Teeth (2 page)

“How’s it going, short stack?”

Mom says, “I think he sounds a little better today.”

Routine.

But he doesn’t sound very good, and I can tell by the glance she gives me that he had a rough night. He has been better since we moved here, but there are still times we really, really worry.

Back home sometimes I’d stay up listening to him cough. I can’t hear him anymore.

I give Dylan my fist to tap with his, and then he goes back to telling Mom, quietly, about the cartoon robot he saw on TV. I’ve never met a kid who cares as much about TV as Dyl.

I sit down next to Mom and zip up my hoodie. When I was a kid, I thought beaches were always warm. But it’s
only September here and I already feel frozen all the time. Something about the cold makes me want to pace all the time, but it drives my whole family crazy, so I try my hardest to keep still when I’m here and go for walks whenever I can.

“I need a heavier coat,” I tell Mom.

She nods, immediately, and then more slowly as she keeps considering. “We’ll have to order one,” she says. There’s a little farm here for milk and eggs and meat, but most other stuff rolls in on the slowest boat in the world. Like we did. Twenty days puking on a rocking boat, the opposite of immigrants coming to a better land.

“Ms. Delaney invited us all over for dinner tonight,” she says.

“What about Dylan?”

Dylan looks up at me with those brown eyes. People usually estimate him as two and a half, which is almost exactly how old he was when we realized he was sick.

And the two and a half years of sheltering that came after mean that my goofy-ass little brother completely lacks social skills. My parents keep him cooped up because they’re afraid someone will cough on him, but I do it because not everyone is as receptive to endless talk about octopuses and body fluids as we are, you weird kid, come curl up and tell me and leave the normal people out of it.

“Dylan can come,” Mom says. “Maybe it will be easier to breathe, with the altitude.”

“I think it works the opposite of that.” I palm Dylan’s head, and he makes this big show of trying to squirm away.

“It’s only another hundred feet up, anyway,” Mom says. “And she promised to show us a new fish recipe.”

The rest of us usually only sample it, but Dylan eats nothing but fish—not just any fish, but
fish
, the kind people here mean when they say
fish
—technically Silver Enki Fish: fat glittery balls of scales that hide in the darkest water and under rocks in the marina. They’re rare here but nonexistent everywhere else in the world. The Delaneys are the ones who discovered the fish, I’m pretty sure. Way back, decades ago, one of them was sick. And then they never left the island.

It’s somehow still a fairly well-kept secret that the fish here keep people healthy, probably because it sounds so fucking fake. I had to lie to my friends about why we were going. I used the same lie people migrating here have used for generations—we think the sea air might help.

There’s a reason seventy percent of the island’s population is over sixty-five. This is a place for last resorts. The fish add years and years and years.

Being here is a good thing.

Dylan crawls off Mom’s lap and onto mine. I let him stay until Dad comes out with breakfast. Omelets for us. Boiled fish for Dylan.

I eat as quickly as I can.

“Going for a run,” I say.

Dad says, “Put some shoes on.”

I have some mental block about shoes. I don’t know. I’m always cold and I just won’t put shoes on unless I’m forced to. I have no explanation. But I’m not going to put shoes on.

I stand up and Mom says, “Rudy, can you stop off by the marketplace, pick me up a bottle of milk?”

“Sure.” I think she does that on purpose. Gives me goals. I like it.

I hop off our bottom step and make my way to the thick sand by the rocks, the damp stuff that takes a half second before it gives under my feet. The grains creep underneath my toenails. We are on the edge of the island and we have the longest walk of anyone to the marketplace, but we don’t complain. My mom, I think, has this secret fear that if we piss anyone off, they’ll stage an uprising and kill us, and no one will ever know. This island does feel like the perfect place for a murder.

I jog by one of my favorite places here—a long dock surrounded on either side by jetties of rocks. It’s impossible to see if you aren’t at a specific angle. My father fishes there sometimes, but he’s never caught anything. There are tricks to catching Enki fish that nobody knows.

I think that dock is where the real fishermen used to work, but now they have a camp not far from our house,
in the opposite direction of the marketplace. We hear them grunting and cursing at the fish and their massive nets, when the water isn’t too loud.

The Delaneys’ mansion sits above all of this, at the top of its dune, all its doors and windows shut tight. That house could be hit by a tsunami and never budge. Ms. Delaney rarely comes to the marketplace. I’ve seen her once. She has this guy who does the shopping for her. I don’t think he’s sleeping with her. He looks too happy for that.

The marketplace is only open on Tuesday mornings, and it’s the highlight of everyone’s week. A lot of the houses are clustered around here, the ones that aren’t hideously cheap, like ours, or hideously expensive, like the Delaneys’.

The peddlers, who are just neighbors most of the week, but peddlers now, drive hard bargains as they hop from their stand to the others. The whole place sounds like the eggs and bacon frying at the farmer’s station, and my mouth is almost shaking from the smell, but I don’t have cash with me for anything but milk. I’m still not used to a world where credit cards are useless.

I nod at Ms. Klesko selling jars of jam and shake hands with Sam as he hands me a milk bottle. “How’s your brother?” he asks.

“He’s good. Eating well.”

“Always a pleasure,” he says.

Fiona the fortune-teller stops me with a hand on my arm
as I start to go. She looks at me, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening as she searches my face. I don’t think Fiona touches anyone as much as she touches me. This should probably bother me more than it does. To be honest—and this sounds really stupid—I feel sometimes now like I’m actually starving for someone to touch me. God, it sounds even more stupid than I thought it would.

“The ghost is with you,” she says.

I kiss her cheek so she’ll let me go and then I head home, the bottle of milk cold and tempting in my hand. Halfway home, I give up and take a sip. Milk here is so heavy and thick. My mom used to tell me that milk was a food, not a drink. I never believed her before.

So I guess what I do is eat half the bottle. Mom is going to kill me.

To distract myself from the rest of the milk, I follow the path of the shoreline, looking for sand dollars. Today is too cold to even touch the water, but even when it isn’t, I rarely go in past my knees. I’m not a strong swimmer. I don’t think I’ve put my head under since we’ve moved.

Maybe I’ll drop off the milk and then run more, blow off my schoolwork, go past my house until I hit the marina. I’ll scale the cliffs. I’ll watch the grimy fishermen catch my brother’s meals.

And then I hear someone whistle.

I turn away from Ms. Delaney’s mansion and that’s when
I see him, sitting on a rock with a piece of seaweed hanging out of his mouth.

He’s only about twenty feet from me. And before I notice anything else about him, I realize he’s about my age.

And then the rest of him hits me: webbed fingers, the scrawny torso patched with silver scales, and a twisted fish tail starting where his hips should be, curling into a dirty fin. A fish. A boy. The ugliest thing I have ever seen.

Can’t be real.

I take a few steps toward him, but I’m afraid to get much closer.

I’m afraid I’ll wake up, I guess.

He gives me a funny smile and a small wave. And then he pushes off the rock and dives into the water.

I find him with my eyes a few seconds later. He’s swimming out past the surf, hard. I see his fin hitting the water behind him with each stroke, setting up waves that push him farther and farther away from the shore.

He can’t be a mermaid, because he has to come up to breathe. He’s stopping to pant. He’s tired. Mermaids sing underwater. Mermaids can’t get tired.

Because mermaids aren’t real.

And then he’s gone.

“I THOUGHT SHE LIVED ALONE,” I WHISPER TO MY MOM.

She holds her finger to her lips. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that for three fucking months I’ve been thinking I was the only teenager on the island, and now I’ve found two others in one day. Even if one is half-fish.

I watch Ms. Delaney’s daughter bring an enormous bowl of soup to the dining room table. Her red hair goes down to her hips. It sways with her like it’s another limb. She’s glancing at me, too. I feel guilty that I didn’t somehow let her know I was here.

My parents don’t look surprised at all. You’d think they would have mentioned her. Maybe they kept this from me
on purpose. Maybe the whole get-your-brother-well thing is a ruse, and we’re really here because my parents want me to be less of a slut.

At home I went to a school with over a thousand kids. I had strings of girlfriends and the kind of friends whose cars you borrow when you take them out, because theirs have bigger backseats. Here I do math problems alone at the kitchen table. If celibacy was their plan, it’s working.

I reach next to me and rub Dylan’s back while he chokes on his cup.

It’s not like I actually think that’s their plan.

Mom might not let me demand any more information, but she can’t stop me from staring as the girl sits across the table from me and passes the mashed potatoes to her left. “Thank you, Diana,” Ms. Delaney says.

Diana. That’s also my mom’s name. This never happens in movies.

My last girlfriend at home was Gabrielle. We were together for only a month before I left. I pretty much knew by the time we kissed for the first time that I was leaving soon. That’s probably why I kissed her so hard that I bruised my lip against her teeth. I felt like I could get every bit of me inside of her, if I tried hard enough. I don’t know.

We haven’t written.

“I’ve never seen you before,” I say to Diana.

“I don’t get out much,” she says. She sounds proud of it.

Diana Delaney doesn’t seem like a real name, and she’s so secret and pale, the closest thing to a ghost I’ve ever seen.

She’s probably sick. There’s got to be a reason the Delaneys stayed.

I turn my head and look out at the beach. Ms. Delaney has a window so big it takes up an entire wall. I’d be terrified, I think, living here with ghosts. They could push you right out through the glass and into the sea. You’d die with cuts full of salt water.

“This brie is phenomenal,” my dad says.

Ms. Delaney slices neatly through her fish. “Linda Curlin, who lives down on the north tip? She makes it from Sam’s milk, but of course it isn’t available every week.” She keeps chattering about the amazing apples she got from the marketplace last week, but while she makes small talk her eyes jitterbug from her plate and my parents back to her daughter, like she thinks any minute Diana will get up and run out the door.

Diana chews each bite of food a zillion times before she swallows. Her teeth are straight and perfect. Each sip she takes from her water glass seems to take a lifetime. I don’t know how she does it. I want to shake her, or throw something at the wall. I at least get to go home to a house that isn’t made of right angles and wade through my brother’s toys. She stays here.

I want to take her by the wrist and pull her outside.

The conversation stays appropriately dull until Dylan faints, likely just from boredom, but my parents make a big deal out of scooping him up and making him drink water until he feels better. At home we’re so used to Dylan fainting that we barely blink. Half the time he does it for attention. He’s a clever little bastard. It doesn’t usually work at home, but here at least it’s something to talk about besides what fruit was good at the marketplace this week, so yeah, it looks like we’re letting him get away with it.

Mom fusses over him for a minute, and Ms. Delaney murmurs “Poor thing” and “I hope he’s all right.” Diana looks kind of fascinated. Ms. Delaney is averting her eyes the way people think they’re supposed to, like Dylan has an extra head and it’s rude to stare, when, come on, he’s five years old, he wants you to look at him. And Diana does, smiling at him like he’s a little kid.

Dylan starts whining and reaching his hands out to me, so Mom drops him into my lap. I feed him fish off my plate and he keeps the fingers of my other hand trapped in his fist. It means only one of us can eat, but I’m not a big fan of the fish, to be honest. I’ve only had it a few times. It’s expensive, and we need to save ours for Dyl. But the bit I ate tonight should beat off that cold I’ve been brewing, so there’s that. I stuff all I can into the kid on my lap.

“Has the fish been helping him?” Ms. Delaney asks. She’s still not looking at him. Diana nudges the salt and pepper
shakers toward Dylan. I start to motion that he’s fine, and then he grabs the shakers off the table and starts marching them like they’re soldiers. Diana smiles.

Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are citing all the improvements in Dylan that they’ve only whispered to each other, like they’re afraid getting too excited will scare it all away. (Dyl and I keep track of them and high-five and say everything out loud, thanks.) “His color’s better,” Mom says. “He doesn’t get blue nearly as often as he used to, and chest percussion doesn’t take as long. And we’ve even gotten a few words out of him. We’ve always had the hardest time getting him to talk, but now he’s getting brave enough to use some of his air for that.”

The Delaneys look at Dylan like they’re expecting him to suddenly explode into the Gettysburg Address. Yeah, he isn’t a trained monkey, and he
just fainted
. Give him a break.

He reaches for another bite of my fish, oblivious, and his back pushes against my chest as he breathes. He’s not a great listener for a five-year-old, and we blame it on the breathing, but really I think he just acts like a bitch sometimes because he knows he can get away with anything. He flashes me that fucking smile of his. This kid can knock you dead.