“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Just as a whole, we find it wrong. My first thought on hearing you say all of this was that I couldn’t believe someone as kind as you had even considered it. But if that’s the culture, I understand why you thought of it or why you thought it was normal. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you never did.”
“I never considered it,” he clarified. “Not even once. Well, maybe once, but it repulsed me so much that I hid.”
“I’m so glad you did,” she said because he still looked so ashamed.
“It was just a mom and a kid,” he said. “And then when I washiding, I wondered if I could just join them. Not for having the woman or anything but just…” He sighed heavily. “I’ve been so lonely. The only mermaids that come to the shallows are women with their young and whoever accompanies them.”
“Why didn’t you go back into the deeper water? Because of what happened with your mom?” Didn’t he say that was his first and last time in deeper waters but that ‘actual’ mermaids were supposed to be in the deeper ocean? It made sense. She imagined close to humans was a dangerous place to be. If only humans’ rules for murder applied to other creatures as well and not just amongst humans. Because surely if a mermaid could talk and think like a man, he deserved to be treated as one, but she was not at all confident that would be the case.
“No, actually, don’t talk about it if it’s too painful,” she said.
“No. It’s okay,” he said, though he fell silent again and she wondered if she’d have to wait forever. “I…I wouldn’t leave her body. The other mermaids—the women—tried to pry me off her, but I was incoherent. I…”—he swallowed deep—“they said it was dangerous and the man even hit me to try to get me to go—to knock sense into me as one might say. It didn’t work, and even though those women all made cooing remarks that they would raise me as their own—probably because I looked so much like that man—I was making enough of a ruckus that no one wanted to deal with me so they left. And then…then…it was quiet. Too quiet. Like death. I like the sounds of the waves crashing. I like hearing it from above and even from underneath, and I like the gulls and the birds and the calls of the fishermen.”
She was sure those weren’t the only things keeping him from the deep, but she chose not to say it, and his hand, almost as if in answer, touched his scar.
“We’re…we’re not like the dolphins and whales in the sense that unlike them, only our tail is hard. This flesh”—he touched his torso and swallowed again—“well, when a whale dies, very few things can work through it. When a mermaid dies, the scavengers can start on this part and then keep tunneling.”
She felt like she might be sick.Whywas he telling her this?
But he wasn’t looking at her but rather the water, so he didn’t stop at her horror, and in truth, she was glad for it. How many years had he been scarred by the monstrosities that happened in those silent waters with no one to speak them to? Her poor Kallias.
“I didn’t want anything to touch her. I know how impossible that is, but if they did…it was like if they did, then she would truly be gone.”
His hand dropped from his scar as his eyes rose to her. “Do you…get what I’m saying?”
“I do,” she murmured softly. “I feel the same way. Most humans do. We have such a hard time letting go, we bury the dead in the ground so nothing can get to them, and then we make these plaques that have their name and some things about them and we put them above the ground where we buried them so that they will never be forgotten. The rich even make the plaques in stone.”
Tears rimmed his eyes. “That’s…that’s beautiful.”
And then she was hugging him again as tightly as she could. “The ones for my mother and father are on this island. You know, we could make one in memory of your mother too. There doesn’t have to be a body buried. We do it for humans whose bodies get lost at sea.”
“Really?” he muttered into her shoulder.
“Really.”
“Even so long after?”
“Of course. The heart doesn’t know a time limit.”
“Are you really sure?” he asked, pulling away to look at her again.
“I am. Why do you keep asking?” she said.
“Well, I’m a mermaid. She’s a mermaid. To let us into your customs…”
She placed her hand on his cheek. “I see no problem with it whatsoever. You’re as human to me as any other.”
“Daria,” he murmured, touched.
“And if she was important to you, she’s important to me.”
“I love you,” he murmured, kissing her.
“I love you more.”
CHAPTER 36
She lay awake in her bed, sure that she would hear the dropping of her pebbles before she managed any sleep.
