Page 12

P arasite , he’d called me. Even mermen thought I was a leech.

All evening, I lingered at the mirror to check my bruises, the ghost of long, wet fingers still squeezing my neck. My duffel was sticking out of Saul’s open armoire, still packed for the possibility of jobs where the occupational hazards didn’t include getting my head bashed in by a sea creature.

No one was forcing me to stay. I could leave right now. Just kiss the cozy mattress and suspiciously high wages goodbye, and let fate pick some other cabrón to make nice with a mythical being smart and angry enough to list terrifyingly specific ways to kill a guy.

Except I couldn’t.

Jesucristo , I wished I’d never heard the merman speak. Then I might never have known that the one who’d traded her last word for my healed hand had been his mother . El tritón hated my guts, but unlike the baseless loathing that used to follow me around the ironworks like a shadow, I’d absolutely earned it.

I’d built the cage that held him. Made it damn near indestructible. And ever since, the universe seemed pretty insistent that his welfare was my new head-smelter to solve.

Once five doors clicked shut and the hall lamps gave way to the dark, I slunk back downstairs, grabbed my coat, and nicked a can of sardines from the pantry.

I had an aquatic circulation system to build.

As creepy as the Menagerie Curiosity Museum was during the day, this place at night could give Gravesend Cemetery a run for its money. Before anything came to life in that graveyard of stuffed atrocidades, I grabbed the oil lamp from behind the ticket counter and hustled out of there—only to find out the theater was an even blacker hole than the museum.

Morgan had been busy after I left. The benches were now stacked along the wall, leaving a wide, empty space for my footsteps to echo, the plaster gods’ kerosene-lit eyes following me as I walked. With the sardine can thunking against my thigh, I jogged up the stage stairs toward the rim of blue light and paused.

It’d take a cannon to break that glass , I reminded myself, then pulled back the red velvet, and stepped behind it.

I was back in the lagoon. Rippling moonlight danced on everything, from the curtains to the walls to my clothes and skin. There in his corner, wide awake and staring at me like my bones would make a decorative addition to the bottom of his tank, was el tritón .

I steeled my jaw and approached with the lamp.

“Hey. I, uh... I think we got off on the wrong foot.” Dios purísimo. “Not foot. ’Cause you don’t got foot—I mean, feet. What I mean is... I figured we might start over.”

I couldn’t be sure, but his glower seemed to get more glower-y. I set the lamp down.

“You should know, I don’t usually help steal merpeople from the river, in case you thought I wanted you to get stuck here. ’Cause that was an accident. Mostly. I didn’t know that they would—you know. Like, no one ever told me you were even... Cristo .” I bit my useless tongue and tried again. “I ain’t gonna hurt you, all right?”

He didn’t so much as nod. Or sneer. Or do anything to prove my words weren’t just ricocheting off the glass. I was out here pouring iron without a cast, and he knew it.

“I get it. Most times, I don’t trust me either.”

Caramba , he was unnerving to look at. There was no reconciling the human and the sea creature in him, because he was both and neither, with eyes that stayed blue even in orange lamplight and a perfectly symmetrical scowl that made the faces in the Grecian friezes look jolly. And yet, somehow, his glare wasn’t as scalding as it had been before. I thought he might just be tired, but then I noticed his arms wrapped tightly around his waist.

I used to do that. On the hungry days. Press in on my stomach so I couldn’t feel how empty it was.

El tritón was starving.

“Morgan said you haven’t eaten. I figured, maybe salt cod ain’t your favorite, so I brought you these.” I pulled out the can. “Says here, these are American sardines. From...”—I squinted at the label—“Maine.”

Crossing myself ( En el nombre del Padre, el Hijo, y el Espíritu Santo, amén ), I made the climb back up to the tank roof. We could have been eyeing each other through cellophane the water was so still, nothing moving so much as an inch except the direction of his leering gaze. I crouched on the grill, peeled back the can lid, and, without ceremony, let a fish drop through the lattice. It hit the water with a humiliating doink.

He side-eyed it all the way down until it reached the floor, where it stayed.

“ Bueno , you don’t have to eat it now. ”

I left the can on the bars and got my ass off the roof in case his craving for human flesh had lingered from this morning. “I’ll just do a bit of work while you get your appetite back. I ain’t much of a talker anyway.” I hesitated on a rung. “Then again, I’m the idiot hanging around here talking to myself.”

Just then, I saw it: He rolled his eyes! I’d take it; at least he could translate the flood of tonterías pouring out of my mouth into something to sneer at.

I meandered over to the steam pump and started looking for valves and couplings to connect the other hose. “The other folks in the company are a lot more interesting to listen to than I am. They think you’re gonna put them out of a job, but that’s only ’cause they know the public’s gonna go batty soon as they meet you. I mean look at you, you’re...”

A backwards glance at the silky glimmer of his fins in the lamplight nearly derailed my train of thought.

“Gosh, you’re gonna make them forget Dreamland ever existed.”

His eyes flashed over pursed lips. With a flourish of his tail, he turned his back to me, a violent tremor running through the sharp fronds along his spine.

“Miércoles.” I winced. “Sorry. We’ll talk about something else. You speak English. Do you speak Spanish too? La sirena me habló en espanol— ”

He sat up straight as a mast the moment I’d said the mermaid had spoken to me in Spanish. If he didn’t speak it himself, then he surely understood it, because when he slowly turned back to me, the acid was missing from his expression, replaced by a blend of shock and grief so raw and open—and human —that my stomach clenched at the sight of it.

“The thing is,” I murmured, “I’d probably try to kill me too if I was you. Doesn’t much matter that I didn’t know better. I helped them cage you, I built this tank, so you’re allowed to hate my guts. But your mother”—and for the briefest moment, the merman’s iron stare wavered—“she told me to save you. Shouted it right into my mind. I ain’t stopped thinking about it.”

Looking at his stricken face was like staring into a blast furnace, so I looked at my feet instead.

“Believe me, I don’t get it, either. I can hardly help myself; I don’t understand why she thought I had any power to help you. But she wanted you to survive, and this,” I said, pointing to the sardine at the bottom of the tank, “is the only way I know how to do what she asked. So, uh... please? You’ve gotta eat.”

I made myself look up at him. El tritón held my gaze for a long, silent moment with shoulders tensed until, reaching some kind of decision, they loosened.

My heart began to thud in my throat as I watched him rise slowly out of his corner, bite his pewter lip, then float gracefully toward the abandoned sardine, his tail sweeping out behind him in a streak of blue and silver. Just when I thought my words had run out, one came to mind that I didn’t dare say out loud.

Hermoso.

He picked up the fish with lithe webbed fingers, inspected it, then shot a withering look in my direction.

“Sorry. I’ll just get back to work.”

I’d won a second victory. Suppressing a grin, I turned around to attach the hose to the couplings and hoped the sound of shifting water at my back meant he’d begun to eat. In a moment, there was a soft burble and the metal scrape of the tin when I knew he’d decided to finish the rest of his dinner.

Some of the tension ran out of my body too, as I tinkered away amidst the milky reflections swirling around me. This wasn’t the same as sitting on the pier after work—hanging out next to a tank in an amusement park in the dead of night—but there was some of the same lonely serenity here as there was looking out on the Gowanus after dark.

Solitude had become a fixture of my life, but something told me the life of a merman wasn’t lonely. Not if his mother could show up like lightning in his hour of need. I pulled San Cristóbal out of my shirt and wrapped a finger around the chain.

“It might not help to hear this, but... I lost someone too,” I said. “A lot of someones, if you count my real parents, but Tití Luz was the one I remember. She wasn’t really my aunt. Just sort of adopted me after my family disappeared in the hurricane. I was a kid when she found me. Pulled me right out of the river.”

Just like you, I stopped myself from saying.

“But she wasn’t murdered or anything. She was one of the revo-lutionaries who wanted independence for Puerto Rico, and I guess, after el Grito de Lares was a bust, waiting for a real revolution was too much for her, especially once the change from pesos to dollars bankrupted her farm.”

I let out a short laugh. “I remember, she used to hate the word ‘pronto.’ Means ‘soon.’ Soon there would be crops. Soon there would be work. Soon there would be food. Freedom, money, peace— pronto, pronto, pronto. In the end, she got so tired of waiting, it wasn’t hard for la tisis to finish the job. ?Quién sabe? Maybe that’s just a different kind of murder.”

I squeezed San Cristóbal , forcing back that old, smoldering anger before it could burn its way into my eyes. The breath left my lungs in a hiss.

“Forget it. I didn’t come here to say all these dumb things,” I whispered. “I just thought maybe it might help, hearing you’re not the only one who lost someone who tried to save you.”

The room had gone very quiet. Turning back toward the tank, I found el tritón suddenly right next to me, hovering off the floor and sizing me up with those eyes, blue as sapphires and sharper than arrowheads. I shivered.

My whole life, no one had ever looked at me this way. Like they could see past the layers of shirt and skin and rib cage and find the X that marked the spot where I’d buried myself.

Slowly, I rose to my feet. In case one quick movement might disturb this fragile thing forming in the silence between us. He watched, still as a stone, as I laid my fingers lightly against the glass.

What I said next came out in Spanish. Because all my truest thoughts were in Spanish and because I knew he understood it.

“It is no wonder you cried out,” I breathed. “I cannot imagine losing your liberty and your mother in the same breath. I am so very sorry.”

El tritón tilted his head wonderingly at me like I was the most confusing creature he’d ever dined with. If he rejected my apology, I decided I wouldn’t take it personally. But then, to my surprise, he raised his silvery hand.

And he placed it on the glass against mine.

A long moment passed before I pulled my hand away, then rushed past my revolú and back up the iron rungs. This time, I sat cross-legged on the lattice, hoping he’d accept the unspoken invitation.

His face broke the surface first, then his shoulders. Below him, a rippling outline of tail wafted gently to and fro, keeping him aloft. My brain idled at the sight of him, which accounts for the idiot thing I said next.

“How was the fish?”

He swallowed. Averted his eyes as if he were weighing something carefully in his mind. Finally, in a voice deep and far smoother than the one he’d used to threaten me, he spoke.

“Adequate.”

I was fascinated. Just as he’d done when listing all the gruesome ways he planned to dismember me, he spoke aloud—instead of directly into my head. I also realized I couldn’t locate his accent on a map; his words had notes of British and even the Mediterranean but couldn’t be pinned to any single country.

Before I could think of a better conversation starter, he asked, “What are you?”

My mouth opened, then closed. “I’m a guy. I mean, a—a man.”

“Is that all?”

“And a... blacksmith?”

He studied me like I was the head-smelter here. “You said my mother spoke to your mind. But you are”—he looked me over with bored disdain—“a blacksmith.”

“What about you?” Remembering Madam Navya’s mutterings about imprisoning deities, I asked, “You’re not like a—a god, are you?”

His expression went frigid. “A god who could not save himself or his kin from death and captivity?”

“Right. Sorry.” I cleared my throat. “You should probably eat the bacalao Morgan’s been giving you, you know.”

“Morgan,” he repeated, like the name tasted bitter on his tongue. “Is that the trench-dwelling shark who circles this cage all day?”

If I weren’t a heartbeat away from shaking out of my skin, I might have laughed. “Yeah, that’s him.”

His jaw tightened. “My kind are not beholden to humanity.”

“Be that as it may,” I said, aiming for diplomacy, “if we want to keep this up”—I drew a line in the air between us—“you’re gonna have to eat what he gives you too.”

He didn’t roll his eyes so much as held back a glower. “I will eat it, but not because the shark wishes it.” With a shudder, he added, “It tastes of the Dead Sea.”

“That’s just ’cause it’s cured. I’ll get him to soak it in water. It’s so much better that way. Not so salty, or chewy... or, um...” My audience was looking at me like I could use a good soaking myself. “I’m Benny, by the way. That’s short for Benigno.”

“Benigno,” he repeated. “Your name means ‘kind.’”

I grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”

An eyebrow—the one with the gash carved into it—arched at me. “We shall see.”

“What’s yours then?”

The corners of his eyes pinched. “Humans cannot say it.”

I held in a scoff. If Igor’s voice could come out of my mouth, this merman’s name couldn’t be so hard. “Try me,” I said.

“No.”

“I should call you ‘merman’ then?”

“ No .”

“I mean, you don’t want me to pick a name for you.” We blinked at each other. “Wait, you want me to pick a name for you?”

He closed his eyes like I was riding the farthest edge of his patience. “If you must call me by a name, then you will choose it,” he said. “To give you my name is to give you the last of myself, and humanity has taken enough from me. My name is my own. You may not have it .”

I found I couldn’t argue. The name I’d given everyone I had met in America wasn’t my real name either, but rather a loaned-out version that matched everything they thought I was: simple and easy to wrap their sharp tongues around. The only place I existed as Benigno was in my memories.

“Well, I don’t want to give you one that doesn’t fit. Couldn’t you tell me something about yourself?”

His eyebrows lowered.

“All right, all right, forget I asked. Lemme think.”

I sat up on the lattice and let myself look at him, reining in my urge to ogle. I’d never seen features like his—like he had evolved to blend perfectly into Atlantic waters, with variegated blue-green skin and hair that fell in waves around his athletic shoulders like copper-colored tributaries.

Tributaries made me think of the river we pulled him from, then that made me think of el Río Humacao . I wasn’t sure about the path that connected the merman to the swollen, rushing current that stole my memories during the hurricane, but it produced a name nonetheless.

“How ’bout ‘Río’?”

“Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua . “Why that name?”

A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”

He tipped his head to the side, seeming to carefully assess my selection. “All right, Boy Named Kind,” he murmured. “You may call me Río.” And without taking a breath, he dipped back under the water, his tail cresting the surface before slipping noiselessly away.

After he summarily ended our chat—and ignored my farewell—I went back to work on the pump. It wasn’t long at all before I’d made use of all the parts Morgan had on hand, but I’d need to spend tomorrow gathering materials and preparing to cast the rest: another valve for the boilers, some spindles, and other odds and ends.

In the meantime, I had the theater to myself and some exploring to do.

The wing of the stage that sat opposite from the exit to Morgan’s tent branched off into two locked rooms. I tested Saul’s keys until one opened into a narrow room with a long vanity running the length of the wall. My housemates had probably dressed in this room for performances before Morgan went and packed it full of sea salt, rows of cured codfish, and the six wheels he’d stripped off the tank.

I threw a few of the rock-hard filets into my pockets for the meal I had volunteered to cook for my housemates. I’d have to save my pennies for something better than sardines if I was going to keep up Río’s health.

When I cut back through the stage to leave, Río lay sleeping—truly this time—his body forming a long S across the floor and his fins draped over him like a blanket. His chest rose and fell in slow intervals spread out over minutes as if his lungs didn’t need to pull in much air—or water—to keep his heart beating. I shook off my jealousy and added the observation to my expanding list.

Before leaving, I put my hand on the glass again and closed my eyes in silent petition for the second time in a week—for both of us. If I was going to make friends with the prince of Atlantis without getting caught, fired, or sent upriver to Blackwell’s Island penitentiary, then I needed a miracle.

And in the meantime, it was a damn good thing I was just a blacksmith instead of whatever Río expected me to say. On my way out, I wrenched the brass claws off the stuffed dragon and pocketed them.

This padlock key wouldn’t copy itself.

When I see the sea again, part of me knows I’m dreaming.

She calls my name from the horizon with a voice like a chorus, my feet leaving ripples instead of footprints as I run across the water toward her. I still can’t get closer.

“No te alcanzo,” I shout, but the sound is absorbed by the wind.

I can feel it in my stomach, the moon’s command over a new fleet of waves that rise up and choke the sky. I’m the one they devour this time, in water like blood. As the light vanishes over my head, I wonder if I can find them— mi familia —here in the depths.