Page 11 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Thing is, for five years I have kept that channel shut with both hands and my whole weight. The last time I tuned in to the water, my mother was alive, and the channel and her voice come from the same place inside my chest. I haven’t opened that door since.

I’m in the room now. That storm kicked the door in.

And the pulse out there is enormous. It’s long and deep and organized, arriving from a fetch of open ocean as wild and untamed as the heart of the sea.

Under the wind-chaos there’s a rhythm with intent in it, waves stacking, periods syncing, and beneath the boat the water has started doing the thing it does over ledges and shoals when big swell finds shallow bottom, standing up. Getting steep. Getting tall.

We are not going to punch through.

We are going down.

The knowing lands in me whole, complete, delivered, the way a proof lands when the last line resolves and you see the whole shape at once. There’s no unseeing it, and my body goes very quiet and very cold. My slides, my speech, the ceremony and my entire meticulous life shrink to the size of a thumbnail image at the bottom of a page.

“We’re going down.” My voice comes out strange. Level. Loud enough to be heard and no louder. “This boat is going down.”

“It’s a squall, girl.” Fergus doesn’t turn, but I see a tendon stretch on his neck underneath his fur. “I have run this crossing in worse weather.”

“No, you haven’t.” I have no idea how I find the strength to speak so evenly, but I do. It rips out of me, his own contempt turned around and thrown back. “I’m right and you know it. Listen to me. I am telling you what the ocean is saying, and it is saying we go down.”

Silence fills the space between the three of us, if a howling wheelhouse can hold one. Fergus stares at the windshield, jaw working, seal-stubborn, and I can see it happen when he decides to doom us all.

“Squall line,” he says. “We’re punching through.”

A voice beside me says, “What do you need us to do?”

I turn. Rafe is braced in the corner with one hand on the overhead rail, glasses rain-spotted, face pale, and he is looking directly at me, only at me, and there is not one atom of doubt anywhere on his face.

“You believe me.” I just state it, because it’s not really a question.

“You said the boat is going down,” he says. “So the boat is going down. What do we do?”

Guilt shoots through me like a harpoon, biting at my vital organs. He doesn’t even look angry at me. I’m the one who refused to turn around in the end. Any reasonable person would spend this moment telling me it’s-your-fault, but not him. Instead, he moved straight to what do we do, and something in my chest breaks open along a seam. Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s the abject terror that sends shards of ice through my veins. There is no time, absolutely no time, to find out which one it is.

“Life jackets.” I’m already hauling up the bench seat. “Under here. Everyone, including captain forty years of experience over there.”

The jackets are stiff orange and smell like rubber and mildew, but they seem in good enough shape. I shove one at Rafe, throw one across at Fergus, who catches it one-handed and does not put it on, because of course he doesn’t. Seals swim, don’t they?

I have no idea if a selkie can swim in this type of weather, but I have no time or inclination to ask.

I’m buckling mine when Rafe, working his second strap, says, “You too?”

“Me too,” I say. “Long story. Buckle.”

The Belle climbs a swell that keeps going like an elevator lift that turns my stomach, and from the top, in the flogging wipers’ one clear pass, I see it.

The sea to the northeast stands up like the hands of a forgotten God.

Rows of waves come our way, gray-shouldered, long as freight, wearing white at the crests where the wind is tearing them, and past them a lower dark line that is not cloud. This means underneath us the bottom is already rising, which means these waves are about to tip us over.

“Fergus!” I scream it. “LEE! NOW!”

The old selkie captain doesn’t argue with me this time.

He spins the wheel, opens the throttle, the diesel bellows, the Belle digs in her shoulder and starts to come around, and for three full seconds I think we might thread it. That’s the cruelest part. Those three whole seconds of hope.

Then the engine dies.

No cough. No warning light drama. Just gone, mid-roar, the thrum that has lived in the deck planks, and the sudden quiet underneath the storm is the loudest thing I have ever heard.