Free An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant by LeAnn Neal Reilly Page A

the canal. While he waited for his order, he drank
iced tea and composed a speech to Zoë, but no matter how many times he tried,
nothing he said sounded plausible or defensible. He stayed there all evening
trying to find the words, sitting in an ever-increasing cloud of mosquitoes who
dined on his penitent flesh until the waitress gently shooed him out.

Five
     
    When it finally came time for John to strap on an oxygen
tank and drop sixty feet to the ocean floor, he found that nearly drowning no
longer dominated his thoughts. He couldn’t look at the Caribbean without seeing
Tamarind’s luminous eyes—everything else about the sea receded into
meaninglessness. He hadn’t entirely lost his fear. It had just moved inside a
plexi-glass box inside his mind: he could see his irrational self pounding and
mouthing words, but it had been reduced to wild gestures that he ignored.
    He met
Chris at his shop. Chris had lost the feral gleam in his eyes and never
mentioned the gente del mar while they loaded gear with Pablo and Jorge
onto his boat. His no-nonsense demeanor and thorough checklist turned the
lights out in John’s anxiety box. As they worked, he told John what to expect
at Amberjack—the reef southwest of Culebra named for the silver fish that
clustered in schools there. The currents were variable, for good and for bad,
but nothing that a neophyte couldn’t handle. John started to look forward to
it, to see himself surrounded by water and breathing fine.
    They’d
boarded the boat and were casting away when he caught sight of Raimunda
slouching against a corrugated building on shore, one knee bent under her
tiered skirt. Even from a distance, warm, spicy smoke from her cigarette
drifted over the cool smell of saltwater, mesmerizing and insistent. A familiar
hollowness filled John. He nearly cried out to Chris to reverse course and tie
up again, but he clinched his jaw instead and wrenched his gaze forward to the
brilliant horizon. The scent of clove lingered like regret until Culebra had
shrunk into a dark speck.
    While
they sailed, an ominous patch of clouds obscured the sun. Pablo and Jorge
shielded their eyes and muttered to each other, but as quickly as it had
appeared, the patch blew away. Chris pulled out photo albums with hundreds of
pictures of fish, crustaceans, coral, and seaweed from dives he’d taken
throughout the Caribbean. John nodded and murmured over as many pictures as he
deemed polite. Perhaps it was the protective sheet overlaying the images, but
the sea life looked plastic and posed.
    Chris
closed the creaky cover on the last album. “I’ve been everywhere. Always come
back to Culebra though. It isn’t the best diving in the world, but there’s
something about the waters around this little rock in the ocean. It’s not just
that they’re so clear. There’s something, I don’t know, something eternal .
Something bigger than us here.”
    John,
who’d let the sound of the engine lull him into a trance, stirred and
stretched. He’d been thinking of Tamarind’s crazy hair and infectious laugh.
The outrageous way she’d spit out her food, the graceful speed of her swimming.
He’d tried to recall her humming, but he could only identify its absence. He
tugged himself back to the present and Chris, who sat rubbing the album cover.
    “I guess
Culebra really is the ‘Enchanted Isle,’” he said. It was the first thing that
came to mind.
    Chris
looked at John out of the corner of his eye. His introspective mood visibly
changed. “Think you’ll see your mermaid?”
    The
question didn’t surprise John. It didn’t bother him as much as it would have
two days ago. “Maybe.”
    “Ah-ha!
You’ve already seen her again.” Chris studied him. “She’s pulling you under her
spell.”
    A
dolphin broke the surface of the water. John watched as it leapt beside the
boat, racing them. An image of himself riding on its back filled his mind,
echoing his dream from the morning after his rescue. “I