More than that, though, she realized her grief had ebbed. While it would always be an ache in her chest, the hard knot of it had loosed, her sadness slowly unraveling.
She’d felt some panic then—panic that the loss of sadness would be the loss of Jack. When she tried to remember his face, she could not. All she could see was the boat moving slowly away from shore, away from her.
Amelia ran into their bedroom then and found one of his sweaters, burying her face in it. His smell clung to the wool, just faintly, and when she breathed it in there he was again—the lines around his eyes, the flash of his teeth when he laughed, the clomp of his boots on the floor.
All at once she understood that to spurn the sea was to spurn Jack, too, for the sea had delivered them to each other.
That very night, Amelia had returned to the cove where first she changed from mermaid to woman. She was filled with the same anxiety and excitement she’d felt the first time. Would she still be able to change, or would the enchantment that allowed her to pass freely between sea and shore have expired when she rejected the ocean?
Amelia was so consumed by this that she didn’t notice the man alone on his boat, the stranger who saw her shed her clothes and dive into the water. She was so delighted that her fin still formed from her human legs that she swam to the surface and broke through, arcing her body into the night air so every last scale of her secret was revealed to the moonlight.
It was only later, when the women of the town closed around her like schooling fish that she discovered she had been discovered—and more importantly, that the people of the town had known for some time. Their careful denunciation of mermaid stories had kept Amelia safe for many long years.
And yet somehow despite this a man was standing on her cliff asking for a cup of tea.
A man with her story in his eyes. A man she would not have noticed if he was jumbled into a crowd. He was of average height, with brown hair and brown eyes and a clean-shaven face. He carried a suitcase, and something else—exhaustion. The man appeared weary to his bones.
Amelia reflected that as he had likely walked all this way from town, he probably was exhausted. Cold, too—she noticed the fine trembling of his hands and the way he tried to disguise the puffs of breath that told her he was in distress.
“You can come in,” she said abruptly.
She moved past him and toward the cottage. He seemed taken aback by the sudden movement. Amelia heard him scrambling behind her, as if he were afraid she might change her mind and leave him there.
Amelia wasn’t the least curious about his purpose—that she’d discerned the moment she saw him—but she was curious about his drive. What could have pushed him all this way? Was he a reporter from a newspaper? And why was his accent so different from the others who lived nearby?
She was suddenly conscious of the fact that she’d never left this very small area since she’d come to land. That she’d swum thousands of miles of ocean to get here hardly seemed noteworthy.
Jack had grown up here, been more than content to stay here, and so Amelia had, too. The foreign sound of the man’s voice was an abrupt reminder that there was more to the world than northern Maine. It was also a reminder that she’d once followed a ship with the intention of seeing all the world and all its wonders, and she never had seen more than this corner of it.
Amelia entered the cottage, poured water from the basin into the kettle, then stoked the fire hot. All the time she was aware of the man’s eyes on her, watching her.
But it would not be her who asked why he had come. She was under no obligation to make things easier for him. He could state his purpose, or gape at her, or leave. Whatever he chose was nothing to her.
Finally he cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have a stove.”
She straightened and gave him a long look. “Mister, I can see I don’t have a stove.”
He cleared his throat again—that was a habit that would grate on her in no time if he didn’t quit it—and said, “It’s just been a long time since I’ve seen anyone cook over a fire.”
“A stove is still a fire,” she pointed out. “Only one enclosed in iron.”
She might have added that it seemed foolish for Jack to buy a stove when a fireplace worked just as well. She supposed if she cared about such things he would have gotten one, but she didn’t. She didn’t care about stoves or parasols or whatever such things Mr. Parsons tried to tempt her with at the general store. Amelia had only ever desired two things—her freedom and Jack’s love.
“Ma’am,” he began.
“It’s customary to introduce oneself when meeting someone new,” she said.
The man flushed from the collar of his shirt all the way up to his hairline. She went about taking down the tea chest and the sugar—Amelia loved sugar in her tea, the more the better—and the teapot and cups. While she did all this, the man appeared to pull himself together.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve gone about this all wrong. My name’s Levi, Levi Lyman, and I’ve come here from New York City with a proposition for you.”
She nodded in acknowledgment. “My name is Amelia Douglas. Perhaps you already knew that, or perhaps not. Perhaps you came all this way because you’ve been listening to stories carried by a foolish fisherman.”
The red in his cheeks deepened. “I confess, Mrs. Douglas, that it was a rumor that brought me here to you.”
Amelia pulled the whistling kettle from the fire and poured the water into the teapot. “And what, exactly, did this rumor say? That I go out at night to dance with Satan and keep myself young forever? That I am a witch who came from nowhere and the children of the village must keep away lest I eat them?”
As she repeated the words she’d heard whispered behind her back, she felt something long unacknowledged—they hurt. It hurt to have her neighbors think so poorly of her, and even if their opinion had changed, the old unease lingered below the surface, reminding her always, always, that she was not the same as them.
She could walk like them, and dress like them, and speak like them, and even take one of their names, but she was not one of them. She came from the sea, and humans would always sense the strangeness in her even if they didn’t know why she made them shift uneasily, or why they didn’t want to spend too long looking directly into her eyes.
“I did hear such tales of you,” Levi Lyman admitted.
Amelia passed him a cup of tea and indicated the sugar. Her placid face indicated nothing of what roiled inside her. “I’m surprised you’ve the courage to come and take tea with a witch.”
He said, “I haven’t. I’ve come to take tea with a mermaid.”
She put several spoonfuls of sugar in her cup and stirred. “You seem to have traveled a long way for nothing. I am only a fisherman’s widow, and I haven’t seen any mermaids frolicking in the Atlantic from my cliff.”
“Naturally you would not if you were the mermaid in question,” Mr. Lyman said.
Amelia felt a prickling of warning. This man would not be laughed away or sent off with a flea in his ear. Somewhere, deep beneath his too-casual manner, there was determination. Even worse, there was a kind of belief. Belief was more dangerous than all the tale-telling in all the pubs of the world.
Humans, Amelia knew, would do anything for belief. They would proselytize from the highest mountain for belief. They would collect like-minded people and form mobs for belief. They would kill one another for belief. She must break that belief before it had a chance to fully flower.
“Mr. Lyman,” she said, quite calm. “Mermaids do not exist. Nor do unicorns or dragons or sea monsters or witches. They are stories told to children, or by the inebriated—who are often the same as children, as you may know. I’m sorry you’ve come all this way following a silly story, but it is just that—a story.”