A child’s cry came from a green canoe floating in the middle of the channel. It looked empty.
The baby wailed again.
Meredith kicked off her shoes and ran toward the river, shedding her shirt before diving.
It should have been easy to overtake the engineless little boat, since Meredith was swimming with the sluggish current, but it kept ahead of her. She didn’t notice when she reached the river’s mouth and entered the Chesapeake until the baby’s discomforted wails became terrified shrieks. The waves were choppier and the canoe’s motion became violent.
Tiring, Meredith redoubled her efforts.
The canoe stopped dead in the water.
Meredith approached, too set in her course to obey the nagging knowledge that all was not as it seemed. Canoes didn’t carry anchors and even anchored boats drifted, but she didn’t care.
A green-haired woman with a mouth full of shark’s teeth surfaced just in front of her.
Meredith was too tired to visibly react, and for that she was grateful.
“You just don’t give up, do you?” the slit-nosed creature asked, half disgusted and half amused.
“What are you doing with that baby?”
“It really isn’t any of your business.”
“Obviously, I made it my business. The poor thing is terrified.”
“Birth is always traumatic.”
“It was already born once!” The full virulence of the Meredith’s accusation was compromised by the brackish water that splashed into her mouth.
“Now she will be born again.”
“What gives you the right?”
“I have a mother’s right!”
“This is not your child.”
“She is now!”
“Is she an orphan?”
The mermaid moved sinuously, uncomfortably, in the water. “No.”
“You left a changeling, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you think that poor girl’s parents will feel?”
“I don’t care!” the mermaid shouted.
“It’s not a soul you need,” Meredith said, spitting water with her words. “It’s a conscience!”
The mermaid sneered, but Meredith didn’t blanch from her sharp, pearly teeth. “I need nothing!” the creature snarled, and dove beneath the waves.
Meredith sucked in a deep breath and reoriented herself in the water, ready once again to pursue the canoe.
The baby had fallen silent, but still Meredith swam on. The limits of her endurance had been reached, and she sacrificed speed for stubbornness. Her exterminates were numb, but Meredith couldn’t tell whether the lack of sensation stemmed from the cold or simple tiredness.
In the distance, the canoe stopped again.
As she approached, Meredith heard the small child’s exhausted whimpers. The poor thing hadn’t stopped crying at all. She was simply too tired to maintain full volume.
Meredith’s heart ached along with her arms.
“So stubborn,” the mermaid said.
Meredith took the opportunity to catch her breath and did not respond.
“Tired?” the fish-eyed creature asked slyly.
Meredith glared.
“Why don’t you just concede?” it urged.
Shivering in the sun, thankful for the added buoyancy of the salty water, and desperately thirsty, Meredith reflected on the reasons.
She had come all this way and couldn’t bear for it to have been a wasted effort. She wouldn’t be able to face the baby’s parents with nothing but wet hair and a wild story. This far out into the Bay, she would never make it home safely anyway, and so it would be an act without point to give up at this juncture.
“If you give up now, I will make sure you get home safely,” the mermaid wheedled, echoing her thoughts. Pragmatically, it added, “Even assuming you somehow ‘rescue’ the child, how do you propose to save her? To take her from me will only seal her fate.”
Meredith wavered only for seconds, but these seconds were long enough for her head to fall beneath the waves.
Perversely, this only strengthened her resolve. “No.”
“So be it!” the mermaid shouted, and disappeared again.
The canoe began to move, and again Meredith pursued.
A third time the canoe stopped, and for the third time, Meredith came up close behind it. In a stupor, she floated, out of habit waiting for the mermaid’s acerbic company.
She had been swimming for hours. The beauty of the sunset assaulted her numb senses. It did not, however, distract her when the little canoe began to be affected by the waves and flipped over.
“No!” Meredith screamed. Salty water spilled into her mouth and she sputtered.
She gathered her reserves and waited for a trough between the waves. Riding a crest, she kicked up with her legs, took a deep breath, and dove.
Fighting her natural buoyancy, Meredith opened her eyes. The salt stung, and the murkiness obscured her vision further, but she could make out the scales of a mermaid’s tailfin.
She swam down as fast as she could, terrified for the baby’s safety. Meredith knew with sick certainty that if the mermaid could provide it with air to breathe underwater, the canoe would not have been employed.
Her ears popped with the changing pressure. Her lungs burned.
Suddenly, there was visibility. She saw the underwater village that the estuary’s mermaid population considered home. Involuntarily, she inhaled water as her body demanded the oxygen it had been denied.
Damn. I wasn’t fast enough.
When she woke, Meredith was surprised to find she was alive. A quick inventory of her surroundings assured Meredith that the chase had not been a dream. Her muscles ached. Her eyes burned. Her lungs were screaming in pain.
Yet they worked.
She was underwater and breathing, floating far below the surface of the Bay, where the sun’s rays did not reach, and she could see.
Meredith inverted her posture – tried to, rather, and failed. At first she thought she was trapped, confined in some sort of magical binding like the green canoe. She soon realized, though, that her body was simply incapable of meeting the demands she had placed upon it.
“Good,” a cheerful voice said. “You’re awake.”