An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant by LeAnn Neal Reilly Read Free Book Online Page A

halfheartedly tossed four cans of beans into his basket. He’d
suspected that camping would test his devotion to Zoë’s diet, but he hadn’t
expected the dearth of good vegetarian convenience foods. He’d have to make do
with fruit, imported chips and candy bars, and purified water from the main
island. One good thing about Zoë’s visit in twelve days: breakfast came with
their room at Tamarindo Estates.
    When he
came out of the mercado , he stopped on the sidewalk, clutching his bag
of supplies and blinking in the brilliance of the late morning. For perhaps the
first time in recent memory, he had no agenda, no goal to accomplish or
activity to pursue. Even the intense desire to go to Luís Peña had lost its
edge. As he stood there, an unexpected tide of nostalgia surged in him. At 26,
he couldn’t be justified in missing his youth, in missing the free hours
frittered away during summer. Or weekends. Or holidays. The lazy, hazy time
spent daydreaming on soft spring mornings instead of tapping away at his
keyboard or reading a textbook. But he did miss his youth. More often than not,
he turned away from the beckoning green world outside his graduate office. More
often than not, he spent hours below ground in a bunker euphemistically called
a research lab.
    He’d
brought a book, of course, Lewis Thomas’s Late Night Thoughts on Listening
to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony , but at the moment it seemed like pulling it out
qualified as an assignment. A must-do, focused and probing. He wanted—no, he
hungered for—diffuse, unplanned, open-ended wandering. After some time, a man
pushed past him, lifting his reverie for an instant. Rubbing his forehead in a
vain attempt to control his thoughts, he saw his bike and understood that he
needed to get on and ride. Unlike his almost-frantic tour of the island
yesterday, he pedaled only strongly enough to keep the bike going and gradually
his thoughts unspooled into emptiness.
    His
surroundings melted and merged into a living Impressionist artwork, a
stained-glass filter that blocked out details of baked asphalt and dusty scrub.
He’d lost two hours this way when a nagging ache in the pit of his stomach
brought him back to the needs of his body. In his moving meditation, he’d
managed to bike back to town—a very good thing because the back of his neck and
his forearms had started to burn even though he’d slathered them with sun
block.
    He
walked slowly into a deli, blinking his dazzled eyes in the sudden dimness. A
plump, middle-aged American woman in an apron stood muttering with a clipboard
before a cooler. She glanced up and smiled; her large eyes and upswept wrinkles
promised old-fashioned hospitality and good cheer. She piled shredded carrots
on top of a mound of hummus and feta, jabbed an olive-adorned toothpick into
the sprouted-grain bun, and grabbed a large handful of plantain chips to wedge
into the basket next to his sandwich. Seeing him settled at a table, she
returned to her inventory and left him to his book.
    John
read through the heat of the afternoon, sucking in Thomas’s essays with all the
fervor of a man dying of thirst. Here was a kindred mind, a scientist and music
lover driven beyond the myopic world of hypothesis, controlled setting,
calibrated instruments, and precise measurements. To life beyond lab specimens.
Even though Thomas’s palpable fear of a nuclear holocaust no longer held the
urgency it must have once excited, his genuine sense of wonder at the beautiful
complexity of the natural world more than made up for its appearance in the
lead essay. His willingness to tackle the dark side of modern technology, to
pull back and consider the intricate connections among humans, life, and
science both gratified and disturbed John.
    He left
the deli, stuffed in body and in thought. This time when he pedaled toward
Punta Soldado at the tip of the southern peninsula, coasting on the downhill
stretches, he returned again to Thomas’s observations about