Before and Afterlives (5 page)

On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned me
rmaid was washed ashore. She was curled in an almost S shape, her arms thrown over her head as if to block out the glare of the sun. Her skin was pale, rubbery and white. The kind of pale that comes from living either beneath the earth or beneath the sea. Her black hair was twisted with ropes of seaweed, and a bruise, golden brown and purple, stained the skin of her right cheek.

Helena found her. She had woken that morning from anot
her dream of her daughter Jordan, from another night of terror and mystery in which she played the lead role. She’d been in a casino this time, after receiving instructions on how to win Jordan back: “Go to the roulette table, place your bet on black thirty-one, walk away from the wheel without collecting your winnings, and believe me,” a disembodied voice told her, “you’ll win. Walk toward the nearest restroom, but don’t go in. A man in a dark suit will meet you by the door. Take his arm. He’ll bring you to me.”

She’d done as instructed, but as usual, never found her daughter. Never won her, never opened the locked safe wit
hout tripping the alarm. Or in another situation, she might be fooled into thinking Jordan was behind a certain door. But upon opening it, she would find nothing but a dark, empty room. As in the shell game, Helena could never pick the one under which the con man had hidden the ping-pong ball.

So she had come down to the beach after waking, leaving Paul asleep in bed. The sun had just risen, dappling the waves with light, and gulls screed in the air, circling and diving over the w
ater.

From a distance the mermaid’s body looked like driftwood, smooth and round, silhouetted by the morning light. It was only when Helena came closer that she noticed the scales glinting in the light; the thickly muscled tail; and after mo
ving one of the mermaid’s arms off of her face, the bulbous eyes, black and damp as olives.

She knelt beside the body and rested her ear against the chilled skin. A sluggish pulse still pumped through those e
merald veins: a slow, locomotive beat. Unconscious then, Helena decided. She stood again, turning her head one way, then the other, scanning the beach to see if anyone else had ventured down this way yet. There was no one around at this hour. But that would change soon enough. It was the end of summer. Within an hour the beach would be strewn with bodies laid out for the sun to take. A ritual sacrifice.

Working quickly, she lifted the mermaid’s arms and shou
lders from underneath and started to drag her. She pulled her away from the hissing waves that collapsed under their own weight, turning to foam as they reached the shore. She dragged, then paused to catch her breath, then picked the mermaid up once more to go a little farther. And all the while the mermaid’s head lolled on the stalk of her neck as if it had been broken.

It was a long, exhausting journey. But in this way, they reached home soon enough.

Home was a house perched forty feet above the beach on the edge of a cliff in southern California. Sleek and modern, it was filled with furniture that had been fashionable two de
cades before and had again come into style. There was a deck in back of the house, braced against the cliffside, and when high tide rolled in it would begin to resemble a pier, the pilings of the deck’s foundation partly submerged in water. The side of the cliff was buried beneath a lumpy shell of boulders, an ad hoc seawall that served to deter any further erosion that might undermine the house’s foundation. Helena and Paul had lived there for fifteen years, since he took the position teaching history at the university. Before the seawall was built, they had seen whole houses fold in on themselves.

The only problem to emerge since moving here, to a sleepy vi
llage by the sea, was that sometimes, often in the summer, homeless people or drifters would hole up beneath their deck. They’d stay for a day or a week, making homes, fleeting as dreams, among the boulders. Then they’d vanish and never be seen again.

Helena and Paul never instinctively disliked or feared these people. But as Helena once articulated the problem, “It’s that you ca
n
hea
r
them down there, whispering, right below your feet.” It would have been easy to have the drifters removed, but they never called the police. As Helena once pointed out to Paul, who stood with phone in hand, ready to dial 911, “What if it was Jordan down there? What if she just needed a place to stay the night?”

Paul had placed the phone back on its cradle, but not wit
hout saying, “If she needed a place to stay, why wouldn’t she call? Why wouldn’t she come home?”

In the past Helena would have supplied him with reason
able answers to these questions—it had once been a specialty of hers—but most questions that had anything to do with Jordan had become unreasonable. As well as inexplicable.

By the time Helena reached the stairs leading up to the back deck, people had started to arrive. They came with surf boards lashed to the tops of their cars, or with children, lathered in sunblock, trudging wearily across the sand.

Helena climbed one step at a time, planting her feet secur
ely before pulling the mermaid up to the next step. It took a long time. Sweat beaded on her forehead, then dribbled down into her eyes. She could hear her own breathing, sharp intakes of breath followed by exhausted sighs.

She wished she were younger, not slowed down by midlife. If I only had more energy, she thought several times a day, I coul
d
d
o
more. As it was, she spent most of her days barely able to keep up with the house. Every time she turned around, there was a loose tile in the linoleum, or a burned-out bulb that needed to be replaced. Even caring for these small tasks drained her easily. She spent all of her energy in her dreams, overnight, looking for Jordan. By morning, she would wake exhausted, as though she hadn’t slept.

Finally she reached the deck, forty steps high, where she sat down for a few minutes to catch her breath, arranging the mermaid’s head on her lap. A few strands of hair trailed over the mermaid’s face and Helena snatched at them, brushing them out of those dark, fishy eyes. And those eyes, a person could lose themselves in them, could dive down into their cold black waters and drown.

She slid the back door open, then pulled the mermaid into the house. Her tail bounced up and down as it rolled over the sliding door track. Helena took her into the bathroom, heaved her tail up and over the lip of the tub, and followed with the upper half. The mermaid’s skin squeaked against the porcelain. She ran cold water from the faucet until it splashed over the sides.

It was enough. She’d done enough. She leaned against the tub and sighed, satisfied.

Now for Paul. She would have to find a way to explain this to him as reasonably as she could. This was possible. This was reasonable. She had done something. She stroked her fingertips across the mermaid’s bruised cheek and decided that that in and of itself, this purple and gold blossom, would win any argument with Paul.

But before she could wake him, there he was. He walked into the bathroom still wearing his pajamas, grinding the sleep out of his eyes. “Why all the racket?” he asked, yaw
ning.

And when he removed his hands from his bleary eyes, He
lena smiled up at him weakly and said, “Surprise.”

Paul was uncooperative, angry, and later he realized, a little unkind. Upon seeing his wife sprawled on the bathroom floor with that creature—he immediately thought of it a
s
that creatur
e
—lounging in the tub behind her, he began to shout. “What have you done? Where did that creature come from? You must be insane, Helena. Completely mad! Get it out. Get it out right now.”

She pleaded with him—he knew she’d plead with him, it was like Helena these days—and practically begged him on her knees. “You don’t understand, Paul. She’s hurt. She needs help. I found her on the beach. Just look at her face, the poor thing’s skull has been battered. Please, you must. You have to. You must let her stay.”

An awkward pause followed during which Helena looked longingly into his eyes and spoke to him like that, with her eyes. It was a trick she’d always been able to pull on him, and each time she did he was helpless. Flustered, he fled the bathroom and went to change out of his thin blue pajamas. He wanted real clothes covering his skin. The nightclothes made him feel caught off guard, vulnerable.

They passed the day in a series of short, sharp spats, nearly all of which originated with Paul sliding around the corner to stand uselessly in the doorway of the bathroom. He’d stare at Helena pouring handfuls of water along the puckering gills of the mermaid’s throat, the thin little slits opening and closing, drinking the air out of the water. Or he would comment derisively on finding her stroking the mermaid’s hair, humming a wordless tune to soothe her, something she once did for their daughter when she was a little girl. And then Helena would stop whatever she was doing and say, “What? What are you looking at? Go away!”

He told her he was going to take the mermaid himself and throw her back to the sea. He said, “There are proper cha
nnels for dealing with these things, and you, my dear, have followed none of them.”

It was true. If she had notified the police, they would have said to leave the mermaid on the beach. They would have come and blocked the area off with sawhorses and yellow tape that had “Do Not Cross” printed on it in bold black. They had dealt with me
rfolk before, years ago. The proper thing to do would be to wait for high tide to roll in, and allow it to take her home.

They decided to make a pact. Helena explained that she couldn’t allow the mermaid to go back with the tide in this co
ndition. She’s unconscious, she argued. Defenseless. In this state, a shark or some other scavenging creature could pick at her. Paul agreed easily enough to that. He said, “Till she’s well enough, then.” And Helena nodded, accepting this proposal. Although, Paul thought, it was a reluctant nod.

“Till she’s well enough, then,” Helena agreed.

Paul rolled his eyes at this childish bargaining and retreated to his study, hiding amongst his books, waiting for the moment he could get that creature out of his home. She was eerie. She floated in the tub like a corpse.

He spent the next two days hunched over his desk, busying himself with preparations for the coming semester, creating his syllabi and course summaries, until he heard the squeals and screams in the bathroom, announcing she had awoken.

After something special of one’s own disappears, a person should learn to be prepared for unexpected events. After Jo
rdan disappeared, Helena came to feel, paradoxically, both ready to handle anything that might come her way, as well as on the verge of disintegrating into tears whenever she saw anything remotely reminiscent of her daughter. Because of these conflicting emotions, she found herself both willful and in tears as she struggled over a bra, black and frilled with lace—one Jordan had left behind—when the mermaid woke.

“You mustn’t struggle so,” she told the mermaid, who was a
ttempting to tear the bra from her chest. Helena had covered her with it out of consideration for Paul. But the bra was too large for the mermaid, whose breasts were smaller, firmer than Jordan’s, probably from all of that swimming she did. “But it will do,” Helena said. She grabbed hold of the straining straps and pulled the bra back on, tightening it like a wicked stepmother. “It will do.”

“Having trouble?” Paul asked. He stood in the doorway, still holding a book from his study in one hand.

Helena ignored him. The mermaid bared her teeth, two crooked rows of pearls, and hissed at them. Her bulbous black eyes seemed even more bulbous now that she was awake. And darker as well, like two black moons. They were set far apart in her head, but turned inward a little, so that they seemed to be communicating to each other some deeply private, mysterious secret.

“I’m sorry,” Helena said, waggling a finger in the me
rmaid’s face. “But there are rules in this house, young lady. We don’t go traipsing around naked. Now it’s time for some dinner and then you’ll go straight to sleep. Consider yourself grounded. And don’t ask for how long either. You’ve been worrying me sick.”

The mermaid’s body was so long that her tail hung over the lip of the tub, drooping down towards the tiled floor. She still had ropes of seaweed tangled in her black hair, and sand speckled her skin, as though she’d been dipped in glitter. He
lena reached out a tentative hand to stroke the mermaid’s hair, but snatched it back when the mermaid suddenly opened her mouth in a wide O and began to scream.

The scream spilled out at such a high piercing pitch, the bathroom mirror shattered. It burst apart in a rain of jagged silver, clattering into the sink, onto the tiled floor. Pieces lay at Helena’s feet, each one reflecting an individual eye, a patch of green scales, or a mouth, unhinged and opened so wide you could see the red wet skin inside.

Even after the mirror flew apart, the screaming failed to stop. Helena clapped her hands over her ears and looked over at Paul, who had done the same. “Stop it!” she shouted as loud as possible. “Stop it this instant!” Her eardrums tightened and vibrated, thrumming. They were ready to burst as well. The mermaid gripped the sides of the tub, though, and threw her head back into a higher octave.