The room seemed warmer than the others, heated by his sleeping breath, and she wanted so much to be where it was warm. She knelt beside his bed, stroked her fingers into his hair, and watched as his dark eyes opened. She saw the recognition in them, and she never wondered how he knew it was her, the same mermaid he’d caught in his net.
A long time later he told her that it was her eyes, that her eyes were the same no matter what form she took, and when he saw them, he knew she’d returned to him.
He lifted the blanket, and she saw that underneath was his man’s body with no coverings on it as humans usually wore. She went to him then, and his warmth covered her, and his love filled her heart and made her want to stay.
He taught her how to speak his human-speak and told her his name was Jack. Her name was not something they could say in human, so he told her many names for many days until he said the one she liked, and so she was called Amelia.
Amelia loved Jack, but she could not leave the sea altogether, and at night she practiced transforming from a mermaid to a woman, until she could pass easily between one and the other without the pain that had struck her down the first time.
So she stayed with him, and loved him, and lived as a woman on land and a mermaid in the sea for many years. At night, when there were no other fishermen about and her husband lay sleeping in their bed, she would go out to the rocks and leave her human dress there and dive into the black water, and there she would stay, at least until her heart remembered the eyes of the man she loved and she would return to him.
She loved him almost as much as she loved the sea, and so they were well matched, for he loved the sea almost as much as he loved her. He’d never thought any person could draw him more than the ocean, but the crashing waves were there in her eyes and the salt of the spray was in her skin and there, too, was something in her that the sea could never give. The ocean could never love him back, but Amelia did.
Many years passed, and they were happy and content, but there were no children. Neither of them spoke of their secret hopes or their secret sorrows, but sometimes they would sit upon their deck and watch the water churning below the rocks and he would take her hand and she would know he was thinking of the children that never became.
They lived near a village—close enough to supply them with what they could not provide themselves but not so close as to force them to be neighborly when they had no wish to be. Jack loved Amelia and the sea, and Amelia loved the sea and Jack, but they did not love the questions that too-keen neighbors asked, questions about where Amelia had come from and where were her people and when had they gotten married and oh this was so sudden, wasn’t it?
Still, they grew accustomed to Amelia after a time, as folk will. They were a good people, but suspicious, and the mermaid’s eyes were always too direct, too beautiful, to make them comfortable. And where there is discomfort there is sometimes jealousy, and sometimes curiosity, and the two mingled on their gossiping tongues until the villagers were accustomed to the taste.
“That wife of old Jack’s, they say she goes out in the moonlight and dances with the devil and that’s how she stays so young and lovely.”
“That’s foolishness, Martha. Where would she go to dance up there? Their house is perched on the rocks just so. A good nor’easter would push it into the sea, I expect, and there are no forest clearings for dancing to be seen,” her companion replied, with more than a touch of New England asperity.
There was more than a touch of New England superstition lingering, though, enough that some folk believed the tales of moonlight and demon-dancing. Many treated Amelia just the same when she came into the village, but there were those who never would.
The years passed, as years will. Jack grew old, though Amelia did not, and after a time the people of the village began to remark on this—even the ones who were inclined not to believe the worst of her in the first place.
They had not known, Jack and Amelia, that when she crawled out of the ocean to be at his side, they would not grow old together. Mermaids, it happened, lived a very long time, though they did not reckon time in the same manner as men. Amelia watched her young, strong husband grow brittle, his face as grey and weather-beaten as the prow of a ship.
Still she loved him, and loved him more for she knew his heart, and after many, many years she found she loved him even more than the sea.
And so the sea, who can be bitter and jealous herself, took Jack away—perhaps in hopes that Amelia would love her best again.
It was an ordinary day, mostly grey but with peeks of sun, and the wind was light and fine. Jack kissed her good-bye as he always did and made his way—slowly now, so slowly—down the many steps to the cove.
Amelia watched from the door of the cottage as he rowed out of the cove. He waved to her when he saw her standing there, and she waved back. She had a feeling then that this would be the last time he would wave to her, that this was their final good-bye.
This feeling clutched her heart so strongly that she believed it was truth, and she ran from the cottage down the steps to the cove to call him back.
It was too late then, far too late, for the wind was blowing into the cove and it took her voice and threw it against the rocks instead of carrying it out to the ears of her beloved.
She watched him row farther out, farther away from her, and join all the other boats out to draw their trade from the sea.
For one wild moment, she thought of changing into a mermaid to follow him, to bring him back home. But the presence of all the other boats stopped her.
There were nets there, and hooks and lines. The one time she’d been caught in a net it had led her to Jack, but she had no desire to be caught again. What if the fisherman who caught her didn’t believe that she was Amelia, that she was Jack’s wife? What if he carved her up with his knife to sell at the market?
This fear made her slightly ashamed, for she’d always been brave, but it was easier to be brave when you had nothing to lose. And she did have something to lose now—her home, her life, her happiness.
After all, what if this feeling was only that—a feeling? Would she put her—their—secret at risk for nothing? And what could harm Jack on that sort of day? It was a fine day with no signs of storm.
She was only worrying because he looked so frail lately, she reasoned. But when he came home that night she would tell him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t to go so far out to sea alone any longer.
All day she tried to go about her chores as usual. She found that she was constantly at the window, looking and hoping, but the sun went on its usual journey and the fisherman did not reappear at the horizon.
As night fell, she went out to the rocks and waited. The cold air bit into her bones as it had done the first night she’d walked as a human, so long ago. Amelia didn’t go back inside, to wait by the fire or to put on a coat. She stared at the ocean as if the intensity of that stare would make her Jack appear there, tired and careworn but safe—Above all things let him be safe.
But she could not make him appear, no matter how hard she wished it, so when night fell and all the other fishermen had tied up their boats until the morrow, she went down to the cove and took off her dress and touched the water of the ocean.
In a silver flash she was in the water and swimming faster than any human ever could. Amelia followed the line she thought Jack had taken, out to the open water where he could cast his net.