Girl at the Bottom of the Sea

by Michelle Tea

  “Yes,” Syrena murmured. “Is working. I see her, now. I see everything.”

  Sophie felt a strange relief as the octopus massaged her. It was like she was a sheet of ice cracking apart beneath something warm, turning first to slush and then to a liquid peace. The octopus withdrew its tentacles gently, twining them together in a bundle and settling onto the floor where Sophie and the mermaid lay.

  “You took my heart,” Syrena said, turning to the girl. “You took too much. It was not, what you think, the curse, the Invisible, whatever you seek to remove. Was my heart. My heart.”

  “But you were so sad,” Sophie said. “There was so much of it. It was beautiful, and all mucky, all buried so deep, it was hard for me to get to—”

  “It wasn’t for you,” the mermaid snapped. “Is mine. My Griet, and my Griffin. My wars, my beloveds, my Krystyna. You took them all and I was empty. And that was even more terrible.”

  “But it’s supposed to feel good,” Sophie protested weakly. “I was trying to help you. You were so sad.”

  “Is okay to feel sad. Sadness okay. Your sister get taken away by spoiled prince, okay to be sad. Your love become dead from your very own weapon? Okay for sadness. Your, what you call, bestie, best human friend become shot by bullets till not breathing? Your city set to fire? Your home, your river, torn to pieces? The people you supposed to protect dying right at your banks, with you no help to them? Make you very sad. If not, you monster. Do not make me monster. I am mermaid. I have mermaid strong heart, hold many sad things. Is built for such.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie whispered. She felt as dry as Griet upon the banks, everything alive in her curling up. She shuddered at the memory and wished she could give it all back to Syrena, every last bit of it, even this last haze of it upon her heart.

  “If I grow to hatred because of Griet taken from me,” Syrena explained. “If I never love after Griffin slayed. If I never fight again. If I give up on humans after they kill one another at my banks, make my river into graveyard. That you take. You take the hate and the pain that makes more hate and the pain, that brings madness. But sadness? Sadness is innocent, like salt, like pearl. Like Griet. You leave me with my sadness.”

  With a gust of wind, the Ogress bent down to look at Sophie. Her enormous eye was full of feeling. “You are doing such complicated work, Sophia,” she whispered. The breath of her voice blew across the girl like weather, a warm salt breeze. “Fenja and I, we tried to fix it, too. We thought we could grind goodness into the world, to outweigh the bad. But it didn’t work. The Invisible only had more to prey upon. So we began to mill the salt, and that works some. It absorbs the Invisible, we know it does. But that, too, upsets the balance. The sea, it should not be so salty. But it’s the best we can do. You, you’re like a surgeon.”

  “Ya,” Syrena nodded her head. “Is true.”

  “You must learn to go in and take only the bad. There are many sadnesses that may feel bad, but they have to stay. The heart cannot function without them.”

  “Why can’t I just take it all?” Sophie cried. “I hate that Syrena feels so bad!” She turned to her friend. “I hate that you feel like that,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. When the mermaid smiled upon her so kindly, the tears came forward, spilling down the girl’s cheeks.

  “You may have taken some bad things, ya? Bad I did not know I had. I do feel lighter. But when you take away all the sadness, I so disoriented, so lost. Heart is compass. Love help me move forward every day.” Syrena looked upon Sophie, and with a gasp inside her heart the girl realized that the mermaid loved her. In her tough, mermaid way, Syrena loved Sophie. “You help me, Sophie,” she said. “Griet help me, her memory. Love and sadness, together. Must not take the sadness that love holds.”

  Sophie nodded. All she had taken from the mermaid left a residue like a fog around her heart. Bloody sunflowers. Muddy cubes of ice melting on the bank of a river. “What was all that?” she choked.

  “It my life, Sophie. And I will tell you all, as I have been. But is my life. Okay?”

  “Yes,” Sophie nodded.

  “Syrena will teach you how to tell the good from the bad,” Menja told her. For such a booming whisper, it still soothed. “It’s all part of your training.”

  “I your guinea pig, yes?” Syrena asked. “You experiment on me like mad doctor!”

  Sophie peered deeper at the mermaid. “Syrena, I really do think I helped you. You seem happier. I think I got something.”

  “Okay, so what. Broken clock right twice a day, ya?” The mermaid giggled.

  The octopus, quiet on the floor, undulated toward Menja’s foot and slithered its tentacles across it, tapping.

  “Sophie,” said the giantess, and straightened back up to the ceiling, her long braid hanging down her back, making waves as it swung. “The Vulcan would like to work with you. It has some things to show you.”

  The octopus slid off the giant’s foot and swam back to Sophie.

  “Vulcan amazing,” Syrena affirmed. “Bring me back my heart. Has big powers, for healing and for seeing. Thank you.” The mermaid held up her hands, flat, and the Vulcan tapped against it with his tentacles. “If I have eight hands I give you all for high five,” she said. She swam away, toward the giantess. “Now I leave you alone,” she said.

  SOPHIE FACED THE octopus. It was a mysterious, slightly ghoulish figure. Its skin was so pale it glowed like an apparition. And it glowed for real, too, with little pulses of light here and there, visible through its translucent skin. Its legs swayed gently, like little scarves in a wind, the tips curling and looping. And its head! Bulbous, slightly cone-shaped, its eyes on either side of its long head. It was very different from the small creature that had been living in her hair for the past few days. Sophie reached up to check that it was still there, and her fingers felt its tiny tentacles, raised in greeting. The Vulcan extended the thinnest tip of an arm as if to shake hands with it. Then it placed that arm on Sophie’s head, and then another arm, and then another. And then all of the Vulcan’s appendages were cradling Sophie’s head, and she was looking into its flickering face. She tried to fearlessly face the strange and groping creature, but it was hard. Its eyes were splayed so far apart, and it seemed to be looking directly into her heart.

  The Vulcan tipped itself back, and Sophie was looking at its underside, where a ferocious little beak curved out from the center. She couldn’t help it—her heart skipped. Was this where it would end? After all that she’d been through, now she was to be eaten by a giant octopus in the den of an Ogress? Fed to him, practically, by the creatures she’d trusted? Sophie took a deep breath, summoning her powers. She would zawolanie this stupid Vulcan or whatever it was to smithereens, send it smashing through the roof of the cave, feed it to the Invisible! She had battled Kishka, and won! She would not be done in by this leggy bottom dweller!

  As if sensing her fear, one of the Ogresses piped up. “The Vulcan,” she boomed gently, “Is an oracle. A deep-sea shaman. Not only a healer, but a seer. It can transfer energies—move thoughts and feelings from one creature to another. That is how it helped Syrena, and you, too—it took the emotions and memories you’d taken from her, and returned them. So now Syrena is whole again, and you are relieved of the burden of her history.”

  Thank you, Sophie began to address the octopus, but as she began to speak, the Vulcan’s beak opened, and out from it came a bubble.

  The bubble floated, wobbling, toward Sophie, and what she saw made her words catch in her throat. It was Hennie, her magical aunt. As if she was peering into a snow globe, Sophie watched as the old woman rocked a child in a giant wooden rocker, a storybook spread on her ample lap. Sophie recognized the toddler, though she had never seen her so animated, poking at the book with excited fingers, laughing up at Hennie’s face, her sweet and jowly face, tugging at the babushka knot beneath her chin.

  “That’s the Dola’s baby,” Sophie gasped. “I mean, Laurie LeClair’s.” And as the bubble spun
in the water before Sophie, she saw a figure hunched over a desk, scratching into a notebook. Dark roots grew out from the top of her head, fading to bleachy white and spilling over a pile of books. The figure raised her head and glanced in Hennie’s direction, and a smile came over her face like a sunrise. It was Laurie LeClair. And she no longer had the look of the Dola, that dead-eyed creature, nor the dead eyes Sophie had seen blinking from Laurie’s face when she’d seen her wasted in the square so many times, either. Laurie’s eyes were as fiery and alive as her baby’s, as glinting and happy as Hennie’s. They were helping each other, Sophie understood, and it was good.

  As the bubble popped in front of her, the Vulcan opened its beak and released another.

  Dr. Chen stood at her rooftop dovecote. Sophie could see all of Chelsea in the bubble’s round distance—the green stretch of the Tobin Bridge carrying cars into Boston. The red-and-white water tower rising cheerfully from the Soldier’s Home, the veteran’s hospital on the hill. It looked like a sweet toy town from this angle. But Sophie noticed that the dovecote was empty, and that Dr. Chen’s smooth face held sadness and worry. Stray feathers caught in the structure’s mesh were fluttering in the wind and Sophie reached for her hair, finding Livia’s feather snared tightly in the tangle. Where were the pigeons? Sophie bit her lip, watching the doctor pull the feathers free from the wire of the dovecote, creating a small, fluffy bouquet. And as the tears fell from her gentle face, Dr. Chen lifted all that was left of her flock and dried her face with the soft clutch.

  The image popped, leaving Sophie with an anxious feeling that only grew when she saw what lay inside the next wobbly orb. It was a green bubble, blown from the Vulcan’s curved beak. Green with a thickness of plant life, with crawling vines and leaves like elephant ears, floppy and prehistoric. Then a hand rose up like a pale flower and pulled the greenery down, and Sophie was looking at herself. Herself with well-kept, untangled hair pinned back neatly with a barrette. Herself with smooth skin, pale skin, skin that had never seen sunlight, had never had a sunburn, let alone felt the searing lash of a sea dragon. Herself with eyes empty of struggle, empty of conflict, empty of concern, or of thought. Her own eyes, empty. Staring back at her.

  Inside the bubble, Sophie’s sister raised her hand as if she could see Sophie watching. Sophie raised her hand as well, a reflex. She raised her right hand to the girl’s left, tilted her head left to her sister’s tilting right. Could her sister see her? The pale girl’s eyes remained empty, almost cold. Tiny tree frogs, colorful and venomous, hopped around her from leaf to leaf, onto her shoulders and off. A desperate feeling stirred in Sophie’s chest. She didn’t even know her name. Her own sister. She opened her mouth anyway. “Hello?” she cried, and her twin’s eyes widened, her mouth hung open.

  “Help me!” Sophie’s twin begged, in a voice that sounded as old and creaking as a jammed attic door. The effort of the words on the girl’s dry throat produced a spasm of coughing, which drove tears from her eyes. Sophie brought her hand to her mouth, covering it in horror. Help her?

  “Can you see me?” Sophie begged. “Who—what—what’s your name?”

  The girl coughed, and coughed, and coughed, until a thick green liquid curled out from the corner of her lips. She tore a leaf from a plant and mopped her mouth.

  The name Belinda floated through Sophie’s body, feeling like an itch, like the beginning of a cold. The name felt bad inside her, and she too began to cough, as if she could hack it from her lungs. Belinda. It drifted through her, leaving a poisonous trail. Sophie imagined the red bumps of a rash, but inside her.

  “Belinda?” The word left Sophie like the croak of a frog, not the nimble ones that leapt across her sister but a bullfrog, something warty and bulbous and stuck in the mud. Her sister’s big eyes searched her jungle home, looking for something. Belinda: the word had left a residue in Sophie’s throat. She coughed it out and the burst of air from her lips shattered the bubble into a dozen tinier bubbles, each containing her sister’s white face, then each shimmered into nothing, gone.

  “No!” Sophie cried, distraught, pawing at the empty space in front of her, as if she could whip the bubble back from the sea itself. “No, I wasn’t done! I heard her!” Above her the giantesses’ faces loomed like statues of stone, stern and sad. Syrena’s face, smaller and closer, looked just as tight.

  The next bubble left the Vulcan’s mouth like a puff of smoke. It was Andrea, her mother, sitting by a window in the house Sophie had left behind. A chipped plate was balanced on the windowsill, and Andrea absently flicked her cigarette ash onto it. Her mother had gone back to smoking! Sophie felt a tug in her heart. She’d like to pull the thing right from her mother’s melancholy grip. She’d known her mother used to smoke, back when she was young and wild. She’d quit when she became pregnant with Sophie and her twin sister and abandoned Ronald, their father. When Ronald fell under Kishka’s spell at the dump, plied with endless alcohol, alive but dead, the closest thing to a zombie Sophie hoped she’d ever see. And Sophie knew, as she watched her mother, that Andrea was thinking about Ronald as well. Sophie could feel it. She was thinking about Ronald, and she was thinking about Sophie. In her cocoon of smoke, Andrea was waiting, and thinking of the people she had lost.

  Sophie watched as her mother stubbed the cigarette out on the dinner plate, and went to place the plate on the wooden back stairs. As her hands reached through the window her arms seized as if she was being electrocuted and the plate jerked from her hand, rolling onto the back porch. Andrea’s face twisted in pain; she tried to bring her arms back through the window, into the house, but they appeared to be stuck to the air itself.

  “No!” Sophie cried helplessly. “No, no!”

  With a terrible grimace of effort, Andrea managed to yank her arms back inside, the strain knocking her on her back on the kitchen floor. She clambered up, shaking tears of hurt and fear from the corners of her eyes.

  “Goddammit!” she hollered into the empty house. She hugged her arms together, rubbing her elbows. She swiped at her eyes, wiping her tears back into her frazzled hair. She struck out at the kitchen table, which Sophie saw was piled with a great tumble of long boxes. They crashed to the floor and Sophie could see what they were. Cigarettes. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes. Andrea kicked at them wildly and raged through the house, to the front door that led out to Heard Street. She dove for the knob and was flung back from the door as if a terrible shock had struck her.

  Andrea ran back through the house, into the kitchen, stomping the boxes of cigarettes beneath her bare feet. She reached out for the back door that led out to the stairs, and Sophie flinched in advance, covering her eyes so that she didn’t have to see her mother shoved back by the force field that was keeping her hostage in her own home.

  “Please!” she heard her mother demand. “Please! Let me go!”

  When there was quiet, Sophie dared to peek again. Her mother was back at the window, a new dinner plate beside her, dusted with ash, a torn-open pack of cigarettes on the sill. Andrea inhaled the cigarette, shaking. She blew a smoke ring toward Sophie, and the bubble popped.

  “No,” Sophie said, turning to the Vulcan, her voice a pleading echo of her mother’s. “Please. I don’t think I can see any more.” But the Vulcan exhaled its next bubble, and Sophie couldn’t look away.

  It was Ella, alone in her room. She lay facedown on her bed and, from the look of her heaving body, she was crying. Her hair streamed out in all directions, black and lustrous, a shine that could light the deep, Sophie thought. She missed her friend with a sharp pang. What was hurting her? Sophie feared the sight of Ella pulling herself up from her bed and revealing her lovely face abraded, scrubbed compulsively with a rough sponge or a chemical meant for dirty pans. Sophie’s heart ached for her friend. Could she get inside her, somehow, and take that thing away, the thing that made Ella feel so dirty she thought she needed to scour herself that way?

  But maybe Ella wasn’t even hurting like that anymore. Maybe
her dumb new boyfriend had helped her stop; maybe the need to be pretty for him was bigger even than her need to feel clean. Maybe she was crying because he’d hurt her, in her heart or, Sophie thought, her body. What if Ella rose to reveal a black eye, a cut lip? Sophie’s heart curled into a fist at the thought of it. She would turn into a shark again. She would swim back to Massachusetts and find the boy at Revere Beach; in the scummy froth she’d swallow him whole.

  But when Ella rose up, her face was the same lovely face she’d always had. No imagined germs had been sanded off her cheeks, and no harm had come to her eyes, muddied with eyeliner and tears. Her lips were not split, though they trembled. Sophie spied a crumple of pink upon her best friend’s lap; she’d been folded over it, lying upon it. A dented cardboard box and a sheet of unfolded paper. Sophie could see instructions, diagrams. Illustration of ladies’ fingers holding some sort of stick. And there was the stick itself, pink and white plastic on Ella’s pink bedspread, bright pink strips in the tiny plastic window. Sophie suddenly understood what was wrong. Ella was pregnant.

  The bubble whooshed away before Sophie could call out.

  She turned to the Vulcan. If she hadn’t been so afraid of the claw-like curve of its mighty beak she might have pressed her hand against it, made him swallow whatever was coming next. “No more,” Sophie told the creature, covering her eyes. The Vulcan’s many tentacles rubbed her head, relaxing her, and eventually she took a deep breath and wearily opened her eyes. In the bubble wobbling before her was Angel. Her heart leapt with love and fear—what would Angel be doing? Was she okay? She was bent over, her strong arms in motion, her longish-shortish hair swaying at her chin. Angel was… doing dishes. Sophie laughed a large, joyous laugh—to see something so boring! Angel wasn’t fighting Kishka or crying or stuck somewhere she didn’t want to be. She was finishing the last of the dinner dishes, there in the home where she lived with her mother, the Curandera. She was tucking a knitted afghan around her mother, who was watching a Spanish soap opera in front of a flickering television. She was walking into her bedroom and pulling from her dresser the clothes she’d wear tomorrow, a button-up shirt and a pair of jeans. She was placing them on a chair in her bedroom, getting ready for bed. Oh, it was all so mundane, Sophie’s pent-up tears sprung with joy. Imagine! Just to be home, washing milk from a cereal bowl in the sink. Settling into the tired couch to watch reruns with her mom. The sort of comfort Sophie hadn’t recognized as comfort when she was just a normal girl. Maybe it had even bored her. From her new position on the ocean floor, a psychic octopus’s tentacles wrapped around her head, boredom suddenly seemed nice to Sophie.