Aquamarine

by Alice Hoffman

  wandered away from her sisters during

  a storm the way Aquamarine had.

  As for Hailey and Claire, they couldn’t know that a mermaid in love is far more irrational than a jellyfish and more stubborn than a barnacle. “You’ll just have to go back to the ocean,” they advised her.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Aquamarine’s pale complexion flushed blue as she pouted. “I won’t leave before I meet him.”

  Up at the snack bar, Raymond was whistling a tune as he cleaned up the counter. Aquamarine tilted her head to listen, hearkening to what she clearly believed was the most beautiful melody anyone had ever been privileged to hear, either on land or at sea.

  “Oh,” she sighed as she watched Raymond. Her elbows rested on the edge of the pool. Her sea-blue eyes were dreamy. “If he only knew how I felt about him.”

  “I really don’t think he’s your type,” Claire said as politely as she could.

  Aquamarine looked stricken. She had never been denied anything she wanted. “Of course he is,” she said.

  “Well, for one thing, he lives on land,” Hailey reminded the mermaid.

  “You are both so mean,” Aquamarine cried. “You’re meaner than my sisters, and probably just as jealous.”

  Since she’d been swept up by the storm and set down at the Capri, Aquamarine had felt a taste of freedom. More important than the terrible food and the chlorinated pool was the idea that she could do whatever she pleased. She tossed her head and fixed the girls with her sea-blue eyes. “No one can tell me what to do anymore. Not my sisters and certainly not you. Anyway, it’s too late. I’ve already made up my mind. I’m staying right here for as long as I want to. And no one can tell me otherwise!”

  At the end of the day, the girls ran to Claire’s grandfather’s car and when he said “What’s new, Susie Q’s?” they let out a gale of giggles, convinced that no one would believe that they’d stumbled upon a mermaid who refused to behave. When they got to Claire’s grandparents’ house, they raced past the half-packed boxes in the living room and looked through the crates of books in Claire’s room, hoping to find a solution for Aquamarine’s predicament. Although they discovered references to many unusual creatures of the deep, from dolphins that were said to rescue lost sailors to sea-serpents twice the size of a whale, they couldn’t unearth a single bit of advice on what to do with a mermaid who’d fallen in love.

  That night, the girls had dinner at Hailey’s house. Through the kitchen window they could see the new people, the ones who’d bought Claire’s grandparents’ house. They were getting a final tour of the yard to ensure that once they moved in they would know how to best care for the garden. They’d be aware of which plants would bloom to be day lilies and which ones would forever remain weeds. A red-haired girl of twelve trailed after the new people. She looked uncertain and lonely and she stopped to smell the roses that Claire’s grandmother had planted beside the back door.

  “Maybe she’ll be your new best friend,” Claire said.

  “I’m never even going to talk to her,” Hailey assured Claire.

  “Never?” Claire said hopefully.

  “Not unless there’s a fire and I have to shout for her to get out of the house.”

  That night Claire was thinking about what might happen if there ever really was a fire; how Hailey would run over in her nightgown and pound her fists on the door to wake everyone and save them, and how the red-haired girl would always be grateful, and how no one would even remember that Claire had ever lived in that same house. Claire was so wrapped up in trying to forecast the future, that she wasn’t her usual problem-solving self. Frankly, she wasn’t herself at all. She nearly jumped out of her chair when the phone rang. It was the friends’ special signal: one ring, then hang up, then call right back again.

  Claire went into the kitchen to answer the phone. She looked through the window and across the yard to where Hailey was, in her own kitchen. All night, Claire had been wondering who she would be without Hailey to take up her plans and turn them into actions. In case of a fire, would Claire be courageous enough to knock on the door of a burning house?

  Hailey waved across the yard. “I found an encyclopedia of mythical creatures.” Hailey held a red book up to the window for Claire to see.

  “She’s not mythological,” Claire reminded her friend.

  “Well, whatever she is, this book says that no mermaid can remain on land. The longest survival on record was one week in a circus and on the seventh day that mermaid dried up from head to tail. Nothing was left but a pile of green dust.”

  “What can we do?” Claire said. “She won’t listen to us.”

  Unless Hailey was mistaken, Claire was actually asking for advice. Now that the responsibility rested with her, there was really no choice but for Hailey to come up with a plan, and that’s exactly what she did.

  “All we need to do is get her what she wants,” Hailey decided. “Then she’ll have to listen.”

  RAYMOND WAS PACKING HIS BOOKS when they found him. He had worked at the Capri for four summers, and although he still hadn’t figured out how to cook a hamburger without burning the meat, he’d read one hundred and twenty-two books during his time at the beach. All the same, he wasn’t sure he’d read quite enough to go to college. The future seemed like a cloud that day, the black, stormy kind it was impossible to see through, the sort that could make a person believe that blue skies would never again return.

  But Raymond’s worrying was interrupted when the girls ran to the snack counter to tell him they needed his help. They had a cousin visiting, they told him, from overseas, which wasn’t so far from the truth. To make certain their cousin wouldn’t be bored, the girls wanted Raymond to have dinner with her the following night.

  “How can you have the same cousin?” Raymond was confused. “I didn’t even think you were related.”

  “It’s through marriage,” Hailey said because she’d heard other people use that excuse to explain complicated family relationships.

  “And divorce,” Claire added, because she’d heard that as well.

  “Anyway, she’s a very distant cousin,” Hailey said. “We just want her to have a good time while she’s here. All you have to do is show up in the cafeteria at six o’clock tomorrow night.”

  After Raymond had agreed to the dinner, Claire began to wonder how Hailey kept coming up with all these ideas, one after another, as if they just popped into her head. Now, for instance, Hailey raced to the pool, where she sat with her feet dangling in the shallow end. She took a can of tuna and an opener from her backpack, having remembered that the mermaid would be hungry.

  “Good thinking,” Claire said to her friend.

  Claire sat beside Hailey, but was careful not to hang her feet over the edge of the pool. She looked into the water, and gingerly dipped one toe in. It wasn’t quite as cold as they’d thought it might be. Just to be safe, she held on to the concrete.

  When they told Aquamarine of her date with Raymond, she let out a shriek of joy that chased the perching seagulls into the sky.

  “You only have to promise one thing,” the girls reminded her. “After tomorrow, you’ll go.”

  Aquamarine begged and cried until the pool was awash with blue tears which stained the moon jellyfish turquoise and indigo, but the girls would not change their minds.

  “We’re doing this for your own good,” they said. “We want what’s best for you.”

  Without saltwater, they told her, Aquamarine’s skin would soon dry up until her fresh face became grainy as sand, her beautiful pale hair would curl like seaweed, her tail would turn limp and dull. Already, her time away from the ocean had caused her to fade, so that when she blushed or was angry she turned silver rather than blue. The webbing between her fingers had fallen away, and her hands looked like those of any ordinary girl. Out in the waves, her six sisters were calling for her. They missed her and worried and at high tide they came dangerously close to shore in their
search.

  “All right,” Aquamarine said finally. “I promise I’ll go.”

  Upon making this vow, the mermaid cried even harder.

  “Cheer up,” Claire said. “You’ll always remember the night you had together.”

  But now that Aquamarine was to get her heart’s desire, she was nervous. “What if he doesn’t like me?” she wondered.

  Although at first Aquamarine had been happy enough to be free of her sisters, the truth was she’d been coddled and protected for so long that she couldn’t seem to figure anything out on her own. She had never even braided her long, silver hair, for there had always been her sisters’ twelve hands to turn the strands into plaits.

  “I look dreadful,” the mermaid said. Indeed, her hair was stringy and her fingertips were puckered and pale. “I don’t even have anything to wear.”

  “Claire can solve that problem,” Hailey said.

  “I can?” Claire really hadn’t a clue as to what she could do to help out. How could she think straight? Her whole life was packed up and sitting in her grandparents’ garage. When the moving van came to cart everything away, she wasn’t sure she’d even know who she was anymore.

  “I’ll get one of my mother’s dresses,” Hailey said, “and you can make

  it beautiful, the way you always do.”

  Although Claire was pleased by the compliment, she was thoughtful as well. “One problem,” she whispered. “What do we do about the tail?”

  “Oh, the tail.”

  The girls studied Aquamarine solemnly, staring until she covered her face with her hands.

  “I’m horrid,” the mermaid despaired. “I’d be better off falling in love with a dolphin or a shark. It’s no use. It’s hopeless. I might as well stay in this pool until they drain it and take me away.”

  At that, Aquamarine sunk to the depths of the murky water. All the girls could see of her were little bubbles rising and popping as they hit the air.

  “She’s probably right.” Claire crouched down to peer into the deep end. She splashed her hands in the cold salty water, hoping to call Aquamarine to the surface, but there was no response. Not a flicker, not a fin, not a face. “It is hopeless. How could we ever hide her tail?”

  “I’ve got it!” Hailey said. She couldn’t have been more pleased with herself, not even if she’d managed a perfect swan dive. “We’ll say she’s had an accident. She can’t walk, just like your grandfather last winter.”

  That afternoon they ran to Claire’s grandfather’s car in the parking lot, threw themselves inside, and begged to borrow Maury’s wheelchair before he could begin to get out the words Susie Q’s.

  “Please,” the girls cried. “It’s for a friend, and you don’t need it anymore.”

  When they got home, Claire’s grandfather unearthed the wheelchair from the bottom of a pile of odds and ends set out for the moving men. Hailey’s mother found a blue dress at the back of her closet that she had worn to a dance years ago, before Hailey had even been born.

  Later that night, after the grown-ups had gone to sleep, Claire went to her room and opened the last box she had packed. This was where she kept all the treasures of summers past. There were angel wings and creamy oyster shells, tiny starfish and pink rocks. She stitched every one onto the blue dress, so that the fabric shone in the moonlight, sighing as though it had just been fished out of the sea. Claire had decided not to think about the fact that in twenty-four hours she would have to set off for Florida. She wasn’t going to think about what it would be like when there was no one next door to make secret phone calls to late at night, and no one to wave at through the open kitchen windows.

  “It’s perfect,” Hailey declared over the phone when Claire held the dress up to the window for her to see. The blue fabric moved in the breeze. “He’ll fall in love with her the minute he sees her.”

  Both girls were so sure of this they wouldn’t have been the least surprised to discover that all night long Raymond dreamed of high tides and deep blue seas, and that at the bottom of the Capri’s pool, where the moon jellyfish glittered like stars, Aquamarine braided her long, silvery hair and tried her best to ignore her sisters’ song, which reached up from the ocean to call her home.

  THEY DECIDED TO TELL Claire’s grandfather. For one thing, he wasn’t like most grown-ups — he actually listened to what they had to say — and for another, the girls needed to stay at the Capri until nine, in order to take Aquamarine home from her date with Raymond. After they had recounted the story of the mermaid in love, Maury didn’t say a word. He didn’t say he’d never heard such nonsense before. He didn’t say, Maloney baloney, which he sometimes shouted out when he didn’t believe some bit of news he heard on the radio. The way he listened made Claire realize how fortunate she was to have him as her grandfather. He even drove them to the beach that morning, telling Hailey’s mom he wanted to chauffeur the girls as a way to say good-bye, since the next day was Saturday, their last day at the club. Although this excuse was true enough, the other reason he drove wasn’t mentioned: The wheelchair fit neatly into the trunk of his car.

  “I know you won’t believe this,” Maury said when they got to the beach, “but you’re not the only ones who’ve ever seen a mermaid. I’ve spotted several myself down in Florida, although I admit I’ve never gotten to know one personally. When you think about it, you are two lucky girls.”

  Maury told them to have a good time and not to worry. He’d be waiting in the parking lot at nine and, like most people who’ve seen mermaids, even from a distance, he could be depended on not to tell.

  Hailey and Claire borrowed a hammer they found in one of the abandoned cabanas to open the boarded-up cafeteria. Once inside, they swept the layer of sand from the floor and dusted the cobwebs off tables and chairs. After that was accomplished, they set out the dinner Hailey had thought to bring along, a carefully planned menu of tuna-fish sandwiches, seaweed salad, and sardines on toast. There was spring water for Raymond and a glass of saltwater, perfectly chilled for Aquamarine.

  When they got to the pool, they saw that the water had turned so murky that the shallow end resembled a tidal pool. Purple snails climbed the metal rungs of the stairs and seagulls dived to scoop up the little silver fish that swam past the mosaic tiles. Aquamarine was waiting for them. She was even more faded than she’d been the day before, her tail withering to white, her complexion turning chalky, but when she saw the dress they held up, she turned blue with delight.

  “Come and get me out,” the mermaid demanded, and then she thought better of what she had said. “Please,” she amended. “Help me.”

  “How do we get her out?” Claire asked Hailey.

  “We have to go into the pool and carry her,” Hailey said. “There is no other way.”

  Claire turned cold at the very thought. “But I don’t swim,” she reminded her friend.

  “You don’t have to,” Hailey assured her. “All you have to do is wade into the shallow end.”

  And so they went into the pool slowly, and only as deep as their waists. But even in three feet of water, Claire was fearful, especially when the moon jellies floated near. Still, the girls managed to carry Aquamarine out, and they lifted her onto the wheelchair. After that, they helped her get dressed in one of the abandoned cabanas. When they cleaned off the mirror and Aquamarine finally saw her reflection, she made a sound that was somewhere between laughter and a wave breaking.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, completely delighted. “I look like a real girl.”

  As they wheeled Aquamarine to the cafeteria, the sun began to set. Thankfully, the air was turning cooler — still being on land had begun to affect the mermaid. Out of saltwater, she was rapidly drying up. Claire had to collect the trail of scales that were shedding from her silvery tail.

  “What if he doesn’t like me?” Aquamarine worried. “What if I’m all wrong?”

  But she had nothing to worry about. Hailey and Claire knew that for certain because the moment Ray
mond saw her, he looked as though he were drowning.

  “She’s your cousin?” he said to the girls. “I’ve never seen anyone like her before.”

  “That’s because she isn’t like anyone else. She’s special,” Hailey told Raymond. “And she’s had an accident, sort of, so don’t ask her to dance.”

  Hailey and Claire waited outside on the patio. They pulled up lounge chairs and listened to the murmur of voices and the beautiful sound of Aquamarine’s watery laughter. Up in the summer sky, there were so many stars a person would never be able to count them all. Claire wondered if there would be the exact same stars in Florida, and if when she gazed out her window she’d still be looking at the same constellations that Hailey saw.

  “That new girl with the red hair isn’t so horrible,” Claire said. “Her name is Susanna. Susie Q. You get it?” The new people had come back again, and Claire had showed Susanna the room that would soon be hers. “She’s actually nice.”

  “I don’t care,” Hailey said. “It doesn’t really matter to me if she’s nice or not. I’m never talking to her.”

  “Unless there’s a fire,” Claire reminded her friend.

  “Or an earthquake,” Hailey said grudgingly.

  “You’d have to,” Claire said. “You’d have no choice.”

  “But I’d never call her on the phone with our code.”

  “No. You never would.”

  Sometimes it was a comfort to say the thing you were most afraid of aloud. Tonight, Claire felt certain that stars would shine as brightly, no matter where a person was when she watched them. Even if someone was at the bottom of the deepest sea, the light would find her.

  When it was nearly nine o’clock, the girls went to retrieve Aquamarine. Silvery moonlight was spilling into the cafeteria. Raymond looked a little stunned when the girls said he’d better say good-bye to their cousin. Time had a habit of moving too fast. Anyone could see that from the expression on Raymond’s face.