Darla sighed and propped her feet up on the chair opposite. Her feet always hurt after she worked or stood for too long. It didn’t matter how many supportive insoles she bought. Her feet were useless things, unable to bear weight. She looked out the window back at the waves until her eyes lost focus. The corners of the windowpanes at Tom’s were dirty and speckled with fly dirt. Enough to be visible even during the late hours, when the only light inside was from the dusty lamps and equally dusty and cockeyed wall sconces. She thought how she ought to stop holding out hope of fattening her wallet on rich people’s tips, and come to work here. Here, they’d let her out front. She could bust the fishermen’s chops when they lost their sea legs on beer. She could get a better nickname. But there were so many rich people. And so many tips.
Jobs, she thought, and kicked her heel against her schoolbag, where it sat like a loyal pet. Green canvas with frayed edges and a brown leather buckle. It looked old, and a little filthy. No one ever bothered it or asked to see inside. That was a lucky thing, tonight.
“Here you go, hon. No tomato, and steak fries doused with sea salt and vinegar, just as you like.”
Rose set down a platter of cheeseburger and fries, and a refill on Darla’s Diet Pepsi. She had stuck her thumb into Darla’s ketchup, and wiped it dry on her red apron.
“You okay, sweetie?” Rose asked. “You’ve seemed a bit down, these last few weeks.”
“Just tired,” Darla replied.
Rose eyed her skeptically, but said, “All right,” and walked away, her ample hips and long blond hair swaying. Rose was a kind woman, if not terribly bright, and if anyone cared that she sometimes spilled a drink on you or put her fingers in your ketchup, then no one dared to say so out loud. It was common knowledge at Tom’s Anchor that Tom’s anchor was Rose, the only woman pretty enough to keep him on dry land after fifteen years of working the boats. Fifteen years on the boats, and another fifteen behind the Anchor’s bar, and these days neither Tom nor Rose had much of whatever prettiness had drawn them together. But Tom still smacked Rose’s backside whenever she passed him through the kitchen, and Rose winked more often than she brushed his hand away.
It was nice, love like that. It was true. It wasn’t meant for Darla, with her hound’s face and trash name. Darla. A name for bottle blondes. One day maybe she’d do it, if she could manage to grow her thin, mousy brown mop long enough to bother.
She eyed her fries, and after some staring, ate two. Before she knew it, the platter was empty aside from the garnish of iceberg lettuce. She hadn’t figured on eating so fast. Hadn’t figured on having much of an appetite at all. But that was all right. Judging by the good-time girl wall clock with the swinging, gartered leg, Jason would already be at the pool, waiting.
• • •
The first day he spoke to her was after practice. He came over like it was nothing, towel draped around his neck, T-shirt wet and clinging to every indentation of his chest, and she could say she hadn’t blushed, but she’d be a bald-faced liar. Faces reddened routinely when Jason Fahle spoke. He was a man among boys, the kind that, had they been down south, would have been said to give girls the vapors. He had just broken up with Miranda Halverston, a rough, loud, soapy breakup that would have been humiliating for anyone else. But Jason walked the halls half smiling. Eyes front, he stayed in his lane. Darla had noticed that about him. Maybe he had noticed her noticing.
“That was good,” he said.
She sat on the edge of the pool, the tiles sloppy with splashed water. She was still in her cap.
“You shaved off a second, I think.”
She hadn’t. She hadn’t even swum particularly well. Darla was a competition swimmer. It was the challenge of unknown rivals that pumped her blood, not the tick of Coach Mathis’s stopwatch.
“What are you still doing here?” she asked.
“Hot tub,” he replied. “I think I strained something in my shoulder. Maybe I’m overextending.”
“Didn’t look like it to me. You looked fine. I got here early.” She bit down on her tongue before she could explain further. She was on the girls’ team. They had practice. She could be at the pool whenever she liked.
“I can tell that about you,” he said. “You pay attention. You’re focused. Outside of the water, that is.”
“I’m focused in the water,” she said, her voice low.
“You’re driven in the water. There’s technique but there’s no precision. It’s not an insult. You know you’re the best on the team.”
He leaned down, so close she could count the droplets on his biceps without it seeming like staring.
“You’re like a mermaid, Darla,” he said. “You swim on instinct.”
• • •
Darla sat in the alcove of shiny red lockers inside the girls’ swim room. The place was tidy as always, with stacks of white towels folded and ready to use and the showerheads sparkling. The school wasn’t rich, but what money it did have it threw at sports, swimming first and foremost after the program spat up a string of state champions in the 1990s. Since then the trophy case had continued to grow, with Jason Fahle and Darla the Dog set to bring home another pair of golds.
Darla took a deep breath and wrinkled her nose. The swim room still smelled like chlorine—of course it always would, but the smell of chlorine had never bothered her. Chlorine was her world. It smelled like home and tasted like candy. But chlorine wasn’t the only smell. There was something else. Something different, and sinister. Once, when she’d been beachcombing as a child, she’d come across a dead shark. Not a freshly dead shark, but one that had been dead for quite some time, dead and worked on by the ocean as a dog worked down a rawhide bone. It had been covered over by a wave until she looked up, and then the sea rolled back, as if to show her what it had. That shark, with the rotted, pockmarked, sandblasted skin, bits of itself drifting around like it was growing ragged seaweeds, had smelled a little like this. But not quite. That shark hadn’t smelled so goddamn thick, so goddamn heavy, that it filled her head and made her legs go slack.
For a moment the stench of it almost made Darla change her mind. Only Darla wasn’t the kind of person who changed her mind once it was good and made up. And besides, some small part of her had begun to suspect that she couldn’t have changed course, even if she’d wanted to.
She slipped out of her backpack and shivered a little despite the humid heat. Her suit was hanging in her locker, probably still damp from practice. But she’d have to put it on. While she changed, the backpack sat on the bench, pulsing slightly.
• • •
Sometimes the sea sang. Sirens songs, the fishermen said, to soothe you on a hastened journey home or to lull you to sleep as you were drowning. The night that Jason told Darla where they stood, when she’d waded in up to her waist and felt her clothes moving against her in the black waves, the sea sang only to Darla.
It was cold that night, and the current pulled at her legs. It was strong enough to take her far out to drown if only she would sink, and she regretted she hadn’t had the foresight to sew stones into her pants legs and pockets. But when she walked into the sea, she hadn’t had any thought aside from the comfort she always felt in the water, the feeling of calm suspension, and sudden muted sounds when she went under. Darla felt that way every time she dove into the pool. She was happiest when her head was down. The roaring of the crowd when she surfaced only drove her back under again, faster. Jason had been right. She moved through the water like she belonged in it. So did he. That’s why they made sense, despite their differences. Despite the fact that he was a tanned god and she was the dog-faced girl. In the water they were the same.
Darla let the ocean rock her back and forth that night. She listened to it sing and pull at her clothes as Jason’s words ran through her head.
He’d brought her to the pool, the place where they always met. It was where they’d first swum together, and where he’d first kissed her. Where she’d let him take her as far as a girl
could go.
“There isn’t any way to say this that isn’t going to sound shitty. It’s Miranda. She wants to get back together. And I still have feelings for her, Darla. I still have feelings for you, too. I mean, I don’t want to stop seeing you.”
He didn’t look sorry. He looked like he meant to look sorry. He looked sly as a tomcat with a live mouse asking to be let in the door.
He talked a lot about Miranda. What their problems were and how they’d fix them, as if Darla cared. Maybe he really thought she did. Maybe he thought she was just that big of a person, just that kind. Then he ran his hands through his hair, like he was suffering, and talked about how he didn’t want to give up what he and Darla had. He said their connection was a different kind. That it was on another level. It wasn’t a connection for the daylight. He looked at her body as he said those things, the way he always did. Jason hardly ever looked at her face.
He put his hands on her afterward, and she’d let him. She remembered his touch with bile in her throat, and in the sea the waves splashed against her chest and pushed her back. Stupid girl, stupid girl, it scolded as it cradled. As it sang.
She was in the ocean for a long time. She didn’t know how long. She never felt cold and never shivered. But when she walked home, she caught a glimpse of herself in a silver inlaid sign near the docks, and saw that her lips had turned a strange shade of purple.
• • •
By the time Darla changed into her navy blue suit, the swim room was thick with the scent of the thing in her backpack, the thing that smelled like decayed shark and deep waves and nothing like those things at all. Whoever came in first the next morning would run back out immediately with their hand over their mouth and nose. They would report to the main office that something had died in there, perhaps a rat, or a dozen rats, softening in one of the walls.
Darla took a deep breath and scooped her backpack up off the bench.
When she walked out, onto the turquoise and white tile, Jason wasn’t swimming. That’s usually how she found him when she was late. She’d walk out of the swim room and into the pool, and he would be lapping around lazily, turning and playing, lounging like an otter on its back.
“You’re not in your suit,” she said. She didn’t need him in his suit, but a suit would make it easier.
“I wasn’t sure if I should,” he said. “I didn’t want to assume things would be just like they were. I saw you, in the hallway. When I was with Miranda.”
“And I saw you.”
She’d seen him, all right, with his arms snaked around Miranda, one hand stuffed into her shiny, chestnut, society hair, and the other creeping onto her pert, straight A student ass. Creeping, but not quite there. Miranda wasn’t Darla. Miranda was a prize. She wouldn’t let Jason do the things that a dog would allow him to do.
“I should really go change, then?” he asked, and grinned when she nodded.
That grin. It was so boyish, so guileless. It would ensure that for the rest of Jason’s life, he would get whatever he wanted. For some people it was that easy. One empty smile, and here, have the world. But even as Darla resented that, the part of her that had wished for stones in her pockets loved it, and smiled quietly back.
She put her backpack down by the edge of the pool. The scalpels inside made silvery sounds.
Jason came back fast. He must’ve shimmied out of his clothes like a snake from its skin and left them on the floor. Maybe he even had his suit on underneath. He didn’t waste time.
“What’s your hurry?” Darla asked. She looked down at his hand on her chest.
“Nothing,” he said, and drew it back. “No hurry.”
“You have a date or something, after this?”
“No,” he said. He grinned that grin. She would never know whether he was telling the truth.
“Good. Then I want to swim first.”
Jason dove in. Graceful. He never goofed around in the water. He’d laugh while the rest of the team splashed and dunked and did cannonballs off the board, but he never joined in. Darla had always liked that about him. He respected the water, even if it was sanitized and chlorinated, and tiled in place.
He swam around her in circles for a while. Flirting. Making amends. But then he forgot, and swam off on his own. She waited until he went under for a good, long kick before drifting to the corner and taking the loaded syringe out of her bag.
It was easier to take him down than she thought. She kissed him in the shallow end and bit his ear as she injected him underwater. The hard part came next, when she had to roll him up and out, but Darla was strong, wiry strong, and she got it done.
She pushed out of the water and slid her butt across the wet tiles. When she stood, the bottoms of her feet slapped down loud in the puddles, and she started to worry. Suppose someone found them? No one ever had before, but it only needed to happen once. She reached down for her bag, and in the corner of her eye, saw Jason roll over. Darla spun.
He hadn’t moved. He lay on his back, beside the 4FT marker, just where she’d put him.
She didn’t think it would feel this way. Nerves and jumps and a cold ball in the middle of her stomach. The waves had made it sound so easy. She took her bag back to where Jason lay and sat down beside him. She let her leg trail into the pool, and that was better. Water always made it better. Soon it would be better for Jason, too.
• • •
He started to come around after only twenty minutes, far sooner than Darla expected. Despite the newfound steadiness in her hands, she’d managed to make only the first cuts.
“Darla?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“What happened? Did I hit my head?”
She felt him try to move his arms. A good thing she’d restrained him, just in case. The syringes she’d found on the Marine and Wildlife boat had been preloaded, and she had no way of knowing with what dose. It could have been enough to knock out a bull sea lion, or it could have been loaded to take down a muskrat. Judging by the scant time Jason was under, it had been closer to the latter.
“No, you didn’t hit your head,” she said, kneeling by his legs, still working.
Jason flexed his arms.
“Why am I tied? What’s going on? Dar?”
She smiled. He never called her Dar. That was the drugs. Their relationship wasn’t one of pet names and sweet whispers. It was swimming and it was sex. Base needs. Instincts. Survival.
“Did you give me something?” Jason asked. “What did you give me?”
“Fentanyl-diazepam. I got it from Marine and Wildlife.” And it had been easy. She was on the docks so often that people looked right through her. She could have done it at high noon.
“Why?” Jason asked.
He looked down at himself and started to scream.
Darla held up the reddened scalpel, and he stopped. But she would have to gag him anyway. He was tranquilized, but not exactly anesthetized. Asking for quiet was asking for a lot. She reached across his torso and tore off more duct tape.
“Darla, this isn’t funny. I’m not kidding around. I’m serious, goddamn it!”
“You shouldn’t have used me, Jason.”
“I didn’t use you! We’re friends. Aren’t we, Darla? Aren’t we friends?”
She raised her arm. The water in the pool reflected prettily in the silver of the blade.
“Darla, come on. Please. I never, never treated you like a dog.”
“No, you didn’t. People love dogs.”
“Darla.”
She slashed once, as a warning, to shut him up so she could stick the tape over his mouth. Talking was getting them nowhere. And they had so much work to do.
• • •
It was a gift, was what she thought when it surfaced. The sea gave gifts sometimes, fresh, white fleshed fish, or large perfect pearls, or a slick backed dolphin to lead a boat to harbor. Of course the sea took many things away as well; many, many drowned bodies sucked down and covered over with silt.
D
arla stared into the water at the small, dark rectangle. It had lines of ridges running lengthwise on its greenish sides. It drifted in front of her waist, suspended and rocking in the current. She could see it very well, despite the dark and the utter blackness of the water. She couldn’t see her jeans more than two inches below the surface, but the edges of the rectangle seemed to shine slightly, almost phosphorescent. It looked like a piece of seaweed, or a seedpod, but it wasn’t. It was a—
“Mermaid’s purse,” she whispered.
She’d seen them before, washed up on the beach. Several different shapes and sizes, different textures. Some ridged like this one and others smooth. Some light, puke green like old canned string beans, others rich as emeralds, yellow or black. Once she’d seen a fisherman cut a few out of a mother shark’s belly. But she’d never seen one like this.
It glowed and twitched and pulsed with the excitement of whatever was inside, and she thought of those beans with larva in them, jumping and popping and waiting to get out.
Around her the wind howled above the sea’s song, and the waves were choppy, but she didn’t know when that had happened. All had been calm when she’d waded in. Her hair whipped into her eyes, and, above, a long vein of lightning illuminated the water. It was only a flash, but in that instant she saw something a few feet farther out, something black, and twisting, like a tail.
Darla smiled. She reached forward under the waves and grasped the mermaid’s purse in her fist.
• • •
Darla knew just what to do. She knew just what it wanted. There was something comforting about that, like having it there to guide her through every cut of the scalpel. It felt as sure and natural as when she stroked laps in the pool.
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