Before and Afterlives

  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, yawning.

  And when he removed his hands from his bleary eyes, Helena 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 asthat creature—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 channels 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 merfolk 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 condition. 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 Jordan 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 attempting 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 mermaid’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. Helena 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.

  Hesitantly, Helena lifted her hand and slapped her across the face. Then the screaming choked off. “That’s enough out of you, young lady,” said Helena. She looked at her hand, pink from the slap, then back at the mermaid, who clutched at her cheek. It was the same cheek, already bruised and swollen with dead black blood from whatever accident had knocked her out and washed her ashore two days before. Helena could tell it hurt enough as it was. Now she knew it hurt even more.

  Embarrassed, she stood and pushed her way past Paul, out of the room. Past Paul, who told the mermaid, “That’s a fine way to act, now isn’t it?”

  Helena tried finding things for the mermaid to eat. She experimented with seafood first, offering up a plate of lemon-pepper whitefish on a bed of rice. But the mermaid wrinkled her nose and pushed the plate aside. When Helena brought her fried calamari, she hid her face underwater, and when presented with a bowl of fruit she pinched her nose between her finger and thumb. Paul chuckled when informed of this last reaction. “She finds the scent of apples repulsive?” he asked. And Helena shrugged, throwing her hands in the air.

  “She has to eat, Paul,” said Helena. She lay on the white leather couch in the living room, her head on the armrest, her feet elevated on pillows, exhausted. She’d been bustling around for the past two days with more energy than Paul had seen in her for the past year. Whenever she wasn’t in the bathroom with the mermaid, she was fixing up the house. Patching cracks in the walls, polishing furniture, upending reclining chairs to sweep beneath them. There was so much to be done, she murmured as she went. She had let it all go, it had all gone astray.

  “Let me have a try,” Paul offered. Helena had been staring at the ceiling, at a brown spider-shaped waterstain she wanted to erase, but she turned her head toward him when he spoke.

  “You?” She squinted at
him.

  “Yes,me,” Paul said. “I’ll take care of it.” Then he rose from his chair, grabbed his jacket from the hall closet, and left the house.

  Paul sincerely wanted to help. Even though he was still angry with Helena, he couldn’t stand to see her banging her head against walls over that creature. He’d been hoping she’d stop playing these games with herself. Over a month ago, he’d found a journal she’d been keeping secretly, in which she wrote long florid letters to their daughter. Or in which she wrote down detailed memories she wanted to capture before forgetting. He had found an entry that read: “My memories flash over my mind, like lightning briefly illuminating a dark landscape.” He hadn’t known his wife was a poet. He still didn’t know if she was a good one or not. And he had found: “Dearest Jordan, I miss you so. When are you coming home? I found a coffee stain the other day and thought of you. Perhaps you made it, before you left? I’m not mad, though. We’ll get new carpet! It’ll be an excuse.”

  She collected old newspaper clippings, stories from over two decades before, now yellowed with age. Articles detailing the resurfacing of the merfolk. They had come with a message, although it took months for translations to occur. They didn’t use words but spoke with squeals and clicks, like whales and dolphins. They were sad, they said. So sad to see us still walking on land. It looked painful and exhausting. And why, they wondered, did we continue to put ourselves through this self-imposed exile? It tortured them to see us torturing ourselves. Come home, they said. You’ve proven your point. All is forgiven.

  They had disappeared soon after arriving, had only stay a few months. And soon after, people began disappearing as well. Or so it was said. Paul knew that Helena considered this to be a possibility with Jordan: that she’d gone down beneath the waves to join them. “Others have,” Helena said. “A girl who lived down the street from me did. Martha. Martha Pechanski.”

  But Paul didn’t believe Jordan chose that route. A year ago now—the last time he saw her—she’d been living with a group of squatters in an abandoned tenement in LA. A friend of Jordan’s had phoned him, or someone who had once been a friend, and said she no longer attended classes at UCLA. That she’d hooked into a group, a bad group, the friend said. And that this is where you will find her.

  Paul went one day, without Helena, and found Jordan in a dreary room, wearing stained jeans (stained with what, he couldn’t tell) and a threadbare T-shirt with the wordBillabong fading on its front. She’d been a surfer, and still had her board with her even then. Her hair was matted into dull and frizzy coils, almost dreadlocks. He shivered, seeing her like this. “Why?” he had asked. And she had replied, stroking the board that lay across her lap, “Because it’s all a lie.” He asked what she was talking about, he wanted her to tell him what it was that was all a lie, but Jordan would not elaborate. She only stroked her board like a cat.

  She was high on meth, he discovered. He went home and told Helena, who shouted and screamed and immediately made him drive her to the place. By then, though, Jordan was gone again. “Why didn’t you bring me with you?” Helena had demanded. “Why didn’t you letme talk to her?” Paul had no answers for her then. He still didn’t.

  He stopped at an Asian grocery a few blocks from their house, where he bought food and drove home between the roadside corridors of palm trees. At home he unpacked the items in his experiment while Helena scrutinized everything. All of it was Japanese food, she pointed out. “I know,” Paul said. “Take this to her.” He held out a clear plastic package filled with sheets of greenish-black, papyrus-like material, which Helena sniffed at doubtfully.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Roasted seaweed,” Paul told her.

  Martha. Martha Pechanski. The girl with the green eyes and blonde hair, the blonde hair that reached down to the small of her back. And those legs—those legs that turned anyone’s head. Twenty-three when Helena was seventeen, the girl who lived down the street, the girl who married into the sea. There were two stories about Martha Pechanski and Helena knew them both.

  One story said Martha drowned herself in the ocean. She had tied plastic grocery bags filled with rocks around her belt loops and walked out and out, into the waves, until they covered her head like a veil. She was a sad girl, some said, cut quite a tragic figure. Had problems that no one else knew about. A person would say this while twirling a finger beside an ear. But Helena never liked those who insinuated Martha was crazy.

  The other story said Martha Pechanski had fallen in love with a merman she met while surfing one day. She’d been out early in the morning, her legs straddling the board, waiting for a wave, when his head burst out of the water. Like a dolphin or a seal. Some said it was her legs he had noticed from beneath, dangling in the water.

  The merman’s eyes were like two black glass beads and his hair was moss green. His skin was ivory and his muscles moved beneath his skin like light rippling on water. If you kiss me forever, he told Martha, I can breathe for us both beneath the sea. And so she went, clasped in his arms, mouth on his cold mouth, his strong tail pushing them down deep, deeper, until they reached home. There she developed gills and a tail of her own and soon she forgot her former life. It was only in dreams, sometimes, that Martha possessed those head-turning legs once again. And in those dreams, her legs took her step by step back down to the water.

  A sea gift, Helena thought. What the sea takes, it gives back in return. She leaned over the edge of the tub and watched the mermaid devour sheet after sheet of the seaweed paper. “You like that, don’t you?” she said. That and the raw shrimp Paul bought, and the tuna and the salmon eggs. She was a luxurious girl, this one. This mermaid here, now she was a fussy one.

  Over the past few days she had eaten her fill of the groceries Paul bought; she had calmed down a bit. With her stomach full, she’d given Helena this gift of proximity. She was allowed to be closer now, although the food had to keep coming. They fed her raw oysters, popping them into her mouth like grapes. The days were good, filled with peace and harmony once again. The only cloud obstructing their place in the sun was that several homeless people were sleeping under the deck again. Helena found them. Or rather, heard them, whispering beneath the deck. Let them stay, she told herself. A sea gift, she thought. A gift from the sea.

  That and a neighbor had phoned to tell Paul he was bringing someone over to inspect his house; it seemed its foundation had been undermined over the past few years, and the seawall hadn’t helped as much as they had hoped. Paul mentioned the call to Helena, but she didn’t hear him. “We should get ours looked at as well,” Paul said. “And soon. I start fall classes in less than a month.”

  “Do it then,” Helena said. She didn’t have time for that. She’d given up on the house to devote herself to the well being of this girl, this beautiful girl in the bathtub.

  She ran a comb through the mermaid’s dark, tangled hair. It was a silver comb, an heirloom handed down for generations in Helena’s family. The mermaid seemed to enjoy it. She looked at the comb as though she might lick it. She seemed very partial to beautiful combs, Helena thought. Perhaps she lost her own in the accident?

  The mermaid grinned at Helena, showing those crooked pearls for teeth. She wagged her tail happily at the other end of the tub. She had accidentally knocked a vial of lavender bath salts off of a shelf at the far end of the tub the day before and when they fell in they had clouded through the water, turning it a light purple, perfuming the air. They had been Jordan’s. And now she smelled quite like Jordan used to, Helena thought. A little briny from all of that surfing, and a little lavender as well. Something above and something below.

  The night before, Helena had had another dream. This time she’d been invited to a talk show, by an uplifting, sentimental host—a woman who was soft and fleshy and obstinately maternal. The show was about people who had disappeared and the loved ones left behind. Paul refused to come, but Helena told the motherly host everything, her whole story, in front of a studio a
udience. The audience cried at all the sad parts, which made her happy. Somehow, she thought, she’d told Jordan’s story right.

  When Helena had finished, the host waggled her eyebrows teasingly and said, “We’ve searched long and hard, far and deep, and we’ve found someone we think you’d like to see, Helena.” A door opened on the set then, and out walked Jordan, young and beautiful, eager to be in Helena’s arms. Tears were shed by all. The audience applauded and applauded again. And when all had quieted down, Helena asked, “Why, honey?”

  But Jordan didn’t answer. Helena smelled something fishy. She held her daughter out at arm’s length. There was seaweed braided through her hair. The talk show host commented on how fashionable it looked. She asked, “Where did you have it done, dear?” Jordan opened her mouth to answer, but a scream spilled out instead. The scream spilled out and flooded the studio set, washed over the audience, and shattered the camera lenses. This broadcast was at an end. When Helena woke, her head was filled with static from a dead television channel.

  Helena began to hum a wordless tune, thankful that the dream hadn’t been as futile as the ones that came before it. This one had a bit of hope. The mermaid now had finished off the seaweed sheets and was lounging extravagantly with her head nestled on the lip of the tub while Helena combed through her hair, freeing it of sea substances. Soon it would no longer be encumbered by kelp. A sea gift, Helena thought again. But now, thinking that, something made her afraid.

  What if she had gotten it all wrong? she wondered. She remembered the articles about the merfolk resurfacing. They had said, “You came from the sea and to the sea you shall return.”

  But she’d been thinking of this process the other way around. Jordan had gone into the sea and returned. Certainly a little changed, but returned nonetheless. What if—and she cringed at this thought—what if this beautiful girl in the tub would have to go back? She had come from the sea. Would she have to go back? Helena couldn’t bear that. She’d lost too much already.