“That’s weird,” said Chip. “She didn’t seem the excitable type, so much, when we first met her. Did she, Deb?”
We got down off the rock and strolled along the intertidal zone toward the marina. We weren’t in a hurry—we held hands, we held our shoes in our other hands, we looked for crabs and shells, scooping up water and wet sand onto the top flats of our feet, then letting it trail off. It wasn’t long at all, though, before we saw the parrotfish expert again, and this time she was running toward us. She still had her wetsuit on, which made her run in a held-back, goofy-robotic way that looked like a form of slow torture. But she was doing it anyway. That expert was determined. And it was a sight worth seeing.
By the time she got up to us, though, she was huffing and puffing so hard I thought she might be having an attack. The biologist could hardly breathe, much less speak. But she waved us away and bent over, hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. She shook her head when we asked if there was anything she needed, just shook her head, struggling to breathe. Finally she wrestled the breathing under control and straightened up, her face beet-red. Her cheeks and forehead still bore the deep, bruising marks of a snorkel mask, which made her look deformed.
“In the reef!” she said breathlessly. “You’ve got to come with me! I have to show you! I saw them!”
“Those colorful fish you like so much?” asked Chip, genuinely interested.
She shook her head rapidly, emphatically.
“Mermaids! There are mermaids! Mermaids are swimming in the reef!”
SHE WAS DISTURBED, of course—we hardly knew the woman. Maybe it was a schizoid deal, we figured, or maybe a drug problem, we didn’t have all the info yet, but the situation had to be handled humanely. If there’s one thing Chip is, it’s game. He’s game for almost anything, and so much the better if, later, it might make good material for an anecdote to tell at a party.
So he humored the delusional scientist, and I went along with it cheerfully—because, of all the people we’d had dinner with, she was the only one I kind of liked. That meant that, after Chip, she was my favorite person for a thousand-mile radius.
She said she’d booked a 7 a.m. seat on a snorkel boat, and it turned out she was the only one booked for that slot, so the boat’s captain took her out to the reef by herself, muttering something about swimming in pairs. But he didn’t want to give her money back; it was just snorkeling after all—child’s play. So he took her by herself, without a second paying customer. And that was how she came to see the mermaids. The boat captain hadn’t seen squat.
We were sitting in the boat ourselves by that time, being ferried back out to the reef. She’d offered the captain more money for the second trip; she talked a blue streak while we were motoring. Also she ran around collecting parts of wetsuits for us to wear, a top and bottom for Chip and a one-piece suit in my size. I obliged her by changing in the boat’s tiny bathroom, enjoying the privacy; I figured we might as well get a free snorkel out of her sad mental incapacity.
The night before, when I’d been assuming she was sane—an absentminded type, but with all the usual marbles—I’d viewed her as a normal, if geeky, woman. Now she took on a kind of homeless aspect to me. I studied her face trying to pick out signs of that unhinged quality. She didn’t tweeze her brows: well, that one was inconclusive. A crazed person might tweeze or might not tweeze—might pick the brows off hair by hair, even get rid of them in one fell swoop like those women you see who shave off their brows on purpose, then pencil them on again, making you wonder: grotesquely ironic? Or ironically grotesque?
If I looked at her brows for too long, they started to seem like centipedes. I was afraid they might start moving their legs. And they had so many!
Nancy, the biologist, wore no traces of makeup, which I’d first thought signaled a feminist: laudable. I like a touch of lipstick and a subtle brown eye shadow myself—I rationalize it as less an attempt to attract males than as a kind of ritualistic tribal decoration/shamanistic warding—but I also enjoy the rare sight of a naked face. Still, now, with the insanity rearing its head, I wondered if the no-makeup thing was less a stance than a sign of neglect. Maybe Nancy was the type who wore her underwear for weeks on end, or stored her cut-off fingernails in jelly jars.
Apparently there was a sunken airplane on the reef, a small plane from long ago, and Nancy said she’d been slowly following a princess parrotfish as it weaved among the corals and then, out of the corner of her eye/mask, had seen something far larger flash through one of the holes where the airplane’s door used to be. Excited to think she might have her first local encounter with a shark or large ray, she abandoned the fish and swam cautiously over to the rusting plane. It was there that she saw it: the tail. Only the tail was visible inside the plane, from her vantage point, she said, until she swam up close and stuck her head around the brown and corroded metal door edge.
And that was when she realized that the tail, covered in silvery scales, was surmounted by a humanoid torso. Atop that sat a neck, and finally a head, out of which long hair grew—modestly, and a little too conveniently, covering the impossible creature’s breasts.
“What color was her hair?” asked Chip, like it mattered.
“Yellow!” said Nancy. I couldn’t tell if
