Talk spread like fire across a plain when Stéphane Stowe, the Blackest man in Mackerel Sky—in fact, one of the only Black men in Mackerel Sky—returned from Florida with a white woman. He went fishing there for three winters and came back after the third with a bombshell aboard his boat. She had hair black like wet dark bark, and eyes of green that sparkled disarmingly.
They said that Millicent Stowe would have won Miss Mermaid in the Open Pageant that they held every year Friday night at the Mermaid Festival, but she never entered. She was quiet, reserved, and preferred the library above all things. She fell into books and disappeared for hours at a time. During her pregnancy she walked the beach and read borrowed books that she shelved when she worked in the stacks. Millicent loved water and word, her husband and son.
Stéphane had not been back to the Millcreek Library in years, but he ended up there in the early morning of the Mermaid Festival. He had come into town to check on his boat and found himself with his hands in his back pockets, watching the waterwheel. The library held a book sale during the festival every year, and he had some books to donate that had been sitting in a box in his house for months, piling up, and today felt like a good day to get something done long overdue.
He waved to Widow Pines, who, although a librarian for decades upon decades, kept fisherman’s hours and so had been up organizing children’s books since about three a.m., before Stéphane arrived with the end of night. She hugged him, as she always did, and told him she had something for him. He followed her into the dark library to the back office the same time as the sun rose.
He remembered the smell of the library—paper pages and carpet and oranges, Widow Pines’s favorite snack. He moved the rest of the big boxes of books for sale outside for her because he thought it foolish she move anything heavy herself. She thought him foolish for worrying. She fed him coffee and doughnuts as thanks and told him she missed Millie every day. Widow Pines loved books and loved introducing books to children even more so, and Millie was always akin to a wide-eyed child when it came to books, so when Millie worked at the library they got along properly.
Widow Pines handed Stéphane a journal, leather-bound, with an empty setting in the cover where a stone was once embedded. Inside the front cover, Musings of a Mermaid: A Memoir by Millicent Stowe was written.
“Funniest book, that journal is. I found it in the fantasy section, near the mermaid section, of all places, and kept setting it aside to return to you, and I kept on forgetting where I had put it down. Very strange. Almost like it was moving on me! But this time it stayed put. I thought you’d like to have it. I’d find her in all corners of the library, Millie; she was always reading and writing. I thought she might have something she wanted to tell you.” Widow Pines patted his hand. “Your boy’s gonna be fine, Captain. He’s got good genes.”
She smiled, nodded, still as a lighthouse.
When Blade got back into his truck he put Millie’s journal on the dashboard, and it sat there while he sold his handmade knives with the bone handles in the craft tent. It sat there while he drove the half hour to the hospital to visit his son as the Mermaid Parade was marching down Main Street. Blade couldn’t open it yet. He didn’t want to lose himself in grief over the memory of his wife when his heart was already breaking over his son. It stayed forgotten on the dashboard through the Mermaid Festival fireworks and overnight, but then in the early-morning hours he brought it into Derrick’s hospital room.
Ricky Townsend had fallen asleep; he had spent the whole of yesterday there, sitting and eating fried dough, reading poetry out loud, narrating the baseball game. He stood up as Stéphane entered and wiped his hands, covered in powdered sugar, on his pants.
“Fried dough,” he apologized, his hair spiking all over the place from sleeping squished in the chair.
“Derrick’s favorite,” Stéphane stated, and Ricky smiled sheepishly because he already knew.
“How’s the room working out?” Stéphane asked.
Ricky had rented a room owned by Gladys, Beatrix, and Agathe-Alice on the Lone Docks.
“It’s really good. It’s working out good.”
The Three Bats had shown up at one of the baseball home games, three old ladies in their deck chairs, and at one point called Ricky over with a knitting needle.
“We heard you needed a new place to live,” Gladys said to him that day.
He nodded.
“We have a spare room available. We also have an apartment that should be available very soon,” Agathe-Alice added.
“Come by this afternoon, after you have visited that sweet boyfriend of yours. Let him know we need him back on the mound,” said Beatrix.
The Three Bats smiled at Ricky’s shocked expression. Ricky had no idea how they knew, but he basked in the comfort and joy of being out and himself safely for the very first time. The old ladies knew he and Derrick were boyfriends and didn’t slip on a stitch. Still, he tested the waters. He said quietly, very quietly, “He is very sweet, isn’t he?”
“Ayuh.” Gladys.
“Sweeter than sugar.” Beatrix.
“Don’t you worry, deah.” Agathe-Alice.
Ricky’s legs felt more solid on his foundation of self with their acceptance.
In exchange for pennies of rent Ricky helped out as the Three Bats’ handyman and personal grocery shopper at the IGA and lived in their spare room, under the apartment where Manon lived. He had magazine pictures of David Bowie taped to his walls, a bulbous old television from the eighties, and a wastepaper basket filled with hospital visitor name tags. He wrote in his journal every night and never felt more alive. He missed Derrick achingly.
Still, he wasn’t yet ready to sit and chat with his secret boyfriend’s father next to said secret boyfriend’s hospital bed. He didn’t want to accidentally out Derrick. He mumbled some sort of goodbye and left the last of the fried dough for Stéphane or one of the nurses or anyone on his way out of there.
After checking on Derrick (no change), Stéphane sat in the mauve chair to read. It was still warm from Ricky’s vigil. He opened his dead wife’s journal.
And began to remember what an old spell had made him forget.
In his coma, Derrick felt like he was in the womb of the sea. Dark as night shadows and warm; he heard the continual rushing of currents like a bloodstream.
He couldn’t remember how he got there.
Content, relaxed, he swam somersaults and figure-skating axels and reveled in his free body. A bubble floated up past him, then two, then a tumultuous multitude, and suddenly he was in the middle of a school of mermaids, swimming up up up to the surface. They cracked the mirror of the sea into a world of white and gray—a blizzard above swells.
“This is where you live,” a mermaid of goldenrod and mustard seed gasped reverently, frightened. Derrick had never thought of it that way, that some mermaids believed that where the waves on the surface of water met the air, not the land itself, was where humans came from.
Some of the mermaids had no fear and surfed the giant crests of the blizzard with abandon, jumping like porpoises, gilded breaching. When the orca came barreling toward them, hunting, he saw his mother; she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the deep, their tails beating in rhythm, speeding mermaids pushing hard beside them, the water blooming red behind them.
They swam a long time before they switched course and began heading toward the surface and the light. When Derrick’s head burst through the seawater he saw a beach beyond the billows, a beach he knew well, the beach where he practiced pitching and his mother walked every day, the beach where the Townsend twins beat him into oblivion, Mackerel Sky’s Crescent.
He and his mother climbed onto a rock, their tails flirting with the sea.
“I loved this place when I lived with your father. I walked it almost every day, at sunrise, pregnant too.”
“Did he know?” Derrick gestured to her tail, and then suddenly he became overcome because there she was right before him, his mother, who had been dead since he was eight. His mother was a mermaid.
“He knew at first; he rescued me. I would have died had he not taken me aboard. I was trapped in a net, ghost gear from a boat. He cut me free, took care of me. He won’t remember now, of course, because that’s the magic,” she said sadly. “If he finds my journal he will remember, but only while the covers are open. When they close, he forgets again.” She looked to the moon as if they shared a secret. “I had to leave him, and you—not because I wanted to. I never wanted to. I loved him, and you, so much. I made a deal with a sea witch to have a human life with him. I never expected to be so lucky as to have you! One hundred full moons, no more. I was only allowed one hundred full moons to be human, and in that time, during those moons, I married your father, had you. It was wonderful. I only left because the spell expired, and I had to return to survive.”
She turned to the beach, where a younger Stéphane was chasing a much younger Derrick on the shore.
He remembered that day on the beach; it was the day she drowned. He remembered that day; he would see his mother’s shoes and shorts by the water’s edge, but not his mother.
He realized he was watching a memory.
He saw himself tumble in the sand and be picked up and swung over his huge father’s shoulder, scream-laughing. He saw the two of them, father and son, at the dawn of a terrible heartbreak, running carefree on the beach toward his mother’s clothes, the last indication of her they ever saw.
For months afterward, Stéphane and Derrick would each sleep with T-shirts she had left behind in the laundry hamper, waking each morning with the clothing wet from tears.
But the vision wasn’t happening as he remembered it. He remembered them calling for her and no answer. And then the tragedy starting. He remembered the police and coast guard, his parents’ friends’ boats searching.
How a month later they declared her dead. He remembered that very well.
But this version was different, in this version his mother emerged from the ocean a mermaid, and he and his father ran to her in the water and embraced her.
“It’s time,” Stéphane said, a question, a prayer.
“Yes,” she said.
They cried.
Tears make an ocean, Derrick remembered Myra Kelley saying to him once.
Derrick wasn’t sure how, but he understood. His mother’s potion, her spell, had come to its end, and she could no longer be human. His father knew. His father knew all along.
He watched her kiss them both goodbye in the past.
“The sea witch came to me that final full moon, that day I left you on the beach. She offered me a choice. She would give me a lifetime as a human in exchange for you. So the hardest decision of my life, to leave you, became less difficult in the end to make, because I would never give you to her. Me leaving meant you could live. Me leaving meant she could never touch you.”
As she narrated the memory, Derrick watched his mother in the past lay her forehead on her husband Stéphane and then kiss him full on the lips. She then turned to Derrick and hugged him fiercely. Derrick saw how much his family loved each other, and that eased the yoke of his sadness.
“I will return. I don’t know how, but I will. I will seek the magic out in the waters, and I will see both of you again. But until then, it is safer for you not to remember.”
She kissed them once more, then swam out to the deep. She sang to Stéphane and Derrick then, a siren’s song that did not have the same effect on Derrick the merman as Derrick the eight-year-old boy saying goodbye to his mother. The song was beautiful, haunting, like the lament of a falling star. Derrick watched as his younger self’s and his father’s eyes glazed over and sparkles tumbled out of their ears.
“Those lights are your memories of me as a mermaid,” Millicent said, tears mixing with the sea spray. “Including this last one. The spell took them from you and then hid them. This last memory was hidden deep in your mind. The other memories were kept in my journal, which was concealed in the library by a misplacement spell. It will now find its way to you.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go, Mom.” His mother embraced him on the rock in the sea, held her son in a hug that only could be given by a mother. On the beach, once Stéphane and Derrick emerged from the ocean, the memory now unfolded as it always had: they ran to the clothes first and then the water and began calling her name.
“I’m still looking for a way back. I will find it. I will find my way back to you,” Millicent said, her eyes sharp.
They watched the father and son hug and cry together, and then Millicent the mermaid held her son Derrick on the black rock under the sun and they cried too, scraping off the barnacles of grief that had built up over time.
“Your father loved more deeply and more fully than I could have ever hoped for. He loves you in that same way, just the way you are. Because who you are is beautiful.” She cupped his face. “How much I have missed you.”
The beach was empty again. Derrick followed his mother back into the sea, and they swam until they were surrounded by the green and gray and black of the water once more.
“Why were you always writing and reading about mermaids if you were one?”
“I was fascinated by what you humans thought you knew. I wanted to know about our history through the eyes of humans. Perhaps the humans know something about my spell that the mermaids don’t. But mostly I love books, learning about this surface world, which exists only in the imaginations of my kind. We don’t have such things in the ocean, and to be able to open a binding and travel or fall in love or learn about history or ancestry or to fight a battle is a special kind of magic.”
Derrick agreed. He too respected the power of words.
Suddenly, underwater, from above, from everywhere, the water glowed with a bright light that grew in intensity. A great golden net was descending from the surface at a pace too fast to outswim. Millicent embraced Derrick protectively, but the shimmering net passed through her body entirely like a ghost and ensnared Derrick, pulling him far away from her. She struggled to catch him; the net pulled him away too fast, and soon Derrick’s mother disappeared in the dark. The net pulled and pulled, and he burst through the surface and over the town and down Route 1 and then west to the hospital, where the golden net pulled him to the corner room on the third floor past the mauve chair and into the bed and back into his body, where after six weeks and four days of being in a coma, Derrick Stowe opened his eyes.
Blade sat in the chair, reading his wife’s journal, tears streaming down his face. The hidden memories of Millicent the mermaid mended the rips in his heart.
His wife was a mermaid.
And she was alive.
“Dad?” Derrick’s voice was weak, thin, but it was audible.
Blade closed the book and rushed to Derrick’s bedside, his heart bursting to the brim with hope. He saw his son’s open eyes and kissed his son’s forehead and let the tears come.
“Bonjour, mon fils. My dear boy. My love. My life.” Stéphane sat on the edge of the bed and embraced his son, embraced his breathing, awake, dear son, in a bear hug entangled in hospital wires, and amid the furious flurry that followed, nurses and doctors that broke into orbit around them and ran tests and took vitals and measured the vitality of a life, the father and his son were perfectly still, together.