May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (10 page)

Her bursts of speed amazed her. She soon was aware that all this speed was not coming from her arms but … her legs? She gave a powerful kick and found herself racing to the surface, breaking through
it into a high arcing leap. The moon and the stars that had quivered in the sea now seemed rock solid and anchored to the sky.
Good lord, am I flying to heaven? A
slight tingling radiated just beneath her skin, and she was struck by the sense that her legs were no longer legs but had become a tail—glistening and beautiful.

When she plunged back into the water she rolled onto her back and lifted her tail above the water’s surface, looking at it with amazement. She touched the locket around her neck; the iridescent sparkles that gilded her tail were identical to the flattened crystal ovals she had picked from the frayed blanket. She had lost her legs, and yet she had become whole.

A moment later the two dolphins she had seen with Rudd swam up to her. They greeted her in a watery language that had no words, but that May understood immediately. It was as if she had discovered a different order of thinking, a new kind of cognition. She heard more clearly, felt every feathery current of the sea, and now seemed to be able to
communicate without words. She swam far out with the dolphins, beyond The Bones to the rocks that were marked on the charts as Simon’s Ledge. They were several miles offshore, but May and the dolphins had reached their destination in a short time. And when they arrived, she knew almost instantly why the dolphins had brought her to these ledges. This was where she had left the sea, from the time she was an infant. This was where Edgar Plum had found her, in that sea chest. She looked at the two dolphins and stroked their heads.

The dolphins had found her where two minor gyres intersected. Unsure how long the chest would last, they drove her toward the nearest fishing boat they could find. But May felt for sure that there were others out there someplace. There were three mermaids carved on the chest. “They are my kin,” she whispered to herself, but this the dolphins did not understand.

Snow had started to fall, big fluffy flakes descending quietly from the dark bowl of the starry night. An April fools’ joke, for she realized that this was
the first of April. But snow along the coast of Maine in April was no surprise. What surprised May was that she still did not feel cold, not even cool. The irksome variations in temperature that she had felt on land, which would make her run for a shawl or chafe against a high-collared dress in the heat of summer, no longer seemed to affect her. It suddenly struck her that for all these years, she had been a rather clumsy visitor on land. She flinched as the very thought sent a momentary pain shooting through her. How could she return to that life? Pretending to be something she was not, surrounded by people who could never understand?

May was not sure how long she had been swimming. The darkness had begun to fray until the sky looked worn, the thin light of dawn seeping into the new day. But she could not tear herself away and kept swimming until the last star faded into the final remnants of the night. There was a glimmering of pink, then gold on the horizon. The snow had stopped and there was a crispness in the air as she watched the sun rise in the east. And with this dawn, clarity
of thought came to her as well.
My kin might be on land still—like myself—or they might have died.
But the second part of that thought was unendurable. She knew they were still somewhere out there, and so she returned to land.

T
HE SHEETS FELT ODD
and the mattress lumpy, but hadn’t they always been that way? May wondered as she awakened after a brief hour’s sleep. It was the absence of movement that struck her first—that billowing motion that had enveloped her all while she was in the sea; that absence as well as an odd sense of disconnection. When she had been swimming she felt fused with life, with Earth. There was a vital correspondence with all living things as if she were plumbing the most basic elements from which life arose. But she had left that liquid essence behind, and now the sheets seemed to scratch, the mattress felt lumpy, and just then there was that familiar caw.

“May! May!” Zeeba’s voice outside her bedroom splintered the air.

“What?”

“Would you mind explaining something to me, young lady?”

Young lady!
May winced. She felt like calling back, “What do you want, old lady?”

Zeeba was standing just outside her door and shoved it open now. “What in tarnation is that flying on the clothesline?”

May looked out the window from her bedroom. She began to laugh. Her wet petticoat had frozen solid and was now dancing in a stiff breeze. Luckily her tail had quickly dissolved into two very human legs when she had returned from her miraculous awakening. She had peeled off the wet petticoat, put on her skirt, blouse, and calico jacket, and proceeded to hang the petticoat on the clothesline. It wasn’t wash day, and usually when only one garment had to be washed in cold weather, they hung it up to dry inside near the wood-burning stove. But May had wanted to be as quiet as possible when she returned to the house a few hours
before and hadn’t thought twice about hanging it outside. She certainly didn’t want anyone finding saltwater stains on the wood floor.

“I just rinsed it last night when I came back from the dance and hung it out to dry, Zeeba.”

“Hrrumph!” was the only utterance she heard as Zeeba turned away and walked back to the kitchen.

May couldn’t resist. “You must be feeling better. You’re up earlier than I am.”

The creak of the floorboards stopped. She could imagine Hepzibah fuming now. To comment positively on Hepzibah’s health was to enter dangerous territory. Hepzibah did not take kindly to any sort of comments on the improvement of her health by anyone who was not a physician. She didn’t even like doctors to express too much hope. She preferred that they remain confounded or at least perplexed.

May got up, dressed, and went about her chores as she usually did, but she was suddenly aware of how awkward everything felt, from the ground under the milking stool as she sat to milk Bells Two to the
stairs winding up to the lantern room when she went to dust the lenses. She wondered if she looked odd doing these tasks. Did she walk funny? She felt very peculiar. There was that expression “like a fish out of water” — was that what she now appeared to be?

When May had completed her chores, she knew she should go back downstairs, join her father for a mug of tea, and go over the shipping news, the accounts that listed any merchant vessels that might be plying the regular routes from Halifax to Boston or the reverse. But she was hesitant. Would he find a change in her? Were there any telltale signs of what had happened the previous night? When he had found her in that sea chest as an infant, did she have—she smiled softly to herself—a tail? Two days before, she would have been staggered and embarrassed if such a thought had crossed her mind, but now she wanted desperately to ask him —
Did I have a tail?
There were, after all, those glistening little ovals that she now knew were scales in the chest. She took a deep breath and started down the stairs.

She slid her eyes cautiously toward the pine table
where Gar was sitting. He was deeply engrossed in the shipping news and did not look up. But she did observe that her father seemed better than he had in weeks and had even put on his uniform. He was now freshly shaved, wearing his vest, jacket, and cap as he sat at the table, reading. He looked ready for lighthouse business.

“Pa, is it time already for another inspection?”

“No, de-ah, not for another month.” He looked up at her brightly, and she felt color rise in her cheeks. “They never get up here until first week of May. But you’ve been doing more than your share of the work these last weeks. My hip hardly gives me a twinge. So I’ll be helping out more. And I never seen you look prettier than this morning.” Something lurched in her stomach. “Dancing agrees with you.”

Relief swept through her, and it was all she could do to refrain from saying, “Not dancing, Pa, swimming.”

“Now, tomorrow,” her father continued, “I’m going to take you in on the skiff. I want you to be able to finish up school this term.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed nervously. Did this mean he was thinking about sending her inland when she finished her schooling? Had he picked up on something and wanted to get her as far away from the sea as possible? If Gar was trying to separate her from the sea, she would have to flee—flee to her true home and find her true kin.

“Pa, don’t misunderstand, I want to go back to school, but I really don’t want to go to Augusta or Bridgeton when I graduate.”

“Well, that’s not why I want you to go to school. You need to be with young folk—like you were at the dance.”

A sigh issued forth from the corner of the kitchen where Hepzibah was rattling a spoon noisily in a glass of one of her tonics.

“Yes, that would be nice. And, Pa, maybe I could help Miss Lowe at the library right in Bar Harbor. I mean, that would be good, wouldn’t it? I’m sure she needs help. And it wouldn’t be so far away, you know.”

“Well, it’s a tiny library—not like in Augusta. So
I’m not sure how much help she would need,” her father replied.

May was now desperate to change the subject. “Funny about that snow. Not a flake of it stuck. Just April fools’, I guess.”

“What snow?” Edgar Plum asked.

“Late last night, almost at dawn. It snowed … didn’t it?” May asked nervously.

“You were up?”

“No, no,” she paused. “I must have dreamed it.”

The rattling of the spoon in the glass stopped. Hepzibah turned around slowly and fixed her eyes on May. “You must have dreamed it because I was up. I got one of those terrible back cramps. The only way to get rid of it is to wrap a hot brick, tuck it behind my back, and sit in that chair. I didn’t see no snow.”

“You were up?” May said weakly.

“Certainly was.”

Hepzibah was up and hadn’t caught her coming back into the house? She rarely came into May’s tiny little bedroom on the landing a quarter way up the
tower. But nonetheless May could have been caught returning. She must be careful when she went out again, which she planned to do as soon as possible.

For May had formed a larger plan and knew that the time was approaching for a very long swim. A swim to find the
Resolute.
She had to figure out where in the vast Atlantic the bones of that ship lay. She needed to study the tracks of the sea, learn about them through Maury’s wind-and-current studies, and through swimming herself. She would have to build up her own strength, her stamina. But there was something else beyond her own abilities that was crucial for this swim. It was as if she were waiting for someone to go with her, accompany her. She did not want to go alone.

After finishing her tea she returned to the watch room of the lighthouse and read Matthew Fontaine Maury. The book that had seemed so impenetrable to her the day before, she now read with a new understanding. Maury only wrote about the currents of wind and sea, but she had swum them. He had only thought about the tug of the opposing gyres and
eddies off the New England coast, but she had felt them. He had his theories based on a combination of Scripture and mathematics, but she had been born to them. He had been a lieutenant in the navy, but she was a daughter of the sea, and she was determined to find her kin.
Oh, Mr. Maury,
she thought.
You don’t know the half of it!

E
VERY NIGHT FOR THE NEXT WEEK,
May slipped out to the sea. Each time she slid into the water she was overwhelmed by a powerful sense of belonging, finally being at home. She had no fears whatsoever. She had seen sharks, but they seemed to avoid her. She had become familiar with the grinding noise of the steamboat engines that brought people up from Boston to Bar Harbor and the slicing sound of a sailing schooner’s keel as it passed through the water. It did not take her long to learn the navigation routes of the larger vessels in order to avoid them. On one of her first nights, she had nearly ensnared herself in a herring weir. Ever since, she’d kept a keen lookout for the bobbing buoys to which the vast nets
were attached. She swam every current between Egg Rock and Eastport and then down to Cape Rosier. These were distances of forty miles or more, but she could cover them in a night of swimming, especially if she took advantage of the tides and the normal currents.

On the fifth night after she had crossed over she became aware of a slightly altered quality in the water on either side of her. It was as if there were pockets of air, voids in the water. At first she thought they were large bubbles of some sort, but they had no contours. She was most acutely aware of these spaces that flanked her body when she swam, but she had begun to sense them on land as well. She longed for these voids to be filled, to reveal themselves.

If she understood the tracks of the sea, she might be able to determine where the
Resolute’s
wreckage could be found, even fifteen years after it went down. Had there been another sea chest? Three mermaids were carved on the one that Gar had pulled from the sea. Could that mean that there were two others beside herself? That she had sisters?

There was one place her swimming had not yet taken her: The Bones, where the schooner had wrecked. She was afraid to go there, afraid of what she might see—dead men, their unseeing eyes staring dumbly into a watery eternity, their bones. Perhaps fish had scavenged their flesh. The idea was unnerving. And yet she knew that she must dive this wreck. She needed to understand how the currents might have disturbed it; how the fractured timbers from the ship could have been swirled away.

One evening, a week after her transformation, May determined she would go. As she was approaching The Bones, she could see that rigging lines were still tangled around some of the rocks. She gasped when she saw a baby seal thrashing about in an eddy. He had been snagged by rigging and was now crying, his mother barking desperately.