“It sounds like paradise.”
“It was a disaster.” The top twists free and she pours. “The houses sucked for the environment, the food made people sick, the rubber trees wouldn’t grow or just plain died of a strange blight. Then synthetic rubber was invented and it was all over. Here.”
I look at the clock. It’s only just past ten in the morning. “Isn’t it a little early?”
“Where the hell are you going, anyway? It’s Saturday. And you’re gonna need it by the time I’m done tellin’ ya this.”
I take the shot from her. We knock them back. The liquid fire spooks the chill from my bones.
Juliane refills her glass. “They say Ford was warned . . . by a mummy piranha cursed with the gift of foresight. Nobody remembers what the natives called it in their language, but in the stories it’s called ver los dientes—in Portuguese, that means seeing teeth.” She knocks back a shot. “Want another one?”
She was right. This is getting creepier by the minute. “Sure, what the hell.”
She takes my glass and refills. “This piranha, you see—when it was alive—supposedly ate the heart out of a bathing witch doctor.”
I’m beginning to suspect this is one of those stories she uses to tame rowdy boy scouts at her overnight programs.
“They both died, and the soul of the witch inhabited the piranha. Teddy Roosevelt picked it up in the Amazon. Roosevelt passed it to Ford. Roosevelt and Ford had differences, especially over Fordlandia, so the reason Ford ignored the warnings was because he thought it was Roosevelt messing with him.”
“You’re telling me that’s what this could be?”
“Cheers.” She gives me the shot and knocks back her own. “God, that’s fantastic stuff! Hell, it’s the kind of legend that’s been around forever, which means there might be a grain of truth in it someplace.” She refills again. “You said your neighbor goes lots of exotic places, right?”
I admit it’s starting to sound plausible, and it does make sense when I think about yesterday’s leaf left message. “You really think this thing is real? That it can really predict the future?”
“We should test it out over the next few days and see.” She slams back another shot.
Then it occurs to me, and that familiar panic knots my stomach. “What if Marilyn finds out?”
“Why would she?” She pours another. “Damn thing was coming all the way from South America, it easily could’ve been lost.”
“But . . . technically, we’re committing mail fraud.” My head fills with visions of orange jumpsuits, bad meatloaf, and crapping where everyone can watch. “It’s a federal offense.”
“If this thing can do what I think it can do, it’ll warn us first.” She downs the silver liquid with an audible gulp. “Then we can quit our jobs and drink Patrón every day of the week on some nice beach in Tahiti where no one will ever find us.”
~~**~~
In terms of clarity, the fish is no better than the tarot cards—which kinda rules out the idea of using it to win at the Kentucky Derby or the office Super Bowl pools. But Juliane, determined, has one of her Kokuyo notebooks she uses at work, and we sit at my driftwood table and start a glossary.
Leaf is the first thing we add to the language—it will probably prove itself to have more than one meaning, but for now we know one of those definitions is leave. We add broken lobster, too, although we know that the lobster part really isn’t important, it’s the broken part, and Juliane jokes, If you’d been having barbecue, would it have said ribs?
Juliane and I hole up for the next two weekends and sit completely still—no TV, no music—so we can be sure we hear every whisper the fish makes. Most of its messages aren’t critical—it warns of a phone call from Juliane’s parents, the coffee pot shorting out, and salmonella-infested cheese—and we don’t figure them out until after they’ve happened. There’s also no rhyme or reason to when it decides to release the information, either. It spews when it wants to—whether it’s first thing in the morning or midnight.
The third week in, we’ve moved our operation to the sun porch. Juliane lounges on the wicker couch with the lighthouse cushions, and that leaves me the Swingasan, but I bought it more for looks; I don’t trust it’ll hold me. Anyway, being on the floor gives me a unique perspective on Juliane as her chestnut eyes drift over the Pier 1 catalogue with a little more, it seems, than just casual interest—sometimes I catch her looking at me, then averting her gaze back to the colorful pages of coastal cottage tablescapes. In those moments, her eyes betray her desire for me.
I can’t say that there isn’t something inside me that’s warming up to the idea of going for it with her.
Then the risk, as it always does, presents itself: it won’t end up like The Little Mermaid but Fatal Attraction, where my heart’s so crushed it poisons my mind, makes me slash my wrists and boil rabbits. Worse, I won’t have my best friend to turn to because she’ll be gone.
“Why’d you spend six hundred bucks on that Swingasan if you’re not going to sit in it?” She gnaws on yet another Dum Dum—her fourth today. I hear the distinct sound of her teeth crunching through the candy.
“I don’t like the creaking sound it makes. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
She slams the catalogue against her thighs and slides me a look. “You have a talking mummified piranha in your kitchen and that doesn’t bother you, but the chair freaks you out.”
“I’m thinkin’, broken tailbone if it snaps and I land on the wrought iron stand.”
She sighs, then cocks her head back and yells: “What do you think there, Perry?” That’s the name she’s given it—Perry. Perry the WonderPiranha. “You can tell us what’s going to happen. If she sits on it, will it break?”
The thing doesn’t respond.
She tosses the catalogue on the glass coffee table, chucks her crystal-speckled Dum Dum stick in the ashtray, and reaches for the almost-empty bottle of Patrón. “That’s what really sucks.” She pops the cork and fills a shot glass. “We have this awesome thing here that can warn us about the future, but we can’t make it speak on demand, so what good is it? I mean, we gonna invite people to sit on your sun porch in silence and wait for the thing to talk? It reminds me of Waiting for Godot.”
~~**~~
Easter Monday everything changes.
We’re eating garlic and onion pizza from Angie’s when the fish speaks: Peepers stairs tree crush.
Juliane and I scramble to figure out what it means; it’s the most words the thing has spoken so far.
“Maybe.” Juliane knocks back yet another shot of Patrón. “Maybe peepers means peep frogs.”
I’ve honestly lost track of how many bottles we’ve—okay, she’s—been through. She glances out the window, where a menace of swollen greenish-gray clouds trundles across the sea; a threatening rumble resonates in the distance. “There’s a big storm coming in, maybe they’re going to fall from the sky or something. You’ve heard of that, right?”
I dip a piece of crust into my tequila. A sliver of fresh garlic drifts to the bottom of my shot glass like an errant flake of skin. “That was at the end of some movie, right?”
“Shit, they went crazy on the garlic this time.” She swallows. “Magnolia. But it really happens. Earliest reference we have of frogs falling from the sky is in some medieval manuscript, like, five or six hundred years ago? I used to know but I forgot.” She takes another bite, chews. “People thought it was all supernatural, but now we know winds or twisters pick the things up and drop ’em elsewhere.”
I look beyond the houses across the street. The ocean is obscured in fog—a sure sign this is going to be one of those violent spring clippers. There’s a flash of lightning, and a spray of rain hits the windows.
Peepers stairs tree crush.
The rain gets louder, and the fish raises its voice.
Peepers stairs tree crush!
The wind hastens past the house with a haunting shriek, which I’m not unused to; h
ere on the New England coast, the winds gusting off the sea are shrill as banshees, and they wail on and off through the day and night, every day and night. Eventually, it grates on your nerves to the point that even when there is a lull for a day or so, you swear you hear it: in your dreams, in the shower, at your job. If you’ve reached this state, you are what we call wind crazy.
Wind crazy is definitely not what we’re suffering now as the wind suddenly increases and railroads into the house. In the kitchen, the windows shiver. Outside, on the back deck, a stack of plastic turquoise chairs tips over. Upstairs, glass breaks.
For a second I just sit, paralyzed.
Juliane’s up and moving, and I’m on her heels, but I’m not fast enough to keep her from rushing upstairs to see what has happened . . .
There is a bang and a pop and the whole frame of the house shudders. “Juliane!” I scream at the base of the stairs.
She doesn’t answer, and I’m about to start up the staircase when a massive tree crashes through the living room ceiling, missing me by inches. A sharp piece of wood would have impaled my chest had I remained where I was standing.
It feels like someone’s sucked every breath out of my lungs.
Juliane screams, tumbles down the stairs, and lands at my feet.
I pull her clear of the bannister, which suddenly seems flimsy as cardboard.
“My leg,” she says. “Ouch, God!”
“It’s okay!” I press her against my chest. Cold sea-salted gusts whip our bodies and rain needles our faces. My hands are already raw.
“Jumpin’ dart frogs!” Juliane struggles to catch her breath. “What the hell’s gonna be next?”
Somehow, despite the noise, we hear the mummified piranha.
Money coming.
“Oh my God!” Juliane shrieks. “It answered!”
I’m confused. “What?”
“Ow!” She grimaces at the pain in her leg. “All this time we’ve been hoping to get the damn thing into some kind of pattern. It just answered. I asked it a question, and it answered!”
It says it again: Money coming.
Juliane beams. “What’d I tell ya, right? We’re gonna be rich!”
And then she kisses me.
~~**~~
My crippling anxiety is rooted in a thwarted trip to Disney World.
It was a tenth birthday present from Auntie Ree, so I couldn’t wait—we were even going on a plane. She’d brought me Viewmaster reels showing a sleek white train parking inside a cavernous hotel lobby, a submarine we could ride in in a sparkling lagoon, and men in grass skirts twirling fire batons.
The night before we were supposed to leave, an ambulance came, and they took Auntie Ree away. The plane left without us. For weeks I hoped she would show up at our house and say it had all been some kind of cruel joke. I had dreams about her walking into my room, telling me she’d called Mickey Mouse and he’d said everything was just fine, you can still come, see ya real soon!
But I never saw her again.
Although that’s when anxiety took over my life, nothing has been as bad since then.
Until now.
While the lovemaking is amazing and I relish in having decisions made for me, Juliane’s been my friend for so long, the stakes are high. Worse, crawling out from the rubble of the fallen tree means that I have no home—at least for a couple of months. I’m terrified of the commitment of living with Juliane, but Juliane, clearly, is ready to live with me.
We stand in her tiny apartment with the dark-paneled walls and colonial furniture that has been in her life since she was born. She has an interesting theme going on with a ship’s wheel on her chimney, and in her fireplace, a giant fish tank teems with darting streaks of blue, yellow, pink, and green.
The fish sits on the mantel and stares at me. I wish I could just ask it now what was going to happen, and it would tell me.
“No worries, Margie. When this is all over, we’re going to take our piles of cash and get a really nice place together!” She roots through a Costco-sized bag of Dum Dums, taking them out a handful at a time and picking up each to look at the wrappers. She squints. “Motherfucker, I’m getting old. I’m gonna have to buy cheaters to read these things.”
“Five dollars, Christmas Tree Shops,” I say.
“Pffft.” She waves her hand in a dismissive motion. “You’re not that much older than me.”
But yes, yes I am when it comes to that magical moment when you suddenly can’t read small print. We may have been best friends, but that’s only because I was held back twice—the thought of advancing a grade, where I’d encounter new teachers, new classrooms, even a new school—was so petrifying I’d be nauseated for weeks just thinking about it, so there were two years in there where I so badly wanted to stay in my safe surroundings I just deliberately failed so I couldn’t advance. Eventually, Juliane caught up with me and we were in the same grade, but I’m at least two years older than her.
What if she gets bored and leaves me? What if I wake up, roll over, and there’s only a note?
Worse, what if there is a happily ever after? No, really, what if there is? She’s not in the safest of jobs. She told me once that people in her field even joke about it.
We were having dinner at Go Fish, and she was busy wolfing down her mussels appetizer. “Listen, you can’t be an aquarist and be ‘in the club’ unless three things have happened to you.” She speared a squishy tan morsel on her appetizer fork and swirled it around in the pool of ale sauce in the bottom of the bowl before dipping it in parmesan cheese. “One, you gotta fall into a tank; two, something’s gotta take a bite out of you, or, you have to have contracted some kind of weird illness or parasite from somehow getting fish shit germs into one of your orifices.” She shoved the mussel in her mouth and chewed noisily. “Three, you gotta get electrocuted. God! I kinda feel bad eating these, but damn they’re yummy.”
I had found it cheeky and cute then, but now, not so much. What if they call me and say she fell into the shark tank? Or she contracted a flesh-eating parasite? Or there she was, standing in a pool of water when somebody plugged something in?
What if she dies on me?
“Oooh! Cherry!” She’s been scrolling on her phone and manipulates the Dum Dum to one side of her mouth. “I’ve been looking at all these websites that tell fortunes—you know, tarot sites, psychic sites—did you know there’s even a site that lets you play with a virtual Ouija board?—and you know what’s really popular now is live-streaming . . . people can watch ol’ Perry just do his thing, live.”
The idea of actually taking this thing so public scares me. “Wait a minute—you’re doing this online?”
Juliane blinks. “Well, yeah, how the hell else would we do it? Sit on street corners like panhandlers?”
“What if my neighbor sees it and finds out?”
“She’s probably in places that don’t have the internet, so don’t worry.” She tosses the phone aside, rises from the couch, and stands before me. She sets her hands on my shoulders, and the smell of the raw fish she cuts up every day to feed the animals at her job is obscured by the cloy of her cherry Dum Dum and her lavender hand cream.
“But we don’t know when the thing is going to speak; we can’t guarantee that.”
She shakes me by the shoulders. “Easy! We go freemium—in other words, we lure them in. They can watch Perry right from our page for as long as they like.”
I take a moment and try to figure out how that makes sense. “But how is that going to make us money if we’re not charging? And there’s no way to ensure that what it says is the message intended for a specific person.”
“Ha! No.” She bites through the Dum Dum with a mighty crack. “That’s really not what we’re selling. We’re the ones with the dictionary, right? We’re going to sell them the translations.”
She chews the Dum Dum and it sounds like she’s grinding sand in her teeth.
For some reason this instills panic. “What if we’re wrong
? Money coming hasn’t happened yet.”
She thinks for a minute, then cups my face in her hands. They’re rough and dry from having been in salt water and fish shit all day, as she likes to put it, but to me they feel like magic. “Sure it has, honey. The insurance company’s paying for the damage to your house, right? Doesn’t that count as money coming?”
“They’re paying the contractors directly.”
She sighs. “Well, then, it means Perry’s going to bring it big time. We’ll call the site ‘The Mystic Mermaid’! What do you think?”
“Well—”
“You know the coat closet we’ve got in the front hall? It’s perfect to set him up, and a camera on a desk, a microphone—all we need is some fun stuff to decorate the backdrop with. You know, some sea shells, lights—ooh! We can get one of those blue lights that spins around and puts fake waves on the walls! We have one of those in the jelly exhibit in the aquarium and it just creates the best atmosphere. Whaddaya think there, Perry, huh?” She yells in the direction of the mantel. “You wanna be the Mystic Mermaid and tell people what’s comin’ on down the creek so they’re not up it without a paddle?”
The mummified thing is silent.
Juliane frowns and shrugs into her jean jacket, then grabs her leather shopper and swings it up on her shoulder. “Well, that’s just great, wrinkly one, I don’t really care what your opinion is when it comes to this, anyway. We’re gonna go buy some equipment and craft shit and make it happen.” She rams her cell phone in her pocket and starts heading for the door.
I hear it: Sunset and smackers.
Smackers? My God. What does that mean?
She turns, jangling her keys. “You coming, or what?”
“But—”
She blinks. “What?”
Sunset. Does he mean tonight sunset? “You heard what it said. Maybe—maybe we shouldn’t go today.”
For a moment, she looks slightly confused. “It’s almost never literal. We’ll figure it out later. Come on! The future awaits!”
The Shadows Behind Page 25