Chapter 1

The television flickered blue in the dark of the sitting room, and seven-year-old Dario Serra sat close enough to it that his mother kept telling him he'd ruin his eyes. He never moved back. On the screen, a girl with a fish's tail broke the surface of an animated sea, and Dario's whole small body went still in the particular way of a child who has just discovered that something he didn't have a name for yet, wants him.

"Again," he said, the moment the credits began to climb the screen.

"It's nearly nine, tesoro," Assunta said from the doorway, drying a plate.

"Again."

She let him watch it a second time that night. She would regret it, mildly, for the rest of his childhood, though she never could have guessed how much.

By the end of that month the videotape had been watched so many times the picture had begun to judder and swim on the worst-loved scenes, the girl beneath the water, reaching up toward a world she wasn't allowed to belong to. Assunta finally hid the cassette on top of the armoire, out of reach even standing on a chair, and told Dario firmly that some things were better left for special occasions.

It didn't matter. He had already taken what he needed from it. Not the songs, he couldn't have hummed you a single one by the following spring, but the shape of the story: a girl who lived beneath the water and ached for the world above it. Dario lived above the water. It seemed to him, with the total conviction that only very young children and very dangerous men ever manage, that somewhere out past the harbor mouth, the ache ran the other way too, and was simply waiting for him to go and meet it halfway.

He started going down to the breakwater alone that same autumn. Not to swim (he couldn't yet), just to stand at the very end of the stone arm where the waves broke white against the rocks, and watch.

His mother found him there once, at dusk, and had to call his name three times before he turned around.

"What are you looking for out there?" she asked, more amused than worried, that first time.

"I don't know yet," Dario said, entirely serious. "I'll know when I see it."

"You'll catch a chill before you see anything. Come home."

He came home. But he went back the next evening, and the one after that, until it stopped being something his parents remarked on and simply became a fact about their son, the way other boys' parents had a fact about a son who collected football stickers or couldn't sit still in church. Dario likes the water. It sounded, said that way, almost normal.

At school he filled the margins of his exercise books with drawings, girls with fish tails instead of legs, hair streaming out behind them as though they were always, in every drawing, mid-motion, mid-escape. He never gave them the name from the film. That name, he decided without quite knowing why, belonged to someone else, someone who wasn't real in the specific way his own drawings felt real to him. Instead he gave them names he invented, or half-remembered from somewhere, old, salt-worn words that felt, on his tongue, like something older and truer than a cartoon: Ondina. Marina. Nerina. Perla.

His teacher, finding one such drawing folded inside a maths test, asked him gently who the girls were supposed to be.

"They live in the water," Dario said. "Under it."

"Like mermaids?"

"Not like anything," he said, with the flat certainty of a child correcting an adult about something he alone understands. "They're just what's really there."

It was around then, that winter he turned eight, that he asked his mother out of nowhere, over the washing-up, whether mermaids were real.

"They're a story, tesoro," Assunta said. "A beautiful one. But a story."

"The sea is so big, though," Dario said. "How would anybody really know?"

"Because if they were real, somebody would have found one by now. Sailors go everywhere. Fishermen too."

"Maybe nobody's looked hard enough."

Assunta laughed, the easy laugh of a mother who thinks she is winning an argument with an eight-year-old, and kissed the top of his head. "Maybe you'll be the first, then."

She meant nothing by it. It was the sort of thing a tired parent says to end a conversation warmly instead of arguing a child into silence. But Dario did not hear it that way, not that night and not for the rest of his life. He heard, in his mother's offhand joke, something closer to a commission: the first of many things he would go on deciding, over the following thirty years, had been promised to him by people who had never meant to promise him anything at all.

He didn't say any of that to her, of course. He only nodded, satisfied, and went back to drying the spoons.

Two weeks later, without warning either of his parents, he announced at dinner that he wanted to learn to swim.

Enzo looked up from his plate, surprised into something almost like a smile. "Where's this come from, all of a sudden?"

"I want to be ready."

"Ready for what?"

Dario considered the question with the seriousness of a much older person weighing something important. "For when it's time," he said finally, and picked his fork back up, and would say nothing more about it no matter how his father pressed, half-laughing, half-genuinely curious, for the rest of the meal.

Enzo let it drop. Boys wanted strange things sometimes; it rarely meant much. He and Assunta agreed, over coffee after Dario had gone to bed, that swimming lessons could do no harm and might, God willing, wear the boy out enough that he'd stop standing alone at the end of that breakwater every evening like he was waiting for a boat that was never going to come in.