Atticus lived a hundred years, married twice, and loved only one girl. She became more a legend than a girl as the years went on. Her straw-blonde hair took on, in transit from one telling to the next, the pale white of a spirit. Her denim cutoffs and wicked grin became a billowing Victorian petticoat, her soggy daisy crown a shimmering tiara.
Death has a way of glamorizing all things, especially love.
But Atticus never wavered. He remembered his girl exactly as she had been the day she drowned. He remembered the small wet hills of her breasts when she was hoisted from the water, and the seaweed plastered to her arm like a patch sewn over a tear. He remembered the sound of his pocket watch ticking like her heart was in his hand, the last gift she would ever give him.
His youngest grandchild, and the most intuitive, Mary, would sit by his favorite chair in the evenings and struggle with her knitting. “Tell me about the girl you loved,” she would say. She was a romantic creature; it showed in her large, dark eyes. She had a whimsical and restless heart. One day she would be tall. She would be a Queen of Spades, the boys folding before her like unworthy Kings.
“Her name was Beth,” Atticus began the story. “She was a mermaid.”
“Was she pretty?” Mary asked, for the nine-hundredth time in her nine years.
“I thought so,” Atticus answered. “She had freckles that spread out from her neck and up around her face like gills.”
“I have freckles,” Mary said.
“Yes you do, and they’re lovely,” Atticus said. “But Beth’s freckles were different. They had been given to her by the sea witch. She was born an ordinary human girl, you see, but she never felt right on land. Her father was a pilot, and she tagged along on his flights, thinking there might be a place for her in the sky. But it was the water that enchanted her.”
“’Beth, Beth, Beth,’” Mary trailed, making whooshing sounds with her teeth to simulate the ocean’s call.
“Yes,” Atticus said. “That is exactly what she would hear.”
“And she answered the call,” Mary goes on, having memorized every word. “And the sea witch made her a mermaid.”
“But not always,” Atticus said.
“A sometimes mermaid,” Mary said, her eyes widening with importance. She abandoned the pink tangle that had become of her knitting. She was forever trying to create things, all of which ended in chaos.
“A sometimes mermaid,” Atticus agreed. “She was born human. And humans can never fully become something else. That’s why Beth drowned; she stayed in the water even after it was time to leave.”
Mary’s eyes filled with tears and she launched into his lap and hugged him. Small children are all elbows and knees, and her embrace was painful on his old frame, but he would never tell her so.
His grandsons burst into the room after that, all heavy stomping feet and muddy jeans. Not one ounce of passion among the lot of them. His son and daughter-in-law followed, pushing buttons on the microwave, crinkling grocery bags, turning on the television until the rooms were filled with sound, until Mary had disappeared completely.
~~
It was the only story Mary liked to tell. Beth was just a girl who had drowned, her father would say. Sweetheart, it’s just a story Grandpa made up to scare us, her mother would say (but Atticus had never liked Mary’s mother very much). Mary’s brothers teased her about it. They chased her along the beach, waving their arms, yelling, The scary mermaid is going to get you! Listen, you can hear her splashing! Look, I see her dress floating on the water! They were terrible brothers, and she daydreamed the sea witch would rise up from the waves and stun their mouths into frightened O’s; she daydreamed the sea witch would turn them into scurrying crabs.
