The Mermaid's Secret (10 page)

Sheriff was furious. He had to leave work early so the principal could tell my mom and him what a wild and unrepentant child I was. He sent me to my room for the rest of the day as punishment. But as soon as he went back to work, my mom called me down to the kitchen and we boiled up those clams with garlic, parsley, and wine. We made a chocolate cake and picked fiddlehead ferns from the creek bed behind our house.

When Sheriff came home from his shift that night, there was a beautiful feast on the table.

He wasn't impressed. He pulled my mom into the living room, as I hid in the coatrack, eavesdropping.

“She needs to be punished, Barbara. You can't reward her bad behavior. She'll never learn.”

“Why should she get in trouble for bringing home dinner?” my mom asked.

“She needs to learn to respect authority.”

“Why? So other people can tell her how to live her life? That's what my mother always did, and I ran away as soon as I could.”

“She's too wild.”

“She's adventurous.”

“But she ditched school, Barbara. Don't you understand? She's going to end up in big trouble if we don't rein her in. I see kids every day on this island who end up in the wrong crowd. Kids who don't have any direction.” Sheriff was whispering, but I could hear anyway.

“Maybe if school taught her something worthwhile, like how to dig for clams, then she'd want to go.”

“Barbara, I'm worried about her.”

“She's a strong girl. You never need to worry about strong girls.”

He sighed, and then I heard them kiss, which is how all their conversations started and ended, and my mom said, “Now, let's be thankful and eat the food Jess has brought us.”

She always understood me better than Sheriff.

*   *   *

I look up from my hair twirling to find Sheriff's eyes on me. “What's up, Jess?”

I pause. Take a sip of my Pepsi. “He's on island.”

Sheriff's face is blank for a minute. He's trying to figure out which “he” I'm referring to. Then it registers. “The Sinclair boy.” It's a statement, not a question. He stands, puts his hands on his hips, and stares out the window to Mom's backyard garden, with its asparagus gone to seed and dead, dry patches where there once were zucchini and peppers of all kinds. “And?”

I stand, too. “And … how can he just come back here? How can he just walk around our island like nothing ever happened?”

“He's not breaking any laws.”

“I don't care what the laws are. Trip Sinclair has no right to be on Ne'Hwas. What's he doing here, anyway?”

“Vacationing would be my guess.”

“It's not right.”

“I can't stop him.”

“You can do
something
. You're a cop. You investigate crimes. You arrest bad people,” I say.

He tightens his jaw. “What am I supposed to do, plant a crack pipe in his Corvette? Write him a citation for breathing?”

“Prove he's guilty. Charge him with murder. Manslaughter, at least.” My voice is rising and I can feel the heat rise to my face.

“Jess, they went through all this. He was cleared.”

My palms sweat. “How can you be so calm? I want to kill him. I want justice for what he did. How can you just stand there and not do anything?”

Sheriff rolls the kinks out of his neck. “You can't take the law into your own hands. Promise me that. Promise you won't do anything stupid.”

The anger is taking over. I'm angry about Trip Sinclair killing my sister. I'm angry that Sheriff won't react. “Aren't you mad?”

“Of course I am. But Trip Sinclair isn't my problem. You are. And the only thing I care about is protecting the family I have left.”

“We can't let him get away with it!” I say.

“There is no
we
in this.
You
need to stay out of trouble.
I
need to do my job, which is to protect and serve.”

“Mom would freak if she knew he was here.”

Sheriff's face drops. “I think Barbara would be more interested in keeping you out of trouble than getting revenge. If she comes back, that is.”

“Mom is on a spirit journey. She'll come back,” I say.

“I don't know about that. I looked into phone records, credit card statements, but the trail was cold from the start. She doesn't want to be found this time.”

“She's coming back,” I say. My mom is coming back. She's on a spirit journey, that's all. It's like an Australian aboriginal walkabout, a period of wandering. She used to disappear for days. No warning. No explanation. Wandering, she would tell me, was the best way for a person to get rid of sorrow. When you lose yourself, you set free anything locked up inside of you, she would say. Some people turn to Prozac or wine; my mother would wander.

They should have taught us about spirit journeys that day at the lobster cannery. I might have hung around.

Sheriff sits down at the table again. His shoulders are slumped. He's lethargic. He sighs constantly. All those signs of depression written across his body.

“I want you to stay away from Trip Sinclair.”

“I want you to arrest him.”

“Promise me you won't do anything stupid.”

I get up and head for the door. “Like what?”

“I don't need to give you any ideas.”

“What do you think I'm going to do? Track him down? Stake out his house?”

“The law only works if you follow it when it's hard, Jess.”

“Sometimes it seems like you're more concerned with the law than with me.”

“That's not true.”

I can't stand how sad he sounds. How lonely. I can't stand how quiet the house is now, how overgrown and unkempt the garden is without my mom around to tend it. I can't stand how much Sheriff needs
me
now. I hate that I don't get to be the child anymore.

I'm twenty-three and the world is my oyster, but no one passed me the shucking knife. I want Kay here to help me out, to tell me what to do. To glue my family back together.

The screen door squeaks on my way out.

 

N
INE

I take Sheriff's advice and manage to get through the next couple days without doing anything too stupid. I don't try to rip Trip Sinclair apart limb from limb with my bare hands. I don't jump off any fishing boats in the middle of the ocean. I don't yammer on to Matthew about being a mermaid and escaping the jaws of great white sharks. In fact, I try not to think too much about what happened to me out there.

Life goes on. Ferries continue to cart boatloads of people to the island. Parking spots become hard to find. Restaurants fill up. Tourists swim at the beach and sail their yachts and shop for tacky T-shirts along Spinnaker Street while locals tend bar, wait tables, and cater to their every whim.

On Wednesday, the sky is the color of pewter when I get down to the docks. Storm clouds roll in from the east, spreading a fine mist over the island. It's cold today, rain on the way.

At the Slack Tide shop, only a handful of people linger under the covered porch, waiting to buy tickets. I'm scheduled to work on the
Mack King,
but since there aren't enough passengers signed up for mackerel fishing to justify the price of gas, Harold cancels the trip. He sticks them on cod fishing instead. Running an empty boat puts the day in the red, and there's nothing that Harold hates more than a day in the red.

So I get the day off. Unpaid, of course.

The rain really picks up as the last passenger climbs aboard the
Dauntless
. I help Tony untie and coil the heavy lines from the dock as passengers huddle on deck tightening the hoods of their rain slickers. Matthew waves to me from the wheelhouse, flashing a broad, white smile as he drives into the harbor.

I'm completely drenched by the time I get back to Barefoot Lane.

“Good morning, kitty cat!” someone yells through the pounding rain.

Lady Victoria, the drag queen who rents the apartment across from mine, is sitting on her balcony smoking a cigarette. She's the main attraction at Club Ooh-la-la, the drag show revue down the street, and one of the many summer transients of Barefoot Lane. She's dressed like a man this morning, except for the black eyeliner. It always throws me for a loop when I see her as a man. She looks so plain. So ordinary. Only when she dons her drag queen regalia does she become her true, fabulous self. The Incomparable Lady Victoria. Not just plain Victor from Pennsylvania. It's a complete metamorphosis from the everyday to the extraordinary.

“Welcome back,” I say, dodging the rain beneath the striped awning of Bob's Fishmonger.

“Aren't you fishing this morning, pork chop?” she says, sashaying over to the railing.

I crane my neck to look up at her. “No one wants to go out in weather like this.”

She blows a smoke ring that floats over her balcony. “Do tell. Rain does terrible things to mascara. Wreaks havoc on stilettos, too. Simply isn't natural to be out in the rain.”

I shrug. “Well, the plants seem to like it.”

“You got yourself a nice man to curl up with on a day like today, sugarplum? Someone to rub your feet and warm your heart?”

I shake my head.

“A beautiful thing like you? Girl, you need to find yourself a man. Why don't you try a little harder. A little lipstick, perhaps. Maybe a pink scarf to brighten up that gorgeous face of yours. A pop of color here, a sparkly brooch there. It's not so hard.”

“Isn't inner beauty what's important?”

She waves her long red nails at me. “It's about letting the girl you are on the inside shine through on the outside.”

I head up the narrow stairs to my apartment.

There's not much to do on a rainy day like this, so I strip out of my wet sweatshirt and watch the morning news. There are stories of war and natural disasters, political debates, stock market frauds, droughts, celebrities doing crazy things, fashion trends. I get bored with the news pretty fast, since all of it is happening someplace far, far away from Ne'Hwas. Another world.

I do laundry. I clean up my room. I mop the kitchen floor.

I go into my room and call my mother. I don't know if I'm really expecting her to pick up. I've called about a thousand times already. Like always, an automated message tells me that the number is no longer in service. So I sit down on my bed and write her a letter.

I tell her that Sheriff and I got into another fight, and that it was mostly about her, so she really should come back home so he's not so lonely anymore. I explain how my birthday was pretty much the worst birthday ever, since turning twenty-three only reminded me of Kay being twenty-three. I tell her that Trip Sinclair is back on the island. I tell her about the special present Matthew gave me and admit to her that I feel like melting every time I see him lately. And since I know I won't send the letter (seeing as I don't have an address for her), I tell her that I had the most incredible dream about turning into a mermaid. I explain the sensation of breathing water, of how beautiful it was, how liberating. I tell her I wish it were real. That maybe it was real.

Then again, it could have just been some kind of psychological wish-fulfillment thing. If only I'd paid better attention in psychology class. Maybe Freud could have helped me. Who wouldn't want to transform into something else? Who wouldn't want to escape to their own world as easily as Lady Victoria does with just some makeup, hair spray, and sequins? Oh, and a boa. Always a boa.

But my mind was always on the waves, not Freud.

I ask her how her spirit journey is going and whether she's managed to let go of her sorrow yet. I end the letter by saying that maybe I could join her, since I have a few things I need to let go of, too.

“What are
you
doing here?” Sammy asks, popping her head in my door.

“My boat got canceled.”

“You okay?”

I must look pretty pathetic and waterlogged, writing a letter I'll never send to my absent mother. “I'm fine.”

“Well, I'm off to work. Lunch shift. I'll see you tonight. Want to grab drinks at Schooner Wharf?”

“Sure.”

I read through my letter one last time, then wad it into a ball and toss it in the garbage.

Outside, the rain is coming down in sideways sheets. I think about how rough it must be out on the boat today. Passengers will be cold and wet, miserable no matter how many fish they catch. I wonder if Matthew is wishing he had the day off.

I wonder about the waves, too. I always wonder about the waves. I once heard that Inuits have a hundred different words for snow. I must have at least that many ways of describing the waves—waves that sparkle in the sun, waves that slice through you, waves that welcome you, waves that trick you, waves that ride on bigger waves, waves that transform you.

*   *   *

There's just one thing I have to do before I head back out there. I pull in to the lot at the Lobster Corral and double-park, since there isn't a free spot anywhere. Inside, it's packed with tourists wearing plastic bibs around their necks and bright red sunburns on their cheeks and noses.

Sammy is waiting on a table of ten for a very late lunch. She's taking their drink orders when I walk up.

“I'm going surfing,” I say.

She looks at me while scribbling orders on a little notepad.

“Okay.” Rain beats against the windows.

“I'm going surfing at Tutatquin Point.” I raise my eyebrows.

“What do you want, a permission slip?”

A woman at the table orders two Shirley Temples for her kids and a margarita for herself.

“Rocks or blended?” Sammy asks.

“Rocks. No salt,” the woman responds, wiping her son's nose with a napkin.

Sammy slides over to the next customer and I move with her.