Page 5 of Oceansong
His hand shook as Angie took the phone and hit the “Play” button, bracing herself for what she might see. A blurred and grainy recording started. Muffled breathing came through the phone’s speakers, the unmistakable, hollow-sounding inhales and exhales through diving regulators. Through the soft green night vision, coral formations appeared and a leatherback sea turtle glided by, darting into the dark when the camera moved closer to it. Angie squinted, waiting for the supposed merfolk to come into view.
Five seconds later, a long, scaly tail brushed by, and the camera shook as if the person holding it nearly dropped it in shock. Another tail followed.
What the Hells?
At first glance, it appeared to be a large fish slicing through the water. Then she saw human-like hands held at their sides, webbing reaching halfway to their fingers’ first knuckles.
The camera tumbled out of the diver’s possession, and they reached to grab it before it disappeared into the depths.
Her arm tingled as she handed the device back to Bàba. “No way.”
“Told you.” He stuffed his phone back into his pocket. “I’m sending out a group of divers tomorrow afternoon to take another look around, see ifthey can find anything else. If this is real, and if it truly is—” He stopped, taking a deep breath before continuing, “Merfolk taking our food supply, we will need to deal with them directly. I’ll let you know what they find.”
“Wait, Bàba.” Angie grabbed his arm before he left. “Let me go with them.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday. Don’t you want the whole weekend?”
“No, I want to go. I haven’t done a dive since I came back home, and I miss it.” She struggled to process what she’d seen on the video, and wanted to see for herself in person. Angie admitted, “Makes me think of Mama.” At the mention of her, Bàba’s shoulders dropped, a forlorn shadow crossing his face. He pushed his glasses further up his nose and rubbed his five o’clock shadow, wrinkles forming around his eyes. “Okay. I will look at the conditions of the sea tomorrow and plan a quiet time to go out. But expect to be there around thirteen or fourteen hundred.”
Angie nodded. “You got it.”
The next morning, she gathered her scuba gear from her closet: flippers, drysuit, hood, BCD vest, booties, snorkel mask, and fins. Before leaving, she double checked her gear to ensure she didn’t forget anything.
Her chest tightened, and she sucked in a gulp of air, hands hovering over her mesh diving bag. Behind their portable UV lights which they used to simulate sunlight for winter’s unending dark, a chest full of her childhood belongings sat in partial view. Angie reached for it, pulling out a drawing of merfolk she made when she was eight. A school of them, swimming without a care in the world, complete with raggedly drawn green stripes she hoped depicted seaweed.
She held the picture close to her heart. It was a simpler time. Her family and friends didn’t understand her interest in mythical fish-creatures, as they dubbed merfolk, but she didn’t let them deter her from believing. Her ten-year-old self was so sure mermaids still existed somewhere in the deep blue sea, and she would prove everyone wrong. Of course, over a hundred dives later, she never found a trace of them. She continued diving in Alaska and Washington’s lakes and oceans over the last thirteen years, but lost interest in mermaid hunting and stopped believing in their existence after entering high school, preferring to focus on her studies and friends.
Shaking the memories away, Angie put the drawing back in the chest and slammed the closet door shut. Intrigue and fury and anxiety played athree-way tug-of-war in her mind.
A pull came from deep inside her, a speckle of hope sprouting that the divers were wrong, and the video was fake.
So many years of failed searches.Shehad failed. If merfolk had turned up some years earlier, and if they truly had healing powers, she could have saved Mama.
A swell of resentment rose, and she pinched her lips together and zipped her dive bag closed. She caught a finger in it and hissed, jerking her hand back.
When she was thirteen, she scuba dived to search for mermaids. Now, she was twenty-four and about to go diving for mermaids again.
The irony wasn’t lost on her.
Three
At one-thirty, Angie stood atthe docks’ edge, fidgeting with her drysuit and obsessively checking that it covered her wrists and ankles. She shivered in anticipation of forty-degree water that would soon meet any exposed patches of skin.
Their last diver–and her dive buddy–was running several minutes late from an unexpected traffic jam crossing the bridge into the harbor. Other divers chatted in a small group beside her, and their boat bobbed in tune with the waves, seemingly unfazed that they were to go searching for merfolk, of all things.
Angie’s leg kept bouncing in anticipation, only stopping when her phone pinged and distracted her. The guy she was seeing from college had answered her after two weeks of silence with a vacant,
hey, wanna come over tonight?
This was followed by the slanted-eye, coy smile emoji. The message was in response to her last text asking his plans for the weekend, and an inside joke. After four months, he hadn’t asked her to be his girlfriend, expertly dodging the question when she brought it up.
Thinning her lips, she blocked and deleted his number without a response then put the device away and strapped her diving knife to her ankle. The final diver arrived, suited up, and was now gesturing at her with frantic motions.
“Hey, Angie.” He jogged to her and retrieved his Heliox tank before tying his wavy hair back into a neat man-bun.
“Hey yourself, Stefan.” Angie watched him don his booties, depth gauge, and rebreather. Stefan was well into his fifties, yet Angie thought hepassed for ten years younger. His hair was still a vibrant, glossy ebony, with skin like porcelain and a lively spark in his whiskey-brown eyes.
It must have been the cold water diving he did. He jokingly called it a preserving agent.
