Mermaid Read online

  Table of Contents

  START READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JODI PICOULT

  CAST AND CREW

  Two Ways to Read

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  When my mother was pregnant with me, she used to float belly-up in the Gulf of Mexico, with her ears below the surface of the water, and wait for the waves to tell her my name. She told me she'd stare at the seagulls as they circled overhead, forming potential letters that never strung themselves into anything meaningful. For nine months she swam, and for nine months she heard and saw no signs. Still, she decided to name me Hope. Just because the ocean never chose to speak to her didn't mean it wouldn't choose to speak to me.

  She wanted me to become a marine biologist; me, I wanted to be a painter. I imagined sitting on a stool somewhere in Tuscany, framing a golden landscape; I wanted to be able to talk at cocktail parties about different types of light. But to make my mother happy, I took a marine biology course. I was hooked the moment the grad student injected phosphorus into shrimp and they glowed beneath the water like a string of Christmas lights. That grad student was Nick. He knew far more about marine biology than I ever would. What he didn't know is that he'd fall in love with me.

  Now, years later, I sit in the backyard waiting for the fish to come. Nick is doing a breeding experiment with Bothus lunatus--peacock flounder--and he's organized the project so that it can be done in the comfort of our home--the one we've only just signed the papers for. We bought this house--our first house!--because of the gunite pool, which was empty but full of potential. Not even the listing agent could explain why, in the heat of summer, the pool had been drained. It was a hazard for little kids, an eyesore, an unhealed wound in the backyard.

  For us, it was perfect.

  I have spent weeks preparing it, lining the bottom with sand and rock to accommodate the habitat of the West Atlantic Ocean. I have tested for acidity and salt. Nick will be studying the serial spawning of this species, and how the flounder might be triggered by warming and cooling currents in the water. He has been planning this since the first night he took me out to dinner. Over steak (he didn't eat fish, out of solidarity), he drew a map of his life that was as clear as any picture I could have painted. The ocean might not have called my name, but Nick had, and it was easy to confuse the two.

  I graduated and became an aquarist in Boston, which was the best I could do with an undergraduate degree in marine biology, while Nick slogged through his dissertation. When he took a job as a marine biologist at the same aquarium where I worked, I thought it would be convenient. We could carpool. We could steal kisses in dark corners.

  Then life got in the way.

  And now, he's heading up a study and I'm trying not to believe that he hired me to assist out of pity or nepotism, rather than credentials.

  I hear the rumble of a truck in the driveway. The man who peeks his head over the fence looks like someone I saw last night on the Lifetime Movie Network who killed an entire sorority with a Swiss Army knife, so I speak cautiously through the wooden slats before unlocking the gate. "Yes?" I say, playing dumb.

  "Mrs. Payne," he answers. "We have your fish."

  I unlock the gate. The blue truck in the driveway says On the Spot Transport. The man's faded plastic name tag reads Johnny.

  "You've got to be kidding," I say.

  There was a time when I would have called Nick to tell him this, and we would have laughed until our bellies hurt.

  Johnny and another man, Felix, cart a couple of large plastic tubs into the backyard. They make damp tracks on the lawn. At my direction, they release the fish into the swimming pool. I tip them, and they leave.

  The flounder swim in circles, hovering near the man-made reef Nick and I installed last month. Nick will come home, and we will watch the sun go down over our ingenious suburban breeding tank. We'll drink margaritas and sit so close our shoulders touch. The moon will leap on the water, casting green shadows in his eyes.

  I call Nick at the aquarium to tell him the flounder are here, but he doesn't pick up.

  I crouch down and stretch my hand over the shimmering mirror of the pool. The fish settle uneasily at the bottom and stare up at me, both eyes on one side of their heads. This is one of the interesting physiological facts about flounder: from certain angles, they can never tell what's coming.

  Here is how peacock flounder reproduce: In a harem. One male, many ladies. It happens just before the sun goes down. A male and a female sidle closer. They bow their backs, and their snouts brush. Then the female plays hard to get, moving away, and the male has to come toward her again, from the other side.

  You know, so she's blindsided.

  The way flounder mate is spectacular, magical. The male and female are drawn upward together, in a column of water, as if the very act of procreation makes them lighter. When they are floating about six feet above the ocean floor, the fish release their sperm and eggs, a tornado of genetic material. When the pair settle down on the sand again, the male checks to make sure that the mating worked, and they go off in opposite directions.

  It was less profound for Nick and me. A snowstorm. Vodka shots. A broken condom.

  For twenty minutes, I have counted and recounted. I have checked in corners; I even hiked up my pants and waded into the water myself to make sure there were no blind spots eluding me, no fish hiding beneath the reef. I close my eyes, open them, and count again.

  "There are supposed to be fourteen," Nick says, running his hand through his hair, the motion that's giving him a receding hairline.

  "There were. I swear it."

  "And what happened?" Nick asks. "Did one get up and go out for a jog? For God's sake, how could you lose a fish, Hope?" Almost immediately, his words lose their edge. "I'm sorry," he says. "I shouldn't be yelling at you." His hand, solid and warm, slips down the length of my arm. "It's okay. You signed for the fish, you counted them. The missing one's here, somewhere. Things don't just disappear."

  This is not true. This is not true at all.

  "You don't have to do this," he tells me. "Maybe it's too soon."

  I stare down at our fingers, twisted into a Gordian knot. "This is important to you," I reply. "So it's important to me."

  He looks at me as if he is about to say something, but then shakes his head.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. I just . . . There was a point when this was important to you, too," Nick says.

  This is not true, either. What was important to me was Nick. There's a difference.

  "I know this wasn't the plan," he murmurs. "But we'll make a new one."

  I wrap my arms around his neck and start kissing him. I kiss him so deeply that I start to see stars and he has to hold me up with his arms around my hips. When he pulls away from me, gasping, he stares into the center of me. "Really?" he asks, afraid to hope.

  I jump up and wrap my legs around his waist.

  Somehow we make it up the stairs, leaving a trail of our clothing behind us. Nick moves in me like a man who's found faith. I touch him, I kiss him, but I am thinking of the flounder. How when they swam to the bottom of the pool, swaying to and fro, it looked like a fall of autumn leaves.

  Then Nick buries his face in my neck and I imagine us floating off the bed, more ethereal joined together than we are apart. I picture the faces of angels.

  I don't even realize I'm crying until Nick presses a tissue into my hand. "I'm sorry," he says, over and over, like this is a prayer and he is the sinner.

  When I first met Nick, I didn't tell him where I worked. On Saturdays, I became a mermaid at a ratty theme park clos
e to campus. There were four of us at a time, dressed in bikinis and rubber fish tails, submerged in a giant aquarium. We had little tanks of air strapped to our backs, and an air tube we could hold surreptitiously to our mouths when we needed oxygen; we could stay submerged for an hour.

  My mermaid alter ego was Marina. I had a blue shell bra and a purple tail. The best outfit was the silver shell bra and the iridescent tail, but that belonged to Audra, who had been a mermaid for seven years. You didn't have to be a certified diver to work there, but I was. The only requirement, I think, was that you had long hair to swirl around, and that you could keep your eyes wide open underwater. What I liked about the job: the looks on the faces of the little girls who truly believed after seeing me that mermaid was a viable career option. What I didn't like about the job: the effect being submerged that long had on my skin. I spent hours with pruny hands and feet.

  I had dated Nick for five months and had managed to keep my job a secret from him. It was embarrassing, after all, for a senior majoring in marine biology to be masquerading as a mythical maritime creature. Instead, I told him I volunteered at a nursing home, thinking he'd never question humanitarian behavior.

  Visitors sat on benches in front of the glass tank. Normally we got families and one or two sketchy old guys who just liked to see half-naked women. I could see the daily crowd as we sang our "Sea Sweetheart Welcome Song." (Another talent I could list on a resume. How many people do you know who can sing underwater without drowning?) One Saturday, I looked out into the audience and counted three families and one creeper. At least I thought it was a creeper, until Nick leaped up, climbed an emergency ladder, dove into the tank fully clothed, and kissed me. He kissed me, and then he put my bubble tube to his mouth, and then he breathed me to life.

  I watch Nick in the mirror after his shower. Tiny gold hairs stand up on his forearms.

  When the doorbell rings, we are in equal stages of undress. "It's the pizza," I say.

  There is a tiny stalemate, where we wait to see who is going to go downstairs to pay for the food we ordered when we were starving after sex.

  I lose. I grab money from my wallet in the kitchen, and as I do, I notice that the light is on in the pool, although I am pretty sure I didn't leave it illuminated.

  Give me.

  I shake my head to clear it. The doorbell rings again.

  The kid who is delivering the pizza never even takes his earbuds out. I hand him the twenty and tell him to keep the change. Then I walk back into the kitchen, through the sliding door to the patio near the pool. Its edges are foaming, and the flounder are iridescent. Purple. "Nick," I scream, and he is here in a heartbeat, his bare chest pressed up against my shoulder blades.

  "Holy shit," he says.

  "I think I heard the pool say something," I mention, my voice tiny.

  Nick closes his eyes. "Hope . . ."

  "You know what the problem is with you?" I say, turning on him so fiercely that he reels backward. "You want me to tell you the truth. But you don't want to hear it."

  I walk away and head back to the bedroom. I'm not hungry anymore. I lie in bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling, until Nick comes in and slips beneath the covers as if nothing has passed between us. "There are only five flounder left," he says.

  I would have said, There are nine missing.

  This, in a nutshell, is my marriage.

  The focal point of the aquarium is a three-story cylindrical glass tank that makes up the heart of the building. The rest of the exhibits line the walls in a gradual spiral that leads to the top of the tank; the path down is a ramp that curls its way along the tank all the way down to the penguins, waddling at ground level. The tank is a huge saltwater reef, complete with sand sharks and groupers. Eels creep in the corners. Stingrays shuffle along the tank floor.

  I used to love spending time in there. It was my job to do a feeding two or three times a day in front of the public. At 11, 1, and 4, I would get into my wet suit and gear and float at the top of the tank, waiting for Nick to introduce me over the microphone to the visitors who lined the spiral surrounding the tank. Sometimes he called me Annie Aquarium, sometimes I was Sheena, Queen of the Sea. Once, I was Ariel. I was never Hope.

  The last thing I would hear as I disappeared below the surface was the even edge of Nick's voice, reeling off facts about marine life. Underwater, language turned violet. The fish were used to me; they knew me by shape. They would swim up to me and bump against my hips and my breasts, trying to get the food cinched in a bag at my waist. Clown fish and blowfish circled my legs. The sharks didn't look me in the eye.

  There was a Zen to being underwater, an otherworldly parallel universe I could inhabit. I never could see outside the tank, but I knew children's faces were pressed to the glass, especially when one of those sharks swam by. The kids would draw in a breath as I pulled a whole fish from my pouch and rubbed my free hand over the belly of the shark. It felt cool, hard, and round; the sharks were already sated. We had to keep them that way, or they'd devour all the other fish in the tank.

  My favorite place to swim was the base of the tank, because it was dark and full of shadows, shrouded with coral and anemones, full of spiny fish and crustaceans. On the glass wall, I saw my own face and body, mirrored like inside a fun house. When feeding time was over, I would rise like a rocket, out swimming the fastest and strongest fish. I'd burst through the surface of the water and turn, and the first thing I'd see was Nick.

  The next morning, there are no more fish.

  "What the hell is going on?" Nick says.

  The pool is clear and blue, riddled with that red coral reef on the bottom. To look at it, you wouldn't know there was a problem. I walk to the hedge that hides the filter and turn on the underwater light.

  "I'm going to lose my job," Nick says, his voice skating higher. "Do you already know what kind of hoops I had to jump through just to breed flounder off-site? Frank told me that no one would take it seriously enough for publication, but I didn't listen to him." Frank is his boss. Frank used to be my boss, too. "And I practically had to prostitute myself to get the funds for--"

  "Why?" I ask. "Why did you do it if you knew it wasn't going to be a publishable study?"

  Nick just stares at me in silence.

  Because I wasn't ready to come back to work. So Nick decided to bring the work to me.

  A bug zapper hanging from the porch electrocutes a mosquito.

  Give me.

  "Give you what?" I ask.

  Nick stares at me. "I didn't say anything."

  "Give me," I repeat. "Didn't you hear that?"

  "Hear what?"

  When I was little, I would sit on the beach with my mother, building sand sculptures of blue herons, of giant scorpions. Sometimes she would let me bury her in the sand. From time to time, she'd put her hand on my shoulder. "It's sad today," she would say, waving at the Gulf of Mexico. "Can't you hear it crying?" I never did, but my mother believed so strongly in the communicative power of the water that I grew up believing in the possibility.

  Now, my mother is seventy-five and senile. She can't remember my name, much less the things she believed thirty years ago. But I still wonder what she'd make of this pool.

  "I have to get ready for work," Nick says. "Might as well dress for the firing squad."

  I watch him go back inside.

  "All right," I say, sitting cross-legged on the fieldstone edge of the pool. "I'm listening."

  The water gets warmer. I can tell by the way my hair curls around my face.

  I need, the pool says.

  It sounds like the belly of an echo, like the words are coming from the center of Earth and bubbling up through the drain at the bottom of the pool. It reminds me of singing underwater when I was a mermaid, of how, when Nick proposed in the giant tank, I said, "I love you" and the syllables came out distorted by waves and splashes.

  "What do you need?" I ask.

  The pool has turned the backyard into an open-air sauna
. Steam rises from its surface and rolls over me. There is so much, in fact, it screens the house from view.

  Sweets, the pool says.

  If my mother could hear this pool, she'd nod. "Oh, yes," she'd say. "Who doesn't?"

  I fall asleep in the heat and the steam. When I wake up, the coral reef is completely gone. I am not surprised.

  When I wrote my senior paper in college, it was on tide pools. They are the little warm water pockets left by receding waves, puddles that hold the heartiest of animals: mussels and snails and horseshoe crabs. Tide-pool creatures have to be tough, because just when they've become oriented to their environment, another wave comes and turns the world upside down.

  I was thinking of hermit crabs when I looked at the pregnancy test and saw the pink plus sign.

  I was thinking that once you add one more to the equation, you can never go back to the sum you used to be.

  I was thinking that it was my turn to go to grad school.

  I was thinking we'd barely just said I love you.

  I was thinking, Wait.

  I was thinking, No.

  I never said it out loud, but that doesn't mean the baby never heard me.

  That afternoon, the pool looks ordinary. It's clear and blue and holds sunlight in its corners like tears. If I didn't know better, I'd take a swim.

  On my way inside to take a shower, I notice a group of kids gathered near the fence. One, a boy with buckteeth, is straddling another's shoulders so that he can see over the wood slats.

  "We've heard things about your pool," he says.

  "What things?"

  "That it's possessed." He hops off his friend's shoulders and waits for me to open the gate.

  "What if I tell you it isn't?" I say.

  The boy pulls his baseball cap off his head and tucks it into his back pocket. "Prove it," he answers.