CHAPTER 36
It was cold enough to bring half s shout from my lips, and without any conscious thought my arms were already flailing around for something to hang onto. That brought my mind back, but I was arguing with myself, in panic looking for a handhold to keep my face above the water as my shoes and clothes dragged me down into the murk of the Ouse, and at the same time cursing my lack of forethought in not stepping off a bridge away from the bank, where my cowardice could be ignored and the water take me where I belonged.

Introduction: What is discovery? Perhaps it’s finding something that you didn’t know existed. Maybe it’s finding a hidden treasure. Maybe it’s finding out something about yourself that many were aware of but you just didn’t know it.

Maria tells Manny it’s time to go forward, that going nowhere is not the right solution. She gives him the name of a psychologist in Fort Smith.

My week as a mermaid continues: My young human friend and I surfaced and sat on a rock, where we could talk without having to use her underwater message pad. I was hoping she might start making sense now, but Valerie's strange stories were growing progressively stranger: Reagan and Kennedy on Mount Rushmore... A transsexual woman giving birth... Peace in Iraq but a war in Antarctica...

I might have decided that she just had a wild imagination, except she also had all this impossible hardware---like the artificial gill she'd been breathing underwater with---which had me wondering if I'd somehow wandered into an alternate universe. Given the kind of week I'd been having this didn't seem like such a crazy notion, but these mysteries had a different explanation that I would eventually discover. It was just a matter of time...