“Do you know who wrote the note?” Izar pursued.
Chiton produced a microscope from underneath his counter. Placing the parchment on the counter, he bent his head over it, closing one eye and positioning the other just above his microscope, muttering to himself as he read the single line.
“I believe this note was written by one of my long-standing customers, Osmundea Ranularia,” Chiton said, looking up at Izar. “I recognize her handwriting, because I’ve printed lots for her over the years.”
The old merman offered Izar directions to Osmundea’s home. Izar wrote them down carefully in Coralline’s notepad. Upon following the directions, he found himself knocking on the door of a small, rounded house at the end of a row, hemmed with a little garden. As he waited at the door, he started to return the notepad to his satchel, but a little square drifted out from within. It started to float away, but Izar caught it and turned it over. It was a portrait of a merman, a handsome fellow with a vertical cleft in his chin and traces of dimples in his cheeks. Who was he? Izar wondered. And what was his portrait doing in Coralline’s notepad?
The door opened.
The mermaid who hovered before Izar had indigo eyes and scales, just like his own. There was a one-inch-long horizontal scar along the side of her mouth, appearing a direct extension of his own. “You found me,” she said in a breathless whisper.
Her voice was soft in the center and frayed about the edges—he knew this voice, from a long, long time ago, and his face almost crumpled to hear it. She held the door open, and Izar slipped inside her living room, his mind buzzing with questions. Who was she? How could he so resemble her? How could he recognize her voice? He wanted to ask her, but he could not unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth. He took a seat on the settee across from her.
“Will you let me tell you a story?” Osmundea asked, her eyes as gentle as cotton swabs.
Izar felt himself give the slightest nod.
“There was once a young mermaid in Urchin Grove who lived with her parents and sister. She taught a class called Legend and Lore at Urchin Liberal Arts Academy. She focused on two areas of legend and lore: the elixir and hummers. Do you already know about the elixir?” Upon his nod, she continued, “In that case, let me tell you about hummers. The word hummer derives from half-human, half-merperson. Hummers are a unique breed of people—people who have one human parent and one merperson parent. Any sort of interaction between humans and merpeople is exceptionally rare, let alone any children—so you can imagine how rare hummers are. They are, in fact, so rare as to fall in the category of lore.
“At a biological level, hummers have both gills and lungs, the gills from the merperson parent and the lungs from the human parent. It’s a little-known fact that, because they belong equally to both land and water, hummers transform automatically based on their environment. When they are in the water, hummers have a merperson form; when they are on land, they have a human form. When they move from one environment to the other—land to water, or water to land—their body dies and then returns to life in its new form. At an intellectual level, because hummers belong to all of the earth, they are capable of forming connections between things that others cannot even conceive of. As such, they are particularly inventive people, the most inventive on earth.
“One day, the mermaid noticed a new merman in her Legend and Lore class. He approached her after the class and asked her to help him find the elixir. She gave him a slip of parchment with the name of someone who could assist him in his quest. But he had a mistaken impression about the elixir; he thought that it could make him immortal. She told him that it could save his life, or someone else’s, were death imminent, but it did not have the power to bestow immortality—nothing did. The elixir saved life once, and that was it. The mermaid also asked the merman why he would wish to be immortal. He said it was because there was something he wanted to invent, and he worried he wouldn’t find a way to invent it in his lifetime. On the topic of invention, she told him about hummers and their inventive qualities. He seemed enthralled by the idea of hummers.
“There was something very different about this merman, and the mermaid found herself falling headlong in love with him, just as he seemed to be falling headlong in love with her. One day, she told him she was expecting. Clasping her hands, he promised her they would marry soon. She broke in half a large shell—a lion’s paw scallop. She retained half and handed him the other half—symbolizing that they each now carried the heart of the other and the power to break it.
“But after that day, the merman vanished without a trace. She assumed he’d died on his quest for the elixir, and she blamed herself for having played a role in his quest. Nine months later, their child was born. The mermaid’s parents helped raise him, as did her younger sister. The child was precocious: Before he turned three, he could speak, read, and write.
“One day, when the mermaid was out on an errand with him, an orca dived down and asked her, How old is your hummer? The whale could detect his lungs through echolocation, a process of sending out sound beams and using the echoes from those sounds to identify objects; echolocation gives whales the ability to see through things. The mermaid was shocked. She realized then that the father of her son was not a merman but a human. He had transformed somehow from a human to a merman, perhaps through some magic potion. He had deceived her by letting her believe him to be a merman. He had used her in order to create a hummer who would invent what he wished. He had likely not died on an elixir quest, as she had first assumed; instead, he must have left the ocean and transformed back to a human.
“Now at least the mermaid understood their child’s precociousness—it was because he was a hummer. She guarded him vigilantly, worried that his father would return to kidnap him. Her nightmare soon materialized. The villain burst through the door of her home on the night of the child’s third birthday. The ruckus awoke the mermaid’s parents in the next room, and they emerged into the living room. The villain clubbed them to death. Then, grabbing the child, he rushed to the surface. The mermaid followed him up to the waves and managed to wrest the child back. The villain tried to slash her throat with the half-shell she’d given him, wielding it as a dagger. But his aim was inaccurate in the dark. He ended up slashing the child’s cheek, starting at his earlobe, and a part of her face, culminating at the lip. Then he knocked her unconscious and escaped with the child.”
Osmundea slipped out of the living room, and Izar was glad, for it was all too much—he keeled over, his head in his hands. His scar prickled as though an electric wire were sparking to life beneath it. Osmundea returned soon with a large half-shell with long, flaunting beige ridges and dark-pink fan-like ribs. Izar’s fingers quivered as he extracted the half-shell from his own satchel and held it against hers. The two halves fit perfectly, crease against crease, forming two parts of a broken heart.
“Tang Tarpon found the elixir thirty years ago,” Osmundea said quietly. “I interviewed him as part of my research on the elixir. Then, twenty-nine years ago, Antares Eridan approached me after my Legend and Lore class, requesting assistance in finding the elixir. To help him, I wrote on a piece of parchment: Find Tang Tarpon. He will guide you to the elixir. Soon after, upon finding myself expecting, I gave Antares the half-shell you are now holding in your hands. I’ve waited twenty-five years for you to find me, son, for you to return home to me.”