I would have to be careful or the Navy SEAL/old salt would take over where Nancy left off, commandeering Chip’s attention for the rest of our honeymoon.
I WAS NERVOUS about my dive, but when the time came I was even more anxious about being left behind. I made sure I was suited up and ready to go before we dropped anchor; I stuck right by Nancy and Chip, shadowing them as Jamie shadowed me. The videographer was at their other elbow, holding his underwater camera apparatus like it was fashioned of gold filigree.
So we were in the first wave of divers off the boat, scaling a ladder down the side and sinking in backward, tanks first. Once I’d oriented myself in the water my jerk of fear smoothed out, with Jamie on one side of me and Chip on the other, and down we swam toward the sunken, encrusted plane. I felt happy; the water was that bejeweled aquamarine, and nestled in the brilliant coral I spotted skulking eels and other hole-lurkers I hadn’t seen before. Mermaids or not, I thought, this was great. For the first time I felt gratified the honeymoon hadn’t moved along a normal path. We wouldn’t have dived without Nancy, would have settled for snorkeling, probably.
The videographer swam up front with Nancy; then came Chip and I. Behind us swam the second wave, including the Navy SEAL, the high school science teacher and some spearfishermen deprived of spears. A few had tried to bring along their own underwater cameras—cheap deals, not like the videographer’s setup. They were trophy-seekers by nature, they hadn’t wanted to go down there, spot a monster grouper and have nothing to show for it. But Nancy had made them leave those cameras on the boat, and in return she’d promised them free copies of anything the Australian recorded.
I looked up from the corals and the small, flitting fish at one point to find that Jamie and I had fallen behind the other three just a bit. I kicked hard and scooped with my arms to push up alongside Chip; just as I made it to his side, he snapped out an arm and grabbed my wrist. And that was when I realized that despite my claims of solidarity with Chip I’d no more expected to encounter a bevy of mermaids than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’d simply been hoping for an explanation—to find, down there, some natural phenomenon that would help explain the mermaid apparition, some anomalous or physically interesting effect, down there below the waves.
But that wasn’t what I got.
What I got was mermaids.
They didn’t see us at first, I guess, because they were engaged in a labor of their own, digging around the base of a large rock. Their hair floated in clouds behind them, long weightless-looking swaths like seaweed, as did their tails, which moved up and down slowly as the tails of dolphins move, not side to side like the tails of fish. Those tails were graceful, beautiful muscles, scales shining silver in rows and rows of small coins.
The Australian, I saw, had his camera on them—I couldn’t read his facial expression because of the mask. No one’s expression was visible under their masks, which is a shame, really, during an event like a mermaid sighting. We hovered there in a kind of frozen surprise, looking down at a cluster of mer-tails, a cloud of mer-hair waving and rippling, their faces hidden from us as they did, industriously, whatever they were doing.
But that tableau lasted only a couple of seconds, and then one of the mer-people turned. She turned her head, looked over her shoulder, and saw us. I saw her face, I saw it full-on—not mythically beautiful, not mythically homely, just a face, its skin sickly white in the water. I saw gills on her neck, their slits opening. I saw a look of surprise.
And I saw her hand: that mermaid was holding some kind of an eel. I had the feeling it was dinner.
Then, like a whip cracking, her tail seemed to buck and all of them were gone, faster than fast, utterly vanished in a turbulence of water.
That was it.
WHAT SHOCKS ME the most, in retrospect, is that within the next few days I would assimilate the mermaids handily. One moment they were impossible, the next they were everyday, in my view of the world. Like moon landings or cell phones. They went from of course not to of course. By the second day I was not only not disbelieving in mermaids but thinking of them as a given. A quirky facet of natural history. Oh the mermaids, I would register casually when they were mentioned.
But before the second day, there was the first.
We swam after the blurred wake, but as underwater swimmers, they were way out of our league. There would be discussions, once we surfaced, of radio-tagging opportunities that had been lost, of the possibility of using the sonar equipment so readily available on all kinds of boats, of enlisting local authorities for future coordinated searches; but in the aftermath of first contact we were just frustrated.
Nancy in particular did not wish to yield. That parrotfish expert swam around as rapidly as possible,
