After Love

A year had passed since the incredible three days during which she had walked on land for the first time. She had left her home under the sea, made a deal with the sea witch, and stepped on the beach for the first time. Each step had felt like a step on a thousand blades. Even with her voice taken as the cost of the magic, she silently managed to make a man fall in love with her. “I love you, too,” were her first words to him. He had had no idea about her past but welcomed her into his life immediately.

They had been wildly infatuated for some time, high on the idea that their love was literal magic. Now, they had a very ordinary life together. They had settled into what people expected from a romantic relationship. They watched their favourite TV shows together. They brought each other along to drinks with friends. They had satisfactory sex. They rarely disagreed or argued.

She had not returned to the sea since the day she had left it. They sometimes bickered about why she wouldn’t join him and his friends for a day at the beach. He couldn’t understand why she sometimes talked so fondly about past life under the sea but refused to go near it now. She couldn’t tell him how her heart ached to remember her life in the ocean, how being so close would make her so sad.

They celebrated their one-year anniversary in a perfunctory way. They had dinner at a nice restaurant. They presented each other with small but shiny gifts. They had sex in a candlelit room.

His anniversary gift was a plan for a vacation. It had been a few years since he had been to his home country to visit his family, and he thought it was time for her to meet them. She was excited. She looked forward to seeing more of the world she’d risked so much to be a part of.

In the months leading up to the trip, she began to fall ill. First, it was her throat. She was always thirsty, but no matter how much she drank, her throat was sore and her voice raspy. Then, it was her legs. They tingled like they’d fallen asleep, making walking unsteady. When her legs began to hurt so much she couldn’t walk at all, he cancelled their trip and took her to the hospital.

She wasn’t sure it was a good idea to go to the hospital. She had never been to a doctor in her time on land. While her test results were inconclusive, the doctors did not find anything suspicious about her body. She found out her blood type was O-positive. She wasn’t pregnant. She didn’t have cancer, a virus, or a parasite. The doctors detailed all sorts of illnesses that coincided with her symptoms before concluding that no tests indicated that she had such an illness.

He sat beside her in the hospital for weeks. He felt guilty every time he had to leave, but she assured him, in her raspy whisper of a voice, there was nothing to feel bad about. It wasn’t his fault she was ill. But he started to believe it was. In those long, quiet stretches of time, as he sat by her bed while she slept, he began to wonder about her new life. She had explained everything she knew about how she and her people lived and everything she could remember about the deal that had transformed her. But neither of them knew what the deal was after “I love you”. Was she free and clear? Or did the deal continue to be contingent upon that “I love you”?

Her body was fading fast, with more tubes and machines around her every week and no solutions from the doctors. He returned to her room from the hospital cafeteria one day to find that her heart had stopped, and the medical team had just brought her back. They told him she didn’t have long once her heart started to give up. He looked at her, unconscious, full of tubes forcing her body to keep working and thought of her heart. Her heart that was no longer working, that wouldn’t be able to keep her alive. And he thought of his heart and—though he didn’t want to admit it when she was in such a state—his heart was no longer in love with her. He hadn’t been for some time. But how could he leave someone who gave up her whole world to be with him?

She recovered just enough to have a conversation with him one afternoon. Seeing the guilty expression on his face, she told him that he was free to leave, that although she still loved much about him, she knew they were no longer in love with each other. That it was okay for him to leave her to die; he had loved her and given her the life she had dreamt of. If this was all the deal had gotten her, it had been worth it.

He did not leave. He stayed as she closed her eyes. He stayed as the machines started beeping loudly. He stayed as the doctors and nurses ran in to resuscitate her. He stayed as they put more tubes and wires around her. He stayed as they told him that her heart was failing, that she wouldn’t survive another event like this. He stayed by her side past visiting hours. He stayed as the moon rose, and from the hospital room window, he could see the moonlight sparkling on the waves.

That’s when the idea struck him.

With her life already on the precipice, he knew they had nothing to lose by his trying. He had never done anything that required such stealth, but he set his mind to doing what needed to be done and avoided the eyes of the night nurses as he tip-toed down the halls until he found an unoccupied wheelchair. Back in her room, he knew he would have to be fast to not be caught. As gently as he could, he lifted her, still attached to all the machines, into the chair. He wouldn’t have recognized her from the day he met her. She looked like life had already left her long ago. He prepared himself for the race to the finish line, closed his eyes in a sort of prayer, though he’d never prayed to anything before, and quickly but gently removed every tube, line, and cable from her body, hoping he wasn’t causing her any pain. She didn’t move or react, but her chest slowly rose and fell with breath.

He made it to an elevator without being seen. Maybe his anonymous prayer had worked. The main level was empty of staff, and he briskly pushed her wheelchair through the lobby and out the door. From there, he began running as fast as he could while pushing. He took her down the path from the hospital to the boardwalk. He worried with every bump the chair hit that he was hurting her or even killing her, but he told himself again: She was already dying. He couldn’t make her worse.

A few minutes later, a late-night dog walker gave him a suspicious look as he ran the chair off the boardwalk into the sand, and when it wouldn’t move any further, he carried her to the water. He paused at the edge of the water as the gentle night waves lapped at his shoes. She looked dead, but he carried on. He walked into the water, wincing at the cold temperature but continuing in his steady march. When the water reached his waist, and she was already wet from the waves, he lowered her into the water. His arms still cradled her as she bobbed up and down on the waves, seemingly lifeless. Seeing no change in her, he pushed her down by her chest and waist so that she was completely submerged. No air escaped her lips. Beneath the water, he saw in her face a glimmer of the beautiful, joyful woman he’d fallen in love with. A tall wave came over him, and he lost his balance and lost touch of her body. He recovered from the hit and looked around frantically but then felt relief. He had tried. The doctors had tried. She would have been gone by now anyway.

Tears joined the salty sea spray on his cheeks. Grief set in. But then a light caught his eye. More than the sparkle of moonlight on the surface, something below. He walked further into the water until he was almost up to his neck. Suddenly, the face of the woman he had loved was before him. She shimmered in the moonlight, a green tinge to her skin, her wet hair slicked back over her head. And a smile came over her face. She looked more alive than he’d ever seen her. She reached out a hand, and he took it; she was ice cold, but he didn’t flinch. “Thank you,” she said before she slipped her webbed fingers out of his grasp and slid beneath the waves.

He stood in place for some time, letting the waves crash into him, hoping to see her again. Eventually, he turned and walked back to shore. He walked in his wet clothes all the way home, where he fell into bed for a long, deep sleep.