Page 2 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

“Nerissa.”

“I packed snacks,” I lie with a pinch of guilt. Well, technically, it’s not a lie. I did pack snacks, in the sense that I piled snacks with every intention of bringing them with me on this trip. I can picture the granola bars sitting on my kitchen counter with perfect photographic clarity. I just forgot them there.

Well. That’s a problem for boat-Neri.

“Call me after your talk,” Dad says. “I want the whole thing. Standing ovation, weeping deans, all of it.”

“Deans don’t weep. They just huddle in a corner and rub their faces with old linen tissues.”

His laugh is warm and familiar and I hold the phone a little closer to my ear than strictly necessary. “Love you, kiddo. Knock ’em dead.”

“Love you too.”

I hang up, and the armor takes a second to settle back into place, like it always does after his calls. I take a minute to allow myself to feel how much I miss him, how much I feel lonely to the bones since I left San Francisco. Then a seagull lands on the piling next to me, screams directly into my soul, and the moment officially passes.

The Saltford Belle sits at her berth twenty yards down, white hull, navy trim, her name painted across the stern in cream letters. She’s a working boat, wide and unglamorous, and her captain is currently on her back deck, radiating the specific gloom of a man who has been awake for hours and enjoyed none of it.

Captain Fergus Williamson is his name. We spoke for eleven seconds when I arrived this morning. He is a selkie, covered head to knuckles in short beige fur, built like a barrel that decided to become a man. He took one look at my hair, then my face, then said “Departure is at nine o’clock” in a tone that suggested he’d rather let seagulls pluck his eyes out than allow me to wait on the boat.

Well, I’m still here and I don’t care one bit. Take that, Captain.

He’s coiling a line now with the enthusiasm of a man attending his own funeral, and I go back to my slides. For a while the dock is just gulls and diesel and the tide doing its slow, patient thing against the pilings.

Then a voice rolls down the dock like warm weather.

“Buenos días! You must be Captain Williamson. I love your boat.”

I look up. I shouldn’t, but the human neck is a design failure, and I look up.

The man walking down the dock is tall, dark-haired, wearing hiking boots and a fleece zip jacket. He’s also carrying, and I want to be very clear that I am not hallucinating, a life-sized cardboard cutout of Carl Sagan under one arm.

Cardboard Carl Sagan gazes serenely out at the harbor, turtleneck and all, as if contemplating the billions and billions of bad decisions that led him here.

The man himself has the kind of easy, loping walk that says nothing bad has ever happened to him in his entire life. Glasses. Backpack. A smile aimed at Captain Fergus like they’re old friends instead of strangers.

Here’s the thing. I know that face.

Everyone in my department knows that face. It’s on the news every time AETHER clears another milestone, usually mid-laugh like he’s privy to the best inside jokes in the universe. It’s a face also usually captioned with words like visionary, genius and mastermind.

Dr. Rafael Vasquez is the Halloway University Chair in Astronomy. My department chair, technically, in the way that the sun is technically my primary energy source: relevant, distant, nothing I deal with directly, but capable of burning my retinas if I dare stare at it too long.

The great man has arrived.

“She’s a fine boat,” Captain Fergus says, in the tone of a man saying the weather is weather. Gloom incarnate. A conversational door, closing.

And then I watch Rafael Vasquez do something I have never once managed in twenty-seven years of being alive. He wedges himself into the closing door, cheerfully, and it just... opens.

“Downeast hull, right? Late nineties?” He runs a hand along the rail like he’s greeting a horse. “My dad and I used to watch these come into Boston Harbor. What does she draw?”

Pause. A long, furry, suspicious pause from our furry, suspicious boat captain.

“Four foot,” says Captain Fergus.

“With that beam? She must sit like a church in a swell.”

Another pause. And then something horrifying happens to the captain’s face. The gloom cracks. The whiskers twitch. The pot-belly heaves once, twice, and Captain Fergus Williamson laughs.

I have heard about this laugh. The woman at the harbor office mentioned it in the way coastal people mention weather events. It starts somewhere below decks, rolls up through the barrel of him, and detonates across the harbor at a volume that startles two gulls off a piling and one academic off her slide deck. A hundred yards of working dock briefly stops working.