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No one called Marty Walsh “Farty” but me, the only reason being that anyone who talked out of his ass as much as he did deserved a name to match.
I got to my feet and ran to catch up with Sonia, trying not to dwell on what I’d just learned. Pain looks the same in merpeople as it does in humans.
This man was absolutely full of shit. But he’d also called me a bold spirit. And that was a damn sight better than being called Wheezy.
You only swallow ashes if you know what it’s like to go hungry.
“Is also much more pleasant for to be famous than feared. Is not so loud, the screaming.”
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, and here I was being offered the brass ring, no new skills required.
But if I had to guess, the merman wasn’t leering at me because I’d killed the mermaid or helped kidnap him. In the same way I resented everyone who’d ever stood by while Farty Walsh tortured me at the furnaces, el tritón leered at me because I’d watched. And I’d done nothing to stop it.
And if I was you, I’d take a long look at my pale-ass face in the mirror and think about how that Caribbean kid crossed an ocean for a slice of freedom America ain’t never gonna give him.”
What I said next came out in Spanish. Because all my truest thoughts were in Spanish and because I knew he understood it. “It is no wonder you cried out,” I breathed. “I cannot imagine losing your liberty and your mother in the same breath. I am so very sorry.”
But then, to my surprise, he raised his silvery hand. And he placed it on the glass against mine.
“I’m Benny, by the way. That’s short for Benigno.” “Benigno,” he repeated. “Your name means ‘kind.’” I grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.” An eyebrow—the one with the gash carved into it—arched at me. “We shall see.”
“If you must call me by a name, then you will choose it,” he said. “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.”
“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.”
“All right, Boy Named Kind,” he murmured. “You may call me Río.”
“To Ekaterina, I was devoted husband,” he said. “Not giant.”
How do you describe asthma to someone who can’t drown?
“It is the simple truth of every creature with a soul. You are not your body, Benigno.”
“Thank you as well. For el guisado.” I puffed a short laugh. “You didn’t like it.” “But it was kind of you,” he said, not laughing. “And kindness is its own food.”
Are you kidding?” “I always hear that word, ‘kidding.’ There is not a juvenile goat for miles. What does that even mean?”
So, you’re saying your language is music?” “All language is music, all music is language. But the song of the sea is a dialect unlike any other.” His eyes took in my cuatro and dimmed. “I was a voice in a once vast choir.”
“So, your name suits you too, Boy Named Kind.”
Could you hear him sing from where you are, Mother? The whales would welcome him to their choir, so mystical a sound does Benigno’s voice make. And given so freely! Does he not comprehend its value?
“I have heard their strange music and found peace in its noise,” you once told me. “Many humans are lost. But not all.” My cell is haunted by a man who would destroy me by my ears—and guarded by another who would relieve me by them. Our elders were not wrong. But you were also right.
Are you my captor or my savior? I ask. His answer is a musical refrain my mind plays over and over again until I wake. Benigno, you and I are both.
Harmony’ is how we refer to our family groups.”
“With my mother returned to Neptune’s robes, I am all that is left of it.”
As he finished his story, my mind assembled another. Of a merman who finally found someone to rescue on a cold moonlit night, and the mermaid who wouldn’t let him do it alone.
“I regret my mother did not charge you with a simpler burden.” “You might regret it.” Benigno scratches a fingernail over the bars. “But I don’t.”
As far as Río and I had come as polite conversationalists, grilling a merman about his bodily functions felt like a Brooklyn Bridge too far.
“You should know, Benigno,” he said with sudden seriousness, “that violence is not in our nature. I regret the threats I made.”
“He saved my life, kid. And I’ve been his extra leg ever since.”
I’d never known a love like that—the kind that paved a road through Hell and motored you to freedom.
“See, he’s got this crazy idea,” he said carefully, “that maybe we three got something in common.” I tried to laugh, but it came out thin. “What gave him that idea?” “Could be the way you look at Miss Kutzler. Or don’t look, I should say.”
Relief comes only when I force my thoughts away from his ugliness and toward something else . . . A shy, lamplit smile. Kind night-sky eyes. Webless fingers that dance upon lyre’s strings as his mossy singing voice sets the water rippling around me. I cling to Benigno’s seashells until the tremors cease, and sleep carries me to oblivion.
“Yeah, well”—I shrugged—“I learned all I needed to know about what the world thinks of ‘someone like me,’ by which I mean . . . Manos a Dios, I don’t know how to say this . . .” I drew a deep breath. “A Puerto Rican boy who falls in love with other boys.”
“What ridiculous savagery,” he breathed in English, “would make humans spurn a person for something so . . . so . . . ordinary?” I squinted at him. “You mean merpeople don’t care?” “Benigno, why in the Seven Seas should it matter who we love?”
“And it’s because, after everything, I still wish it wasn’t true. Everything else in my life is so damn hard already, couldn’t God give me one less complication?”
“I have given it some thought, and what I think is this: Guarding your heart because it has been broken is not una estupidez.” I pursed my lips. “Really.” “Yes. Revealing your truth is like swimming, Benigno. It may not come naturally or easily. But in still waters, it can be learned,”
“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.”
Benigno is braver than I. With every seashell he gives me, I long to meet his courage with a shell of my own. And yet, though the desire to give him more of myself rises each day like a tide, when Benigno asked for my name, I could not share it.
Something in his nature calls to mine with music both familiar and strange. 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.
Among the more fascinating things I learned was that merfolk were not born ni macho ni hembra—that becoming male or female in body happened only once one’s soul had chosen “its truest form.” “Some are neither maid nor man. A good many are both, though Spanish and English have yet to accommodate such realities,” he remarked dryly.
“Benigno.” He brought himself upright again. “Do you mean to say you do not cry?” I crumpled the wrapping. “What does that matter?” “It matters,” he insisted. “Salt water has healing properties. That is why our tears are made of it. Why should you hold them in?”
“Like the armored sea cradle, you are protecting yourself.” “From what? ¿El cuco?” “From a pain that has followed you here and demands to be felt.”
The softest hearts wear the thickest armor.
“Would that the moon could know the depth of my gratitude for its comforting light.”
<3
When was his last sip of water? His lips look far too arid. A kiss would restore their shine . . . I catch myself again, watching Benigno with my heart alight and heat in my eyes.
“It brings me pleasure to look at you.” My hands tightened around my cuatro. “Though,” he added, surveying my surprise, “you seem strangely unaware of your beauty.”
“One day, I shall tell you how beautiful you are and why it is so. And on that day, you must believe it.”
Brown, Puerto Rican, and inverted, I was a walking composite of undesirable traits, and every time he said I was something more, I wanted to shake him, make him understand that I couldn’t survive in this stupid town if I believed I was better than the petty allowance of scraps I lived on. More treacherous than hoping for a seat in Ornamental was believing in a world where Río wanted me.
