Call of the Water (COMPLETE)

34. GAME OF LIGHT AND SOUND

Hearing my father's question made the whole room smaller. It was as if the walls were closing in on me. He knew. He knew Professor Cyan was an Aquantien.

I gazed at my mother whose eyes rested on my shock-stricken face. Calmness surrounded her, making it obvious that my teacher's secret was no longer hidden.

"You know," I stated, and nodding of her head confirmed it.

For a moment I forgot to breathe. With a palm over my mouth, I was struggling to process the new information. The gravity seemed to be pulling me with more force than a minute ago, and if I felt this way, I couldn't help but thinking how must Ms. Cyan be feeling.

Breaking the chains of gravity, I returned to the kitchen. Ms. Cyan was sitting at the table, my father on the opposite side. Her face was as white as the porcelain tea set on the counter top behind them. He was looking at her with warmth in his eyes and a smile on his lips.

I walked up to the table and sat down without a single spoken word. Ms. Cyan looked at me. "You told them!" she accused me.

"No!" I exclaimed and cast a glance in my father's direction. "I haven't said a word!"

"She didn't," he confirmed. "She didn't have to." He was still smiling, making it look as if this whole situation was amusing him.

"What do you mean?" I leaned towards him. "How do you know that Professor Cyan is an Aquantien? Not that I'm saying that she is."

"She is," he said with a nod of the head. He crossed his arms over his chest and sank into the chair.

"How..." Ms. Cyan tried to ask a question, but her voice gave out.

"How I figured it out?" my father finished her question.

She nodded in confirmation.

"You made the same mistakes Azora did when she was learning to swim and dive again. She could not keep her mouth closed. She kept trying to breathe under water. She must have drank and spat out half of the ocean back then." A spark appeared in his eye as he was remembering those days. "I have to give you credit though, you're a much faster learner."

"But humans sometimes drink water when they go diving too!" I was not going to let him win this one.

"Yes, but usually they don't need somebody to tell them that letting the water into their lungs is a bad idea," my father said, taking away all my arguments. I did say that to Ms. Cyan. I just thought he wasn't able to hear us.

"There's one thing you need to know about the sound," he said. "It gets amplified when it travels over the surface of water."

He loved to use everyday situations to teach me about the scientific principles. I would have loved it if he saw fit to teach me this particular one before the day at the sea with Professor Cyan.

I looked at her. She sat with her head bowed and her fingers in her hair. She hadn't moved a muscle. A tiny drop of water slided down her cheek and fell to the surface of the table. As if that was her cue, my mother walked up to Ms. Cyan, sat on the chair next to her and placed an arm over her shoulders.

"No need to feel uneasy," she said in a soft voice. "This is something you clearly don't want to share with the rest of the world and let me assure you, your secret is safe with us."

The sideways glance Ms. Cyan gave my mother, let me know that she wasn't too convinced in that. It was pretty obvious she did not have faith in my parents.

Her eyes kept wandering, looking at the patterns on the wooden table, doors of the lower kitchen cabinets, coffee table and area rug on the floor in front of the sofa, basically anything below the sight line of the rest of us, trying to avoid eye contact.