May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (20 page)

Later that morning May and her father took the skiff to Bar Harbor. The town pier was half underwater from the storm surge, and lobster traps that
had been stacked at the fish pier bobbled about freely now in the harbor, along with bait barrels.

“Raise up the centerboard, May, and we’ll run her right up on the beach, since it looks like the only working pier is the fish one, and we better not take up any room.”

The small crescent of beach was piled high with debris flung up from the hurricane: lobster pots, barrels, and dead fish, small ones—mackerel, stripers, smelts, herring—their eyes glazed and becoming filmy, their gills still open as if caught in a last gasp. She imagined them just hours before, flopping about, stunned at their sudden forced expulsion from the sea.

May turned to her father. “You want me to jump out with the painter and tie us up?” She saw a pulse start to work in Gar’s jaw.

“Oh, no! No! I’ll do it. I’m still limber enough.” He gave a nervous laugh.

He’s still worried,
May thought, worried that she would instantly become something else lest the tiniest drop of water touch her foot, or God forbid, her
jump was short and she fell in. Did he think she would be like one of those fish that hours before had been gasping on land? Did he know that she had crossed over and come back? Of course not. But how often would she come back—for Gar, for Hugh?

“Hi! Gar, May. Can I give you a hand with that painter?” May’s stomach clutched. It was Rudd.

“Oh, Rudd, kind of you. May, get up there and toss him the painter.”

May walked up to the bow grimly. She was sick of this man. Sick of his lurking about the edges of her life, sick of that festering brutality she detected in him. But most of all she was sick of her own fears of him. He preyed on weakness. She coiled the painter and flung it toward Rudd. He had to back away a bit, for she had aimed for his face.

“Gotcha on the end of a line again, darlin’,” he said in a low voice that only May could hear. He tethered the rope to a granite block on the beach. May jumped quickly onto a pile of seaweed.

“She’s nimble, that one,” Gar said as he swung a leg over the bow.

“Oh, quite the mountaineer, I think!” May’s blood froze.
No, he couldn’t have!
Was it possible that he had followed her and Hugh that day? Would he have seen them that night? “Yep, she moves fast, that one!”

May’s face turned as red as her hair. “I’m going to the library to see if Miss Lowe’s all right.”

“Library’s fine, May. You can still go there and read your books with the doctor or that Harvard fellow.”

May tipped her head. “Why do you say these things?”

“What things, May? What things are you talking about?”

“I read in the library. I take out books, and what I read and who I talk to while I am there is my business.”

“That so?” He said it so smugly. Then a smile crawled across his face. And very casually he said, “Post office needs some help. I even got a letter here for you.”

“For me?” May bit her lip slightly. Why did he keep smiling at her? It was unnerving.

“Yep, all the way from Boston.”

“Why do you have it?”

“Well, when Carrie Welles saw that I was heading over toward your skiff she just handed it to me. She said everything’s at sixes and sevens. Only a few letters didn’t get drenched. So here’s yours.” He reached into his pocket and handed it to her.

May willed herself not to look at the envelope. She took it and immediately put it in her pocket and walked away stiffly in the direction of the library. “See you in a bit, May,” her father called. She did not reply.

The library was fine, and once she had said hello and made polite chitchat with Miss Lowe she went to the window seat in the back corner, where she had first read the book of Matthew Fontaine Maury. She sat down and tore open the envelope.

Her heart sank as she saw the tiny piece of newsprint with a small headline:
BRITISH SHIP OF THE LINE SINKS: ALL FEARED LOST.

But he is returning,
May thought.
He is coming back.
But with the next sentence her heart sank once more.

Cordially!
The word was like a slap across her face. It resounded like a clap of thunder in her head.
Cordially
—it was the coldest word in the English language.

T
HEY WERE PERCHED ON A SLANTED ROCK
in the cave at Otter Creek. It was the perfect hideaway and May found it completely charming. Lovely mosses and lichen filigreed its walls. The water lapped in, but there were dry places as well to store clothes and even tins of food that Hannah had brought from the Gladrock kitchen. They were eating molasses cookies.

“You see, Hannah, I think if we can find this wreck we can find out where we came from, and—and …” She hesitated, for it seemed wrong to raise false hope. “And find out if there are others like us.”

“You really think there are others? Could be others?” Hannah asked.

“I am sure that we have another sister. I think we are destined to find her as we seemed destined to find each other.”

“Maybe she will come to us, as I came here to you.”

“Maybe, but maybe she won’t, and what about our parents?” May asked.

“They most likely died in the shipwreck, don’t you think?”

“But who were they?” There was an urgency in May’s voice.

“Yes, who were they?” Hannah said softly. “All these years I thought I came from nowhere, really. When other girls at the orphanage would daydream about their parents — oh, how they daydreamed—I never uttered a word because I dared not dream. Imagine if I had said my mum was a mermaid or my father a merman. They would have shipped me off like Miss Lila to the loony bin.”

“Never mind what other people think. I know how to find this ship. There’s a current we can catch. It’s off Grand Manan. We have to go a little bit out of our way to catch it, but it’s worth it.”

May bit into one of the cookies Hannah had brought as she conjured up that stream of water that flowed south. “These cookies are wonderful, by the way.”

“Mrs. Bletchley is the best cook.”

“And she doesn’t mind you taking food?”

“Oh, no. She’s always pressing snacks on us.”

“What’s it like being in rich people’s houses?”

“It’s complicated,” Hannah said.

“Complicated how?”

“We all have to know our place. Mr. Marston has a whole chart that explains who’s where in the order of things and what our jobs are.”

“Are they nice, though—the Hawleys—except for that girl you told me about, the crazy daughter?”

“I don’t know. I mean, people at my level in service never really talk with them that much. We’re not supposed to. Except, of course, for Ettie. She talks to anybody or anything. She’ll talk to a tree.”

“No!”

“Yes. I caught her, one day, talking away as if this spruce were a person—saying it should grow some
limbs lower down so she could climb up easier.” Both girls burst out laughing. “Ettie is a character, and she makes her own rules. But tell me more about this current you discovered.”

“Well, I think it spins off from the Gulf Stream. It will boost our speed by twice, at least, maybe even three times.”

“How fast can we go in the current—as fast as the
Prouty?”
Hannah asked. May cocked her head and looked at Hannah with surprise. “Why are you looking at me like that, May Plum?” Hannah asked, and bit into her cookie.

May had to remember that Hannah had only been swimming a few days. She didn’t really know her own power. “Hannah, we can already go that fast!”

“We can?”

“I’ve tested it.”

“You have?”

“Yes.” May told her about when she had gone out nearly to Nova Scotia and came back racing an eagle.

“It’s this,” May said when she finished the story,
and flipped the flukes of her tail up from the water. “All our power comes from our tails. Amazing, isn’t it, that our two spindly legs could change into something so powerful?”

“So now tell me more about the
Resolute
.”

“Well, I’ve had this plan from when I first went into the closet where the sea chest was. I think the next step in the plan, now that I found you, is to go to the
Resolute.
I think I could have done it by myself but … well …” She reached out her hand and took Hannah’s. “I didn’t want to go alone.”

“I understand,” Hannah said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to, either.”

May smiled. It felt so good to be understood completely. She continued explaining about the steps of the plan that had come to her when she found out that Zeeba and Gar were not her parents. “It was a horrible moment in so many ways when Zeeba came out with that. But it was good, too. It freed me.

“I told you how I figured out that I was found in the sea chest and that Gar had hidden it away in this little closet up in the service area to the lantern room? It’s not like I had never noticed the closet
before, but I had just never thought about it. I can’t explain, but I sensed that if I could get into that little closet there was something in it connected to me.”

“Well, you were surely right about that.”

“The thing I can’t figure out is why I was found in it and not you and—and —”

“Our other sister,” Hannah said.

“Yes. Wouldn’t it have made sense to put us all in one sea chest?”

“Maybe it started to leak. Maybe the three of us weighed too much and they had to put us in something else.”

May’s eyes brightened. “Heavens! I never thought of that. That would make perfect sense, of course. And then we floated away in different directions — me to Maine, you to Boston?”

“I guess.”

“What do you mean, you guess? Isn’t that where the orphanage, The Home for Little Wanderers, is? You wandered to Boston, or floated there.”

“I suppose. But where did the third baby go? You’re absolutely sure there is a third?”

“Yes, absolutely. I feel her,” May said firmly.

“But how can you feel something that’s not there?”

“The way I felt you before you came to Bar Harbor, before you crossed over.” May paused. She swept her hand slowly down her side. “You were like a space here, a shape beside me but empty. And then after we met the emptiness swam away because you were here.” She reached out and touched Hannah’s hand.

Hannah had grown very still. “I think I know what you mean. There has been something pressing just lightly against my sides ever since I came to Gladrock. Now this side feels fine.” She touched the right side of her rib cage. “But there is something still there on this side.” She made a cradling gesture with her left arm.

“It’s her,” May said quietly. “She’ll come. I know it. But we don’t have to wait for her. We can swim to the
Resolute
soon. So that by the time she comes we might know more.” May looked around the cave. “I like this place. I like it so much. It can be like our little house.”

“I always dreamed of a little cottage by the sea. When Mrs. Larkin, at the orphanage, asked me what I would do with the money I earned from working in service to a fine family, I told her that I would buy a cottage by the sea. But this is much better, isn’t it?”

“Much.”

“I wonder, though, would it be too cold in winter? Could we even swim in winter?”

“When I crossed over it wasn’t summer. And we’d had very cold weather, but I didn’t really feel it that much. It’s odd, but I rarely feel cold.” Her mind flashed back to the night on Mount Abenaki. In the deepest part of the night Hugh’s teeth had almost been chattering. For it was cold on that mountaintop, and yet it hadn’t really bothered May that much. She stopped herself from thinking about that night. She couldn’t anymore. The word—that loathsome word
cordially
—rang in her brain, not like a thunderstorm but rather a doleful tolling. She focused on Hannah instead. “So two nights from now we’ll meet here and set out for the
Resolute
.”

“Yes, May. Oh, yes!”

May left and Hannah watched her swim off. Hannah, too, had thoughts she wanted to push from her mind. She recalled her last meeting with the painter Stannish Whitman Wheeler. She knew she loved him deeply. She thought he loved her. Dare she ever tell May that she not just suspected but really knew that he was mer as well, or rather had been? Her last meeting with him had been so frightening. He knew she had crossed over. His words rang in her ears as if he were in front of her in the cave.

“Listen to me, Hannah!”
he had said.
“Right now you can go back and forth between two worlds. But it will not be this way always. In a year, at the very longest, you must make a choice. You must be of one world or the other!”
And then when she refused to believe him he had said,
“It is true. I am living proof. You can never go back!”

I
T’S LIKE TRAVELING
through a starry night made of water, not air,
May thought. The phosphorescence of the water spun by them like galaxies. There were times they were swimming so fast that May felt as if her body were sliding out ahead of her mind. The current swept them through the night sea, and when they broke through the surface and leaped high to catch a gulp of air even the wind was with them and pushed them farther until they dove back down to that starry river.

“We’re getting closer,” May said.

“Already?” Hannah asked.

“I told you it would be fast. Now we’re going to have to swim out of the current or we’ll be swept by.”