He kept hurting her, over and over. He’d come back and stay with my grandmother just long enough for her to become attached, even hopeful, and then he’d vanish. Poof. Gone.
ii.
LAURA AND I LIKE TO JOKE THAT WE MET ON THE BOTTOM OF THE ocean, that we swam up to each other—just two lonely people drifting along the dark, empty moonscape of the ocean floor—and introduced ourselves.
“Hello,” I said, which, underwater, came out more like: “Mebbo.” Bubbles tumbled from my mouth as I spoke.
“Hi,” Laura managed, her hair swaying around her face.
The truth is that Laura and I met at the aquarium, where she was doing evaluation work for its public relations department. I had gone to the aquarium to see an exhibit that had just opened, an exhibit on deep ocean life that was causing a big stir in the news.
The exhibit was called “Creatures of the Deep: Life in the Bathypelagic Zone,” and everyone I knew was talking about it. The opening had been a big event for the state of Florida. Politicians had come, and local celebrities.
The exhibit featured fish from the deepest parts of the ocean, strange, frightening fish that had never been on display before. Until this particular exhibit, no one had been able to successfully bring any bathypelagic fish up from the depths. The captured specimens had always died as a result of the massive changes in pressure that occurred as the traps were brought up toward the surface.
But in acquiring their specimens, the marine biologists at our aquarium had used a brand-new type of trap from Australia called a PrAc, which stood for pressure acclimatization. A PrAc trap gave a fish time to adjust to a low-pressure tank by reducing the atmospheric pressure inside the trap a fraction at a time, over a period of days.
Even Liam was going on about the exhibit. He called me at work to push me to go. “They have weirdos you have to see to believe,” he said.
I could hear seagulls behind his voice. Liam owned five wrecking yards around the state and was basically retired. He lived with his wife on their houseboat, which was huge, with three stories, like a penthouse bobbing on the water.
“I’m not much for aquariums,” I said. “I’ll send Jesus or Marco. They’ll report back.”
“No. I insist. Take the day off tomorrow and go see this exhibit. It’ll clear your head.”
“My head is clear,” I said.
There was a pause from Liam’s end. Just the birds, the lapping waves.
“What?” I said.
“Your head isn’t clear,” he said. “It hasn’t been clear since you broke up with what’s-her-name. Angie? Angeline?”
“Anne,” I said.
“It hasn’t been clear since her.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re taking time off,” said Liam. “Go see some fishes. Tomorrow.”
So I did. I took the day off and I went through the motions. I drove up to the aquarium, the whole time just wanting to go back to the yard. The exhibit did take my mind off things, though. It was easy to lose myself once I’d made it through the line and down the long, winding ramp leading to the exhibition’s main gallery.
The gallery was a world unto itself, a winding maze of underwater glass tunnels and exhibit halls. Behind one window was something called a gulper eel, a black, eight-foot serpent with razor-sharp teeth and a mouth that billowed open like a sack, wide enough to engulf a small child. Behind another window swam a deep-sea angler, a vicious animal with beady eyes, and oversize fangs sticking out of its mouth. From a stalk on its head hung a little lure that glowed bright white, like a bare bulb, swaying back and forth to attract victims.
Then there was a fish that seemed to be wearing all its organs in sacks hanging on the outside of its body. Across the hall was a fish with extra rows of teeth inside its throat. And whipping around in a tank by the water fountain was a slimy, worm-like animal called an Atlantic hagfish.
Also known as the slime eel, read the hagfish’s information plaque, the hagfish eats by burrowing inside of unsuspecting passersby, then devouring them little by little from the inside out.
The hagfish thrashed about inside its tank, leaving gooey smear marks on the glass.
They were like monsters, these creatures, like things come to life from my childhood nightmares. These were what hid beneath all that beautiful ocean. These were what lurked in the darkness.
I walked over to a bench in front of the angler’s tank and sat down. I began thinking about Anne again, and how badly things had ended. How, like always, I’d changed into someone I hardly recognized, someone I hated.
“She’s really amazing, isn’t she, the angler?”
An attractive girl was standing beside me, twenty-four, maybe twenty-five years old. She was wearing a blue skirt and blazer. A security tag hung from her neck on a chain.
“She’s the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my whole life.”
The girl smiled. “Well, granted, she’s not about to win any pageants. But the guys like her. See all those fins sticking out of her stomach?”
I noticed a crop of little tube-like shapes protruding from the angler’s belly.
“Those aren’t actually fins. They’re male anglers. The males, they attach themselves to a female and fuse to her body. And then after a while their insides dissolve and they become these pouches of sperm she can use when she feels like reproducing.”
“That’s sweet,” I said.
The girl laughed. “Was that totally disgusting, what I just told you?”
“Which part, the fusing to the female’s body, or the insides dissolving?”
Her smile was lovely, almost too wide for her face, with a single dimple in one cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You talk to kids all day and you get a little loopy. I’m Laura.”
“Jacob,” I said.
“So, Jacob,” she said. “What do you like best about the new hall? I’m doing a survey.”
“I don’t know. I’ve just been in here. The ugly room.”
She sighed and shook her head in a teasing way. “Come with me,” she said.
I got up and followed Laura through the gallery. Children ran past us, laughing and yelling. I watched her walk, watched the way her dark hair swung across her back.
We came to a room off the main throughway. Like in the others, the walls here were all glass. Behind them hovered schools of differently colored jellyfish. They glowed brilliantly in the dark blue water. Their movements were so elegant, the way their bells expanded and contracted in a dreamy, billowing slow motion. The rhythm was like breathing, like a deep, slow breathing. Then, all at once, the whole bunch changed colors in unison, like the turning panels of a kaleidoscope. The bells went from violet to green to bright yellow.
“Better?” said Laura.
“Better.”
“This is my favorite room. Look at that one, over there,” she said, gesturing at a lone jellyfish hovering in a tank across the way. It was enormous; it looked like some kind of mutant, with a bell that was at least five feet across. Its huge tentacles lay coiled along the tank’s floor. It was hideous but lovely at the same time, a huge upswell of color and light.
“It’s amazing how much pressure these animals live under. This jelly, right here—you find it almost two miles beneath the surface. The pressure down there feels like an elephant standing on every square inch of your body. Isn’t that wild?”
She waited for me to answer. The giant jellyfish was glowing a pale orange. The light coming from its bell was soft, like firelight, and Laura appeared very beautiful in it.
“Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” I said.
“You’re asking me out?” she said.
“Usually, when I find a woman I like I just fuse myself to her body. But I’m trying something new.”
Laura laughed. “So, Jacob,” she said, holding up her pad again. “What’s your favorite part of the new hall?”
“That depends on what you’re doing later,” I said.
I did
my best to win Laura over once we started dating. I liked her right away. She was bright and driven and funny. There was a toughness about her, too, a stubbornness that I found sexy. If she began reading a book she’d always read it all the way through, even if she hated it, especially if she hated it.
“I feel like it got the best of me if I put it down,” she said to me one night, when I woke up to find her sitting in the bathroom, on the lip of the bathtub, reading a novel she’d already read once and disliked for its confusing ending.
It made me smile, seeing her in her nightgown, squinting at her book in the bathroom in the middle of the night, so tired, but so determined.
“What?” she said, looking at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“What?” she said again, laughing now. She threw the book at me.
I couldn’t get enough of her those first few months. I took her to all my favorite places. I took her to a restaurant out on the pier. I bought her a pair of rhinestone cowboy boots and took her dancing at a place I loved, a country music bar that was located on an alligator farm. To get in you had to cross a rope bridge suspended above the hatchery, with all those yellow, prehistoric eyes staring up at you.
“Okay, I give up. I surrender,” Laura said to me, laughing as we left the dance floor and returned to our booth, both of us tipsy. She flopped down and put her cowboy boots on my lap. “Where have you been all my life?” she said.
I pulled a tack from one of her boot heels. “I should tell you something,” I said.
She squinted at me. “This isn’t the part when you tell me you’re married, right?”
“I’m not married,” I said.
“You’re not in love with someone else.”
“I’m in love with you.”
“What?” she said. The band had started up again, and she had to shout over the music.
“I’m in love with you!” I said.
She grinned. “I’m in love with you too, fool!”
“Listen, though.” I paused, trying to figure out how to put it. An image of Anne came back to me: Anne lying curled up on the bed, crying. Screaming at me through her hands.
“Why are you doing this?” she yells. “Why are you ruining us?”
And I can see myself standing over her, not caring, saying terrible things to her.
“Who are you?” Anne says through the cage of her fingers. “For eight months everything’s great, and then, one day, out of nowhere, you’re saying these things to me. You’re killing me!”
And I don’t know what to tell her. I only know that something in me has changed and I don’t want to be with her anymore. Instead I want to hurt her, to lash out and cut deeper until she never wants to see me again. I want to tear her apart.
“I have problems, sometimes,” I said to Laura. “I have trouble…”
“Shh,” she said. She ran the back of her hand down my cheek. “We’re just getting started, right? Nobody’s buying rings yet?”
I felt a tremendous gratitude. “No. Nobody’s buying rings,” I said.
Coincidentally, though, a week earlier, an aunt of mine had died and I’d ended up inheriting, among other things, her engagement ring—a plain gold band crowned with a one-carat diamond—which I’ve been waiting to give to Laura ever since.
In our old apartment, I kept the ring hidden in a drawer in my desk. In our new house, I keep it in a small room off the main hallway, one of the dark, empty rooms Laura never goes into. I hid the ring beneath the floorboards—I pried one up and placed the wrapped ring box in the dark hollow. It makes me feel good when we get into bed at night to know that the ring is nearby, that it’s tucked like a seed deep inside our home.
There are moments, though, when I’m tempted to throw all this caution to the wind. Moments when I want to just go ahead with it. Laura and I will be lying in bed, talking, or taking a shower together, and suddenly I’ll feel this great urge to give her the ring—to go dig it up from beneath the floor and offer it to her right then.
But I tamp the urge down. I remind myself of what can happen when you rush things, when you’re not careful. I think of examples, such as a certain photograph Laura brought home from work not long ago. The photograph showed a killer whale stretched out in the middle of a country road. The whale was lying on its side, one fin in the air, the other crushed between its body and the ground.
The picture was taken at the site of an accident the aquarium’s transportation crew had. They were driving the whale from a water park in Jacksonville, speeding, and they lost control of the truck. When the cab jackknifed, the whale’s aqua hammock broke and the animal came crashing out into the road, tumbling over itself, its bones cracking, before it finally rolled to a stop. The whale lay there wheezing, insects crawling over its skin, for a full hour before the rescue team came. Every now and then it would shriek through its blowhole.
I remember that picture and think: See, asshole? See? That’s what happens when you act too fast. When you don’t go step by step by step.
iii.
THE HOUSE IS COMING ALONG. IT’S AMAZING TO WATCH THE place change, week by week. Just nine months after moving in, we’ve finished most of the major work; we scraped the rot out of the second-floor walls, replaced the floor in the basement. Marco and Jesus and Jesus’s brothers came by and helped for a fee.
As expected, there are things about the house that will take years to fix: the slight, undulating warp in the upstairs floors, the sag in the attic ceiling. But our goal was to make it livable by the end of the first year, and here we are.
The only thing bothering me is that the prison has turned out to be something other than what Joyce said it was. I’ve learned that there’s more to the place than she originally let on.
From almost the moment we moved in, I made a hobby of studying the prison and its residents—looking up all the women, getting to know who they were, what their lives had been like before they ended up incarcerated. Almost every one of them had an interesting story: the chef had tried to burn down her own restaurant for the insurance money; the owner of the baseball team had been caught trying to smuggle drugs into the country on her private plane.
I enjoyed getting to know them, one by one: finding out about them on my computer at work, looking up their stories, then coming home and getting to watch them in person, through the keyhole of my telescope.
But there was one group of women, a tiny subset, that I didn’t become aware of—didn’t even see—until long after Laura and I were already settled in. After those first months of spying, I started to notice, every now and then, and only in glimpses, a different kind of resident wandering the grounds: I became aware of a small handful of women who were much older than the rest, actual elderly people, white-haired and wrinkled. There were only three of them on the grounds, I learned after watching the prison more closely. During the summer these women must have been indoors, where it was air-conditioned. But as autumn closed in and the weather grew cooler, they began to come out into the yard, lingering for just a few minutes at a time, smoking a cigarette by the vegetable garden, playing a quick hand of cards at the picnic tables, before heading back inside.
None of the younger inmates seemed to want anything to do with them. At first, I assumed the giant age difference was the reason. It took me a while to learn that they stayed away from the old ladies because they were frightened.
As it turned out, the three old women were transfers from another Florida penitentiary—a real prison, with guard towers and searchlights, bars and razor wire. They were all violent offenders too, killers who’d spent thirty, forty, even fifty years in maximum-security prisons. They’d simply been transferred over to the camp because by now it was assumed that they were too old to do harm anymore. And because at their age they needed certain amenities that were difficult to provide in real jail.
“It’s not like there are any thugs in there,” Joyce had said. “No real criminals.”
But these women were murderers.
All three of them had killed in cold blood. Two of them had murdered their husbands. One had done it for money, the other for no good reason at all. And the last lady, the oldest of the three, turned out to be a serial murderer. Her name was Rose Deach, and as a young woman in the 1940s she had killed over thirty people. If the war hadn’t been going on she likely would have made national headlines, because her crimes were particularly heinous.
Rose had started out working in the nursery of the Volusia county hospital, up the coast, not far from Daytona. She’d been a physician’s assistant, a pretty young girl who watched over newborns until they were ready to go home. Some babies she apparently took good care of. She checked their temperatures, their breathing; she fed them, did whatever she was supposed to do to keep them healthy. Other babies, though, Rose killed by clamping her hands over their faces in the middle of the night.
For three and a half years Rose moved from hospital to hospital, caring for some, killing others. When she was finally caught, she didn’t seem to understand what she’d done wrong. She’d only killed the bad babies, she said. She claimed she could tell which ones were going to grow up to be good people, and which ones were bad seeds.
“I don’t understand it myself, but it’s so,” she was quoted as saying from jail in June of 1944.
“I press my hand to a child’s chest and right off I can feel what kind of character they’ve got. Right in my palm. I can tell whether they’re going to add goodness to the world, or subtract from it. And so,” she said, “the bad ones I go ahead and press out of the world. Who needs them here? Right?”
In the 1940s Rose Deach was a scary story that parents and nannies around Florida told misbehaving children, a fairy-tale villain. Kids used her name to frighten each other.
Rose Deach knows you’re a bad boy. She’s coming to get you. She’s sneaking inside your closet right now, closing the door behind her with those bony hands. She’s waiting for you to fall asleep….