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Across the bay, a different patron saint of travelers guarded the Iron City with her back to Manhattan, Lady Liberty’s glowing torch held high like a promise. I’d made a promise too, to Tití Luz. Maybe I’d finally make good on it. Find the liberty America never gave us tucked somewhere between the tenements and brownstones.
“Dale consuelo al tritón, Señor,”
Barco que no anda no llega a puerto.
Pain looks the same in merpeople as it does in humans.
I’d lost track of all the times I had melted myself down just to recast myself as someone with a slightly better shot at belonging someplace,
“To give you my name is to give you the last of myself, and humanity has taken enough from me. My name is my own. You may not have it.”
“How ’bout ‘Río’?” “Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua. “Why that name?” A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”
“It is the simple truth of every creature with a soul. You are not your body, Benigno.”
“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”
Despite the wisdom of my harmony, despite everything I believed possible, my heart is cultivating a pearl. For a human. And the more I learn about Benigno, the more he teaches me to swim.
“Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it. Why should you hold them in?”
Don’t waste your damn life trying to smother a spark what wants to be a blaze.”
“Madre de Dios, why’d I even come here? What was the point of crossing the ocean just to find a different hell everywhere I go?”
“I cannot take your burdens,” he went on. “But if you let me, I can bear them with you for a while.”
Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”
“Río,” I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.” “Benigno,” he whispered back. “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.”
I’d dropped my English because Spanish has so many words for declaring love, and I needed to use them all before it was too late. And though his tears were invisible in water, we both wept to the sound of promises whispered like prayers through the glass about a future where time couldn’t chase us, where my heart would beat for him for as long as he wanted it—until the oceans boiled and the rivers dried. Por los siglos de los siglos.
