Several men shouted down the second man, while another chorus joined in favor of his argument. Women stumbled away from the suddenly jostling and dangerous group, several of them fleeing out the doors of the hall into the night.
Levi realized the crowd had turned ugly. He bent to another one of the workers and said, “Better go and get the local constable before this becomes dangerous.”
The man nodded and climbed the stage to stand next to Levi. “Best if I go out the back exit. Else I might get caught up in that mob.”
Levi nodded as the man disappeared backstage. Then he ran to the rope that controlled the curtains and pulled them shut. The noise seemed to grow louder once the crowd was out of sight.
It’s only your imagination, Levi told himself. Terrible things always seemed more terrible when you could not see them.
Amelia was already climbing out of the tank, her hand in the jar of sand on the platform. He scooped up her dress and carried it to her as she stepped quickly down the ladder.
“We have to leave,” Levi said.
“Of course we do,” Amelia said. “Even I can tell that lot will kill each other over their sense of injured honor, and if we’re still here they might decide to kill us, too, for fooling them in the first place.”
He took her hand, and they hurried to the backstage area. Just as they slipped out into the night they heard an angry cry.
“The mermaid’s gone!”
“They must have sneaked out the back!”
Levi pulled Amelia along, thinking only of getting her back to the hotel. They would be safe there, he thought. Once they were in their room and out of sight, the crowd would calm down. The constable might arrive soon, in any case, and disrupt the proceedings before they could go any further.
Amelia struggled along beside him, and Levi realized her feet were bare. He hadn’t thought of her shoes, only of covering her body and getting her away before someone tried to hurt her.
I’m not having another Elijah Hunt, he thought. It would kill him to see her hurt like that again, even if he did know the cure.
“I’m sorry,” he said, panting from the effort of hurrying. “Can you walk?”
“A rock cut my foot,” Amelia said. “It’s bleeding.”
Levi glanced behind them and saw, in the dim light, the dark track that Amelia left behind her. He also saw—and heard—three men searching for any sign of them behind the hall. Soon enough they would notice the blood trail and they would follow it.
He scooped up Amelia in his arms.
“You can’t walk very fast like this,” she said.
“Your foot is leaving a trail,” Levi said. “If those men notice it, they’ll follow us. And you can’t walk very fast with your injury in any case.”
They hurried along in the dark as fast as Levi could manage. Amelia weighed practically nothing, but it still wasn’t easy to carry her this way for very long, and soon he was sweating and breathless from the effort.
“You’d better put me down,” Amelia said.
“We’re almost to the hotel,” he said between his teeth.
But they rounded the corner of their building and Levi pulled up short. A surly crowd of twenty or so men had gathered outside on the porch, and the manager of the hotel stood in the doorway holding up placating hands to a red-faced man who pressed his nose very close to the manager’s.
“Oh, no,” Amelia said.
Levi disappeared back into the notch between the hotel and the building next door. He placed Amelia carefully on her feet and bent over his legs, panting.
“What should we do now?” Amelia asked.
It was strange, he thought, that the one time she seemed inclined to defer to him was the one time he had no answers.
“The wagon train is on the outskirts,” he said. “If we can get there we can take one of the wagons and leave.”
Amelia shook her head. “That will be the next place they go if they can’t find us at the hotel. Besides, what about everyone else—the workmen, Mr. Wyman, Mr. Veronia? The mob might go after them instead.”
“I don’t think they will,” Levi said. “They just want you. They want to prove you’re not real, or that you are, whichever it is that they believe more.”
“I think the ones in front of the hotel want to prove I’m only human,” Amelia said grimly. “They want a lynching.”
“The only way to keep you from them is for you to leave,” Levi said slowly. There was only one possible solution—the one that he wanted the least, the one that he’d known somehow would always be the only answer. Where did a sea creature belong except the sea? “They won’t care about the others once you’re gone. Amelia, you have to go to the ocean.”
She stared at him. “You mean leave you? Leave forever?”
“Yes,” he said, and grabbed her hand. Charleston was flush up against the sea. They only had to reach it in time. “It’s the only way.”
“Levi, I’m not going to leave you here,” she said. “You’re my husband, and I love you.”
“And I love you, more than I can say, and I won’t watch you be hanged by that lot,” he said.
He didn’t think that throwing her in the ocean would fix a hanging the way it had undone her bullet wound. Everything inside him was breaking apart at the thought of her leaving, and all their arguments seemed foolish beyond reason. Did any disagreement matter more than the one you loved? But he would give her up to the ocean, and gladly, if it meant she would live. If it meant that one day he might see her again.
“Please, Amelia, if you love me you’ll go. The only possible way for you to be safe is if you are in the ocean.”
Amelia put her hand over her belly, “Levi. I’m going to have your child.”
He felt as though he’d been sideswiped. He stumbled, his breath hitched, and then he stopped to look at her. “Truly?”
“Yes,” she said, and kissed him. “Truly.”
His child. His child inside the body of his wife, and an angry mob wanted to tear her body apart.
“If they kill you, they’ll kill the baby, too,” Levi said. A baby. His baby.
It was then he saw the realization in her eyes, and the resolution. “I’ll go,” Amelia said. “I’ll go to Rarotonga, far away, and I will raise our daughter there. But, Levi, you have to come to us. You must.”
“I will,” he promised. “No matter how long it takes, I will find you there.”
They went on in silence then, staying to the shadows, avoiding anyone who strayed near them in the night.
Levi remembered that night for many months after—the only sound their breath and their soft footfalls as they made for the salvation of the sea.
He remembered her kiss, and the way her hands clung to his arms, and the way his own arms didn’t want to let her go. He remembered how she tore her dress away and ran toward the breaking waves as if she were afraid he might try to change her mind.
He remembered how he scooped up her dress and breathed in the smell of her, and for a long time afterward he slept with it curled around his pillow so that he would not forget, and sometimes he could almost imagine she was there.
He remembered the silhouette of her tail against the horizon, and how it disappeared under the water, and how it did not reappear no matter how long he watched or hoped for it.
Amelia swam, swam away from Levi standing alone on the shore, and she felt like she did on that day long, long ago when Jack caught her in his net and then let her go. She’d felt tethered to him then, tethered by his loneliness, and it had made a long cord that bound them and brought her back to him.