Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (9 page)

“Really?” Sophie had asked, skeptical, disapproving that her mother was wasting perfectly good food this way.

“You do what you can,” her mother said, resolutely, upending the plastic bag, shaking out the final grains. Sophie never even saw the birds come for the rice. They stayed high above, their scabby claws clutching electrical wires, and the rice grew grimy in the street below, carried away by insects and rain.

Once she noticed the pigeons, Sophie could hear their
coo
, a breathy whistle beneath the steady locomotion of the rumbling sound. The roof was dotted with wide glass bowls of rainwater, and some of the birds bathed in them, their wings stretched surprisingly wide, creating an upwards splash with their scrawny bird legs. Sophie, already in a state of enchantment from the heaps of crystalline glass, found her senses unexpectedly pleased by the pigeons. Their coos were delicate and steady, like a room of devotees chanting
Om
. The architecture of the wing was magnificent, wide and strong at the base, a flying muscle, tapered at the tip. The perfect stripes of the feathers, lightest gray to charcoal, the iridescence of their heads, the fuchsia and green of it matching the gleams of certain glass in the barrels below. Sophie watched the pigeons bathe like a hunter who'd stumbled upon a nymph in an old myth. She moved carefully, as if her activity would startle them into the sky, but they had been watching her for longer than she'd been watching them. As they kept up their murmured coos
and shifted their plump bodies, Sophie spied an appendage, bulky and odd, jutting from the rear of one bird. She squinted in the sun.

“Livia?” she asked. The bird wobbled, settled into itself, its body a nest of feathers, the unmistakable bamboo flute wired to her backside. “Livia!” Sophie felt excited to know the bird—perhaps she should catch it and return it to Dr. Chen! The bird seemed to have liked her, maybe it would come to her easily, as it had walked onto the fingers of its master. Sophie like the idea of being special to an animal, even a useless, dirty one like a pigeon. It was special to have a creature so instinctive seek you out. It must mean there was something good about her, she decided, something subtle that animals, with their refined sense of goodness and danger, could detect. She started to call to Livia again, but noticed another protrusion on the backside of yet another bird. It was the same bamboo whistle the doctor had affixed to her pet. As the flock continued to rustle, Sophie realized that many of the birds had them, hollow whistles that looked like miniature organ pipes bound to their tail feathers. If any of them were Livia it was impossible to say, but certainly they all belonged to Dr. Chen. Did the woman know her pets spent their time lounging at the city dump? Would she care? Sophie stood still, her hand resting on a fat brown jug from another time, her eyes on these mysterious birds. And suddenly, the tremendous, backbeat rumbling stopped, and in its place rushed a silence that made Sophie's ears pop, a roar of nothing. The birds, finally acting like normal pigeons, took off as if a shot had been fired, gracefully swooping in perfect formation. In the
deafening quiet Sophie could hear them pulling music through their flutes, a sound like ribbons would make if ribbons could sing as they fluttered, something high and sweet and liquid whistling through the air, twirling through the clap and smack of wings. The rickety door of the crooked building creaked open, and out stormed her grandmother, with Angel, the glass artist, scuffing behind her.

“I'm telling you, I am hearing it
in
my dreams, and it's giving me nightmares!” Sophie's grandmother was waggling her hands above her head. “I feel like it's my own goddamn head in the tumbler, getting rolled around like a rock. And then I wake up and all I hear is
thu-thunk, thu-thunk, thu-thunk
, and try going back to sleep with that racket! My trailer is
vibrating
with it, Angel.”

Kishka's silver hair still held the stain of long-ago blond upon it, a yellowy tint. Her scratchy, chiffony scarf was knotted around her neck, the ends of the bow fluffing in the breeze of her agitated motions. Behind her stood Angel. Sophie, frozen still on the upended bucket, investigated Angel. Boy, or girl? The tumbler's work pants were baggy and coated with dust and grit. A flannel shirt with its arms ripped off to accommodate the heat. Angel's arms were folded across Angel's chest. Sophie looked for breasts, felt like a creep, looked away. She hadn't noticed any. Angel's arms were muscled, but skinny, too. Was that a scribble of hair poking out under the arms? Was that even a clue? A knit cap was pulled over the person's head, with choppy black hair poking out from underneath. The hair was long for a guy and short for a girl, at least in Chelsea. Angel's face was broad and smooth.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Swankowski, we have a landscaper in Boston who just placed an order, and I'm expecting a design firm in here later this week to clear out most of the finished glass. It's certainly bringing in the money—”

“Listen, buster.” Kishka shook her knuckly fist. “You think I'm worried about
money
? I make my dollars off
garbage
. The only thing this rotten town produces! I'm fine. But you better find a way to quiet that machine or else
you're
out of a job.”

Sophie watched this person named Angel get a little bit smaller, and nod at her grandmother. She wondered if she could do that
thing
she did, the thing she just did to her mom by accident, the thing she stopped herself from doing to Ronald, when she sort of
pushed
herself into another person, and could suddenly feel them so sharply. Was she pushing herself into them, or was she bringing them into herself? Or was she a little bit crazy, had she made herself broken and strange playing the pass-out game? Sophie could feel the pull inside herself, and gave herself over to it. Maybe it was a creepy, sneaky thing to do, like reading someone's diary but worse, snooping in their most private spaces. Surely this was creepier than just scanning Angel's body, looking for breasts or no breasts. Sophie braced herself against the shelf, clutched at the worn, splintery wood, lodged her hip against it, and she sent herself out into Angel. Never had she done such a thing of her own volition; the other times had been involuntary, it had come upon her like a seizure, but Sophie saw now that she could control it, and was a shocked at the speed and the ease with which some part of her
sped toward Angel. She felt that first shimmer of entering a person's sphere, a new flavor almost, one she'd never tasted, a certain shift of mood, she was about to feel what it felt like to be Angel, she opened further with cautious excitement, and that seeking, speeding part of herself smashed against what felt like darkness made solid. The collision was abrupt, like running into a sheet of glass you hadn't known was there. Its shatter knocked Sophie from her perch, tumbled her into a bin of shining beads, sending the blobs of color rolling across the dirt. Sophie's eyes locked with Angel's as she tumbled, the two of them linked somehow, and as her body hit the ground two thoughts rose inside of her:
Angel is a girl, and she knows I tried to do that.

Chapter 6

I
t was only a moment that Sophie was out, but the dream she had in the dark space of her mind felt eternal. She was clutched in the talons of a giant bird, its claws like a cage around her body, its dark feathers batting and disorienting her. Sophie tried to steady herself on the claws but her hand slid off them; she tried to grip the creature's scaly legs but they were so terrible to touch she drew back her hand and gagged. She couldn't breathe with the evil smell of the beast, and began to thrash and kick at the claws, bringing a shriek from the bird as it looped its long neck down and locked its terrible eyes on Sophie. A great razored beak stuck with blood and fur and skin; bulging eyes with ruptured red blood vessels streaking like lightning across the yellowy whites; a knotted chiffon scarf around its neck. It opened the knife of its beak to scream.

“Oh my dear, dear granddaughter! My little bumblebee! My tiny birdie-girl!”

* * *

SOPHIE WAS AWAKE,
gasping air back into her body, the air her fall had knocked from her lungs. She was tangled in the bony limbs of her grandmother. Kishka's feathers fluttered into her face, ticking her eyes—no, it was her scarf, the scarf her grandmother always kept knotted around her neck. Scratchy-soft, spritzed with perfume. Kishka's smell was a deep, green smell, the smell of a lime petrified to stone. It was a hard, heavy smell, something dug from a cave. Kishka smelled of emeralds, if emeralds had a smell. The initial lightness of the perfume was pleasant, but as you inhaled more deeply it grew darker, leaden, til you feared the fumes of it in your lungs. Sophie pushed herself away from her grandmother, and breathed deeply.

“What?” Kishka cried, insulted. “A grandmother can't give her hurt granddaughter some care? I'm just seeing if my little tweety bird is okay,” Kishka watched the girl stand up, unsteady, like a colt just dropped from her mom. Sophie felt dizzy. She was afraid to look at Kishka and see a set of wild, yellowed eyes beneath her regular grandmother eyes—squinty eyes, always peering through a veil of cigarette smoke or against the fierce summer sun. She jumped as her grandmother's bony hands came clutching at her chin—
claws
, Sophie thought, she and her mom always laughed at Kishka's claw-hands, but it wasn't funny now, how did Sophie ever think it was funny, nothing was funny about a grandmother that was also a shrieking bird-monster clutching at your face with her talons. Sophie jerked away but Kishka's grip grew tighter,
her fingers sinking into the girl's skin and then releasing. All the while Sophie kept her eyes closed, afraid to look, even though the scene of the vicious bird clawing at her face was no better.

“Oh, dear.” Kishka pulled her hand away from Sophie's chin, and Sophie opened her eyes. Kishka's fingernails were pointy and ragged, with blotches of chipped-away nail polish here and there but the splash of red on the jagged tip of her thumb wasn't polish at all. Sophie stared at her grandmother, dizzy and horrified, as she licked the girl's blood from her claws. “You hurt yourself,” she said, nodding at the scrape, beading with blood. She slid her jagged nails into the knot of her scarf and freed it, quickly daubed at the cut on Sophie's face. Sophie jumped back at the touch, but Kishka's hands were like an iron vise upon her.

“What is
wrong
with you?” her grandmother spat. “I'm trying to fix you up from your tumble and you're acting like I'm trying to kill you! You bang your head or something?” Kishka opened her mouth and her tongue slid out to moisten the scarf. Sophie shut her eyes again but too late, too late, the sight of her grandmother's tongue, thin and pale as a worm, forked like a snake and rising from a coil at the back of her throat, made her feel sick.

“There, there.” Kishka patted the wound gently with the moistened scarf, cleaning the red smears off Sophie's chin. The old woman glanced at Angel. “Well, children hate getting a spit bath from an adult, but it's my right as a grandmother, isn't it?” She knotted the scarf back around her neck and pulled Sophie in for a hug.

“My little Humpty Dumpty took a real tumble, didn't you? Did you bang your noggin?” She released Sophie, held her at arms length, her hands on her shoulders. Kishka smiled, a smile Sophie had seen all her life.
Had
she bonked her noggin?

She placed her hands gingerly on the top of her head, on her shoulders and knees, on her face. No part of her body felt hurt, but some strange place inside her felt deeply bruised.

The thought of the bird, of her grandmother's tongue, sent a pukey feeling straight through her. It had been like a vision from the pass-out game, only terrible. Sophie worried that she had brought that dream space too close, and now her body was falling into it on its own.

“You only tumbled from a little bucket, for goodness sake,” Kishka said. “I think you just gave yourself a scare. You gave us a scare, too! When did your lazy mother drop you off? Oh, here—Angel, this is my granddaughter, Sophie. She got her mother mad at her and now she's going to be staying here at the dump all summer. Sophie, this is Angel. He runs the glass recycling until I tear it down and fire him. Which is any minute.”

Sophie looked at Angel, and Angel winked at her. It was a quick wink, so quick wondered if she'd really seen it. As she reached to shake Sophie's hand, Angel winked again, slower, if a wink can be slowed. “Great to meet you.” Angel's voice was gruff, but female. Sophie peered at her. What was this strange day when everyone was something else? Angel pushed a bit of hair behind her cap with—well, could hands be male or female? Sophie was starting to feel dumb.
She knew Angel was a girl, but her nana seemed to think Angel was a guy, and Angel somehow knew that Sophie knew she was a girl, and appeared to enjoy putting one over on her boss. Sophie relaxed, relieved to be included in the joke, if that's what it was.

“No egg on your head?” Kishka reached out and ruffled Sophie's curls, her fingers getting stuck in a snarl. “Well, what the—doesn't that mother of yours comb your hair? It's a rat's nest!”

“I'm fine, Nana,” Sophie finally spoke. She helped pull her grandmother's fingers from her hair. Just regular-old fingers, bony and old. Sophie's hair tangled easily; if she didn't brush it each morning the snarls formed in sleep would continue to weave together throughout the day. She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and pulled the mess of it quickly into a bun. “Mom's really busy,” Sophie explained. “She had to get to work.”