by Joy Preble
He offers up a grim smile, and I try not to let my growing panic eat me alive. We’re home at least. That’s got to count for something.
I smile back encouragingly. “Maybe I can help,” I say. I reach out and clasp his hands in mine.
An electrical storm ignites. My magic, his magic—he has magic again and a lot of it—entwine, combine, explode. My body vibrates. I think my eyes roll back in my head.
The magic sizzles between us, in us, around us. Ethan’s face lights with it. His eyes darken more, the irises disappearing. Memories—mine, his, someone else’s?—slam into me over and over. Lily in the river drowning, the rusalki swimming toward her. Ethan’s father, dead on the ground. Viktor offering food to a skinny boy with blue eyes. David dying. Anastasia screaming as Baba Yaga grabs her. Viktor on the speeding El train, holding a gun to my head. Tasha Levin smiling at Ethan as they sit at the piano. Me—with Anastasia—holding the matryoshka doll between us just before I sent her back to die.
And then more. A ballerina dancing Giselle, protecting her true love from the Wilis. Anastasia sitting on the edge of a quilt-covered bed in Baba Yaga’s hut—holding the matryoshka. She opens it and pulls out a smaller version of the same doll. Opens it and pulls out another. Opens it and suddenly I’m seeing inside it—an endless cavern of space that makes me feel like I’m falling. Viktor’s face looms up from inside, leering and smug.
I gasp, trying to get air down to my lungs. I need to breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. God, I—
I rip free of Ethan’s hands. My own hands are glowing—blue, white, blue. Sizzles of power flickering from my fingertips. And something new this time—dark veins surfacing at the tops of my hands, running down my fingers and up my arms to the elbow. For a few beats, my hands look larger, coarser. Impossible. But it fades before I can even be sure it really happened.
“I need—” I manage. But I don’t know what I need. I’m dizzy. I can’t breathe.
I yank open the door.
“Don’t follow me.” I scramble down the stairs with no plan other than to put distance between us.
I’m thirsty, I realize. Terribly thirsty. What do people drink in times of blind panic? Not Diet Coke.
I skid into the kitchen, skim my hand along the wall, and flip on the small light over the sink. No sense turning on the overhead. I’ll take my full-on freak-out in the dark, thank you. Stray flickers of light continue careening off my fingertips.
They illuminate the pantry as I scan inside. Brandy. People drink brandy during a crisis, right? There’s a bottle on the back shelf. Mom bought it last week when she decided that the best way to cure her “My daughter is a witch; my birth mother is a crazy mermaid” blues was to attempt to flambé desserts. Her Cherries Jubilee had been more scorched than jubilant.
I’m reaching for it when I hear a noise. I try not to be annoyed. I don’t want Ethan right now. I want my swig of brandy and possibly a good cry and maybe a sandwich. On top of everything else, I’m suddenly ridiculously ravenous. Like side-of-beef-on-a-roll hungry.
I turn.
My mother—dressed in a thin, white sleeveless nightgown—is sitting at the breakfast-room table, her head in her arms.
My heart knots itself into a hard little ball, then swoops into my throat.
“Mommy? What’s wrong?” I stand where I am, suddenly afraid to move. But also afraid not to.
She doesn’t answer.
Somewhere in another room, I hear footsteps. Fabulous. I still don’t want Ethan down here. I’d rather not add to the situation by letting my mother know that it’s one in the morning and I’ve got a boy in my room. Man. Whatever.
“Mom.” The white tile is very cold under my feet as I move to rest my hand lightly on her shaking shoulders. Against her bare skin, my fingers feel the outline of each vertebra. A shiver works its way up my own spine. When did she get this thin again? “Mom. What’s wrong?”
She raises her head but doesn’t look at me. Instead, her gaze tracks out the sliding glass door into the backyard.
No.
Pulse thundering in my ears, I walk to the door. Press my face against the glass. The moon is very bright. So it doesn’t take me long to see. Our sprinkler is on. In the moonlight, I watch the arc of water move back and forth, back and forth. Close enough to the house that stray droplets hit the window—tiny pecks of sound. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Standing in the spray of water, her face lifted to the night sky, Lily holds out her arms. Her rusalka body is impossibly gaunt, her ravaged face etched with thin dark lines that cling to her cheeks like seaweed. The sleeves of her gown are gone, and her bare arms look pale and brittle. Underneath her tattered lilac gown, her mermaid’s tale swishes in our grass.
My heart—that tiny knot—freezes. Now? She chooses now to come back here?
And then I see him.
Next to her stands my brother, David. He’s dressed in the outfit we buried him in—khaki pants and his favorite maroon polo shirt and the stupid brown dress shoes he hated. I cried when I saw that was what my father had packed in the bag we had to bring to the funeral home.
“You should have brought his Doc Martens,” I remember screaming. But really, it was just a pair of shoes. That our elm tree is visible through his clothing is my only relief because it means he’s not real. Oh God, make that be true.
“I thought it was a dream,” my mother says. She moves to stand next to me, and briefly I see her reflected next to me in the glass, insubstantial as a ghost. “I heard a noise. Your father’s still sleeping. She came to me.” Mom is crying audibly now, huge choking sobs. “Lily came to me. She brought your brother. You see them, don’t you? I don’t have the magic like you do, but she came to me anyway. She knew what I needed. No one else knew. Just Lily. See?”
“Mom, no. Don’t look out there. Please. Don’t. It’s only going to make things worse. Trust me. It’s a trick of some sort. Please.”
She slips her arm around me, presses herself close. Her nightgown is damp.
“Mom, have you been outside? Were you out there with them?” I don’t know if it even matters. But suddenly I feel as violated as I had inside Tasha’s body. My family is being ripped apart. And it’s not going to stop.
My mother nods, a barely perceptible jerk of her chin. And it occurs to me to wonder why she’d come back inside. Why, if they were out there—her mother the mermaid and my brother come back from the dead—she would leave them and come to cry at our kitchen table.
“She says you could take me to the past,” Mom whispers. “That you have that power. Do you, honey?”
Her tone is oddly normal, like she’s asking me if I can pick up milk at the grocery store. “Lily says you could take me. I wouldn’t have to go for long. I just want to see him before. When he was well. You don’t know that things are going to change, you know? You have no idea how precious every second is. You’re just going along and making dinner and nagging him to do his homework and trying to get through your own life.
“That day your brother came home and told me he had that lump under his arm, you know what I was worried about? That one of our jewelry shipments hadn’t come in. Your brother was standing there telling me there was goddamn cancer under his arm, and you know what I was thinking? I don’t have time for this. I have two customers who expected certain pieces to wear to events and now I have to find some way of making them happy. That’s what I was thinking.”
In the glass, I see that Ethan is now standing a few feet behind us. I turn—put my finger to my lips. Still, relief floods through me. I’m glad he didn’t do what I asked. Suddenly, my mother knowing that he’s spent the night is the least of my worries.
“Can you?” My mother turns her gaze to me. Tears sit on her lashes. “You have to do this for me, Anne. I’m your mother. And I’m asking you. Please.”
I try to swallow, the knot in my throat grown to a boulder. “Mom. Mommy. No.”
Despite myself, I flick my gaze outside again. Lily snakes her arm around David. He beckons to me, a slow twist of the wrist. It takes every ounce of strength I have not to run to him. The way his hair curls a little at the nape of his neck, the broad familiar shape of his hands, the little mole at the corner of his left eye, like one tiny freckle. The tilt of his head as he looks at me. This is not David, I tell myself. But everything I see screams at me that it is.
“It’s not real.” I force myself to say what must be true. “Mom. She wants something. She’s tricking us. She’s making us see something that’s not there. He’s not there, Mom. David’s dead. He’s not coming back.”
My mother reaches up and I think she’s going to stroke my hair. Instead, she slaps me, sharply, across the face. I gasp. Grab her wrist harder than I mean to. She cries out, a sound of real pain. In the glass, I see Ethan move forward. Again, I hold up my hand. We need to let her say what she needs to say.
My mother seems oblivious to the fact that she’s just slapped me. Her voice rises. “You can, can’t you? You can take me to the past. Please, Anne. Just for a few minutes, a second or two. Let me see him. I thought it was Lily I wanted to see. I thought that was what would make me happy. But it isn’t that at all. I have a mother. Your Grandma Ellen. I was wrong. I don’t need Lily. But I need my son. I want my son. Please, Anne, he’s your brother. I’m not asking you to bring him back from the dead. Just let me see him in the past. How could it hurt?”
I shake my head. How do I even begin to tell her that the past isn’t always what you think? That even if I did what she asked, it wouldn’t make things better. It would only open old wounds and confuse things. I’ve seen the past, I want to scream. I’m probably destined to see more of it. And if I had any choice right now, I’d never go there again.
“No,” I say softly. “I won’t do that, Mom. You don’t want it. Trust me. You have to understand. You don’t want it.”
“Don’t tell me what I want!” My mother’s hand rears back again.
Ethan crosses the distance between us with one long stride. In the dim light from the sink, I can see that his eyes are blue again. But the darkness flickers just underneath.
He grabs Mom’s arm. “Mrs. Michaelson. Laura. No. This isn’t you. Stop it. Leave her alone. You have no idea what you’re asking of her.”
If Mom has been unaware of his presence in the room up until now, that little mystery is over.
And here’s the thing about mothers that I totally get now: even when they’re wacked-out by grief and eating disorders and rusalka birth mothers with crazy agendas who make them see their dead sons and ask their daughters to do the impossible, they’re still mothers.
“Anne?” Ethan still gripping her arm, my mother turns her attention to me. “What is Ethan doing here? It’s the middle of the night. Has he been here all this time? In your room? With you?”
On the periphery of my vision, I see Lily and David edge closer to our house. She moves with him gracefully through the arc of sprinkle spray like some sort of creepy water ballet.
“Let me explain,” I start.
“Are you sleeping with my daughter?”
The question doesn’t come from my mother. It comes from my father, who has chosen this moment to come downstairs and join the party. I sense immediately that our previous plan to “keep Dad out of the crazy loop” has just failed.
My father steams across the kitchen wearing boxer shorts, an ancient U of I T-shirt, and a dumbfounded expression. His hair stands up in messy little clumps.
But at least he’s asked a question to which I can give an honest answer.
“Daddy, no. No.”
The look on his face tells me that he doesn’t believe me. The look he gives Ethan is just plain dangerous.
“Steve,” my mother says as Ethan lets go of her arm. “Go back to bed.”
Like that’s going to happen. My hands start to do their glow thing again, and my pulse races off the charts to the kind of territory where doctors bring in the crash cart and charge up the paddles.
Lily and David press their bodies to our sliding glass door. Lily’s rusalka tail beats rhythmically against the glass. Thud. Thud. Thud. Her dress is so destroyed that most of her body is visible. Almost naked mermaid breasts flatten against the glass. She stretches her mouth into a hideous grin, all pointed teeth and flecks of seaweed.
“Answer me, young man,” my father goes on. This is bizarre on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin. For whatever reason—most likely situational blindness brought on by his assumption that Ethan and I were having sex in my room—my father has yet to acknowledge that there’s a mermaid with her boobs smashed against the sliding glass door. Or that the ghost of David is holding her hand. If we all live through this, I am going to need years of therapy.
“It’s not what you think,” Ethan observes helpfully. Then to my mother: “Laura. It’s going to be all right. You have to believe me. We’ll figure this out. We’ll stop it. But you have to trust your daughter. You have to trust me.”
My father frowns. His hands clench into fists. “What the hell are you talking about? What the hell is going on down here? And if you’ve laid a hand on my daughter, I’ll—”
“Come out to me, granddaughter,” Lily says, her mouth leaving puckered dots of moisture and seaweed on the sliding door. Her voice is gravel and water and misery. Double-paned safety glass is obviously not sound-proof. “Will you listen to a man rather than to your flesh and blood? Do as your mother asks. Give her what she wants. Perhaps then she will forgive me.”
My father looks like a cartoon character. His mouth forms a perfect O. His eyebrows rise higher than I thought possible, and his face drains of color. A vein on the side of his neck begins to throb.
He looks from the window to me to my mother to Ethan, then repeats the circuit, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish out of water. He tilts his head and stares out the window again, and his eyes fill with horror and tears.
“Dad,” I say. “You need to sit down. We need to explain.”
I’m not sure exactly what “we” are going to say. But we’d better start talking. That much is clear.
“Explain?” my father says sort of blankly. He walks to the window and places his hand on the glass. The ghost of David lifts his own hand in response.
“It’s not real, Daddy. It’s not David. It’s Lily. Don’t look, Daddy. Just turn away. We’ll get her to stop. I’ll make her—”
“Lily?” my father asks. “Who’s Lily?”
Outside, Lily lets go of ghost David’s hand and lifts her arms skyward again. Our sprinkler system goes crazy. Sprinkler head after sprinkler head bursts through the ground, spewing water.
“David,” my mother moans. “Oh, sweetie. Oh, my baby. My poor baby. I couldn’t save you. But your sister—she’ll take me to see you. I’ve asked her for just a few minutes. Just one ordinary day. Oh, honey. I’ve missed you so much.”
“What the hell?” my father yelps. He must believe that what he sees isn’t real. Otherwise he’d never focus on the sprinkler and not on the reanimation of his dead son and the specter of a crazy Russian mermaid. This is what I tell myself. He is, after all, Steve Michaelson, tax attorney. Jogger. Occasional tennis player. As we’ve kept him in the dark, he has no frame of reference for what he’s seeing.
“What is this?” Dad’s voice cracks. “Some kind of cruel joke?” He looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. “What does your mother mean about you?”
“Last fall,” I say. “Daddy. I—God, where do I start. Daddy, Lily is—”
“Monster.” My father isn’t even listening. He puts his hand on the door.
“Daddy, no!”
But he’s al
ready outside.
Wednesday, 1:36 am
Ethan
“Come back, Dad!” Anne shouts. “It’s not safe out here.”
But he strides toward Lily, and we have no choice but to follow into the erratic spray from the sprinklers.
“Do as she says,” I tell Anne’s father. “Anne’s right. You’re in danger. We’re all in danger if you don’t come inside.”
The rusalka laughs, a throaty sound distorted by the throb of the pulsing water. She points at me, her jagged teeth shining as she smiles. “You’re the one who’s dangerous, Ethan. I can feel it pushing off you in waves. If my Anne is not careful, she’ll end up like me. And then where will she be? Swimming and swimming. Trapped. As I am.
“And you, Ethan, your problems will have just begun. If you don’t let my granddaughter help me, you will never escape him. Do you not understand what is going on inside you? Are you that naïve?”
“I will never end up like you.” Anne’s hands are glowing again, lighting the space around her as she takes her father’s hand and tries to stop him from reaching Lily.
“Granddaughter?” Mr. Michaelson’s voice rises in confusion.
“Later, Dad. Just go inside. Please. I’m begging you. You and Mom both. I know this is all so weird, but Ethan and I can take care of this. It’s not David. Believe me. Go in. When it’s over, I’ll explain.”
“Foolish girl,” says the rusalka. She runs a skeletal hand over the boy’s head. The thing that she has made to look like Anne’s brother.
“You’re the fool,” Anne says. “For thinking that you can manipulate me like this and get away with it. If you want me to help you, then let me help you. Don’t appear to my mother in the middle of the night. And if you want me to believe that you’re on my side in all this, then don’t parade whatever that is around like it’s my brother. You leave him out of it.”
