Nugget is in the lake.
Nugget stands at the end of the public swim dock, wings folded flat, tail moving in focused counterbalance. He launches. The entry is committed, full-body, with complete conviction. The splash reaches approximately the first row of the gathered audience on the shore, which is Liana and Roarke, who have relocated the blanket twice already and are showing no signs of relocating it again.
Underwater, he's quick and fluid, the copper-bronze parts of him catching the light in the clear shallows like a moving piece ofsun. He threads between the pickerel with focused interest. The fish have apparently acclimated. Phineas, surfacing briefly from his morning rounds to observe this, looks thoughtful and then shrugs.
Nugget surfaces at the dock ladder, hauls himself out with the wings half-spread for counterbalance, shakes. A full-body shake that sends lake water in a radius of approximately fifteen feet, which is why the blanket has been moved twice. Then he stands at the end of the dock for a moment in the sun, scales gleaming, amber eyes scanning the audience with complete self-satisfaction.
Liana claps.
She does this every time, which is why he keeps doing it.
Roarke looks at his mate with the expression of a lion-man who has accepted the chaotic antics of the loves of his life.
I watch this from the Snack Hut doorway, waiting for the morning tour group to arrive, with Muir beside me and a tour manifest in my hand that I'm not looking at because it's impossible to look at a tour manifest when Nugget is doing his routine.
"Does he do this every time the weather is good?" Muir asks.
"Every time," I confirm. "Liana says Roarke introduced Nugget to swimming when he was still the size of a cat, and would splash in the town fountain. He has always had strong feelings about water."
"Roarke's moved the blanket twice."
"He'll move it a third time. He always does. He doesn't learn and he doesn't mind."
"That's love," Muir says.
"That is absolutely love."
"Morning group is coming," Muir says.
I look up. The shore path: six people in various states of preparedness, sunscreen applied in some cases more generously than others, one of them carrying what I recognize as a very expensive waterproof camera bag.
Sera is with them. She booked herself onto every mer-magic session through August and calls it research and I call it the reason our underwater photography program has a six-month waiting list.
"Ready?" Muir says.
"Always," I say.
He squeezes my hand once and goes to start the gear check, and I go to meet my people at the dock.
Muir
The tour group is good.
They always are, in June. The people who come at the beginning of the season are the ones who planned ahead, who researched, who wanted Harmony Glen specifically rather than a generic lakeside experience. They arrive knowing what a sirena is andwhat it means to dive with one, and they go in the water with the specific quality of people who intend to be fully present for the experience, which makes the work a pleasure.
Sera is in her element.
She's a compact woman in her forties with the focused intensity of someone who has been making images of the natural world for twenty years and has never lost the capacity to be struck by it. She surfaces from every dive with the same expression, a kind of recalibrated wonder, the face of a person who expected something beautiful and got something true, which are not always the same thing but are today. She has a new housing for her camera, a wide-angle lens that I helped her spec out in February when the lake was frozen over and we were planning the season from her studio over coffee and printed gear catalogs.
The mer-magic session runs ninety minutes. I work the safety perimeter while Cora leads the group through the north cove. The light in there is still what it always was, the particular filtered green-gold of a sheltered freshwater inlet in morning sun. I watch from the outside as she becomes what she is in the water, and the tourists become what tourists become when a sirena in her full form moves through the same water they are in.
They come up different from how they went in. They always do.
Afterward, when the group has gone to change and Sera is reviewing her shots, I run the gear rinse and check the equipment shed and make notes in the tour log.
Today's entry:Clear. Temp 22C at surface, 14C at depth. High visibility. North cove in morning light. Group engaged throughout. Sera working the wide-angle.I pause, then add:Osprey returned to the north pine. Has reconsidered the serving window. Provisional approval granted.
Cora reads the log sometimes. This will make her laugh.