The Mermaid Girl (2 page)

*   *   *

After the fog of another headache Daniel asked her, “Are the pills not working?” Elbows on the kitchen table, he chewed his lower lip. A line dented his hair above the ears and circled around the back of his head, an invisible crown left by his safety goggles. If she ran her finger over it, she'd have to use the flat or the side to properly feel the shift in the smooth.

“I didn't take them this time,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I never know how bad it's going to be. Sometimes it's just the blind spot, then gone.” It was also good to remember exactly how bad pain could get. Sometimes she deserved it, just a little.

“It's irresponsible,” he said.

She smiled like a cat. “Oh, you know me.” A nipped tongue, a tug on that crimped hair.

“I do, Paulina. I do.”

In bed, he said, “We're leaving. We're getting out of here. I'm sick of the ocean, I'm sick of boats. I'm sick of dirty air.”

“Okay,” she whispered. It was nice, the moments when they both felt restless.

“I'll sell the boat.”

“It's only half yours, and Frank loves that boat. So do you. He won't want to sell. You don't want to either,” she said.

Lifelong friends, Daniel knew Frank's difficulty with letting go. “You're right. Fine. I'm selling the house,” he said.

“No, you're not.”

*   *   *

She dreamt of a factory flooding. The workers inside were fused to an assembly line; their legs were the legs of a moaning conveyer belt. As the water rose, their mouths became the glass in diving masks, round and clear. She could look inside and see barnacles taking shape on tonsils, each opening like an eye for a tiny fernlike hand to uncurl and filter breaths for sustenance. Every face was one she knew but could not place. A man who stared at her too long when she was in the mermaid tank once, maybe. Someone she'd seen on the street. A clerk from a motel too many cities ago to remember correctly. A boat sailed through the flooded factory. Its sides were rough and translucent, pale yellow and orange, as though shaped from a jingle shell formed for just that purpose. No one reached for the sides. The workers continued adding pieces to the intricate machines they built. One by one, their dive masks began to crack. Air leaked from them and the water turned red.

*   *   *

She sat with the baby on her knee. Enola was small enough to hold in place with one arm. In the mornings, early, the baby's skin almost glowed. Too young to have been burned up by the sun, pickled by sea, or marked by anything else, nothing was quite like a baby. She rubbed her cheek against the black fuzz covering Enola's scalp. People talked so much about the sweet baby smell, but it was their hair, their skin, the feel of them on you—all the softest things wounded you into loving them. She looked at the rows of cards before her. “These are Mama's. They were your grandmother's, too, though you'll never meet her. That's okay. She was a little selfish. But she would have loved you.” She cleared the spread with one hand, using her fingernails to pick them up. Her father had said that her mother felt a spark in them when she held them, that they bit down with kitten teeth. Paulina never felt it. She blamed it on the sequins, on the mermaid tail, and on her father's having been the sort of man who cried every time he had a beer, every time they left a town, and for the entire month of July. She tapped the cards against the floor and offered them to her daughter. “Careful now.”

*   *   *

The first scent she remembered was a pungent mix of Vaseline and big-cat urine. Her mother slathered her legs with Vaseline so they'd shine under the lights. Her father spent more time with the cats than with people, and like them, left his scent everywhere. Later, other scents would work their way in, hairspray, Michel's clove cigarettes, spoiled face paint, cotton candy, roasted nuts, axel grease, and, when they were close to the ocean, salt. Salt washed everything else away, even leopard piss. She'd spent hours sniffing her skin, trying to figure out if she smelled like her mother or her father, or exhaust from the Airstream. And then her mother was gone. Drowned, and nothing smelled of salt anymore. At six she discovered that her scent was the same as a small lacquered box and the deck of cards inside it. She asked her father what that scent was.

“Trouble and misery,” he said. He sometimes smelled like gin—rubbing alcohol and pine trees.

Michel said the smell was aging paper, the beginnings of dry rot, and that was mold. It smelled like vanilla and dust, good earthy things. Michel smelled like Wildroot and Florida water. When she was old enough, she Vaselined her hands, her lips, her whole upper body to keep the water in the tank from drying her out. After washing a night off, the scent still stayed with her. She wondered if she'd disappeared into the memory of her mother. She wondered if a memory could consume you until it walked around inside your skin, and you became a coat for it to wear, or a mermaid tail that got stitched up every morning.

Michel told her what the cards were, and how her mother had loved them. She knew that her father never touched them, but refused to throw them out. They stayed in the bottom of a suitcase with a sequined white bathing suit, a stained marriage certificate from Reno, and a picture of her mother and father, so young that she could see herself staring out of them. When her father left with the big cats, the suitcase stayed behind with Paulina.

She was twelve and felt like trouble and misery. She opened the box.

*   *   *

Paulina carried Enola on her hip, content with how pregnancy had spread her bones, making shelves for her children, and years of swimming had given her the muscle to hold them to her side and walk the crooked staircase up from the beach without bobbling, without fear of dropping them. Simon had run up ahead. She thought he would wait for her at the top of the steps, but he'd gone back to the house. The shadow that stood at the top of the cliff was large, and also familiar. Enola gummed on her shoulder as she walked the stairs.

“I told you not to do this,” she said. “I asked you, then I told you. You can't watch me all the time, not anymore. It needs to stop.”

“I wasn't, I swear. I was just coming down to go fishing.” He nodded to the railing, where a bucket sat with a fishing rod sticking out of it.

“It had to be now?”

“This is when the fish are out. What did you want me to do? What am I supposed to say?”

She didn't know. She leaned against the railing. A splinter gouged her, and her wet bathing suit stuck to the wood.

He looked as sorry as she felt. Almost. Walking away from him without a word would be worse, more suspicion-making than talking. Eventually he walked away. She waited to see if this time she'd miss him.

*   *   *

“I think we should sell the house,” Daniel said.

“No.”

“You're sick here. I read something in the paper, a story about air quality. We get the worst of it. All the smog from the city, all the crap from Connecticut, it all gets blown out here and we breathe it in. You'd be breathing cleaner air if we lived in a car lot.”

“I'm tired of moving.”

“We've only ever lived here.”

“I've lived everywhere.”

Taxes. Daniel brought up the taxes argument. Taxes, the stupid thing that regular people did with paperwork that meant swearing, receipts, and a bizarre code of honesty when what you really wanted to do was lie, lie, lie. She missed cash. Thievery. Trading. Sewing sequins for a tarot lesson, extra doughnuts, or a demonstration of all the things that could be done with Max Factor and good body tape. “Just because you've never left Napawset doesn't mean I'm not tired of moving,” she said.

“Are you going to make me say it?”

“I'd rather you didn't, but I can't stop you.”

Enola picked that moment to wail. An echoing thrum started in Paulina's head. Headaches were like birds. Starlings. They could be perfectly calm, then a single acorn could drop and send the entire flock to the sky. Simon's door opened. There were times she felt like responsibility was a terminal disease. She left Daniel at the kitchen table, chewing on his thumbnail, biting down and slowly devouring the grease in its bed.

*   *   *

Later, Daniel kissed her hair. They traded sorrys and meant them. He smelled like the pan-fried steak they'd had for dinner, like aftershave and Irish Spring. She breathed him in. His arm curled around her, hand under breast, pulling her tight, his chest to her back. In the quiet, when he loved her most, the nasty part of her longed to break him, to spill out a secret and see if he would still love her, if he still could. She wanted the punch of knowing that he wouldn't, that he didn't, and that he was as bad as she. She rolled over, pressed her face to his collarbone and licked the skin. Salt, but not the ocean, salt like a cliffside, like rock, like land.

Sometimes you made love to a man because you wanted your body to feel something other than the aches and pains of use. Sometimes you made love to a man because he looked so good that you wanted to try him on. Sometimes you made love to a man because he fathered your children, he made you a home, he loved you, and he staunched the parts of you that were always bleeding. Sometimes you made love to a man because you felt split in two, and joining with him pulled you back together.

When he slept, she went to the kitchen table and spread her cards across it, the whole deck, to see the faces looking up, to read the symbols as her mother had. The kitchen light bathed them in green. She could imagine them underwater, in the tank under nighttime carnival lights, floating around her while she held her breath. Michel had walked her through their meanings. It was hard to see them and not imagine his iron-streaked hair bent over the cards, the dull shine of his pomade. She touched the Fool's foot. How terrible to be trapped, forever preserved in the moment you're about to fall off a cliff. She tapped the ink with her finger. Would this be the time she'd finally feel the paper? Nerves grew back. Not always, but some did. It could take decades. She hadn't stitched a sequin in years. She shut her eyes and knew that if she wished, she could count the days, the hours, since she'd last pricked her finger to make herself shine.

She collected the cards, tapped the deck, shuffled, cut.

Mom, I need to talk to you.

The Queen of Cups. Communication.

Mom, I have a son and a daughter. I stopped moving.

The Star. Water pouring into a lake under the watchful heavens.

Mom, what do you do when you stop moving?

The Ten of Swords. Catastrophe.

Behind her, from the living room, her son watched. She saw him move, small, quiet. She tucked the cards away, hid them under one of the linen napkins they'd gotten as a wedding present. “You shouldn't be awake.”

“I'm not.”

“Well, then. Come here, little sleepy. Tell me what you're dreaming about.”

“I was dreaming about a man who lives in a river but he's not a man, he's a duck, or an eel. He was an eel so I cut off his head.”

*   *   *

In the water, she practiced swimming with Simon. He had a good long stroke for someone so young, but his balance was off. The trickiest bit was convincing your neck to let go, that the water would hold you and the animal part of you knew not to drown. She let him splash in the shallow, while she held Enola's feet in the water.

It was a shame you had to be so careful with babies. The water couldn't be too cold, the Sound had to be absolutely still. Everything that gave water life was not allowed for children. Deep in her memory was the barbed smell of metallic city water, something that tanged of the minerals in Saratoga Springs, and being splashed into the deep before she knew how to walk. Gulping air, gulping water, and not being afraid. Just once, for a single second, she loosened her grip. Water took Enola, lifted her up, and the fat rolls of her legs kicked, as if to swim. She squealed in delight. “Oh, look at you, little blackbird. Look at you.” She put Enola in the bassinette and gave herself a minute to dunk her head under the waves. The cold washed her clean.

A voice in the water said,
They're so lovely, Paulina.

Here you are,
Paulina thought.
Never around when I need you.
She counted the years since she'd last heard that voice. When did life begin to outweigh missing?

She toweled herself off.

Leah McAvoy was at the bottom of the steps, holding her daughter's hand. Alice, with her mother's brilliant red hair and Frank's eyes, Frank's chin. “Hey, Paulina. Would you mind watching Alice for a little while?”

“Not a problem,” she said.

“I won't be long. Just a few errands, but she's in that carsick phase. You know what that's like.”

“Oh, don't I.”

Paulina had never had a carsick phase. She'd fallen asleep to speed bumps, train cars, an unreliable Airstream that always had a flat even when the tires were new. She'd been rocked to sleep by a shifting elephant, and the annoyed pacing of a big cat. When the animals were gone, when Michel realized Lareille was a better carnival than circus, she'd fallen asleep floating in a mermaid tank, too tired to crawl out after long nights. She'd spent enough of her life in water that her inner ear grew like a nautilus, winding and keeping her steady with anything that rolled—the sea, cars, trains, animals. It made standing still harder, it made her want to cling to land even when it made her sick.

“I'll watch her. It's no trouble at all.” Simon splashed out of the water and ran for Alice, kicking up sand and pebbles. Everyone on the beach, all of them, especially her children, had never known Paulina when she wasn't lying.

*   *   *

She tried to get her typing up to speed. Jobs helped with restlessness, and she was sure that she could file at the very least. She could make paper fly if she needed to. Daniel had gotten her a beautiful old Smith Corona from a thrift store. He'd cleaned it, oiled it, and strung a new ribbon, but she always tapped too lightly with her left hand, or pressed so hard the keys became stuck. D and G had sandwiched F between them, and only sliding a thumbnail between could tear them apart. She did, and the key sliced the skin under the nail. Her thumb came away smelling like blood, ink, and oil. It was what she should smell like, like herself, like her husband, and a useful machine. Between keystrokes, she heard water lapping at the bulkhead and tried to type faster to block out the sound.