The Mermaid's Sister(21)

“Friends?” he says. He is standing behind me now. The spicy Christmas scent of him still makes me woozy, no matter how I fight it.

“Of course,” I say, pasting a smile on my face and turning around. “You are my almost-brother, after all.”

Water whooshes and splashes against the inside of the tub as Maren stirs, attracting all our attention to the mermaid-girl.

O’Neill runs a hand through his hair, his habit when perplexed or troubled. He motions for me to follow him across the room, where Maren may not hear our whispers. “She is smaller than she was yesterday. I’m sure of it,” he says.

I nod. “Every day, by fractions.”

“What will become of her?”

“I think she must be taken to the ocean, or she will shrink away to nothing. She will disappear.”

“We must take her, then.” His eyes meet mine. “You and I must take her to the ocean. Scarff is not well enough, no matter what he might say. He needs to stay here with Auntie and her potions and recover his strength.”

I know then, without a doubt, that he is as brave as the heroic O’Neill of my daydreams, braver than I could ever hope to be myself. “I will go with you,” I say. I would follow you to the ends of the earth, I think. And then I look at the mermaid across the room. “I would do anything to save my sister.”

“As would I,” he says. He takes both my hands and squeezes them tightly. “We will make the journey together, and once there we will find a way to save her, Clara. Surely the merfolk can tell us how to release her from whatever enchantment has stolen her humanity.”

The mermaid slaps her tail against the water. She points and gestures demandingly.

“Have patience, sister dear. I was just getting to that,” I reply. “Fetch the buckets, O’Neill. Her highness requires fresh, warm water.”

He bows low, with a flourish of his hand. “Queen Maren, your subjects shall obey.”

She peers into O’Neill’s face worshipfully as he scoops the old water from the tub to make room for the new. He meets her gaze and endows her with one of his mischievous, crooked grins before dousing her with the bucket’s contents. She giggles (sea foam rolling over sand) and grabs his wrist and pulls. Only narrowly does he escape tumbling into the tub.

Maren’s full-on laughter is a bubbling, subaquatic spring. Everything about her glistens: her skin, her copper-gold hair, the lustrous scales of her perfect tail. Even her eyes gleam. She is happy.

My sister, Maren, is happy as a mermaid. And she is happier still with O’Neill at her side. She has not shed a single pearl tear since his return to the mountain.

The knowledge stabs me like a knife. She is happy, and I must let her go. I realize that I must stop trying to make her into the girl she was, now that she is the mermaid she was born to be. As Auntie has said, we must be who we truly are.

The knife plunges deeper as I realize how completely Maren loves O’Neill. Nothing but love could make a person—or a mermaid—glow in such a way. It is the most beautiful and terrible thing I have ever beheld. Beautiful, as all true love is. Terrible, because the thing I feel for O’Neill is paltry, dull, and silly in comparison.

From this moment on, I swear to banish my unsisterly feelings for O’Neill. It is a hollow promise I make to myself, one that I fear I shall break a thousand times before learning how to keep it.

I will do my best to let go of both of them: the mermaid and her true love. They will be who they must be. Who am I to interfere with that?

I pity him, truly I do. His time with her is short. For what place could there be in the ocean for a human peddler boy—other than as food for a shark. Heaven forbid such a thing!

O’Neill nudges me. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” I lie. He must arrive at his moment of truth and surrender on his own. I have known him since we were infants, and I know he would not accept such a painful truth from me. His bright, unquenchable hopefulness is one of the things that makes him who he is. One of the things that makes me—made me—love him. Only brutal experience and unchangeable, visible facts could ever make him give up on making Maren human again.

When Maren reaches her ocean home and leaves him on the shore, what will become of him?



A spring snowstorm shuts us all inside the cozy cottage. The fire blazes as the wind howls and O’Neill sings a naughty sea chantey that makes even our mermaid blush.

“Kraa,” says Pilsner, shaking his head in what I take to be approval of the unsavory lyrics. The impish bird perches at the foot of Maren’s tub and preens his blue-black plumage.

“Enough of the wholesome entertainment,” Scarff says, setting his pennywhistle aside and scratching Osbert behind the ears. “I owe you children the rest of the tale I began a few days ago.”

We pull our chairs closer to Maren, forming a semicircle around the tub. Maren snatches O’Neill’s hand and bats her shimmering eyelashes. The mermaid version of my sister is even more flirtatious than the human girl was. Then again, no village lad could hope to compare to our O’Neill.

“Where were we? Boston, was it? Just off the ship, trying to get our land legs back. Yes, that was where we left off. So, Verity and I set out upon the road, living much as we had back in the Old Country. A penny here, a fresh loaf there . . . but the cold in America proved much more biting than any we had known before. As luck would have it, we met up with a little old man by the name of Willie Brady. A traveling tinker he was, bereft because his partner had recently succumbed to consumption. At the end of his rope, he said he was, about to dig a hole and bury himself if only he could figure out how. But didn’t our Verity talk sense into Willie Brady? And in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, we were on the road together, selling pots and pans and spoons and the like, as well as Verity’s cough elixirs and headache powders. A grand time it was! At night we’d light a nice fire in the caravan’s little potbelly stove and we’d bed down as warm as fleas on a spaniel.”