The Cormorant (25 page)

Her arms are lobster red.

She feels her neck–

“Ow, shit.”

Sunburned. She has a sunburn.

She mocks everyone: “Oh, Miriam, you should really wear sun block.” Then she mocks herself in turn: “Nah, I’m a certified bad-ass indestructible bitch. The sun tries to burn me, I’ll kick him in his fiery balls. I don’t need no stinking suntan lotion.” She sighs. “I’m so stupid. Stupid for this. Stupid for being here. Stupid for ever leaving my mother.”

She buries her hands in her face. Even that hurts.

“The sun is brutal,” says a voice behind her.

Miriam wheels, reaching for her knife–

A woman stands holding an electric lantern. She’s tall and wispy,
hovering
there in a white sundress cinched at the waist with a yellow scarf. Smooth skin and long hair the hue of wet sand. Dark freckles on her cheeks. Pale eyes like someone drained them of their color.

“Hi, Miriam,” the woman says.

“You Sugar?” Miriam asks.

“I am.”

“How’d you know I’d be here? Gina tell you?”

“Is that who sent you here?” She
mmm
s. “No. She didn’t tell me.”

“You’re saying you just
knew
.”

Sugar winks. “I am and I did.”

“Because you’re psychic.”

“I am.”

“So you know what it is I want?”

Sugar walks – drifts, almost, like she walks so lightly her bare feet never touch the ground – and orbits Miriam. “I don’t know exactly what you want, but you want the same thing everyone else does. You want to find something, or someone, or somewhere. We’re all looking for these things.”

“And you can help me find them.”

“It’s what I do.”

“You’re the real deal. Not just some hokey string-puller.”

“I found you, didn’t I?”

“She could’ve called you. Gina, I mean. Just because you’re saying she didn’t doesn’t mean–”

“You’re psychic, too,” Sugar says. “Aren’t you?”

“How’d you know that?”

“It bleeds off you.”

“Sorry, must be my time of the month.”

“You defend yourself against engaging with people in a real way by being witty. And cruel. It affords you distance.”

Miriam snorts. “Your psychic abilities tell you that?”

“No.” Sugar smiles; it’s like warm honey spreading on toast. “That one I can figure out on my own.”

Miriam and Sugar pace each other. Incomplete circle against incomplete circle. The woman stares at her. Smiling. Almost smug. Like she thinks she understands Miriam in a way that Miriam doesn’t or won’t ever. Miriam feels suddenly on guard. Cagey.
Caged
.

“Tell me what I want to know, then,” Miriam says.

“You’re looking for someone, is that right?”

“Don’t you need to touch me to find out?”

“I only need to look in your eyes.”

“And what do you see in there?”

Miriam realizes suddenly that Sugar doesn’t blink. Her eyes are open, wide open – each a whirlpool of gray water drawing her in. “I see in you a lot of things. I see rage. I see death. I see a sky full of carrion birds, I see a bandolier of skulls, I see a well of darkness – and in that darkness I see a tiny, almost insignificant, light. Like a firefly at the end of a stick. And I see who you’re looking for and where he is–”

“Tell me.”

“Not yet.”

“Fuck you. Yes
yet
. I want to know.”

“And if you’re not nice to me, I’ll never tell.”

Miriam thinks,
I’ll beat your wifty gossamer ass until you bleat like a llama.
Instead she says, “I can be nice when I have to be.”

“I want to tell you a story.”

“I don’t want to hear any bedtime tales. I’m not tired.” Miriam fishes around for a cigarette. She finds one, thrusts it in her mouth. “I have work to do.”

“Is that what the trespassing specter in your head tells you?”

The cigarette hangs from a dry patch on Miriam’s lip. It dangles there like a mountain climber hanging on for dear life. “The Trespasser.”

“That’s what you call it?”

“Yeah. You have one?”

“I do.”

“What do you call yours?”

“The Ghost.”

A chill runs up Miriam’s neck: a cat with icy feet. “So it’s real. It’s a ghost. We’re haunted.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. In this I have no answer, Miriam Black. Maybe it’s a part of my psyche that breaks off and screams in my ear. Maybe it’s the ghost of what I’ve lost. Maybe it’s a delusion – a derangement. I’ve grown comfortable in not knowing.”

“You’re a better person than I am.”

“Probably,” Sugar says, but the way she says it doesn’t sound smug or mean, just cruelly honest. Miriam can’t fault her for that.

“You can start your story now.”

Sugar smiles and tells the tale.

INTERLUDE

SUGAR’S STORY

My father was Cuban. My mother, American.

I never met my mother. My birth meant her death.

I have since met my father but he gave me away when I was born. He didn’t speak English, didn’t understand it either, and so he took me to the hospital in Marathon and left me there.

My father named me. Even though he could not speak English, he wrapped me in a ratty blanket and pinned to it a note in shaky scrawl:

Dulce como el azúcar.

Sweet as sugar.

I lived in a foster home with seven other children.

I was never adopted out.

My foster “parents” were not particularly nice. They were not cruel in the way that some parents are: fast with a striking hand, quick with an awful word. Their cruelty was in how they paid no attention to me at all. Not me, nor my so-called brothers and sisters. We were not a family. We were just a collection of people living under a single roof.

They got paid for it.

I was paid nothing but, I suppose, the chance to live.

I did not play with the other children. I instead invented a child to play with: a little girl my age who, in the logic given over to the very young, was also my baby girl. My imaginary friend was also my daughter who was also my age – it made no sense, but who said children had to make sense?

Some little girls always think about their wedding day.

I always dreamed of the day when I’d have my own daughter.

A daughter I’d love. A daughter I’d never give away.

At first I thought I’d name her Beloved. But then I read that book.

Later in life I thought I might name her Precious.

But then I read that book, too.

So I decided that I would have a daughter and name her Cherish.

And that’s exactly what happened to me ten years ago. I met a man. We did not love each other but we liked each other. He was Cuban-born but American. He was not a drunk or a drug user or an abuser.

He was a cheat.

I knew this about Javi, and I married him anyway. Because I was pregnant with my little girl and she was his.

We rented a small apartment in Key Largo. I worked as a waitress at a dive bar that lied about having the best conch fritters in the Keys. They were not the best. They were not even fresh.

Javi worked as a boat mechanic at a marina across the street.

We had our daughter. I loved her very much. I think he tolerated her. But he was nice enough. There for birthdays and Christmas.

I didn’t care. I figured he could go and do what he wanted as long as he was her father when he needed to be.

One day I was on shift. He agreed – reluctantly – to babysit.

He got bored with her. He would say, a man can only sit and play Tea Party Pirates – Cherish’s favorite pastime – with his little girl so often.

So he took her to the marina. He had a boat he was working on.

Or so he said.

He did take her to the marina.

But he went there to play with his other little girl – a nineteen year-old tourist. A rich white girl. He told Cherish to go play, which she did. While she was off throwing bread-crusts to seagulls, he fucked his girlfriend on a boat he was fixing.

I got off shift early because we ran out of conch that day. People thought it was because we were all fished out, but the conch at the restaurants here are really from the Caribbean, and the shipment didn’t come in. We were out. So I went home.

Or, rather, I went to the marina to pick up my little girl.

I went. I looked for them.

I finally found Javi. With that girl bent over a drink cooler.

I asked him where Cherish was.

And he said, outside, just outside, throwing bread to the birds.

And I said, “No, she’s not.”

He laughed at me like I was stupid, and we went outside so he could show me how dumb I was for missing what was right under my nose. But she wasn’t there. And he said, oh, she’s over here, then, on this other dock – and we went among the boats and all the sails and she wasn’t there, either.

She wasn’t anywhere.

It was like she just disappeared.

Into the water, maybe. Or onto a boat. Or into a car. Or, or, or.

Cherish was gone.

I’d lost her. Because I did not cherish her enough. And because my husband did not cherish her at all.

The police didn’t know what to do. They found no body. They found no signs of a struggle. And I was half Cuban, my husband Cuban, and they didn’t seem to care very much.

I lay awake every night, thinking about where she could be.

Caught in the darkest waters. Fish sliding in and out of her dead mouth. Or maybe taken by an evil man and used for whatever purpose such a monster would want a darling little girl for. Maybe she was alive. Maybe she was dead. And I confess my guilt over the fact that the most horrific scenario I could imagine was the one where she’d been found and taken in by a new family. A new family that loved her more than I did.

That guilt became too much.

So one night I took myself to the docks. The same docks where Javi worked. I was drunk and I dove in. I let the dark water take me. I opened my mouth. I breathed in, and it was like inhaling ice and shadow and I remember panicking and thrashing but it was over so quickly, almost painlessly, really…

That night, I died.

I didn’t see any tunnel of light.

I didn’t see Hell and all its devils.

I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t there anymore.

And then, suddenly, I was again.

I woke up screaming. In the same hospital where my little girl was born. In the same hospital where my father had given me up and named me Sugar. The same hospital where I was born and reborn.

Javi found my body floating.

He did some inexpert form of CPR. It worked, though I don’t remember it; he said I gasped and threw up a rush of water but did not regain consciousness. He feared I was brain-dead, so he took me to the hospital where I awoke.

He divorced me the next day. I didn’t protest. I signed the papers.

I came back different.

Something had come back with me. My ghost. My little ghost – the little girl who follows me around when nobody else is with me. Cherish. My beautiful angel. My smiling demon. Sometimes she speaks like my little girl. Sometimes she says things no little girl would say. Horrible things.

And I came back with power.

The power to find things for people.

An irony, of course. Because while I can help others find what they want, I’ll never find what I want. I’ll never find my real daughter.

But I can help others.

That’s what I’m going to do for you today, Miriam Black. I’m going to help you find two things, because I always help people find two things. I help them find the thing they’re looking for.

And I help them find the thing they don’t know they need.