Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  “Our work can’t be done!” Sophie cried. “I—I—there’s a lot I don’t understand, Angel. What if I go too deep and I can’t get out? Can I get trapped in a person?”

  Angel shook her head. “No. They might begin to feel you again when you come out, there could be a struggle, but you can hold your own in a struggle. Jeez.” Angel tried to smile, to lighten the moment, but truthfully she didn’t feel light. She felt battered and exhausted, and sad. She had been training for this moment her whole life; she didn’t expect it to be over so soon. The girl knew everything she could teach her.

  “Well, what about Teresita?” Sophie said, desperate. “You barely told me anything about her, she seems really important.”

  “She is important.” Angel nodded. “Honestly, Sophie, I have thought that you might be her. You might be her, and Joan of Arc, and all those saints, those girls who had crazy magic and didn’t know what they were doing, who didn’t have helpers like you have, and the people of their time just punished them for it. I’ve even thought you could be, like, the big revolutionary heroes who spoke about love, you know? Like Jesus Christ or Gandhi. Maybe it’s the same spirit coming back again and again to try to help. Maybe this lifetime, it’s you.”

  Sophie thought of the images she’d seen of the men Angel talked about. Fragile-looking Gandhi, too skinny, but he seemed cheerful, a happy man in his little glasses. Jesus Christ on the cross. She’d looked at him every day for eight long years of Catholic school. And Angel was suggesting she was him. In your face, Sister Margaret, she thought with a spiteful pride. Angel caught it.

  “I shouldn’t be saying any of this to you,” Angel said. “This is not the story. This is not the prophecy, not at all. These are just my thoughts. Maybe it only means that you are part of a powerful lineage, Sophie. It is good for me to remember. Because when I see you, I see a young girl with snarls in her hair, and I need to remember your lineage.”

  “What’s lineage?”

  “Like ancestors. But, it’s like you’re part of a bigger family than the one you have here on earth. Anyway, it’s good for me to think like this.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get out of you when you wanted me to,” Sophie said.

  “It’s okay. Please don’t do it again. I hope to never give you a reason to.”

  “But Angel—” Sophie started, stopped. “Why did you lie? What won’t you tell me?”

  “Someone else should tell you these things. It is not my work to explain everything to you.”

  “Hennie,” piped Livia, who, like all the pigeons, had been watching them quietly. “Hennie will tell you more; go to her when you can.”

  “Okay,” Sophie said. She wanted to look at Angel but felt she might cry. “We’ll still hang out at the dump, right? Smashing glass and stuff?”

  “Sophie,” Angel was shaking her head. She busied herself pulling her hair from its ponytail, then roping it back into a ponytail. She fussed with her bangs. “Sophie, I have been waiting to quit the dump for years. I was only there to wait for you. I can’t keep working with your grandmother, in that smell, watching how she treats Ronald— she’s killing him, giving him all that alcohol, she might as well give him rat poison. Having to keep my wall up all day in case she comes snooping, having her think I’m a guy all the time—I can’t do it. It’s really stressful.”

  “Well, what will you do?” Sophie cried. She couldn’t picture Angel anywhere but the dump, smashing old jars in her goggles, harvesting gleaming beads of perfect glass from the tumbler.

  “I want to help kids,” she said. “I want to be a juvenile drug counselor. It bums me out, seeing so many kids in Chelsea messed up like that. There’s a program at that college that just opened a campus right here in town, in the old post office. I bet I could get financial aid, I think I could do it.”

  Sophie thought about Angel counseling drug addict kids, her ability to go inside them, her ability to keep them outside of her. It seemed perfect. “You’re a really good teacher,” Sophie said shyly. “It would be kind of like teaching, wouldn’t it be?”

  “Maybe.” Angel nodded. “So… I won’t be at the dump tomorrow. I’m sorry to leave you there. The pigeons will be with you, but you have to steer clear of your grandmother as much as possible. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Sophie hurled herself impulsively at Angel, gripping her in a clutching hug. “Can I please come visit you sometimes? What if I need you?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Angel said. “Of course, if you ever need me, come find me. You know where I live. My mother will always be home, she would always be happy to see you, okay?”

  “Can I just come and, like, hang out sometimes?”

  Angel laughed. “Yeah, sure. In all your free time. When you’re not, like, saving the world, come by and I’ll tell you the whole story of Teresita.”

  “Okay, great,” Sophie felt relieved. Angel handed her a paper bag she’d brought along.

  “One white candle, dressed by my mother. Light it and pray to Teresita. Make an altar. It will help you stay focused and strong, and it will call help to you.” Angel kissed Sophie on her forehead. “I will be praying for you all the time, always know that Sophie.”

  Sophie clutched the paper bag to her chest and watched Angel walk away. A sweet fragrance, like lilacs and peonies, floated up fro the sack. One of the pigeons, a bird named Bix, settled onto her shoulder and lifted his feather to soak up her tears. “ ‘Parting is all we know of heaven,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘And all we need to know of hell.’ That’s Emily Dickinson. She was a poet, perhaps you’ve heard of her?”

  “Don’t start with the poetry crap,” Arthur bellowed. “She’s having a moment, let her have her moment.”

  “I find that poetry aids the having of such moments, greatly,” Bix sniffed.

  “Thank you, Bix,” Sophie said. Together with the pigeons she watched Angel move up Heard Street, unti she was around the corner and gone.

  “Who will put out water for us to bathe in?” Giddy asked sadly.

  “I will,” Sophie promised. “If you guys promise to stop taking dumps on my mom’s car.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, lady,” Arthur said. “But you got us over a barrel. We need a bath. It’s a deal.”

  “I would offer to clean it for you,” Bix offered generously. “But we do not possess the appendages for such a task.”

  The pigeons took off into the sky, the tail-whistles of Livia and the others like audible streamers in the night. Sophie waited at her door until she could no longer hear them, then pulled her house key from her shirt and let herself in.

  Chapter 15

  Sophie was too exhausted to wake her mother from the couch and coax her into bed. She felt a pang, thinking about her mom waking up in her work clothes, her body crumpled and sore, but she felt a flare of annoyance, too: Why keep falling asleep on the couch, then? But Sophie knew she should be grateful for her mother’s narcolepsy. Without it she would not have been able to sneak away these past nights, out of her house and into her destiny.

  Sophie walked through her mother’s empty room and into her own cramped space, her twin mattress on its twin frame facing a stout wooden dresser, old looking. It had been Andrea’s when she was a child, something Sophie hadn’t learned until after she’d found how easy it was to carve onto the surface with her house key, and spent an hour on the phone with Ella idly carving spirals, stars, and hearts into the dresser. Andrea had been so upset she simply stared at the furniture, her tongue working to conjure the proper words from deep in her throat. “That was mine,” she said simply. “When I was your age. That was an antique.” She rubbed her fingers over the vandalism. Sophie felt defensive. She hated getting in trouble for things she hadn’t known she wasn’t supposed to do.

  “I thought it was mine,” she said. “I thought I could do what I wanted to it.”

  “Just because something is yours doesn’t give you the right to ruin it. It doesn’t mean you get to treat it disrespectfully.” Andrea ra
n her fingers in the deep, rough grooves of a heart her daughter had bore onto the surface. “Or, I guess it does. Do what you want. Draw all over the walls, why don’t you? It’s ‘your’ room.”

  But Sophie would never do such a thing; she knew it wasn’t her room at all, but the landlord’s room. She’d thought the dresser was hers. She didn’t know why she’d carved on it, it didn’t look good, she’d simply wanted to do it at the time and so she’d done it. She felt embarrassed, and hated how beaten down her mother was being about it. She preferred Andrea angry to this limp and hopeless version. “I’m sorry,” she offered, wondering what other things she thought were her own were in fact not. Her mother had left the bedroom, and the defacement was never spoken of again.

  Lying in her bed, with the candle in its paper bag stashed beneath it, Sophie watched as the slowly rising sun lit her room, illuminating the carvings on her dresser. She was perhaps more tired than she had ever been. She wondered if she had to pull up her shield right then, if she could even do it. She’d surely collapse. She lay flat on her back because she liked to feel the weight of the sea glass on her sternum, cool and flat and precious. At least that was hers, she was certain. She pulled her sheet over her head to shield her eyes from the coming day, and tried to get some sleep before heading back to the dump.

  * * *

  IT SEEMED LIKE Sophie had just shut her eyes, and her mother was calling her. But it wasn’t her crisp, drill-sergeant mother, it was some croaking, weakened, frog version of her mother.

  “Sophie,” her voice was raspy. “I’m sick.” Andrea was seated on the edge of her bed, in a room adjacent to Sophie’s own. Sophie pulled herself up with effort; her eyes did not want to be open.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Andrea felt around her throat. “My lymph nodes are swollen,” she said. “And my throat is sore. I think I have a fever. Will you feel my forehead?”

  Sophie climbed out of bed and brought the cool inside of her wrist up to her mother’s forehead, feeling the throbbing heat of the skin there. The air around her shimmered, and a part of herself magnetized toward her mother. She reined herself in. “You have a fever.”

  “That goddamn old man sneezed on me,” Andrea grumbled. “I washed my face and Purelled and everything but it’s no use. I work in a germ factory. They should give us all extra sick days.” Andrea took off her work pants and slid into bed in her t-shirt and underwear, bringing the sheet over her body limply. Her head sunk into a pillow. “Ooooh,” she groaned, a mixture of relief and pain. “I forgot what it’s like to lie down in a bed. It’s so nice.”

  “What about me, Ma?” Sophie asked. “How will I get to the dump?” She held her breath hopefully, keeping a cheerful, earnest look on her face. Even though her mother couldn’t read her, she brought her wall up anyway, just for practice. She felt snug and safe inside it, like a tree house had sprung up beneath her, and from its heights she spied everything but no one spied her.

  “No dump,” Andrea said. “You’ll stay here. I’ll need you to stick around and go to the store for me later. Call your grandmother and tell her you’re not coming. And call the clinic, would you? Tell them I’m not feeling good. Ugh.” Andrea kicked off the sheet and spread her limbs across the bed as far as she could, feeling for a spot that felt cool. “Nothing is worse than being sick in the heat,” she said. “I feel like a dog, a sick dog.”

  Sophie walked over and kissed the burning top of Andrea’s brow. Her hairline was damp, the hair sticky with sweat. She petted her mother’s head, pushing the full roundness of her hair back onto the pillow. Bobby pins jabbed her hand; Sophie removed them so they wouldn’t poke her mother in the skull, laid them on her bedside table. “Okay, Ma,” she said. Then Sophie walked solemnly into the kitchen and, once out of Andrea’s view, did a happy dance. She wiggled her hips and punched her fists in front of her, kicking her legs. Her mother falling ill was the best thing that could have happened.

  She called the clinic first. Who was her mother’s boss? She wasn’t sure, actually. There was a long list of people at the clinic her mother complained about on the regular, and Sophie wasn’t sure who was who. She let the voice mail take her through the workforce. None of the names were familiar. Betsy Chen, the robotic voice intoned. Sophie hit pound, and the phone began to ring in Dr. Chen’s office.

  “Hello,” the doctor answered.

  “Hi, Dr. Chen?”

  “Yeeees.” Something about the way the doctor spoke made Sophie feel like she was half-singing her words. It was similar to the pigeons, she realized. How they spoke in such soothing, cooing melodies. Dr. Chen’s voice was not so different.

  “Hi, it’s Sophie Swankowski. I’m calling about my mother. She woke up really sick and she’s not going to be able to come in today.”

  “Oh, no!” Dr. Chen exclaimed. “Well, I’m so sorry. What is wrong with her?”

  “Um, her lymph nodes are swollen and her throat is sore and she’s got a fever.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sophie imagined the doctor’s face nodding, her smooth bob swaying above her shoulders. “That’s what’s going around. She’ll probably need some antibiotics. Perhaps I can stop by later and look in on her.”

  “Sure,” Sophie said, suddenly alarmed at the thought of Dr. Chen inside her dumpy house. Dr. Chen was a doctor. The perfect, sharp cut of her hair suggested a person with money to blow on a fancy salon, someplace in Boston, Sophie bet. Though she knew the doctor grew up in Chelsea, lived here still, Sophie couldn’t imagine why. Dr. Chen was too good for Chelsea. The thought sat uncomfortably inside her. Sophie didn’t like thinking anyone was too good or not good enough for anything, ever.

  On the line, the doctor could sense Sophie’s reluctance. “Well, you let me know, okay? I’m only thinking about your mom. I’ll let reception know. Please tell her I hope she feels better. And,” she finished, “Livia says hello.”

  Sophie felt a burst of excitement at the dove’s name. “Is Livia your favorite?” she asked the doctor, knowing immediately it was a sort of lousy question.

  “They are all my favorites, but Livia is so special, isn’t she?”

  “She never gets ruffled,” Sophie said. “She’s very capable. Very sensible.”

  “It’s true. But there are good things about Arthur’s temperament, too. Arthur gets very ruffled, but he’s passionate, and passion can accomplish quite a lot. What about Giddy?”

  “Giddy is so sweet!” Sophie gushed. “She makes me want to take care of her.”

  “Well, she’s still young. But yes, she’s very purehearted, very sincere. Roy, too. They’re good mates for each other. Roy is very loyal. But then, all the pigeons are. Loyalty is a pigeon trait. They mate for life, you know. How about Bix, have you met him?”

  “Yes!” It felt good to talk about the pigeons with someone else who knew them, who knew them so well.

  “Bix is a poet,” Dr. Chen said. “He is very learned. He’s yet to find a mate; I think his standards are too high.” Sophie caught her breath as she realized the conversation they were having. A casual conversation about pigeons being capable, or passionate, or learned poets. “You’ve caught some of Bix’s quotations, no?”

  “I have,” Sophie said. She felt like she was admitting to, or confirming, much, much more.

  “Well, if you would ever like to see their dovecote you’re welcome to visit. Let them know, they’ll bring you over. I’d be happy to see you, Sophie.”

  “Okay,” Sophie said.

  “You’re doing okay with everything?”

  “With everything?” Sophie couldn’t be sure what the doctor was asking, and even more, she could not be certain she was doing okay. “Yeah,” she lied.

  “No more passing out?”

  “Once more,” she said. “I did it once more.”

  “What happened?”

  “I saw the mermaid. I was out for an hour and woke up with water in my lungs and a fish in my mouth and now my best friend is mad at me.”

  S
he heard the doctor take a deep breath on the other end. “Oh, Sophie,” she said. “You really must stop. The mermaid will find you, please stop doing that. To be out for an hour—you could have put yourself in a coma. It’s quite serious.”

  “Okay,” she said, feeling small.

  “When do you start high school? A couple months?”

  High school? The thought was ridiculous. All this insanity—talking pigeons, Polish mermaids, mind reading or heart reading or whatever that craziness was, and she was supposed to go to high school? Chelsea High at that, to get shoved in the halls by kids tougher than her, to suffer through the dull classes by day, and what? Save humanity by night? The effects of two nights without sleep were working to derange Sophie a bit. Her emotions felt right at the surface, tears felt close. “I guess,” she said. “I guess I’m supposed to go to high school.”

  “Well, you’ll need another physical,” Dr. Chen said in a clipped, business-y voice, still musical, though, still a voice with a flute tied to its tail, whistling pleasantly as it spoke. “I’ll make you an appointment. A follow-up for that last one, just to make sure you’re okay. I’ll schedule it for when your mother is working, just you and me. And no more passing out.”

  “Okay,” Sophie felt grateful to the doctor. With so many strange characters watching out for her, it felt good to have a doctor on her team. Even if it was a rather strange doctor.

  “And maybe I’ll see you later,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  * * *

  BEFORE SOPHIE DIALED up the junkyard she pulled her shield up high over her emotional body. She made sure it went above her head, imagined it closing over her skull, sealing her inside an impenetrable bubble. Kishka picked up on the first ring.

  “Sophia,” she said before Sophie said a word. “You’re late.”

  Her grandmother was being aggressively psychic. The boldness of it threw Sophie off balance, but her shield stayed strong around her.