The fog had lifted. The water was steady, but calm. The clouds flitted across the sapphire sky like fish scales reflecting the sun, like the mackerel running slick and silver.
The sand mounds had crumbled back into the waves. The wood had retracted back into the boat, save for one arm, one thick branch that reached out port side, where Manon and Jason held on. All the mermaids dove down deep until they disappeared, leaving only young Nimue, her guardian, and the iridescent siren who saved Leo. Nimue was holding on to Manon; Manon was holding on to Nimue.
Leo was flabbergasted to see Agathe-Alice, dripping wet, back in her wheelchair. Gladys and Beatrix were knitting again, like it was a regular Sunday afternoon.
“How was your swim?” asked Myra.
Agathe-Alice preened. “Oh, just lovely. And lucrative.”
The iridescent figure swam to Leo. “Hello, boy.”
Leo remembered the night she saved him from alcohol poisoning. He didn’t know how to officially thank a mermaid, but he thought he should, so he simply said thank you, and then quickly bowed as an afterthought. She smiled indulgently, and then inclined her head in acknowledgment.
She spoke to Myra Kelley. “The queen has granted your wish, daughter. The body has been brought to shore.”
Oswald came and stood behind Leo and put his hand on his shoulder. Even though there was a sickness in his stomach, Leo had never felt so tall.
“Thank you,” Leo said, and found his voice was strong.
“You are most welcome, little wizard.”
She turned to Jason and Manon. “In the ocean Nimue will live. You will see her again, once, when she comes of age. You cannot look for her anymore, for you will not find her. She must travel her own current. She is like the pearls that belonged to my ancestors—once they touch land, they have to make their own journey back to the sea; we cannot seek them; we cannot find them. Nimue must make her own journey; you cannot seek her; you cannot find her.”
Manon nodded, shivering. She looked to Jason, to her husband, their tears mooring them to the ocean. But two truths sparkled through their agony of separation: first, they could give up the honor of raising Nimue so that Nimue could live, that ultimately was a simple choice, and second, they would see her again.
Her daughter was alive, Mackerel Sky’s own beloved mermaid.
Manon’s heart breached.
She kissed her daughter’s briny cheeks and forehead, her daughter’s skin not sun-tanned and soft anymore like she remembered, but slick and salty, her pores now a sieve for the sea. Nimue took in her mother’s embraces stoically, observant, still, tolerant but reticent, like studying fauna in the wild. The little minnow then darted back and forth among her mother, father, and guardian, emerging and receding like an eel in a reef, each time going farther, each time a little braver. She’d stop her spirited swimming to tread water, her wet eyes blinking, taking in the faces of her parents on the land, a ghost of a smile of recognition at the corners of her lips. She played with the pendant on her mother’s necklace, the buttons on her shirt, the front pocket of her father’s button-down. She ripped a pearlescent button off and put it into a purse strapped to her waist with kelp and cowrie shells.
Jason laughed, a watery sound, a release, a shift. “My new favorite shirt,” he said.
Manon knew he meant it and would wear the shirt until it was threadbare and a hotel for moths. My husband, Manon thought fondly, proudly.
Nimue stayed close between them; her hands traveled her mother’s face, and then her father’s, like she was trying to chart the unfamiliar territory, like she was trying to see underwater.
“We love you beyond words, Nimue. Let these two pearls remind you of us, one for me, your momma, and one for your dad. We will always be with you.”
“Always, pumpkin. We love you.” Jason kissed her forehead.
Nimue stayed very still, nestled in the crook of her mother’s arm, filling that hollow. Manon closed her eyes and imprinted the memory.
Then little Nimue slipped away, down into the dark and deep and unknown, onto her own path, where her parents could not follow. Manon watched the green pearls underwater until they disappeared.
The branch retracted back into the Laughing Lamb, gently taking Manon and Jason with it. It lifted them aboard, then returned to its true form of a keel. Nimue’s guardian, the sole mermaid left, swam to the starboard side where Manon sobbed, held up by Jason, his arms solid.
The ocean lifted the sea sprite up, its billows framing her prow like the figurehead that she was. She rose up on the crest of a wave like the birth of Aphrodite and placed her hand on Manon’s womb. “Do not despair, little mother. You will be much occupied.”
Jason swallowed more ocean and tears when his mouth dropped open.
Then he comprehended.
“But,” Jason sputtered, “it was only just yesterday, just once, well, twice, but how—” He dragged his hand through his hair and expelled a sound that was a cross between a laugh and a yelp.
Myra leaned into Leo. “Let that be a lesson, Leo boy. It only takes the once.”
Leo was incredibly confused as to what Mrs. Myra was talking about. All he knew was that this mermaid floated up on waves and touched Mrs. Perle’s belly and talked about mothers, and now Mrs. Perle was cradling…
Then he got it.
The wave receded, and with it went the mermaid, slipping into its crest, and for a moment, all were still, just breathing.
“Wow,” said Jason. “I’ve cried more today than my entire life.”
“Tears make an ocean,” said Myra Kelley.
Before returning to their knitting, the Three Bats offered Jason and Manon a blanket, which the bedraggled couple took gratefully; cozied up underneath it, they were soon snoring soundly.
For the first time in lifetimes upon lifetimes, Ozzie came and stood beside Myra Kelley and put his arm around her, and the boat rocked a bit less.
Leo came up beside them. He looked at Myra. “I get most of it now, Miss Myra—but what does ‘what was barren shall unfurl’ have to do with being pregnant?”
She patted him on the back, and then pulled him close in a hug. She looked to Manon, snuggled in a deep sleep in Jason’s arms. “I’ll tell you when we get home.”
When they returned to port, they were a subdued crew. They rode in silence, passing the line of shore. The fires and torches lit up and down the coast had burned down to smoke.
The Lone Docks were as busy as they ever had been, full of tourists and law enforcement and coast guard and fishermen and locals and the wharf rats and crime enthusiasts. While Oswald and Jason were tying up, the Smith boys, Barry and Bob, came running to the dock.
“They found her—”
But the elder boy’s words cut off when they saw Leo.
“He knows,” Myra said, and the Smith boys nodded.
“Mighty sorry about your mom, clippah,” they said, taking off their caps. Leo nodded, swaying with fatigue. Then they added a burst of good news: “Have you heard? Derrick Stowe is awake!”
There was a collective shocked exhale.
“Land sakes,” said Myra Kelley.
When Manon finally slept that night in her marriage bed, next to Jason, their bodies touching all night, she dreamed of a mackerel sky.
Burrbank awoke on the highest cliff. He had slept but a few hours. The sky bloomed under placid clouds.
He had to see her again. He had to see the Mermaid.
He stood and surveyed the sea the first morning on this new, rugged coast, the waves gnawing at the cliffs, waiting for her.
Manon stepped beside him. For the longest time, the drop sickened her; she dared not, she could not go near its edge. But now she planted herself on the land and cried streams of tears that would drain through the ground to be reclaimed by the sea.
She would be forever a tributary to the ocean if her daughter could live.
For live little Nimue the mermaid did, swimming in the seas on currents, laughter bubbling, bubbling. Manon could see it, the great room of her mind, her lost daughter the mermaid.
Then in the dream she was under the water in the dark, the dark of waiting, of blood, the silence and the dark. She was herself, but not herself. She was young, little. She was her daughter that day in August on the boat, dead, wrapped in her favorite blanket, which Beatrix, Gladys, and Agathe-Alice had crocheted, sinking into the abyss. The stitched scales began to glow gold, the water began to bubble, and fish scales erupted on her legs and a tail unfurled, attached to her lifeless body. The blanket disappeared entirely into her skin, and gills appeared on her hips. And then she breathed again, deeply, violently, and she no longer breathed air.
Manon was next to Burrbank again. He was wickedly handsome, sharp edges and nimble fingers and spicy wit.
“It would not be a jump,” he said. “Rather a dive. You understand. You of all.”
Yes, Manon thought. I do understand the nature of sailors leaping into the ocean in search of their mermaid.
She cradled the growing baby in her womb. “Did you dive then?”
“A new life begun.” The Captain smiled and was silent. Manon saw he was wearing a green pearl necklace.
She stepped beside him on High Cliffs and looked out beyond their world.
A few weeks later, Manon woke up and dressed at dawn. Jason was long on the water then, but his heart remained with her. She got into her car and drove past the coves under a September sunrise, the inlets carved into the land like teeth in a bite mark.
Derrick was coming home from the hospital, and the heart of Mackerel Sky beat stronger for it. She rode past lawns dotted with signs wishing him a welcome home. Four rainbow flags whipped in the wind, one in the mouth of the Crescent Beach Christmas Pig that adorned the lone lifeguard chair. It had been dug up and discovered during the Mermaid Festival by twin boys searching for Burrbank’s long-lost treasure.
Manon drove on. She thought of Nimue again, always. She flowed with the current.
Out of town, past the crimson-leaved blueberry barrens and the deeper woods, into the mackerel sky, the sun rose. She didn’t want to go to the IGA to buy a pregnancy test and become the latest small-town news broadcast, so she drove thirty minutes and stopped at a pharmacy and peed on two different sticks in their employee bathroom.
She set the pregnancy tests on the edge of the sink and studied the square and circle of white where her future lay. She absolutely believed what the mermaid had told her, but she needed proof.
And on both tests a second pink line made berth.
What is barren shall unfurl, thought Manon as she cried, with a big, wide smile.
She held her secret like a seed, like a soap bubble, like a baby bird. She carried it with her through the morning, as she drove home, when she took the last two boxes out of her apartment on the Lone Docks. The Three Bats were chittering and chuckling among themselves in their rocking chairs. They spoke over each other.
“We’re gonna miss you, deah,” said Beatrix, and then Agathe-Alice: “How’s that handsome fella of yours?” and finally Gladys: “Take this. We’ll leave your damn seat free.”
Manon unwrapped the bundle to a baby quilt, a lamb in a lupine field. Manon studied the intricate stitching with vague familiarity; in places the gold stitching looked like the Paths she had walked before. She looked at the three women, beautiful and wrinkled as time itself, their eyes, on her, full of sparkling mischief, their hair white and grizzled and gray and free. She hugged them each, one by one.
“Most likely a girl too,” Agathe-Alice added.
“What the stars are saying,” confirmed Beatrix.
“Only been wrong once,” declared Gladys.
“Ayuh,” the triad spoke.
When Manon returned home, she scattered two scoops of birdseed and a handful of berries for the crows. She went inside and upstairs, to the end of the hall, to Nimue’s room, and stepped across the threshold.
She stood very still in the center for a long time. She ran her fingers along the spines of the books in the little library there, remembering how much she loved reading to her daughter. Hand-me-downs of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (which Nimue mispronounced “capertillar”) and Goodnight Moon and Owl at Home and a Richard Scarry collection sat silent in shelves. She sat in the rocking chair and stared at a Dahlov Ipcar print of animals in the blue jungle.
She did all this while crying, but the tears were not a waterfall, more a steady rain that gave everything a good soaking so it could grow again. She would forever be a tributary to the ocean.
She would see Jason tonight. He would smell like the sea, and he would look at her like he did and love her like he did before they broke, and they would continue to heal. She would cook dinner with his catch, and he would ask how her day went and care about it. She would tell him about turning in her apartment keys to the Three Bats and show him her gift, and he would not understand the significance but remark on its beauty. She would tell him then that she was sure she was pregnant, and he would kiss her full on the mouth and hold her for a long time.
But for right now, for only this afternoon, she would treasure the secret of her pregnancy for herself. Later she would share her news with her circle, and the number of those in the know would grow with her belly. But not now.
Alone and not alone, she sat in the chair and rocked and read books to her womb, to her growing baby. She sketched the idea for a new quilt, a mermaid girl with dark hair, a water-rushed rock, the sunrise fireworks around her. The waves rumbled and Manon didn’t hear. The pile of books and pencil shavings next to her chair grew taller. The grandfather clock ticked away time.