She continues her strange gestures, fingernails scraping glass. She isn’t forming any letters or symbols that I can see, just meaningless sweeps, lines, and curves. She isn’t even denting the glass. I can tell that she knows it, too, because her face grows frustrated, and she tries to retrace her lines, over, and over, and over. And then just one line, and then just one part of the line, until it gets to the point where she’s digging at a single point on the glass wall with all of her might, and then, suddenly, her fingernail snaps.

Well, not snaps, so much as bends backward on itself—there’s only so much snapping things can do, in the water—but clearly it causes her pain, because she opens her mouth, as if gasping, and then clutches her hand to her chest. Her eyes cinch tight, as if she wants to cry but can’t, and her body curls in on itself, buckling gently into fetal position. She drifts to the floor of her tank.

Long after she has landed on the plastic-gravel base, her tail is still fluttering down, and the long tendril-like fins on either side of her curl lazily above her in the water. Her hair blooms, then settles like a halo of blue silk, and all I can think is that if she’s an angel, she’s the most broken-looking one I’ve ever seen, and how could God not have pitied Lucifer, if he’d looked like this? Although, of course, in our own allegorical universe, I am so far from god. If anything, I’m a soul in limbo. My heart aches to reach out and help her, or to turn away so that I can’t see, but I’m stuck. I don’t move in either direction.

As she lies there, I can see the faint smudges of shed scales her fingers have left on the glass—tiny things, almost invisible, glittering and pale—and beyond them, the painted fish on the wall of her tank, and it starts to dawn on me, slowly, at first, and then in a great rush, that, well, it’s exactly the same thing. The thought is unbelievable at first, but I explore it, and eventually, after prodding it around like a loose tooth, I am forced to conclude, it is exactly the same thing.

She was doing to me what she has tried to do for the fish on the wall. She was trying to carve me out of the glass, and put me safely back in the water. She thinks I’m trapped, here, outside in the air.

She’s trying to set me free.

The mermaid is swimming back up to me, again, her face determined, as if the hurt she just felt was only a minor setback, and I feel so horribly guilty, and also, strangely, so horribly grateful, about the implications of what she’s doing, that I just stare for a moment or two as she starts again, scratching around my outline, tracing me, like a corpse at a crime scene. In the end, it’s only by rapping gently on the glass (earning myself a slight glare from Jared the Security Guard) that I can get her attention. I lean in, and say, as earnestly as I can, as if maybe if I sound like I mean it, she’ll magically understand:

“Listen, hey, listen, that’s not going to work. It doesn’t work like that.”

She tilts her head.

“You can’t get through that way. And anyway, I like it out here. Really, I’m okay. I’m fine. I’m free, look.” I wave my arm.“Totally free.”

She shakes her head, and presses both of her hands toward me, and I remember the first time I saw her, drifting in lazy loops around the upper right-hand corner of the tank, hands limp at her sides. She was staring straight ahead as she looped, but I don’t think she was seeing anything, really. She was just turning and turning and turning, like there was something she was looking for, but she’d forgotten what it was. Her hair fluttered wistfully behind her, blue silk trailing like fingertips. And she looked lonely, I remember that. She just looked so desperately lonely.

But now I feel like everything is flipped from the way it used to be, and I’m not sure when I started to be the one who needed saving, only, I think, maybe we have to reach some middle ground here, because we can’t both be always trying to save each other. Can we?

“You’re right, I guess,” I say, leaning in toward the glass. Jared starts forward with a warning look, but I keep myself with just a paper-thin layer of air between me and the actual tank, and I let my hand hover over hers, not even touching, just pretending to touch. But then, we’ve always been pretending, haven’t we? That we know each other. That we understand each other. (And, in a way I don’t think I could ever properly explain, this feels more real than anything else.)

“There are a lot of things I can’t do, not properly,” I say, “I can’t sing. I can’t talk to people without wanting to scream. I can’t break aquarium glass.

“Hey,” I say, “Hey. Thank you. I don’t know if I’ve ever said it.” Around me, the crowd is starting to trundle and bump its way back toward the doors.

“Ma’am,” Jared says, patiently, in a way that suggests that his patience is going to be gone in a minute, “we’re closing.”

“Just a minute,” I say, to him, and then I turn back to her. “I have to go.”

She frowns.

“I have to leave, it’s time to leave,” I say, and I take my hand away, trying to show her, with my expression, my eyes, the reluctance of my fingertips, that I do not want to leave, only, I don’t really have much of a choice. I don’t know how much she understands of it, but she lets her hands fall hopelessly to her sides.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say, and then, for good measure, just in case she can hear me, “You know, you should probably stop trying to scratch the fish out of your wall. They’re not real. I mean, not really real.”

She keeps staring at me.

At last, I shrug. “Hey, what do I know.”

“Ma’am,” Jared says, and he sounds a bit exasperated.

“I know,” I tell him, slinging my purse over my shoulder, and then fluttering my fingers goodbye back toward the mermaid. She flutters her fingers back, but I can tell that it’s only an imitation. She doesn’t know what it means. She only knows that I smile when she does it. (But then, maybe that’s all anyone knows, really, maybe that’s why we do anything.)

The aquarium halls are empty and cold and, in the abandoned rooms, my footsteps sound like a heartbeat. I feel like a trespasser when I’m alone, here, where I feel completely at home among the crowds. I’m not sure which feeling is more true. I’m not sure either of them has to be.