Promise Bound (17 page)

“Let’s just see what develops naturally,” Pavati soothed, her voice taking on a noticeably maternal tone.

“No,” Sophie said. “It’s never going to happen for me. Not naturally, anyway.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Now go back inside.”

“I did the chart,” Sophie said.

Pavati and I exchanged a look. “What chart?” I asked.

“We learned in science about dominant and recessive genes,” Sophie said. “Mr. Callahan showed us the chart for the redhead gene. You got that one, too, Lily. It’ll work out the same with everything else. Lily will be the only one, and it’s not fair.”

“I don’t follow,” said Pavati.

“Mom had two human parents,” Sophie said matter-of-factly.

Suddenly it occurred to me that I had no business trying to engage in a mermaid debate. My skills were paltry when compared with my little sister’s. As young as she was, Sophie could be very persuasive; she always had the data to back her up.

“So?” I asked nervously.

“Dad had one human and one mermaid parent. That means that no more than half of his kids will get the mermaid gene.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said. “It took me seventeen years before—”

“Mom can’t wait for me to turn seventeen. That’s six
more years!” Sophie exclaimed, practically screaming. Pavati and I both took a step—or in her case, a stroke—backward.

“Sweetheart,” Pavati said. “I’m not going to change you. It’s not going to happen like that.”

Sophie bowed to get her face as close to Pavati’s as possible. She set her teeth. “Then I’ll. Find. Maris.”

“No!” Pavati and I exclaimed together.

“Ugh,” groaned Sophie. She picked up one of my sandals and chucked it into the lake.

“Hey!”

She growled at me, then turned on her heel and marched up to the house, only pausing to yell over her shoulder, “I hate you both!”

Pavati and I watched her go. I wasn’t ready to give up on our negotiation. “I have something more to offer.”

“Go on,” she said.

“I promised Calder I would never join you without him.”

“That was an unfortunate promise to have made.”

“But I didn’t make that promise on behalf of anyone else. If you changed my mom, I could convince my dad to join you. You’d gain two. Even without me and Calder, you’d have the numbers against Maris.”

Pavati met my eyes. “I won’t change your mother. But convince your father to join me, and I’ll give you Daniel Catron, emotionally intact.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise—a reaction that was interrupted by Sophie slamming the front door behind her. Both Pavati and I flinched.

After its vibrations dissipated, I returned my attention to
Pavati’s lesser offer. “You’d promise to love Danny?” I asked. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was a significant move on her part. I couldn’t ignore it. If Pavati was promising to love Danny, then she was promising to stay close to him. And if she made herself a part of Danny’s life, then he wouldn’t fall apart like Jack had. He wouldn’t get desperate. He wouldn’t resort to reckless behavior.

Before Pavati could answer, the front door opened again. It was Dad. Pavati ducked below the surface.

“Lily, are you out there? Sophie says you’re in the water. What are you doing? It’s not Friday.”

Little liar
. “No, Dad. Dry as a bone.”

“Well, Gabby’s on the phone. She wants you to go to some film noir festival with her in Washburn. What should I tell her?”

Pavati surfaced on the far side of the dock.

“I’ll be up in a second, Dad.”

The door closed again, and I turned back toward Pavati. “So?” I asked. “If my dad sided with you, would you promise to love Danny?”

“I would promise to let him think that I love him. That’s the best I can do.”

But something in the way she averted her eyes made me think it was only half the truth.

B
ack on the road in the hamburger-wrapper car.

I slipped my fingers above the visor, dug through the center console and then the glove compartment, looking for cash. I came up with seven dollars and fifty miserable cents. It wasn’t going to get me too far in Thunder Bay.

I lifted my foot off the gas and coasted. There was still the chance to turn around. Obviously I couldn’t avoid my promise to Lily, but I didn’t have to go all the way to Thunder Bay. I could research my parents from any coffeehouse with Wi-Fi. But the thought didn’t last long, and I stomped on the pedal, pushing my speed up to eighty.

When it came right down to it, eventually I’d have to start talking to real, live people. I cringed at the memory of one of my and Lily’s first conversations. “Didn’t they look for you?” she’d asked. At the time, the idea had been beyond my comprehension. I had given my human parents so little thought over the years that it was difficult to imagine my death having made a lasting impression on them. Now I was going to start asking the general populace of Thunder Bay if anyone remembered me? Lily believed a three-year-old couldn’t fall off a sailboat and be completely forgotten—even after all these years. I guess I had to trust that—despite my years of study—Lily understood human nature better than I.

Trust was going to be tough going, though, because right now, Thunder Bay was alien to everything I knew; it seemed impossible that anyone there would have heard of me. And who was I anyway? Tallulah had chosen the name Calder, so what name would I even ask about?

When I crossed the Minnesota border at Pigeon River, the customs officer waved me through. “I can let you go to Canada,” he said, “but you better find your passport if you want to get back in.”

Yeah, right.

I pushed the driver’s seat back a few notches, stretched out my legs, and succumbed to the rugged and rocky landscape. The shadow of the mountains shrouded me, and mesas pressed against the roadside before breaking into a valley of sprawling farms, their wheat fields plowed and recently planted. After an hour or so, the valley gave way to pine trees and Mount McKay, hotels, a roadhouse, and
scattered gas stations before leveling out to more flat highway and ugly factories.

The expressway had taken me too far inland to see Lake Superior, but I could still smell it, faintly, beneath the acrid factory smoke that wafted through my car’s vents. I turned onto Arthur Street and made my way straight for the water, trolling along the shoreline. Somewhere out there, too far away, the lighthouse at Isle Royale blinked in the early-morning sky. It was mirrored by the red light on my newly acquired phone, blinking on the seat beside me.

I didn’t know if I hoped for or dreaded another text from Lily … or possibly worse, from Jason.… What would he say about the girl on the beach? I didn’t check to see who was calling. Their disappointment in me was palpable across the miles.

The waves, too, seemed to scold me as they chopped against the strand. The lake wanted to reclaim me, but I steeled my nerves.
Later
, I told it, and a wave hit the pier so hard it sent an answering spray into the air.

I drove back up Arthur and stopped a person on the sidewalk to ask directions to the closest library. He pointed me toward Brodie Street.

The library wasn’t hard to find. It was an impressive building: red brick and stained glass. Pale, lighter stone made pillar-like stripes up to the roof. I parked the car. My rain-soaked clothes had dried stiff. I missed the smell of the Hancocks’ laundry soap; I missed Mrs. H folding my clothes, treating me like her own son.…

I stripped off the old sweatshirt and threw it on the
passenger seat. I would have ripped off the scratchy T-shirt, too, if I thought I wouldn’t get turned away at the library door. I entered and followed the signs to the reference desk on the main floor.

“Can I help you?” asked the girl behind the desk. Her smile was more of a smirk, and her eyes sparked in a way that gave me pause. Something about her reminded me of Tallulah. It wasn’t just her hair, which hung in loose ringlets, the color of pale apricots. It was—as I originally thought—the way she looked at me: like someone who would come in for a kiss but bite my nose instead.

She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, exposing a Chinese symbol tattooed on her neck. Red-and-tan-striped feathers blended effortlessly with the baby-fine strands of hair behind her ears.

“I need to do some research,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, saying, “Mmm-hmm,” as if I’d just said I was Neptune’s nephew.

“No, really.” I rested my forearms on the counter and leaned toward her.

Unexpectedly, she made a
pfff
sound and rolled her eyes again. She returned her attention to the papers she was shuffling on her desk. “Of course you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you really want?”

“A computer. Just point me to—”

“I suppose this works for you all the time, eh?”

“You suppose what works?”

“Come swooping in. Smile. Flash those white teeth of yours. Ask the library girl for a little help? Guys like you never do your own work. Well, I’ve got stuff to do, and you’re not half as cute as you think you are.”

That was it. I was giving up on girls for good. “You’ve got a serious customer service problem. Just show me how to work the computers and I won’t bother you anymore.”

She jerked her head in the direction I should go. “There are log-on instructions posted by each terminal.”

“Thanks”—I read her name tag—“Chelsea. Big help. I got it from here.”

She gestured with a graceful, though ambiguous, wave of her hand.

In the next room, several computers with bright blue screens hummed. I sighed at them in resignation. Admittedly, the girl had pegged me correctly (electronics had never been my strong suit), so I sat at the one in the farthest corner, half-shrouded by an overgrown ficus plant, where no one would notice me fumbling around. The table was scattered with scratch paper and short, stubby pencils.

For a second I just stared at my fingers on the keyboard, poised on the edge of God knows what. What did I know already? One: the name of the boat started with a
K
or an
R
. What I didn’t know was if that memory was real or fabricated. If I’d screwed up on that detail, I didn’t stand a chance. Two: registered in Canada to a husband and wife. Probably. And three: it was a sailboat. I was ninety-nine percent sure of that point.

I followed the instructions on the sheet, typing slowly
with two fingers until I got on to the Canadian transit site I’d found last summer. The site logged every vessel, air, and freight carrier registered in Canada. If my parents’ boat was still in service it would be here. I went to the maritime page and plugged in Thunder Bay, then narrowed my search to only those vessels whose names started with a
K
or an
R
. Four thousand names popped up, give or take. I further narrowed the list, excluding tugs, freighters, and other commercial vessels. What remained was a startlingly short list:

Three sailboats. Three. Could it be that easy? I swallowed hard. Was I looking at my last contact with my human life? I wrote each name down and wiped my palms on my pants.

I stared at the screen for one long second, then, hovering the cursor over
Rhapsody in Blue
, clicked the mouse. The registered owner’s name and address appeared: McIntyre; Farmer Road. I wrote them down on scratch paper and moved on to the owners of the other two boats.

I scrubbed away a shiver that ran down my arms. This time tomorrow I could be face to face with my parents. That quick. What would Lily think about that? Didn’t matter. She was probably hoping it would take me longer anyway. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all a ruse because she couldn’t find the heart to break it off with me. She was hoping a long absence would make me forget her.

Agh
. It might be only three sailboats, but it wouldn’t be quick. This time tomorrow, there’d still be three because, as close as I was, it was the final step that I dreaded most: researching myself in connection with any one of these three vessels.

I didn’t know what would be worse: to sift through all the stories of long-dead children, or to stumble upon my own reported drowning. Or worst yet: to discover there was no story to read at all.

I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Then, picking out each letter with my index fingers, like two birds pecking at seeds, I typed my first query:

I don’t know what I expected, but a picture of me didn’t pop up. Neither did a Wikipedia article on
Little Boy Lost at Sea
. I scrolled through the search results until settling on a newspaper archive site. Two hundred stories of drowned children between the years 1980 and 2000. The first was about a ten-year-old girl. And I knew her.

It was 1988. In my memory, I looked about ten, although by then I’d been in the lake for two decades. It was Big Bay—the same beach on Madeline Island that I’d brought Lily to last spring. I’d forgotten it at the time, but I remembered now. The little girl. Nadia watching from up the shore where we’d beached.

It had taken twenty years for the natural mermaid
disposition to catch up with me. Until then, I hadn’t been touched with even a drop of sorrow. But when it did find me, it hit with a vengeance. For several nights, Mother had been worrying over my crying bouts, trying to pacify my tantrums. Maris convinced her it was time for my first kill; she was sick of me keeping her awake.

“There,” Mother said. “She looks like a good one,” and we watched the little girl on the beach for almost half an hour before Mother pushed me forward. I ran south along the shore, on uncertain legs, following the wavy line that separated the wet sand from the dry.

When I finally reached the little girl, my skin was dry and my feet felt solid under me. She was on her hands and knees, crawling around a mound of sand.

“What are you doing?” I asked in my younger voice, a scowl on my face.