Mermaid

by Jodi Picoult

At this point, Nick doesn't believe me. Maybe if these kids hear what I've heard, he will.

  We settle on an admission charge of fifty cents. I let the kids--all six of them--file into the backyard. There are four boys and identical twin girls.

  "Shit," the tallest boy says. "What a rip-off. It's just a pool."

  "Bummer," one girl mutters.

  Another kid grabs her arm. "Maybe we should toss Jenna in."

  They shout and shuffle, and finally the first boy I spoke with tosses his baseball cap into the center of the pool. It floats, and then bubbles appear at the edges, and then steam rises from the bill. A moment later, it vanishes.

  "Did it sink?" Jenna asks, peering over the edge.

  "That was sick," another boy says. He looks down at his phone, where he's videoed the evidence. "I'm selling this to TMZ."

  "No, wait," I say, but they have already run off.

  I lock the gate behind them and go into the house. I call Nick's cell phone. "Please," I say, "come home."

  Something in my voice must make him think I'm losing it, because he doesn't even put up a fight. As I hang up, I remember what the pool said last night. I search my cabinets and kitchen drawers for sweets, but all I can find are raisins and an old box of Baci chocolate-covered cherries. I toss the raisins one by one into the center of the pool, but nothing happens. I throw the candy in all at once. The cherries sink faster than the raisins, but all of them are gone before they hit the bottom. A fine, cool mist rises from the surface. It's violet and cerise, goldenrod, indigo. It's the most beautiful rainbow.

  I didn't tell Nick for six weeks; I knew the words would change everything. So instead I pretended I did not have to swallow them down a dozen times a day. I went to work and grocery-shopped and cooked dinner and picked up my dry cleaning and went to bed early, letting his messages go to voice mail. Nick brought me flowers and took me out to dinner, sure that I was giving him the silent treatment for a reason. In reality, I just didn't know what to say.

  One day, I was in the penguin enclosure, scrubbing shit off the rocks while the slippery little guys dove and waddled around me in their faux formalwear. I shivered in the water, oblivious to the crowds taking pictures as I worked. Then I heard Frank's voice, asking me to bring 568 to the infirmary. I had no idea what the vets were going to do to that penguin, but then it wasn't my job to ask. It was my job to sort through the constantly moving mass of a hundred penguins and find this needle in the haystack.

  "Over there," Frank yelled from dry ground, pointing to one little guy on a rock. He had something tangled around his neck; that was probably the issue.

  Penguins, it should be noted, do not stand still.

  "Here, buddy," I murmured in a sweet singsong as he flapped his wings at me. "I am absolutely not stalking you right now . . ."

  I grabbed him with both hands, tucking him under my arm like a football. That's when I realized that the cord around his neck was a ribbon, and that tied to it was a diamond solitaire ring.

  "Marry me?" Nick said. He was suddenly in the penguin enclosure, wearing a wet suit, and there were a hundred people clapping.

  "I'm pregnant," I blurted out.

  To his credit, Nick did not skip a beat. "I've always hated long engagements," he said, and he kissed me.

  I give a five-dollar bill to a kid who is hanging around, hoping to see the pool, and ask him to get me a package of Hershey's bars at the Handimart. I want something I can use to show Nick, when he gets home for lunch, that I am not making this up.

  The first thing Nick says when he sees the pool is, "What did you do with the reef?" As if I would be able to move a five-hundred-pound hunk of fake coral by myself.

  I tell him the pool ate it. That it's hungry.

  Nick unbuttons the collar of his shirt. "Hope," he says, "do you even hear yourself?"

  I throw a chocolate bar into the pool.

  Nick tries to catch it before it hits the water, yelling about the level of acidity. But I've thrown it too far and the chocolate sinks. We both watch that rainbow glow. "See?" I say.

  Nick grips the back of a lounge chair as if he is about to fall down.

  Greens, the pool sighs.

  "I'm going to find some vegetables," I say.

  "Don't be ridiculous," Nick says. "There's a scientific explanation."

  "Really?" I ask. "Like what?"

  "Like you're imagining things."

  "Did you see fish in this pool yesterday?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "Are you imagining things, too?"

  Well. He comes up short there.

  "Hope, I have to go back to work. Just promise me you won't . . . do anything. All right?"

  I nod.

  But after Nick leaves, I take the station wagon to the supermarket and back up to the loading dock. A teenage clerk tells me I can't park there. "Lady," he says, "what do you think you're doing?"

  "I need an awful lot of vegetables, and I was hoping you could load them for me," I say, stepping out of the car.

  The boy grins as soon as he sees my face. "Hey! Is this for your pool? My little brother told me he saw your pool eat a baseball cap this morning." He opens the hatch of my station wagon. "Just wait here."

  A moment later, he reappears with a big man sporting a greasy comb-over. "No kidding, Owen," the man says. "This is the chick with the monster pool?" He sizes me up. "You want yesterday's stuff? I'll give it to you for half price."

  "Half price? Weren't you going to just throw it out?"

  He winks at me. "You got me, girlie," he says. "Owen, load her up."

  Peacock flounder are brown, with vibrant blue rings and spots all over. They have a deep V between their eyes, as if they're constantly consumed with thought. They can change color to blend in with the bottom of the sea.

  Here is my favorite fact: as peacock-flounder larvae mature, their bodies mellow into circles. Their right eye migrates to the left side of their body through a slit left behind by the separation of the dorsal fin from the cranium.

  During this time, they are both asymmetrical and blind.

  Once, when I was a mermaid, the air hose cut out during one of my solo performances. It was a Saturday in February, and the park was packed with tourists. I put the bubbler up to my mouth to breathe in, but there was no air flowing from the oxygen tank. I smiled, tiny bubbles floating from my nostrils. I waved to a little girl who had pink sneakers.

  I could have swum to the surface. No one would have thought twice about me aborting the act in the middle, due to a technical malfunction. But instead, I let go of the hose and let it trail behind me while I sank. I curled my tail beneath me and I shrank to the bottom corner of the glass enclosure, my hair a festive cloud around my face.

  I held my breath until my lungs were on fire.

  Until I couldn't see anything but white.

  I imagined myself, as clear as the Florida sky, unfurling in that tank, lying on the sandy bottom, fast asleep. A princess in a glass box.

  Instead, Audra--who was on duty next--saw the air hose floating and dove into the tank and yanked me to the surface, pounding on my chest until I spit up all the water I had swallowed.

  There are two vans in my driveway. One says Brookville Labs on the side, and the other has a drawing of Jesus. As I park, a nun with a face as wrinkled as linen steps up and presses her palm to the window. I unroll it. "God bless you, Mrs. Payne," she says.

  She is joined by a striking young priest with green eyes and jet-black hair. I am so busy staring at his dimples that I don't hear what he's saying.

  "It's too good to believe," the nun says.

  "I'm sorry?" I say. "What is?"

  "God," the priest replies. "Right here in your backyard. Your neighbor, Margaret LaFoye, saw the face of the Lord reflected in the pool from her bedroom window." He reaches for my hand. "I'm Father Laborteaux," he says. "We're from Saint Margaret's on Mooney Street. And I have a van full of the Sisters of Mercy, who'd love to pray in your backyard . . ."
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  A horn sounds from the other van, and a man steps out in white hazmat coveralls. "Not so fast, padre," he says. He pumps my hand up and down. "Harry Welch. We've got reason to believe that your pool is connected to a dump that the hospital had here, before it was a subdivision."

  "Is it toxic?"

  He shrugs. "I'll know after I take some samples."

  It strikes me that all these people have come to see a performance, and that I am not only part of the act but its box office manager. Father Laborteaux even carries a crate of asparagus into the yard for me, and the others follow.

  With all the showmanship I once used to submerge myself in the great tank of the aquarium, I hold a bunch of asparagus into the air and, with a flourish, toss it into the center of the pool.

  This time when the rainbow appears, everyone claps, and suddenly the pool begins to buzz. A nun faints and has to be carried to the lounge chair. Another strings a medal of Saint Jude on the net we use to fish out leaves and debris.

  The pool is in its heyday, humming and fizzing and smoking and steaming. A purple fog rises over the water and trails east by northeast with the wind. In the mist, I see myself and Nick. We are moving in slow motion, dancing an underwater pas de deux, in the mermaid tank.

  I shake my head to clear my vision and turn to the priest. His eyes are shining. "My ordination," he whispers, and crosses himself.

  Harry, at the far end of the pool, begins to weep. "That's my dad," he says.

  I turn to the mist in front of me, waiting. Again, I see Nick, drawing our next breath from the air hose. I feel his arms around me. Even as we rise to the surface, he does not let me go.

  I told myself that Nick had proposed before he knew I was pregnant, so it made sense to get married as quickly as possible. We went to the town hall during one of my lunch breaks. I wore a cream-colored dress that was already tight in the waist.

  At Nick's insistence, I stopped diving in the tank and manned the Hands-On Tank, where kids could touch live sea urchins and sea stars.

  We called the baby Kumquat.

  Sometimes Nick fell asleep with his arms around me, his palms spread across my belly.

  Sometimes I woke up and didn't know who I was.

  For several hours now, crowds have been lining up outside my fence for admission to the pool. There is a police officer on the block, directing traffic. I've made over $1,000. I've let in people in wheelchairs, blind men, sinners, a pregnant teen, a Vietnam vet. People huddle at the edge, waiting for the purple steam, which pours forth as long as I keep feeding the pool. They wait, hoping they'll get what they came for. At this point, no one with a disability has walked away from their wheelchair and no blind man has seen, but everyone seems to be able to hold on to a dream for a few moments. They leave, pressing my hand, thanking me, different from the way they were when they came.

  Every hour, I feed the pool. Admission to that viewing costs twice as much as the others. When the rainbow appears, women sob and grown men sink to their knees.

  I am in the midst of a feeding when a TV news crew appears. The reporter, Lou McDaniels, is thin and wiry, with a mustache that has taken the rest of his face hostage. Hearing the cries of surprise as I throw a head of broccoli into the pool, he pushes his way through the gate and stands beside me. "Holy cow," he murmurs. "I should have brought the underwater cam."

  He sets his crew up on the lawn and asks me about the diet of the pool and how I discovered its insatiability. I hesitate when I begin to tell him about the flounder delivery, then give him all the details. "Lately the pool's been doing something else," I say. "I think it shows you what you want to see."

  "Such as?"

  "Your dreams," I say. "Or maybe your past. People who can't walk see themselves running. Widows see their husbands." I glance toward the fence, where people are being jostled. "That kind of thing."

  The crowd swells and recedes like a wave, then pushes one man forward. Lou McDaniels asks me a question, but I can't focus; I'm too busy watching Nick approach.

  "Hope?" the reporter prompts. "What did you see?"

  Nick stops three feet away from the videographer.

  "The first time I fell in love," I say.

  Nick grabs my wrist and pulls me away. "What are these people doing in our yard?" he says.

  "I can't help it if they're interested." We stare at each other, waiting for the other to break. There's something empty in Nick's eyes. I wonder if it's him, or just a reflection of me.

  "You think they'll still be interested when they realize you just got out of a psychiatric hospital?"

  His words feel like a slap. Are you? I want to ask. Are you still interested?

  "They're not doing any damage," I say stiffly.

  Nick rubs a hand down his face. "I'm not worried about them, Hope. I'm worried about you. I didn't mean--"

  "You did," I say softly.

  But before he can respond, we hear a moan. It belches from the ground and rises to the sky. More.

  Lou McDaniels's jaw drops, and he pulls the videographer's shirt. "Tell me you got that," he says.

  Leaving Nick, I run to the edge of the pool and see that a thick green gel has formed a ring around the water's edge. With strength I didn't know I had, I pick up a crate of Boston lettuce and hurl it over my head, so that each green head flies like a grenade and splashes.

  Nick is beside me when the mist begins to rise over the pool. "What do you see?" I ask, facing him. Desperate.

  There we are, under the water, still turning in slow motion. Kissing behind a screen of bubbles.

  "I don't see a thing," Nick mutters, and he walks away.

  During our first weeks as newlyweds, Nick would seek me out at the aquarium near the Hands-On Tank, his eyes bright with his plans for his flounder study. As I tried to keep little monsters from ripping off the legs of sea stars, Nick would go on and on about flounder territories. He'd ask me for my feedback on his proposed hypothesis. We were, I thought, still part of a team.

  One day, I got an acceptance letter from the University of Hawaii's MS program in marine biology. I ran to his tiny office to share the news. "Hawaii!" I said. "Can you imagine?"

  "That's great . . . ," Nick said.

  "But?"

  He looked at me. "Hope," he said, "you can't go to Hawaii."

  I would be six months pregnant by then.

  I tried to pretend that I had, of course, considered this. "I mean, I know that. I'll defer a year," I said, shrugging this off, when both of us knew that I probably couldn't move to Hawaii if Nick was employed here in Boston, and if there was a baby in our lives.

  I needed to lose myself that day. So I went into the locker room and put on my wet suit. I loaded up my waist pack with fish. I climbed onto the metal railing at the top of the giant tank, where another aquarist named Lesley was getting ready to do the 1 p.m. feeding I used to do. "Oh, Frank needs to see you," I lied. "He asked me to cover."

  By now, it was well-known among the staff that I was pregnant--that penguin proposal had morphed to mythic proportions. Lesley looked at my abdomen. "Are you sure it's okay?"

  "Five minutes can't hurt," I said, and I sank below the surface.

  There, I swam around the mirrored walls of the glass tank and stared into the lazy eyes of sea turtles. I rubbed the hard bellies of the sharks and ignored the flutter in my own.

  There, at great cost, I remembered who I used to be.

  This is what I've fed the pool:

  Fifty pounds of asparagus. Fifty pounds of lettuce. Twenty-five pounds of broccoli. Green beans, leftover Chinese food, chocolate. Jelly beans, Jujubes, tofu, couscous. Campbell's soup, still in the can. Tortillas and frozen french fries. Yogurt gone bad and yogurt that's still fresh. Salt-free potato chips. Seven gallons of milk.

  It is now almost midnight, and the pool is still hungry. It asks for food at regular fifteen-minute intervals. Although the throngs of people have dissipated, there is still a small group of people maintaining a vigi
l. They carry flashlights and line the fieldstone with citronella candles.

  I watch from the kitchen as people rub good-luck charms and count rosary beads. They wrap up in blankets and lie under the stars. Every so often I take a cardboard box that once held broccoli and empty a cabinet in the kitchen. At this point, there are only eggs and bottled water left in the fridge.

  Nick and I aren't speaking. He sits at the kitchen table, his fingers pressed to his temples. He has been sitting like that for four hours. I am plucking bottles from the spice rack: chives, parsley, mustard seed. The bottles clink as they roll against each other in the box.

  Then Nick gets up, as if he has come to a decision. He walks into the backyard. He stands on the diving board and clears his throat like he's about to deliver the Ten Commandments. "I'm sorry, but you all have to go home," he says. "This is my backyard and my pool, and I want to keep it that way."

  As he is talking, the ground shakes. The pool turns neon yellow.

  I show everyone the way out. I lock the gate and find Nick waiting for me on the back porch. "Hope," he says, his voice breaking, "I'm going to call Dr. Fisher."

  White coat, red lipstick, black bob. The scratch of her pencil. Three bitter pills in a paper cup. The group sessions, where sometimes all I could do was sob.

  "No," I say, shivering. "I can't go back there."

  Nick puts his hands into his pockets. "Neither can I," he says sadly. He walks back into the house. I see his silhouette as he holds the phone to his ear.

  Here is what I never told anyone. Not Nick, not my OB. Not Dr. Fisher. Not the paramedics who found me in the bathtub, slack with sleeping pills, beneath the surface of the water.

  I heard her speak to me before she left.

  She said, It's my turn.

  We've barely just said I love you, I told her.

  She said, Wait.

  She said, No.

  The fact that she didn't say this out loud doesn't mean I never heard it.