Page 13 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Because here's the thing. Here is the thing I cannot make sense of, the thing that's been screaming in me since we hit the water: she's a half-mermaid.

Everyone knows how this works, it's not folklore, it's biology, there are mermaids on the Olympic team, there was a mermaid in my sister's wedding party. The whole horrible swim, some corner of me kept waiting for it, kept expecting a flash of tail in the churn and then her arms hauling me to shore.

Honestly, her rescuing me was the version I'd have bet on.

She never shifted. She went into the sea like I did, swimming with human arms and legs, panicked just like me. And the wrongness of that is so loud, so specific, that even mid-breath, mid-count, it sits on my chest like a second drowning.

Why didn't she shift? She knew the water better than anyone today. She should have shifted and saved herself.

Two breaths. Compressions. I lace my hands over her sternum, and that's when my palm registers what my eyes already snagged on and refused to name.

There are slits on her neck.

Three fine lines along each side, below the jaw's shadow, and they are open. Feathered at the edges, delicate as the frills of a deepwater creature brought up into air, working, fluttering, trying to breathe an ocean that isn't there anymore.

Gills. She has gills. I understand with a clarity like cold water that her body is confused, caught between two sets of plumbing, drowning in air. I breathe for her again, again, and I hear my own voice, wrecked, saying "come on, come on, querida, just breathe."

Her whole body convulses.

Seawater comes up out of her mouth in a gush, shockingly much of it. I get her rolled onto her side and she's coughing, gagging, hauling in these long horrible ragged pulls of air. The gill slits flutter once more and lie down flat and seal themselves into two faint seams that a stranger would never see. She breathes air, loud and perfect, and I have never heard anything better in my life.

"There you go." My hand is on her back, between the jacket straps. I'm shaking harder than she is. “There. You're okay. You're on land, you're—”

She shoves me.

Weak, both hands, but unmistakable, a full-arm shove that catches my shoulder and knocks me back onto my heels. She scrambles away from me over the gravel, one arm buckling, until there are six feet of stones between us. She gets her back against a rock. Her hand goes to her neck.

Not to her throat, the way choking people do. To the side of her neck. Flat palm, fingers spread, covering.

We stare at each other in the almost-dark.

She knows what I saw. It's all over her, the knowing. She's half-drowned, gray-lipped, one shoe gone, shaking in waves, and the first, the very first thing her body found strength for was putting distance between us and a hand over those seams. Her eyes on me are not grateful, not shocked, nothing so simple. They're braced. Braced like I'm the next threat.

"Hey," I say. Slow. The voice for a spooked animal. "You're okay. We're on some sort of island. You were in the water a long time, so just breathe, that's the whole job right now."

Nothing. Coughing. The hand stays on her neck.

"I did mouth-to-mouth," I say, because she'll reconstruct it anyway, she's the smartest person on this beach even hypoxic. "You weren't breathing."

"Don't." Her voice is coarse, two hundred grit like sandpaper. She stops. Swallows. When it comes again it's lower, steadier. "Don't ask."

I've got a hundred questions and they're all on fire. Why didn't you shift? How can you have gills and hear the ocean speak but also drown? I look at her braced against her rock, guarding her secrets with everything she has left, her face so closed off, she might as well be in a police interrogation room.

“Okay," I say. “I won’t ask you anything."

Her eyes go narrow. Waiting for the catch. There's no catch, and watching her try to find one is its own kind of heartbreak.

I make myself look away, and survey the world instead, because the world is not done with us. Dusk is nearly spent. The rock around this beach stands in black snaggled masses against a sky going char. The surf is white noise and white teeth all along it. Out there somewhere the Saltford Belle is sinking to the bottom of the ocean beneath the waves.

And Fergus. I shiver thinking about the captain. All I can do is hope that his selkie nature saved him.

Nobody knows where we are, but there will be people searching. But search as they may, they won’t find us tonight.

We’re going to have to spend the night somewhere and we can’t stay on this beach. The wind has found us even behind the rock shoulder, and the drizzle is refueling. We are two soaked bodies at dusk on the Maine coast and everything we own is wet.

I blink as another shiver wracks my body and when I look up at Nerissa again, I see her doing the same. She’s shivering and her lips are a deep blue-purple, her skin ashen gray. Even her shaking has changed register in the last few minutes, becoming slower. Like she doesn’t even have the energy for her muscles to move properly. I know what that means.

Everybody who hikes as much as I do knows what that means. Hypothermia is setting in.