The Shadows Behind

by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

~~**~~

  It wasn’t until years later that I found out what had doomed my aunt. Apparently, there had been an undetected brain tumor. She had, for a year or so before that, told my other aunts that her eye had looked strange—droopy was the word she used—but only she ever saw it, I guess, because they’d tell her it was just in her imagination, that it was all just stemming from fear.

  ~~**~~

  Several hours later, Juliane cleans out the coat closet. She takes a kitchen stool and drapes it in sparkling aqua cloth that I’m sure is a fave of dance moms everywhere, and across from it, on another stool, she sets up her laptop so the camera is centered.

  The fish she’s decked out in a tiny turban and a pair of fake earrings. “Can’t go scaring the customers,” she says, struggling to fit a mermaid tail she cut off a Disney Ariel doll over his ass end.

  I almost feel bad for him.

  “I’ve already put out the word on Facebook and I’m going to run ads,” she says. “Check out this website!”

  What she’s done is equally absurd, the front page bordered in a wallpaper of the Amazon jungle.

  Now you can harness the power of the Amazon basin’s best kept secret . . . The Mystic Mermaid. Underneath that, a version of the story she’d told me what seems like a hundred years ago now appears.

  Hit the PayPal button below, select your prediction package, and we’ll take you to meet this Amazonian wonder.

  Our expert translators will give you the message you’ve been waiting to hear!

  “Expert translators?”

  “Well, we are. We’re the only ones that’ve figured out what things mean.”

  “Except for sunset and smackers.”

  She blinks. “I’m sure we’ll figure that out.”

  The Mystic Mermaid knows all. You’ll never be anxious again.

  Bing! comes from her computer.

  “That’s it!” Juliane beams. “I bet that’s our first customer!”

  Money coming, the fish says.

  “Don’t worry, babe.” She sets a hand on my arm. “This is going to be awesome.”

  ~~**~~

  It’s midnight and I think it’s Juliane’s snoring that wakes me—she snores a lot, something I hadn’t really recalled from when we were kids having sleepovers at each other’s houses. I watch the sheer navy curtains flutter in the breeze from the heating vent beneath the window, and I can hear the whispering as the hot air is forced through.

  Then I realize it couldn’t have been Juliane’s snoring that woke me, because she’s not snoring at all at the moment.

  I roll over and rest on my elbow to look at her. Her full lips are parted, and I can see her eyes flitting about beneath their lids; I remember that this means someone’s dreaming. I wonder what she dreams about. If I’m in those dreams, and we’re on the beach in Tahiti like she promised, or maybe we’re on a vacation together, or maybe—

  Sunset and smackers!

  It was the fish. The fish woke me.

  Juliane doesn’t stir—and she’s a light sleeper. I remember when we were kids and the sound of my mom’s footsteps coming quietly down the hall would wake her.

  Sunset and smackers!

  It makes me uncomfortable that Juliane keeps blowing off figuring out what that means, and although we’ve barely started this little adventure, I already long for those days spent gnawing on Angie’s pizza and sitting on my sun porch. Still, sunset today came and went. Maybe Juliane was right; it’s not a literal sunset that it’s talking about. And smackers—I try to avoid thinking it’s something bad. Smackers could mean money, of course, but you could give someone a smack on the lips, right? So it could be kisses . . .

  Fire safe not present!

  I sit up.

  Fire safe not present!

  I carefully curl back the blankets, tiptoe to the foyer closet, and turn on the light.

  The fish stares at me. Despite its ridiculous getup, it almost looks sinister.

  Leaf alone!

  “What. What is it?”

  Deviant whispers.

  “I don’t know what that means!”

  “Margie?”

  I nearly jump out of my skin.

  Juliane stands in the hall. The shadow behind her stretches out in a spindly, almost inhuman shape. “What are you doing?”

  I rub my arms as a chill settles over me.

  “It’s talking.”

  She hesitates, then frowns. “I missed it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll get the dictionary and set our heads to it! Come back to bed.”

  She takes my hand, and I look at the fish one last time before snapping off the light. In its dark pits I could swear I see a flash of pity.

  ~~**~~

  Juliane goes to work. A few hours later, the call comes.

  She was crawling in the ceiling over a ten-foot-high tank that contained poisonous jellyfish—the kind people get rushed to the hospital for.

  Fortunately, she didn’t die, but she’s laid up. Her leg is four times its size, and she’s not getting around unless I carry her. For a while I sit with her on the couch and rest my head on her shoulder while she creates Facebook ads for the fish.

  “I can take more time off work to stay home with you,” I say.

  No slack, says the fish.

  “You need to go to work.” She kisses the top of my head. “Absolutely.”

  “I just feel bad—”

  “Are you kidding? Getting into a smack of jellies is the best thing that ever happened to—it’s the best thing that ever happened to us!” She reaches into the bag for a Dum Dum and unwraps it, sticks it in her mouth. “Ew. Peach Mango and S’mores. Foul.” She shifts the laptop and types. “I obviously can’t go back to work right now, so I can spend all my time with Perry and make our new lives happen.”

  Smack. “What did you say?”

  She pulls the lollipop from her mouth. “I said, ‘I obviously can’t go back to—”

  “No, before that.”

  “Getting into a smack of jellies is the best thing that ever happened? Why?”

  “Smack—what is that?”

  She smiles. Her teeth look a little less white now that she’s not wearing her usual raisin-colored lipstick. “A school of fish, a shoal of piranha, a smack of jellies.”

  “Smackers!” I say.

  She pulls away from me. “What?”

  “Sunset and smackers! The smackers were the jellyfish.”

  “Jellies,” she corrects me. “They’re not fish.”

  Another bing from her laptop. “Ooh! We have another customer.” She pushes me aside. “You know we’ve made two hundred bucks in twenty-four hours? We get four people a day, that’s six grand a month!” She looks at me and I’m hoping she’s going to kiss me, but she doesn’t. Instead, she slams the laptop closed. “Here, go set this up.”

  I take the laptop and set it on its stool in the closet.

  No slack, it says. Fire safe not present!

  I have no idea what no slack means, but I don’t like the word fire, and once I get Juliane settled, I spend the afternoon checking all the plugs in the house and replacing the batteries in all of her smoke detectors.

  ~~**~~

  When I arrive at work there’s a strange bustling over at Kasey’s desk. Several coworkers—including my boss—are huddled, whispering and giggling, in front of her computer.

  Now, as I set my coffee down and drape my jacket over the back of the chair and realize there’s no photo of me and Juliane yet on my desk, she shouts, “Margo! Have you heard about this thing? Come here—this is amazing!”

  I’m a little nervous—I’m not included in anything that goes on here; most of the time, I keep my head down. For me, staying out of politics has always been the best way to hang on to what I’ve got.

  “What do you suppose it means?” says Jeanne, who loves to share where to find the cheapest yarn. “I mean, kick out the quiet?”

  Oh, no.

  I swall
ow and creep over to the bunch, trying to sound natural and at ease when I ask, “What is that?”

  Meghan—who’s actually quiet, bookish and reads National Geographic when she’s not answering phones, pins her golden hair up using a freshly-sharpened pencil. “It’s this thing they found in the Amazon . . . it’s a prognosticator.” She briefly explains how it works.

  I feign surprise and amazement.

  Courtney stands up and straightens the flouncy neck scarf on her hot pink silk blouse, sighing. “Okay, everyone. This is really interesting, but we were supposed to start work five minutes ago.” She eyes me. “Can I see you for a moment?”

  The gaggle disperses. Kasey looks quickly away and shuffles papers.

  Courtney closes the door and I sit down across from her.

  “We know what you’ve been doing with the mail,” she says, and fires me.

  ~~**~~

  After an angst-ridden ride home, I turn into our condo complex and see there are people milling about in the parking lot—Mrs. G, the dog lady who lives two doors down from us; Pete, the hotel manager who helped me move a trunk of my things into Juliane’s place just last week. The air is heavy with the smell of burning wood and some kind of chemical, and then I see her—Juliane. Juliane, sitting on someone’s forlorn patio chair, watching our condo burn.

  I leap from my Corolla with not a thought toward killing the engine and grabbing the keys, and I bang my thigh painfully on the door as I try to shove my way past the few people and leap over a fire hose to get to her.

  She looks up at me, ashen, but doesn’t move to embrace me.

  I lean down and try to get my arms around her. “What happened?”

  “I crawled my way to the door.” Juliane coughs. “Thank God I was in the foyer closet, so the door was right there, and . . . thank God I got Perry out.”

  I realize why she hasn’t hugged me.

  She’s clutching that damn fish.

  Stop slack.

  The checks. It was talking about my shoving the checks in the drawer . . . it was telling me to stop that.

  Fire safe not present.

  It was telling me there was going to be a fire but we’d all be safe and I wouldn’t be home.

  Everything about the old legend of this thing comes back to me: It was a disaster . . . Ford was warned . . . by a mummy piranha cursed with the gift of foresight . . . seeing teeth . . . Ford ignored the warnings because he thought it was Roosevelt messing with him.

  This thing doesn’t foretell the future.

  It warns people.

  I think how I’d been given warnings and didn’t really understand them, didn’t listen. But if I really did understand them, if I did listen—I’d never not know what was coming around the pike again, would I? I could always be prepared. And have no more anxiety.

  And that means other people wouldn’t, too.

  This is a gift. This isn’t something we should be charging for.

  There’s the sound of breaking glass; our bedroom window shatters.

  “Juliane, I . . . ”

  “Yes?” She’s petting the fish.

  Then another warning hits me: Leaf alone.

  If I say something, she’ll leave me. Not just homeless at the moment, but jobless and penniless, too. “I’m thinking that maybe . . . ” A fireman walks by us, carrying an ax.

  Her back ramrods, and she gives me a hard expression. She’s not even the person she was three weeks ago.

  Leaf alone.

  “Come on, Margie. What?”

  I watch as another hose attacks the second floor window. “I got fired today.”

  She doesn’t react at first, and seems to hold the fish closer. “See? Now you won’t have to quit.”

  ~~**~~

  My house hasn’t been repaired yet, so for now, it’s a hotel. Not that money’s a problem—Juliane was certainly right about that, we’ve got loads coming in. But the close quarters, something young lovers should absolutely adore, seems to make things worse.

  For one, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that we’re charging people, and she’s incredibly secretive about what’s in the bank account. Two, our room is a suite and has not one, but two closets—one large enough for The Mystic Mermaid operation. The walls are Kleenex and spit, but Juliane clearly doesn’t want me to hear what she’s up to all day. She staples padding to the walls and tells me she can’t be interrupted, because the spirit inside the fish might get spooked and deliver the wrong message, if at all. She spends less time with me and more time with the fish.

  The fish has had a new, strange message for me as well: Tear it down.

  Tear it down. Tear what down? And that’s not something I’d ever do, destroy anything, break anything—that’s not me. Not me. I like to keep things the way they are. I don’t like change. I can’t have uncontrolled change.

  Tear it down.

  Something isn’t right. Not about her, and not about any of this.

  I stand at the door and press my ear to it and hear: “Leaf left.”

  But that’s not the fish’s voice. Not at all.

  I feel like I’ve just been Steve Irwin’d.

  It’s Juliane’s.

  “Leaf left,” she whispers.

  And she’s selling old predictions—that prediction was mine, the day I was going to drop the damn thing on Marilyn’s porch.

  I think about the way she told me I needed to be at work. The way she reacted to the fire.

  Deviant whispers.

  She’s cheating these people.

  I bang open the door; Juliane jumps. “What!”

  “Hang up,” I demand.

  “Why . . . ”

  “Hang. Up!”

  For the first time, I think I see something like fear in her eyes, and it hurts me, that—even if only for a second—she’s afraid of me.

  I glance at the mummy. It just looks sort of pathetic and sad, like an old woman in a pink housecoat and smeared lipstick. I feel pity for him, and so instead of continuing with Juliane, I go to the fish and take off the ridiculous turban, earrings and worst of all, the fish tail; I hold him in my arms and for one second I swear I hear him say thank you. “What have we become? Never mind that, what have you become?”

  “Oh, come on. It doesn’t really matter, does it?” She stands, reaching for the fish.

  I don’t let her have him, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them: “Yes, actually. Yes, it does.”

  Juliane straightens and cocks her head to the side, pulling back. She blinks at me for a second, as though she’s completely surprised. “What?”

  “I said, it does matter.”

  “We’re giving people hope. What’s the difference how they get hope, the important thing is that they have it.”

  This infuriates me. I know what it’s like to have such anxieties, to look at those tarot cards and make my daily decisions based on what I see there, or in many cases what some other woman saw there, and she doesn’t understand what she’s doing?

  Or maybe she does.

  In this moment I do not see the Juliane with the full lips. I do not hear Juliane of the interesting folklore, I do not feel Juliane of the soft tender hands or magical kisses, or taste Juliane of the Patrón who fixes me when I am broken.

  She has become a woman-thing I don’t know.

  Tear it down.

  Now I know what the fish means.

  I take a deep breath and say it. “I think you should go.”

  Juliane just stands and stares, and I see the little clock wheels turning in her head. Then she folds her arms across her chest and leans back a little. “What?”

  “I said, I think you should go.”

  “I’m sorry, are you—you just want some space, I get it.”

  “No. Get out and don’t come back.”

  Now there’s a silence in the room that is heavy, heavier than the thing I carry in the pit of my stomach, that painful boulder that makes me want to run and hide beneath anyt
hing I can find. But it feels better because it’s not inside my body; it’s not. It’s outside. It’s outside, and it’s between us, and it’s all those unspoken things I could never say to anyone, all the disappointment and the stress and the loss. Nobody had ever asked me how I felt, or cared enough about me to tell me what I should do.

  But the fish, the fish knows.

  “Are you—are you breaking up with me?”

  I heave a deep sigh.

  Sixty-five over, says the fish.

  It’s clear she hasn’t heard that.

  Sixty-five over, it says again.

  I make the mistake of eyeing the horrifying thing, and she looks at me quizzically, then turns, glances at the fish. “Oh, my God. That thing stopped talking to me, but it didn’t stop talking to you, did it?” She whirls on me. “Is it telling you to break up with me? Is that what this is about? Because, you know, you . . .” her voice softens, and she unfolds her arms. “Listen, this isn’t like you, and the fish—you know, Perry, he was really just here for us to get off to a great start.” She approaches me. “It’s our time now! We can go be together somewhere, just you and me, and I won’t have to work, and we can just—do whatever we want, and I don’t have to tell these ridiculous stories to slow-on-the-uptake brats who don’t give a shit about anything except their phones anyway.”

  I take a step back.

  She stiffens, widens her eyes in surprise. “Is this real? You’re really going to do this to me?”

  For a moment I think there’s still time, still time to take it all back. But wouldn’t I rather be alone than dealing with this?

  You won’t be alone. You’ll have the fish.

  When I go to answer her and say Yes, something like a croak comes out. I nod instead.

  Her expression flares. “I just—I can’t believe you’re taking the word of that thing over me!” She marches to the couch to grab her jean jacket. “Seriously? Well, all that money we made? I’m keeping it. All of it!”

  I’m surprised when I hear myself say, “Fine.” It occurs to me at this moment that I don’t give a shit about money and never have, and that this was really all her thing. That everybody I’ve always been with, I just go along with whatever they want. I’ve never made a decision for myself, ever. I realize I have no real personality. I have nothing that’s my own. I just sort of morph and become whoever it is the person I’m with wants me to be.