The Mermaid of Brooklyn (35 page)

A little faith, child. Just a little faith.

“Laura,” I said.

“There she is,” said Laura.

I squeezed Rose in relief. “Really?” I followed Laura’s pointing finger. There, in the clutch of benches by the sprinklers, darkened
by shade, was Betty’s tiny figure, holding the hand of a man. Sam. We raced over.

“Betty! You scared me to death! Don’t ever wander off like that! Never, you hear me?” Betty looked at me, surprised by the velocity of my hug. I cupped her face in my hands, stared in her eyes as if performing a retina scan, squeezed her close again.

“Hi, Mama!” she answered brightly. “Sam!” She pointed to Sam.

“I see that, sweetheart.”

“Hi, Sam,” said Laura, with what struck me as exaggerated normality.

“Hello,” said Sam. “Sorry to scare you, Mr. Kralik. I wasn’t going to steal your child to eat for my lunch, I promise.” Then he cackled villainously and lifted Betty up into the air, holding her and play-biting her tummy. Betty shrieked. “Down! Down! No wunch!”

I was afraid to look up. I knew I was gleaming with sweat and that curls had escaped from my ponytail and were snaking around my red face in non-pretty-tendrilly ways. My heart pounded against my chest, my knees weirdly wobbly.

“Still, Betty, you scared Mommy,” I said, flustered. It was all so confused in my mangled mind, as if my wanting Sam had caused Betty’s potential playground harm. I deserved to have terrible things happen to me, but my kids didn’t. I was sure I was the bloody hue of a juiced beet.

Sam let Betty down, and she hugged my leg, and then she and Emma puttered over toward the sprinklers, Emma’s cast entombed in a makeshift cover fashioned from a plastic
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
bag. We stood at the perimeter, getting spritzed now and then by the icy water. I ungracefully shoved Rose into the carrier, and she pasted her sweaty head to my sweaty chest. Seriously, this summer had to end eventually, didn’t it? Everything would feel easier at a brisk eighty degrees. Wouldn’t it?

Adrenaline still coursed through me. I could feel Sam studying my face, waiting for something, and Laura watching him watching me.

She knows something’s up.

You’re the most paranoid non-adulteress I’ve ever met.

“So, have you heard that Laura is going to be a radio star?” I said numbly, for lack of anything else to say.

They exchanged a look.

“Wait. What?”

“I know,” said Sam. “She’s recorded me.”

Laura was avoiding my eyes, watching the girls with what struck me as exaggerated care designed to point out my earlier negligence. Or maybe that was completely paranoid. I thought of the Chinatown T-shirt:
JUST BECAUSE I’M PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN THEY AREN’T OUT TO GET ME.

“What! Laura?
Him?
”

He laughed. “Yeah, did you know I was a donut-craving insomniac?”

“I did not. And?”

“What do you mean,
and
?” He bumped my hip playfully with his. I quickly scanned the playground to defiantly evil-eye all the scandalized observers (none, seemingly).

“What did you talk about?”

“He can’t tell you that,” Laura said.

“Oh?” Fear prickled across my chest. What had he said? What did Laura know?

Look at her. Nothing. She knows nothing.
Bubeleh,
please.

I’m not so sure.

“I said you could listen to it and help me edit, if you want. Or you can wait to hear it on WNYC!”

It was later, after Laura and I had bribed the kids into their strollers with snack traps of Cheerios and begun walking slowly
home through the shade, that she said, “Could you guys flirt a little more, please?”

Oh, look who’s jealous!

“Who?”

“You know who. You and Cute Dad. Jeez Louise.”

Luckily, I didn’t have a heart anymore but a misshapen lump of coal, or this might have really gotten to me.

Jeez Louise, indeed. What is with this Little Miss Perfectface, anyway?

“Oh, please. You’re exaggerating.”

“Am I?”

I decided to change the subject before my head exploded. Who needed that sort of mess? “Well, I think the whole radio project is just wonderful. Good for you.” I almost added,
It’s amazing the things you have time for when you only have one kid,
but thankfully managed not to. A rock lodged itself between my silver sandal and dead-skinned foot. Or maybe a piece of glass. Or crystallized bile.

Laura blinked. “Yes, I guess so.”

I hopped along, shaking my foot like a lunatic. It was really sharp, whatever it was. “Do you guys ever think about having another?” I was desperate to move things away from me and Sam, even though we’d had this conversation a hundred times. Laura was an only child and had told me she didn’t want Emma to feel as lonely as she had. This was what I told myself when it looked like my own toddler was really, actually planning to murder her baby sister:
They will be friends someday; they will be friends someday; best best best best friends
. But Laura was so organized and patient, and would probably wait until Emma was five, and have another perfect little baby, and their spacious apartment would never be gummy from floor to ceiling with various unidentified baby tars. Laura was the type not to find out what gender the baby was before
it was born. This made me insane. It was like someone being vegan near you—you could feel the self-restraint oozing toward you like sanctimonious secondhand smoke. I’m sure it’s normal to hate your best friend so much at times. It must be. Anyway, I said, “Time’s a-wasting.” It was an especially cruel thing to say because Laura was older than I was, pushing forty. Time really was a-wasting. Not in a New York way—you were considered a teenage mother here if you procreated before thirty-five—but in a rest-of-the-world way, in a biological way, yes.

Laura seemed to be deep in contemplation of a squirrel performing Cirque du Soleil–style acrobatics on a low-hanging branch. “Um, ha,” she said. “Actually. Can I tell you something?”

Uh-oh.

“Of course, anything. Sorry, I was just teasing.”

“No, it’s okay.” She stole a glance toward Emma, who was already snoozing, her head at a horrible angle. “I actually—um. I had a miscarriage.” She looked at me, and her eyes were welling up. I felt awesome. I felt like a really wonderful person and a fantastic friend. Why had I ever felt self-loathing when I was so sensitive and kindhearted?

“Oh, Laura. Oh, no. When?”

“A couple months ago. Actually, right around the time Harry left. I figured you had enough on your mind, so I didn’t tell you.”

I tried to remember her acting sad or weird around that time, and awfully, I could remember only how I had felt. How I had been acting sad and weird. How it had occluded everything, blinded me to everyone. “Excuse me one moment, would you? I’m going to throw myself in front of this bus.”

Laura smiled. “Oh, stop. Don’t feel bad.”

We crossed the street, leaving the shade of the park. “Why are
you
telling
me
not to feel bad? Stop being so fucking sensitive and
kind all the time! It’s making me crazy! Jesus, are you okay? I’m so sorry! What happened? How far along was it? Were you, I mean.”

Laura looked teary. “Uh, twelve weeks. We were about to start telling people. We were being cautious about it because I’d had so much trouble with Emma. But we went in for the sonogram, and they said—ah—sorry, I guess I’m still sad about it.” She took a minute to compose herself. I reached out and squeezed her arm clumsily, horribly, like a teenage boy trying to console the girl he’s just deflowered. Laura even looked pretty when she cried. She cleared her throat. “He— It just wasn’t moving. It— You know. No heartbeat.”

“Oh God. God, I’m so sorry.”

We turned the corner, almost at my building. My kids were quiet, I realized. Weird. Napping or heatstroke? A couple of large bedraggled-looking women from the shelter down the block barreled toward us, one pursuing the other in an O. J. Simpson speed chase. “Get back here, you crackhead bitch!” screamed the pursuer. The other woman, closest to us, sporting a matted wig and an ill-fitting tube top, stopped and spun around. She pointed a finger and cried, offended, “I ain’t a bitch!” They huffed past us.

“And people in the neighborhood want to have that shelter moved,” I said. “Why? It makes things so colorful around here, don’t you think?”

Laura smiled obediently at my attempt at comic relief. “Anyway, sorry to dump that on you. I feel like I’m not over it yet.”

“Of course, of course! Why would you be? I’m so sorry. That must have been awful, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

We stopped in front of my building. I couldn’t even look at the stairs to the door. I poked Betty. “Wake up, bunny. Time to walk.” She shifted and murmured, “Nofankyou.” I looked at Laura and shrugged. “We’ll walk you home.” Sometimes I felt like a perpetual
motion machine. It was easier to keep moving forward than to stop, so I continued on but only out of laziness and lack of drive.

Anyway, let’s be honest, I owed Laura. We walked slowly to her gorgeous limestone building, four long blocks away, and when we got there, we kept going past, bumping our strollers aimlessly over the rutted city sidewalks. I asked her questions about the miscarriage, about her project, about her lack of desire to go back to work, about Will. I let her talk and I listened instead of thinking about how I had everything harder. She told me how she’d started the midnight recordings around the time of the miscarriage because she kept waking up in the night with weird cravings, which made her even sadder—the pregnancy symptoms had outlasted the pregnancy—and so one night she’d gotten dressed and gone to the diner and eavesdropped while she sipped her mint tea, and then she had started to record, on her phone at first. Laura! I wanted to cry. I wanted to cradle her in my arms, to be able to make everything okay with a hug and a kiss, the way I could with my children. She told me she had this need to collect something, to hold on to something, to remember what it was like to be alive. “It’s like you and your sewing,” she said.

“What? No. I just started sewing again to make some money,” I said.

She and the rusalka scoffed in unison. “Right, but you need something like that. You’d need something like that even if you didn’t need money.” Though I couldn’t imagine not needing money, I didn’t say anything. “Sometimes you just need something that’s yours.”

Or someone,
added the rusalka, unhelpfully.

At around three p.m. on Labor Day, summer convulsing in
its muggy death throes, the city began to repopulate. Double-parked SUVs clogged the narrow streets while everyone who’d summered at the shore unloaded their duffels before heading off to battle for parking spots. Even the dust caking their luggage reeked of privilege—these were people whose children had gotten to munch all summer on good clean country dirt, not the glass-studded amuse-bouches of city park gravel. Now that they were back, there were more white-people picnics, distinguished as they were by pretty blankets, fancy cheeses, and guys with guitars, scattered in among the salsa-thumping pig roasts that had colonized the park every skin-scorching summer weekend until now. For the first time that whole stultifying summer, the air began to cool and sweeten. It felt miraculous. You could walk up the stairs without sweat trickling between your shoulder blades. At night I would open the windows, car alarms and sirens and summer concerts in the park be damned, and let a cool breeze sift through the apartment.

This time of year always reminded me of when Harry and I first met, so, predictably, I was moping around. Worst of all, or maybe best of all, things continued to get weirder with Sam. He and Juliet
and the kids had gone away to visit his parents, and he’d come back hungry—hungry for space, hungry to misbehave, hungry for me. I admit I was happy to see him when he reappeared with the kids one day on the playground. Too happy. I leaped up from the bench and waved and shouted, jostling poor Rosie, calling, “Sam! Sam!” He located me and smiled. It was like the moment in a stupid teen romance where they spot each other at the prom and the edges all go soft focus and everyone else fades away—it really fucking was. Can I add that I was still breast-feeding Rose? What on earth do you do if you get close to the object of desire while you happen to be lactating to feed another man’s child? Shouldn’t some primitive law of the jungle make that physically impossible? Like, if we were to get together, you know,
together,
and he was kissing my neck, his hands moving gently down my sides (in this fantasy, these are sculptural lines free of mottled bits or stretch marks or sticky scabs of strawberry jelly, obviously), and he leaned down to lick my breasts, to nibble a nipple, I mean, I’m sorry, but milk would come out, and— It was no good to think this way, no good at all, very unhelpful, particularly on a dazzlingly sunny morning on a playground teeming with children.

Sam and I had been driving each other crazy over the past few weeks with these texts we were trading, like amorous teenagers, or robots, or married people daring themselves to get caught. Then there was that missing night during which anything might have happened. And then there had been this absence. And so, I don’t know, when I saw him, I couldn’t shut it down. I’d been so unhappy for days and days, and then my entire body flushed hot pink. I nestled Rose into the stroller and turned to Laura—“Could you keep an eye on her for a second?”—and ignoring their shared look of incredulity, I jogged over to Sam and he jogged over to me. We might as well have hired a skywriter to pass over Prospect Park
scribbling
SAM AND JENNY ARE GOING TO DO IT
in neon-orange clouds.