“I’ve heard of a lot of men give a lot of pathetic excuses to leave their lover, but darling, this one takes them all!” Hawk paused, panting and clutching his own side. “You’re even more mad than everyone thinks you are!”
NOW, SILVERFIN!
Silverfin’s limbs were suddenly heavy and foreign. Hawk’s laughter resounded in his ears like peals of thunder. He was as if caught in a fisherman’s net, struggling to breathe, a fish out of water. Damaged. Broken.
“You don’t trust me,” he whispered. “You don’t believe me. So be it.” He dragged himself over to the storm windows, each step heavier and more painful than the previous, as if the air itself could not wait to be rid of him. “Goodbye, Samuel. Remember that I loved you.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Hawk responded, avoiding meeting his eyes and already reaching for a bottle of rum.
Silverfin narrowed his eyes upon the liquor, a memory flashing across the recesses of his mind.
“It was I, you know,” he spoke, “who pulled you from the oceanic grave that night you tried to drown yourself because you were so heart-sick overLucas.” Hawk’s hand trembled and he placed the bottle down onto his desk. “And it was I who pulled you from shark-infested waters when theOrcawas shipwrecked in the storm. I suppose next time you’re drowning, there won’t be anyone out there to save you.”
And with those parting words, he slipped over the windowsill, and down into the waiting waves below.
Silverfin is home! Silverfin is home!
The last thing Silverfin hoped Hawk saw as he swam away was the parting wave of his magnificent tail and the floating, discarded buoy of his peg leg.
Jesus Christ!Hawk thought to himself as he leaned out the storm windows, staring down into the black waves below. It had been a reflection of the moonlight off the waves, hadn't it? Or some large, slender fish that just happened to have been floundering near the surface when Silver dove in.
Except he'd seen the familiar lines of Silver's shoulders in the water, seen the way he moved with that strange fishtail following. The two parts undoubtedly made a whole, diving down into the depths of the ocean with ease and a grace unfettered by the rough-hewn stump of a fake leg that floated sadly in Silver's wake.
Too many things were coming together now to deny it. Things Silver had said and done. Things Pane, of all people, had said when he'd shown up on the beach naked, the sole survivor of his crew. "The things! In the water!" and "Sharks don't strip you like that."
He's a mermaid,Hawk thought, staggering back to his desk and collapsing into his chair. He pulled the stopper from the bottle of rum and drank deeply, his head already spinning before the liquor was even past his lips. The idea was completely impossible, and yet the more he thought about it, the morethings seemed to slot into place. The little peculiarities that he'd written off as Silver's own idiosyncrasies now revealed themselves as blatant tells, enough that he began to feel foolish for not realizing the truth of the matter earlier.
But who the fuck thought that mermaids were actually real? Let alone masquerading as humans? And what the hell gave him reason to be here, anyway? The thought of giving up what must be an idyllic existence under the ocean to deal with the harsh folly of mankind was unthinkable.
What more must I give up for you to see that I truly love you, Samuel?
He did it for you.Hawk tried to drown his terrible realization in the rum.
He did it for you, and you pushed him away.
17
Desperately
Seeking Mermaids
Sea-foam
And coral! Oh, I'll
Climb the great pasture rocks
And dream me mermaid in the sun's
Gold flood.
? Adelaide Crapsey, Laurel in the Berkshires
“ARE YOU EVER PLANNING on going out there again?” Elizabeth’s voice was unusually kind, as was her hand that lay gently on Hawk’s shoulder, and yet, he could detect the exasperation in it. “You can’t hide here forever.”
“Mmm,” was the only response he felt up to giving.
“You have what you’ve always wanted,” Elizabeth continued. “All that gold to build our own life here, free of the past!” Her fingers squeezed around his shoulder, making him acutely aware of the tension he’d been holding there for days. Since Silver left. Or whatever the hell that damn fish’s real name was because it sure as shit wasn’t “Finn Silver”! Bile rose up in Hawk’s gullet. “Perhaps,” Elizabeth continued in those same patient tones that she had adopted with him most of the time, as if talking to an intransigent child, “that isn’t what you’ve always wanted after all. Perhaps, what you wanted is what you did not know you had till it was gone?”
