Adrift: A Little Mermaid Retelling

40: Epilogue

 I sit on the cliff, chewing the tough bread I brought with me for my breakfast. Nearby, a wheeling cloud of gulls teeters over the rocky shore. The choppy water stretches out toward the horizon, an unforgiving expanse of dark mystery.

That sea nearly killed me once. The practiced old hands of Nort brought me back, forcing my chest again and again until I came to, sputtering out salt water that felt like fire in my aching lungs. He told me they'd found me there on the shore; they'd been at work mending nets along the beach when they'd heard an animal screaming, screaming like nothing they'd heard before.

When they got there, nothing was there but me: a drowned man with one foot in the other world.

An inquisitive gull has approached me and now stands a few armspans away, its head cocked. I toss a crumb of bread to the sand for it, considering the sea.

I wonder if she is happy out there. Does she think on me? I think on her. She is my first thought on waking, my last before I slip into slumber. Her shadow haunts my steps, silent, ghostly. And yet, she is no ghost. I know she is alive, or at least I know that she lived past the day of my drowning. I have the proof. Those screams proved it—for they were surely hers, and I dimly remember her dragging me bodily through the deep water before my world went black.

And if her cries, remembered vividly by my rescuers and told of time and time again, were not enough ...

"Daddy!"

I turn my head, looking toward the voice. There, running along the cliffs with her arms outspread, comes Pearl. Her pinafore flutters in the wind. She carries a shell in each tiny white hand. Her dark hair streams behind her, her grandfather's legacy.

"What is it, my little love?"

"Look!" The girl flings herself onto the rocks beside me, fearing neither bruise nor dirt. She has always been thus: fearless. She holds the shells up for my inspection. One is cream-white, the other pink, in its color and its shape just like a baby's ear.

Hers had looked like that, when she was small: tiny, perfect. I had been fascinated by every one of her features the first time I saw her there in the fishermen's inn. I had gone there for company, aching with sorrow and loneliness, not long after my drowning. They had all been huddled around her, the little mystery baby.

"Very pretty, my love," I say, putting my arm around her. Still she feels small at my side. Fragile. But she is anything but fragile. She is her mother's daughter, delivered in the black of night. They found her there in the morning, swaddled in a length of burlap and sleeping as if nothing, not even the chill of the night or the threat of loneliness, could scare her. There was no question about who would take the raising of her. Never once was a word of her mother spoken, but all of us knew Halimeda had borne her. It was there in her delicate features, there in the fact that there were so few mothers in the Reachlands, and Hali had been so close to her time.

"I found them down on the rocks, sitting just so." She arranges the little shells, one overlapping the other. "I bet they were washed in on the tide. Can we go out there sometime?"

"To the sea?" My heart clenches in my breast as I think of those traitorous waves.

I wonder if Pearl feels the call of them. Will she be stolen from me, as her mother was?

"Yes—on a boat, like Nort's boat. We can have an adventure out there."

I contemplate her small, upturned face, her nose, her rosebud mouth. She has some of my features, this girl; her eyes, though, are her mother's, the merciless gray-green of the sea. I see in that instant the woman she will become, and my heart aches—for myself, the man who will lose her, and for the faceless men who will love her. "Perhaps. The sea can be dangerous."

"So are many things," she protests. "We will be careful."

So are many things, I think. Like life. Like love.

I break my roll in half and offer my daughter part of it. We sit together on the cliff, staring out at the sea. I think of how hard I will try to protect her from the cruelty of life.

It's the curse of a man in love: I will aim always to be the balm for her sorrows, the shield for her heart, the warmth in her life. I know I will fail, and fail again. Nevertheless, I will press on, devoted to her as I am, still, to the only woman I will ever love.