhaps once she was rid of him it might be time to consider a change. She did not want to spend the remainder of her life on land dodging people like Mr. Lyman, people who wanted to find a real miracle and make it pay dividends.

  Mr. Lyman put down his cup of tea. “I apologize, Mrs. Douglas. At no time did I mean to imply that your morals were not of the highest standards.”

  He stopped, started to speak, stopped again. And sighed.

  When he sighed, he seemed to be blowing out all his troubles, his foolishness, his frustration, his belief. He looked up at her with eyes that now burned with shame and sadness.

  That sadness was fatal to Amelia. It pierced her, made her sorry for him, and she drew herself up, hoping to pull armor around her body to protect her from what he would say next. It would be, she knew, the truth, and she was powerless against the truth.

  “Mr. Barnum has a friend, a man called Moses Kimball who runs a museum in Boston,” Levi Lyman said. He wouldn’t look at her now but rather kept his gaze fixed on the fire. “Moses came to Mr. Barnum with a curiosity to exhibit in the American Museum—that’s Mr. Barnum’s museum. It was a mermaid skeleton.”

  Amelia barely swallowed her gasp. Could it be? Could the remains of one of her people have been swept to shore by the tides? Her momentary panic was quashed as he continued.

  “Of course it was nothing but a humbug. Any fool could tell it was just a dried-up monkey sewn to a fish tail. But it got Mr. Barnum thinking. And if you knew Mr. Barnum, you’d know he thinks no small thoughts. Moses wanted Barnum to put the monkey-thing on display, but Barnum didn’t think anyone would believe it, especially after . . .”

  He trailed off, tugged at his collar. “Well, anyhow, he didn’t think it would be enough to convince the paying public that mermaids were real. So he struck on this notion of having a girl dress up as a mermaid, swim around a tank, and wave at the little ones. I told him it wouldn’t work, that we would be caught if the girl was a fake, but you don’t know Barnum. Once an idea gets in his head you can’t knock it loose with a stick and a net. And then old Moses told him a story. A friend had told him this story, he said, a friend who heard it from a fisherman. And that fisherman said—”

  “That he saw a mermaid swimming in the moonlight,” Amelia said, her voice soft. “Yes, I know that story.”

  “Of course it’s ridiculous. I know that. Pretty sure Barnum does, too, although with him you never know. He might believe, or hope for it to be true, or not really condone any such thing but know others might. The one thing Barnum does believe in is money and the getting of it.”

  Amelia scowled at this. Money was fairly meaningless to her except inasmuch as it was needed for things like sugar and vegetables and cloth to make the occasional dress. Mr. Lyman saw her expression and hurried to correct any poor impression brought on by the mention of dollars and cents.

  “He wants to make money, sure, but mostly what he wants is to amaze folks. He wants to take them out of their little lives and show them something wonderful. I could tell—I could see it in his eyes when he was talking—that the idea of the mermaid was just what he wanted. What could be more magical, more wondrous, than a woman who could change her tail into legs, who rose out of the sea like Venus?”

  Amelia’s memory of the first time she changed was not so wondrous. She did not share the remembrance of cold and the shock of falling instead of standing on her fresh new legs. But for a moment she’d felt the enchantment of his words, seen the shining eyes of the children as they gazed upon that wonder—the mermaid.

  Then she remembered how Jack had feared for her, and how carefully they had hidden her secret. She recalled, too, that she would be the one everyone stared at. She wouldn’t be one of the paying customers of this wonder but the main attraction.

  “It sounds delightful when you put it that way, Mr. Lyman. But I fail to see how it has anything to do with me, especially if you don’t believe the tales.”

  “It’s because the stories were told about you, specifically,” he said. “If Mr. Barnum were to hire any girl from anywhere and present her as a mermaid, we’d be found out in a minute. Some reporter would sniff out that ‘Christiana, the wonder of the Seven Seas’ was actually Bertha Cummings from some backwater in Connecticut. The show would be over. But if you’re the mermaid and a nosy reporter tries to track down your origins, what will he find?”

  “The same story that brought you to my door,” Amelia said.

  The logic was sound, but she would give no such concession to him. She did not want him to go away feeling any encouragement.

  “Well, Mr. Lyman, I’m sorry you’ve come all the way from New York for this, but I’ve no wish to leave my home. You’ll have to find Bertha from the backwater, I’m afraid.”

  Her tone was final. There was no space in it for pleading, arguing, or bribing. She wished him to go.

  He stood, his face stiff. “I’m very sorry to have troubled you.”

  She nodded. She could be magnanimous now that he was leaving. He picked up his suitcase and stopped by the front door. Night had fallen while they had their tea. Amelia noted his uncertainty as clearly as if he’d spoken it—how to get back to town?

  He must not stay at the cottage. The only thing that protected Amelia from the cruelty of wagging tongues was her status as a virtuous widow. The vaguest of improprieties would destroy her.

  “If you go west from here,” she said, pointing behind the cottage and away from the sea, “you’ll find a dirt road. This time of evening all the fishermen go down to the village for their evening ale. Some of them have carts and I’m sure would be happy to take you for a coin or two.”

  He looked doubtful. “It’s very dark. I doubt I could find my own nose.”

  “The moon is rising,” she said, and opened the door.

  Sure enough, the white moon was breaking over the edge of the sea. Soon all the land would be lit by its cold eye. Amelia felt the pull of the ocean, the longing to disappear under the waves and then crash through into the air, into the moonlight.

  She led Levi Lyman around the cottage and pointed to the track that led to the road. It was just faintly visible now, but it would become clearer as he walked and the mo
on rose higher.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Lyman,” she said firmly. He was leaving whether he liked it or not.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Douglas,” he said, and lifted his hat to her.

  She turned and left him there, not looking back to see what he chose to do. It was entirely possible, she admitted, that he might curl up there in the snow and she would find him in the morning, blank-eyed and frozen.

  Amelia paused just before she reentered the cottage and listened. His footsteps crunched in the snow, moving away. Good, she thought. That was good. He was leaving.

  She shut the cottage door behind her, trying to shut out the confusing tangle of thoughts stirred up by the stranger.

  New York. He came from New York. It was a city, a city with hundreds and hundreds of people. You could get lost in a place like that and nobody would know who you were. You could say you were anybody you liked and no one would know different and you wouldn’t be trailing around stories about dancing with the devil or swimming in the moonlight.

  And oh, to have something new to see, someone new to talk to! Hadn’t she promised herself that she would see all the wonders on land? There were wonders to be had in New York, she was sure.

  (But what about the sea? How will you return to the sea?)

  Amelia didn’t know anything about New York except that it was large. But it must have ports, she reasoned. She’d heard the shopkeepers talk about ships traveling from New York to Boston. A place with ships meant she could find the ocean anytime she wished.

  (But what about Jack? If you go away, if you’re not here waiting, how will Jack find you when he comes back?)

  That thought, the speaking of her secret heart, made her gasp in pain she’d thought long-forgotten.

  He’s not coming back. He’s not coming back.

  “He’s not coming back,” she said, and the words chased the dust out of the empty corners and settled there.

  “He’s not coming back,” she said again, and the words crawled into her cold bed and hid beneath her pillow.

  “He’s not coming back,” she said.