The Mermaid's Mirror

by L. K. Madigan

  “But I looked closer, and I could see her face. Her beautiful face.” He fell quiet again.

  Lena waited.

  “I was surfing with my buddies, so I didn’t want to say anything to them. They would have thought I was insane, anyway. But also . . . I didn’t want them to see her, if she was real.”

  Lena recognized the sentiment. It was the reason she had never even told her best friends about seeing a mermaid.

  “I guess she saw me, too. She disappeared into the waves, then came up a little farther away. But she didn’t swim away.” He smiled again, and closed his eyes, the better to see into the past. “She looked right at me, and she didn’t seem scared. We stared at each other for a long time, and we . . . I think we were falling in love even then.” He opened his eyes. “Then one of my buddies called out to me, and she ducked under the waves. I waited to see if she would come back, but she didn’t.”

  “So when did you see her again?”

  “Well, I became kind of obsessed. I was just sure I was going to see her again. I started going back to Magic’s by myself.”

  Sounds familiar, thought Lena.

  “And she came back?”

  “She did. I really think it was love at first sight. For both of us. I wanted to see her again, but she wanted to see me, too. She was the one taking the risks—coming close to shore too many times, allowing a human to see her.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We started talking.” He laughed. “Just your average boy-meets-mermaid story.”

  Lena looked at the mirror in front of her, which reflected back a face composed of features from her father, the human surfer, and her mother, the rebel mermaid.

  “We used to meet at Shipwreck Rocks and just talk. Well, first she had to learn English, but she learned so quickly! It was more like she could read my mind than I taught her the language. We asked each other questions, and we laughed. It was so wonderful. Every time I saw her, I fell deeper in love. And it was the same for her. After a few weeks, though, we realized that we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives apart.” Her dad’s words poured out, a dam of memories finally released. “I asked Lucy to marry me.” He looked at the wedding ring on his left hand, a different one than he had worn all those years ago. “And she said yes.”

  “So she came on land?”

  “Not at first. I wanted to ask her father for her hand in marriage.” He shrugged. “Old school, I know. But it seemed like the right thing to do. So she took me beneath the surface with her.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “She sheltered me under her cloak.”

  Lena stared in confusion. “But . . . how did you breathe?”

  Her dad gave her a wry smile. “Heck if I know. It was magic, Lena—I can’t explain it. She put some kind of, I don’t know, enchantment on the cloak.”

  “What was it like? How do they live?”

  “I don’t know. I never made it to the village. All I know about their world is what Lucy told me.”

  “But what happened? Did you get to ask her father for her hand?”

  “No, I—” He shoved his hand through his hair. “I didn’t get the chance.”

  Lena started to ask him another question, then saw the way his face had hardened. She waited.

  After a moment, he began to talk. “That was the day I got a concussion. I always told people I got hit on my head by my board. But it was more complicated than that. It wasn’t a surfing accident; it—” He scrubbed both hands through his hair, as if to scatter the memories. “I don’t really want to talk about what happened. But I did end up unconscious, and when I came to, I was alone on the beach.”

  “Where was Lucy?”

  “She . . . she wasn’t there.”

  Lena made herself pause and take a breath. She could see that her dad was getting agitated, and even though dozens of questions jumbled around in her mind, fighting to be first out of her mouth, she forced herself to wait.

  After a long moment, her dad seemed to compose himself, and Lena ventured, “So you were alone when you woke up. And you said you don’t want to talk about that part. But eventually Lucy joined you, right? Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here now.” She smiled. “I guess you were irresistible.”

  To her relief, her dad smiled, too.

  “So what happened?” said Lena.

  “I went back to Magic’s,” he said. “As soon as I could. But I didn’t see her for a long time. Well . . . it was really only about a week. It seemed like a long time to me. I started being afraid that I would never see her again.” His gaze drifted away. After a moment, he said so quietly that Lena almost missed it, “That felt like dying.” He closed his eyes, turning away from the memory. “She finally made it back, though.”

  “Thank goodness,” breathed Lena.

  He nodded. “Thank goodness. That was when she told me about the other uses of her sealskin cloak.”

  “Sealskin?” Lena was horrified. “They kill seals to make their cloaks?”

  “No, no! Seals are their companions. Otters and dolphins, too. Mer-folk would never harm them. The pelts are collected after a seal dies.”

  “Oh.”

  “In order for them to come on land, mer-folk need to wear a sealskin cloak for protection.” Her dad reached for a paper napkin and a pen. Lena knew he felt better when he could explain things by writing them down. “It has a kind of hood, which the mermaid—or merman—can pull over her head.” He sketched a crude drawing of a cloak. “If a human sees them swimming, they think they’re just seeing a seal.” He added a seal’s face under the hood of the cloak. “Once a mermaid comes ashore, she can take off her cloak, but she has to be very careful not to lose it, or she can’t return to the sea.” He drew waves, and a fairly good rendition of Shipwreck Rocks.

  Lena stared down at his drawing. “You said she found the cloak. So . . . that means you must have hidden it from her.”

  Her dad nodded. “She wanted me to. She wanted to live on land, as a human. With me.” He smiled, shrugging a little, as if to say, Me . . . can you believe it? “If I hid her cloak, she would have to stay, and the light of the full moon would split her tail into legs. She would still be able to go in the water, but she would have legs.”

  You must not have hidden it very well, thought Lena, but she managed to hold the words back. “What happened then?”

  “Lucy told me to hide her cloak so that she could never find it. If she found it, we both knew that she would forget everything immediately, and return to the sea.”

  “Why didn’t you just get rid of it?”

  “We were afraid to. Sealskin cloaks are talismanic. They protect the wearer from harm when they travel between sea and land. What if your mother got sick living on land, among humans? What if she needed to return to the sea? We couldn’t risk getting rid of the cloak.”

  Lena sighed. “And she found it.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Lena fought to keep her voice level.

  “I’m not sure. I came home, and you were asleep in your bed, and she was gone. I looked for the cloak, and it wasn’t there.” Her dad stopped talking, and the silence that replaced his voice was terrible.

  Chapter 29

  Lena’s dad seemed to shut down after that.

  The shock of finding Lena with the mirror, the image of his lost wife floating up from its depths, the revelation of so many old secrets . . . all seemed to drain his spirit. Lena felt like she was looking at a hollowed-out version of her father.

  “Please don’t stop, Dad,” she begged. “I need to know everything.”

  “I know you do, honey,” he said. But he stayed quiet.

  The longer he stayed quiet, the edgier Lena became. Finally she burst out, “How could you lie to me all these years?”

  He put his hand over his eyes. “I never lied to you, Lena.”

  “What?!”

  “I always told you we lost your mother. There’s a difference.” As Lena open
ed her mouth to protest, he looked up and said, “The moment she found her cloak, we lost her. Even if I’d been home, I don’t know if I could have stopped her from leaving.”

  “Dad,” said Lena. “I get it. She was under a spell. But you let me think she was dead all these years! There is no excuse for that.”

  After a long time, voice cracking, he said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I am so sorry. But you don’t know . . . you don’t know how hard it was. You were four years old, and your mother was gone. You were traumatized. You even stopped talking. For months!”

  “I’m not four anymore,” said Lena bitterly. “I haven’t been four in a long time.”

  When her dad put his hand over his eyes again, Lena snapped, “Stop doing that!”

  He dropped his hand, which trembled. “I’m—” He stood up and paced. “Cole will be home soon. We’ll have to talk later.” A troubled look came over his face. “Allie. She’ll be home soon, too.”

  Lena suddenly remembered the photo of her father, her mother, and Allie, sitting together in a restaurant. Smiling. As if they were the best of friends. “Mom knows, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she does. She was closer to Lucy than any other human besides me. She’s wanted me to tell you about her for a long time. And . . . Grandma Kath knows, too. She was present at your birth. We . . . we weren’t sure what would happen when you were born.”

  Lena blinked. Oh, she thought. They didn’t know if I would have legs or a tail. Then a surge of fury flooded her mind. That’s really great, she thought. Everyone knew about my mother but me. “Fine,” she said, standing up. “If you don’t have time to talk, I guess I’ll read my letter.” She pulled the wrinkled envelope out of her back pocket, darkly pleased to see the expression of pain that crossed her dad’s face.

  But he didn’t try to stop her.

  Carrying the comb and mirror and letter, Lena went upstairs to her room. She set the comb down on her desk, then just stood for a long moment staring at the envelope with her name on it.

  It was too much. First finding her mother’s death certificate saying she’d killed herself . . . then finding out she wasn’t dead, she was inhuman . . . it was too much. Lena’s heart felt ragged and damaged. She set the letter down on her desk.

  Picking up the mirror, she lay down on her bed, wrapping the sun-moon quilt around her. Stroking the satiny white moon, she gazed into the mirror again, hoping to see the mermaid. Her mother.

  But it showed only her face . . . her father’s blond hair and her mother’s pointed chin and her own stormy eyes.

  Time, faraway and formless, spun out while Lena lay wrapped in her quilt. The light in her room changed from the soft gray of a cloudy afternoon to the deepening shadows of evening.

  I must be in shock, she thought, because I can’t move.

  She heard Allie come home, and pictured her dad breaking the news to her about Lena’s discovery. The absence of normal Mom sounds from below—keys landing on the counter, closet door opening and closing, chatty conversation—told Lena the news was being absorbed in silence.

  Then Cole came home, filling the house with his high-pitched voice and happy babble. The noise was a welcome relief to Lena.

  But no one came to talk to her.

  After a long time, Lena mustered the energy to roll over. She pulled the quilt tighter around her and closed her eyes. But the sound of Cole’s Mindbender game kept her from escaping into sleep. The murmur of her parents’ voices intruded on her thoughts, and finally she sat up. She pulled out the mirror from under her pillow, but there was no magic in its reflection. She slid it back under her pillow and got out of bed, padding to the top of the stairs.

  Lena paused. Part of her wanted to go back to her room . . . but the larger part of her was lonely. She wanted to see Allie, and Cole. And even her dad. He’d been such a wreck earlier, she was worried about him.

  Lena went down the stairs. When she walked into the family room, Cole jumped up to greet her, as he did every time they were separated for more than a couple of hours.

  “Hi!” he said, throwing his arms around her.

  Lena bent over his white-blond head, planting a kiss there. “Hi, bud.” She mussed his hair and released him.

  “Want to play with me?”

  “Sure.” Lena settled down on the floor next to him and picked up a controller. She glanced at her parents. They were both watching her, as if expecting some dramatic scene.

  For some reason this irritated her, and she turned her attention to creating a female warrior.

  “Purple hair?” Cole laughed.

  “Yes. My player has purple hair, and her superpower is—” Lena scrolled through the options and clicked one. “Swimming.”

  Allie approached and laid a hand on Lena’s hair. “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  Lena fought back the urge to answer, I’ve just discovered that my mother, whom I thought was dead, is alive, and a mermaid. Sure I’m okay. But she saw the worry in Allie’s face, and said simply, “Yeah.”

  For dinner, Lena’s dad made pancakes and eggs. Cole was overjoyed.

  “Breakfast for dinner!” he crowed. “Can I have hot chocolate?”

  “Sure,” said Allie. Her fingers strayed to her earring, twisting it as she gazed into space.

  Lena knew that Allie really must not be herself, after giving in to such a request without a second thought.

  They ate their breakfast for dinner, and Cole regaled them with tales of past battles on his game. After dinner, Allie and Cole went upstairs, leaving Lena and her father alone in the kitchen. Lena began to load dishes into the dishwasher.

  “Leen?”

  She looked over at him.

  “I’m ready to talk now.”

  Lena kept loading the dishwasher. What if I don’t feel like talking now? she thought. What if I want to pretend none of this is happening . . . just for a little while? What if I just want to chat with my friends or watch TV or something?

  But that life was over.

  She still had friends and school and movies and chat, but she could not pretend she was a normal teen. A strange grief filled her over the loss of her old life.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Did you read the letter?” asked her dad.

  She shook her head.

  He studied her for a moment, then said, “I think it’s time.”

  Lena didn’t answer at first, then she said, “Can I . . . read it in front of you?” She found that she didn’t want to be alone with her mother’s words.

  “Of course. I’ll wait here.”

  Lena retrieved the letter from her room and came back downstairs. She and her dad sat down at the kitchen table again, and Lena opened the envelope.

  Chapter 30

  My darling Selena,

  You are four weeks old today, and already I cannot imagine life without you.

  I thought I knew what love meant before you came . . . now I know that mother-love is more powerful than any other kind. The idea of being separated from you is unthinkable.

  But I take up this pen today, knowing that if you are reading this, it means that we have been parted. The unthinkable has happened.

  The only force that could take me away from you is as ancient as mother-love: magic. On this day in the future when you read these words, know that I would never leave you. I may have been taken from you by magic . . . but please know, my precious maid, I would never go willingly.

  Your loving mother

  “Would never leave me? She’s swimming around in the ocean and I’m sitting here in the house with you and Allie and Cole. She left me.” Lena was surprised to feel a lump in her throat again.

  “No,” insisted her dad. “I told you . . . the moment that cloak was on her body, she had no choice.” He raised his voice, old loyalty flaring to life. “In fact, Lena, I’d bet my life that your mother made sure you were safe first, then walked down the street with a broken heart, not even knowing why she was crying. So let’s
show her some mercy, all right?”

  Lena swallowed. “Okay. I’m sorry.” She hesitated, then asked, “Dad? Where was the cloak?”

  He stood up. Lena thought he was going to refuse to answer, but instead he headed for the sliding-glass door. “Come with me,” he said, taking a flashlight from the desk drawer.

  She followed him outside to the garden. It was dark. As in a fairy tale, the moon swelled above them, full and faintly yellow. Lena thought of her mother, hiding in secrecy, waiting for the full moon to transform her beautiful tail into legs.

  They could hear the sound of the surf in the distance. Lena’s dad turned on the flashlight, and they picked their way carefully through the obstacle course of Cole’s toys in the backyard. He stopped and shone the light along the length of the fence. It was adorned with stone garden sculptures: a long-bearded god of wind, his cheeks puffed out, a smiling sun, a sleeping moon, a spouting whale, a dolphin, and a mermaid.

  “Don’t tell me you buried it under the sculpture of the mermaid!” exclaimed Lena.

  He grinned. “No. I may not be a smart man, but even I am not that obvious.”

  She watched as he lifted the dolphin off the fence and turned it over. On the back of the dolphin sculpture, there was a hollowed-out space. It was empty.

  “This is where I kept the key,” he said. “I don’t know how she found it.” He shook his head, as if he still had trouble believing it. “I never saw her act like she was searching for the cloak, but I don’t know. Maybe mermaids can’t help searching for their cloaks, whether they want to or not.”

  Lena’s knees felt weak, and she sat down on Cole’s plastic picnic table. It seemed almost inevitable that events would lead her mother back to the sea. “Where was it?”

  “The cloak was in the chest. I kept it hidden in the crawl space above the garage.”

  “What crawl space?”

  He gave a half-smile. “See? No one even knows it’s there. The chest was in a box that was taped shut, surrounded by other boxes, and covered with clothes. It just looked like a big pile of junk. I don’t know how she found it.”