An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant (9 page)

BOOK: An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant
13.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She laid
a cool, moist hand onto his cheek and looked at him unsmilingly. After a
moment, the spectacular smile split her face again and lit her eyes, and then
she backed away from him without looking at the ocean.

“Wait!”

But she
only waved and turned to run into the shallow water. When the water reached her
thighs, she flung herself into the next wave. John saw a tangle of arms and
hair as she surged away from him.

“Wait,”
he repeated to himself. He didn’t know what else to say.

When she
looked back at him, her laughter danced like sunlight on waves. And then she
disappeared around the point toward the canal.

***

That
evening, John ventured south over the drawbridge to the Dockside, as much to
avoid running into Raimunda as for a change of culinary pace. Isla Encantada
was small and intimate, and he’d be a sitting duck if she showed up. He’d had
all day to consider what he’d done last night and he still didn’t know how it
had happened. He wasn’t a saint by any means, but he knew where his boundaries
were. At least, he thought that he’d known. Raimunda had waltzed right over
them as if they didn’t exist. As if she had a secret code that bypassed his
system programming. The question was: would Zoë believe him? Would she forgive
him? They lived together; it mattered a great deal what he did with another
woman, to himself as much as to Zoë. Stefan, if he knew, would grin and offer
to buy him a beer.

John
asked the waitress to seat him as far from the entrance as possible and she led
him to a small table next to the canal. While he waited for his order, he drank
iced tea and composed a speech to Zoë, but no matter how many times he tried,
nothing he said sounded plausible or defensible. He stayed there all evening
trying to find the words, sitting in an ever-increasing cloud of mosquitoes who
dined on his penitent flesh until the waitress gently shooed him out.

Five

 

When it finally came time
for John to strap on an oxygen
tank and drop sixty feet to the ocean floor, he found that nearly drowning no
longer dominated his thoughts. He couldn’t look at the Caribbean without seeing
Tamarind’s luminous eyes—everything else about the sea receded into
meaninglessness. He hadn’t entirely lost his fear. It had just moved inside a
plexi-glass box inside his mind: he could see his irrational self pounding and
mouthing words, but it had been reduced to wild gestures that he ignored.

He met
Chris at his shop. Chris had lost the feral gleam in his eyes and never
mentioned the
gente del mar
while they loaded gear with Pablo and Jorge
onto his boat. His no-nonsense demeanor and thorough checklist turned the
lights out in John’s anxiety box. As they worked, he told John what to expect
at Amberjack—the reef southwest of Culebra named for the silver fish that
clustered in schools there. The currents were variable, for good and for bad,
but nothing that a neophyte couldn’t handle. John started to look forward to
it, to see himself surrounded by water and breathing fine.

They’d
boarded the boat and were casting away when he caught sight of Raimunda
slouching against a corrugated building on shore, one knee bent under her
tiered skirt. Even from a distance, warm, spicy smoke from her cigarette
drifted over the cool smell of saltwater, mesmerizing and insistent. A familiar
hollowness filled John. He nearly cried out to Chris to reverse course and tie
up again, but he clinched his jaw instead and wrenched his gaze forward to the
brilliant horizon. The scent of clove lingered like regret until Culebra had
shrunk into a dark speck.

While
they sailed, an ominous patch of clouds obscured the sun. Pablo and Jorge
shielded their eyes and muttered to each other, but as quickly as it had
appeared, the patch blew away. Chris pulled out photo albums with hundreds of
pictures of fish, crustaceans, coral, and seaweed from dives he’d taken
throughout the Caribbean. John nodded and murmured over as many pictures as he
deemed polite. Perhaps it was the protective sheet overlaying the images, but
the sea life looked plastic and posed.

Chris
closed the creaky cover on the last album. “I’ve been everywhere. Always come
back to Culebra though. It isn’t the best diving in the world, but there’s
something about the waters around this little rock in the ocean. It’s not just
that they’re so clear. There’s something, I don’t know, something
eternal
.
Something bigger than us here.”

John,
who’d let the sound of the engine lull him into a trance, stirred and
stretched. He’d been thinking of Tamarind’s crazy hair and infectious laugh.
The outrageous way she’d spit out her food, the graceful speed of her swimming.
He’d tried to recall her humming, but he could only identify its absence. He
tugged himself back to the present and Chris, who sat rubbing the album cover.

“I guess
Culebra really is the ‘Enchanted Isle,’” he said. It was the first thing that
came to mind.

Chris
looked at John out of the corner of his eye. His introspective mood visibly
changed. “Think you’ll see your mermaid?”

The
question didn’t surprise John. It didn’t bother him as much as it would have
two days ago. “Maybe.”

“Ah-ha!
You’ve already seen her again.” Chris studied him. “She’s pulling you under her
spell.”

A
dolphin broke the surface of the water. John watched as it leapt beside the
boat, racing them. An image of himself riding on its back filled his mind,
echoing his dream from the morning after his rescue. “I met the girl who pulled
me out, yes.”

Chris
beamed. “What’d I tell you?”

John
smiled at him. “She’s a scrawny young thing.” He almost said,
Too young for
me
. He didn’t. Instead, he pointed out the obvious. “With legs.”

Chris
grinned. “Oh, yeah. They can put on legs, walk on shore. I’ll bet you cold cash
you won’t find it easy to go back to Pittsburgh next week.”

It was
clear that Chris couldn’t be talked from his irrational belief. But how
irrational was it? How had Tamarind pulled him, a 165-pound male, from eight
feet of ocean? She’d grabbed him as he slipped under that last time. Perhaps
that explained it….

John
shoved the doubt aside and ended their debate with a joke. “Don’t tell my
girlfriend that. She’ll come down here and kick my ass all the way back if I
don’t.”

Chris
shook his head and stowed the albums away in watertight bags. As he headed
below decks to put them into a locker, he called over his shoulder, “I came to
Culebra to escape my girlfriend. Best thing I ever did.”

***

At
Amberjack, they descended through warm, clear water to a bottom where
tan-colored soft corals sprouted, sheltering tiny black-and-yellow-striped
wrasses. A sharp, brief twinge of fear erupted through John’s mental restraint,
but it was too late. He succumbed to the press of water overhead, gave into
it—and found himself free to mingle with a teeming world of alien life. Even as
John watched, the wrasses set up cleaning stations there to rid barracudas and
orange hogfish of parasites. Not far from the coral lay a long line of rocks
where delicate sponges and red and black deep-water gorgonians blossomed in a
rich brocade, large French angels gliding among them. At the end of the row of
rocks a cabin-sized boulder jutted off the flat sand. A school of amberjack
swirled around John, many of them larger than his torso. Here Chris urged him
to shoot some photos.

As John
floated over the boulder with his waterproof disposable at his eye, he heard—or
rather felt—humming like the song Tamarind had hummed the day before. The
weight of the water around him disappeared and colors brightened. Yet when he
looked around he saw nobody but Chris, who hovered nearby. Chris turned his
palm up, questioning. He grabbed at his own throat with two hands before
repeating the upturned palm. John shook his head vigorously and brought the
camera again to his eye. No panic assailed him now. He’d shed his fear as
easily as a sea snake shed its skin.

***

In the
warm air afterwards, his body weighed more and the nerves in his skin tingled,
exposed. The fiberglass deck burned his bare soles, but John scarcely noticed.
As he moved around the deck, he swayed to the rhythm of his afternoon dive even
though the boat rocked little. When they returned to Chris’s dock in the
harbor, they tied the boat up and began stowing gear in the lockers. Voices
further down the dock, the thin cries of seabirds, and the sawing of outboard
motors out in the harbor all washed over him after the deep silence of
Amberjack.

“John.”
Tamarind’s odd voice startled him.

Looking
up, he saw her standing on the dock in his t-shirt and the same pair of cargo
shorts that she’d worn the day before and still barefoot. Copper-colored hair
corkscrewed around her face, obscuring her eyes in the breeze. A smile radiated
through the mess.

“Hey,
Tamarind! And here I was afraid I’d never see that t-shirt again.”

Chris
paused behind him at that moment and said in a low voice, “I’d be afraid I’d
never see what’s in that t-shirt again.” Raising his voice, he said, “Go on. I
can take care of the rest of this. See you tomorrow then.”

John
nodded, grabbed his backpack and slipped on his sandals before stepping up onto
the dock.

“Your
father anchor somewhere close by?”

“Yes.”
She matched his pace as he walked. “What were you doing? Fishing?”

“Nope.
That guy—Chris,” here he gestured behind him, “is keeping an eye on me while I
dive. We went out to Amberjack today.”

“Keeping
an eye on you? What does that mean?”

John
looked at her, but it was a serious question. “Watch. Dive with me in case I
try to drown myself again.”

“Oh.
Well, then, that makes sense. You obviously have a lot to learn.”

“Gee,
thanks.”

She
stopped. “Did I say something wrong?”

John
sighed and turned toward her. “No, no. I guess I’m not used to hearing such
brutal honesty, except from my—my friend Zoë. But she enjoys it.”

“Enjoys
it?” She appeared to think for a moment. “It’s not that I enjoy or don’t enjoy
it. I just tell the truth. We were all babies once.”

John
looked at her for a long moment. “I believe you.” He heard the surprise in his
voice and hurried on. “Do you dive?”

She
looked away and started walking again. “Yes.”

“Do you
want to dive with me tomorrow then? Chris won’t mind.” He didn’t say that Chris
would salivate at the chance to dive with a mermaid. He didn’t think that he
could say that with a straight face.

“I
haven’t ... with the things you use.”

“Really?”
They walked along in silence while he pondered what she meant. He imagined Chris
grinning. He went on slowly, thinking aloud, “You dive like pearl divers?
That’s amazing! How long can you stay down?”

She
looked at him, her eyes wide, but said nothing.

“Well, I
don’t know much about them, but I think there are some people who can dive
pretty deep and stay there for a minute or two to look for oysters. Where’d you
learn to dive without equipment?”

“I don’t
know.” She looked away from him.

“You
don’t know?”

“We’ve
always dived without things, all of us.”

“All of
you?”

“All of
my family.”

“Why?
Why does your family dive? Is it for your livelihood?”

““Livelihood’?
What’s that?” Again, the eyes that haunted his dreams jolted him as she turned
to look at him.

“To
bring up stuff to sell. Like the pearl divers.”

She
shrugged. “We just do. We dive because we can.”

“Oh,
well, that’s a good enough reason.” He looked at her, but her crazy hair hid
her features. He rushed on. “I think it’d be pretty cool to see you in action.
That’s if you’d show me.”

She
didn’t say anything, her head bent to look at the street onto which they’d just
stepped. John changed the subject.

“Can you
do that humming thing again? It was unbelievable! I felt like I’d just had a
full night’s sleep
and
a massage. I can’t remember being so relaxed and
alert.”

Without
answering, Tamarind began humming. This time, the throat-level hum skipped
along in a decidedly upbeat melody. They walked for several minutes with the
heat of the afternoon rising from the pavement around them. John, looking at
Tamarind’s feet, wondered if they’d developed protective calluses or if her
humming blocked out all burning sensation in them. He was about to ask her if
she wanted to join him for lunch when she abruptly stopped humming. He glanced
aside. Her gaze had frozen forward.

“I’ve
got to go. Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow.” A note of panic sounded in her
voice.

“Wait!
Tell me where I can find you.”

She
didn’t answer; instead she turned down a side street and hurried away. John
started to call after her when a small movement caused him to look ahead. Ana
sat cross-legged under a palm tree forty feet away, a large mat in front of
her. Sunlight glinted on numerous small objects around her. When John’s gaze
met hers, she folded her hands into her scrawny lap and nodded. The lightness
following Tamarind’s humming drained away into the scorching pavement. A gull
laughed overhead. John looked up reflexively and bird crap dropped onto his
bare shoulder.

BOOK: An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant
13.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Tumbling by Caela Carter
Logan's Redemption by Cara Marsi
Web of Angels by Lilian Nattel
Knockout Games by G. Neri
Comfort Zone by Lindsay Tanner
The Destiny of Amalah by Thandi Ryan