Real Mermaids 2 - Don't Hold Their Breath (2 page)

I managed to make my way back to the scooping station without tripping over my jaw, but barely.

The rest of my conversation with Luke had gone something like this.

“Gah. Mrumpt. Uh…me. Oh, well then. Urp.” And that's when Luke got a call that the new blade for his lawn mower had come in at Harry's Hardware Store and he had to go.

How could I have been so stupid? Here I was, ready to rip the poor guy's head off, and all the while he'd been at his mother's bedside at the
hospital
.

Cori, the scooping goddess, had weeded the line of customers down to nothing by the time I got back. She shut the cooler lid to keep the chill in, then turned and leaned against it with her arms crossed and her mouth set in a thin line. Chelse was cracking open rolls of pennies while peering at the screen of her phone, unaware of the violent mer-micide about to happen right beside her.

I held an arm across my face. “Sorry, sorry! Please don't hurt me, I just couldn't help myself.”

“Didn't I tell you? Didn't I
tell
you?!” Cori held out her arms and gave me a quick hug.

“Ugh. Now I feel like a total jerk.”

“Spill. What happened?” Cori picked up a washcloth and wiped the ice cream stickiness from her hands.

“Well, mystery solved. They weren't being idiots and ignoring us.” I hunted for the bag of peanuts under the counter to restock our peanut bin. “They were actually three hours away at Renworth Hospital with their mom.”

“They were?” Cori's face softened. She turned to glance across the diner to catch a look at Trey and gasped when she realized he'd been waiting for her on the other side of the counter, just a few feet away. Trey held out a small bouquet of wild daisies like the kind that grew near the bridge.

“There might be a few bugs in them. Sorry?” Trey smiled and raised his eyebrows in an expectant expression. Geesh, those Martin boys sure knew how to turn on the charm. And from the look on Cori's face, she was totally going for it hook, line, and sinker.

“Trey!” Cori grasped the bouquet in one hand and leaned over the counter to give him a peck on the cheek.

“Sorry. Things have been really crazy,” Trey said.

“What happened? When you didn't call I was
so
worried
!” Cori caught my eye and gave me a buggy-eyed “work with me” look then turned back to Trey. “How's your mom?”

Trey slid onto a counter stool and pulled Cori's hand into his. “Her epilepsy has been a bit worse than usual. We took her to Urgent Care here in town but the seizures got really bad on Sunday night, so they rushed her to Renworth Hospital. We hardly had time to pack a bag.”

“Is she okay?” I realized I hadn't even asked Luke that before he had to go.

Trey's face was somber. “It took them a while to get the seizures under control.” He turned to Cori. “I really wanted to call but we were staying at my uncle's summer trailer nearby and between the no-Internet zone at the trailer park and—”

“No cell phones in the hospital,” Cori finished for him. Her mom was a nurse at the cottage hospital nearby so she got it.

“Yeah. So…” Trey fiddled with a strand of Cori's hair and smiled. “Am I in the doghouse?”

“Of course not!” Cori swooned. “But is your mom okay now?”

“Yes.” Trey let out a breath of relief. “She's pretty wiped but at least she's home.”

I let out a breath too, not realizing I'd been holding it in. “I'm really glad she's okay.”

“Thanks, Jade.” Trey gave me a friendly smile and went back to gazing into Cori's eyes.

Customers were starting to gather at the takeout window again, so I gave my hands a quick wash and got back to work, thankful for the distraction. Of course, I was happy Cori and Trey had worked things out, but with my awkward conversation with Luke still fresh in my mind, I wasn't really in the right head space to watch their happy reunion.

Three double-scoop sugar cones and a strawberry sundae later, Cori breezed back to the cooler with a goofy grin.

“All good?” I asked with a smile. And yes, it was sincere. Cori was my girl; it was nice to see her happy.

“More than good.” Cori rubbed the goose bumps from her forearm. “He's picking me up later and we're going roller-blading along the boardwalk by the beach. Hey, why don't you and Luke come too?”

Trey had obviously forgotten about the verbal diarrhea I'd spewed earlier.

“Yeah, I'm not really sure if the Luke-and-me thing is still happening,” I said quietly.

Before Cori could answer, Chelse's stool scraped along the floor as she stood from her perch at the cashbox. She checked the time on her cellphone.

“Shift's over. I'm out.” Her voice cracked when she spoke. I wasn't sure if it was because of the underuse of her vocal chords, since she hadn't actually said more than ten words to me throughout our whole shift, or whether she was upset.

“You okay?” I searched her face.

Then, the impossible happened. Chelse forced a smile and
turned
off
her
phone
. As in, cut off her main source of communication with the outside world. Her screen went blank as her phone powered off. She tucked it in her bag and got her sweater from the back of her stool.

“Yeah. I'm good, thanks.” She signed off on the time sheet attached to the clipboard by the soft-serve machine then disappeared through the kitchen to the back door.

“What the heck was
that
all about?” I asked, washing my hands so I could take over cash box duty while Cori got to work at the cooler.

“Probably something about her ex-boyfriend. It looked like she was on his Facebook profile earlier. But wait a sec.” Cori plopped a scoopful of Mooseprint Mocha into a paper cup and handed it over to a touristy-looking elderly woman then turned and whispered to me. “What's this about you and Luke?”

I made change for the lady and complimented her on her flowery hat, then asked if she needed another napkin and suggested some Port Toulouse landmarks she might want to explore on her trip. Cori poked me in stomach with her elbow. I smiled at the lady and bid her good-bye before Cori cracked one of my ribs.

“I just kind of went off on him,” I admitted. Sure I was ticked about him not calling me since we kissed, but it was more than that. Luke was the only other person I knew like me—a mer. Other than Mom, that was. But Mom wasn't there just then and Luke was. Thinking I'd screwed up that mer-to-mer connection made me feel more lost than ever. Not that I could admit that to Cori. “Roller-blading with me is probably the last thing on Luke's priority list.”

“Aw, Jade. I'm sure it's not so bad. Why don't I get Trey to talk to him?”

But I couldn't do that. It wasn't like we were in fourth grade and could get away with passing notes to each other with check boxes to find out:

Do you like me?

Yes

No

“Nah…I think it's just best if I cut my losses.” I didn't need
Teen
Cosmo
to tell me that our summer romance had probably come to its thrilling conclusion.

That's when a busload of day-campers and their counselors converged on us, shutting down our conversation, which was just as well.

I'd been so focused on Luke that I hadn't given enough of my brain space to the other mer in my life. Mom was stuck in the ocean, waiting for the Mermish Council to decide when she could become human again. Or was she in the magical tidal pool undergoing her transformation already? Gah! I needed to find out what was going on with Mom or I'd drive myself crazy wondering. Crazier than usual, anyway.

From then on, I vowed to put Luke Martin out of my mind and turn my attention to bringing Mom home. I was sure that was exactly what I needed to get my head on straight again.

Forget boys, especially adorable mer-boys like Luke Martin.

I had bigger fish to fry.

“Did I just hear you correctly?” Dad called from underneath the bathroom sink as he attempted to replace the faucet. I could hear the smile in his voice.

“What?” All I had said was I thought we could use a plumber.

CLANG, DING, CLANG
.

“We don't need a plumber.” Dad's pudgy legs poked out from underneath the sink as he worked to get comfortable. “I just didn't realize there was an up and a down on this valve thing. No biggie, I'll figure it out.”

I scrolled through my Google search for local plumbers on Dad's iPad. AAA Drain Repair all the way through to Zooter Rooter Plumbing Services. At least
they
would know which direction to install a bathroom faucet.

“All I'm saying is there are professionals who depend on this kind of work to feed their families, you know.”

I wasn't sure if Dad's latest do-it-yourself kick was to make the house look nice for when Mom finally got home or whether he was just trying to distract himself while he waited. There was the new paint job in the living room, some project he and Luke's grandpa Eddie were working on in the garage, and now the plumbing job to replace the leaky faucet. Oh, and the plugged bathtub drain would probably need to be addressed at some point.

“Sheesh, have a little faith!” Dad called over the clanging. “I'm an engineer, after all. How hard can it be to change a bathroom faucet?”

I leaned over and hollered into the sink.

“Apparently, harder than quantum physics!” My voice bellowed down the drainpipe. The sound made him jump.

“Hey!” A hand appeared from below and a crumpled wad of packing tape sailed toward me. It missed me by a mile.

“Ouch, I'm hit!” I faked a cry. “This is definitely going to need stitches.”

“Yeah right!” Dad's hand disappeared again. More clanging noises.

“Hey, is the main water valve still off?” I called down, trying to figure out the instructions on the sheet of paper that had come with the faucet.

“Give me a little credit, Jade. They teach that kind of thing in engineering school too, you know.” Dad popped his head up from under the sink and stood to survey his handiwork. “There! All done. See? That didn't take any time at all.”

I checked my watch. “Yep. Only three hours and forty minutes, seven Google searches, and two trips to Home Depot. Record time.”

The cell phone rang. We both froze and stared at it vibrating on the vanity's countertop, just like every other time the phone had rung in the past three weeks. Was it Mom? Was she safe?

I picked it up on the second ring. “Hello?” I asked hopefully.

“Congratulations! You've been selected for an exclusive three-day Frontier Alaskan Cruise…”

I clicked off the phone and tossed it back on the counter. “Argh! Another telemarketer. Seriously, do people actually fall for that stuff?”

Dad let out a breath, then turned to clean up the extra parts and packaging from the faucet box. But I could see his expression in the bathroom mirror. His face was flushed red and his eyes shone with disappointment. Crushing, heartbreaking disappointment.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?” He cleared his throat and looked up in the mirror, meeting my gaze, then busied himself arranging tools into his metal toolbox. The sound reverberated through the hollowness of the bathroom.

“I want to go to the ocean to go see what's happening with Mom.” The last time I'd seen Mom was underneath the pier at the Descousse Marina. Sure, she'd said the Mermish Council was going to let her use the tidal pool so she could transform into a human again, but what if something had gone wrong? And why was it taking so long?

Dad shut the toolbox's lid. It snapped shut on his finger.

“Oh! Ouch.” He snatched his hand back and sucked on his finger. “Yeah, sure, honey. We've been up and down the coast looking for the tidal pool already, but maybe we can look around Gros Nez Point this time.”

This wasn't going to be easy. How was I going to convince Dad that I didn't want to do just another one of our evening coastal hunts up and down the shores around Port Toulouse? I wanted to go straight to the source. I wanted answers. Real answers. And there was only one place to get them.

“No, Dad. The ocean…the actual ocean.”

“Oh, honey. No—”

“Please? Not knowing what the heck is happening with Mom is making us both a little batty. We can't jump each time the phone rings. And honestly,” I stared at the loose wires hanging from the half-installed bathroom fan overhead, “I'm not sure how many more home improvement projects we can survive before one of us gets electrocuted.”

Dad blinked a few times.

“No.” He picked up the toolbox and brushed by me. I sighed and followed him out the door and down the stairs. Dad kept ignoring me through the rec room door and out into the garage, but I pressed on.

“Wouldn't you love to know what's going on? To have some idea when Mom was actually coming home? Whether she was coming home at all?”

Dad stood squarely in front of his workbench. He ran his hands along the lid of the toolbox before turning to me. “Of course I want to know, Jade. But I've already almost lost one Baxter girl to the ocean. I really don't feel like risking another.”

“I promise I'll be careful,” I pleaded.

“It's not like you're asking me to go to the movies by yourself, Jade. What you're proposing is extremely dangerous. There are tidal forces, salinity and buoyancy factors to consider…”

Great. Dad was totally geeking out on me.

“Plus,” he continued, “the Atlantic is not like Talisman Lake, where you can just turn in any direction and find your way back to shore. This is the ocean, Jade. One wrong turn and next stop is the British Isles.” He patted the pockets of his pants and looked around the garage as if he'd misplaced something, then peeked under a tarp covering our old camping trailer—except it wasn't exactly our camping trailer anymore.

“What did you do to the trailer?” I asked pulling off the rest of the tarp. “What is this thing?”

Dad cringed as though I'd found my presents a week before Christmas. “Uh, just something Eddie and I have been tinkering with.”

The trailer's canvas top had been removed, and an old hot tub took up most of the floor space inside. Hoses and pipes came off the hot tub at all angles, and a tangle of wires was connected to a laptop on the counter at the far side of the trailer.

“Well, I guess this is as good a time as any to show you.” Dad climbed the steps into the trailer and held out his hand to help me up. He squeezed his way around the tub, which was filled with water, and took a seat in front of the laptop. The laptop flashed on and Dad opened a program with graphs and data. He pressed a button to start the hot tub jets, sending bubbles whirring through the water.

“When did you have time to do all this?” I asked, amazed.

“Eddie, or rather Dr. Schroemenger,” Dad said, reminding me of when we'd found out Eddie was actually a mer expert who had published an article about a mer discovery when he was a university professor in Florida—Eddie was laughed at and lost his job over it, so now he preferred to keep his mer discoveries to himself—“amassed a lot of information from his years of research. He analyzed the water-to-air ratio of hundreds of tidal pools and found them fairly constant. Our theory is that the tidal pool the Mermish Council uses to transform mers to humans isn't magical at all. And in fact, Eddie's contact in Florida has found the same thing.”

“You mean the Mermish Council just made that up? To keep other mers from trying it on their own?”

“Well not many mers know about the possibility of becoming human, so they wouldn't give tidal pools a second glance. It actually all comes down to sound scientific principals of accelerated evolution and devolution. I just applied Eddie's data to an algorithm and we came up with this.”

“Okay, okay.” I held my head and watched air rush through the jets. “Assume I didn't understand a word you just said. What exactly is
this
?”

“The Merlin 3000.” Dad beamed.

“What does the 3000 stand for?” I asked.

“Nothing, it just sounds cool.” Dad smiled and fiddled with one of the knobs on the hot tub.

“But what, exactly, does the Merlin 3000
do
?” I felt a spark of hope growing in my chest.

“It's a mer-to-human synthesizer equipped with what we believe are the correct ratios of air and water, fully optimized with salinity sensors and temperature gradients. And it's portable.” Dad slapped the side of the trailer and smiled.

“Like a fake tidal pool? To changes mers to humans?” I cried. “So, this is it! This is how we can get Mom back!”

“No, now wait, Jade. The Merlin 3000 is still in its prototype stage. There are still a lot of variables we don't know yet.” Dad powered off the computer and turned off the jets. Bubbles traveled to the surface of the water and popped as the air pump whirred to a stop. “We just thought it would be a good idea to work on a backup plan just in case.”

Dad stepped down the stairs and waited for me to do the same before he pulled the tarp back over the trailer.

“But what if Mom never made it to the tidal pool? What if she's trying to figure out how to get back to us? If we could find her, we could test this thing out. Let me go find her, Dad. Please?”

“No. Absolutely, unequivocally no. Sorry, Jade.”

I followed Dad back into the house and up to the bathroom.

“But,” I got the wastepaper basket and started filling it with bubble wrap, “I just can't go through the rest of the summer without knowing. Can you?”

Dad looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath.

“Okay, okay,” he finally said. “I have to admit I'm having a hard time with the wait too.”

My heart leapt. “So you'll let me go?”

He eyed me seriously and took forever to reply. “Only if we do it my way, okay?”

“Yes. Yes! Whatever you want.” I jumped up and down and gave Dad a hug. He laughed and shook his head.

“I'll get Eddie to take us in the Martins' boat on Saturday. It's got a depth sounder and a fish finder and is equipped with state-of-the-art nautical charts and electronic weather tracking. I need this to be as safe as possible, got it?”

“Saturday's good. It's my day off and I was thinking Saturday anyway. Yes, Saturday! You're the best. Thanks. You won't regret this! Really!” I kept tidying up the bathroom to prove my enthusiasm. Something sparkly caught my eye amid the extra washers and leftover faucet parts. I picked it up and examined it.

My toe ring.

“You found it,” I whispered.

“Yeah, it came up when I snaked the drain, trying to unplug it. It must have fallen in that time…” He didn't have to finish—that time my toes and feet and legs turned into a tail for the first time.

“Wow, everything changed after that, huh?” I twirled the toe ring between my fingers and rubbed off a piece of gunk wedged between the grooves.

“That's for sure.” Dad took the toe ring from me and inspected it with a smile. “The tub has never drained quite the same way since.”

“Ha ha.” I snatched the toe ring back from him and started to turn on the faucet to wash it off but hesitated. “Is it safe to turn this thing on?”

“Of course! Should be good as new.”

I turned on the faucet and held my breath. Water flowed from the spout. Miracles did happen!

“See, I told you I knew what I was doing.” Dad smiled and shook his head. “And you thought we should call a plumber.”

Just then, I felt a drip on my toe.

“Uh, Dad?”

“Yes?” He replaced the soldering gun in its case.

Drip. Drip.

“Wasn't that conference you went to in June about fluid dynamics or something?”

“Mm-hmm…why?”

Then a trickle.

“Well, I think that's going to come in handy.” I opened the doors underneath the sink. Water gushed out all over the floor.

“Ah!” Dad cranked off the tap.

I pulled a beach towel from the rack and caught the puddle before it turned into a tidal wave. We slipped and slid on the bathroom tile, trying to sop up the mess.

“Should I make the call?” I blew a curl from my forehead.

“Make the call.” Dad squeezed water from the bath mat into the bathtub.

I reached for the phone and dialed one of the numbers from my Google search.

“Hello! Mr. Zooter? Yeah, we've got a problem!”