—and my left leg seizes.
As my calf muscle spasms, I slip along the tiled bottom on my too-long fin. Cold water plunges up my nose before I fight back to the surface, sputtering, to see Fancy Eyebrows clinging to the ledge a little ways from me. She reaches out while I struggle forward and hauls me over to the side.
“Thanks,” I say, and cough, pool water carving a painful trail down the back of my throat. I lever myself onto the deck with shaking arms.
Then Eric’s hovering over me, hands on his knees, whistle dangling in my face. “Okay there, Savannah?” The whistle recedes as he straightens. “This is why you have to stick to the shallows until your tail fits properly, ladies!”
I unzip and unclip and shed my fin as fast as my Jell-O-fied fingers can. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Take ten, all right?” He pats my shoulder.
I grab my shirt and duck out of the exhibit’s back entrance, the slap of my flip-flops uneven as I weave through tourists on a still-stiff leg. Even though the employee locker room is empty when I reach it, I slip into one of the tiny shower stalls and pull the cloudy plastic curtain closed. I squeeze the shower faucet as hard as I can for a full ten seconds without the flutter of a finger. Then I crank the water on and hold my hand below the too-hot stream, and my hand obeys even as my skin turns pink. Satisfied, I shut the faucet off and slide to the floor, both legs fully under my control.
It was just a cramp, I tell myself, breathing through raw lungs. I didn’t stretch enough after lunch, and I worked my muscles too hard struggling with the tail, which didn’t fit in the first place.
Cramps happen all the time.
It doesn’t mean anything.
I’m strong and I’m in control. Cramps happen.
It doesn’t mean . . .
When Mom finally made Dad an appointment with his doctor after a long series of spills and outbursts, he sent him to Dr. Michaels, a neurologist at the testing center based out of UNM Hospital. He explained there are two kinds of gene tests for HD: confirmatory and diagnostic testing, and predictive testing. The first one confirms you have it when you’re showing the symptoms already; the other one can predict whether you’ll get it even if everything’s peachy for the time being.
You have to be eighteen to take the second type of test; that’s the rule. Some people choose to take it when someone in their family is diagnosed. A lot of people don’t.
For Dad, it was the first kind. So there were interviews. There was a vivid mapping of any and all horrible illnesses in the family. Dr. Michaels asked him about emotional problems and intellectual stumbles (already, Dad would search a little too long for the answers to simple questions, or his temper would rubber-band-snap when he’d always been unnaturally cool and calm). The doctor examined the way Dad’s eyes followed the light, tested his hearing and reflexes and strength and his brain and his blood. At last in July before my junior year, Dr. Michaels sat us down and told us it was Huntington’s.
That is, I know he told us, though I don’t remember him saying the words.
Which is funny(ish) because I remember everything that came before. I remember the way the afternoon sun sliced through the open vertical blinds in the waiting room, and the wrinkly pink brain puzzle some kid was struggling through on the floor. I remember Mom smiling so determinedly for so long, her secretly scared lipstick cracked across her bottom lip. I remember that Dad smelled like tomatillos and spice because chilaquiles was the lunchtime special at Silvia’s that day. I even remember what I was wearing: an eggplant-purple babydoll sundress I’d just gotten for my sixteenth birthday.
And I remember after, when Dr. Michaels left his own office to give us privacy and family time, but Dad asked to be alone for a little while. So Mom and I went down to the cafeteria “for dinner.” We poked gelatinous kung pao chicken around our plastic trays in silence until Mom spoke up, quietly and without looking at me. “¿Estás bien, mija? I want to make sure you heard Dr. Michaels. This doesn’t mean . . . this might not mean anything for you. There’s a good chance it won’t, and I don’t want you to live like it does. You have your schoolwork, your friends, your plans for college, and they’re important. Your dad and I don’t want . . .” She pinched her lips together, ghost pale below the worn-thin veneer of Riveting Rose. “Do you hear what I’m saying, Vanni? You need to keep planning. This doesn’t change anything for you.”
“Uh-huh.” I speared a slimy, semicold mouthful that would’ve made Dad weep and choked it down.
If I’d wondered for even a second that things had changed, the start of junior year confirmed it. By then, everybody in La Trampa who’d never heard of Huntington’s disease had gotten their MDs from Wikipedia. And they were all so nice. Diana and Marilee stuck to me like I was flypaper, like it would hurt them to peel themselves from my side. They walked with me arm in arm through the halls of the high school. They checked on me when I got up to grab a wooden bathroom pass, and when I came back. Diana made me promises she couldn’t keep (It’ll all work out, Vanni. There are so many people praying for your family!) and Marilee asked for promises I couldn’t make (You’re okay, right? I mean, you feel fine, don’t you? So you probably don’t even have it, do you?).
Every time I lied to my friends or let them lie to me, it felt like I was carving pieces out of myself to give to them.
For a while I went along, until the day I came home from school to find Mom sniffling over a ruined batch of camarones al coco. It was one of Dad’s favorites, and I don’t even think it was that hard to make. Just prawns caked in flour, egg, and milk, dipped in coconut flakes and cornflakes, then fried (I’d watched Dad and had a decent memory for his recipes, even if I couldn’t hope to replicate them; there’s a big difference between reading sheet music and playing Bach on the piano). Mom wasn’t much better than me, and all the coating had fallen off, blackened crumbs of it burned to the pan, and the prawns were sad, soggy pink curls on the paper towel. She looked up at me, eyes swollen. Tried to smile and failed. Then she scooped the whole batch of them into the trash can, slammed it back under the sink, and went into their bedroom and closed the door. I stood in the kitchen, listening to the muffled squawk of a laugh track on their TV drift down the hallway.
Then I couldn’t do it anymore.
The next day at lunch, I planted myself at a near-full table with stoners and La Trampa lifers and the three whole art freaks at El Trampero High. Maybe the boy with ear gauges the size of quarters was set on fleeing for San Francisco when he graduated, but none of the rest had plans to leave. None of them wanted to babysit me and ask me about my feelings while I peed. None of the boys wanted status updates on my father’s slow degeneration.
And there was Jake.
That whole thing began like a strange game of Clue: the horndog waiter, by Silvia’s Dumpster, with the Lucky Strikes. We were working a dinner shift together, and Marilee had just uninvited me to her New Year’s Eve party via passive-aggressive text:
I really wanted you to come, but you never ever get back to me, so ur not in the headcount. Sorry ☹
Which, fair enough. But I was feeling pretty shitty down there in the mess of my own making, so when Jake took his break out back during a lull, I followed him. I asked for a smoke and, in true Jake fashion, he said, “What will you give me?”
He’d asked me this 1.5 bajillion times before, and I’d only made offers in the vein of “gratitude that cannot be redeemed for cash.”
You should’ve seen the look on his face when I answered, “You could kiss me.”
“Sure, princesita,” he laughed nervously, then sucked down smoke like he was trying to wither his lungs in one world-record pull. “Don’t kid about that stuff.”
By then I was sixteen and a half, and I sort of knew what I was doing. I’d gotten almost as far as I could with Max, my technically ex-boyfriend, before he left for Doña Ana Community College in Las Cruces (as in we’d climbed the Rocky Mountains a few times,
camped out for a while in the lower regions, but we’d never reached Pikes Peak). So I took a cigarette from the pack in Jake’s fist, slipped it into my mouth, and lit it by pressing the tip to his and breathing in, the way Max had taught me, coughing a little. “Don’t call me princesita.”
This is what I was thinking, that first time: I was imagining water, deep and dark and cold, as if it were barely thawed or nearly frozen. I took everything I wanted but now knew I couldn’t have; everything I was sad about; everything I was afraid of. Being scared all the time is exhausting. Like a slowly leaking faucet you can only ignore for so long, until you lie awake in the silence between drips, just waiting, waiting. When I burned my fingers freeing a too-hot strand of hair from my curling iron; when I sponged sticky white rings of horchata off the tile-top booths at Silvia’s; when I slipped between my sheets at night, staring up at GABRIEL ESPINOZA WAS HERE. Through it all was the same dull drip-drip-drip of fear. So I imagined that fear into something solid. A bucket, a blanket, a book. I imagined dunking it in the pond, icy water swelling up around my wrists. If I let go, the thing would rise up and bob on the surface, and that was no good. But I held it under until it filled, soaked, bloated, sank. I drowned it and watched the surface glass over, and then I forgot it. For a little while, anyway.
I did it again, and then again. The boys may have changed, and some were good and some were clumsy and some were nothing, but every time was basically the same. A pond where all of my fears sank to the bottom, into a dark, frozen junkyard, and for a while the only thing left above the surface was me, and my lips, and his hands, and our skin.
Eventually, I get my shit together and get off the shower floor, already vined with mildew from the last month. Texting as I walk, I traipse back to Mermaid Cove to grit through to the end of the day. Eric hands out our training schedules—we’re due to practice in half-day shifts almost every day until our big premiere performance next Tuesday, the Fourth of July. Because Eric and Naomi want us fully prepared, juggling the Lost Lagoon and Silvia’s will be tougher than I realized.
Gathering my stuff and waving good-bye to my fellow mermaids, I don’t bother taking off my suit. Instead, I throw on my shirt and flip-flops and scuff half-naked out to the parking lot, shielding my eyes from the sun as I scan for my ride. I’m only standing there a minute before the big dented Ford with more rust than paint clinging to the bumpers pulls alongside the curb, and I climb in.
“You’re welcome,” Jake says immediately, like I wouldn’t have thanked him for answering my text when I haven’t returned his texts in days. For driving forty minutes through Albuquerque to pick me up. For the way his cheek dimples when I ask to stop at his one-room apartment above the Turquoise Depot so I can “change into something dry.” For the way I feel with the hot highway breeze in my face, my elbow resting against the burning sill of the passenger door, my legs stuck to the vinyl seat: young and strong and in control.
For all of the things I plan to forget.
TEN
My life for the next week and a half: a blur of grocery runs and laundry duty, topped-off coffees and nightly specials, waterproof body glitter and castor oil to keep my poor chlorinated hair from turning to hay.
Things are crazy enough at the restaurant. Estrella and Juno come down with the same summer cold (miraculously, Jake remains unscathed by the slime-a-thon—either he’s out of Estrella’s bed and can’t yet bring himself to jump into Juno’s or, like the poisonous gas station chili dog he is, Jake himself could survive the nuclear apocalypse). Mom has to be at Silvia’s to keep things running without her assistant manager, so I pick up the slack where I’m needed. There’s extra errands and chores, as well as driving Dad to appointments, or just to and from the restaurant when he gets tired or frustrated, which I don’t mind.
But I’m also doing daily shifts at the Lost Lagoon to prepare for our debut on the Fourth of July. “I heard girls at that park in Florida get to train six months before their first show,” grumbles Kristian, a tiny, ironically leggy mermaid with hair that dries in natural kinks I would slaughter for.
“True,” Eric says patiently, “but they eat bananas underwater.”
After the pool heater’s fixed, it’s not so bad. Sure, most days I have to pour, cram, and squeeze myself into my spangled fin and matching shell bra, feeling each of the freezer-burned waffles Mom scraped out of the toaster and into a to-go bag for me that morning. But at least I get to be in the water. We start to learn our choreography for the Fourth, practicing first in just bathing suits, then in scuba fins, and then with our tails on. Because we don’t perform underwater, it’s more like synchronized swimming, and a pretty simple routine at that. We learn our musical cues. We learn to float in circles and form stars with our bodies, with Eric directing from the footbridge. Each of us has short solos to memorize, and little duets. Eric and his assistant get in the water with us to teach us moves like “the tub,” where we keep our legs bent with our feet and knees parallel to the surface, our faces above water and our butts below. And “the surface arch,” done by arching our backs below water, with our whole tails above.
Fancy Eyebrows, a.k.a. Iris, did competitive synchronized swimming in high school, and she confirms it’s pretty basic stuff. “Not that I’m complaining,” she tells us while we sit poolside during a break, wringing water from our hair and spattering the stones, though we’ll be wet again in fifteen minutes. “I can’t believe I’m making money like this. My sister was on the team too, and she’s got a summer job at a gas station. In high school, I was a waitress at Outback Steakhouse.”
“You were a waitress, right, Vanni?” Camila C asks, working her fingers through my tangles, twisting the hair into an elaborate side braid. She’s a single mom who works part-time as a stylist out of her trailer in Bernalillo.
“Yeah, at my family’s restaurant. I still am.”
“That’s nice you work with family, though,” she says. “When I was your age, I worked at Sonic, as one of those carhops who rollerskates your burger out to you? Then some kid I was bringing a shake to put his car in drive and not reverse. Drove it right into the side of the building. I skated out of the way, but they had to close the place for repairs, so that was the end of that job. He got my number later, said he wanted to take me out and make it up to me.”
“Did he make it up to you?” I ask.
“Más o menos,” she laughs. “Then he made me a mother.”
“¡Que cabrón!” Kristian swears.
Camila C ties off my braid, kisses my cheek, and cries, “¡Mira que linda!” and the rest of the mermaids hum in agreement.
I admit it’s almost comfortable, to be a bee in an all-girls hive again.
And when I collapse into bed at night, for the first time in a while I feel exhausted and strong, asleep even before Mom clicks off the canned sitcom laughter in the living room.
An hour before the park opens on the Fourth, the female employee locker room is stuffed. Lifeguards stroll in and out, loud and tanned and neon-ed. Paler restaurant and gift shop staff stop by to stash their crap. Anastasia, one of the rotating actors who play Neptune, the park mascot, sits on a bench and texts in half costume. She’s already in her royal-blue robes with her trident propped against the lockers, but her big cloth hands and big cloth head rest beside her. I still don’t get how a god with a foam crown and eight fingers fits in among the moldering ruins of the Lost Lagoon. I guess that’s Eric’s business, and none of mine.
We mermaids crowd the mirrors. We slick on waterproof eyeliner, press plastic jewels onto our temples, clip flowers and starfish in our hair while Kendrick Lamar pounds out of a phone someone’s perched on the sink. Camila A combs out her ombre hair, then turns and cranes her neck to inspect her butt in the mirror. “Ugh, I hope Naomi can let our fins out. My fiancé took me out last night and I ate half my body weight.”
Half of A’s bodyweight is one of my legs and my ponytail. But I’m remembering how to have casual frie
nds, and so with a silent apology to my curves, I deliver my line. “No, you’re so skinny and I hate you.”
She grins and paints swirls of body glitter on my cheeks, a bikinied fairy godmother in false lashes.
Fifteen minutes to go, and half an hour till our first show at nine fifteen. We make our way to the Cove, squeeze ungracefully into our fins, and scoot into the dark pool. I shiver and dip under, then swim to the end with the big basking rock. Eric and Naomi give us the rundown once more. We’ll start the show on the rock while a park staffer leads a batch of tourists through the exhibit gates, up the stone path, and onto the footbridge that cuts across the middle of the pool. We’ll flirt unattainably for a minute or two, the music will come on, and then: showtime.
Biceps straining and with my legs useless, I hoist myself onto the sun-warmed plaster boulder. We arrange ourselves in our assigned spots. Then there’s nothing to do but sit in the already-hot breeze and fidget. Once I stop moving the nerves set in, the pressure building somewhere behind my shells.
On the pebbled deck, Eric checks the clock on his phone, announcing through the bullhorn, “T-minus five minutes to curtain!” and I wonder about the drama kid he was in a past life. He gives an order into the walkie-talkie clutched in his other hand. The loudspeakers mounted around the pool crackle, then play calypso-ish music that echoes throughout the Cove. Kristian sits to the right of me; she flashes a quick, queasy smile. My own smile wobbles as I wrestle for control of my lungs, command them to breathe.
¡No! ¡Vete al carajo! they respond.
Soon comes the squelch and slap of flip-flops, the laughter of park visitors being led through the gates of the Cove and up the path still hidden from view.
Lounging to my left, Camila C reaches out and squeezes my wrist.
A staffer leads the way across the footbridge, and we see our adoring public. Well, our bemused public, anyway. Moms fan themselves with park maps and dads lift their kids onto their shoulders to see. The children squeal while their parents sweat. A boy, barely thirteen, leans so far over the railing he’s practically bent in half. One of a pack of teenagers, he wolf whistles, braces winking in the bright sunshine. The girls in his group coo at us, “Oh my god, look at their tails! I totally want one!”
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