“But Mark! They’ve known each other for a month and a half! Six weeks! And they’re getting married!”
He tumbled her onto his lap and nuzzled his face into her neck, sending shivers of delight down her spine. “And who are you to talk, Mrs. Forsythe? What about us? We were married four weeks after we met.”
She laughed as she responded soberly, “That was different. We were never strangers.”
“Maybe Shirley and Edward feel the same way,” he said.
Indeed, it turned out the older couple felt exactly the same way.
On their wedding day, Edward asked both children if they’d consider calling him “Grandpa,” and explained that if he wasn’t their grandpa, he wouldn’t be allowed to spoil them. “Grandma,” he said, a faint complaint in his tone, “won’t let me.”
Readily, both children agreed.
“All right, ‘Grandpa’ ”, Mark said, “I’ll permit my kids to call you that on one condition.”
“Condition, sir?”
“If you’re to be my stepfather-in-law, you no longer call me ‘sir’.”
Edward huffed. “Oh, well, now, sir. I don’t know...”
“Dad,” Jillian said with a grin, “I think you’d best give in. This husband of mine is as stubborn as your bride.”
“I am not,” her mother protested. “I merely expect, within our family, we do not stand on ceremony. Edward, my son-in-law is no longer to be called ‘sir” by my husband. Clear?”
Edward sighed long and loud. “Yes, dearest. Quite clear.”
“Well then?” she prompted.
He sighed again. “Very well. “M-Mark. But you,” he added facing his former employer, “will not be calling me ‘dad’. Is that also clear?”
Mark clapped him on the shoulder and grinned widely. “Yes, sir!”
Long after the newly-weds had left on their honeymoon to St. Petersburg, Florida, a pair of tired children had gone to bed, but their mother and father continued to pick up dishes, glasses and crumpled napkins.
“I wonder,” Mark said, “if they’ll...well, you know.”
“Consummate their marriage? That, my love, is none of our business.”
“Hmm...I suppose you’re right,” he conceded, drawing her away from the vacuum cleaner she’d pulled from a closet. “But this is our business.”
As she responded to the growing urgency of his kisses and touches, adding a few embellishments of her own as they went along, he didn’t waste any more time speculating about his mother-in-law and Edward.
Nobody but he and Jillian had ever felt quite this way about each other. Nobody could have, or the world already would have come to a halt.
In the few weeks that they’d been married, it seemed that all they ever did, ever wanted to do—and ever would want to do—every chance they got was love each other.
He carried her off to their bedroom, closing the door tightly and setting her down gently in the middle of their big bed. She sighed in perfect happiness as they began to take each other’s clothes off, and then murmured in ecstasy as their bodies finally came together in a wonderful union they had made uniquely theirs.
While the nights belonged to them, their days belonged to their children. Sleeping in was a luxury they had been denied after their brief, week-long honeymoon. But as Mark got up to open the door to a knock the next morning, and Jillian sat against the headboard smiling at the two kids who stood in the doorway, neither of them minded. “This is the last day of your vacation, Dad. What are we going to do?”
Chris, under the umbrella of love spread by his father and stepmother and little stepsister, had become a changed child. He still grieved for his mother but no longer believed that Mark had deliberately killed her or had wanted him out of the way too. As he’d said to Jillian one day when the two of them were talking quietly together about it, “I think I was a little bit nuts, Jilly. I just missed my mom so much, and I was scared to love Dad in case he went away too.”
“It’s the last day of yours and Amber’s vacations too,” said Mark, the sound of his voice bringing Jillian back to the present. “Suppose the two of you decide and then let us know.”
As the kids left, he closed the door and clicked the lock in place. Turning back to the bed, he shucked his pajama bottoms and slid back under the covers, drawing his wife into his embrace. The decision-making, he was certain, would take at least half an hour.
That would be long enough. Just.
Jillian looked at the clean bathroom and backed out of it. It was the last room of the eight she had scrubbed or vacuumed to within an inch of its life, and there was nothing more to do. It was only eleven-fifteen in the morning. The day stretched ahead of her endlessly, as had all the other days except weekends, for the past three months. The Thanksgiving festivities were behind them, and her Christmas shopping was all done. The packages were all wrapped and stored neatly away. She had read all the books she’d been wanting to read for years, also watched a hundred or more DVDs of movies she’d been wanting to see. Next, she supposed, were daytime game shows and soaps.
Wandering into the spotless kitchen, she spent an hour baking cookies then another twenty minutes cleaning up again. She sighed, sat down, and idly turned the pages of a magazine. She could go shopping, she thought, but she didn’t need anything. She didn’t want anything. Neither of the kids needed anything. Mark didn’t need anything. Nobody did.
But more important, nobody needed her for anything at all.
She sat blinking hard to hold back tears as she let that thought sink in, but the tears flowed anyway. That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? She was redundant in all their lives.
The kids had school all day. Chris went to soccer practice a couple of afternoons a week, guitar lessons once a week, and the other days he was out playing with his friends.
And Amber went to school, to ballet and karate, and talked about her teachers and how wonderful they were. She had made lots of friends in the months they had been there and was one busy little girl.
Mark, of course, had his work. While his “elves” were excellent at the jobs they did, they still needed supervision and guidance, so Mark didn’t take very many days off, even though he could afford to. He had an able assistant who could and did take over when necessary, but his workers trusted looked up to him, and he liked to be there for them.
She and Mark had a fairly normal social life, and from within his circle of friends, she had made some friends of her own.
But going out to lunch with a friend once or twice a week wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she needed. Now, in this moment of tearful introspection, she asked herself what it she needed, but she couldn’t come up with an easy answer, only one that she recognized as being impossible.
She needed a job, but she hadn’t seen any ads for mermaids in a long while.
She quickly brushed her tears away as she heard Mark’s key in the door. But as he entered, he frowned, knowing right away that she had been crying. Crouching in front of her, he drew her into his arms. “What is it, love?”
She shook her head. If she didn’t have an answer for herself, how could she give one to her husband?
“Nothing, really. Just a minor case of the blues. It’ll get better,” she assured him.
It didn’t get any better. Day by day it got worse. Even the kids noticed and started tiptoeing around as if they had done something bad to make Jillian so sad. But she struggled to put on a cheerful demeanor for their sakes and Mark’s. Often, she could convince the children that there was nothing bothering her, but Mark was a different story.
At night he held her, loved her, traveled with her to their secret, wonderful place, and then lay awake when she thought he was asleep, watching silent tears run down her face. But he couldn’t get an answer out of her about what the problem was. Maybe it was just the adjustment to a different kind of life, to marriage, to being a homemaker, to having two children rather than one. Maybe she missed her mother.
A
nd maybe he had been right all along, that he made a better bachelor than he did a husband, because clearly he wasn’t making her happy. What they had together wasn’t enough.
When Christmas came and her mother and Edward, the two children, and even Chris’s grandparents sat down to dinner with them and complimented her on the wonderful job she had done, Mark thought perhaps it would be the turning point.
She glowed under their praise and watched with pride as Mark carved the golden-skinned turkey she had spent all afternoon basting and fretting over.
On New Year’s Eve, she laughed like an excited girl as she kissed him in the crowd of swaying, dancing friends, with streamers and confetti and music swirling around them, and he thought that now, at last, she had made the necessary adjustments and would be happy again.
But when the kids were back in school and Mark back, at work, the sadness descended upon her once more, even though she was growing better at concealing it.
And then one evening when the children were in bed, and Mark and Jillian sat watching television together, it happened.
There it was. The boat, the bay, the white-clad fisherman playing his catch as his deep, persuasive voice said, “Our oceans are our most precious resource. Some of the smallest of earth’s living creatures make their home here”—the screen filled with a much-magnified picture of phytoplankton—“as do the largest”—whales moved in stately splendor and the song of the blue whale came from the speakers.
The voice went on, overriding the whale song, outlining the many ways in which the oceans were important to all mankind, while on the screen porpoises dove and played, schools of tropical fish darted here and there, boats bobbed on clean water, and children splashed and played on calm shores and salmon swam upstream.
“And we do not know all there is to know about what lives in those mysterious depths,” the resonant voice continued as the screen filled once more with the stern of the boat and the fisherman in white. All at once, a disturbance on the surface of the seething ocean was the focus of interest, and then a large, silver tail shot with blue and silver, followed by a sleek, golden head emerging from the water appeared, and Jillian Lockstead, Mermaid, was being seen by millions of viewers.
“How can we go on pouring tons of chemicals into these waters? How can we go on risking their purity—their already compromised purity—risking not only the lives of the creatures we know about, but those of whose existence we can only guess?”
As the smiling mermaid came nearer, reaching up to unhook the line from her costume, the camera drifted over her. She waved, flipped her tail, and then dove away out of sight.
“Many of you are saying ‘There is no such thing as a mermaid,’” the candidate went on as the camera panned back to his earnest face. “But I say, do we know that for certain? And if such a beautiful, exotic creature should exist, can we risk killing her and her kind with our own careless acts of vandalism?”
He went on, but Mark heard nothing. He was watching Jillian’s white face, seeing the tension there, the tears running down her cheeks as her shoulders heaved from the force of the sobs she was trying to hold back.
And now he understood.
He didn’t touch her. He didn’t hold her. He couldn’t comfort her. He could only look on in torture as he witnessed her pain.
Finally he said, his voice just barely above a murmur, “It’s not enough, is it? We aren’t enough for you. Being my wife, the mother of our children, isn’t enough. You want...that...back.” He waved at the television screen where the camera was now following the mermaid’s course as she swam back out to sea, turning now and then to wave and smile as if beckoning the world to follow.
They both watched as the scene switched to an underwater shot of the mermaid poised at the entrance to a grotto. She disappeared inside, leaving only an afterimage of magic that slowly faded as the candidate’s voice faded, and a loud commercial came on extolling the virtues of a bathroom tile cleaner.
“You want the adulation. You want the panting, men, faces pressed against the glass, the notes in your dressing room, the thrill of knowing that you’re turning on five hundred men a night, the ego boost of knowing that every woman in your audience is envious of you,” Mark accused.
“God, Jillian! How can I compete with that? What do I have to do to be enough for you? I took that all away from you, didn’t I? And I haven’t given you anything to make up for it.”
He got to his feet and walked slowly to their bedroom, for the first time not reaching out his hand to draw her along with him. And for the first time he was asleep, or seemed to be, when she finally went to bed.
When morning came, Jillian stayed in bed, listening to the children squabbling, to Mark’s shower beating against the wall near their bed, and then slowly got herself ready to face the day. At last alone in the house, she sat at the table in the kitchen, for the first time not leaping up to begin scouring and scrubbing and keeping the house spotless. She stared at the toast crumbs, at the milk splotches on the crisp tablecloth she had so carefully starched and ironed even though the instructions said ironing was not required. She stared at the dirty dishes and thought long and hard about what Mark had said the previous night.
He was right. It wasn’t enough. She had thought that having him as a husband, having their two children to raise, their home to care for, would be enough. She had believed, so wrongly, that all it would take to make her complete was Mark and his love. And now she knew she had been wrong.
She was still as incomplete as she had been—as she had become—the day that double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun had torn half her leg from her body.
She was still as incomplete as she had been while dressed in the suit that gave her the appearance of completeness, that created an illusion of reality, but was, when it came right down to it, only a fantasy, something to hide behind.
For more than two years she had let herself buy into that fantasy because it was easier than facing up to a cruel truth. It was her mind that was incomplete, not her body.
She showered, dressed very carefully, and with trepidation but determination, got into the car Mark had given her as a wedding gift—one with no rust, one on which no rust would ever dare to appear—and pulled out of the garage. At the street she hesitated for another moment, wondering if she could go through with her plan. Then she turned the car and headed downtown.
“Mrs. Lockstead! What are you doin’ here?”
Jillian turned in response to the surprised voice.
She smiled and blinked in astonishment. “Hello, Juan.” She had to look up at him now. In two and a half years he had grown so much. “Still hangin’ in, are you? A senior this year?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Junior again. I screwed up pretty bad and had to do last year’s stuff over again, but this time round, it’s easier.”
“Good for you for sticking with it. I’m happy for you. I always knew you could do it.”
She moved on, haltingly, because so many of the students in the crowded hallways remembered her and stopped to talk, to tell her what they’d done while she’d been away, and to ask about her life. A few had even seen the paid political announcement in which she had appeared and asked if she was going to be on TV all the time.
For several minutes she stood outside the gym, hearing the sounds of a basketball game going on behind the closed doors, the shrill, feminine voices, the slap, slap, slap of a dribbled ball, the thud of feet landing on hardwood. She ached to open the door and watch, but as the halls emptied and classes resumed, she walked on.
Finally she made it to the office. One of the secretaries burst into tears upon seeing her and gave her a hug. The other two were new and didn’t know her, didn’t remember except vaguely. She was a figure from an old, mostly forgotten newspaper story, a thirty-second segment on the evening news. There had been so many other news items, the one concerning her had been buried in the memories of those not intimately involved.
When she was ushered into the
principal’s office, he got slowly to his feet.
“Well, Jillian.” He didn’t smile.
“Hello, Peter. You told me—two years ago—if I was ever ready to come back to let you know. That you’d put in a good word for me with the board. Will you do that now?”
“By my reckoning, it’s been closer to three years. Two and a half and then some.”
“Okay, so call me a liar for seven months. It took me a while to make up my mind.”
“Are you sure you’re ready?”
She gazed at him steadily. “I’m sure.”
He continued to look at her, from the top of her neatly combed hair, to her dark blue dress with its stand-up white collar, to her legs which were clad in navy stockings. The hem of the dress hung to mid-calf, but even that and the dark hose didn’t completely disguise the fact that she wore a prosthesis.
“Yes,” he said. And now he smiled. “You’re ready.”
“Are there—do you know if there are any openings?”
“In this school?” She could sense his doubt of the wisdom in that.
“In this school,” she said firmly.
He didn’t reply, only took her arm and walked her across the office to a door, which she recalled led to a small interview room. Opening it, he let her enter then stood behind her, gazing over her shoulder at the sullen, pimply-faced girl who sat slumped in a chair.
“This is Star. Star, this is Mrs. Lockstead.”
“Mrs. Forsythe now,” Jillian said, moving toward the other chair and sinking into its softness. “What’s up, Star?”
“Why ask?” The girl didn’t even look at Jillian. “You don’t give a damn.”
Jillian leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, and looked the girl square in the eyes. “If I didn’t give a damn,” she said pleasantly, “I wouldn’t be in this room.”
Behind her, she heard Peter close the door quietly.
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