Cry of the Sea

by D. G. Driver

  “What’s the matter with them?” Carter asked.

  “They’re suffocating,” Schneider answered. “Fish need to move to be able to get oxygen into their gills. They can’t move in there.”

  I remembered what the mermaid had looked like when we first brought it to the center. Her skin was a deep navy blue from suffocation. Most of the mermaids in the tank were that color now. I stood up and faced Schneider.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he begged. “I asked to have some of them moved into different tanks but was given nothing but negatives. This is the only lab in the facility that locks, and it has the biggest tank. Affron couldn’t afford to put the mermaids anywhere else. The risk of exposure was too high.

  “So I dared to suggest, ‘Why don’t we stop collecting them?’ Bill—Mr. Cortlandt—just laughed at me and said, ‘Have you seen the madness out there? They’ll be discovered before too long.’ I reminded him, ‘They’ve been discovered. The Sawfeather family has seen to that.’” Schneider sighed. “He didn’t think you and your family were too much of a threat. ‘It’ll blow over,’ he told me, ‘if no one finds any more of them.’”

  “Why didn’t you let them go?” I asked. “If you thought it was wrong, why didn’t you do something about it?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said desperately. “They threatened my job.”

  “You can get another job,” Haley said.

  “Not without references and not after my name has been slandered as the crackpot who believes in mermaids.”

  “They threatened to shut down the center, too, didn’t they?” Carter asked.

  Schneider nodded. “I was ordered to study the mermaids like lab animals, and if they died, so be it. This was not what I expected when I got the call to come up here and work. I sincerely thought they wanted me to, oh, make the world better. That is their slogan, isn’t it?”

  Haley’s voice came from behind Dr. Schneider. She was standing at his computer pressing buttons. “What is this graph showing?” I got up and moved with Carter over to the computer. Dr. Schneider wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and joined us. I noticed how his hands shook as he took the mouse from her and guided the cursor across the screen. He sat down and refused to raise his eyes to us as he found the work he wanted to show us. The man was truly wrecked.

  “Don’t think this was easy for me, kids,” he said quietly. “When I first got here all I wanted to do was find our mermaid to make sure she was okay, but a lot of them wear the necklaces, and I couldn’t pick her out.”

  He was right. The overpowering frailty of them had taken all my attention, but now that I looked closer, a lot of them wore the shell jewelry that Juarez Peña had told me about. I’d have to study the mermaids for a long time to find my girl, and I didn’t have that kind of time. All I could hope was that she was in the tank, and that she knew I was here to help and not hurt her like Dr. Schneider had.

  Dr. Schneider was still talking. “By the end of the first day all I’d managed to will myself to do was read the files about what they like to eat, discover that there were indeed male mermaids, and establish that they were dying. I kept putting off the autopsy of the dead mermaids, leaving them packed in ice. I didn’t have the heart to pull any living ones out of the tank to study their reflexes or behaviors either.

  “According to the papers I’d gathered from the other scientists who had been working on this project, the first mermaid had been discovered less than two years ago off Port Alberni just above Vancouver. Since then they’d popped up randomly, usually beached from oil spills or pollution. Most of the time they were in pairs or threes. Maybe they didn’t like traveling alone. Or maybe the others got trapped while trying to rescue the first oil spill victim.”

  Carter interrupted, “Which is evidence that they are social creatures. Do you know any fish that would help each rescue each other?”

  “Only people do that,” I said.

  With a sheepish grin, Haley said, “The fish do that in Finding Nemo.”

  I hit her and she mouthed “Sorry.”

  Dr. Schneider nodded and went on, “I wondered how long these creatures had existed. If they’ve been out there all these years, why were they starting to show up now? And why weren’t they going away now that things were dangerous for them?” He pointed to a map that showed where the majority of the mermaids had been found. “It’s almost like they’re coming here on purpose to look for their missing relatives.”

  I walked over to the tank, searching the eyes of the mermaids for the one that might recognize me. “I’m kind of surprised you didn’t jump into the biology and experiments, Dr. Schneider. Weren’t you curious?”

  “Sure I was curious,” he said. “But I didn’t want to do what they were asking of me. This work for Affron won’t get my name written up in history. Who remembers the debunkers? When would there ever be a class taught in a college or university where the professor would ask, “Tell me the name of the man who proved that mermaids were nothing but over-sized halibut?”

  “True,” Carter said.

  “Juniper Sawfeather’s name is all over the news for discovering mermaids. You have fame now for that little thing, and if Affron hadn’t taken the mermaids away, I could have expanded that discovery all the way to the cover of Scientific American. My name would have been in the annals of history. But that’s all been taken away!”

  He stabbed a button on the computer and a horrible squeaking and groaning came from speakers around the room. It sounded like whales. I covered my ears because it was so loud.

  Dr. Schneider stood up, yelling over the noise. “This morning I was told that I had to start the experiments or think about flipping hamburgers for the rest of my life. I started with sound sensitivity and recognition. Whale and dolphin soundings. Mating calls and nursing coos at first. I got a reaction from them, but it wasn’t significant. Then I switched it up and tried cries of distress. The mermaids reacted immediately and with much more demonstration. Watch them.”

  I had been staring at Dr. Schneider and the speakers, so I pivoted to take in the vision of the mermaids. Their heads were all up on stiff necks, and their strange, black eyes were open as wide as possible. They squirmed around as if they wanted to back away from this horrible sound. Some of them began to make their own calls, as if they were answering the voices they heard.

  “Interesting, right?” Dr. Schneider yelled. “They’re behaving like fish now, aren’t they? Does this mean they don’t think? No. But it does mean that they may not necessarily think like a human.”

  He switched off the noise. Tension fled from their bodies immediately and the relief in their demeanor was clear. Though now sadness filled the tank. Their heads drooped, and they brought their hands to their faces as though ashamed or devastated that they couldn’t do anything to help the creatures they had been hearing.

  I thought of my dad’s Chinook tale of the killer whale and the mermaid’s attachment to it. I recalled the legend Juarez Peña told me about the drowned sailors becoming killer whales. The island I was on was called Orcas. Now I know those weren’t just silly legends or made up folklore. They were true accounts. The mermaids and the killer whales were linked in love and history. And they were linked to my people, the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

  “Do you have a recording that is specifically of killer whales?” I asked. Honestly, I didn’t want to hurt them, but I had to know if I was right.

  “Yes, I do.” Dr. Schneider hit a button and a horrible keening came out of the speakers.

  All at once the mermaids began thrashing about. Slamming into each other. They frantically searched for a way to get out of the tank but couldn’t find one. Some of the mermaids smashed their tales against the glass so hard I worried the five-inch thick glass might crack and jumped away.

  “What’s happening?” Haley screamed. “Why are they doing that?”

  “Turn it off!” I shouted to Dr. Schneider.

  “Fascinating,” the
scientist said, moving away from the computer and walking toward the tank. “Even more dynamic than last time.”

  “Hayley, turn it off!” I shouted, but she was panicking. I saw Carter push her to the side and frantically search for the way to end the recording. More slamming against the glass caught my attention. I shifted to look at the chaos and squeezing through the silver bodies was a face I recognized—my mermaid. I knew her big eyes, and I could tell she knew me. She pressed her hands up against the glass, and stared at me.

  Noise crowded around me. The whale calls, the mermaids slamming against the glass, the sloshing of the water, Carter and Haley yelling at each other, and Dr. Schneider having some weird epiphany. I tried to tune it all out and focus on my mermaid. I locked eyes with her and stepped forward to put my hands over hers. All the noise became dulled, like I had stuffed cotton in my ears. What came through clearly was a voice that I couldn’t understand at first. I focused harder. Nothing but the mermaid.

  “Help them.”

  It wasn’t quite words like that, but somehow I understood what she was telling me. I tried to respond to her with my mind, but I didn’t know if I could send my thoughts to her the same way. “These whale cries aren’t real. It’s just a recording.”

  “Help them!”

  “Ah ha!” I heard somewhere behind me—Carter’s voice. The whale sounds stopped and the silence buzzed in my ears. I tried to stay concentrated on my mermaid.

  “See? It stopped.”

  She nodded at me, but her eyes were still so sad.

  “Help us.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Is that her?” Haley asked, walking toward me.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Oh my God.” That was from Carter. I tore my eyes away from the mermaid to find out what was upsetting him. “Did you know this would happen?” he yelled at Dr. Schneider.

  “I... yes,” the scientist stammered. “I tried it once before.”

  “Then why did you push that button?”

  That’s when I realized that there was something wrong even though the panic had stopped. Inside the tank several mermaids had been pressed so hard against the glass they were smothered to death. Five more were floating at the top of the tank lifeless.

  “This is my fault,” I said weakly.

  “No, it’s not,” Haley said, putting her hand on my shoulder. She pointed at Schneider. “It’s his.”

  I ran over and pushed Dr. Schneider in the chest. “So you knew that they would freak out like that? Why didn’t you say, ‘No, June, we can’t play those sounds, it’ll kill them’?”

  “It wasn’t so extreme last time. I didn’t think.”

  I screamed at him. “You never think! You are the stupidest scientist I’ve ever met!”

  “June, look!” Carter yelled over me. He yanked my hand and pulled me away from Dr. Schneider. He wrapped his arms around me tightly as we faced the aquarium. It wasn’t until I felt the pressure of his arms around me that I realized I had been shivering. I leaned my head back against his chest and took in the sight in front of me.

  Inside the tank, the mermaids were now rushing up and toward the back where part of the top of the tank was opening up. I got as close to the glass as I could to be able to see what was happening. Four men in wet suits and scuba gear were there, pulling the mermaids up and over the top of the tank out to the open water. Mermaids hoisted their torsos up with their arms and flipped over the top, with a push from the men to get them going.

  “What’s happening?”

  Dr. Schneider laughed. “They’re being released. Cortlandt must really be in a jam up there with the reporters you sent.”

  “That’s good, right?” Haley checked.

  “Of course it’s good,” I said. “For the mermaids. But now there won’t be any evidence that they were here or that they exist. When the reporters get down here, they’ll all be gone. Right, Dr. S.? Guess you really won’t be in Scientific American now, will you?”

  My mermaid banged with her fist on the glass. I went back to her and put my hands over hers again. Her eyes were much brighter, and she had a wisp of a grin on those thin lips. I could almost see that dimple in her cheek. “You’ll be safe now,” I thought to her.

  “Come with us,” she shared with me.

  “I can’t.”

  Her silver forehead wrinkled. “You—in the water—with me—before.”

  “I can’t live like that.”

  The brightness in her eyes fled again. Nearly all of the living mermaids were out of the tank now. She had to go.

  “I will find you again,” she thought to me.

  “I will be looking.”

  She swam away from me and hauled herself over the opening. Then the two men dove into the tank to start removing the dead mermaid bodies. They lifted them up and over the glass and dropped them far enough away that the murky water obscured them from vision. All this happened in minutes.

  As the last mermaid vanished with a diver, I heard a commotion in the hallway outside. A lot of voices. A key turned in the lock, and a second later Dr. Cortlandt entered followed by his secretary, Peña, Regina, and a whole lot of other reporters and cameras. Mr. Boyle, the thug who stole my mermaid from the Center in Aberdeen stepped in behind the crowd and made his way to Schneider’s desk.

  I motioned to Carter to keep an eye on the man, and he nodded.

  “Juniper Sawfeather,” Mr. Cortlandt said, approaching me with an outstretched arm and a smile. “Here you are. We have been looking all over this building for you.”

  A dozen microphones poked toward me.

  Juarez Peña asked the first question, “So, where are the mermaids, Juniper?”

  “They’re gone,” I answered. “There were close to a hundred in that tank until two minutes ago. Mr. Cortlandt ordered them released before you could get down here to see them.”

  Cortlandt laughed his fake, eely laugh. His secretary joined him, and I decided she was similar to a barracuda. “A hundred mermaids in a tank that size and then extracted in a just a few short minutes? Does that even seem plausible?”

  The reporters muttered about how this didn’t make any sense at all. A profound disappointment crossed Peña’s face too.

  “We all saw them!” Haley shouted out. “Some were dead, even.”

  Marlee screeched, “You saw the mermaids?”

  Regina pushed toward Haley. “A loser like you gets to see the mermaids while I’m stuck up in the lobby with all these stupid reporters and this ugly, weird man.”

  Ted grabbed his girlfriend’s arm and yanked her back so that she lost her balance and fell back into a desk chair. “Leave her alone, Regina. You’re just embarrassing yourself.”

  I stepped between Haley and Regina as the popularity queen struggled to regain her balance with no help at all from Ted, who had moved over to his snickering best friend. “I let Haley come see them because she’s my best friend. You are the loser today.”

  Regina’s eyes turned to thin little beads. If they could shoot lasers, they would have. “I think this whole thing was a hoax, June. And I’m going to make sure everyone at school knows you’re a fake.”

  “Fine!”

  She grabbed Marlee’s hand and pulled her out of the laboratory. Gary followed while shouting, “I told you it was fake. I can’t believe you made me miss practice for this.” Ted lingered an extra moment, passing a final apologetic glance at Haley before walking out too.

  Cortlandt stepped up to me, gesturing to the empty tank. “So, now you’ve lost your popularity and your credibility. Anything else you want to say, Miss Sawfeather?”

  “Yeah.” I faced the reporters. “I wish you all had gotten here faster. You let Affron win again.”

  At that, I pushed through them and headed for the door with Haley and Carter close behind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  College catalogs and application forms littered the living room. My mom and I pored through
each one that looked interesting. So far (and we’d been at this for forty-five minutes) neither of us had raised our voices or looked cross-eyed at each other. It was truly a miracle.

  “Now, what about San Diego?” Mom finally asked. I know she’d been avoiding it. “Isn’t that where you said you wanted to go?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I confessed. “I thought really hard. Part of me still wants to go there because I know they have the best program, but another part of me thinks I should stay in this area.”

  Mom grinned as she ran her fingers through my long, black hair. “Could it have anything to do with a young college student majoring in Biology?”

  I felt my cheeks get hot. “Maybe,” I answered. “It also has to do with something else.”

  Mom nodded, but the grin changed to something more sincere. “You know the chances of seeing another mermaid are slim.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said too quickly to fool her. “If they’ve got any brains at all they’re probably far, far away from here.” I knew that wasn’t true, though. They’ve lived out there in our waters for hundreds of years, and I didn’t believe they would abandon their homes or their killer whales. Every couple weeks I headed out to Grayland Beach to see if maybe my mermaid friend was swimming around by the buoys keeping an eye out for me.

  I flipped through the pages of a Humboldt University catalog slowly, but I wasn’t looking at the pictures. I remembered all the effort it took to get the reporters to finally stop harassing our family and go away. There hadn’t been much point in defending my story any longer. No one believed me anyway. Plus, someone at Affron nicely retouched my video for me, messing with the image, brightening it too much and setting the contrast way off. It looked ridiculous. Not even worthy of the tabloid rags. Somehow, when this new image got spread around the Internet, the old one was forgotten.

  Haley was angrier about it than me. She came over on Saturday afternoon, the day after our adventure, to show me what had happened and how quickly. “I worked hard on that video.”

  “I know,” I said. “I think that Boyle guy wiped out all Schneider’s research, too. Carter said he was messing with the computer the whole time Regina was wigging out. So, there’s no proof of anything.”