Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (35 page)

“I'm not a bird,” Sophie said.

“I've told him that,” Roy said. “I'm trying to get him to come to his senses.”

* * *

THE SUNSET ON
the creek almost made it look pretty. Hot reds and orange and neon pink, it looked like a stream of fire winding through the weedy earth. Sophie was delighted to see Angel and Dr. Chen standing side by side, watching Sophie pick carefully through the ripped chain-link. She wished she could run to them, but the weight of Giddy and Roy on her shoulders plus her massive garland of flora and trash forced her to walk slowly, with purpose. With dignity, even.

“Hi you guys,” she said shyly. “I didn't know I would see you.”

“I wouldn't miss this, are you kidding?” Angel said. “Hey, bird-brains.” She held up her palm to Giddy and Roy, and they smacked their tiny claws upon it. “High five.”

“Dr. Chen,” Sophie said.

“The birds were so excited,” the doctor said. “They had been making this necklace for you at the dovecote, and sending messages to other flocks. It has been quite an exciting time at our place.” She paused. “And we all know about the tragedy, also. The birds from a flock in Lynn that your grandmother ate.”

Sophie's hand flew to her face in sadness, causing Giddy and Roy to lift off in alarm.

“Oh, Dr. Chen! They will have—a burial? A service?” Sophie did not know the pigeon custom for such things.

“The flock will have their mourning. And their revenge.” A wave of energy rippled through Dr. Chen, as if she were shaking something off her. Her perfect, shining bob tossed, glossy with the day's dying light. She put her hands on Sophie, gripping her by the arms and pulling her in for a tiny peck of a kiss on the top of her head. “What an adventure is before you. Try to enjoy yourself, okay? So many girls would
kill
to run away with a mermaid!”

“Well, you haven't seen this mermaid,” Sophie said uneasily.

As if on cue, the oil-slicked waters rippled, and Syrena's gnarly head broke the surface. She pulled herself to the bank, stretching her arms onto the trash-strewn earth.

“Really,” she spoke. “I look and look for some thing of worth in this creek, I find nothing. Terrible place. I not believe I trapped here so long. We go now, finally, yes?” She wiped at the water streaming down the sides of her face, leaving dark streaks of grime smeared across her skin, like war paint. “Hello, you people.”

“Hello!” Dr. Chen said crisply, her excitement making the word sparkle.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” Angel said, her greeting more of a dazed sigh. Her eyes upon the mermaid were wide. Sophie thought about Ella's declaration that all girls who looked like boys were lesbians. Angel was mesmerized by the creature.

“What they say here—What's matter, got staring problem?” Syrena shot Angel a dirty look, pulling the wild snarl of her hair around her shoulders. “No time for—big party, meet mermaid, oh, so magical, blah blah blah.” With her strong, gnarled fingers she tied her impossible hair on the top of her head in a big knot. Fish sprung from it into the creek below, diving for their lives. “I been here for days, all alone, no one bring me party, no one see if I need anything.” Syrena pouted. “Too late now. Time to go. Sophie, get in.”

Sophie looked at the skanky creek. This was her grand exit, the climax to her braid of pigeon treasure, her skyfull of birds, her mother's gesture of love? She was going to climb into the lousy creek, Dr. Chen and Angel watching. She looked at the adults. Dr. Chen nodded encouragingly. “It's okay, Sophia.”

Angel's eyes were still glued to the mermaid, in spite of her spiteful pronouncement. “If I had known you had needed for anything,” she said, “I would have brought it for you.”

“Get better magic, why don't you. I would have liked a fish to eat without, you know, the chemicals all inside. Maybe a crab, some oysters.” She sighed. “Is fine. I am being, what you call, a snob. The
chemicals, they are interesting in their way. Get me drunk, I think.” Syrena smiled. Sophie's heart took on a new beat at the sight. She hadn't seen the mermaid smile, ever, and it was a beautiful thing, like shoots of sunlight cutting through water, illuminating beams. The mermaid's smile changed everything.

Sophie ran to Angel and clutched her hard in a wordless good-bye. “Look inside,” Angel said, and Sophie drew herself into Angel, no wall to keep her out, and she felt the depth of Angel's love and concern, her hope and belief in her. She felt its purity and its strength. “Remember that, okay?

“Okay.” Sophie nodded. She walked to the edge of the creek. She would have liked it to be deep enough to just jump in. She was so scared, scared and thrilled: to just hurl herself into the waters would have felt right, but the creek was thin, shallow. She crouched to the dirt awkwardly and looked at Syrena. To see the mermaid in person, not beneath the waters, not in a dream. Her eyes were wide and circular as coins, and they flashed with a sort of silver human eyes didn't have. Her face was smooth and rough at once, she had many wrinkles in her face yet she was beautiful, somehow young. Something about her made it seem like you weren't fully seeing her, and so you kept staring, searching her face.

“What is the wait?” she asked Sophie.

“My sneakers,” Sophie said. “Do I keep my sneakers on?”

“For creek, yah. Later, no. Come on, I tell you all you need to know.”

“So, I can breathe under there?” Sophie checked.

“Come, come! Now not time to be ascared!” The mermaid's giant tail poked through the creekwater and slapped its surface. There was a gasp of awe from the crowd of birds and humans. Dirty water spattered Sophie's face. “Come now or I pull you in like Boginki.”

Sophie stepped down into the creek. The water was warm, but creepily so. Stagnant water being baked by the sun, cooking the trash into a nasty stew. Syrena offered Sophie her hand, the chips of pearly seashell rings glinting in the last, orange light of the sky. “Come with me.”

The mermaid dunked beneath the surface so that all Sophie saw of her was stray clumps of hair floating like seaweed. With her free hand Sophie waved goodbye, and disappeared beneath the creek.

* * *

SOPHIE WAS STILL
trying to orient herself when Kishka broke through the water. Syrena had led her slowly down the narrow creek, warning her to dodge the various debris she had become intimate with during her stay. A car door, dismembered, wedged on its side in the sludge. A shopping cart, the weave of its metal dark with rust. There were hunks of car battery and chunks of random concrete, there was a refrigerator to maneuver around. Sophie picked her way around it all carefully, mimicking the ginger movements of the mermaid, whose hand she clutched. Syrena's hand, Sophie noted, was not wrinkled with her eternity in the water, the way Sophie's fingertips pruned
when she stayed in the bathtub too long. The mermaid's hand was poreless and smooth, and the slick feel of it oddly familiar. What was it?
Dolphins!
Sophie's class had had a field trip to the aquarium in Boston, and Sophie had gotten to touch one of the smiling creatures. The feel of them was like a toy, just the way Syrena's hand felt inside her clutch, like it could slip away, some kind of rubber or plastic, something unalive yet alive, like the dolphins. Sophie's head swam with questions, and as if Syrena could feel them, a current in the water, she turned to her charge.

“We get to deeper water, we talk, yes? I tell you all. For now, you just stay close and walk careful. Soon you will learn to swim like mermaid. You learn to eat mermaid food, you understand water. Now, you are like human baby. You just follow me.” Syrena paused and plucked a small dark fish from creek bed. She popped it in her mouth.

“My last chance to eat these!” she spoke around the fish as she chewed, then pulled the bones out intact, and stuck it into her hair like a comb. “Jewelry now, a snack later!” The mermaid hiccupped, and her eyes flashed silver beneath the dark water. “I maybe a little funny from the fish.” Sophie couldn't be sure, but it seemed like Syrena was smiling. “Very bad for you, but I begin to like feeling.” She giggled a little, giggles that rose toward the surface in little air bubbles. “Very glad we go now! Back to the sea! Back to my home, my river! Oh Neptune, let us get out of here!” She turned to Sophie, and yes, Sophie was sure of it, the mermaid was smiling! “So many people waiting to meet you, Sophia. My sisters, the Ogresses, so many animals! Let us begin.”

Sophie felt calmed, momentarily by the mermaid's authority and sudden cheer.

And then her grandmother arrived.

Kishka's presence exploded the waters like a bomb. A wave rose above her. Like a bad magnet Kishka drew the waters toward her, and the waters, as if conscious, responded, came to do her bidding.

“Oh no.” Syrena looked back at Sophie, her authority cut with fear, her cheer dead gone. Still disoriented by the little toxic fish but no longer giddy. For a terrible moment Syrena looked her age—ancient, withered, exhausted. In that glance Sophie knew that the mermaid had witnessed many, many things, bad things, and that those things had left some part of her sunken and resigned.

The wave rose like a tornado taking to the sky, carrying within it heaps of mud, layers of sediment embedded with decades of poisons. Toxins dumped and long settled were now stirred into this giant wet cloud arcing above them. Sophie thought of her friends on the creek bank, watching this liquid monster grow. The birds, at least the birds could fly. What about Angel, and Dr. Chen? Kishka's arms were stretched above her, her hands breaking the surface of the creek, and her face was contorted with her awesome power as she summoned the wave. Sophie looked to the mermaid, who shook her head in a sort of stuck panic.

“This will be bad, this will be very bad. She is making
rogue
.” Her silver eyes flashed at Sophie, like the rhythmic flash of a lighthouse in the darkness. “Sophie, this is going to hurt.”

But the hurt came before the rogue wave crashed upon them. It came when Kishka's hands plunged beneath the surface of the creek, clutching in their bony grip a drowning flutter of pigeon. Its wings churned the water, the struggle creating a tiny whirlpool. Fighting to free itself, all the bird could do was wrap the water around itself like a horrible cloak of drowning. Beneath the dark waters, the orange flash of a bird eye, tiny and desperate.

Sophie lurched toward the animal, the water both catching and stalling her, like in a slow-motion nightmare when you try to run away but you're stuck in molasses. Sophie's arms sunk thickly in the grimy creek bed as she pushed herself to where the bird lay thrashing in Kishka's hands. Too shocked to put up her shield, Sophie felt her grandmother enter her heart, a sickening swirl, like the poison of the dirty creek had slid right into her veins. Sophie realized that this was Kishka's terrain, too; this creek was part of her rotten heart, all the parts of the earth that had been ruined or killed were part of the vast, dark heart of her grandmother.

The rogue was descending. Sophie could feel it as a pressure change inside the water. Her ears did strange things, clogging and snapping; she grew dizzy. She made one last lunge toward the bird but it was too late. The creature was limp in Kishka's hands, which had taken on glamours and become goat hooves, chunky and cloven. Stilled by drowning waters, Sophie could finally see the pigeon—the thin stick of bamboo, the artfully carved whistle. The shine of the wire that held it to Livia's tailfeathers. Livia. Her tiny head turned to the side, her
lovely eyes, that orange color, how nicely her eyes had matched the coral of her legs, Sophie realized, how beautiful Livia had been, how much like necklaces were the marking of her throat feathers. Livia was beautiful because Livia was
beautiful
, Sophie thought dumbly, realizing beauty to be a thing deeper than she had ever understood. In a sob she reached out to catch the bird as Kishka left the waters, grabbing for the precious body this thing called
Livia
had brought alive, this precious thing now empty of
Livia
but special for having held her.

And above Sophie's head, crashing through the creek's surface, were hundreds of pigeons, all working to save her, their claws piercing the water, their beaks and wings cutting through the waters and then retreating, because the pigeons were powerless before the creek. They dashed and retreated, dashed and retreated, stirring the water into a froth as above them the rogue wave curled against the sky like a fist and began its terrible topple. Catching Livia in her hands, Sophie flung herself out of the water as far as she could and lifted her arms high. She felt a flock of feathers scramble to meet her, she felt the scrape of claw and wing brush her skin as the birds received Livia. So many of them, Sophie could feel the wind they created, making the surface of the creek choppy with their tender efforts. They gathered their beloved friend, sweet Livia, and then Sophie's hands were empty of her. She couldn't cry, but it seemed that the creek itself was her tears, that she was swimming in her sorrow. When she brought her hands back beneath the waters she saw them scraped, scratched by bird feet, and stuck with a single feather from Livia's plume.

Syrena came toward Sophie, wrapping the length of her body around the girl, tightening her fish tail, bracing Sophie's back with its wide fin. She let down her hair and snared the girl within it, and with her hands she cupped Sophie's head, pulling it into her neck.
Like a dolphin
, Sophie thought once more, her face snug in the smooth hollow. Her hands clutching at Livia's wet feather like something magic, and perhaps it was. Sophie understood now that magic was everywhere, and there was no telling what held such power. Surely the feather grown from such a lovely creature as Livia held something in it still, even after her passing.