Cry of the Sea (6 page)

“Okay. Do that,” I said. “But hurry. She’s at
the end as it is.”

The gasping mermaid was now almost a navy
blue color, all the luster of her silver gone. Carter let out a
long whistle at the sight of her once she was lying flat on the
table and dad had backed away.

Dr. Schneider, who had been standing there
sputtering as if the shock of seeing the mermaid had stolen his
ability to speak, finally formulated some words. “Dear God! What
have you found?”

I ignored all of their reactions. “I don’t
think we have time to clean her, Carter,” I said. “She’s dying.
Let’s get her in the tank now.”

Dr. Schneider walked around the table slowly,
giving the creature a long visual once-over. “No doubt about it,”
he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant that there was no doubt that it
was a mermaid or no doubt that it was dying.

“Sir?” Carter asked. “What do you
suggest?”

“Yes, yes!” the scientist declared. “Into the
tank. And fast!”

Carter moved fast to help my dad lift the
mermaid and carry her to the aquarium. All the cockiness he
displayed when we first got there evaporated with the task of
handling this unusual creature. Now he was all business. He climbed
the stepladder and pushed back the screen lid to the aquarium. Then
he helped my dad and me guide the body up and over the edge.
Gently, he let the mermaid topple from his hands and drift into the
cold, salty water of the tank. He closed the top and joined us back
on the cement floor of the warehouse.

All of us watched the mermaid as she sank
lifelessly to the bottom of the aquarium. No one spoke. No one
breathed. We waited patiently, each of us hoping the mermaid’s
color would return and that she would open her eyes.

Chapter
Four

“Come on, girl. Breathe,” I began to chant
softly. “Come on.”

At last, with great effort, the mermaid threw
her head back and seemed to gulp in a large breath. She rolled in a
small loop through the water before stretching upright again. It
was as if she were standing, although her tail wriggled beneath her
to keep her treading water in one place. Her large eyes were open,
and I swear she was looking directly at me. Those giant blue orbs
had softened away from the edge of fear and pain I saw in them
earlier. I think I could understand what she was trying to convey
to me through those eyes. She seemed
grateful
that we’d
saved her life.

After a moment, when the mermaid decided
she’d made her message clear, she began swimming around the tank to
get her bearings. All the while, she swiped at her skin to try to
remove some of the oil. Her efforts did no good. All she did was
smear the greasy stuff around more. As she became increasingly
agitated, her movements got more and more frantic. Her tail
thrashed about wildly in the tank, causing water to splash over the
top and making the screen cover slap up and down.

“We’ve got to get that oil off her,” Carter
said. “But I don’t know how. If we pull her out again, she might
die.”

“Do you think she’d let us go in with her?” I
asked.

“I don’t know,” Carter said. “She looks
violent.”

“Wouldn’t you be violent if you were covered
in oil?”

My dad interrupted us. “Perhaps we should
wait for her to calm down a bit before making any decisions. She’s
got to get used to the environment, and she
is
breathing.
Her life’s not in jeopardy—”

Carter interrupted. “It is, sir.”

“—
at this second,” my dad said,
finishing his sentence. My dad’s stony expression made it clear
that he was not to be argued with or interrupted again.

Carter frowned but conceded to my dad. He
backed up and sat on top of the metal table. I moved back, too, and
leaned against the table next to him. Dr. Schneider, on the other
hand, had slowly inched closer to the aquarium while we talked and
was now practically pressing his nose to the glass to take in the
mermaid’s every action.

“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever
seen,” he said. “You found this on Grayland Beach? This
morning?”

“Yes,” my dad said. “There were three of
them.”

That’s right. I gasped, realizing that with
everything we’d been doing, I had forgotten we left the other two
bodies in the truck. I gestured at Carter for him to follow me, and
he jumped off the table. As we headed toward the door, Dr.
Schneider inundated my dad with questions about how the mermaid had
looked when we discovered her.

“Did you find her face up or down? Had she
crawled up on the sand with her arms? Or do you think she was
pushed ashore by the tide? Were the mermaids horizontal or vertical
to the shoreline?”

They were good questions, and as I walked
away I tried to think if I knew the answers. I had been so shocked
at discovering them at all and then overwhelmed by the need to save
them, that I’m not sure I noticed all those details. I wish I had
paid more attention. I knew they were face up, but I really
couldn’t remember any details that would have helped me to know how
they got there.

Carter opened the double doors for me, and I
passed through to the lobby. Once the doors were closed behind us,
he said, “So, that’s Peter Sawfeather. I’ve heard of him. He led
that fight against Oceanside Construction a few years ago,
right?”

“That’s him. My mom, Natalie Sawfeather, was
the lawyer on the lawsuit too.”

“Yeah, my dad works for that company.”

Great. Someone else who was going to hate me
because of my parents. “Sorry.”

“Oh no! It’s not like that.” Carter laughed,
easing the tension that had instantly formed between us. “My dad
works for Oceanside
now
. After the lawsuit your parents won
against the company, my dad got hired to oversee construction sites
and make sure they are being left litter free and that the workers
are following all the environmental guidelines. Your parents are
heroes at my house.” Carter held the front door open for me. “It’s
pretty cool of you to come out and help him like this.”

I paused as I walked through the Visitor’s
Center. I looked back at his face and those nice blue eyes. “You
think so?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You know, there are girls
that come in here all the time. They look great in their
sundresses, perfect hair and makeup. They parade around and look at
the tanks, but they won’t even touch so much as a sea star because
they’re
slimy
.” He pantomimed reaching his hand in the water
and pulling it out with a shriek and a series of shivers. “Ew!
Ew!”

I giggled in spite of myself. He grinned and
shook his head.

“I know. Pathetic, right?”

“You could say that.”

“You’re different from them. You don’t care
how you look. You’ll wake up before dawn and throw on whatever
you’ve got ‘cause you know you’re going to get dirty with the fish
and oil. I’ve never met a girl like you.”

“Oh,” I said, and continued toward the front
door. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that. I think he was trying
to compliment me, but it didn’t really work. All he did was remind
me of how terrible I looked at the moment. Thanks for that. And why
were all these girls coming to the rehabilitation center in their
sundresses and make-up anyway? Ummmm, let me guess. It probably
wasn’t to look at jellyfish and sand sharks.

Outside, I unlatched the back of the pick-up
and pulled the blankets off the mermaids. Carter took a step back.
The smell of the bodies had ripened. They gave off a distinct dead
fish odor mixed with sulfur that I knew would be in my pores and
hair for days. I reached for the first body.

“They’re heavier than they look,” I said.

Carter got my hint and quickly stepped to my
side to pull the torso out of the truck bed. I wrapped my arms
around the tail. “I’ve heard your dad’s name at school, too,”
Carter said, his voice almost too cheery. It seemed like he was
trying to keep a light conversation going to avoid thinking about
the grim thing we were doing. “My professor of Geology at
Washington State is a friend of his. He’s mentioned your dad a time
or two during lab.”

“You’re in college?”

Dumb question. Of course he was in
college.

“Aren’t
you
?” he came back.

I felt my lips pull up into a wry grin. Well,
that was something. I may have looked like Hell, but at least he
thought I was older. That was cool. I kept my eyes diverted from
his tan face.

“Well, actually, no,” I said. “I’m a senior
at West Olympia.”

“That makes you even more unique, then. I
can’t imagine any high school girl doing anything but playing with
her cell phone and shopping at the mall.”

I had to look up at him then. Just a glance.
I wanted to know if he was smiling, and he was. Maybe unique was
something he could like in a girl.

I wasn’t good at flirting. No guy had ever
shown any interest in me, and I wasn’t sure if Carter was or if he
was just being polite. It was also really hard to be
all
that
when holding a dead mermaid tail with both arms. So, in
response, all I said was, “Yeah, well, when you’re raised by
activists it gets in the blood.”

I couldn’t help but notice the muscles in
Carter’s arms when he shifted the weight of the mermaid so that he
could open the door. They flexed beneath his blue T-shirt and the
weight of the mermaid bundle.

“How’d you get a job working for Dr.
Schneider?” I asked him.

“School,” Carter answered. “They have
listings in the Student Center of places that need interns and
apprentices. I thought an internship here would look good on my
resume when I graduate.”

“What year are you?” I found it hard to
believe that this guy was close to graduating college. He didn’t
look much older than me. In fact, he even had a couple bright red
pimples on his otherwise perfect nose.

“Oh, I’m just a Freshman,” he said. “I’ve got
a long way to go. But who knows what can happen? Maybe this
internship will turn into a paying gig before too long.” He nodded
to the mermaid in his arms, her head tucked against his chest and
arms crossed over her torso between his arms. “After a discovery
like this, maybe I won’t even have to graduate. The National
Geographic Society will give us all huge grants and make us all
successful. How would that be?”

I didn’t say anything. It was a nice thought,
being rich and successful, but I knew it wasn’t reality. My parents
were not about becoming rich. They would find a purpose for this
find that would benefit some cause. I didn’t know what that would
be yet, but my parents would uncover it. I also knew that I really
didn’t want to skip college. I needed college to get away from my
parents, and I needed a degree to do what I wanted with my life.
Carter seemed like a pretty motivated guy, so I felt pretty sure he
wouldn’t quit college either, no matter what happened next.

Without any more small talk, we got both of
the bodies inside and spread out on the metal table behind where my
father and Dr. Schneider were still animatedly discussing the
mermaid in the tank. As soon as we were finished, the men turned
their attention away from the tank and onto the corpses.

“Remarkable,” Dr. Schneider said.
“Astounding.”

Dr. Schneider put on some latex gloves and
began running his fingers along the deep blue skin of the mermaids,
which was drying out quickly. He poked at them and plucked scales
off their tails, all the while speaking aloud his thoughts about
the skin tissue and biology of the creatures. I knew that I should
be paying more attention, like Carter and my dad were. They nodded
their heads and said “uh huh” after every sentence Dr. Schneider
uttered. But I wasn’t following what the scientist was talking
about; all the tech talk bored me. While I knew that I’d have to
take tests and write essays about this kind of stuff when I went to
school, it wasn’t the reason I wanted to be a Marine Biologist. It
was the actual physical involvement with the animals that intrigued
me.

Halfway listening to Dr. Schneider’s
monotonous scrutinizing, I stepped away from the table to watch the
living mermaid. She had stopped thrashing about and appeared to be
actively observing the men and the dead bodies with her hands
pressed against the glass. She winced every time the scientist
prodded at her sisters. Again, her eyes revealed emotions that were
anything but happy. They conveyed loss, loneliness, and pain all at
once. I was positive she could comprehend that the other mermaids
were dead.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the mermaid, touching
the glass softly. “We weren’t fast enough.”

The mermaid looked into my eyes. She
understood me. Maybe not my words so much, but she recognized the
sincerity behind them. Ridiculous as it was, a part of me expected
her to talk back to me. If it were a SyFy Channel movie, she’d have
a snippy English accent and would tell me important secrets in
riddles. In a Disney film, she might even sing. However, she wasn’t
really partly human with some uncanny ability to talk beautifully
in my language even though she’d never heard it before. She was
mostly some kind of fish with an upper half that looked vaguely
like a woman who lived under water where people don’t talk or watch
cable TV. So, instead of talking with words, the mermaid simply let
out a squeaking noise similar to the sound of a dolphin.

The men heard it and stopped what they were
doing to gather around me.

“Did she just make that sound?” Dr. Schneider
asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I think she was talking to
me.”

“That’s impossible,” Dr. Schneider said.
“That would mean she was sentient, able to think and
communicate.”

“Well, why not?” my dad said. “With a
human
ish
head, why couldn’t she have a brain similar to ours
too?”