Page 12 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

The boat, mid-turn, broadside, floating without power.

“Fuel’s fouled, she’s swamped a vent.” Fergus is already moving, shoving past, wrenching open the deck hatch, and he’s shouting something about the pickup line.

Then he ducks out the wheelhouse door onto the open back deck with a wrench in his fist, fur slicked black with rain, one hand for the boat.

“CAPTAIN, NO!”

The wave that takes him isn’t even one of the giants. That’s what I notice in my terror-addled brain. It’s an ordinary storm wave, gray and quick, it climbs the low side rail as the Belle wallows, sweeps the open deck hip-deep in one motion. Where there was a furred barrel of a man with a wrench a moment ago, there is now only rushing white water and a cartwheeling orange life jacket, unworn, and then the sea, blank as a wiped board.

“FERGUS!” Rafe’s at the door. I have two fists in his jacket before I know I’ve moved, hauling him back. He’s strong, but I hold on to him with all I have.

I win that fight, barely.

“He’s a seal!” I’m screaming it into the wind, into Rafe’s face, and I don’t know which of us I’m convincing. “He has a better chance than both of us.”

That’s when the big ones arrive.

The first breaks a boat-length short and buries the deck to my knees in white. Cold walks straight through me like a stabbing knife. The Belle rolls and tries to right herself. The vessel is tired, old and brave, but I feel the next one coming through the soles of my feet, through the pulse of the sea.

The ocean is inhaling, the particular gathering hush of water standing up to its full height over shoaling ground.

“Hold on to me,” Rafe says.

His arms come around me and he turns his back to the wave. Somewhere in the last two seconds of the world I take notice of it. That protective gesture, even against a foe as formidable as the mighty Atlantic Ocean.

The wave breaks on us.

The window goes white. The floor becomes a wall.

The Saltford Belle turns over, and the ocean I have refused for five years opens its arms and takes us both.

Chapter 6

Rafe

The sea keeps trying to take her from me.

That's what it feels like, some enormous dispute over the fate of this small, vulnerable woman. I've got her life jacket strap wrapped twice around my fist and I fight with all I have not to let go. A wave buries us both and rolls us over rock. Salt scours up my nose, down my throat. My boots find bottom, lose it, find it again. The bottom here isn't sand, it's teeth, black ledges and boulders slick with weed, surf detonating white against them in the last gray light.

Swimming ended a while ago. This is just arguing with an ocean. I might as well box against a hurricane.

"Stay with me," I tell her, or the water, or myself. I've been saying it since the boat went over. I have no idea if I'm saying it out loud.

She's not answering. That's the thing I'm not looking at directly. She's face-up because I'm keeping her face-up, head lolling against the orange collar of the jacket, turquoise hair plastered dark across her face. She hasn't moved on her own since a piece of the wheelhouse came around in the whitewater and hit us.

A swell lifts us, and I use it, kick with every ounce of strength I have left. It throws us up a shelving ramp of granite and tries to suck us back on the return. I claw us both above the backwash, boots skidding on the slick rocks. Then there's coarse wet gravel under my knees, actual land. I haul her the last body-lengths up out of the reach of the surf. My legs quit and we go down together on the stones.

Cold air. Rain gone to spitting drizzle. The wind is still shouting out there over the water, but here, behind a shoulder of rock, it’s reduced to a whisper.

"Okay," I gasp air in huge lungfuls as I turn to her. "Okay. We made it."

She isn't breathing.

The world becomes extremely simple and infinitely complex at the same time.

I've had CPR training every year for twenty years because universities love a certification, and I remember thinking, each time, when will I ever use this? Well, it seems that the universe played its cards right because all that training comes back to me like some kind of muscle memory I didn’t know I had.

Her lips are gray-blue in the dusk as I tip her head back on the gravel, check her airway, pinch her nose and then seal my mouth over hers and breathe out into her lungs, deep and hard. I watch her chest rise as it’s supposed to. I'm counting, and some stone-cold, calibrated back room of my brain is keeping the rhythm while the rest of me is one long silent yell.