The Mermaid of Brooklyn (44 page)

“Jesus Christ!” I sputtered. “That would have been a lot better than just disappearing, don’t you think? Disappointing me a little?”

But he had disappointed himself. And he’d driven from Atlantic City, indebted, broke, broken, discouraged, really discouraged, seriously discouraged, suicidally discouraged. Thinking we would all be better off without him. Getting all
It’s a Wonderful Life,
minus the guardian angel. He needed to get better, to be a better person, before he could face me and the girls again. And so he drove on, out into the dessert, on some sort of freaking vision quest, where he had a spiritual epiphany while hiking on the red rocks in Sedona, Arizona—

“Are you kidding?” I had to interrupt again. “Who
are
you? Did you wear crystals and feathers, too? And talk to the spirit of a long-dead Indian chief? Harry, it’s just not fair. Parents don’t have time for vision quests. Parents have to suck it up and hang in there until college, or at least pre-K. What the
fuck,
man?” The look on his face
was enough to shut me up, or it should have been. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Continue.” But I couldn’t help it—I’d had too much wine—and when he confessed the power that the mountain’s energy vortexes had held over him, I snorted with laughter.

Unexpectedly, he smiled. “I know how it sounds.” Something flickered across his face. A hint of the old Harry. He was trying. He really, really was.

“It sounds bonkers, Harry,” I said between sobs of laughter. “It sounds
stupid
.” I held a hand out, as if to provide a “stop” signal for my hysteria. “I’m sorry, I just—vortexes?”

Harry chuckled. “I
know
! I know. I would have said the same thing a few months ago.” Laughing together opened something up between us, exercised my muscle memory, made us feel suddenly like a husband and a wife again. Vortexes! Wait, vortices! “Okay, okay, so what was this epiphany?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said sheepishly. “It’s hard to talk about.”

“She’s at Fred’s,” I said. “Juniper. Is at Fred and Cynthia’s. She’s brought them back together, if you can believe it.”

Harry looked relieved, and thanked me for telling him, and continued. So he’d realized that, duh, he needed to stop gambling, that he would lose everything, that maybe he already had, and that there were programs that would help this happen, and that he’d always thought rehab programs were total jokes, and that gambling wasn’t
like that,
but then again maybe it was, and so he found one and admitted himself and stayed there until they pronounced him healed. And then he had come back. And here he was.

“Mm-hmm,” I said. “And here you are.” I got up, paused to ride out a bout of light-headedness, and went to the kitchen, where I poured myself a glass of water and stood on one leg like a stork and drank it.

“I know that’s not all you have to say,” Harry said after a minute.

“Mm,” I said, shaking my head and holding out a hand, like I was too terribly busy sipping this water to respond just yet. I rummaged around in the cabinet, returned to the couch with a sleeve of saltines, sat down, spent a long time opening the crinkly plastic, ate a cracker, chewed it until it turned to paste, then swallowed. When I looked up, Harry was peering into my face. “Mm, you’re right. It’s not,” I said finally. I ate another cracker. Chew, chew, chew, chew. Swallow. Like a meditation. Chew. Chew. Chew. “Well, hmm. So, how did you pay for the rehab?”

“Oh. This is going to sound bad.”

“You won money playing poker.”

“Yes. At an Indian casino.”

“Oh, wow. That’s what they call irony, my friend. And they didn’t need to contact your family? You didn’t need to apologize in the whole twelve-step thingy? That wasn’t part of the whole deal at the rehab place? You didn’t think, ‘You know, I’ll just call the wife, let her know what’s going on. I’ll shoot my mother an e-mail. I could take a sec to text my brother.’ Nothing like that occurred to you?”

“Ah. No. I mean, it did. I just—couldn’t.”

I held up a cracker to my face, looking at my husband through one of the salty peepholes. “Is that so?” I paused. His eyes flickered around the room. “No more lies. Just give me that much.” I took the cracker away from myself and picked a fleck of salt off the small bland pane.

“I told them I didn’t have any. Family. At the rehab place.”

“Nice.”

“No, I know it wasn’t right, but I didn’t want to talk about it. About you. And, well—I made this deal with myself. I was going to get better, get ahold of myself, and I wasn’t going to bother you until I was better.”

I aimed a saltine at his neck. “How noble! You know, it would have been no bother at all. ‘Hey, you know, I’m doing this thing, I’ll be back in September, don’t worry.’ Would that have been so difficult?” I hurled the cracker, a tiny, savory Frisbee. I could see the headlines now.
KILLED IN FREAK CRACKER ACCIDENT, HARRY LIPKIN, 40.
“How was your birthday?”

“Oh.” Harry looked embarrassed. “Fine. They had cake. At the place.”

“You told them your birthday? Not about your family but about your birthday?”

“It’s hard to explain, Jenny.”

“You don’t even like cake.”

“Okay, it’s impossible to explain. I understand. And I want you to know, I understand if you want nothing to do with me anymore. I do. I’ll go spend the night at my mother’s or something. I’ll leave you alone. I just— I just wanted to come back to you better. Healed. And if I didn’t think I could be better, I wanted to not come back. To disappear. I was—I am—so ashamed. All the times I’ve lost money or taken off. I thought you would all be better off without me.” Then he did the least Harry-ish thing I’d ever seen him do. He buried his face in his hands. I reached out and, from old habit, patted his back.

“I wish I could say I didn’t understand,” I told him. “But the thing is? Actually? I do.”

I never got to have a satisfying shouting fit. I never got to make Harry fall onto his knees and beg my forgiveness. It was not how I would have imagined his homecoming. I would never have thought I’d feel, after a few hours, a belated surge of wifely relief that he was okay, that he was alive, that he was back. It didn’t mean I was making room for his stuff in the closet, but it did mean I could focus my emotions. Now I could be angry or forgiving; I
could self-consciously style my response to what had happened. At least it had stopped happening; the unknowns were back to being the same old unknowns. Believe me, had the rusalka been running the shop, she would have been pissed, churning around inside of me, wailing,
Nonononono! Make him paaaaaayyyyyy!
Harry and I drank some more wine, and I filled him in on what the girls had been up to, some of it, and around eleven I told him he could sleep on the couch. He was acting so . . .
nice
. I was across the room, heading for bed, when he stood up. “Jenny,” he said. The way he said my boring old name, it sounded as rare and precious as a foreign coin. He had grown thin, I noticed. “Can I hug you? I—I’ve really missed you.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. My voice broke. “You know, Harry, I died for you.”

He looked, unsurprisingly, surprised. “What?”

“I died for you.” I sat down in the middle of the floor. It felt good to say it aloud, to be able to admit the truth. He eased off the couch and sat down next to me. We sat there for a while without touching. I hefted Rose’s tooth-marked rattle in one hand, Betty’s balding princess doll in the other, to help me keep my balance. “I don’t mean, like, metaphorically, in case that’s what you’re thinking.”

Now it was his turn to say, “Hmm,” and I heard in the murmured syllable a hint of the old condescending Harry. I sucked in a deep breath. “I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. I did. I thought about doing it, and then I turned around and saw my shoes and I didn’t want to leave them, and I didn’t want to leave my life, you know, I changed my mind, but I tripped and fell, and then I drowned.” I couldn’t tell him the whole story. I wasn’t sure I could ever tell anyone the whole story. Not even my sister, who believed in fortune-tellers and that kind of wacky shit, not even my college roommate who had claimed to be a witch. A mermaid. A
possession. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said out loud. “I mean, I went in the water, and I almost drowned. But I didn’t. I survived. It was a miracle, it really was, and— Well, I just haven’t been the same since. So you should know that.”

Harry knitted his brow, again reached for my hand. I got up as if it were important to put away the children’s toys right at that moment, and I moved around the room gathering friendly hunks of chiming plastic, feeling Harry’s stare. “Are you serious?” He was going to say something else but swallowed and started again. “You seriously jumped?”

“I fell,” I corrected him. “I think. You know, I don’t even know if this is really Betty’s book. I think it might be Emma’s.” The grinning fairies didn’t look that familiar.

Harry paused for a long time, considering. He had just been telling me about his vision quest. It was hard to say whose story was less likely.

“Are you making fun of me?” he finally said.

“Excuse me?” I held an orphaned jigsaw piece in the air, looking for its puzzle. “You know, I haven’t told anyone about what happened, and now I confide in you, and look how sympathetic you are. Really nice. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

“I just mean— Jenny. I would have heard about something like this. Everyone would have heard about it.” He was saying it gently, he was.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a big story when someone jumps off the bridge and survives. It’s in the news. You would have been fished out by the Coast Guard. You would have been interviewed by that awkward guy from NY1. You would have been on the cover of the
Post
with some awful punny headline. ‘Fish Tale.’ ‘Real-Life Mermaid.’ ‘A Watery Save.’ ”

“I like that last one. That’s a good one.”

“I know it was awful, what I did. I know you must have hated me. You must hate me now. But don’t make up stories.”

“Make up stories? What am I, three years old? Harry, I am telling you the truth. I died that day.”

He stood up and grabbed me by the arms. It was all very Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. I closed my eyes.
Sam would never do this. Sam is gentle. Sam is so—
“Look at me,” Harry was saying. There he was, the furious old Harry, the violence in him that had, let’s admit it, drawn me to him. The Harry who got rough during sex, the Harry who was full of passion. I remembered, out of nowhere, an old friend of his saying upon meeting me, “So here’s the girl who tamed Harry Lipkin.” Who were we kidding, he hadn’t been tamed, but the idea of someone who needed to be tamed had lit a flare beneath my breastbone, between my legs, and something about the way he grabbed me, the fire in his eyes, it woke up a long-dormant part of me, a hibernating sliver of the old Jenny, the really old Jenny, the pre-marriage-and-kids Jenny, as if I had received a letter from the girl from Minnesota who listened to sad music and dreamed of big-city romance. “Jenny, look at me,” Harry hissed again. “You’re scaring me now. Tell me the truth.”

“I am. I died,” I said, and hearing my blubbery voice was the first clue that I was crying. It was a good cry, a deep-tissue-release cry, the kind of cry I’d heard of happening when people got intense massages. It came from my muscles, released like a scent. “I did. I’m not lying. I remember it.”

“You said you would never think about it again. You promised—”

Crying loosened something within and made it hard to keep the reins on her. She shoved her way to the surface, propping my mouth open like a puppet’s: “What? I promised I wouldn’t think
about suicide anymore? What about you? How could you leave me alone with the children? How could you trust someone like me? You made a mistake, Harry. You were thinking of yourself, and you should have been thinking of us.”

He released me, as if slapped. “I
was
thinking of you.”

“You knew I had to go off my depression meds while I was nursing Rose.” There. I had said it. I collapsed onto the couch, tears gone. I felt as dried out as an autumn leaf. Harry studied his hands, finally speechless.

“Do you have any idea how hard it has been for me? No pills, all those insane pregnancy and nursing hormones? You didn’t think abandoning us would be upsetting to me? You weren’t at all worried that I might—”

Harry knelt on the floor before me. The supplicant posture infuriated me. He had never even properly proposed! My brain piled up protests. “Listen. I— What I did wasn’t right. I know it wasn’t. But I knew I could trust you with the children. You’re a great mother, Jenny. You’re a perfect mother. You are. And I knew that you wouldn’t hurt them or yourself.”

But he was wrong. Because I had. I had tried to hurt myself. And if it hadn’t been for the rusalka inhabiting my body, whispering ideas for coping, helping me along step by step, if it hadn’t been for Sam, who knew what might have happened? “I think—” I started, and then cleared my throat, “I think you should spend the night at your mother’s.”

Harry studied me. Had I even remembered him correctly? It occurred to me that in the months he’d been gone, I’d remembered all the bad times, all of his flaws, conveniently leaving out the things about him that I loved, and only now that he was here, when I should have been most furious, did it all come flooding back. I loved him. Fuck. I did, I loved him. What a stupid brain I had.
What a stupid heart. He stood up. “I understand,” he said. “I really do. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you for letting me stay for dinner. I really— I missed the girls so much. I know how that sounds, but I did.”

“That’s nice.” I poured the last dregs of wine into the cup. I was thirsty.

“Can I see you again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll think about it.”

“Can I call tomorrow?”

“I guess you’d better. Betty will want to see you.”

Harry paused before leaving. “Jenny?”

“Hmm?”

“I—I’m sorry.”

“I know,” I said. I didn’t look at him. Then I said, “Harry?” I could smell the hope wafting off of him. He stood stock-still.