This time she dares.

She jumps into the water. A standing jump.

It’s cold. Not too cold, though. The water makes the light ripple around her but to her astonishment she’s not surrounded by waterweeds or fish. At the bottom of the water fish live and weeds grow, everyone knows that, and a multitude of creatures move about that aren’t even fish, so they say – the whale, for example, an animal that lives underwater though it’s a mammal. Here, no. The ocean, or Lake Superior, or that mere pond she’s just jumped into that’s empty.

And she can breathe there!

She brings one hand to her neck, checks to see ifgills have sprouted without her knowledge. She remembers enjoying the class about gill structures at the local school in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan. She laughs, she imagines being able to breathe underwater, not having to keep coming up to the surface, spend hours, days, her lifetime under water. Swim between the sunbeams. Filter oxygen with the help of her gills. Play with hersisters, who’ve also become mammals that live underwater though they aren’t fish.

So now that it is possible, she is alone in the midst of the sunbeams, without her sisters, without fish, without waterweeds, without air …

She lacks air! She must go back to the surface! She lacks air! No, it’s all right, she can breathe. Something that isn’t air. Water from deep in the ocean. Or the lake. Or the pond.

But what will become of her, all alone in the empty water? It’s liable to be long, isn’t it? She’s not going to stay like that, hands sketching a little waltz ahead of her in the undulating sunbeams, with nothing to do and no one to talk to, is she?

The world is at one and the same time empty and filled with liquid. And she can’t even manage to drown … Because she can breathe the water. In spite of herself.

Then, in the distance, a silhouette takes shape.

She liked very much the story of the little mermaid in love with a human, who grows two beautiful legs that let her move around on terra firma, to the great displeasure of her father, king of the Tritons. Maybe she’s the one that’s arriving. The Little Mermaid in Andersen’s story comes to meet her opposite, the little human girl without gills but able to breathe under water. She looks at her feet. No, and no fish tail either. She hasn’t turned into a mermaid.

But the silhouette that’s approaching is not that of a delicate red-haired girl with a robe of seashells and a fish tail covered with shiny emerald-green scales. It’s that of a woman. Staggeringly beautiful. With an irresistible smile. And who gestures to her as if they knew one another, as if they were reunited after a long separation. A friend, a close friend, who might replace her sisters, with whom she could chatter away as much as she wanted, confide her child’s secrets in the middle of the empty water. No, no one can replace Béa and Alice, and no one is to know about the sorrow and bad luck she’s suffering now. Especially not a stranger, no matter how beautiful, how friendly, how much of a mermaid she may be!

The little mermaid who is now an adult opens her mouth, speaks. But what she says is incomprehensible.

The new mermaid tries to turn around, to move away, but her feet are caught in the mud. She flaps her arms, she can’t breathe, can’t breathe underwater without gills … The fish-woman approaches her, touches her shoulder, shakes her.

Rhéauna wakes with a start. Devon is bending over her. He tells her something, pointing to the window. She understands that they must have arrived in Ottawa while she was asleep. He’s probably telling her that she has to get off the train. She’s soaking wet, cold sweat is running down her forehead as far as her neck. She’s afraid she has a fever. No, her forehead is cool. It’s just a remnant of fear. Of dying. It will pass. It passes. It’s over.

She thanks Devon in her version of English.