Page 16 of The Lighthouse Keeper and the Mermaid
He said something else but she couldn’t understand. He smiled understandingly and then nodding to the plate, bowed his head.
“Oh. A thank you?” she said. “You’re more than welcome.” She pointed to where the shell had been, wishing she had it on her so it would be even more obvious, but still, she thought he’d get it. “Thank you.”
He looked to the boat and then seemed to understand. There was a nod.
“Also, thank you for saving me,” she said again. She bowed her head in thanks and then pointed to the ocean before trying to mimic drowning.
He laughed and nodded.
“Will you come back?” she asked, making the same signs she did for sunrise and this spot. “We could get to know each other.” The words started to rush out again, a problem she had never had before but perhaps that was because there had never been anyone to listen. “I could learn your language or you mine. And we couldbecome friends.”
He smiled a bit, as if uncomfortable at not knowing what she was saying, but then that smile turned to a comforting, warm one, and looking up at her, he made the same gesture for sunrise and pointed to the spot.
She almost wanted to cry from the joy of it. “And this time I won’t be late.”
CHAPTER 11
She was a flurry of activity the rest of the day, trying to fit a day’s worth of tasks into a few hours. She hastily scrawled down the daily weather and the water current log as well as the account balances and the lists of supplies she had used in repairs to the lighthouse. She polished the glass with vigor, then cleaned the windows of the tower. She swept the staircase to the light. (She had never understood why sweeping it was part of the daily chores but Father had always insisted. He had said daily maintenance was always easier than weekly.) She weeded small plants around the base of the lighthouse, then the few in her small garden.
And then she slept—or tried to—for her thoughts kept drifting to him. She was sure she was being silly, like a schoolgirl with a crush, but she was so excited to see him again, and so with happy thoughts, she drifted to sleep.
Long ago, she had designed an alarm to wake her based on a somewhat vague description she had found in a book on the ancient Greeks. It involved two pots. She would fill water in one pot to a specific height she had found through trial and error, and then the water would escape through a small hole into a second pot that she had rigged with a stick that acted as a floating lever. Until the correct time, the stick leaned toward the pot, and so she had made a small wall on the end of the stick so that it could hold pebbles without them rolling in. When the water in the second pot reached a specific height, the stick would tip and the rocks would fall onto a metal plate she had put beneath them.
She had a line drawn to where she needed to fill the pot for the stones to fall after two and a half hours—which was a bit short of thethree hours the lighthouse would run without any interference—so on a clear, stormless night she could actually get some sleep.
Father, who insisted on staying up the whole night regardless of her inventions—for she had made it for him originally—called it cheating. A real keeper of the light would stay up, he said, but he also never chastised her for using it.
So now, when the rocks would fall, she would get up and rewind the turning mechanism of the light and trim the wick and make sure it was lit, and then she would dump the second pot of water in the other and start again. She’d then lie down once more, and luckily, having done this ritual for so many years, she was good at falling back asleep, and she would do this cycle until morning came.
It wasn’t the best sleep and she always took a nap during the day, but it was enough to let her have some waking hours in the sun. Many men ran these with their wives’ and children’s help. She thought she’d heard some lighthouses even had more than one keeper.
But her lighthouse and its island were tiny, with room only for one family. She understood people saying a family would be better suited; they didn’t know about her alarm hack. Because given how much maintenance work she always had to do during the day, if she couldn’t sleep at night, this job would be untenable for one soul.
As it was, it was uncomfortably manageable. Of course she wouldn’t mind some help or someone to talk to, but she didn’t seem to connect to the men her age. Well, perhaps that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t met most of them and the only ones she had were the ones bold enough to harass young women in the street. She imagined ones she would get along with would never do such a thing and thus she had never met them.
Maybe Lionel’s wife Rose wasn’t wrong. Going to dances would be helpful for meeting eligible bachelors, but a lighthouse keeper couldn’t leave their post except when necessary for duty or on their single day off. It was a policy that made sense since someone always had to man the light, but coming to town once a year left little in the way of finding love.
But maybe it was all the same because she didn’t want to leave her island and she doubted many men cared for such an isolated life. Many had already expressed how strange it was that she did.
Maybe that was why she was so excited to meet this merman. Finally there was someone to talk to.
How ironic that she could talk but he wouldn’t understand. Or was that another twisted reason he excited her: if he couldn’tunderstand, he couldn’t judge her? Not the fact that maybe she didn’t quite know what to say to other humans or that she was a girl but could still take all the mechanisms and gears apart and put them back together again. Not the fact that she didn’t wear dresses or that she didn’t know how to cook more than ten things.
How embarrassing.
But maybe a mermaid wouldn’t care about such things. Maybe they could connect over the love of the sea. Maybe he wouldn’t care that she let her hair loose or ran barefoot or swam. Maybe with him she could just be.
Smiling at the thought of it, at thechanceof such a beautiful thing, she trimmed the wick, wiped down the glass, and oiled the gears before heading back downstairs. She imagined she had just enough time before sunrise to make biscuits.
CHAPTER 12
She didn’t see him at first. The sun had only begun to shine, and in these early hours where the sun lingered by the horizon, the sea looked dark, like midnight blue. But as she scrambled down the rocks, which were a bit wet from the sprays of high tide, his head popped out of the water, only twenty feet away. “Good morning!” she cried. “I brought biscuits.”
His smile was infectious, and she found herself grinning like a schoolgirl as she cleared the last few rocks and he the last few yards.
She put one knee down to get close to the water and found him smiling up at her. “Kallias,” she said happily.
“Daria.”
