Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  “I don’t know!” Sophie sulked. The only strategy she could muster was embodying a bratty teenaged girl, which she supposed she was. “We were hanging out and she got weird!”

  “Well, she’s on drugs,” Andrea informed her daughter. It was extra easy to talk about Laurie like she wasn’t there, because she wasn’t. But when Andrea told the girl to take her baby and leave, the Dola responded.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?” Andrea repeated, shocked.

  “No. I’m not leaving your yard.”

  “You’ll do what I say or else I’ll call the police. And Child Services. I think I’ll be calling them, regardless.”

  The Dola shrugged. “I don’t care,” it said. “Do what you want.”

  “Sophie!” Andrea turned her agitation toward what she could control, her daughter. “Make her leave!”

  “Sophie can’t make me do anything,” the Dola said in its simple, honest voice. There was a bit of weariness to it. Sophie had to strain to hear what the Dola sounded like beneath the waves of dread and regret the voice provoked. The Dola didn’t sound sad exactly, just resigned. It must be wearisome to walk around all your life telling people simple truths they didn’t want to hear.

  “I’m calling the police.” Andrea turned and stormed back into the house.

  “If I am taken away, I’ll jump into her.” The Dola nodded at the back door. There was no threat in its voice, just the calm reportage of facts.

  “Really?” Sophie asked. “So we’ll be having this conversation, this same one, but you’ll be in my house with me, you’ll be my mother.”

  “That’s right.”

  Not only was that horrible for all the obvious reasons, but the thought of seeing her mother all zombified, blank and flat, her self gone away, replaced with the monotonous Dola, gave Sophie terrible shivers.

  “Oh, god, okay!” Sophie spat. “Ugh! I really hate you.”

  The Dola shrugged. “People tell me that all the time, but I don’t know what it feels like.” Beside it, Laurie LeClair’s baby howled and screamed, whacking itself in the head with its shovel.

  Inside the house, Andrea waited for the staticky telephone to connect her with the police department. With all the windows opened to the summer day, Laurie LeClair remained in full view. “Hello?” Andrea spoke into the phone.

  Please, please, please, please, Sophie chanted in her mind. Her hand stuffed in her pouch, her fist wrapped around a cool, jagged hunk of crystal. She willed the phone to die, pushing her energy into the piece of black plastic. It exploded in Andrea’s hand.

  “Shit!” Sophie jumped.

  Andrea turned to her, staring at her empty palm where the phone once was. The thing lay in shards around her bare feet, the edges of the shards melted. “Why are you swearing!” Andrea scolded her daughter. “I don’t understand what is happening. Sophie, is something happening?” Andrea sounded desperate, and scared. She touched her head. “I think I may still have my fever…”

  “Ma, the heat wave is causing all these blackouts and stuff,” Sophie lied. “We’re not really supposed to be using electricity if we can help it.” She wrapped her hand around Andrea’s arm and made to guide her mother back toward the bedroom.

  “Uh, uh, uh.” Andrea shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere until that druggie is out of the yard.” They both turned to look at Laurie LeClair, motionless as a sundial, aimed at them. Andrea shuddered. “Do you see?” she hissed at Sophie. “Do you see what drugs will do to you?” It was truer than Andrea even knew. If it wasn’t for drugs Laurie wouldn’t have brought the Dola. Sophie imagined one of those antidrug commercials she’d seen on television—Laurie LeClair, all zombied out, possessed by a conceptual being. This is your brain on drugs, inhabited by a Dola.

  “Ma, please let me handle it,” Sophie said softly. She knew tone would be everything right now. Energy was contagious. If Sophie was all ruffled, Andrea would continue to be, and it would turn into a fight between them. The vibe was volatile, charged with the eyes of the Dola upon them. Sophie rounded her voice with compassion, and weighted it with maturity. “Let me walk her to her home, okay? Please don’t call the cops.”

  “Well, I can’t now,” Andrea spat, kicking at a piece of phone with her foot, a battery melted to a chunk of plastic, bright, thin wires wrapped around it. “I can’t believe we need a new phone. Sophie, you are not going to that girl’s house!” Andrea’s hands clutched at her hair, close to the scalp, a habit of hers when she was overwhelmed. Sophie could detect a low, painful sound. It made the house feel tragic around them. She looked out the window and saw the Dola’s mouth moving, very slight, very quiet, almost soundless. The baby smacked her hands to her ears and wailed. Andrea pressed her thumb to the place between her eyes. “Oh, my head,” she moaned. “And that baby. It’s so wrong. The cops would actually get her help, Sophie. That baby shouldn’t be with a mother like that, she’s already tried to kill it, I don’t understand how she’s even on the streets.”

  Sophie stuck her hand in her pouch, watching her mother watching Laurie LeClair, shaking her head, her lower lip bunched in her teeth. She slid her hand into her magic bag. The finest stuff, like a powder. Sophie knew what she needed, like the elements were bits of her own self. She pulled a pinch into her palm, and removed her hand. She pulled her zawolanie up inside her, but calmer, smaller. She didn’t need the full strength of it, she was understanding. Sometimes a whisper would do the trick. Or a sneeze. She fake-sneezed her zawolanie into the palm of her hand, surprising Andrea with the sound. Andrea looked up and got a palmful of magic dust sneezed into her face. Sophie’s mother’s eyes grew heavy, she strained to keep them open, and as she tumbled to the floor Sophie saw them cross, rolling in her head like marbles.

  Chapter 18

  “She wouldn’t have let me go,” Sophie explained to the Dola defensively. “She would have called the cops on you, you would have been hauled away, then you would have jumped in her and I don’t think I could have handled that, the way you make the people’s eyes dead, has anyone ever told you about that?”

  “How the eyes look? Yes.” The Dola nodded. “It bothers people.”

  “You really make people look dead. It’s creepy.”

  “Well, it is best to be scared. You are more likely to change your ways.”

  The pair walked down Heard Street, the baby in Sophie’s arms. Babies were heavier than you thought they were going to be. This one had exhausted herself crying and now was in a numbed state, drooling onto Sophie’s t-shirt, occasionally grabbing a snarl in her fist and refusing to let go. Babies were also stronger than you thought they were going to be. “What’s this thing’s name again?” Sophie asked shifting the child’s weight around in her arms.

  “Alize,” the Dola said.

  “Right.” Sophie began to explain the controversy of this to the Dola, then decided it would be too exhausting. The being didn’t grasp evil, or maternal instinct. She probably wouldn’t get why naming your kid after a cheap wine cooler was tacky.

  They approached the house where the boys gathered, their bikes still sprawled across the sidewalk. The scrawl of their voices on the air was tangible as they talked boisterously over each other. Cigarette smoke clouded lazily from the porch. The sound of them all shutting up in unison to watch the girls pass was even worse. Sophie’s face turned sunburned at the feel of their quiet eyes upon them.

  “Hey, Laurie!” one yelled. The big one leaned over the edge of the porch and made a hand motion around his mouth while his tongue bulged his cheek grotesquely.

  “What is that?” the Dola asked.

  “It’s like—ugh. He wants Laurie to do something to his penis. With her mouth.”

  “Laurie, Laurie!” another boy yelled, the one whose cigarette had been burned down to the quick. “Cute baby! You want another one?” He locked eyes with Sophie. “You want one, too?” He smiled and rocked his hips at her, while the boys behind him cracked up. One began to bark.

>   “Is it my destiny,” Sophie whispered, “to kill any of them? Or to turn them into frogs?” It thrilled Sophie to know that she could actually do this. She ached to do it right then, could feel her zawolanie inside her, a snake ready to strike. But the Dola was shaking her head.

  “Not now,” she said simply. “And, not all of them.”

  “That is good enough,” Sophie said. “That is actually better than I thought.” She glared fearlessly at the big one, the one whose bangs she’d touched. “I hope it’s that one,” she said to the Dola.

  “What’d you say, bitch?” he hollered, stretching his arms wide so that his pecs strained against his shiny sports shirt.

  Sophie bared her teeth and hissed like a cat. The baby burst into fresh tears.

  “You are moving away from your destiny,” the Dola said.

  “Fucking freak!” the boy yelled. “Did you see that? Did you see that shit?” He was smacking his friends in the arm. But he looked spooked. Sophie was happy to note it.

  “I thought I was already off-destiny,” she said to the Dola. “How can I be moving away from my destiny if I’m already outside it?”

  “There are layers and levels.” The Dola shrugged. “It was your destiny to move away from your destiny, but you’re breaking further away if you continue to engage with the boys.”

  “I don’t know.” Sophie was skeptical. “This destiny stuff sounds like a bunch of crap, frankly.”

  “It is advanced,” the Dola said. “Most humans can’t understand.”

  “I’m only part human,” Sophie said proudly. “I’m also part Odmieńce. Do you know what that is?”

  “Of course. They are the first beings. But, before there was Odmieńce, there was destiny.”

  “Great, you win.”

  “I do,” the Dola agreed.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE HENNIE’S GROCERY store, the wind felt strange, both still and charged. Sophie paused at the door, gazing down Maple, to the overpass. Haunted, she realized in a rush, the place was haunted by the women who died there. If Sophie tried to, she could almost see them, wispy things that fluttered like tattered curtains under the bridge, sitting on dumpster lids, kicking around the train tracks. She blinked her eyes, but it was another sort of eye inside her that could see them. “Are there ghosts there?” Sophie asked the Dola. “Women?”

  The Dola nodded. “They are the Naw I was telling you about. Try not to see them,” she advised. “Once you do, you see them everywhere. This world is crawling with Naw.”

  “It hadn’t been their destiny to die?” Sophie asked. “If there are that many people going against destiny, maybe this whole destiny thing isn’t real.”

  “It was their destiny.” The Dola nodded. “Naw are also people who died tragically. Most tragic deaths are destined. But they still become Naw.” She put her hands on Sophie and turned her away from that sad end of Maple Street. She looked down the other end, ramshackle homes housing people who struggled with their lives. Behind her, Heard Street and the obstacle course of asshole boys Sophie would need to dodge to get home. Then there was the dead-ended dirt road off Heard Street. The heat made the air shimmer, as if passing through it would lead you to another world. It always felt like time was stopped at Hennie’s corner, Sophie realized. She pushed open the wooden door, and the bell hanging from a piece of yarn jingled their arrival.

  “Alleluia!” Hennie’s exclamation was joyful at the sight of Sophie, but her face quickly drooped in confusion at the sight of the baby in her arms. It deepened into a frown as she watched Laurie LeClair shuffle in stiffly behind her. Hennie nodded, her eyes wide. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I understand. The destiny of going against destiny very intense.” She smacked her hand to her forehead. “Oh, my. So much to do! Come in, everyone, please.” A wide table of treats appeared before them, and Hennie clapped her hands happily. “Please.” She motioned to Laurie. “You too little.”

  “Hennie, it’s the Dola,” Sophie explained.

  “So! Dolas don’t eat cake?”

  “No, we don’t,” the Dola said flatly. “But thank you.”

  “That girl you are inside needs food,” Hennie said scoldingly. “And this baby, oh, this baby!” Her tone devolved into the mushy voice everyone used to talk to babies. She reached her arms out and Sophie gratefully passed the baby over. The baby liked Hennie, giggling right away, pushing her face flat into the cotton of the woman’s dress as if looking at her was too much, and then lifting her face to behold her again, bursting into baby cackles. “You play hide and seek with me?” Hennie cooed. She lifted a bottle from the table and placed it in Alize’s hands. She sucked on it greedily. “So sweet, this,” Hennie said proudly, “But much nutrition! My own zagavory recipe.”

  Hennie’s shop showed no sign of the disaster Sophie’s zawolanie had caused. Sophie noted the perfect glass jars, the white candle undisturbed on its shelf. The floor was clean of shards or muck or water or debris.

  “I clean like that.” Hennie snapped her fingers and shrugged. “Sometime is better not to do things long, human way. Sometime magic really is best.” She gave Sophie a soft smile, and Sophie knew she’d been forgiven.

  “I’m so sorry, Hennie,” Sophie said. “You were so nice to me. I don’t know why I freaked out—”

  “Is much.” Hennie nodded with understanding. “Is very much, all of it. You are permitted freaking out. But only so many.”

  “It’s true,” the Dola chimed in. “By your destiny, you are allowed a certain number of brief but intense mental breakdowns, but then you are destined to be over it. So don’t get too indulgent.”

  “Thank you,” Sophie said, touched. The Dola was tight with her information. It struck Sophie as an act of generosity for her to share a bit.

  “I put a spell on my mother,” Sophie confessed. “I used the powder in my pouch.” She hit the pouch where it swung around her waist, tied to a belt loop by its long strap.

  “That is good powder.” Hennie nodded. “I mill myself.”

  “What will happen to her? I don’t really know what I did. It was all happening at once—time, and the baby, and the Dola, and my mother was seeing everything, and the Dola was going to jump into her if she called the cops so I made the phone explode—”

  “You see what happen when you go against destiny,” Hennie said. “Pandemonium.”

  “I know.” In the safe quiet of Hennie’s shop, Sophie began to cry.

  “Is okay, is okay,” Hennie assured her.

  “Is this one of my mental breakdowns?” Sophie asked the Dola.

  “No.” The Dola shook Laurie’s head. “I think you’re just crying.”

  “What did you want for happen to your mother? When you do zagavory?”

  “That she fall asleep,” Sophie said. “I just wanted her to go to sleep so I could come here, and do this, this destiny thing or whatever.”

  “Is fine,” Hennie said, nodding. “Sleeping spell very simple. You go home, you sprinkle more powder, you wake her up. No big whoop. Now, you,” she addressed the Dola. “What do we do with you?”

  “It’s up to you.” The Dola shrugged. “You’re back on track as far as I can tell, so I’m done. I’ve got a romance to haunt; someone is supposed to break someone’s heart but they feel so bad about it, they’re not doing it.”

  “God!” Sophie blanched. “You’re going to go make someone break someone’s heart? Dola, your work is really awful.”

  “It’s what I do.” The Dola sighed. “A lot of great things happen because of broken hearts. It puts a lot of things into motion on this planet. Sometimes I think heartbreak is the dominant active energy. People start things they wouldn’t have started, they go places they wouldn’t have gone, they meet people they wouldn’t have met. It’s actually one of my happier tasks.”

  “When you go,” Hennie asked, “this girl, she be here?”

  “I can walk her home, if you like,” the Dola offered. “And vacate her there.”

  “And
this baby?”

  “She’d come too.”

  Hennie shook head. “This girl, she sick, yes?”

  “She’s a drug addict.”

  “I think you bring her here to me, this destiny, yes?”

  The Dola shrugged. “Everything is destiny,” she said.

  “Argh!” Sophie cried. “You are driving me crazy! If everything is destiny then I can’t go off my destiny so why did you come to bug me!?”

  “It was your destiny,” the Dola said.

  “No quibble over destiny,” Hennie said gently.

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” the Dola said, and to Hennie, “You want me to wait until you’re done and then vacate and leave the girl here?”

  “Yes, please,” Hennie said. “Can I get you anything, is there anything you would like to have? Do you eat?”

  The Dola looked wistful. “Not food. I’ll be home soon enough. I’d like to just rest if that’s okay.”

  A straw-stuffed mattress appeared, fragrant as a clean barn on a spring day in another country in another time. The Dola collapsed on it with a grateful moan. The baby in Hennie’s arms was drifting to sleep as well. Hennie placed her on the bed beside her mother. “When I wake up,” the Dola said drowsily, “I’ll be gone. It’ll be Laurie.” The being squinted at Sophie. “It was a pleasure working with you.”

  “Dolas feel pleasure?” Sophie asked.

  “Not really,” the Dola said. “But isn’t that what people say to each other?”

  “They’re supposed to mean it,” Sophie said, annoyed. “Goodbye, Dola.”

  “We’ll see each other again.” The Dola said it as if to comfort Sophie, as if Sophie would miss the being. And Sophie realized that, strangely, she sort of would.

  “No doubt,” Sophie replied, and the Dola closed its eyes, curving into a spoon around the sleeping baby.