Page 37 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

The part that hurts most isn’t the speeches. I can miss a ribbon cutting. It’s first light. The dome slit opening. The mirror taking its first real photons. Every monitor in the control room filling with the sky.

I used to picture that moment as I fell asleep at my desk: photons that left some other world before the pyramids, ending their journey tonight on a surface that exists because a nine-year-old in Boston got handed a department-store telescope by his father and never recovered.

The sun clears the horizon, painting a shimmering wonder of light across the cove. I don’t hear her come down the path.

The first thing I know is the wool blanket settling around my shoulders, and then Neri sits next to me, her face sleep-creased, her hair a teal catastrophe. She rests her head on my shoulder, her gaze on the water.

“You’ve been sitting here for over an hour,” she says. “The fish can’t be that interesting.”

“Two mackerel and a seagull with a bad attitude had an argument. It was riveting.”

The joke comes out automatically. Right shape, right timing. The familiar little reflex of making the room lighter, even when I don’t feel like joking. Or laughing.

She doesn’t smile. She stays pressed to my side and doesn’t ask what’s wrong.

She waits. The waves come in their eternal dance over the shore. Way out, a gannet folds and hits the water, fast as a thrown knife.

“It’s Sunday,” I finally say.

I feel her go still. She takes this in, then, quietly: “I’m so sorry.”

I take a deep breath.

“It’s fine. It’s a party. I’ve been to a thousand.”

“Of course, it’s not fine. This is your project.”

“It’s fine.” My tone is sharp and I immediately regret it. None of this is Neri’s fault. Then, quietly, like it’s no bother at all. Like all this didn’t cost me a decade of my life. “It’s just work, after all. It will be there when we go back.”

My thumb finds the scar on the back of my right hand and worries at it. I shake my head, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see her staring at me.

“I used to think, when it’s done, then I’ll settle down. Then I’ll figure out whatever the hell comes after spending ten years trying to get one impossible thing up a mountain. Whatever the sentence was going to be after ‘then,’ I never finished it. There was always another wobble.”

I look down at my hands.

“And now it’s done.”

I gesture at myself. The beard. The salt-stiff fleece.

“The worst part, the genuinely embarrassing part, is that I watched all my friends get married, have children, build lives for themselves and I always thought that my project was worth the sacrifice. I always thought that AETHER was worth putting my life on the sidelines. I’m not so sure anymore.”

There.

I wait for her to tell me it’s ridiculous. That of course it was worth it. She doesn’t.

Neri pulls her feet onto the log and wraps her arms around her knees. For a moment she watches the water instead of me.

“When I finally shifted three nights ago,” she says slowly, “the thing I felt first wasn’t joy. Joy came after. The first thing was relief.”

She rubs her thumb over one knee.

“And for about five seconds, I hated myself for it. Like being relieved meant I hadn’t wanted the sea badly enough.”

She turns her head and looks at me.

“Maybe you’re allowed to love something and still be tired from carrying it.”

That’s all.