The Sea Taketh (Alex Singer) (25 page)

I push him away.

“Whatever we feel for each other changes nothing. It doesn’t matter! I have to go to school so I can get a good job so I can take care of myself and Gramps. The modeling isn’t going to last forever. So I have to go to school. In order to go to school, I have to have a scholarship. These are just the cold, hard facts of my life. I don’t have the luxury of falling in love with a merman.”

“You do if you’ll let
me take care of you and Thomas.”

“Christian, quit fooling yourself! I know you have more money than most teens, but there’s no way you can pay for both of us to go to college, take care of yourself, and take care of Gramps. College can be a couple hundred thousand dollars, depending on where I want to go. And Gramps isn’t getting any younger. We’ve been fortunate that he enjoys good health, but I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last. I’m hoping for the best, but I have to plan for the worst. Sometime in the future he might require more help than I can give him. You might think that you can save the day, but your parents won’t want to spend their money on some stranger and her grandfather.”

“Fortunately I have my own reserves,” he interjects.

“Didn’t you hear me? We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. You don’t have that kind of money,” I vent in his direction.

“I’ll prove it to you.” He takes a hold of my hand and directs me to his open laptop.

“How are you going to prove it?” I ask skeptically.

He gestures for me to take a seat beside him. I’m amazed at how quickly his fingers fly across his tiny laptop – webs and all. After a couple minutes he stops and shows me the screen.

“This is my petty cash account that I use when I’m traveling. It makes it easier to mon
itor my finances with a separate account. If you look at the bottom of the screen you can see that I have more than enough money to care for both you and Thomas in just this one account.”

I follow his eyes. Thinking my gl
asses are playing a trick on me: I take them off, clean them with my shirt, and put them back on. My eyebrows furrow.

“There’s got to be some mistake. It says that you have nearly fifteen million dollars in this account,” I say.

“Yes, Henrik has a policy of traveling with an adequate cushion.  Do you want to see my other accounts?”

“This is crazy! Where did you get that kind of money?” My eyes are glued to the total on the screen. “You’re only like six months older than me.”

“About that,” he clears his throat. A worried look appears on his face. “Please don’t overreact, but I may look like I’m eighteen, but I’m older than that.”

“How old are you? Twenty?” I ask, peering at his face.

“
A lot
older,” he says. He pauses for a moment before saying, “Merfolk are immortal.”

I furrow my eyebrows. “How much older… exactly?”

“I’m more than five hundred years older than you.” He tensely waits for my reply.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I say, storming to the door. “I don’t think you’re funny, and I don’t like to be laughed at!” 

Before I can turn the handle, he picks me up and tucks me under his arm like he’s carrying a football. He goes out the door and walks down the landing.

“Christian!” I hiss.

“Yes, my love?” he asks, turning into the library.

“Put me down, so I can go home!”

“I’ll put you down, but there’s something you need to see.” He places my feet on the floor and turns to his cousin. “Henrik, please excuse us.”

He raises an eyebrow before taking a book and going out the door.

“Yes, Marjory has very nice books,” I say, looking at the beautiful leather bound volumes lining the walls. “Can I go?”

“It’s not the books I brought you in here to see,” he says, pointing to a stone tablet. “Please look at the collection of artwork.  I keep a few items in here from my travels in North America.”

I look closely at the stone tablet. It shows a sort of pictograph story of men with fins on their legs coming out of the sea. Christian points to one of the mermen. Strangely, it resembles him.

“This is a very finely carved piece done right before Cortes conquered the Aztecs. I pa
rticularly like how the artist captured the long hair I wore at the time. I was rather a rebellious teenager.”

He moves to the next piece of artwork, an animal skin behind a protective glass. On it is a drawing of a merman with light hair.

“I enjoy the simplistic nature of this piece. I like how it speaks the truth without being bogged down by details. My Iroquois friends were absolutely delightful that way.”

My brows furrow as I move on
to a painting. Christian’s face smiles mischievously in oil paint. It is an exact likeness, only he’s wearing colonial style clothes. The paint is old and cracked, but Christian looks exactly the same.

“Oh, yes, a dear friend of mine was more than a patriot during the Revolutionary War, he was a talented artist. I asked him to paint a portrait of me on a whim, and this is what he gave me on my next visit,” he explains.

Next is a series of very old photographs of Christian and Henrik in top hats.

“These daguerreotypes are some of Marjory’s favorites. She particularly likes the one in which I have a stern look on my face. She thinks it makes me look dignified. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’m angry in that one because the photographer had just informed me that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated,” he says.

More photographs follow, but these are of Christian, Henrik, and Sven wearing fine suits in front of Marjory’s Victorian house with a lady in an enormous hat.

“Ah, this is Marjory’s grandmother. Her name was also Marjory. She was the first of our housekeepers here. Her son then his daughter followed suit. The Rockwells enjoy our fantastic retirement plan; free house and board for life, although I have always wished Marjory would spend more money on her own upkeep. She has always been a very frugal woman.”

My eyes go to a formal portrait over a beautiful fireplace. Once again, Christian’s face peers out of a canvas.

“Yes, that’s a lovely portrait. Marjory Sr. commissioned it and it’s hung there since,” he says.

  “So, the underage drinking laws don’t apply to you?” I break my silence.

             
He laughs with a degree of relief.

“No, that’s why we don’t feel badly about breaking them.  Furthermore, I have had five centuries to build up substantial financial reserves. Now I’m afraid you can’t use money as an excuse not to date me because I have more than enough for the both of us.”

              “How old are Henrik and Sven?” I change the subject, returning to the Victorian photographs of the three of them.

             
“Henrik is approximately three hundred, and Sven is only a hundred and sixty.”

             
“Does Jen know?”

             
He nods. “Jen has become an expert on merfolk in your absence.  She is particularly fond of swimming with Sven.”

             
It’s a lot to take in. I quietly scan the room a second time. It’s hard enough to deal with Christian being a merman, add the facts that he’s rich and over five hundred years old, and I am more than overwhelmed what this means for us. No wonder he’s so arrogant and calls everyone by their first names! He’s been alive longer than the United States has been a country!

             
“Why are you dating me?” I ask, trying to keep my voice even as I look at the photos. What could he possibly find interesting about a seventeen-year-old girl?

             
“Alexandra, don’t take this the wrong way, but you are refreshingly different.  In all my years, I’ve never met anyone like you.”

He kisses the back of my neck, causing chills to run down my spine.

              “But I don’t know anything. Talking to me is probably like talking to a baby,” I counter.

             
“Of course not. Remember that my age and your age don’t mean a thing. I will
always
love you. Moreover, I find you immensely interesting. You are intelligent, beautiful, humble, and once your allegiance is earned, you are loyal to a fault. I would be a fool not to love you.”

             
“But you’re so old and I’m…” I begin to argue.

He silences me with a kiss.
My stomach does a complete somersault, and I melt into his arms. The intimate feeling that my soul is linked to his has returned with a vengeance. I take a breath as I try to fight away the sensation that something deep inside me recognizes this merman. It’s almost as though we’re long lost lovers being reunited.

Christian ushers me back to his room. Sven waves as he dusts the banister in his pink, lacy apron. I force a smile as we pass.

Once inside Christian’s room, he directs me to the giant bed and puts the velvet box in my hands. I try to hand it back to him.

“Are you afraid of a box?” he teases.

“No, I’m afraid of you,” I whisper.

“I know, and I’m always going to love you, regardless of how hard you try to push me away. I promise you that I will never intentionally hurt you. It’s taken me too long to find you.”

I tightly clasp my hands together, making my knuckles white. My mind is a swirl of emotions. I want to love Christian, but I am so very afraid. So many things could go wrong if I let myself love him.

Seeing that I’m not going to open the box, he gently lifts the lid. In it is a diamond brac
elet. He takes it out of the box and clasps it around my wrist.

“No, it’s not even yet Christmas,” I object.

“It’s not for Christmas. I saw it at
Peggy’s
and had to buy it for you.”

“Christian, you can’t buy me a diamond bracelet for no reason.  It’s a ridiculous waste of money.” I try to take it off.

He stops me. His hand goes to the pearl necklace at my neck; the necklace I’ve tried to remove countless times but couldn’t. I can’t even explain it to myself, but I have been unable to sever this connection with him, even at the worst of times.

“It brings me indescribable pleasure to see you wearing items I have given you.”

He kisses my forehead.

I lay back on the bed, crossing my arms. On the ceiling above the bed is a photo of me, proving that Christian is undeniably in love with me.

He lies next to me.

“The last thing I see each night is your face,” he says without embarrassment.

I sigh, knowing he is also on my mind as I go to sleep.

We remain silent for several minutes.

“Tell me about the mermaid who saved you when you were a child,” he says out of the blue, turning on his side to look at me.

             
I swallow nervously. My mouth suddenly goes dry. This isn’t a topic that I’ve even discussed with Jen.

I begin slowly, not looking at him as I talk
, “When I was young, I was always seeing faces in the water. I would scare my parents by leaning over the side of the boat to wave to the children in the water and no one could tear me away from the seashore. I had too many friends in the waves. People thought I had invented imaginary friends, but I knew they were real.  One day when I was about ten, my parents and I went to sea. That day only one small girl followed. I shared some candy with her as my parents sailed the boat. We laughed as the waves grew higher and higher. It seemed like a carrousel or some kind of kiddy ride. Neither of us understood the danger. The waves got higher and higher, tossing the boat around like a toy. We hit a rock, and it broke open the hull. Dad was hit by the mast as the boat went down. Now that I’m older, I suspect he was killed instantly, but Mom wouldn’t leave him. She wrapped me in her lifejacket and went after him. She never came back up.

             
“I became frightened when she didn’t come for me.  I started to kick and scream, slipping out of the lifejacket. There was only darkness as I sunk into the depths. Then the little mermaid came for me. She was so small, but she told me to hold tightly onto her shoulders. She piggybacked me all the way to land.

“The next day, my parents’ bodies washed ashore. I was deemed the ‘imaginative mir
acle child’. Psychologists used me as an example of how children use their imaginations to suppress terrible memories. But no one could explain how I got from where the boat sank to the beach without a lifejacket.”

I can say no more. I wipe tears from my eyes. It is cathartic to tell someone the truth without them thinking I’m crazy but frightening at the same time. This is the experience I wish that I could force myself to forget, but my mind replays the scene each night.

Christian puts his arms around me. He lifts my chin and softly kisses me. It is so intimate, so tender that I melt at his touch. I respond by gently tracing his lips with my tongue. He pulls away.

“Let’s go down for a snack,” he says. “I think Marjory has some ice cream in the freezer, if Sven hasn’t eaten it.”

“Did I do something wrong?” I ask, suddenly self-conscious.