Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (9 page)

SO, SYRENA HAD
set off alone with her sister.
Griet
: the word meant pearl, and Sophie could not help but imagine Griet as opalescent, a shinier, sweeter Syrena, her curls bouncy, like a mermaid in a book.

“Was she lovely?” Sophie asked the mermaid. They had hunkered down for a rest at the northernmost edge of the Atlantic.

“We are so close to the Swilkie,” Syrena mused, ignoring her question, “the whirlpool the ogresses make with their mill. If you are very, very still you can feel the water churning.” She paused. “And taste.” The mermaid swished the water around inside her mouth and swallowed. “Very more salt. Good for you, ya? Ogresses have been milling salt on giant mill since they were very little girls. Wicked king take them, think they full-grown women, ya? Because they so big! He make them work and work, and then they grow up and king like, ‘Uh-oh, giant ladies!' They get rid of him, but they know the sea need the salt. The whole planet do. So they keep the mill going. Very good of them, ogresses very good people. The churning of the mill make a giant whirpool in the sea, the Swilkie. That how we get to the ogresses. We swim the Swilkie.”

“Syrena,” Sophie nagged. Even the story of the giantesses couldn't shake the tale of the mermaid's sister from her mind. “Please, tell me about Griet. Was she beautiful?”

“Oh, ya, so beautiful,” Syrena answered. “The fishes swim up and kiss her pretty cheeks and seahorses comb her long hair with their tails. She wear necklace of diamond and pearl and dolphin always clean her so never the sea mud make her dirty.”

Sophie listened, waiting for the mermaid to continue with the enchanting story. Instead, laughter bubbles rolled from Syrena's mouth like a school of jellyfish.

“Oh, you still such
girl
,” the mermaid said. “You think everything, what you call, fairy story!”

“Well, yeah!” Sophie snapped defensively. “I mean, that's what fairy tales are. Mermaids and stuff. Pardon me for being a human.”

“Griet very pretty,” Syrena said, her tone slightly teasing. “All mermaid pretty. But also—she have fangs.”

“Fangs?”

“Ya, like these,” the mermaid opened her mouth and tapped her own long canines. “But more, longer than normal. They poke out, make her funny looking. Her hair, because so light, show more algae, look more like slime. Her tail very wonderful, sort of pink, but very hurt too, from war, and sharks.”

“Sharks?”

“Ya.” For the first time, the mermaid sounded tired. “When we swim away from our village, through the ships and the fighting, there be many sharks. Drawn to the fighting, all the blood. We fight them off, we dodge ships, we dodge cannons, even the dying sailors.” Syrena twisted her tail, bringing Sophie's attention to a long, raised scar along
its back. “This from anchor chain. The chain cracked, rough, and I become tangled. I thought I would stay forever. Griet help me. Like I help her with shark.”

“What did you do?”

“Kill shark,” Syrena smiled. “Kill shark and eat shark and swim good and healthy out from the sea and all the fighting.”

Sophie knew that Griet didn't look like a Barbie princess mermaid doll any more than Syrena did, but she also knew that the mermaid must have been beautiful, just like the one in front of her. “And then what?” she asked. Syrena's face grew dark at Sophie's insistence, darker and suddenly older. Still beautiful, always beautiful, but it was a beauty that Sophie didn't completely understand. A beauty that scared her a little.

“Time for sleep now,” Syrena said sternly. “No more ‘this-is-mermaid-life.' Tomorrow we reach the Swilkie. Last time in Swilkie, almost lost fin!” The mermaid fingered the delicate scales of her hip fin gingerly. “Very athletic, Swilkie. Rest up.”

“I have a sister too,” Sophie surprised herself by saying. It was the first time she had spoken the truth out loud.
I have a sister.
“A twin.”

Syrena spun her head to gaze at the girl, her hair following slowly, rotating like a big, black cloud above her. “Oh, no,” she said. “You say there two of you?”

Sophie nodded.

“What her name?” Syrena asked. “Is she beautiful?” Sophie realized the mermaid was teasing her.

“She's—she's captured. Or something. By Kishka. She lives in Kishka's trailer at the dump.”

“What ‘trailer'?”

“It's like a really little space, on wheels. But it's so weird. From the outside, the space is little, but then inside it's big. Like, magic-big. And there's a garden there, but there's something wrong with it. Like the leaves are poison. When I went inside, it was like I couldn't breathe, like the plants were stealing my breath. She's trapped in there—she's been living there, inside all the plants and trees. She's so small. I think there's something really wrong with her.” The memory of it made her feel sickened and sad. “It was supposed to be me in there. Kishka was tricked into taking her.”

“That good story,” Syrena said grimly. “That make me happy, that Kishka can be tricked.” Though as she said it the mermaid sounded anything but happy. She sounded like Sophie felt: like there was a rock where her heart should be.

“I don't even know her name,” Sophie said. “And I don't know if she's beautiful. She looked sick. Her skin was green, like the leaves had rubbed off on her.”

Syrena swooped her long tail around Sophie and brought her close. They lay there, side by side but each far away with thoughts of their lost sisters.

Chapter 8

E
ventually Syrena fell asleep, but Sophie couldn't. She tried hunkering into the mud like a cat or a mermaid, but the sand felt itchy, and she was too aware of every little fish that swam by her face. After lying there in the dark for what felt like hours, she decided to explore.

How many days had she spent at the bottom of the sea, practically traversing the whole Atlantic Ocean—and had Sophie even done any exploring? Could she even say she'd seen the deep sea? Or had she just rushed through it at the urging of a tyrannical mermaid?

Following the steady blue glow of her talisman, Sophie set out cautiously, part walking, part human-style swimming. As she paddled around, she came upon a cluster of coral dotted with slumbering sea snails. Her stomach growled at the sight of them and she nearly burst out laughing. Sea snails? Maybe she truly was becoming part mermaid. Sophie swished over to the rocks and plucked a spiral snail shell from
its shallow crack. Before she could even consider the creature inside, she held the shell to her mouth, slurped, and swallowed. The snail left a slime of flavor upon her tongue, and it made her curious. She pulled another from the crack and slurped it from its home. Cruel, a voice rang in Sophie's head. It was cruel to pick the innocent snails from their resting place and end their peaceful lives so suddenly in her belly. It was cruel, like the sunfish eating the mermaids, like Syrena eating the shark. The entire ocean was cruel, and all of the earth, and Sophie was a part of it, made to consume life the way sharks were, the way the snails themselves feasted on fish killed and abandoned by other fish.

Sophie grew dizzy with the thought. She lifted the edge of her T-shirt—once boldly striped, now faded as pale as a fish bone from her time in the salty sea. She dabbed her mouth with the hem. The food chain, or rather chains, the millions of strands of life consuming life upon the planet, was suddenly something Sophie understood, more deeply than she ever had in a classroom. She held an empty periwinkle shell, covered with something fuzzy and nutritious, up to the baby
octopus still residing on her head. He grabbed it with his tentacles and went to work scraping it clean.

Sophie moved deeper into the reef, running her hands over the ruffled lids of giant clams furred with pink algae. She was mesmerized by the pulsing, colorful mantle peeking out from the shell's wide curves. Even more mesmerizing was a giant oyster nestled among them, flatter and wider than the clams, its ridged shell sprawling in all directions. Sophie had never heard of giant oysters, but what did that matter? She hadn't heard of mermaid-eating sunfish, either. As she moved closer to the oyster, its shell began to lift open in greeting. The shiny sea plants and elegant sea fans fluttered with the giant oyster's movement, and gazing at it with apprehension and wonder, Sophie could see the gleam of something dazzling on the oyster's fleshy lip. A pearl! As the oyster cranked its shell ever wider, the pearl caught the scant light available at such depths—the blue of Sophie's talisman, the luminescence of a passing worm, the sparkles of phosphorescence among the algae—and glowed, majestic and ghostly.

Griet! Sophie thought again of Syrena's sister, not that the creature had really left her mind. In fact, wasn't she somehow seeking Griet in her solo outing? With the mysterious mermaid haunting her mind, didn't she set out to find something—some proof of her left behind in this, her undersea queendom? And here it was, a giant ball of beauty in the plush body of the huge oyster. It was for this thing that Syrena's sister had been named; such a creature had to be dazzling. What must it be like to have a sister lovely as a pearl?

For lovely as a pearl Sophie's sister was not. Dumb as a plant, more like, stuck inside her grandmother's trailer, the toxic greenery binding her like roots clutching soil. Sophie shook the thought from her mind. The memory of that glimpse of her sister was truly haunting—spooky. All alone in the dark, she'd much rather imagine Syrena's sister, the beautiful Griet.

Sophie swam toward the pearl. She could gather it in her arms and carry it back to Syrena and perhaps it would comfort her. Not that the mermaid needed comfort, exactly—she seemed beyond it. But maybe in the giant pearl Syrena would see an unusual beauty, and understand for a moment the way her stories had captured Sophie's heart.

As Sophie approached its lip, it was as if the oyster inhaled, took a deep and terrible breath, pulling Sophie into its shell, sliding her across the smooth surface of the giant pearl. Sophie tried to swim against the strong current, but she was pulled completely inside the giant oyster almost immediately. And then the shell slammed shut.

Chapter 9

S
ophie had never even eaten an oyster, so she didn't understand what this particular enormous one could have against her. Inside the chamber of its clamped shell, lit blue with the glow of her talisman, she tried not to panic. Which was hard, because not only was she trapped, but the oyster itself, its phlegmy body, was sticking to her in a rather disgusting way. It was like its goo was trying to cuddle with her. Wherever Sophie's body was in contact with the gooey bivalve it began sliming itself up her. It felt like living glue, impossible to peel away. She struggled against it, the groans of her effort echoing off the shell.