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Panic seized me. Had I done the wrong thing? Would she insist we turn back, when the realization of my lifelong dream was so close? I turned agonized eyes upward. We were so close I could see the top of the water. It was shimmering with light and looked blue-green, bathed in gold. It was more marvelous than anything I’d ever hoped to see.
“Child.”
I forced my gaze to her, trembling with apprehension. She held my future in her hands—how was it I had never realized it before? She had the power to make me happy, or destroy me. And here I had thought myself in control. It was laughable, though this was no laughing matter.
“I only want you to be happy,” she began, her dark eyes peering into my own. “I have done my best to be a good nurse to your family.”
“You are the very?—”
She cut off my fervent praise with a single look. “But it is not the same with you as your sisters. To you, I have tried not only to be nurse, but mother as well. That is my only failing. Because I cannot be both, you understand, and I have to choose one.”
She held me trapped in silence, and I could feel the very pounding of my heart.
“I have chosen. And now you must make a choice.”
I could not speak. The muscles in my throat were knotted in worry, and I could not manage words.
“For, you see, your father will have me killed if he ever discovers this. What I have done… to go against his express wishes…” She shuddered right before my eyes.
It was a terrifying sight. I watched her with wide, unblinking eyes, unable to comfort her.
“If I were truly your mother, I would have no fear in this matter. But as I am not… he will have me killed,” she repeated, her black eyes boring into mine. “He may very well do it himself with his own trident. You need to understand what we both risk, child.”
Suddenly, despite all that she was sharing with me, I wondered what it would be like to hear her say my name. She never had, and to hear her say she saw herself as my mother… it was something I had always known, deep down where thoughts did not need to be spoken aloud.
“You must make a choice.” Her voice was thin, and somehow all the more terrible as she forced me to face this thing she was saying.
“I am a child,” I whispered through quivering lips. “You… you can’t make me…” I shook my head, unable to finish.
“You are a child insistent on experiencing things withheld from you for your own good. So, you must be an adult then. You must choose. Perhaps you go to the surface, and are satisfied, and no one besides the two of us ever knows.”
I nodded, for that is what I had expected to be the case all along.
“But perhaps we are discovered, and I am killed this very day, and you are left with no one but your sisters and your father, the Sea King.”
With no ready answer for her, I remembered what Chammile had told me after she’d ventured to the surface. She was far more daring than my sisters who had gone before her. She swam into an opening close to land and was able to glimpse young children. There had been three of them, she told us later, moving on their sticks that she thought were called ‘legs’. They seemed to be playing with one another, shouting and laughing, until one, a male human, fell. Even from where she had sat, she described the shine of something bright and red on his knee.
“And then, the most wondrous thing occurred,” she’d said, seeming pleased she held us rapt with her story. “His eyes began to spout water!”
I had not believed her at the time, but not to be outdone, Emellia, the following year, had gone to the surface—not once, but day after day until she had seen the thing Chammile had told us of. She’d spotted a woman in a long, flowing white gown, her hair encased in a white veil. There’d been a man with her—they made quite the picture, she informed us, her in white and he in black. The two of them kissed, and when they pulled apart, Emellia had seen this same water leaking from the eyes of the woman, though she smiled.
“They are called tears,” Emellia had reported with a superior smirk.
“Will I ever experience this… these tears?” I’d asked, tugging on Emellia’s tail for her attention.
She’d regarded me somberly and shook her head. “This is not something we can do.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to,” Chammile had added with a toss of her head. “That fat little human I saw did not look happy about it.”
“He was not fat, he was only newly hatched,” Emellia had retorted.
“Have you ever seen a human hatch?” Chammile had demanded, and it had gone on that way for some time until Nurse intervened.
Later that night, before bed, I’d asked her if what my sisters had been discussing was correct.
She cuddled me close on her fin and gently stroked my long, red hair. “Yes. It is called ‘crying’.”
“I cannot cry?” I gazed up at her beautiful face in confusion and wonder.
