An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant

by Neal Reilly, LeAnn

  An electric shock surged through the figure and up John’s hand to his spine. Something dark and steady swirled inside his chest and his eyesight sharpened. He leaned forward, rolled her onto her side and his fingers deftly untied what had seemed impossible only a moment before. Ignoring the tufts of hair clinging to the rough material, he quickly untied the gag. He picked it out of her mouth as carefully as he would have picked shards of glass from the sole of a child. When the cloth came away in his hands, he saw that it had rubbed the corners of her mouth raw. Tamarind worked her lips, but no sounds emerged. John laid a finger across her lips and she calmed. He flung the rough gag away and then set the Goddess into her palm, wrapping her fingers around it. He rested her hands across her heart.

  The floor creaked behind him. Tamarind’s eyes slid sideways and widened.

  John swiveled his head toward the sound in time to see a blurred figure and metal winking. In the space between breaths, he flinched.

  Twenty

  John fell away from the rush of flesh and shadow that descended upon him. Rasping breaths filled his ears and the office walls contracted around him, burying him underneath an avalanche of clothing, carpet, and a tangle of limbs and hair. Bodies squirmed around him and John flailed his arms and legs in response. As he jerked and heaved, memories surfaced and blotted out the reality of the office. Memories of seawater drumming in his ears, of salt burning his eyes, and of choking. White spots blossomed onto his darkened vision and his chest clogged shut.

  Breathe. Just breathe.

  Humming echoed inside his skull and his body responded of its own accord. His lungs opened a little and his vision cleared. His world had gone topsy-turvy. Papers flew around the office like dazed birds mistakenly trapped inside a glass building. Tamarind squatted near him on the floor, her shorn head forlorn in the fluorescent light and shadows obscuring her features. She held the Goddess between her knees. Her feet were bare.

  John rolled a little to the left and saw Jesus propped on one hand and two knees; he held the other hand to the right side of his face. When he heard John move, Jesus lifted his head so that John saw the blood that streamed from his damaged right eye. He lurched toward John and tumbled onto him, scrabbling at John’s neck until he’d found a purchase with his blood-glazed fingers. John clawed at Jesus’ fingers, kicking his heels into the floor. Again, Tamarind’s voice floated through his thoughts like a memory, or an epiphany.

  Remember the pearl divers?

  John closed his eyes. An image of a long dive filled his mind and he relaxed. He clearly saw the oyster shell waiting for him. Then Tamarind appeared next to him, her copper hair fluttering about her in the current and she smiled. She slipped her hand into his and together they swam to the bottom. Together, they reached down and lifted the oyster shell up. When John pried it open, a luminous pearl sat cushioned on the oyster’s flesh. As he blinked, dazzled, Jesus’ fingers released his neck.

  John, surface now.

  He opened his eyes and saw Jesus kneeling in front of Tamarind, who once again lay on her back. The Goddess gleamed in the dark recesses under the desk and the wind had taken on a life of its own. Now it was a banshee, howling through the office and sending papers whirling madly; now a poltergeist who ripped at the corkboard on the wall. The blinds on the windows danced and rattled. Jesus, impervious to the character of the wind, fumbled with his belt.

  “Ahora, mi cariño, ahora. You will have a fucking like you have never had, mi querida. Esto te prometo.”

  He lowered himself onto her.

  John levered himself off the floor and launched himself onto Jesus’ back. Clawing at Jesus’ shirt, he managed to grasp enough cloth with both hands to wrench the other man off Tamarind. His breath grunted from deep in his chest, but his chest remained open, expanded—light. Again, the electricity that he’d felt only a few moments before while holding the wire Goddess charged through him; this time it rushed through every nerve in his system until he felt illuminated from within. He threw Jesus away from him.

  Jesus fell into the desk and yelled. Clutching his side, he stood up and turned to face John, who had pulled Tamarind behind him. John darted a glance at her. She sat, listing to one side, one hand propping her upright and the other hand limp across her torn underwear. When he swung his head back, Jesus flashed his knife, which had fallen under the chair during their earlier struggle. The jagged gash along the inside corner of Jesus’ right eye distorted his features and gave him a sinister, alien appearance. Dried blood and mucous—accidental war paint applied with fate’s indifferent hand—bisected his cheek.

  “Ssst.” Air hissed through Jesus’ clenched teeth. He swiped the knife at John, who barely arched his back in time to pull his stomach out of its path. “You think you’re so listo, gringo. How smart are you now, eh?”

  He tossed the knife to the opposite hand and swung at John again. Again, John avoided the blade. The third time, Jesus feinted to the right and John moved left; the blade traced a path across his abdomen. John understood that Jesus had sliced him, but he felt nothing. Instead, he watched as the wind caught Jesus on the far point of his pendulous arc, overbalancing him. For a moment, Jesus hung suspended in an invisible swing and then John stepped into him, shoving him into the desk. Jesus grunted as his battered side crashed into the sharp edge of the steel desk. John kicked at Jesus’ bent legs and the other man collapsed, cracking his face on the desk as he fell. He lay in a crumpled heap and made no sound.

  John ignored him and spun back to Tamarind, who had slid over onto her side on the rough institutional gray carpet. The t-shirt had fallen open and he saw her belly rise and fall in shallow breaths. Her skin had pallor to it that he’d never seen before. It clung to her frame, revealing fine details in bone structure and hollows under her ribcage and cheekbones. Tamarind had always been slight, but now she appeared almost emaciated, as fragile as onionskin stretched over a frame of hollow reeds.

  He took a step towards her and the wound across his stomach burned and stung so sharply that he winced. She opened her eyes and looked at him. They were huge, too huge, and a dull blue like arctic seawater.

  “You’re hurt.” Her voice no longer lilted. She sounded far away and traveling still.

  “Not much. The other geeks will be in awe when I show them the scar.”

  He knelt at her side, consigning the pain in his gut to the recesses of his mind where it belonged.

  “Tamarind, I know you’re del mar. Did you–did you leave the sea for me?”

  She took several breaths before she answered. Her eyes watched his face. “Yes.” She raised a hand to his cheek; it was hot and dry. “I fell in love with you the day you came to Culebra and climbed that mangrove tree … near the canal.”

  John pulled her hand into his and then touched her lips with his other hand. They were cracked and bled a little.

  “You need water, don’t you?”

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “There’s water in the Jeep.” He glanced over at Jesus, who hadn’t moved since he’d slithered to the floor. “I’ll go get some and bring it back to you.”

  He stood up, feeling as if his gut had come unhinged and might swing open, spilling everything inside. He braced himself for the onslaught of compressed air from the doorway, but in that moment the wind abated. He hobbled toward the open door, anticipating a fresh blast, but it didn’t come. He paused in the doorway. Outside, the sky had darkened to a premature nighttime and the air smelled wet. The oppressive heat from earlier in the afternoon had disappeared as the air pressure dropped. John looked south toward the harbor and saw the palms bent horizontal and the thorny thickets shaking as if in the grip of a fever; rain blurred the edges of trees and buildings alike. He ducked his head and ran.

  In the trunk of the Jeep he found a case of water that he’d meant to unload for Valerie. He hefted it, resting it on his hip as a mother rests her toddler, and shuffled awkwardly back to the refuge office. Once inside, he stopped to catc
h his breath and swing his gaze from Jesus’ body to Tamarind, lying with her eyes closed. The slight rise and fall of her chest reassured him that she hadn’t been completely desiccated yet.

  He set the water on the desktop and broke the plastic seal. Grabbing a bottle, he twisted the cap off and then knelt by her side, gently lifting her until he could prop her against his bent knee. Her head lolled forward and he slipped his left hand behind to steady it. His fingers snagged on her truncated tendrils, but he ignored his first touch of her head after so many weeks of imagining it and instead focused on tipping the bottle between her parted lips. Most of what he poured dribbled out of her and down her chin and neck, but he persisted. When he saw the water on her skin disappear as if absorbed directly, he poured more recklessly. Tamarind choked and coughed, her eyelids fluttering open and then she raised a thin hand to his holding the bottle. Their gaze met and held.

  Tamarind drank five one-liter bottles of water without stopping. By the last one, John had surrendered the bottle to her and had opened three more with which to douse her body. Her skin and soft tissues rehydrated enough that she no longer looked as if she was on the verge of collapsing in on herself, but John suspected that her condition remained precarious.

  “You need to get back into the ocean, don’t you?”

  Tamarind set the empty water bottle down and shifted so that she could lean more comfortably against his bent leg.

  “Yes.”

  “You look so human, it’s hard to believe. …” Here he touched her legs delicately, just a brush of fingertips and nothing more.

  “I am human—almost anyway. I’ve been living between two worlds, mer and human, all summer. Even though I have legs, I can’t stray too far from Mother Sea.”

  “Where should I take you?”

  She closed her eyes as if thinking about where they should go exhausted her.

  “You’ve got to return to town, John, before the hurricane hits. It isn’t safe to be out any longer.”

  “I won’t return until I know you’ll be all right.”

  She opened her eyes. The pupils had returned to their normal size, but they still looked as cold and hopeless as the arctic sea.

  “Take me to the nearest water and leave me.”

  ***

  Before they left the wildlife refuge office, John shoved Jesus’ limp form under the steel office desk. As he did so, he spied the Goddess figure lying on the carpet under the desk’s dark bulk and he pulled it out and put it into his pocket. He’d found an old woven Mexican blanket in the Jeep’s back seat and he brought it to wrap around the nearly naked Tamarind. Then he lifted her in his arms as if he were lifting a hatchling that had fallen from its nest. The knife wound in his stomach protested, but he ignored it. While he carried her to the backseat of the Jeep, the wind and rain avoided their path as if an invisible shield hung over them. John eased Tamarind down into a lying position and then returned to get the last of the bottled water and to shut the door.

  When he got into the Jeep, he turned to look at Tamarind, who lay with her eyes closed. Her face had filled out again, but she was still pale; dark shadows smudged the skin under her eyes. The bright red and green of the blanket accentuated her pallor, nearly swallowing her in its cocoon. Too much space existed between them, a dark chasm of the unknown and the unknowable. He stretched out a hand and touched her on the hip. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “We’ll be there soon, I promise.”

  “I know.”

  He turned back around and his hand slipped away from her. The air remained eerily still around the Jeep and he found himself expecting the wind and rain to return and break upon them as waves break upon a rocky shore. It did not. So he started the Jeep and backed away from the office, heading west toward Dewey and shelter. As he drove, the stillness around the Jeep moved with them so that the rain and wind always remained thirty feet beyond them.

  Earlier, he’d refused to listen to the radio. Now he turned it on: he needed to know how much time he had before hurricane winds reached Culebra and anyone left outside became chaff before Marilyn’s obdurate scythe. Marilyn’s eye currently passed over the east end of St. Croix and the airport on the southwest of that island reported winds ranging up to 97 miles an hour. The Miami Hurricane Center had upgraded her to category two and strengthening toward a category three. As she moved through the Caribbean, she dropped torrents of rain along her outer edges.

  Even at her current speed, Marilyn wouldn’t pass over Culebra for four or five more hours. John squinted out the window as the Jeep reached the intersection with 251. He would make it to Posada La Diosa provided that whatever kept the wind and rain at bay continued to do so for the next half an hour. He turned off the radio and turned north.

  “Is there any music?” Tamarind’s voice startled him in the quiet.

  John looked at her in the review mirror. Her face held a little more color and the dark smudges had lightened. In the dim light of the Jeep’s interior and with the blanket obscuring her head, she looked almost normal.

  “I don’t know. I’ll see if I can find any.”

  He switched the radio back on and twisted the dial, looking for something other than weather, news, or pop music from the States. At last he found a Cuban station playing Lito Peña’s Yo Vivo Enamorado. As its smooth saxophone and cheerful rhythms incongruously filled the Jeep, John found himself humming along and remembering the warm summer evening when he’d first heard the song with Tamarind. The memory of her singing and swinging a dripping Popsicle, her wild hair dancing around her face, brought tears to his eyes.

  “I wish it was turtle-watching season right now.” Tamarind hummed a little with the song, but her hum didn’t reach her chest and none of her joyful clicking joined in as a counterpoint.

  “Me too.”

  On the east side of the road, wild horses stood huddled under a tree. Several eyed the Jeep as it passed and John wondered what would happen to them when Marilyn’s full force bore down on Culebra. He realized that no one had mentioned any of the wildlife, outside of the departure of the nesting seabirds, during the frantic preparations of the last twenty-four hours. What would happen to Valerie’s beloved hummingbirds and bananaquits? Where would they go? Or what about the rooster and hens that walked so freely around town as if parading through their demesne? Would Marilyn devastate the wild things that galloped and strolled, hovered and glided, slithered and hopped around Culebra’s preserves? He came to the fork in the road where the left branch headed toward Playa Flamenco and the right toward Punta Flamenco and Playa Resaca. Between the two branches lay Laguna Flamenco, protected from the Atlantic by the pristine sands of Playa Flamenco. He knew at once where to bring Tamarind.

  He took the left toward Playa Flamenco and parked in the empty sandlot. When he slid Tamarind into his arms, she sighed and leaned into his chest. He lifted her from the seat and brought her closer, trying to block the wind and rain with his back even though neither wind nor rain touched them. A thickness sealed off his throat as he clutched her to him, but his breathing remained even and steady. In his pocket, he felt the Goddess burn and a dark, steady power buoyed him. When his wound began to bleed again, he scarcely felt it.

  He trudged over the sandy path to the beach and then through the thorn thickets and between palm and mangrove trees to reach the lagoon. As he walked by the trees, an odd vibrating filled his chest and the rustling of their leaves almost made sense to him, as if their whisperings called to mind something long-forgotten that was on the tip of his tongue.

  He reached the lagoon, winded and exhausted. Tamarind had lain still and quiet in his arms and he’d lost himself to the effort of getting to his destination, forgetting for the few minutes that it took him to get there why he’d come. He stood in front of the water in the gloom of the storm-darkened evening, his arms aching and his mind blank.

  “John.”

  He looked down at Tamarind, who looked up at him with eyes as dark as a mountain river in winter.r />
  “John, please put me in the water. I’ll be fine.”

  He nodded once sharply and stepped forward. The surface of the lagoon frothed under the continuous caress of the passionate wind. He expected to struggle to the water’s edge, but instead he felt again the dark energy that had aided him. Now it flowed from the ground and up through his legs, passing through the Goddess with an electric burst and up to his head where it settled into a thousand bees buzzing in his thoughts.

  He dropped first to one knee and then the other, holding Tamarind against the rise and fall of his chest. She looked at him again, eyes wide and unblinking, and he slowly lowered her into the lagoon. The blanket opened a little and she struggled against its clinging folds. John freed one hand from under her knees and pulled the blanket away. Her lower half slipped under water and she sighed. John felt a faint vibration in her torso and he knew that she hummed, even if the sound couldn’t make it out of her chest.

  “You must let me go so you can go.”

  “I know.” Still he didn’t lower her completely into the water.

  “You’re bleeding again.” She touched his shirt with a fingertip. “You need someone to take care of you.”

  “I told you it’s nothing.”

  She flinched at his tone and he felt his heart twist in his chest.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll find someone at the clinic to take a look at me. I’ve got a few hours to kill before Marilyn gets here anyway.” His words didn’t come out flippantly as he intended. They sounded grim instead. “How will I find you after the hurricane?

  “You won’t.” A voice growled at him from a few feet across the lagoon.

  When he looked up, John saw a man in the water up to his chest. His long hair flowed in tangled rivers down his massive shoulders, one of which had an angry braided scar bisecting it diagonally. The blue of his eyes left no doubt who, or what, he was.