The Twice Lost

by Sarah Porter

  And Luce rippled out across the screen, her lambent movements clear in the shallow, shining water. Captured or killed. That hadn’t happened yet, or if it had Ben Ellison didn’t know about it, assuming he was telling the truth. But it could happen any day now, any second.

  Even if the mermaids would let Dorian join the war on their side, what was he going to do? Head out into the Pacific in an inner tube? And they would all hate him anyway. Even Luce probably hated him now. Maybe that was contempt in her eyes as she turned to glance back over her shoulder and hesitated, clearly on the verge of saying something.

  The screen went black. Replay.

  “Dorian?” Zoe’s voice came out high, broken. Somehow she’d come in without him hearing her, and she’d already seen the screen. Dorian looked up at her standing a foot inside his door, pink hair trailing around her devastated face. “Wow, that’s a really amazing video, isn’t it? And that mermaid is just so hot. You’d totally do her, right?” He saw her glance sharply at the tears striping his cheeks and look off.

  Dorian closed the laptop. “I think they’re hunting her, Zoe. Ben Ellison said some shit that really sounded like—I don’t know, like the government is after her.”

  Zoe shrugged. “Well, yeah. What did you think they were going to do?”

  “You can’t expect me not to care about that! Think about how scared she must be. And she’s hurt, and she’s definitely not swimming right.”

  “Dorian,” Zoe groaned. “The girl is a killer, all right? I for one am relieved to know that our government is committed to protecting its citizens from, whatever, these little bitch-ass, psychotic Ariels.”

  Dorian didn’t think she meant it. Her round hazel-green eyes still looked shocked and staring; she was lashing out from jealousy and pain. But even so . . . “You know if anyone’s ever going to stop the mermaids from killing, it’s going to be Luce!”

  “She’s basically Charles Manson with green glitter on his ass.”

  “She wants to change things! Zoe, just because I was in love with her before, that doesn’t mean—”

  “You’re still in love with her!” Zoe yelled. She was biting her lip, her body tense and twisted, the toe of one paint-spattered combat boot grinding at the carpet. “You’re probably fantasizing about her whenever you’re messing around with me, and you think you’re doing me some big fucking favor.”

  Dorian sighed. “I love you, okay? Can you stop now?”

  Zoe glowered at him, but her body was starting to droop and her voice seemed tired. “You don’t love me. Not the right way, not the way I love you, not—”

  “Ben Ellison’s trying to get me to go back to Chicago, and I said no because of you! You think I want to stay here?”

  “I guess you don’t have any real reason to stay anymore.” Zoe’s black-clad arms moved up, almost as if she was stretching, but then they stopped in front of her face. Her pale hands gripped at her messy pink-blond hair. “It sucked so bad when I wanted you and you kept ignoring me. But having you hurts even worse.”

  “Zoe, we’re together now—”

  “You think you’re helping me by staying here, but you’re not. You’re just fucking me up. Just because you won’t admit stuff doesn’t mean I don’t know.” She lowered her arms. “Get lost. Go to Chicago. But tell me the truth first.” Her face was pink and swollen, but she wasn’t crying. Dorian was. His back shuddered with every breath.

  “Jesus, Zoe.”

  “Tell me the truth and we’ll stay friends. Close friends. If you don’t I don’t ever want to talk to you again.” She came closer and rested her hands on his shoulders. Her mouth suddenly twisted into a plaintive smile. “Are you in love with Luce?’

  “Yeah,” Dorian barely whispered. He was staring at the bed. Zoe reached with one hand and coaxed his head up, making him look into her eyes. “I’m not lying that I love you, Zoe. A lot. But yeah. I am.”

  Zoe kissed his forehead. Her pink hair brushed his face, striping the room in front of him. “Then I hope they don’t kill her.”

  8

  Golden Gate

  That evening Luce stared across the ocean at the lights of what looked like a good-sized town. Rows of golden windows and streetlights tangled like vines through the dusk, and there were a few bonfires out on the shore. Things hadn’t gone so well the last time she’d slept under a dock, but even so Luce realized that the margins of human towns were the safest places for her now. Those divers would probably be searching any caves they could find along the waterline, any secluded coves: the kinds of places mermaids usually lived. They’d be a lot less likely to come waving their huge black guns through clusters of people laughing and toasting marshmallows out on the beach.

  She swept closer, keeping under the water as much as she could. There was some kind of boat club up ahead, with ranks of yachts parked along neat piers. She slipped below and found a quiet spot on the shore, a ceiling of planks only a foot above her, beer bottles and rusty chains scattered on the sand. She could hear human voices nearby; it sounded there was a small party going on, with soft, delicate music. Luce slept for a long time, and no one disturbed her.

  Being so close to human habitations made her self-conscious about her nakedness. Normally clothes weren’t something she thought about at all, but now when she found a tattered black bikini top wadded on the shore, she smoothed it out and tied it on.

  This was the best way she could travel, Luce realized: swimming as far from shore and as deep as she could manage during the day, sleeping under docks at night. For the next week or more she kept going like that, surprised to find herself enjoying the water and even her own solitude. Human towns used to make her so nervous; now Luce realized that she liked hearing people talking or laughing around her. It was oddly comforting. It almost made her feel the way she had as a little girl, drifting off to sleep in the back of her father’s van while chatter and music softened the night’s harsh edges.

  Listening to the ordinary happiness of strangers, she could almost forget that the divers were after her. That the mermaids were still being slaughtered.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The coast turned wilder, full of cliffs and twisty inlets and beaches closed in by pinnacles of rock tufted with wildflowers. Even from a distance Luce could hear children squealing as they played in the water and the roar of motorcycles swooping along the winding roads. The town where she found shelter that night was small, but its gardens were so thick with flowers that even the dimness under the docks breathed with their perfume. And there were many more living things around her now: seals and sea lions sprawled on sandbars with their spotted bellies exposed, fins flashed in the water, and so many hawks wheeled above that they almost seemed to be gears turning in an immense blue clock. Whenever she swam near the seafloor tall anemones pulsed their wispy fronds in the current and enormous sea stars spread their radial arms. The animals crowding the bottom all seemed to have invented new and fantastical sunset colors for themselves: they came in peach-speckled lilacs, rose-spined saffrons, peculiar moody pinks. Luce could barely feel worried in this outpouring of vibrant beauty.

  Light wings of fog settled over the water as Luce swam on the next morning. She began to wonder if the black-suited divers had given up searching for her. After all, there had been no sign of them for days. Maybe she could try to find other mermaids and ask them for news without inflicting danger on them. Luce was wondering this as the green house-dotted cliffs to her left rolled back, disappearing completely behind hovering cloud-fronds, and something huge and airy and geometric loomed above the mist. It looked so familiar, but for a fraction of a second Luce couldn’t place it. Its two metal peaks were dully red, high and elegantly curved.

  Then she recognized it. It was the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Luce could hardly believe it. She’d swum all the way to San Francisco. She remembered it from when she’d briefly lived there with her father: a dreamlike city with, Luce recalled, a lot of rundown and half-abandoned areas along the
waterfront. She could remember slipping with her father through a gap in a chainlink fence to explore a cavernous building with soaring walls of milky glass panes; it had once been used for building ships, he’d told her. She remembered the rusting hulks of forgotten boats, an inlet mysteriously heaped with dozens of barnacle-crusted shopping carts where herons perched. All around the network of bays tucked behind the Golden Gate there were places like that, he’d told her, partly wild and partly ruined.

  Luce couldn’t help grinning to herself as she realized what was in front of her.

  For a mermaid in desperate trouble, this city was the perfect hideout.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  For the rest of the day Luce lurked under the dock of what looked like an unused vacation home near a town she guessed was Sausalito. Sailboats swept nearby, voices shrieked with laughter. Even if she was careful to keep well below the surface, it was clear that staying in San Francisco Bay meant that she could go out only at night. But it was hard to keep calm as she waited for the darkness that would free her to go exploring. She needed somewhere sheltered and lonely without too many boats around, and especially she needed to find someplace with a reasonable supply of shellfish. Hunger needled at her, sharp and insistent.

  Even more unbearable than hunger was a new idea that kept intruding on her mind, no matter how many times Luce told herself she was being irrational. She couldn’t help imagining Nausicaa’s greenish bronze face looking up in warm surprise, her wild black hair cascading back from her face as she dashed grinning through the water to pull Luce into her arms. Her friend might be somewhere in the bays in front of her. Luce wouldn’t have to explain anything because Nausicaa would already know; she wouldn’t have to think about the horrors she’d witnessed. The ancient mermaid would know exactly what they should do, and Luce would help.

  At least that was the fantasy. The problem with going out to search, Luce realized, was the way she’d feel if the fantasy proved not to be true. Outside her hiding place the fog receded, and Luce could glimpse a bit of the gray mass of skyscrapers prickling upward along the far shore of the bay. An endless procession of ships heaped with neatly stacked cargo containers skimmed below the bridge and out to sea.

  When night finally came it was starless, smoke black, the water crisscrossed by a thousand streaks of light thrown by the shining towers of San Francisco. Luce found a patch of oysters nearby and ate them under her dock, then headed across the bay, aiming toward the left of downtown. She thought it was somewhere over there that she’d gone exploring abandoned piers with her father. Sometimes from the corners of her eyes Luce caught distant flashes of diving shapes that looked about as big as she was: probably seals, though they seemed fast for seals. Enormous stingrays wrapped the depths in their black wings and leopard sharks ambled sleepily just below her. She didn’t pay too much attention. The black water was much smoother and calmer than she was used to while overhead the reflected lights of the city formed a ceiling of prancing dots and beams of gold.

  Deeper into the bay, though, the light became sparser. As she went on the darkness of the water was broken by rows of pilings like rotten teeth. She passed a pier so decayed that it slumped into the water, its wood beams gone soft as rope. There were still warehouses set back from the water, but they had a decrepit look and no light glazed their windows. Only, here and there, a streetlight stood in a lonely haze of apricot-colored glow. Luce hovered fifty feet from shore with her head just above the surface, watching and listening. There was a stench of rust and pollution, and the water felt oily and warmer than she liked. Still, maybe under that pier she could make a temporary home for herself? She’d pictured somewhere wilder, but at least there didn’t seem to be any people around.

  No. There was one. A man was walking out on that decayed pier, so drunk that his whole body pitched like a wave. Luce noticed the man’s filthy layered overcoats; the rags around his feet; the sad, sick way he staggered. It reminded her a bit of the way her father had looked when she’d found him living as a castaway, his body swaddled in sealskins. Luce stopped where she was. The thought of her father opened like a wound in her chest, the shape of an intolerable absence. Where was he now? Had he recovered from all the terrible things he’d gone through?

  The man swayed faster, his body doubling in the middle as if he were about to be sick. He was standing right at the pier’s edge, one foot curling into empty space. Now he didn’t remind Luce of her father but of her uncle Peter. Reeling, pitiful, and broken, although Luce thought furiously that he’d actually broken himself. That was how Peter had looked in the moments just before he turned vicious, smacking her or knocking her down. Her stomach tightened with disgust. Maybe that was Peter, homeless and stinking, wandering across the wasted margins of a beautiful city . . .

  The man still hadn’t straightened, but he wasn’t vomiting, either. Instead he just wavered, his torso tipped precariously toward the water, one hand pawing the air in slow circles. Then he tried to step back, wobbled sharply, and pitched headlong into the bay. The splash blinked white against the darkness.

  For several seconds Luce waited for him to surface. He could swim for the shore, or he could grab hold of the pilings and pull himself back up. She watched the water where he’d fallen: at first the glossy surface was rocking, but gradually it calmed until there was nothing but a scattered hoop of froth. His head should emerge from the froth at any moment, sputtering angrily.

  Nothing happened. Where was he? Luce swam closer. There in the gray dimness under the pier she could just make out his ragged, flailing shape. His waterlogged coats splayed out around him like pinwheeling wings, but they were only dragging him farther down. He twisted randomly, as if he couldn’t guess where the surface was, and Luce understood that he was drowning. His eyes bulged and his lips were moving fast, bright bubbles leaping out like silent words. There was still something he needed to say, Luce thought. For some reason she thought he was trying to tell someone how sorry he was. To ask for forgiveness.

  Without thinking about what she was doing, Luce started singing. The water stopped dragging on the tangled coats. Instead it moved in Luce’s song, and the wide wings of fabric formed a kind of cradle tugging him back toward the surface. The man gagged, thrashing in astonishment as the water shuddered with unimaginable music, carrying him up . . .

  Up into the night air, where the enchanted water seized him in the curl of a tall wave that stood alone above the black glass surface of the bay. Luce sang a sustained note that held him there in space for a moment, his body slowly rotating as he wheezed and stretched out his hands, water spilling from his mouth and sodden clothes. She thought of teaching him a lesson by sending her song into a high spike of sound and then breaking off abruptly, letting him crash back down onto the pier so hard that his teeth would jar from their sockets. Just because she’d gone and saved his life for no good reason, that didn’t mean he deserved any kindness from her.

  Then, almost in spite of herself, Luce let the note fade slowly. The homeless man landed on the planks so lightly that there wasn’t even a thud.

  She was only twenty feet from him now, still glaring at him as he scrambled onto his knees and gaped at her. Of course he wasn’t really Peter. He was much too old to be Peter, probably at least sixty. Just another idiotic drunk who’d destroy anything he could get his hands on, even if that meant he only wound up destroying himself.

  “You’re shining . . .” the man croaked. His hair hung in grayish clumps around his face, but his eyes were bright with longing. The cold water and the shock of almost dying, not to mention being rescued in such an unfathomable way, seemed to have sobered him up.

  “You need to quit drinking!” Luce rasped out furiously. Her nails were digging into her palms and her tail was lashing. “I don’t know why I saved you! Why did you have to go and get so wasted, like you don’t even care what happens to you?”

  Luce was too enraged to think clearly or to control the wild spasms of her tail. It kicked above
the surface, sending droplets spinning out across the night. A trace of mist hung in the air, and the glow of the streetlamps floated like dandelion puffs.

  “You’re . . . a mermaid? And you did that to the water, didn’t you? You saved me. You’re a—”

  “Well, you’re a drunk,” Luce snapped. “This is the only time I’m going to save you, okay? If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll let you drown!”

  “Hey,” the man said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Stay and talk to me. Please.”

  “No!” Luce shrieked. She was already backing away.

  “At least tell me your name. I want to know . . . who saved my life. You saved my life. Beautiful . . . your voice was so beautiful! I need to know . . .” He was kneeling on the pier’s edge, one hand stretched helplessly toward her.

  Luce didn’t think that deserved a response. She’d already wasted too much time on him, she thought, and of course she shouldn’t have let some human see her at all. She turned to go.

  “I’m always here!” he cried out after her. Even as the water closed over her head, Luce could still hear him shouting. “I’m always here! I’ve come so far. I’ve been a stevedore, and a soldier and a ghost, but I’m here now!” Luce was still angry, but she felt the light touch of another emotion she would have preferred to ignore. Maybe there was something sweet about this old man. “Hey! Mermaid, listen up! If you ever want help with anything, you know who to ask!”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Luce kept swimming south. All at once she was overcome by weariness and shame, but she didn’t know why. Of course, she’d broken the timahk again by letting a human hear her sing without killing him, even by talking to him at all, but so many things had changed that the timahk didn’t seem to matter much anymore. Before she’d swum far, Luce realized why she felt so sick with herself: it hadn’t been fair of her to hate that man because of what Peter had done. It wasn’t his fault. That old man had never hurt her; she couldn’t have any idea of what he’d gone through, the events that had left him so broken.