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She still had a bleeding heart where animals were concerned and I’d somehow been roped into dropping her off (on the rare instances that Anna couldn’t) and ended up staying while she cleaned tanks, tested waters, and monitored healing aquatic life.
I’d ended up helping her; our hands slimy and our shoulders touching as we scrubbed old habitats.
When I’d driven Neri home, she’d demanded words in my language for every creature in the aquarium, keeping my mind on her and not on the whisper of fear that if I was pulled over, I could be deported.
It was risky to drive without a license or identification.
Risky to go into the supermarket or downtown or literally anywhere.
But...thanks to Jack and Anna (everything I was, was thanks to them), most of the locals had accepted me as part of them now.
No one questioned where I’d come from because Jack told the same exact story every time: I was a distant family friend here to learn the trade. “I hope he stays for years.” He’d laugh. “He’s a part of our family now.” He’d chuckle.
I quickly learned that Jack was savvy when it came to using the truth to hide the lies, and slowly, I sank into his confidence that no one saw me as different or illegal as long as I didn’t act like it.
Cutting through the captain’s cabin, I glanced at the weathered clock.
Almost forty minutes had passed since Jack and Anna went below, which meant they should be almost done. Grabbing a spare hat from the cupboard where flip-flops and suncream lived, I jammed it on my head, wishing for a reprieve from the sun.
My eyes fell to the table.
I froze.
No Neri.
Her workbooks were all tidied away, her chair back in the stack to be locked into position for sailing.
Where the hell is she?
Spinning on my heel, I sucked in a breath as I found her standing at the back of the boat, her arms folded on the stainless-steel railing, her chin on her forearms, staring into the sea below.
At least she hadn’t jumped overboard to find those wretched dolphins.
Breathing a little easier, annoyed that her well-being always fell to me when her parents dived, I padded over to her.
She huffed as I pressed up against the railing.
“You were a while,” she sighed. “Engine give you trouble?”
“Nothing a wrench couldn’t fix.”
“So we’re not gonna be washed out to sea and become beached on some tropical island where we have to drink from coconuts and fashion houses from driftwood then?”
“What?” I chuckled. “Of course not. Is that what keeps you up at night?”
Turning to face me, she rested her cheek on her forearm. “Yes. But as a dream, not a nightmare. Most days I wish I could do that, don’t you? Turn your back on all of this and just go wild.”
“All of this?” I cocked my chin at the boat, the sea, the knowledge that their work mattered. “I thought you loved all of this.”
She sighed. “I do. I just don’t love the stuff on land.”
“Having another moment where you wish you were a whale, Neri?”
She scowled and looked back at the sea. “Is it my fault that I was a fish in another life? I have a hankering to go back. I want to live down there. Amongst the coral and the currents.”
I laughed. “You cannot possibly know you were a fish. And besides...who’s to say we have anything more than this life. It could all be over with when we die.” I hid my wince at the thought of my family suddenly unexisting.
I’d grown used to Neri’s insistence that my parents, sister, and cousin were still out there. They might not remember me and might not be human, but they still existed. And that offered a bit of comfort to the grief I refused to deal with.
