Page 3 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

“A church in a swell!” the captain booms, delighted, thumping the rail. “Hah! I’m stealing that one. Aboard, then, come aboard. Mind Mr. Sagan on the gunwale.”

“He’s been through worse,” Dr. Rafael Vasquez says. “We’ve been to Comic-Con.”

The captain laughs again. The famous grump of Saltford Bay harbor, chuckling like a kettle, helping a cardboard astronomer over the rail with genuine care.

It took him ninety seconds. Ninety seconds, one boat fact, and a smile, and the gloomiest selkie in Maine is his best friend.

I know exactly what this is. I grew up around his kind, the effortless kind, the kind of people who walk into rooms and the room just likes them back, no audition required. Everything about the man says it: the easy shoulders, the laugh lines, the total absence of doubt that he’ll be welcome. Men like that get believed. Men like that get their telescopes built. Nobody has ever looked at Rafael Vasquez and seen anything but exactly what he wanted them to see.

Must be nice.

My stomach does something small and warm and complicated, and I categorize it instantly as dock-related nausea, file it under never, and close the folder.

Because here is what I know, from twenty-seven years of field observation: charm is weather. It rolls in, it makes everything golden for an afternoon, and then it rolls out to wherever charm goes, and you’re left standing there having rearranged your entire life for it. My mother could pull sunshine out of a room like that.

And that man has it in industrial quantities, plus a telescope, plus tenure, plus a cardboard Carl Sagan that Fergus is now lashing to the wheelhouse with the tenderness of a man securing his firstborn.

Dr. Vasquez says something I can’t hear. The captain’s laugh rolls across the water again, scattering another rank of gulls.

Great. Wonderful. They can be golden together for the whole crossing, and I will be below, or at the rail, or wherever is farthest from all that sunshine, rehearsing the twenty minutes that actually determine my future.

Today has one job. It is not friendship, it is not weather, and it is definitely not tall astronomers who make grumpy sea captains giggle.

I gather my bags, and march myself down the dock toward the Saltford Belle, past the ocean, which is still there, still patient, still breathing against the pilings like it has all the time in the world.

As I move closer, Dr. Rafael Vasquez notices me and waves frantically, high above his head, flashing me the kind of smile that belongs on billboards.

My stomach does that annoying little stunt where it flips upside down.

The golden retriever of astronomy is charming, fine. Noted.

But I have absolutely no intention of throwing him a ball.

Chapter 2

Rafe

Here is something they don’t tell you about achieving your life’s dream: at some point, you will have to act like this is normal.

Nothing to see here, just Dr. Rafael Vasquez, walking around with Carl Sagan tucked under his arm.

Carl and I have been through a lot together this morning. He didn’t fit in the rental car. He tried to fly away twice in the parking lot, turtleneck flapping, like a man finally free. A kid outside the harbor office asked me if he was a picture of my dad. Honestly, in the ways that count, he kind of is.

The keynote bit is simple. I get to the podium, I set Carl up next to me, and I open with the line about how every astronomer is just a kid who never got over their first planetarium show, and then I introduce my co-speaker, who has been dead since 1996 but remains a better public speaker than most of the consortium.

It’ll kill. Scientists are an easy room. We never tire of our own jokes.

Ten years I’ve been waiting for this moment. Ten years of grant panels and budget hearings and engineering reviews. This week AETHER opens her eye to the sky for the first time, right after the inauguration on Sunday.

The dock is gorgeous this morning. Gulls everywhere. Lobster boats idling. And at the end of the row in white hull and navy trim, the Saltford Belle, my ride to the rest of my life.

“Now that,” says a voice to my left, “is a fella I ain’t seen in a while.”

The voice belongs to an older kraken lobsterman sitting on an overturned crate, mending a trap with hands like driftwood. His tentacle-beard is long and the tips wiggle lazily as he looks up at me. He nods at Carl Sagan.

“Cosmos,” he says. “Watched the whole thing on channel two, back when. Billions and billions.” He does the voice. It’s a terrible impression and it delights me completely.

“He never actually said ‘billions and billions,’” I say, easing Carl down for a rest. “That was Johnny Carson doing him. Sagan spent years being haunted by an impression of himself.”