Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (4 page)

“I love salt,” Sophie protested. Andrea's look turned steely, and she turned away.

“Normal babies don't think salt tastes good. Babies—”

“I did. I
loved
salt. I remember eating it right from the shaker, that same Tupperware shaker—”

“No you didn't, and if you were stupid enough to try I would have slapped it out of your hand. Salt can kill small children, infants and toddlers especially. It's a great way for a mother to kill her kid and then act like it was a big accident, like the kid just ‘got into' too much salt. It happens all the time, especially here.” Andrea stopped and watched her daughter, waiting for her inevitable questions to come.

“What do you mean, here?”

“I mean in Chelsea. We have a lot of hypernatremia. A lot of babies die from salt. Every so often there's a rash of salt killings.” She paused. “You've never heard about this?”

Sophie wondered at a place that would fill her head with outlandish fantasies about a teenaged girl's tattoos, yet neglect to fill her in on an epidemic of crazed mothers murdering their babies with table salt. But under her confusion was a ribbon of something familiar. “Ma,” she said, annoyed. “I feel like you're messing with me.”

Andrea jingled her house keys in her hands. “It's because of all the immigrants,” her mother said, the distaste in her voice suggesting she'd forgotten that her own mother and father had been immigrants themselves. “They come here from the old countries with all sorts of crazy old wives' tales, make-believe stories they think are true, and then they do stupid things because of it. Things like poisoning their babies with salt.” Andrea's anger at this deadly foolishness was clear.

“But why?” Sophie asked, though she felt in her mind that she already knew, in some sleepy-stubborn part of her brain, the part that kidnaps your dreams and won't give you anything but the slightest
thread to latch onto. Maybe someone had told this to Sophie when she was very small—her Polish-from-Poland Nana, perhaps, or Papa, before he had disappeared.

“There is a myth, a very old myth, about a girl who'd be the most special girl in the whole world, the most important girl ever born. Like the second coming or something. She'd save the world, I don't know, and she'd have the ability to eat huge amounts of salt, even as a baby. It wouldn't hurt her. That's how you'd know she was the one. So every so often there's an outbreak of people dosing their baby girls with salt to see if they can take it. The babies usually die. It's like believing in a comic book, Sophie,” Andrea said sternly, as if Sophie had been arguing her, not standing mutely, as she was. “It's like believing your baby is Superman so you throw her off a roof to see if she'll fly. They ought to be put into jail for life,” she muttered.

“So that's what Laurie LeClair did? She gave her baby salt to see if she was the… the super salt girl or something?”

“Yep. She should know better. She's not fresh off the boat. I can't believe how strong these stories are. The city needs to do a public service announcement, telling people it's a lie; that they could go to jail.”

“Can they?”

“Sure! They should! That's murder!”

“But if she wasn't trying to kill the baby, just seeing if it was special—”

“Sophie. You don't abuse your children to see if a fairy tale is true. You don't endanger your children, no matter what your beliefs are.
There was that little girl in Boston who died because her parents were religious wackos who didn't believe in doctors, they thought they could just pray and God would save her.” Andrea shook her head. “I even believe in God, and I know that's wrong. God helps those who help themselves, that's what God does. But some fairy tale? It's criminal. Criminal. As far as I'm concerned it's murder, whatever the intention.”

Sophie wondered about Laurie LeClair, and if she was on so many drugs that she thought her baby was some supernatural being. It gave her a sadness that sat in her bones. She didn't understand why a person's life had to be so bad. It didn't seem fair. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be Laurie LeClair, with drugs in her body and a boyfriend who hit her, marks on her skin that wouldn't ever go away and a baby she thought could maybe be impossibly special. At first she couldn't imagine it and then, terribly, she could. As if Laurie LeClair's life came into her like an indrawn breath, Sophie was filled with the feeling of it, a hot, dense sensation like a wall of rotting refuse, claustrophobic, lightless. It filled her lungs, a feeling of despair no amount of dreaming or hoping could crack, and then there was—the smallest pinprick of something airy breaking through the wild and spiraling pain, a bit of brightness so foreign to this world that it seemed insane, and it was, it was insane, the idea to feed salt to her baby girl. It twirled like a dust mote on a thin shaft of light, and as hard as it was to look at it, it was easier than looking at everything else, the deep, stuck, never-ever-ever feelings of that heavy, impenetrable wall of hurt.

Sophie didn't know she had fallen backward into the fridge until a magnet stuck there jabbed her in the ear, and another wave came upon her. To feel so small, to feel so small and ugly that a cockroach seemed big, seemed better than you, more functioning, more intelligent. Sophie swung her head, her dirty-blond hair swinging about her, and she hollered. She didn't want to feel Laurie LeClair. Andrea was at her side, pulling her up from where she had slid, down to the linoleum, her head striking the fridge as she struggled against the assailing emotions, dislodging bills and coupons from their magnets, sending them skittering across the floor.

“Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!” Her mother shook her shoulders, filled with her own raw panic at her daughter's sudden seizure. She considered slapping her across the face but couldn't bring herself to strike her. “Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!” she cried. “Sophie!”

And inside the dank cavern of Laurie LeClair's reality, Sophie Swankowski's name was lowered down to her, a rope to haul her self back into her self.
Sophie
, she thought,
I'm Sophie, I'm Sophie, I'm Sophie, I'm Sophie
. Slowly, too slowly, as if it were a living thing that had sunken its claws and was loathe to let go, the sensation began to retract, until Sophie was not Laurie LeClair but was only her self, sweating in her hot kitchen, her hair in fresh tangles, her face flushed with the effort of her return, her mother's hands upon her, her body ringing with a need for salt. Her mother, filled with rage and fear and love, each emotion taking its turn upon her face like a great wheel had been spun, and both waited to learn which it would land upon. It
landed on the cusp of fury and devotion. With a shake more forceful than necessary Andrea gave her daughter a final jolt, then pulled her to her in a ferocious embrace.

“What?” she cried. “What? What was that?”

Sophie pushed her mother off her with unexpected strength, diving for the stove, splattered with bacon grease and congealed cots of Hamburger Helper sauce, she tore the plastic cover off the salt shaker and poured her mouth full of crystals, letting them tumble down the back of her throat. The claws of Laurie LeClair's life had left her punctured, and she could feel the salt falling into those torn places and filling them up. She was barely aware of the sounds she was making as she ate at the pile on her tongue, choking and animal. Andrea smacked the shaker from her hand and rudely shoved her fingers into her daughter's mouth, wiping away the thick mound of salt and flicking it to the floor with a cry of alarm and disgust.

“Stop it!” Andrea hollered, and this time the will was there, her hand, gritty with salt, came down across Sophie's cheek, swiping her mouth, leaving a trail of salty paste she licked at without thinking. “Stop it!” Andrea repeated in horror, wiping the salt away with one hand while smearing it in the girl's hair with the other. They looked at one another in fear and revulsion, and Sophie thought, her mouth still thick with salt, maybe Ella was right, maybe she
was
brain damaged, maybe she had hurt herself playing pass-out, and the thought scared her so terribly she burst into tears, still traumatized on the inside by her visit to the psyche of Laure LeClair, still haunted by the
mermaid of her vision, the creature's sadness sharp as a sword, but an
ancient
sword, sheathed in the musty, dusty leather of an animal that had been extinct so long no one even knew it had ever existed. Oh, no. Something was awfully, awfully wrong with her. With her entire body atremble, she clutched out at her mother, grabbing onto her arms with almost the same force that her mother gripped her shoulders. “I pass myself out!” she blurted, a terrified confession, afraid of what she'd done to her mind and afraid of her mother's wrath, ashamed at her foolhardiness with her body, guilty at betraying the secret pleasure she shared with her friend, that so many of the girls shared with each other. Andrea looked at her quizzically, then with understanding, and the wheel of emotion was spun again, this time coming down on the cusp of rage and fear.

Chapter 3

D
r. Chen was a small woman with pale skin and dark hair that shot out in little points across her forehead. Her eyes burned bright beneath eyebrows that rose and dipped like roller coasters on her smooth forehead, and she was very smiley. Sophie had been going to see her ever since she was a baby, and Andrea had worked in the same building as her for the past five years. “They think she's a saint,” she'd often express to Sophie, recounting a particularly crazy day at the clinic. Who were “they”? A baby bitten by a rat, a man whose liver was soaked through with alcohol, a diabetic woman with a body too heavy for her own muscles to move. It didn't matter how awful their conditions were, what revulsion they might inspire, Dr. Chen cared for each of them with palpable tenderness, touching them gently, smiling in a way that edged their terror away. When she listened to a patient talk about the way his body was failing, a sensation of grace rose up, the feeling of demise halted, the doctor's office a
magical room where the sad laws of entropy and decay were paused, just for a moment, just long enough for a person to catch his breath and receive a bit of mercy.

“Well,” said the doctor, flashing her quick and shining eyes from Sophie to Andrea and back to Sophie again. “You really shouldn't be hyperventilating. Passing yourself out. But you knew that, right?” Slender fingers darted out to ruffle Sophie's unruly tangles.

Sophie nodded sheepishly. She felt more embarrassed than anything. The time she'd spent in the purgatory of the waiting room had dulled her terror, numbing her out with its abrasive atmosphere: fluorescent lights, a too-loud television bolted to the wall, the sick old man in the corner moaning steadily, a trio of hyperactive kids dashing in shrieking arcs. Her own mother grumbling bitter grumbles about having to miss work so that she could bring her careless daughter to her very place of employment.

“You do not know what it is like to be here and not be getting paid,” she hissed to Sophie, slapping an ancient copy of
Better Homes and Gardens
shut on her lap. She glanced furtively at intake, where her arch nemesis, a coworker named Dorothy, was resentfully pushing papers. “She better not call me over for anything. I am not on the clock.”

Sophie sunk down in the busted waiting-room seat, ashamed at the drama she'd stirred. She felt profoundly tired; all she wanted to do was collapse into her bed with the sheets so cool, sheets worn so soft they felt thin as Kleenex in places, her lovely bed filled with all her smells. She wanted to tuck herself in and drift away in the dusk,
fading like the summer sky outside her window. She wanted real dreams, dreams with senseless plots and absurd juxtapositions, normal dreams that didn't leave you haunted by new emotions. Dreams that occurred at night, as they should, unfurling through the darkest hours. She wanted to wake up fresh, this dumbest of days behind her, becoming history, just one of the millions of days lived and forgotten. But first she'd have to see Dr. Chen.