Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (17 page)

The Vulcan tipped itself back, and Sophie was looking at its underside, where a ferocious little beak curved out from the center. She couldn't help it—her heart skipped. Was this where it would end? After all that she'd been through, now she was to be eaten by a giant octopus in the den of an Ogress? Fed to him, practically, by the creatures she'd trusted? Sophie took a deep breath, summoning her powers. She would zawolanie this stupid Vulcan or whatever it was to smithereens, send it smashing through the roof of the cave, feed it to the
Invisible
! She had battled Kishka, and won! She would not be done in by this leggy bottom dweller!

As if sensing her fear, one of the Ogresses piped up. “The Vulcan,” she boomed gently, “Is an oracle. A deep-sea shaman. Not only a healer, but a seer. It can transfer energies—move thoughts and feelings from one creature to another. That is how it helped Syrena, and you, too—it took the emotions and memories you'd taken from her, and returned them. So now Syrena is whole again, and you are relieved of the burden of her history.”

Thank you
, Sophie began to address the octopus, but as she began to speak, the Vulcan's beak opened, and out from it came a bubble.

The bubble floated, wobbling, toward Sophie, and what she saw made her words catch in her throat. It was Hennie, her magical aunt. As if she was peering into a snow globe, Sophie watched as the old woman rocked a child in a giant wooden rocker, a storybook spread
on her ample lap. Sophie recognized the toddler, though she had never seen her so animated, poking at the book with excited fingers, laughing up at Hennie's face, her sweet and jowly face, tugging at the babushka knot beneath her chin.

“That's the Dola's baby,” Sophie gasped. “I mean, Laurie LeClair's.” And as the bubble spun in the water before Sophie, she saw a figure hunched over a desk, scratching into a notebook. Dark roots grew out from the top of her head, fading to bleachy white and spilling over a pile of books. The figure raised her head and glanced in Hennie's direction, and a smile came over her face like a sunrise. It
was
Laurie LeClair. And she no longer had the look of the Dola, that dead-eyed creature, nor the dead eyes Sophie had seen blinking from Laurie's face when she'd seen her wasted in the square so many times, either. Laurie's eyes were as fiery and alive as her baby's, as glinting and happy as Hennie's. They were helping each other, Sophie understood, and it was good.

As the bubble popped in front of her, the Vulcan opened its beak and released another.

Dr. Chen stood at her rooftop dovecote. Sophie could see all of Chelsea in the bubble's round distance—the green stretch of the Tobin Bridge carrying cars into Boston. The red-and-white water tower rising cheerfully from the Soldier's Home, the veteran's hospital on the hill. It looked like a sweet toy town from this angle. But Sophie noticed that the dovecote was empty, and that Dr. Chen's smooth face held sadness and worry. Stray feathers caught in the structure's mesh were
fluttering in the wind and Sophie reached for her hair, finding Livia's feather snared tightly in the tangle. Where were the pigeons? Sophie bit her lip, watching the doctor pull the feathers free from the wire of the dovecote, creating a small, fluffy bouquet. And as the tears fell from her gentle face, Dr. Chen lifted all that was left of her flock and dried her face with the soft clutch.

The image popped, leaving Sophie with an anxious feeling that only grew when she saw what lay inside the next wobbly orb. It was a green bubble, blown from the Vulcan's curved beak. Green with a thickness of plant life, with crawling vines and leaves like elephant ears, floppy and prehistoric. Then a hand rose up like a pale flower and pulled the greenery down, and Sophie was looking at herself. Herself with well-kept, untangled hair pinned back neatly with a barrette. Herself with smooth skin, pale skin, skin that had never seen sunlight, had never had a sunburn, let alone felt the searing lash of a sea dragon. Herself with eyes empty of struggle, empty of conflict, empty of concern, or of thought. Her own eyes, empty. Staring back at her.

Inside the bubble, Sophie's sister raised her hand as if she could see Sophie watching. Sophie raised her hand as well, a reflex. She raised her right hand to the girl's left, tilted her head left to her sister's tilting right. Could her sister see her? The pale girl's eyes remained empty, almost cold. Tiny tree frogs, colorful and venomous, hopped around her from leaf to leaf, onto her shoulders and off. A desperate feeling stirred in Sophie's chest. She didn't even know her
name
. Her own sister. She opened her mouth anyway. “Hello?” she cried, and
her twin's eyes widened, her mouth hung open.

“Help me!” Sophie's twin begged, in a voice that sounded as old and creaking as a jammed attic door. The effort of the words on the girl's dry throat produced a spasm of coughing, which drove tears from her eyes. Sophie brought her hand to her mouth, covering it in horror.
Help her?

“Can you see me?” Sophie begged. “Who—what—what's your name?”

The girl coughed, and coughed, and coughed, until a thick green liquid curled out from the corner of her lips. She tore a leaf from a plant and mopped her mouth.

The name
Belinda
floated through Sophie's body, feeling like an itch, like the beginning of a cold. The name felt bad inside her, and she too began to cough, as if she could hack it from her lungs.
Belinda.
It drifted through her, leaving a poisonous trail. Sophie imagined the red bumps of a rash, but inside her.

“Belinda?” The word left Sophie like the croak of a frog, not the nimble ones that leapt across her sister but a bullfrog, something warty and bulbous and stuck in the mud. Her sister's big eyes searched her jungle home, looking for something.
Belinda
: the word had left a residue in Sophie's throat. She coughed it out and the burst of air from her
lips shattered the bubble into a dozen tinier bubbles, each containing her sister's white face, then each shimmered into nothing, gone.

“No!” Sophie cried, distraught, pawing at the empty space in front of her, as if she could whip the bubble back from the sea itself. “No, I wasn't done! I heard her!” Above her the giantesses' faces loomed like statues of stone, stern and sad. Syrena's face, smaller and closer, looked just as tight.

The next bubble left the Vulcan's mouth like a puff of smoke. It was Andrea, her mother, sitting by a window in the house Sophie had left behind. A chipped plate was balanced on the windowsill, and Andrea absently flicked her cigarette ash onto it. Her mother had gone back to smoking! Sophie felt a tug in her heart. She'd like to pull the thing right from her mother's melancholy grip. She'd known her mother used to smoke, back when she was young and wild. She'd quit when she became pregnant with Sophie and her twin sister and abandoned Ronald, their father. When Ronald fell under Kishka's spell at the dump, plied with endless alcohol, alive but dead, the closest thing to a zombie Sophie hoped she'd ever see. And Sophie knew, as she watched her mother, that Andrea was thinking
about Ronald as well. Sophie could feel it. She was thinking about Ronald, and she was thinking about Sophie. In her cocoon of smoke, Andrea was waiting, and thinking of the people she had lost.

Sophie watched as her mother stubbed the cigarette out on the dinner plate, and went to place the plate on the wooden back stairs. As her hands reached through the window her arms seized as if she was being electrocuted and the plate jerked from her hand, rolling onto the back porch. Andrea's face twisted in pain; she tried to bring her arms back through the window, into the house, but they appeared to be stuck to the air itself.

“No!” Sophie cried helplessly. “No, no!”

With a terrible grimace of effort, Andrea managed to yank her arms back inside, the strain knocking her on her back on the kitchen floor. She clambered up, shaking tears of hurt and fear from the corners of her eyes.

“Goddammit!” she hollered into the empty house. She hugged her arms together, rubbing her elbows. She swiped at her eyes, wiping her tears back into her frazzled hair. She struck out at the kitchen table, which Sophie saw was piled with a great tumble of long boxes. They crashed to the floor and Sophie could see what they were. Cigarettes. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes. Andrea kicked at them wildly and raged through the house, to the front door that led out to Heard Street. She dove for the knob and was flung back from the door as if a terrible shock had struck her.

Andrea ran back through the house, into the kitchen, stomping the boxes of cigarettes beneath her bare feet. She reached out for the
back door that led out to the stairs, and Sophie flinched in advance, covering her eyes so that she didn't have to see her mother shoved back by the force field that was keeping her hostage in her own home.

“Please!” she heard her mother demand. “Please! Let me go!”

When there was quiet, Sophie dared to peek again. Her mother was back at the window, a new dinner plate beside her, dusted with ash, a torn-open pack of cigarettes on the sill. Andrea inhaled the cigarette, shaking. She blew a smoke ring toward Sophie, and the bubble popped.

“No,” Sophie said, turning to the Vulcan, her voice a pleading echo of her mother's. “Please. I don't think I can see any more.” But the Vulcan exhaled its next bubble, and Sophie couldn't look away.

It was Ella, alone in her room. She lay facedown on her bed and, from the look of her heaving body, she was crying. Her hair streamed out in all directions, black and lustrous, a shine that could light the deep, Sophie thought. She missed her friend with a sharp pang. What was hurting her? Sophie feared the sight of Ella pulling herself up from her bed and revealing her lovely face abraded, scrubbed compulsively with a rough sponge or a chemical meant for dirty pans. Sophie's heart ached for her friend. Could she get inside her, somehow, and take that thing away, the thing that made Ella feel so dirty she thought she needed to scour herself that way?