The Twice Lost

a wave. Luce noticed the man’s filthy layered overcoats; the rags around his feet; the sad, sick way he staggered. It reminded her a bit of the way her father had looked when she’d found him living as a castaway, his body swaddled in sealskins. Luce stopped where she was. The thought of her father opened like a wound in her chest, the shape of an intolerable absence. Where was he now? Had he recovered from all the terrible things he’d gone through?

The man swayed faster, his body doubling in the middle as if he were about to be sick. He was standing right at the pier’s edge, one foot curling into empty space. Now he didn’t remind Luce of her father but of her uncle Peter. Reeling, pitiful, and broken, although Luce thought furiously that he’d actually broken himself. That was how Peter had looked in the moments just before he turned vicious, smacking her or knocking her down. Her stomach tightened with disgust. Maybe that was Peter, homeless and stinking, wandering across the wasted margins of a beautiful city . . .

The man still hadn’t straightened, but he wasn’t vomiting, either. Instead he just wavered, his torso tipped precariously toward the water, one hand pawing the air in slow circles. Then he tried to step back, wobbled sharply, and pitched headlong into the bay. The splash blinked white against the darkness.

For several seconds Luce waited for him to surface. He could swim for the shore, or he could grab hold of the pilings and pull himself back up. She watched the water where he’d fallen: at first the glossy surface was rocking, but gradually it calmed until there was nothing but a scattered hoop of froth. His head should emerge from the froth at any moment, sputtering angrily.

Nothing happened. Where was he? Luce swam closer. There in the gray dimness under the pier she could just make out his ragged, flailing shape. His waterlogged coats splayed out around him like pinwheeling wings, but they were only dragging him farther down. He twisted randomly, as if he couldn’t guess where the surface was, and Luce understood that he was drowning. His eyes bulged and his lips were moving fast, bright bubbles leaping out like silent words. There was still something he needed to say, Luce thought. For some reason she thought he was trying to tell someone how sorry he was. To ask for forgiveness.

Without thinking about what she was doing, Luce started singing. The water stopped dragging on the tangled coats. Instead it moved in Luce’s song, and the wide wings of fabric formed a kind of cradle tugging him back toward the surface. The man gagged, thrashing in astonishment as the water shuddered with unimaginable music, carrying him up . . .

Up into the night air, where the enchanted water seized him in the curl of a tall wave that stood alone above the black glass surface of the bay. Luce sang a sustained note that held him there in space for a moment, his body slowly rotating as he wheezed and stretched out his hands, water spilling from his mouth and sodden clothes. She thought of teaching him a lesson by sending her song into a high spike of sound and then breaking off abruptly, letting him crash back down onto the pier so hard that his teeth would jar from their sockets. Just because she’d gone and saved his life for no good reason, that didn’t mean he deserved any kindness from her.

Then, almost in spite of herself, Luce let the note fade slowly. The homeless man landed on the planks so lightly that there wasn’t even a thud.

She was only twenty feet from him now, still glaring at him as he scrambled onto his knees and gaped at her. Of course he wasn’t really Peter. He was much too old to be Peter, probably at least sixty. Just another idiotic drunk who’d destroy anything he could get his hands on, even if that meant he only wound up destroying himself.

“You’re shining . . .” the man croaked. His hair hung in grayish clumps around his face, but his eyes were bright with longing. The cold water and the shock of almost dying, not to mention being rescued in such an unfathomable way, seemed to have sobered him up.

“You need to quit drinking!” Luce rasped out furiously. Her nails were digging into her palms and her tail was lashing. “I don’t know why I saved you! Why did you have to go and get so wasted, like you don’t even care what happens to you?”

Luce was too enraged to think clearly or to control the wild spasms of her tail. It kicked above the surface, sending droplets spinning out across the night. A trace of mist hung in the air, and the glow of the streetlamps floated like dandelion puffs.

“You’re . . . a mermaid? And you did that to the water, didn’t you? You saved me. You’re a—”

“Well, you’re a drunk,” Luce snapped. “This is the only time I’m going to save you, okay? If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll let you drown!”

“Hey,” the man said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Stay and talk to me. Please.”

“No!” Luce shrieked. She was already backing away.

“At least tell me your name. I want to know . . . who saved my life. You saved my life. Beautiful . . . your voice was so beautiful! I need to know . . .” He was kneeling on the pier’s edge, one hand stretched helplessly toward her.

Luce didn’t think that deserved a response. She’d already wasted too much time on him, she thought, and of course she shouldn’t have let some human see her at all. She turned to go.

“I’m always here!” he cried out after her. Even as the water closed over her head, Luce could still hear him shouting. “I’m always here! I’ve come so far. I’ve been a stevedore, and a soldier and a ghost, but I’m here now!” Luce was still angry, but she felt the light touch of another emotion she would have preferred to ignore. Maybe there was something sweet about this old man. “Hey! Mermaid, listen up! If you ever want help with anything, you know who to ask!”

* * *

Luce kept swimming south. All at once she was overcome by weariness and shame, but she didn’t know why. Of course, she’d broken the timahk again by letting a human hear her sing without killing him, even by talking to him at all, but so many things had changed that the timahk didn’t seem to matter much anymore. Before she’d swum far, Luce realized why she felt so sick with herself: it hadn’t been fair of her to hate that man because of what Peter had done. It wasn’t his fault. That old man had never hurt her; she couldn’t have any idea of what he’d gone through, the events that had left him so broken.

Why should she care, though?

The water around her seemed alive, but Luce didn’t pay much attention. Something faintly luminous darted below her, torqued itself, curled upward. All at once Luce recognized what it was and reeled back, startled.

“You know this is a lousy time to be pulling that here!” a voice snapped. “Now you want to risk them noticing us? Don’t even think about trying that again!”

A strange mermaid furled her pinkish gold tail in front of Luce. She was older and Asian, her long hair clouding black around the creamy golden shine of her skin.

“I . . .” Luce started, but she was too surprised to know what she should say.

“ . . . just offed some homeless guy, right? Fantastic. When the bay’s practically the only safe place left!”

“I didn’t kill him,” Luce said, though of course that wouldn’t help. The strange mermaid glowered, disbelieving. “You . . . I actually didn’t know there were other mermaids here. I’m . . .”

The girl’s face softened slightly. “One of the refugees? Or were you just kicked out of your tribe? Look, I guess there’s room for you, but you really can’t go around singing like that!”

“I won’t,” Luce promised, but her thoughts were racing. “Are there a lot of mermaids here? It’s a big tribe?”

“You are new here! No tribe.”

“But . . .”

“No tribes, no queens. But yes, tons of mermaids. More every day now.”

“Where?”

“All over the place. A bunch of them you should just kind of leave alone—they’re too crazy—but you won’t see them much. There are a lot of us under the old factories before Hunter’s Point, though. You coming?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and Luce went swimming along beside the stranger. They skimmed between angled pilings then beside strange crenelated metal walls that stood in the water with ships docked between them. It seemed like a peculiar place for mermaids, gritty and mournful, though it had a lonely beauty of its own. “Do you