Son of a Mermaid (4 page)

“Why didn’t they live happily ever after?”

Martha sighed again and shook her head. “She wanted you to be born near the ocean. So they came back for a short stretch. But then your mum went into labor early, one afternoon when they were out on the fishing boat. Your dad got her to the medical center on Nantucket just in time.”

Shea felt a lump forming in his throat. “Did she die?”

Martha shook her head. There was a long pause before she finally smiled, putting a gentle hand on his knee. “Did you know your Daddy was supposed to bring you here to Cape Cod, to meet her, later this very summer? Now that you’ve turned fifteen?”

A whole minute passed before Shea realized his jaw was hanging open. He snapped it shut, his teeth clicking together. “He never said anything about that. I didn’t know that they, you know, kept in touch.”

“I don’t think Thomas has seen her since you were born. He hadn’t even come back to the coast to see me until…until the funerals. But he and your mum exchanged letters over the years. She’s heard all about you, and what a great help you are on the farm. She loves you, you know.”

Shea snorted, feeling a familiar rush of anger bubbling inside of him. “No, Gramma, I don’t know. She left when I was a little baby. She. Left. Me. What about her abandonment would tell me that she loves me?”

Martha narrowed her eyes at Shea. “No need for that tone of voice, young man. Maybe this is enough information for now. We’ll talk more later, after you’ve sorted this through.” Abruptly, she rose and left the room, leaving the silver frame on the couch.

Shea looked up at the fireplace, at the other photographs lining the mantel. There were old black and whites of a much younger Martha in her own wedding gown, and many of his dad and twin brother when they were young. In one of the frames was a photo of Tom holding a baby in his arms. Shea thought the expression on his father’s face looked happy and sad at the same time.

Shea reached for the silver frame lying on the cushion next to him. He stared at the photograph. His empty hand clenched into a ball, until he felt his stubby fingernails biting into his palms.

Why hadn’t his father told him any of this? What had he been waiting for?

6 aluminum cans, 3 plastic coffee cup lids, a kid’s sand bucket with a crack down the side, 4 whole silver candy wrappers and 4 more pieces of wrappers, broken red plastic from some kind of reflector, 3 water bottles and a long piece of smelly rope.

Shea catalogued the contents of the flimsy plastic bag, now bulging with the addition of that last soda can. Unable to sleep, he’d risen before the sun and slipped out of his grandmother’s house, Lucky padding silently behind him through the pre-dawn darkness.

The sun was only now peeking out to greet the day, painting the horizon in pale shades of pink and dusky purple. Shea finished the daily two-mile trek along the shoreline, his head still spinning with the revelations of the prior morning. “If Dad really kept in touch with my mother, why didn’t he tell me?” His brain was beginning to hurt, trying to understand this new twist. “Why wait until I’m fifteen?” Having a mom would’ve been a lot more useful in, say, Kindergarten than in high school.

After being so chatty at breakfast, his grandmother wouldn’t say anything more on the subject for the rest of the day. Shea tried to coax it out of her at lunch, but she’d refused to talk about it. Dinner had been something of a silent affair.

He whistled for Lucky and turned toward the dunes, impatient to dump today’s collection of garbage. The waterlogged rope was pretty smelly, even stuffed at the bottom of the bag. The dog’s sharp bark stopped him in his tracks. He whipped his head back toward the ocean.

Lucky stood at the far end of the beach barking frantically at a little girl with blonde ringlets of hair and huge eyes. She perched on top of the rock jetty with her knees pulled tight to her chest, looking down at the big black dog.

“Lucky!” Shea dropped the bag of trash and broke into a sprint. “Leave her alone, dog!” He slowed a bit as he got closer. “Don’t be afraid, little girl. He’s usually very friendly.” With one last bark, the dog walked to Shea’s side, and lay down on the sand in front of him.

The girl turned her eyes toward him, and he thought he saw a flash of recognition flit across her face before she relaxed the grip on her knees. As she uncurled her long body, he realized the girl wasn’t so little after all. Actually, she might even be about his own age. Despite the early hour and the chill in the air, she wore only a bikini and her curly hair was dripping wet.

 “You’re the Garbage Boy, aren’t you?” Her voice sounded like a cross between a whisper and a summer breeze. “I saw you here yesterday.”

He squinted up at her. Long damp hair curled down her back and clung to the tops of her arms, given her a drowned kitten kind of look. Her large green eyes were too big for her face. He decided that even though she wasn’t as pretty as Jeannie, or even Maria, this girl was…interesting.

She smiled down at him. The girl had a nice smile. He felt the muscles in his stomach clench and tighten as he smiled back. “The name’s Shea, not Garbage Boy,” he told her.

“Shea.” When the girl said his name, it tingled in his ears like music touching him all the way down to his toes.

After several awkward moments of silence he asked, “Okay, so what’s your name?”

“My name’s Kae,” she replied with a wide smile, her lips parting to show perfect pearly white teeth.

“Kay?” It didn’t sound the same when he said it.

“Kaa – ee,” she enunciated. She stood and stretched her arms toward the sky. He was right, she looked as tall as him. “You must pronounce all the sounds.”

“Kaa – ee,” he repeated in the same exaggerated fashion and shook his head. “I haven’t seen you on the beach before.”

“You’re the new one,” Kae replied, using both hands to tuck wet hair behind her ears. “My family is here every summer.”

Rich summer people?
He remembered his conversation the day before with Martha and tried to imagine what a rich guy like Bobby Joe would do if he met someone like Kae on the beach.
Probably not stare at her like a complete fool,
he told himself with a mental kick. But he still couldn’t tear his eyes from her face.

“Why do you do it?”

His eyebrows shot up at her question. “Do what?”

“Pick up garbage, for Neptune’s sake. Your efforts are really but a drop in the ocean.” She jumped down from the rocks and stood next to him on the beach. “And the trash belongs to the land, not the sea.”

He stared at her, trying to figure out if she was making fun of him. She stared back, unblinking, cocking her head to one side and running her fingers through her hair. Shea noticed those shining blonde curls were almost completely dried.
Does some hair dry faster than others?
“It offends me when people treat the ocean like their private garbage barrel,” he finally answered, shaking his head. “And I’m not throwing it back in the ocean. I put it in the barrel so it leaves the beach.”

She smiled at him, and he felt his heart beat faster, suddenly uncomfortable under her watchful eyes. It was like she was looking right inside of him, and he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about that. “How come you’re not in school?” Shea wanted to change the subject, away from him, away from the trash on the beach. “I thought summer people didn’t show up until closer to the Fourth of July.”

She laughed, sounding like the tinkling wind chimes hanging in Martha’s kitchen window. “My parents need to arrive early, so I get to come too. We work for a very important family, and there is much to do to prepare after the long winter season.”

He adjusted his initial assessment.
Not rich summer people, but summer workers.

“Where did you come from?” Kae asked, another question out of the blue. “Your voice has a funny accent.”

“I grew up in Oklahoma,” he told her. “But I live here now.”

“Why?”

Shea took in a large breath and held it for a moment, before blowing it out. “There was a tornado. My dad died,” he said slowly, carefully, as if the words themselves might hurt him. “Gramma is the only family I have left.”

“I’m sorry about your dad,” she said, holding his eyes with her gaze. She reached out to touch his arm. Under her gentle hand, his skin tingled, radiating warmth through his body. Shea felt himself relax, and was immediately glad that he’d told her the truth.

The girl touched her other hand to her neck and suddenly, a sharp jolt ran from the base of Shea’s spine down one leg, as if he’d received an electric shock. Lucky jumped to his feet and began to bark at the girl. Startled, Kae quickly released her grasp of his arm and took a step backward. Shea squatted down to scratch behind Lucky’s ear. “It’s okay, Lucky. Just static electricity or something.”

“I hope we can be friends,” Kae smiled, blinking her eyes finally. He noticed how long and thick her eyelashes were.

“Me too.” As Shea returned her smile, his eyes rested on the length of black cord around the girl’s neck. Her fingers were wrapped around the stone dangling from the end, a round black stone with a hexagonal hole through its middle, identical to the one he’d plucked from the waves the previous morning. “Where did you…?”

“Hey, you kids!” A loud, crackling voice interrupted his question. Shea turned toward the parking lot and saw a police cruiser parked there with its blue lights flashing. “No dogs on the beach,” boomed the amplified voice from the cruiser’s loudspeaker.

Hurriedly, he bent to clip the leash onto Lucky’s collar. When he looked up, Kae had disappeared. “Where’d she run off to?” he puzzled as he tugged on the leash. He and Lucky ran across the sand, stopping for a second to grab the bag of garbage.

When they reached the parking lot, Shea dropped the full bag into the barrel. The police cruiser was parked at the front edge of the lot, lights silently flashing blue and white. Shea approached the car warily. His experiences with police were limited to the day of the tornado.

“I’m sorry, officer. My grandmother said it would be okay if we got off the beach before eight.”

“The sign says no dogs, May through October.” The officer wore mirrored sunglasses despite the fact the sun was barely over the horizon. “That means no dogs on the beach. Period. The fine is a hundred dollars.”

“I’m sorry, officer,” Shea repeated. He realized he was staring at his own reflection in the mirrored glasses, but seeing a very different scene. A scene in Oklahoma, where a similar looking cop had walked into his history class to excuse him from school.

He tore his eyes from the mirrored lenses and tried to see this police officer and not the Oklahoma trooper. “Officer L. Tandy, Harwich Police Department,” he said, reading the shiny brass nameplate hanging on the uniform pocket, right over the shiny silver badge.

“What’s your name, boy? I haven’t seen you around.” Officer L. Tandy’s voice had lost some of its edge, but the crisply ironed uniform still made Shea uncomfortable.

“MacNamara, sir. Shea MacNamara.”

The officer gave Shea the once over, pushing the sunglasses down to the end of his long beaky nose. “I went to school with your father and your Uncle Rick,” the officer said, nodding his head. He opened his mouth to continue, then seemed to reconsider. Peering past Shea he asked, “Wasn’t there someone else on the beach with you? I thought I saw two of you by the jetty.”

Shea shrugged his shoulders. “She left.”

“You’d better get home, too, before you miss the school bus,” Officer Tandy said, pushing his glasses back up his thin nose. He made no further mention of the fine.

“Yes, sir,” Shea agreed, as if getting on that bus were important to him. “Thank you, sir.”

“And no more dogs on the beach,” the officer called after him as Shea crossed the parking lot.

He didn’t acknowledge that last order but broke into a run, heading back to his grandmother’s house.

***

Kae peered from behind the rock jetty. The boy and dog had left the beach, and the big black and white land boat was also leaving. “Not a boat, but a
car
,” she said experimentally, recalling the name of the thing from her previous encounter with drylanders. A good memory was essential when things couldn’t be written down. “The girls in Florida called those machines by the name of
car
.”

She climbed up onto the jetty, and walked carefully to the end of the rocky outcropping. The sky above her had already changed from its hesitant pastels of early morning to a brilliant shade of blue, the few clouds having evaporated like morning mist on the ocean. Seagulls wheeled overhead in slow lazy circles.

At the jetty’s end, she clambered nimbly down the algae-covered boulders. She sat on the one lowest to the waterline, feet dangling ankle deep in the lapping waves. Putting one hand around the stone medallion hanging at her neck, she closed her eyes and recited the words her mother had taught her long ago. “
A pedibus usque ad caput mutatio
.”

Suddenly, the sun seemed to shine more brightly on the water at her feet, orangey and yellow sparks dancing on the blue green surface. Kae watched the sparkles slide soundlessly along the surface straight toward her, to where her feet made contact with the lapping saltwater. The dancing lights ran up both her legs, shimmering along the skin as they twined up her thighs. Sitting very still, she kept her hand on the
transmutare
stone, rubbing her thumb in slow circles around its rim. The whole process took mere seconds until the twinkling lights receded back down to the water’s surface, leaving behind a glittering green mermaid tail where once two separate legs had been.

Smiling to herself, Kae slid down into the ocean, quickly submerging in the cool depths. The codium weeds grew thick near the base of the jetty, dancing in the dappled sunlight that penetrated the waves. The seaweed parted easily as she swished through the undulating underwater forest. She wanted to hurry home, back to her mother to tell her about her encounter with the boy. She knew she might get in a teensy bit of trouble, but she had to tell her. Secrets were too hard to keep in their small community, let alone within her own family.