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F or the rest of March through early April, Morgan took Sonia on an exhaustive tour of the five boroughs, returning in quick daylong spurts where Morgan blustered through the theater like a gale force wind, nitpicked my progress, then hid in his tent with his pipe before it was back on the road with them both. I got the feeling that Sonia’s resilience as Sam Morgan’s companera was wearing thin because we hardly ever saw her anymore.

It was nice having the theater to myself, though. While the primer on the friezes dried, I towed the wire skeletons of museum monstruos into the orchestra seating and took down the curtain—for scrubbing, but also to leave the stage exposed so Río and I could carry on a conversation over the lip of his tank to cure our mutual boredom while I worked.

Generally speaking, Río was a snob who found everything about the world of men barbaric and extreme, but it didn’t stop him from indulging my questions or enjoying the impressions I did of Oscar Barnes, Farty and Dan, or my old foreman in Puerto Rico, whose missing teeth lent a squeak to all his consonants that had him avoiding v ’s and f ’s altogether.

I got the feeling Río liked the attention.

Little by little, my merfolk education deepened in ways I was certain Morgan’s research never had. Apart from the babel of languages he spoke—and his attachment to calling me “Barnacle”—Río knew things about the ocean I’d always wondered about, like whether Atlantis exists (it used to) or if the Devil’s Triangle is as dangerous as they say ( “Claro que no.” ). Among the more fascinating things I learned was that merfolk were not born ni macho ni hembra —that becoming male or female in body happened only once one’s soul had chosen “its truest form.”

“Some are neither maid nor man. A good many are both, though Spanish and English have yet to accommodate such realities,” he remarked dryly. “For all your words, your language is rather primitive.”

“ Primitive , eh? There a word for ‘comemierda’ in your language?”

He smirked. “If I stare at you long enough, I am sure I can come up with one.”

“Ah, shaddup.”

Now that all my lunch breaks took place over Río’s tank, I started leaving the house earlier to pick up fresh fish from the Iron Pier markets, necessary for charming Río into answering ruder inquiries like the one I was about to ask.

“What’s with the sharp spines on your fins? Do they make you especially hard for predators to kill?”

Río laid back on his watery hamaca , scratching shapes into a seashell. He pointed the graver at my shirt. “I see you have stripes on that garment, Barnacle. Does that make you an especially dim-witted bass?”

“Vete de aquí,” I muttered, reining in my laugh. Then, after a beat, “What’s a bass?”

He sighed wistfully. “Delicious.”

“All right, well, if you’re not dangerous and you’re not magical, did marineros make up everything ? What about wrecking ships and luring sailors down to the depths?”

Río rolled his eyes mightily. “Sky and sea, they were bound to conjure some idiotic fantasy to explain their limited encounters with our kind and skirt blame for their shipwrecks.” His tail flicked in irritation. “When water claims a human life, fault the sailor, not the sea.”

I took a bite of my hot dog, mopping up the juice before it could run off my chin and into his water. “You sound just like Tití Luz . ‘ ?Todo lo prieto no e’ morcilla, Benigno! ’” I said in her lilting mountain accent.

Río’s eyes drifted to the center of my chest where San Cristóbal hung. “You loved your tía very much.”

“Couldn’t be helped,” I admitted. “When your family and ten years of memories get swept away in a hurricane, it’s easy to love the one who thought you were worth saving.”

“You do not remember your family?”

My last swallow of lunch went down dry. “ Tití tried to find them after the storm. She put out the word that she’d rescued a banged-up muchachito from the river, but when nobody came to claim me, everyone figured my family got washed out in the rapids with the hundreds of other boricuas who disappeared.”

Río held himself like he was bracing against a chill. “You speak as though it does not pain you.”

“I ain’t gonna cry about it,” I said, tucking San Cristóbal back into my shirt. “You can’t change what happened. Better to just accept it and move on.”

“Benigno.” He brought himself upright again. “Do you mean to say you do not cry?”

I crumpled the wrapping. “What does that matter?”

“It matters ,” he insisted. “Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it. Why should you hold them in?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer him. As awful as I often felt—not just about the San Ciriaco hurricane, but about everything —my brain had figured out that, if I dwelled on the injustices of my life, the hurricane would rage in me long after the clouds had dissipated and wash me out as well.

“Do you want to know what I think?” he asked.

“No, but I bet you’re gonna tell me.”

“I think you have not yet grieved.”

“Of course I’ve grieved— ”

“If that were true, then your eyes would not have forgotten how to perform their most basic function,” he said with more concern than judgment. “Like the armored sea cradle, you are protecting yourself.”

“From what? ?El cuco? ”

“From a pain that has followed you here and demands to be felt.”

That hot dog was souring in my stomach. “You don’t have to make me sound so heartless.”

“To the contrary. The softest hearts wear the thickest armor. I have seen enough of your heart to know it exists.”

Santa María. Every time he dug out bits of me to redeem, I worried the dirt it kicked up wouldn’t rinse off later. “Well, it’s how I am. Not even God can fix me, all right?” I let out a hollow laugh. “I oughta know, I’ve prayed enough times.”

“Perhaps that depends on what you call a god,” he said solemnly. “And what you are praying for.”

“I stopped praying after Tití Luz went. Although... bueno , I guess that’s a lie.”

“Is it?”

“That night. You know the one. I prayed for comfort,” I said, heat creeping into my ears. “For you.”

I ventured an embarrassed glance in his direction only to find him staring up at me like the point between my eyes was a horizon he was trying to reach.

“Then your petition was heard,” he said. “You became that which you prayed for. Perhaps you are a god, Benigno.”

There it was again. A twinge, like the sides of an open wound being painfully drawn back together with thread. I rubbed my chest uncomfortably. “We’ve already established that I’m a sea cradle. What about you?” I pivoted. “What kind of occupation is a ‘keeper of the seas’?”

He clicked his tongue at me. “Humans are obsessed with occupations.”

“All right then, what do you do in the ocean all day?”

“Merfolk do not do anything. We flow,” he explained, reclining in the water again and resuming his shell carving. “We commune with the deep, rescue the occasional marooned creature, protect our harmonies, explore. But we age too slowly to behave like time is a thing you can outswim if you fill it up with enough doing .”

I would’ve laughed if I wasn’t so jealous. Whether I was picking worms off tobacco leaves or sweating before a furnace, not a maldito day in my life had passed when I wasn’t working. “Is that what you miss the most about the ocean?” I asked. “All the, uh, flowing?”

“No.”

His tail flicked again, and it spun him at an angle where he could look at the windowpane. He held the little white shell out in front of his face. “What I miss most is the moon.”

Río rarely gave me an answer that didn’t lead to more questions. “What’s the moon got to do with the ocean?”

I expected another eye roll, but instead, he turned a wistful gaze on me that washed my neck in tingles.

“The moon and the ocean are lovers. Companions in the night,” he murmured. “When the moon is full and the sea is calm, it hangs so large and luminous in the sky; I would go to the surface just to bathe in the silver glow and feel the tides rise to greet it.”

His voice seemed to carve a path through the noise directly into my heart as he added, “Would that the moon could know the depth of my gratitude for its comforting light.”

We stared at each other, and Dios purísimo , that’s when I realized how poorly I’d hidden myself from him. I nearly asked him if he knew. If, when he fixed his blue irises on mine, he could see into my dreams and find himself there.

I cleared my throat. “You’ll have the moon again one day,” I said. “Te lo prometo.”

He smiled at me, then closed his eyes to the rumble of the pump. I laid down above him, and we stayed that way until drowsiness pulled me off the lattice to go back home.

Before I left, I put my hand against the glass. A promise to return.

He came and placed an argentine palm on the glass against mine. A promise to wait.

Asthma woke me up ahead of the dawn the next day. I creaked up to sitting—but before I could lapse into panic, I put a clammy hand over my chest and the other on my belly the way Río had told me to. I closed my eyes.

“You are just thirsty,” I whispered in Spanish to the empty room. “The air is water...”

Río’s techniques were calming my breathing a bit, so I figured a bath might settle the rest. Moving my wheezing lungs to the Albemarle’s porcelain tub, I sank into liquid warmth, inhaling VapoRub-scented steam through my nose. My hand went back over my heart, fingers tangling in my necklace and the sparse hair on my chest, the other hand on my stomach.

My skin felt different in the tub. Awake in ways the rest of me wasn’t.

As I relaxed into the water’s silk touch, without meaning to, my thoughts floated back to Río. To pewter lips and copper hair. To the glittery luster of warm lamplight on his skin and scales. How his blue eyes came alive when he talked about the moon and looked at me with an almost aggressive compassion for the ways I fell short of the man I pretended to be.

I could almost ignore it before. Río was objectively beautiful; it was easy enough to write off my fascination as the probable outcome of daily exposure to a mystery of nature. But the more time I spent with him, the less monster waves invaded my nightmares, and the more I dreamt of Río and me, the open sea, and his deep, musical voice delivering me to the sunrise.

I breathed in, closed my eyes... and let my fingers venture down...

Just past my navel, I stopped them.

I dragged my body out of the bath, toweled off, and dressed without looking in the mirror in case something had washed off in the water that I didn’t want to lose. Before I left, I braced myself at the sink, listening to water drip off San Cristóbal like a ticking clock.

Santa María, ayúdame, I prayed . I think I am the fish, and he is the net.