An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant (35 page)

She took
it; it was rough and heavy and made of metal. John’s body rocked beside her as
he worked the second and third pins out of the hinges. After each pin slid
free, he handed it to her and then he gave her the Goddess. She pressed the
small figure between her breasts.

“You
might want to stand over there for a moment.” He gestured away from the
doorway.

She
stepped back a few steps and he lifted the door away from the doorframe and
propped it against the doorway so that there was a space big enough for them to
enter.

“C’mon.”
John turned and caught her hand before leading her into the black interior of
the tower.

They
shuffled along the curving outside wall toward the far side away from the
partially open doorway. John, who walked ahead of Tamarind, stopped abruptly
and swore.

“What?”
Tamarind found herself whispering.

“I just
ran into the stairs. Can you hold up that Goddess so we can at least make out
shapes in this pitch black?”

Tamarind
grasped the Goddess by the head and dangled her at the end of her extended arm.
The stairs leading up to the top of the tower came into vague outline. She
swung the Goddess to the right and saw another door beneath the stairs.

“Ah,
storage. Let’s see if we can open this one, too.” John tried the door handle
and the door swung open easily. “Let me hold Her.”

He took
the Goddess and waved her around the space. “As far as I can tell, there’s
enough room for us to squat in here. It’ll be warmer, I think.” He took her arm
and pulled her into the closet and shut the door.

They
sank down onto the concrete floor. Tamarind brought her knees to her chest and
wrapped her arms around them. Her shoulder touched John’s arm and her flank
rested against his soaking t-shirt and shorts. In the muffling darkness, their
breathing rasped in unison like some monster from the fairy tales that she’d
read that summer. She hummed a little and her breathing smoothed and slowed.

John’s
own breathing calmed somewhat. “I’ve missed hearing that. God, I’ve missed
you
.”

Tamarind
dropped her head to her knees. She tried to hold herself still, but her body
shook beyond her control. Fluorescent light haloed her mind’s eye, defining the
dark figure that kept bending over her.

“I
should have come for you yesterday. I’m sorry, Tamarind.” His voice fractured
on the last words; they lay between them as sharp as slivered glass. “But that
doesn’t help you, does it?”

They sat
there without speaking and Tamarind bit her upper lip so hard she tasted blood.
Its salty, mineral taste evoked the sea so strongly that she gasped and then
the saltwater washed over her face. Mucous mingled with tears and blood and for
a moment she knew nothing of her surroundings. When at last the waves stopped
rolling through her, she brought her hands to her cheeks and wiped beneath her
nose.

“Here.”
John wiggled next to her and then handed her his wet shirt. “Wipe your face
with this.”

As she wiped
her face off, they heard the howling of the wind. It sent fingers of damp air
under the door to the closet as if searching for them.

“Men
killed your mother?” She could barely hear him over the wind.

“Drug
runners killed her years ago.”

“How did
they find her? Couldn’t she hide from them?”

She felt
the breath sigh from her. “Yes. We
mer
have cloaking spells and glamour
to protect us from people. But she didn’t want to hide. Humans fascinated her.
I think maybe she wanted to be human too.”

“No
wonder your father wanted to kill me.” He shifted next to her and she felt his
upper arm brush her nipple. She tingled where his skin had touched hers. “You
said you were almost human. Will you always have to stay close to the ocean?”

“I only
have legs until the end of the rainy season.”

“That’s
November, isn’t it?” She felt him hold his breath for her answer.

“Yes.”

“And
then you get your mermaid’s tail back.”

“Yes.”

“And
there’s nothing I can do to stop it, is there?”

She
hesitated.

“What?”
His voice sounded sharp. “
Is
there something I can do?”

“I can
keep my legs if I mate with a human.” She almost didn’t get the words out of
her throat.

“Well,
then, you’re all set.” The saltwater of his voice stung the scraped hollow of
her chest so that it burned.

“What do
you mean?”

“Jesus
was just coming back for a little more, wasn’t he? I mean, maybe he’s a prick
of the highest order who deserves to burn in hell, but he didn’t exactly
imagine that you’d be willing to have sex with him, did he? After all, you’ve
already had sex with him on Punta Melones.”

“What?”
The word scarcely escaped her numb lips.

“You
know I saw you. You looked right at me that night.”

“What
night?”

“What
night? You gotta be kidding me. The night you and he went dancing at Isla
Encantada.”

“I didn’t
have sex with him. He clearly wanted me to, but I went back to Ana’s.” She
wanted to leave this tower, plunge down Mount Resaca, and throw herself into
the sea.

“It was
you. I know what I saw. I went back later to Isla Encantada looking for you and
while I was out, I found your Goddess. When I picked it up, I had the strongest
urge to go to Punta Melones, and there you were under Jesus. You smiled at me
and I dropped her—” here he held up the Goddess, “on the beach.”

“I
didn’t make her until after you left Culebra, John. Valerie gave this moonstone
to me, to give me hope that you’d come back.” Saltwater slid down her cheeks
again. “It wasn’t me. It might have looked like me, but it wasn’t me. What if I
had
given myself to Jesus? Are you telling me that you’ve never been
with a woman? Are you telling me that you and Raimunda only ever went dancing?
I heard the stories, John. I know you were with her, many times since you and I
met.”

John
squirmed next to her. “I—”

“I think
you saw what you wanted to see so you could leave Culebra and me. And now you
believe what you want to believe so you won’t have to act. I’ve waited all
summer for you. I’ve never lain with a human even though I could have, and in a
few weeks, I’ll return to the sea. I won’t come back, John. I won’t come back.”
Convulsions shook her breathing and she felt lightheaded in the stifling dark.

They sat
there for a long moment. The sound of John’s breathing vanished and Tamarind
pulled herself away from him and balled herself around her knees. She closed
her eyes and hummed, rocking and weaving an ellipse in the air above her head.
If she rocked long enough, her humming would clear her thoughts and the spell
she wove would take hold. She would disappear inside a cloak of darkness. And
then, in a silence so complete that she’d nearly closed off all awareness of
John, she heard him inhale audibly.

“Tamarind.”
He breathed her name out steadily. “Tamarind.”

She
could feel him release and expand next to her. She stopped rocking and waited.
He reached for her and touched her shoulder with a fingertip as light as the
brush of an angelfish. She didn’t pull away but held herself still. He brought
his full hand down upon her shoulder tentatively; his palm was warm and his
fingers firm. A surge of electricity, warm and dark, flowed down her arm and
through her body, reaching the base of her spine and radiating through all of
her limbs. Her breath grew shallow and the air in the closet grew close around
them. Outside, the hurricane had arrived and the winds careened through the
tower after flinging the loose entry door aside.

“I don’t
want to lose you. But I don’t deserve the gift you want to give me.”

She
leaned toward him and he moved his hand up to her shorn head. When she cried
out, he bent and kissed her head, and then he kissed the top of her ears, first
the left and then the right. He kissed the back of her neck, and then he traced
her face with the tips of his fingers. He held her cheeks gently and waited.
She lifted her arms around his neck and he kissed her mouth at last.

He slid
slow fingers over her shoulders and down her flanks and when she’d stopped
trembling, he moved away from her and tugged off his shorts and sandals. And
then he sat next to her. She extended her hand carefully, searching with her
fingers until she felt his nearest hipbone. Moving her fingers across his
abdomen, she touched the tender skin above the cut. He flinched. Murmuring, she
laid her palm over it. Gradually, he relaxed and she knew the pain had faded
from his awareness and the risk of renewed bleeding had gone. She raised her
hand to his face; he turned, pressing his lips against her palm. By degrees he
pulled her on top of him, as carefully as if she were sculpted from tissue
paper, and wrapped his arms around her. He rocked her as the madness and fury
descended upon the breathless world outside their tower, ripping tree and wall,
shrub and roof in an ecstasy of obliteration. Together they wove a spell so
exquisite that the foundations of heaven might have crumbled and still they
would have known only the utter stillness of their breath.

Marilyn slowly lost strength
,
becoming first a tropical storm, and then a storm front, and finally
dissipating out at sea, miles north and west of Culebra days later. The morning
after she passed, John awoke to find Tamarind’s head resting on his shoulder,
her body curled in his lap. The storage closet in the observation tower where
they huddled had lightened imperceptibly. The screaming winds and gunshot spray
of rain mixed with hail had vanished, leaving a profound silence. He absorbed
the feel of Tamarind against his chest, her silky scalp lying against his neck,
and the slight weight of her buttocks on his thighs. He wanted to sit in this
place so far from people and research and proposals, until they’d put down
roots and transformed into a tree like some Greek nymph.

The
reality of a full bladder, an empty stomach, an aching slash across his
abdomen, and the soreness of scratches and bruises kept him from pursuing this
option.

“Hey.”
He touched Tamarind’s cheek.

She
stirred and sighed. “It’s quiet.”

“Yeah, I
guess we slept through the rest of the hurricane. I think it’s still raining
though.”

She
moved a little and he grunted. “Sorry.” She brushed his wound with a fingertip.

“Oh,
that’s not the problem. You just pushed against a full bladder.”

“Ah.”
She sat very still. “We can’t stay here much longer. There’s no food and I need
something to wear.”

“You
sound disappointed.”

“It’s
just that it seems so safe here. And private.”

John ran
his free hand along her flank, around the slight curve of her hip, and down her
thigh. “Yes, private is good. Perhaps we can wait a bit longer to venture out
into the world.”

***

Tamarind
and John remained in the observation tower on Mount Resaca until the sun chased
away the last of the rain later that morning and then they trudged down the
road toward Playa Flamenco. John wore only his shorts and shoes; Tamarind had
pulled on the remnants of his bloody t-shirt. She’d regained enough water since
leaving the refuge office that she no longer looked emaciated and frail, but
bruises purpled her arms and legs and angry scratches slashed her skin. A
single long scratch marred her right cheek.

All
around them lay scattered thorn acacia, ripped by the roots from the ground,
and broken limbs from palm and mangrove trees. The rain and wind had gouged
chunks from the land, leaving it pitted and vulnerable. Overhead, sooty terns
and laughing gulls dotted the clear sky and they heard birds calling as they
always did, as if the world below hadn’t been devastated.

They
found Valerie’s Jeep sitting alone in the lot near the beach, thorny scrub
caught under its chassis and in its rearview mirrors. A dead Puerto Rican
ground dove lay on the Jeep’s hood, its neck broken and its head lying
sideways. They cleared the Jeep of the brush and carcass and drove to Ana’s
cinderblock house to get Tamarind’s belongings. Fragments of the chicken coop
and seagull house had embedded in the branches of nearby tamarind trees and
littered the ground; patches of the blue tarps that had covered them had been
caught on limbs and wrapped in eddies around rocks and tree trunks.

The
plywood covering Ana’s small windows had been hurled from sight and the glass
shattered, but in the corner of her house the temporary chicken roost and its
occupants remained unharmed. The birds chuckled and squawked when John and
Tamarind entered. Tamarind tiptoed through the debris of Ana’s home and peered
into the plywood box. The chickens fluttered and complained; they had large
raw-looking bald patches on their rumps and piles of feather and dung cluttered
the floor. She hummed and clicked a little until the birds quieted and settled
into sleep, their beaks tucked under a wing.