Before and Afterlives

  The mermaid had fallen asleep. A mucousy film slid down over her black eyes, clouding them, making her look blind. “I need something from you,” Helena whispered. “Not much. Just something to remember you by, in case you have to go.”

  She stood and padded out of the bathroom, returning a few moments later with a pair of orange-handled scissors. Kneeling beside the tub, she plucked a long tress of black hair away from the mermaid’s face, lifting it to get at its roots. It smelled of lavender and of something dark and underwater. Sliding it between the mouth of the scissors, she gently squeezed them closed.

  Paul was on the back deck drinking a glass of bourbon when he heard the screams. At first he thought it might be another of the mermaid’s fits, but soon he realized someone was in pain. He flew through the house until he came to the bathroom and grabbed hold of the doorframe to stop from running any further.

  Helena sat on the floor with her legs folded beneath her, holding a pair of scissors in one hand and a hank of hair in the other. The mermaid writhed in the tub, throwing her tail back and forth, cracking it against the wall. Paint flaked off, and plaster had begun to fall away as well. Green blood pulsed out of her scalp, pouring over her face. “Shh, please, shh,” Helena pleaded. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, I only meant.” She reached out to touch the mermaid reassuringly, but was rejected with bloody hands.

  The mermaid squealed like a child. She screeched like a gull. She stuttered an annoying patter of clicks and stops, then moaned a deep mournful song that climbed steeply into a howl. “What have you done, Helena?” Paul asked. But Helena only shook her head, as if nothing was wrong. Nothing at all.

  “That’s enough,” Paul said. He plunged his hands into the bath water and pulled the mermaid out. His back strained and he nearly buckled over. Her scales scraped at his flesh and a pink rash, the color of a fresh burn, bloomed on the insides of his arms. “It’s no good,” he told Helena. “I’m sending her home.”

  As soon as he made it to the back deck, Helena was up on her feet and behind him. “Wait, Paul, don’t do this. You don’t understand. You don’t understand.” But he didn’t listen. He stepped down and down until his feet reached sand, and then he headed off in the direction of the nearest pier. He could see its lights in the distance, like strange pearls floating in midair.

  “No, Paul,” Helena shouted as he stalked away, down the beach. But he didn’t listen to her, only kept walking. She balled her hands into fists and hit the deck railing in front of her, then sat down in a chair and wept. “What’s happened?” she thought. “What’s happened? And why all of that blood?” Her thoughts raced in circles. She struggled to catch one. If she could only sort this out, she could stop things from progressing, she knew.

  But her thoughts stopped abruptly, interrupted by what sounded like voices. Beneath her feet. Beneath the deck. “Go away,” Helena murmured, but they continued to chatter beneath her anyway. “Go away, I said.” She raised her voice. She stamped her foot on the floorboard beneath her. “Get out!” she screamed. “Get out of here!” She stood from her chair and began jumping up and down on the deck. The boards twittered beneath her. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Beneath the deck, beneath her feet, they could see light from overhead, filling the cracks between the floorboards. Dust and sand sifted down between the cracks each time the woman jumped. “Get the hell out of here!” she screamed. And so they gathered up their sleeping bags and scrabbled down the boulders.

  Helena watched them go. They scurried away like beach squirrels or rats. She yelled at them once more, for good measure. Then they disappeared, swallowed by the night.

  “Where was I?” she thought. “Green blood,” she reminded herself. “Start there. Find the thread and go back.” What had happened?

  But before she could begin again, the house moved beneath her, disturbed by its dreams. It shifted and trembled, as if an earthquake were occurring. The windows rattled in their frames. Pictures fell from their walls. The cracks Helena had patched days ago reappeared. She stood in the doorway between the deck and the house and waited to see what would happen.

  For the entire length of the pier, Paul carried the mermaid in his arms like a bride. He staggered with her past fishermen with buckets full of sand sharks, past a cigarette stand closed for the night, past rollerbladers executing stunts on steps and benches. He walked all the way to the end of the pier, where a restaurant had been built as a tourist trap. People came here and went home to their friends and told them, “I ate over the ocean.” As Paul passed by its plate glass windows, the people inside pointed out at him, or pressed their faces against the tinted glass to stare.

  At the end of the pier, he lifted the mermaid over the rails and said, “Goodbye.” For a moment, as he looked into her eyes, her face melted like hot wax and reformed itself into his daughter’s face. He released her then, and she spiraled down to the black ocean like a green ribbon snatched from someone’s hand by the wind. There was a splash, and then when he leaned over the rails to search for signs of her, he found nothing but the reflected yellow light from the pier lamps striping the black water.

  Back at the house, the house that now swayed and creaked like a storm-tossed ship, Helena had fallen into bed. Furniture scraped across the floors. Wine glasses dropped from their racks in the kitchen to shatter like icicles against the linoleum floor. The house was crumbling, sliding slowly down the cliffside. With each bump and unexpected movement, Helena was tossed around on her bed. The tide was sweeping in, hissing up to meet the house on the beach. Soon it would be high tide and the house would no longer be a house. It would be a boat. A house boat. It would drift, unmoored, out to sea. By sunrise Helena expects she and the house will have already traveled some distance, but not so far out she’ll be unable to step onto the back deck and wave to Paul, who will be on the beach. A tiny black speck scratching his head, wondering what was happening. She will wave to him with both arms, big enough for him to see. And then—because it’s obvious now this house is unsound, its cracks appearing everywhere, certainly not a seaworthy vessel—she will abandon ship. She will wait till sunset, when the sun floats over the waves, and then she’ll jump so that Paul and any other spectators will see her as a silhouette against it. A red disc spread out on the white sky, like Japan’s flag, and inside it, a graceful woman diving into the sea.

  She will take with her only the mermaid’s tress of hair, tied around her neck like a choker. And perhaps it will gift her with powers. Perhaps it will enable her to breathe water. Then she will swim down, like the Pechanski girl, like Martha, that crazy in love girl from her youth, and she will search the coral kingdoms for Jordan.

  Perhaps one day she will wash ashore, a naked woman covered with nothing but her own bruises, who has been to the ends of the earth, to history, and back. And maybe someone will find her there and drag her home.

  Helena rocks on the waves of her bed. The house rocks on the waves of the ocean. She understands that going under with only a lock of hair in her possession is not the sanest plan.

  Still, she brings the hair to her face and inhales its salty lavender scent once more. She tells herself, “It will do.”

  Dead Boy Found

  All this started when my father told my mother she was a waste. He said, “You are such a waste, Linda,” and she said, “Oh, yeah? You think so? We’ll see about that.” Then she got into her car and pulled out of our driveway, throwing gravel in every direction. She was going to Abel’s, or so she said, where she could have a beer and find herself a real man.

  Halfway there, though, she was in a head-on collision with a drunk woman named Lucy, who was on her way home, it happened, from Abel’s. They were both driving around that blind curve on Highway 88, Lucy swerving a little, my mother smoking cigarette after cigarette, not even caring where the ashes fell. When they leaned their cars into the curve, Lucy crossed into my mother’s lane. Bam! Just like that. My mother’s car rolled three times into the ditch and Lucy?
??s car careened into a guardrail. It was Lucy who called the ambulance on her cellular phone, saying, over and over, “My God, I’ve killed Linda McCormick, I’ve killed that poor girl.”

  At that same moment, Gracie Highsmith was becoming famous. While out searching for new additions to her rock collection, she had found the missing boy’s body buried beneath the defunct railroad tracks just a couple of miles from my house. The missing boy had been missing for two weeks. He disappeared on his way home from a Boy Scout meeting. He and Gracie were both in my class. I never really talked to either of them much, but they were all right. You know, quiet types. Weird, some might say. But I’m not the judgmental sort. I keep my own counsel. I go my own way. If Gracie Highsmith wanted to collect rocks and if the missing boy wanted to be a Boy Scout, more power to them.

  We waited several hours at the hospital before they let us see my mother. Me, my brother Andy, and my father sat in the lobby reading magazines and drinking coffee. A nurse finally came and got us. She took us up to the seventh floor. She pointed to room number 727 and said we could go on in.

  My mother lay in the hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose. One of her eyes had swelled shut and was already black and shining. She breathed with her mouth open, a wheezing noise like snoring. There were bloodstains on her teeth. Also several of her teeth were missing. When she woke, blinking her good eye rapidly, she saw me and said, “Baby, come here and give me a hug.”

  I wasn’t a baby, I was fifteen, but I didn’t correct her. I figured she’d been through enough already. A doctor came in and asked my mother how she was feeling. She said she couldn’t feel her legs. He said that he thought that might be a problem, but that it would probably work itself out over time. There was swelling around her spinal cord. “It should be fine after a few weeks,” he told us.

  My father started talking right away, saying things like, “We all have to pull together. We’ll get through this. Don’t worry.” Eventually his fast talking added up to mean something. When we brought my mother home, he put her in my bed so she could rest properly, and I had to bunk with Andy. For the next few weeks, he kept saying things like, “Don’t you worry, honey. It’s time for the men to take over.” I started doing the dishes and Andy vacuumed. My father took out the trash on Tuesdays. He brought home pizza or cold cuts for dinner.

  I wasn’t angry about anything. I want to make that clear right off. I mean, stupid stuff like this just happens. It happens all the time. One day you’re just an average fifteen year old with stupid parents and a brother who takes out his aggressions on you because he’s idiotic and his friends think it’s cool to see him belittle you in public, and suddenly something happens to make things worse. Believe me, morbidity is not my specialty. Bad things just happen all at once. My grandma said bad things come in threes. Two bad things had happened: My mother was paralyzed and Gracie Highsmith found the missing boy’s body. If my grandma was still alive, she’d be trying to guess what would happen next.

  I mentioned this to my mother while I spooned soup up to her trembling lips. She could feed herself all right, but she seemed to like the attention. “Bad things come in threes,” I said. “Remember Grandma always said that?”

  She said, “You’re grandma was uneducated.”

  I said, “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She said, “She didn’t even get past eighth grade, Adam.”

  I said, “I knew that already.”

  “Well I’m just reminding you.”

  “Okay,” I said, and she took another spoonful of chicken broth.

  At school everyone talked about the missing boy. “Did you hear about Jamie Marks?” they all said. “Did you hear about Gracie Highsmith?”

  I pretended like I hadn’t, even though I’d watched the news all weekend and considered myself an informed viewer. I wanted to hear what other people would say. A lot of rumors circulated already. Our school being so small made that easy. Seventh through twelfth grade all crammed into the same building, elbow to elbow, breathing each other’s breath.

  They said Gracie saw one of his fingers poking out of the gravel, like a zombie trying to crawl out of its grave. They said that after she removed a few stones, one of his blue eyes stared back at her, and that she screamed and threw the gravel back at his eye and ran home. They said, sure enough, when the police came later, they found the railroad ties loose, with the bolts broken off of them. So they removed them, dug up the gravel, shoveling for several minutes, and found Jamie Marks. Someone said a cop walked away to puke.

  I sat through Algebra and Biology and History, thinking about cops puking, thinking about the missing boy’s body. I couldn’t stop thinking about those two things. I liked the idea of seeing one of those cops who set up speed traps behind bushes puking out his guts, holding his stomach. I wasn’t sure what I thought about Jamie’s dead body rotting beneath railroad ties. And what a piece of work, to have gone to all that trouble to hide the kid in such a place! It didn’t help that at the start of each class all the teachers said they understood if we were disturbed, or anxious, and that we should talk if needed, or else they could recommend a good psychologist to our parents.

  I sat at my desk with my chin propped in my hands, chewing an eraser, imagining Jamie Marks under the rails staring at the undersides of trains as they rumbled over him. Those tracks weren’t used anymore, not since the big smash up with a school bus back in the 80’s, but I imagined trains on them anyway. Jamie inhaled each time a glimpse of sky appeared between boxcars and exhaled when they covered him over. He dreamed when there were no trains rolling over him, when there was no metallic scream on the rails. When he dreamed, he dreamed of trains again, blue sparks flying off the iron railing, and he gasped for breath in his sleep. A ceiling of trains covered him. He almost suffocated, there were so many.

  After school, my brother Andy said, “We’re going to the place, a bunch of us. Do you want to come?” Andy’s friends were all seniors and they harassed me a lot, so I shook my head and said no. “I have to see a friend and collect five dollars he owes me,” I said, even though I hadn’t loaned out money to anyone in weeks.

  I went home and looked through school yearbooks and found Jamie Marks smiling from his square in row two. I cut his photo out with my father’s exacto knife and stared at it for a while, then turned it over. On the other side was a picture of me. I swallowed and swallowed until my throat hurt. I didn’t like that picture of me anyway, I told myself. It was a bad picture. I had baby fat when it was taken, and looked more like a little kid. I flipped the photo over and over, like a coin, and wondered, If it had been me, would I have escaped? I decided it must have been too difficult to get away from them—I couldn’t help thinking there had to be more than one murderer—and probably I would have died just the same.

  I took the picture outside and buried it in my mother’s garden between the rows of sticks that had, just weeks before, marked off the sections of vegetables, keeping carrots carrots and radishes radishes. I patted the dirt softly, inhaled its crisp dirt smell, and whispered, “Don’t you worry. Everything will be all right.”

  When my mother started using a wheelchair, she was hopeful, even though the doctors had changed their minds and said she’d never walk again. She told us not to worry. She enjoyed not always having to be on her feet. She figured out how to pop wheelies, and would show off in front of guests. “What a burden legs can be!” she told us. Even so, I sometimes found her wheeled into dark corners, her head in her hands, saying, “No, no, no,” sobbing.

  That woman, Lucy, kept calling and asking my mother to forgive her, but my mother told us to say she wasn’t home and that she was contacting lawyers and that they’d have Lucy so broke within seconds, they’d make her pay real good. I told Lucy, “She isn’t home,” and Lucy said, “My God, tell that poor woman I’m so sorry. Ask her to please forgive me.”

  I told my mother Lucy was sorry, and the next time Lucy called, my mother decided to hear her out. Their c
onversation sounded like when my mom talks to her sister, my Aunt Beth, who lives in California near the ocean, a place I’ve never visited. My mother kept shouting, “No way! You too?! I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?! Oh Lucy, this is too much.”

  Two hours later, Lucy pulled into our driveway, blaring her horn. My mother wheeled herself outside, smiling and laughing. Lucy was tall and wore red lipstick, and her hair was permed real tight. She wore plastic bracelets and hoop earrings, and stretchy hot pink pants. She bent down and hugged my mother, then helped her into the car. They drove off together, laughing, and when they came home several hours later, I smelled smoke and whiskey on their breath.

  “What’s most remarkable,” my mother kept slurring, “is that I was on my way to the bar, sober, and Lucy was driving home, drunk.” They’d both had arguments with their husbands that day; they’d both run out to make their husbands jealous. Learning all this, my mother and Lucy felt destiny had brought them together. “A virtual Big Bang,” said my mother.

  Lucy said, “A collision of souls.”

  The only thing to regret was that their meeting had been so painful. “But great things are born out of pain,” my mother told me, nodding in a knowing way. “If I had to be in an accident with someone,” she said, patting Lucy’s hand, which rested on one of my mother’s wheels, “I’m glad that someone was Lucy.”

  After I buried Jamie’s and my photo, I walked around for a few days bumping into things. Walls, lockers, people. It didn’t matter what, I walked into it. I hadn’t known Jamie all that well, even though we were in the same class. We had different friends. Jamie liked computers; I ran track. Not because I like competition, but because I’m a really good runner, and I like to run, even though my mom always freaks because I was born premature, with undersized lungs. But I remembered Jamie: a small kid with stringy, mouse-colored hair and pale skin. He wore very round glasses and kids sometimes called him Moony. He was supposed to be smart, but I didn’t know about that. I asked a few people at lunch, when the topic was still hot, “What kind of grades did he get? Was he an honors student?” But no one answered. All they did was stare like I’d stepped out of a spaceship.