Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Did you?”

  Denne’s lips moved in that small smile again. “I still do.”

  Gabriel frowned. He’d heard the mermaids were dangerous. He had just never heard how. Had he missed warnings somewhere?

  “Then my father told me to leave Whale Rock as soon as I got old enough to travel.”

  “But you didn’t,” Gabriel said.

  “Oh, I did.” This time Denne did look up. His blue-gray eyes were sad. “College, med school, internship, and residency. Among them all, I managed to stay away for ten years.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “Why did you?”

  It was Gabriel’s turn to look down. Denne knew the answer; he had to. It was probably the same for both of them.

  At some point, the lure of the ocean—this ocean, the dark Pacific—was too strong. No matter where Gabriel went—the Atlantic seacoast, the Aegean, the Caribbean, the warm Pacific off the tropical islands—it didn’t matter. He wanted the rugged coastline and violent waters of his youth.

  All of the beaches had a hint of magic to them, but none of them had hold of his heart the way this one did. It was as if the Oregon Coast were a woman he loved with more passion than any other woman of his acquaintance. He compared everyone he met to her and found them all lacking.

  Finally, he had given up and come home.

  “Point taken,” Gabriel said.

  Denne looked at him then. “My father also made me swear one thing. He made me swear I would never take a gift from the sea.”

  “Like a bottle of wine.”

  “A bottle of wine, a sea shell, seaweed—anything.”

  “Couldn’t our fish woman be considered a gift from the sea?” Gabriel asked.

  Denne’s head jerked back as if he had been struck. “If so, she’s not mine. You’re the one who had her taken away from the beach.”

  But Denne didn’t sound convinced. After all, he had been excited about the find, as if she was something extra special for him.

  “Maybe if you give her back when you’re done,” Gabriel said.

  Denne shook his head. “I don’t think this is what my father meant. I think her appearance there is something unusual. I think it’s wrong somehow, something gone awry.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “I don’t think any of us can know,” Denne said, “unless it happens again.”

  Seven

  Madison. Wisconsin

  More sirens.

  Lyssa drove the Bug through the rush-hour traffic traveling west on University Avenue. Everyone was leaving the city, heading home—to Middleton and the cookie-cutter west-end suburbs. Lyssa had made this drive countless times, and usually she was oblivious to everything but the pattern of the traffic and the comfortingly familiar voices of the All Things Considered news crew on the radio.

  This time, she had the radio off, and the traffic patterns felt unfamiliar. Her shoulders ached from holding them rigidly; her hands clenched the steering wheel so tightly that her fingers hurt.

  The sirens only made things worse. They echoed in the distance and seemed to be moving away from her. No one else on the road even seemed to hear them.

  Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they all had their radios on and the sirens were so faint that the music—the rap, hip-hop, rock, and country—covered it all.

  But she could only hear the blood rushing in her ears, the pounding of her heart, and the nervous rapidity of her breathing.

  Something was wrong. She had felt it all day. But that feeling, that something-wrong feeling, had been so much a part of her life since the beginning of Reginald’s illness, she had taken it for granted. It became part of the everyday patter, like highway noise or the hum of a refrigerator. Things heard but not heard.

  Her turn finally came, abruptly, just like it always had. The roads to the lake were hidden by trees and weeds, making the right side of University Avenue seem like an untended forest instead of the barrier between one of Madison’s nicest neighborhoods and the main thoroughfare.

  The drive felt both familiar and unfamiliar. She had lived here so long—ten years, all of Emily’s life—that each dip in the road felt like a homecoming. But new cars were parked at some of the houses, and Mrs. Nelanic had planted sunflowers to line her borders this year instead of an ornamental grass.

  Each difference seemed like a neon sign that the changes in the neighborhood were as permanent as the changes in her life.

  Finally, Lyssa turned onto her old street. The house was in a slight valley, the driveway invisible from the road. Still, she felt a thread of disappointment that she couldn’t see Emily or her bike.

  Lyssa wished it could be just that easy—and she had known, deep down, that it wouldn’t be.

  The garden Lyssa used to tend so carefully hadn’t been touched in the year since she’d been gone. Weeds had sprung up higher than the saplings she’d planted three years before.

  And the house she and Reginald had designed, their dream house, needed paint, a new window on the southeast corner, and patching on the roof. The house’s dismal condition confirmed her worst suspicion: Reginald was off his medication again.

  Her car slid into the valley, and the weeds thinned to reveal police cars parked in the driveway, one with its lights still revolving. The siren was off, but the light seemed to scream at her—blue and red and terrified.

  Her chest hurt, and she realized she hadn’t taken a breath since she’d seen the squads. She made herself breathe. There could be a hundred reasons for the police presence, all of them having to do with Reginald.

  If he was off his medication, then he could be doing anything from terrifying the neighbors to lighting the bushes on fire. The police presence didn’t mean that Emily had come here.

  It didn’t mean that Emily was hurt.

  Lyssa stopped near the front door. She shoved the car in park as she shut off the ignition and got out. As she ran through the tangle that had once been her garden, she heard sirens start up again, the whoo-whoo-whoo of an ambulance trying to get through the city’s overcrowded streets.

  It was almost impossible to hear sirens here, so near the lake. The sirens had to be really close.

  The thought terrified her, and she blocked it out, running down the flagstone path she had laid herself the summer before Emily was born. The stones were broken, as if someone had gone after them with a hammer, and more than once, Lyssa tripped as she hurried forward.

  Then the sirens shut off, mid-whoo. Her ears echoed. All she could hear was her own labored breathing. The grass smelled like dry hay, and her roses, gamely blooming despite the neglect, gave off a heady scent.

  She burst through the overgrown arbor onto the patio and saw Emily’s favorite beach towel—one her grandmother Cassie had bought for her at a coastal doll shop—rolled carelessly and flung aside.

  Lyssa forgot to breathe. She grabbed the towel as if it were a lifeline and hugged it to her chest. The towel was hard on the inside—Emily’s book.

  Police milled around the backyard, and several stood in a clump in the reeds near the water’s edge. Two people sat on the dock, one of them slight, the other wearing blue, and Lyssa’s heart flipped over.

  The slight one had wrapped her arms around her legs, her knees pressing against her chest. The other person put a hand on the slight one’s shoulder, and the slight one turned her head, making it clear she didn’t want to be touched.

  The movement was so Emily, so post-divorce Emily, that Lyssa felt her eyes burn.

  Lyssa was running across the yard even before she realized she had given her body the command to move. Emily was all right—something here was wrong, but not with Emily. Emily, who shouldn’t be here at all, in this dilapidated, once-loved house, with police pouring all over the yard.

  Just as Lyssa reached the dock, two police officers stepped in front of her, solid blocks of blue. She stumbled into them and they caught her, hands firm on her arms.

  “Ma’am, what’s you
r business here?” the officer to her right asked. He had a tasteful name badge above his left breast pocket. A single word—Mostert—had been etched into the gold.

  “That’s my daughter on the dock,” she said.

  “Did someone call you, ma’am?” This from the other officer.

  Lyssa didn’t even look at him. She was trying to peer over his shoulder. But she couldn’t see past him. She couldn’t see Emily.

  She thought about screaming Emily’s name, but realized that wouldn’t get her through this blue wall.

  “I’m Lyssa Buckingham,” she said to Officer Mostert. He didn’t seem as young as the other one. He had frown lines around his eyes. “I used to live here. I was married to Reginald Walters until this summer. That’s our daughter on the dock.”

  The police officers exchanged a look that made Lyssa feel cold. Some kind of message went between them, some kind of warning. She didn’t know what it was or what it meant, only that it terrified her.

  “I want to see her!”

  “Did she call you, ma’am?” Officer Mostert asked.

  “No.” Lyssa shook her right arm out of his grasp.

  “Then how did you know where she was? Was she supposed to come here?”

  “She’s not supposed to see her father. He’s dangerous. She knows better, but she’s been missing him—”

  “Dangerous?” the other officer asked.

  Lyssa shook her arm from his grasp and stepped back from both of them. Something had happened here, something she didn’t understand.

  Her face felt flushed from the heat. Sweat poured down her back, and she was tired. She hated this place. Once she had loved it. She remembered standing on this back lawn, as untended ten years ago as it was now, and thinking she could make this a beautiful home, having no idea the heartache she would feel in this place, how much of her it would destroy.

  “My husband is mentally ill,” Lyssa said, wishing suddenly for her attorney. No one believed anything bad of the Walters family. No one understood that one of America’s first families could have anything wrong with it. “He tried to kill our daughter and threatened her several times.”

  “Yet she came back?” This from Mostert.

  Lyssa made herself take a deep breath. She remembered all of this from before. The police had an advantage; they weren’t emotionally involved in the situation. She had to be calm, remain calm, act calm, or they wouldn’t let her do what she wanted.

  “Is there a reason you’re not letting me see her?” Lyssa asked. The edge remained in her voice, but at least the panic was gone—even though the panic lurked beneath, threatening to overpower her. Maybe the slight figure on the dock wasn’t Emily at all. Maybe it was a neighbor child who had stumbled onto Emily’s body, over there in the reeds.

  “Do you have identification?” the other officer asked, and with that, Lyssa had had enough.

  “I don’t need it,” Lyssa said, and shoved her way between them, pushing with all of her might.

  To her surprise, the officers parted, letting her through. She walked to the dock, so that her movements did not seem threatening, and as she got closer, she was relieved to see that the small figure was indeed Emily.

  Emily, with her short hair standing up in damp spikes. Emily, her wet clothes clinging to her straight, childish form.

  Her swimming suit must have been in that towel with the book. Somehow Emily had made it all the way to the end of the dock and into the water without putting on her suit.

  But the cabana was gone, the foundation still there. The concrete had char marks—a fire? That would be in keeping with Reginald’s madness.

  And no Reginald anywhere.

  Lyssa felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She was thinking of fire because the air had the faint odor of smoke, and with it, the distinctive smell of burnt hair. Beneath it was another, greasier odor, and even though she had never smelled it before, she knew what it was.

  Burned flesh.

  Her own flesh crawled and she shivered despite the heat. She stepped onto the dock, the old wood sinking and creaking under her weight.

  Emily didn’t move, didn’t even look up to see who was coming toward her. Next to her, the person in blue turned out to be a woman, a female cop who was either comforting her or interrogating her or both.

  Lyssa felt a rush of anger, mixed with protectiveness. She had also inherited a healthy dose of her hippie mother’s distrust of the police.

  “Emily!” Lyssa called.

  Her daughter’s head rose, as if from a sound sleep, and then, when Emily saw her mother, she let out a little cry. Her arms fell to her sides, pushing her up from the dock, and she ran forward, her feet shuffling, as if she had almost no energy at all.

  Lyssa hurried toward her. They met in the saggiest part of the dock, the wood bending beneath their combined weight. Emily stopped in front of her, as if she were afraid to hug her.

  “Mommy?” Emily sounded the way she did when she was really little and tired or very ill. Weak and defeated. Lyssa hadn’t heard the voice from her in years.

  “Come here, baby.” Lyssa crouched and opened her arms.

  Emily hesitated, showing a reserve she had never shown before.

  “Hold me, Em,” Lyssa said.

  But her daughter shook her head. Her lower lip trembled and tears floated in her eyes. Even though her cheeks were covered with dirt and sand from the lake, no tear tracks ran down them.

  Lyssa was the one who went forward and put her arms around her daughter. Emily remained rigid, refusing to hug back, something she had never done, not even in the height of the divorce.

  Lyssa crouched again, sliding her hands down her daughter’s arms until she could see directly into Emily’s eyes. The tears had receded unshed, but Emily’s eyes were red. She also had shadows beneath them that Lyssa had never seen before.

  “What happened, baby?” Lyssa asked.

  “Daddy.” That little voice again, trapped in some kind of pain. Emily’s lower lip still trembled.

  “What about him?”

  Emily didn’t answer. Instead, she swept an arm toward the reeds where all the police had gathered.

  Lyssa’s stomach clenched. What had he done this time? Called his daughter before he killed himself so that she would find the body? That fit with his psychosis. Reginald would do anything to destroy Emily’s life.

  “Are you Mrs. Walters?” The female police officer stood behind Emily. The wood buckled even more with the added weight. Lyssa wondered if this part of the dock would snap. But it seemed to have a lot of give. The wood was old and swollen from the humidity.

  Still, Lyssa would have to move Emily off there. Lyssa didn’t want her daughter falling into the water again.

  “Ma’am?” the police officer said. Her tone had a sternness, a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude that seemed inappropriate given the circumstances.

  “My name is Lyssa Buckingham.” Lyssa kept one hand on Emily’s shoulder as she stood up. She wasn’t going to relinquish any hold on her daughter. “I was married to Reginald Walters at one time.”

  “And this is your daughter?”

  “She hasn’t told you that?” Lyssa felt surprised.

  “She hasn’t said anything, ma’am, not until you arrived.”

  Lyssa drew Emily close. Emily wrapped her arms around Lyssa’s waist.

  “What happened here?” Lyssa asked.

  “We don’t exactly know.” The officer sounded formal, as if she were reciting the information in court. “I’d prefer not to discuss it here, if you don’t mind.”

  The officer gave the top of Emily’s head a pointed look. Emily had buried her face in Lyssa’s waist. Lyssa ran a hand down Emily’s hair, smoothing it.

  “I’m going to take my daughter home,” Lyssa said.

  “Before you do, ma’am, we need to talk with you.”

  Lyssa gave the officer a cool glance. “About what?”

  “We need your help, ma’am. It didn’t feel righ
t asking the girl.”

  The girl. As if Emily weren’t even there.

  Emily shivered and clung tighter.

  “Help with what?” Lyssa asked.

  “We’d like you to make an identification, ma’am.”

  An identification. The officer was trying not to be specific, apparently for Emily’s sake. An identification of a body.

  Although that made no sense if they had already asked Emily to help them. They wouldn’t be trying to protect her.

  Lyssa felt like she had walked into another world. “Let’s get off this dock.”

  But Emily didn’t move. Instead, Lyssa had to bend down and pick her up and carry her to shore.

  Emily’s clothing was cool against Lyssa’s skin, and her hair smelled of lake water. She seemed smaller than Lyssa remembered, as if she had shrunk one size in the afternoon.

  “Don’t go, Mommy,” Emily whispered in her ear. “Please. Don’t go over there.”

  Lyssa looked at the officer. The woman had no compassion on her face. She was watching impassively, as if waiting for Lyssa to set Emily down and come help.

  “I’d like to see what’s over there,” Lyssa lied. She had a hunch she already knew. But she also knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until she went over there herself.

  “No, Mommy. Please.”

  “Have you seen what’s there, Emily?”

  Emily nodded her head against Lyssa’s shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  Emily’s entire frame became rigid.

  “Em?” Lyssa said, waiting for an answer.

  “Can we go home?” Emily’s voice was plaintive.

  “You’re Mrs. Walters?”

  Lyssa was beginning to hate that question. This time, it came from a squat man wearing a cotton dress shirt with the sleeves rolled past his elbows, and a pair of black pants. His blond hair was badly cut, and he was sunburned in the bald spot on his crown.

  “Not anymore,” Lyssa said coolly.

  “But you were married to Reginald Walters?”