Page 20 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Rafe

The door swings in on darkness and the smell of a room undisturbed for a long, long time.

Old wood. Cold ash. The particular held-breath mustiness of undisturbed air, and under it, the mineral patience of stone. I stand in the doorway with Neri on my arm, holding as much of her weight as I can to give her ankle a reprieve and give my eyes a second to adjust. Bit by bit, the cottage assembles itself out of the gloom.

The cottage consists of one main room. There’s a fireplace along the far wall, made of stone and looking relatively untouched by time. An ancient table, simple but sturdy, thick-legged and covered in dust, with two chairs that appear solid enough at first glance. A kitchen alcove sits off the side, shelf boards sagged into smiles, and past the hearth, nestled against the wall is a bed, still piled with quilts. Two deep windows throw gray light in slabs across a plank floor with decades of dust on it, printed now with exactly two sets of footprints, ours.

Not exactly a room at the Ritz.

"Okay," I say, and my voice comes back off the stone all wrong, too loud, like the house is startled. "The listing said rustic."

"The listing said abandoned." She leans on the doorframe, ankle up like a flamingo, running surveyor's eyes over everything. "Structure first. Before we fall in love with it."

I blink repeatedly and look at her with fake outrage.

“Was that a joke? A joke from Doctor Nerissa Marsh, the most serious scientist in the entire country? Either I bumped my head harder than I thought or I’m dead and I’ve gone to Heaven.”

I gasp as she rolls her eyes, but the corners of her mouth lift in a smile that transforms her whole face. It softens those edges that she wears like a shield and dimples form on each side of her pretty, rounded mouth.

“I think we must both be dead.” That smile stays on her face as she keeps her gaze on me. “Because this place is bigger than my apartment.”

I chuckle and look down at her. For a moment, there’s no dusty abandoned cottage, no wreck, no ankle sprain or hunger or cold. I’m just a man lost in the teal-blue eyes of the most beautiful woman in the world.

Then she swallows and pulls her eyes away. And I return to reality.

I do the survey. This tiny cottage was built for the unforgiving weather of coastal Maine: the walls are dry and true, the roof sags in one corner, the boards under it stained dark and long dried, but it doesn’t look like it’s about to cave in. One windowpane is cracked, and the other is empty, the glass long gone, shattered bits layered on the floor. The chimney, when I crouch in the hearth and look up, shows me a coin of actual sky, unblocked. The bed is a good surprise. The iron frame is narrow, its ancient mattress long gone to mice, but the frame is sound. Even better, I find folded wool blankets in a wooden chest that the mice, by some miracle of oversight or respect, never breached. They smell like mothballs and dust and decades past. They are the most beautiful textiles I have ever encountered.

And then the cottage starts handing us things.

It happens like a magic trick, like the room decided we passed some kind of interview. Neri opens the alcove's lower cabinet and there's cookware, a thick-bottomed cast-iron pan, a dented pot that seems to be made of aluminum, a kettle with a rind of ancient lime. I check the wall pegs and find tools, a hand axe with a gray but honest edge, coils of line. Under the window bench: a wooden tackle box, hooks and lures and leader gone cloudy with age but intact, and folded beside it a fishing net with a torn belly, ripped in a long ragged mouth, fixable, maybe, by someone with patience and knowledge.

And on the mantel, a tin box that Neri opens like it might be full of bees, then her entire face transforms.

"Rafe!”

She holds out a fire striker, flint and steel, and a knot of char-cloth still folded in oilpaper. I look at that little kit and feel the way I felt the first time I looked at the night sky through a telescope. With wonder.

"We have fire," I say. "We have a pan. We have hooks and line." I turn in the middle of the little stone room, and the whole shape of our situation is pivoting under me, from bleak survival toward something approaching bearable. Comfortable, maybe not, but bearable, certainly. "Neri, we might just make it to a warm meal and a warm night.”

“It’s not much, but I’ll take it.” She lowers herself onto the standing chair like a queen claiming a disputed throne. “Don’t let it go to your head. We still have lots of work to do.”

So I do, and here's where the day divides itself.

Her ankle has vetoed walking, so the hearth is hers. We’re lucky enough to find brittle-dry, old wood stored in a corner and I ferry in armloads of deadfall from the meadow's edge, spruce twigs, birch scraps off the one dying birch by the garden wall. She gets to work and builds the fire, her face serious as she works on the flint and steel.

I don’t stay to watch her work. I take the outside and follow the most wonderful sound I ever heard. Water. Not the ocean, but trickling water.

Behind the cottage, tucked into ferns and moss like a secret, there's a basin. Stone-built, clearly human-made, catching a thread of spring that comes down off the hill through a mossy channel. It's full, and it drips a steady overflow. And when I taste it, it's cold and sweet and clean.

Better and better. We have water and shelter. With a bit of luck, we’ll have warmth, too.

Now all we need is food. I set out to explore some more. The garden's gone to riot but the riot has survivors: a stand of rhubarb like a green explosion, mint gone overgrown in one whole corner, and, when I dig where the old rows would have been, the unmistakable papery necks of onions, gone half-wild, small and fierce. I pull three, and the smell off them is so sharp and so much like food that my stomach files an emergency motion.

The cove seals it. Down the meadow path, the crescent beach is calm and peaceful, and the northern headland runs out in black ledges that go under at half-tide. And those ledges, when I climb down to the waterline, are shaggy with mussels. Blue-black, fist-clustered, thousands of them, a whole protein sector, free for the picking. I fill my folded fleece and a nostalgic corner of my heart springs to life, because my father used to say the coast feeds anyone humble enough to bend over. He certainly was and I’m grateful for it.

I come back up the path at golden hour with my arms full of the island's bounty, and see the cottage chimney smoking.

Smoke. From the chimney. Neri got the fire going pretty good by the sight of it.