The New Moon's Arms (34 page)

Agway was sitting in the passenger seat. I glanced at his bandaged knees. And all the way to the slip with the wailing child, I kept hearing Ife’s voice in my head:

“Every good deed you do have a price attached.”

Maybe so, but this boy shouldn’t be the one paying it.

E
VEN GRIEF HAS TO GIVE WAY
to sleep. Agway’s eyes were closed when I took him in his life jacket out of the car. Wrapped in his blanket, he was just conscious enough to put his thumb in his mouth and rest his head on my shoulder. The drizzle seemed to be easing up.

He didn’t even stir when I took him into the boat. I put him under a tarp to keep him dry, and laid him down far enough from me to balance the boat a little better. It made me nervous to have him even that little distance out of reach. But even if he fell in, the life jacket would keep the weight of the cast from dragging him down.

I was so upset and shaky that it took me two tries to start the engine. Agway startled at the noise. He stirred, but his exhausted little body hung on to sleep. I headed us out further along the archipelago, towards the tiniest islands.

“I am ashamed of you.”

Find the sea people. Find Agway’s mother. Just fix your mind on that. Give Agway back. I had to have a hot flash. I had to.

But all I willed it to happen, my fingers wouldn’t itch, and the heat wouldn’t rise. Old Slave Joe the finder had been able to use his power at will. “I can’t even tell which muscles to flex,” I grumbled.

“If you couldn’t have him all to yourself, you didn’t want nobody else to have him, neither.”

Tiny Dutchie Island was somewhere here-bout, nuh true? Didn’t think to bring the fucking compass. Shit, shit, shit. Okay. Just keep looking for the whiteheads of its reefs, and wait. Bloody hot flashes were like buses; there was always another one coming.

I had cut Agway’s hair. I had let the hospital cut his legs. What the sea people would do when they saw all that? I blinked the warm drizzle out of my eyes.

The skimming boat hit a swell especially hard, and sea water splashed us. That woke Agway. He sat up. Saw that we were in the sea. I cut the engine so I could hold him. Probably best to just let her drift, anyway. The noise of the engine might frighten them away. For good measure, I turned off the green starboard light. The port light was dead. I hadn’t used the boat in a while.

Silence and dark blanketed us, and the percussion of raindrops. I hated the sea at night. If it wasn’t for the reflective patches on his life jacket, I’d have had a hard time seeing Agway.

I sat him beside me, rewrapped him in the tarp, and put an arm around him. “We going to find her,” I told him. “Somehow.”

He asked me a question.

“I don’t understand you, Pet. Ife was right. I didn’t even try to learn.”

What a three-year-old boy could say to frighten me?

Fingers itching any at all? No, not a rass. No sensation like ants crawling on my skin. “I don’t know how to do this!” I said, frustrated.

The darkness was getting to me. Every slap of sea water against the boat made me jump. Except where there were stars, and the light cloud that Dolorosse cast above itself, I couldn’t distinguish sea different from sky. “I don’t know how allyou manage out here come nighttime,” I told Agway. The rain was making me shivery.

I decided to keep looking for Dutchie Island. Go slow. Keeping the engine revving low. When I opened up the throttle again, the prow of the boat began slapping the water, too hard. We were overbalanced. But now that Agway was awake, I needed to keep him within reach. I slowed us down even more, and sat him on the floor at my feet.

He pointed out into the water. “Mamma!”

“Smart boy. Yes, we going to find Mamma. You just sit right here, you understand? Don’t stand up, you will fall out. You will sit, Agway?”

“Ehe.”

We crawled along. I kept trying to will the magic to happen. I didn’t know how far out we were. Could have reached the shipping lanes, for all I knew. And still the feeling of being weightless in an infinity of ink. I kept looking all around us, trying to get oriented in space, trying to spot any trouble before it got to us.

What the rass I was doing, really? This was ridiculous. It was dangerous for the child, and I was cold. Take us both back. Get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow, ask Gene’s advice.

I was concentrating on turning us around: that’s how I came to have my eyes off Agway. Only a splash slightly louder than the rain told me that he had gone overboard.

“Agway!” I screamed. I slipped my alpagats off. “Agway, I coming!”

I jumped. The blood-warm water took me in. When I surfaced, the life jacket was floating beside me, empty, on a pock-marked sea like black glass.

“Agway!” I couldn’t
see
him! I screamed for help, but the open expanse of water swallowed my voice.

…So the devil woman of the sea wait until the ship was approaching the archipelago. Then she swim close to the porthole of the cabin where the young woman was sitting in chains, and she sing,

Young girl, young girl,

Drop your hat in the water.

Agway’s empty life jacket was a small orange blur, bobbing away from me quickly, disappearing into darkness. Without it, the cast would have dragged him down. I tried to dive, but the groaning black of the sea entombed me immediately. There was no way to see, no air to breathe. Mindless with terror, I surfaced, choking. I felt at my waist for my cell phone. I hadn’t been in the water long; it just might work.

It wasn’t there. Must have fallen off when I jumped in. I had to go for help. Fast. I slewed around in the water; tried to peer through the rain.

I couldn’t see the boat any more. The sea was obsidian. I stopped, bobbed in the water and tried to listen for the slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. But my panicked heart was beating too hard, my breath coming too quickly; they and the rain were all I could hear. Weeping, I struck out again, heading for where I thought the boat might be. Didn’t even know what direction I was facing any more. The sea was vast; it went on around and beneath me in blackness forever. My boy was drowning, and the nighttime ocean was monstrous. There was no way to know what could be rising from the depths this very moment, its maw stretched wide around dagger teeth the length of my arm. My lizard back-brain screamed at me to get
out! Out!
A cold water current ran just below the surface. Every time I dipped a hand or foot into the ribbon of cold, I knew it was taking my scent, carrying it to the invisible horror rising up from way down deep. I swam harder, going nowhere. My side began to ache. I was gasping, my strokes getting weaker, my head dipping occasionally below the water. No boat. “Agway!” It came out a hoarse whisper. I coughed and sputtered on brine. I was scarcely paddling at all now, too tired to move my arms. The pain in my gut made my belly feel distended. Salt syrup burned my throat.

I panicked completely, struck out in one direction, then the next, never finding the safety of the boat. I whimpered and spat out water.

Exhaustion had set in. My arms felt so heavy. All of me, heavy as rockstones. Rain water filled my eyes, and sea water kept getting into my nose. In the back of my brain, I knew I should go horizontal, try to float, but terror and despair kept me thrashing. Please, please let Agway still be alive. Let me get help.

But it was too late, for both of us. I couldn’t make my legs scissor any more. They sank into the chilly current, and the rest of me began to follow. My head sank into the water.

Something hard touched my ankle. I screamed, sucked in the sea.

Something held me, bore me up. My head surfaced. I coughed out the water. It was hands I was feeling on me, many hands, not the grip of a massive jaw. In the dark I could just make out the heads of people bobbing in the sea with me.

“Thank you,” I shouted hoarsely, over the increasing storm.

One of them gurgled a reply, a liquid sound. So did another.

Sea people. Agway’s people. Holding me fast. “You found him?” I heard myself ask, my teeth chattering. “You found Agway?”
Just this once, let my name not hold true
.

A little voice warbled, “Camity!”

I twisted about to try to see where it was coming from. I saw him. Agway! A sea man was towing him through the water. I held on weakly to the shoulder of one of the people holding me up, and sobbed for joy. Agway held tight to the man’s long hair. So that was why he grabbed hair like that.

“Nna,” he informed me merrily. He tugged at the hair of the man towing him. The man grinned.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. My body was shaking with cold and after-reaction. Through the water blurring my eyes, I peered at the man. Did he and Agway have the same nose, the same shape mouth? The man sank quietly beneath the water, taking Agway down with him. I gasped. But seconds later they surfaced again. Agway was laughing. He spat a stream of water from his mouth. “Camity,” he chirruped. He swatted his father on the head. “Nna.”

“Yes, baby, I think I understand you now. So stop beating up your daddy, all right?”

Agway pointed at another man and then a third, called them both “Nna.” So it meant something like “uncle,” then? No matter. Family.

“I’m sorry,” I said to them. “I should have brought him back earlier.”

Another creature broke surface not two feet from me. I yelped. It snorted, as though in surprise, and sank again. “What the fuck is that?” I asked. Some of the people holding me laughed and joked. Fuckers. I grabbed the shoulders of one of them, and pulled my feet up as close to my body as I could. So hard to see in the dark with water stinging my eyes! A dog? A seal? I thought I’d seen large, liquid eyes. An intelligent face. The sea people didn’t seem worried at it being there. They kept pets?

Another head broke the water, this time beside Agway. A person. “Mamma!” squealed Agway, and tried to throw himself into her arms.

“Chiabuotu,” she said, with a catch in her voice. She gave the man towing Agway something large and floppy to hold. A blanket? I could use one of those right now. Then she took Agway into her arms. “Chichi,” she murmured. She was definitely weeping. I felt heartsick at what I’d put her through. She bobbed upright in the water like a bottle, holding Agway tightly to her, laughing through her tears and chatting back with him as he tried to catch her up on everything he’d seen and done. And the whole time, she kept inspecting his shorn hair, touching his arms, patting his face, stroking his back. Every touch said love, love, and Agway echoed it back at her. He curled his fist tightly in her hair.

Damn. One thing to see a dead one, or a little boy who might or might not be one. Something else again to be right here in their own environment with them. Sea people were real!

We were moving. Where were they taking me? Not deeper out to sea! “No, no, I can’t.” I tried to pull free from the ones holding me. “I’m not made like you. I have to go back to land.” They ignored me. I pushed against the bodies moving me. I was too weak, there were too many of them, and they were in their element. Didn’t stop me trying to break free. I fought and fought until I heard a hollow “thunk.” I shook water out of my eyes and peered. One of the sea people had just slapped his hand against the side of my boat.

“Oh,” I said. “My mistake. So sorry.”

The next five minutes or so were pure joke as the sea people tried to help me into my boat. Every last one of them naked, wet, and slippery. Me shaking so much I couldn’t control my muscles. I would get a foot up on a helpful shoulder, but it would slide off one time, and
braps!
I’d go into the water again. It would have been funny, but I was so tired. And so cold! My arthritic knee was giving off a bright, gonging pain. “Should have climbed that blasted almond tree a few more times for practice,” I gasped at them.

Finally a sea man leapt agilely into the boat. He was fat. Right now, I envied him that. But that hair, milord, just hanging off his head like seaweed in the surf! So much for the legends of mermaids combing their hair out while sitting on the rocks. Whatever they were doing on those rocks, it wasn’t grooming. Getting warm, maybe. Or playing dangerous jumping games with little land girls.