The Seas (14 page)

And here is what you won’t like or won’t believe or at least you won’t believe that it took me this long to tell you, but your father was there. Your father was the wave that took me under. “Help,” I said again but I was in the tumble of the salty wave and your father smirked. “I’ll help you,” he said. “You son of a bitch. We’ll make a deal. I’ll save your life, you stay away from my daughter. Forever.” He said it. He didn’t want you to ever marry a mortal like he’d done. He wanted you to come back to the ocean with him. He said you are a mermaid.

I made a mistake. I agreed because I wanted to come home from the war so badly. I agreed. But then your father said, “I’m going to give you something to make sure you stay away from her.” And he took a curved fishing knife and he cut my chest open. He made me take it. He cracked my ribs apart so I knew I was not only drowned I was dead. And your father left something inside me that was even colder than the water. It was ice.

It happened. I know you won’t believe me, but sometimes people come back from the ocean. The polar explorer, he was in a wave over 198 feet tall and he came back because he had all those men to rescue. And for some reason I came back, even a coward like me.

I woke up the next morning in my berth and at first I thought that was the clearest, oddest fever dream I’d ever had until I fingered something on my chest that hadn’t been there before. White scars raised in a scribble across my entire torso.

He gave me an inside of ice so I’d never love you. But it didn’t work. You are so close. You are sleeping in the next room. You are the only warm thing to me. So warm, I am melting.

Jude

In prison there are guards who speak only as chisels. They say, “No,” or, “No!” or, “It’s too late for that,” or they say nothing. They won’t answer. I quickly see what this type of chiseling can do to a life. One prisoner, a woman from even farther north than me, once was

a daughter named Edwina

a son Desmond

a false panel in the floorboards for hiding money

a seamstress

at night, a recurring dream of eating grass

a visit, years ago, to Mexico

certainty

a leather sofa where she felt safe

a new mortgage

something her dead brother once told her

But the guards go to work on any life deposited in this sedimentary manner. They chisel into your recollection and even worse, your dreams at night. They chisel into your children. Their purpose is to strip away all other frequencies of reality. They chisel and separate the layers of prisoners’ lives so that all that is left is, “You work for me now. You will do as I say.” That is the only reality for many of the women here, to please the guards, to please the law. But I arrived in convolutions, more igneous than sedimentary, that is, mixed up. There was no way for them to strip away my reality without killing me. It was twisted inside me like a fetus.

Prison is impossible for me to imagine even sitting inside it. It is the poorest place on Earth because control attempts to live here like a king. Control paves the yard outside. Control doles out violence and prescription drugs. Control poisons the tiny mice that sometimes run down the alleys between cells. The mice are the only beautiful things that still can live in prison. But control is fixing that problem.

I’ve seen the ocean once since I’ve been here. It was on TV, in the background of a program filmed in Southern California starring a team of lifeguards. It curled. It advanced and retreated. It tried to kill three children but the lifeguards got in the way. I have never been so sad.

The word prison shares a root with the word surprise, from the French prendre, pris to take. I am not at all surprised by this. I think prison has taken Jude because I don’t feel him inside of me anymore. I think prison has taken him. That or else I lost him because I cry all the time here and it tastes like him. I have a Dixie cup that I harvest my crying into so that later I can drink it, in case Jude is in there.

Another prisoner here, a woman named Darlene, who is two years older than me and is being held in a cell next to mine for killing her husband, has asked me, “So what’s your defense?”

“I don’t have one,” I tell her. “I didn’t kill him.”

“But you need one,” she says. “Everybody here’s got one.”

“I don’t,” I say and think, “Oh, great. Prison has taken my defense, too.” They take everything.

My mother comes to visit me in prison. We are allowed to sit at a table together, not touching. There is no glass partition the way there is in the movies or in men’s prisons, but still we are not allowed to touch each other.

“Why did you call the police?” I ask her first and she starts crying.

“I was scared. I was so, so scared. You won’t ever know what being scared is like. Only mothers can really know.” She looks away as though she might even be angry at me if I don’t understand. “You ran out and then you didn’t come home.” She is still looking away and I am afraid she’ll leave me here. I ask her how long I have been here and she says, “Just three days now.” I can’t believe that. It feels like months.

“I saw the ocean on TV,” I tell her.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she says.

“I know. I have to get out of here,” I say.

“Well, what’s your defense?” she asks.

I look up at her sharply. “I get that question a lot here.”

“Well?” she says.

I look away. “Um, I didn’t kill Jude,” I say. “That’s all I’ve got,” I say.

“Hmm.” She pulls her hair behind both her ears as if to hear better, as if hearing better will provide us with a greater choice in defense. “Hmm,” she says again, apparently because when she listened she didn’t hear anything.

“I have an idea,” I say and so she raises her eyebrows to listen. “You have to tell Dad that I’m here.”

Her fingers clench, scratching the surface of the table. “Your father’s dead,” she says.

“On dry land he is dead. On dry land.”

“Well, on dry land is where you live,” she says.

“I didn’t kill Jude,” I say again and then start to explain. “In the war, Jude,” I say and tell her the whole story. I even tell her about his letter and the torso made of ice.

“He said that about the ice?” she asks when I’m done and I nod yes. “That’s strange,” she says and reaches her hand forward, in between us as though she can remember what it feels like to touch a torso made of ice. “There is a certain similarity between the two of them,” she says and then lowering her hand and looking away she says, “Maybe it is for the best that they are gone.”

I don’t say anything.

She shakes her head as though she is waking up. “Ugh. That’s the dreariest story I’ve ever heard,” she says. “That’s one thing I’ve never liked about Jude,” she says. “Dreary. I’m going to call a lawyer from the dry land,” she says. She watches me while she stands. She hugs the air in front of her and closing her eyes, she pretends she is squeezing me in her arms. When she leaves I am returned to my cell, and there the door is locked in place by a secret mechanism that I can’t see.

The cell block where I am kept is extremely loud. The noise seems to be a quality that is built into the architecture. I rest my ear against the cinder block wall and I can hear all frequencies of conversation, sleep talking, chatting, even the sound of humming.

“Hello down there,” one voice says though I can’t tell which direction it is coming from. The cinder blocks diffuse the location of the sound’s origin.

“Hello?” I say softly, barely moving my mouth. At first I am embarrassed by the thought of placing my lips near the cinderblocks and speaking. I am wary that the guards will pass by and take something from me as punishment for talking. I am wary that the guards will take my voice, that a guard will turn the key to my cell and then use the same key to open my throat and remove a small box from there, that only later I will discover was my voice.

“Oh, the new girl!” another voice says in the wall, surrounded by the sounds of many sighs and exhales and giggles. I pull my head quickly back from the wall. It’s alive, I think, and press my hand to it, expecting the surface of the cell wall to be fleshy or porous or at least electrically charged. It is none of these. It’s concrete. I reapply my ear. The wall still sighs and giggles and whispers. “Is she there?”

“What’s she in for?”

“Same as the rest of us,” one voice says.

And then another particularly loud voice cries, “MAN! SLAUGHTER!” and the wall fills with laughing.

“Are you there?”

“Did she go?”

“New girl. New girl.”

I tap the wall. I put my mouth close to it. “I didn’t do it,” I say.

“Oh, she’s coy. I love that in a new girl.”

“I really didn’t,” I say. “Really. Really. Really. Really. Really.” I hit my head against the wall each time I say it. Really.

“All right. All right,” one voice says, though I hear others in the background mumbling, “Sure you didn’t,” or, “Liar,” or laughter.

“Hmpf,” I say to the wall.

“Don’t listen to them. They are just bitter. They didn’t do it either.”

I pull my head away. If I had a pen I’d write on my hand, “Didn’t do it,” so that I won’t forget. Next time I see a pen I will do this.

I put my ear to the wall again. Someone is saying, “New girl, tell us your story.”

“Yes please.”

“We’re tired of all the other stories here.”

“Yes heard them all and I mean HEARD! THEM! ALL!”

“Tell us yours.”

I rest my forehead on the wall. “Shh,” one voice says. “She’s thinking,” as though she could see me or as though the walls were not just a conduit of voices but a conduit of thought as well. I begin to wonder about all the voices. Were they all coming from inside the prison? Were they in my head? Or is the wall a repository? Maybe it holds onto the echo of old voices. Maybe some of these voices had already been released from prison or died and the wall is still reverberating with the sound of them. In that way the wall gave me no fear but rather comfort, because the wall felt like my house, old and haunted. I push my ear against the wall. The women are waiting for me to talk.

“One night,” I begin and close my eyes, “my father, he was very handsome, he walked into the ocean. That was eleven years ago. He hasn’t come back yet and even though the police found the place on the beach where my father’s footprints disappeared into the water, they never found his body. So my mother and I have been waiting. We often sit and wait on the beach just at the spot where they say my father’s footsteps disappeared into the water. Sometimes I wait alone. We always thought he would return, and when I was young I would imagine the treasure he would bring back for me, starfishes or shark’s teeth or the navigational equipment from a sunken fishing boat. One day while I was waiting for my father alone, I saw a man. He was in the ocean. He was very handsome. However, he was not my father.

“I fell in love with this man even though I was only twelve years old and he was twenty-six. His name was Jude.”

“Jude,” says one voice.

“Jude,” says another, carrying the name further away through the wall.

“Jude.”

I continue with the story. “I fell and fell and fell until I was so deep in love that love resembled a well, steep sides with no way out. Everywhere I looked and everything I saw was Jude.

“Jude had been a soldier in the war and when he came home he was different. As if the war had drilled a small gulf in him that no one could touch, no one could fill. He tried though. He tried to fill the gulf with drinking. He drank a lot.”

I listen and there is no sound from the wall. I imagine the prisoners’ heads pressed up against the wall, listening to me, their eyes closed, their thoughts escaping for a few moments. I consider what parts of my story I will leave out. I will leave out a lot. I will leave out the personality test. I will leave out, “I save your life, you stay away from my daughter.” I will leave out how the ocean had me arrested.

I clear my throat, “A week ago I woke up at Jude’s. I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in bed. I looked in the bathroom and the kitchen. I looked in the living room. That’s where I found him, only he was really different.” I pause a moment, unsure how to tell them this part. It seems there’s only one way to say it. “Jude had become a puddle, a puddle of water. And so, I was very confused at the time, I drank him.”

For a moment the silence continues until the other voices realize I am done and slowly they begin to speak again. “That’s the most romantic story I’ve ever heard,” one voice says and I smile because I agree.

“Lovely.”

“Sad,” says another. I agree.

“You should talk to Undine,” one voice that sounds maternal says.

“Who?” I ask. “Why?”

For minutes there is no answer. I hear a tiny laugh far away and finally the maternal voice returns, coughing before she speaks. “Undine is a mermaid, too.”

I breathe quickly. I blink my eyes. Too? “How do you know I’m a mermaid?” I ask the wall but this time I really get no answer.

The maternal voice continues, “She’s not here anymore, though.”

“Where’d she go?”

Giggling. “She escaped.”

“She did?”

“Yes, she really did.”

“How?”

“Hmm. I don’t know. None of us know.”

“I know,” one high voice says.

“No you don’t,” another prisoner tells her and then adds, “dummy.” The high voice believes this is hilarious.

The mother voice speaks over the high laughing, “She had a similar story though. She had a husband, but after a few years the husband fell in love with Undine’s stepsister. So Undine, the way she told it, went back down under the water. Her husband never really knew how miserable she was. Her husband never knew she was a mermaid. Then, at least the way she told it, her uncle made her do it, made her come back from the ocean and get the husband. She got him. At least the way she told it, she just kissed him but that’s not what the pathology report said. It said he drowned.”

The wall is very quiet.

Until one mean, deep voice cracks, “Sounds like you, girlene. Freaking mermaids.”

I back away, suddenly scared that someone who shouldn’t have been listening, was listening like the guards or the policemen. I take my ear away from the wall and find my bed with my hands. I try to sleep but thoughts of the women in the wall keep me awake. “That was a dream. That was a dream,” I think, even though I know it wasn’t a dream. My face can still feel the wall’s rough surface imprinted on my cheek. I know it wasn’t a dream because while I am trying to convince myself that it was a dream, I fall asleep.