Page 32

T he electric daylight penetrating the theater was scant, so I lit the lamp and rushed toward the only person I didn’t have to lie to.

“It sounds like a maelstrom out there,” Río shouted as I jogged through the empty house. “What in the Seven Seas is happening?”

“The whole park’s turned on, remember?”

He frowned, following me around the tank side as he stuffed his fingers in his ears. “Hardly a worthy excuse to pollute the air with such barullo !”

“Yeah, well, air pollution’s a permanent fixture in this town.” I tore off my coat and dropped it absently on the ground. “It’s right up there with hot dogs and subway rats.”

Whether all the flashing lights and blaring sounds had lit my nerves on fire, or I was suffering some kind of kiss-induced sensory collapse, for once, I felt just as antagonistic toward that stupid, noisy pump as Río felt all the time. In two strides, I went over and turned off esa maldita cosa .

Río dropped his hands slowly, watching me and my lamp come up the rungs and slump down onto the lattice.

“Benigno, are you well?”

I reached for San Cristóbal and tried to settle my breathing. I wasn’t sure what I was searching for in Río’s company. I wanted to banter in the easy way we always did together, but my thoughts were caught in a loop like I’d left my brain on the carousel.

Sonia’s colorless face when I didn’t kiss her back. The wounded way she ran off. The horrifying secrets I had no choice but to keep unless I wanted to endanger the livelihoods—and lives—of my housemates. What would happen once the rest of the company saw her in that state? How hard would they have to pry for her to tell them how I’d—

“ Benigno .”

“Yeah?”

“Your mind is far away.”

I wanted to be far away. But I also didn’t want to be alone with my panic. It felt like my ribs were caving in...

“Tell me what is wr—”

“Sonia kissed me.”

Río’s tail went still. “Kissed you. But... she is a woman.”

“I know what she is, Santa María .” I scrubbed a hand over my clammy face.

“Benigno, did she...” His voice faltered. “Force it?”

My words were gone. I had none, in any language, to describe what had happened.

“ Benigno —”

“I wish I could say no.” My voice was barely there. “I wish I could say I kissed her and it made us both happy because, carajo , wouldn’t it just be so much easier ? Every guy wants a kiss from Sonia Kutzler, but she had to go and fall for the only idiot in Coney Island who can’t kiss her back. You shoulda seen the way she looked at me.”

“Just because she looks at you does not mean she sees you,” Río said with all the steadiness I couldn’t muster myself. “Otherwise, she would not have taken what you did not offer.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I muttered, my breaths coming shorter and faster. “’Cause I know what’s next. Soon the rest of the company will figure out what happened. Matthias’ll cut me down for being careless. Eli will know I lied to him. And Morgan? God knows what he’s letting his patrons do to Sonia for money. If he finds out what she told me, he’ll fire me, and that’s if he decides I’m not worth plugging with a bullet and dropping in the Hudson. I’ll have to run, go back to the beginning, make it alone all over again in this stinking, godforsaken city with nothing but smoke to breathe every day of my life—”

“Benigno,” Río said with alarm, “you are punishing yourself most cruelly for something you did not cause. I insist you stop.”

“I cause things just by existing!” I covered my face with my hands. “ Madre de Dios , why’d I even come here? What was the point of crossing the ocean just to find a different hell everywhere I go?”

“Do not say that,” he said gently. “What would become of me without you? Where would I be without my Barnacle?”

“Where would you be ?” I raked an exasperated hand through my wind-whipped hair. “ I built this tank, Río! You wouldn’t be trapped in this maldita cage, you’d still be in the East River—”

“Saltwater estuary—”

“You know what I mean!” I half shouted. “You’d be free! You’d still have a harmony!”

“You could not influence the Shark’s actions any more than I could,” he argued, his voice finally rising. “Merciful Neptune, have you no compassion for yourself?”

The answer, we both knew, was no, though the word never found its way past my clenched teeth. I wanted to run without stopping, bury myself in the ground. Anything to stop feeling like a wounded animal being hunted by a ruthless god.

“ Si te digo la verdad ...” My eyes squeezed shut as the darkest secret I carried rose up my throat like an oil slick in water. “Sometimes I think the hurricane hadn’t meant to leave me behind. That everything I am is an accident because I should’ve been swept out to sea.”

“Enough!”

I looked down. Río looked stricken.

“Enough of this,” he said again. “Come into the water.”

“?Qué dijiste?”

“I wish to comfort you. I cannot do it with bars between us.”

My stomach dove into my heels at the suggestion. “Comfort me ? But—”

“Do humans not console each other when they are in pain?”

“They do— we do, but...”

“But what?”

Staring unblinkingly at him—at the scar Morgan had carved into his skin—I said the words in Spanish so I didn’t have to bear the sting of them in English. “No lo merezco.”

His blue eyes flashed stubbornly. “You do not know what you deserve. You think yourself unworthy for your hand in my captivity when I have already forgiven you! Why do you refuse to forgive yourself?”

“After everything I let happen—”

“Of everyone who dragged me from the water that night, you are the only one who has sought to right the wrong,” he said emphatically. “What have I needed that you have not tried to give me? Food, music, protection—hope! You have been my comfort and my friend. If I have any chance of surviving this place, it is because of you .”

His hand rose out of the water, silvery palm upturned.

“I cannot take your burdens,” he went on. “But if you let me, I can bear them with you for a while.”

I stared at him with his arm lifted over his head like Lady Liberty, his open hand offering promises I was afraid to believe in. With his eyebrows bunched up and low over his wide eyes, he looked nearly as grieved as I felt.

“I can’t swim,” I whispered.

“I can carry you.”

“My lungs—”

“Benigno, I will not let you drown.”

Something about Río’s expression touched a long-neglected corner of my mind like an echo from a forgotten dream. I stood up on the metal grate and slid off my shoes, placing them neatly out of the way along with my socks. He watched patiently as I rolled up my trouser legs, undid the buttons of my shirt, then shrugged out of it. The hatch groaned as I lifted it, and I made a mental note to grease the hinges later.

Crouching at the lattice’s edge, I reached down, and for the first time in the weeks since el tritón had called me “friend,” our palms touched without glass between them. Warm, wet fingers curled around mine, the sandpaper roughness I’d felt on them the day he attacked me, gone.

“Come to me.” Río lifted his other arm. “I will catch you.”

Not since my days with Ramón had I known what it was like to stand at a bluff ready to jump, but the three feet down to the water might as well have been a drop off the roof of my old tenement. I swung my legs over the iron ledge, made a silent petition to el Arcángel Miguel , and with a sploosh—

“?Cono!” I yelped as lukewarm water met all mis pedacitos . Río caught me under my arms, keeping my chest level with the surface while the rest of me tightened like a cooling ingot. He tried drawing me closer, but my fingers clamped around his biceps and held him back, as if a few extra inches could short the electricity crackling through me from every point of contact between us.

This felt like hallucinating, albeit differently from my first view of Luna Park lit up. From this distance, I could make out the glint of water clinging to Río’s thick eyelashes, the exact texture the lamplight painted on his skin, the tiny glyphs carved into the small seashells braided into his hair. I looked over my shoulder into the blackness below us just for the distraction and immediately regretted it. We seemed to float over an abyss.

Río cleared his throat. “It would be easier if you held onto my shoulders. Like this.”

As if trying not to startle me, he slowly guided my hands up his arms one at a time, leaving them on his shoulders so he could take my waist. Long fingers stretched across my back, pulling me toward him. A warm breeze brushed against my legs. His tail.

“Boy Named Kind,” he said softly, “when was the last time someone showed you kindness?”

My agitated brain stuttered in search of an answer. Kindness was Tití Luz . The steward on the USS Carolina who didn’t toss me overboard and gave me a job. Even the Menagerie, despite everything, had offered me a life away from fire and smoke. “I wouldn’t be alive without it,” I said.

“?Y ternura?” A hand left my waist to move a curl out of my eyes. “What of tenderness?”

I swallowed. “Sonia kissed me.”

“That was not tenderness.”

He firmed his grip until our stomachs were pressed together, the fronds of his fins curling protectively around my ankles. As one arm locked around my waist, another hand tipped my head gently onto his shoulder where his hair brushed wet against my cheek. With every part of himself, Río held me, and as my arms stretched unsteadily to hold him back, I realized with a leaden pang that he’d grown thinner since the time I’d carried him, knocked out and bleeding onto my coat...

“ Eres inocente , Benigno.” His voice carried only as far as my ears—so I’d be forced to listen.

“Don’t—”

“ Escúchame bien. You are innocent.”

I wanted to argue, but I had been breathing in sips since the moment Sonia ran away from me. Finally, out of air, I inhaled.

Bendito. Río smelled like the ocean.

Like a sunlit morning on a pier in San Juan . Like the world San Ciriaco , President McKinley, and la consumición had stolen from me.

My eyes burned. My shoulders shook. Grief welled up so black and thick in my chest that I clung to Río harder out of an irrational fear we might both sink like stones under its weight. Before I could stop them, tears were scorching a path out of my eyes and into the rivulets on his shoulder.

When my sniffles turned to strangled gasps, he whispered, “Release it.”

As if his voice had cut the tie, it all came out—years of painful isolation in an audible gush from the shunned recesses of my heart. I could hardly stand the sound it made, broken and desperate and raw as iron-scalded flesh. I sobbed .

If Río was put off by the messy spectacle of human grief, he didn’t show it. Instead, his arms tightened around me until I was crushed against him. Until I couldn’t tell whose heart was drumming against my sternum. He molded himself to my body as if it would somehow keep me from splintering apart, and it was a relief to let him so I didn’t have to.

I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Time lost its rhythm in the tank. Just when I thought it might overflow with my tears, the convulsions that wrung out my lungs began to ebb, and my fingers softened their clawlike grip on Río’s shoulders.

“Respira,” he whispered. “Like I showed you.”

I tried. Deeply in. Deeply out.

“Good. Again.”

In.

Out.

As my breath calmed, I felt strangely lifted. Dizzy. I was back on the Circle Swing, my entire world spinning around the axis of Río’s embrace.

In a thunderclap of clarity, I remembered where I was. I, who couldn’t swim and never cried, had just emptied my tears onto a merman in forty tons of water. With nothing between us. No glass. No bars. Just Río’s wet shoulder against my cheek, his arms around me like shields, and the rest of me tangled in green and blue. I didn’t know how to leave him, to maroon myself where his careful hands couldn’t reach me; not without telling him the one truth that mattered more than anything else I’d ever confessed to him.

“I dream of you.”

I waited for him to drop me. He didn’t.

“What do you dream, Benigno?”

My arms tightened around him to curb the shaking in my limbs. “That I’m with you. Under the water. Holding you just like this,” I whispered into his shoulder. “They’re the happiest dreams I’ve ever had.”

His breath disturbed the last strands of dry hair on my neck as he spoke. “Then why do you sound so sad?”

I was wrong. The real leap off the tenement roof was about to come out of my mouth.

“’Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”

He pulled back to look at me with wide, startled eyes.

“ Es una locura , I know. I’m human, and you’re...” I let that thought dead-end on my tongue before it could make a bigger fool of me. “ Dios misericordioso , I’m more broken than I thought—”

“ No .”

With an arm still wound tight around my waist, he slid his other hand against my cheek like a warm compress over an ache. “Your emotions are not madness. Nor are you broken. Everyone else—the cowards who taught you that keeping your heart safe meant caging it— they are broken.”

A look of hope and expectation took shape on his face, and not even steeping in water up to my shoulders could put out the blaze that flared to life in my chest once I realized what it meant.

“What if nobody taught me how to keep my heart safe”—my eyes drifted to the dark ribbon of his mouth—“from you?”

“Your heart in my keeping,” he whispered, “would always be safe.”

No one leaned in first. Our lips met and in one bright, moonlit moment, the whole cruel, confusing world dissolved in brine. There was only Río—fin and flesh, salt water and sugarcane—and I gave in to his touch like flotsam washing ashore after an age adrift.

It was nothing at all like Sonia’s eager, bruising kiss. Río’s mouth was careful, unhurried, and glided over mine with a gentleness I wasn’t sure I deserved. I’d gotten so used to being treated like I couldn’t feel pain; I was a machine meant to labor until the gears failed and I became just another punchline to a white man’s joke. But I was one of Río’s seashells in his hands—treasured, precious, apt to shatter if pressed too hard.

His tenderness wrought in me a needy enthusiasm I didn’t know I was capable of. In a complete reversal of my earlier strategy to keep him away, I managed to relinquish one of my hands so I could thread my fingers into the damp waves of his copper hair and guide him closer, melting against him like the surf into sand. A sound I’d never heard myself make disappeared into the warmth of his open mouth.

Suddenly, he pulled back. “We should stop.”

“What’s wrong?” Miércoles . I understood too little about the romantic inclinations of merfolk to know if I’d crossed some unspoken line.

“Your breathing has become quite”—he gulped—“loud.”

A laugh bubbled out of me at the worry on his face. “I’m fine. Better than fine. Just means I like kissing you.” Heat filled my cheeks. “ A lot . ”

He smiled, relieved, and rested his gaze on San Cristóbal , floating in the water between us. “I did not know my heart could bend toward a human’s touch,” he said quietly. “Until you.”

Still clinging to his shoulder, I ventured to lay my free palm upon his cheek. “Does that scare you?”

“Less than perhaps it should,” he said soberly. “Are you frightened?”

I was terrified. But it was the exhilarating kind. Dreamland’s thrills couldn’t rival the thrill I felt kissing Río. “Only ’cause I’ll be begging you to teach me to swim after this.”

He touched his nose to mine and tightened the circle of his arms. “Then kiss me again, and it will make us brave.”

So I did. Then again, on his cheek. On the scar across his brow. A kiss for every night I’d left him alone. And as I did, I wondered if, like the greasy rag that had gone clean in Río’s hands, I’d been purified.

Because no dream, no fantasy or myth, had prepared me for this—for happiness that ran in all directions and watered every love-parched corner inside me until I felt as free and weightless as I had soaring above the earth in the red barquito .

“Río,” I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.”

“Benigno,” he whispered back. “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.”