To Catch a Mermaid (11 page)

I
t has often been written that someone ran like the wind. This description would not work in Boom’s case if the wind being referred to was gentle and billowy. But if the wind being referred to were blustery and crazed, leaping over fire hydrants and whipping around corners, then the description would work very well. And so, to his home, Boom ran like the wind. Only once before had such a force of energy been seen making its way down Prosperity Street, and that was the morning when the horrible twister landed.

In record time, Boom reached his front walkway, where he skidded to a stop beside Halvor. They stood, side by side, and stared at the Broom house.

Bright red geraniums bloomed in the front yard — in March. They crowded the window boxes, lined the walkway, and edged the dirt circle. The dandelions, normally golden yellow, had taken on a rainbow of colors, from licorice black to grape-juice purple to cherry-pie red. The colors shocked the senses — as if a passing pilot had tossed out jars of poster paints and they had all landed in the Brooms’ yard.

But it was the house itself that made Boom wince. When he had left for Mr. Jorgenson’s, the exterior siding had been periwinkle blue. Now it was pink. And not just any pink. Not soft baby-bottom pink or delicious bubble-gum pink. The siding was hot pink. Nuclear-waste hot pink, like the lipstick that Mrs. Mump wore.

Halvor scratched his beard and looked about as puzzled as a turtle on a fence post. “Well, I’ll be. It looks just like Mertyle’s drawing, the one hanging above her bed. Your father must have done this last night while we slept, to make Mertyle happy.” He shook his head and put his hand on Boom’s shoulder. “I guess it’s a good sign if Mr. Broom is painting again, so we don’t want to hurt his feelings. If he asks, we’ll just tell him it’s lovely, for sure. Watch after Mertyle. I’ve got a few errands to run.” He pulled a wool cap over his bald head. “There’s some chowder on the back burner.” And he left, complaining under his breath that Erik the Red would never have lived in a pink house.

For a moment, Boom thought his father might have overcome his fear. He imagined him tiptoeing outside, across the dirt circle, to dab paint on each and every dandelion. No way. Something else was at work.

“Mertyle?” he called as he closed the front door. “You didn’t happen to make another wish, did you?”

Mertyle nearly flew down the stairs. “I still can’t find the baby. Start looking.” She picked up a corner of the hallway rug. “Hurry!”

Unbelievable. “How could you lose it?” Boom asked angrily. “You know where everything is. You even know where I put my slippers. How can you lose an entire merbaby?”

Mertyle ran into the tiny living room and pulled off the sofa cushions. “I fell asleep, Boom. I told you I wasn’t feeling well. You shouldn’t have left me.”

“You’re always not feeling well,” he said defensively. “Besides, I had to leave.” She couldn’t blame him for this. She had promised to take care of the baby. He opened the hallway closet and searched through the pile of shoes.

“I’m not faking this time,” she said, peering up the fireplace into the chimney. “My arms are itchy and I think I have a fever. And now I’ve lost the baby.” She sat down on a cushion and started to cry. Crying was the least helpful thing Mertyle could do at that moment. Had she chosen to jump up and down on one foot, or twirl like a deranged ballerina, she might have eventually bumped into the baby. But all crying did was to puff up her already sickly face.

“Keep looking,” Boom told her.
Keep looking for the only thing that might save this family.

Just as he was about to search the pantry, a scream came from upstairs — the kind of bloodcurdling scream that always came from Mrs. Mump when she found a rat in her garbage can. Taking two stairs at a time, Mertyle and Boom found their father standing outside the second-floor bathroom, shaking like someone who was very cold.

“In the toilet,” he cried, waving his hands in the air. “There’s an alligator in the toilet. Don’t go in there. Call the exterminator before it eats us!” His eyes bulged with fear. “Follow me to the attic, where we will all be safe.” Boom and Mertyle pushed past Mr. Broom and into the bathroom, to find the merbaby sitting in the toilet bowl.

“Dad,” Boom said, pulling his father away from the door. “There’s no need to be afraid.”

“The wind must have carried that creature from Florida. There’s no stopping the wind,” Mr. Broom fretted while wringing his hands. “There’s no wind in the attic and no alligators, either. We’ll be safe in the attic.”

“You go ahead, Dad,” Boom urged. “Someone has to let the exterminator into the house.”

“Good thinking,” Mr. Broom said. “Once the exterminator leaves, come and join me.” He scurried back upstairs to his sanctuary and slammed and bolted the door.

The merbaby cooed and giggled in the toilet bowl. Although it was a tight fit and only its tail was submerged, it looked to be having a grand time. “That’s disgusting,” Boom said.

“We should have thought of this,” Mertyle realized. “It needs water.”

“Well, we can’t keep it in the toilet,” Boom told her. “I suppose we could fill up the bathtub.” No one really used the bathtub now that Mrs. Broom wasn’t around to make Boom or Mertyle take baths. He turned on the faucet.

“Use cold water,” Mertyle instructed. “So it’s like the ocean.”

Boom got a canister of salt from the kitchen pantry and poured it into the water. He stirred the crystals with his hand until they dissolved. The baby blinked its violet eyes and leaned over the toilet rim to catch a better view. When the tub was full, Boom stepped back and pointed at the water. “For you,” he said.

The baby pushed itself out of the bowl and flopped across the floor. Then, with a smack of its tail, it shot up into the air and dove into the tub. It swam about, splashing water all over the floor. Then it lay on its back, its green face pointed toward the speckled bathroom ceiling, and opened its mouth. An odd sound emerged, then another and another, stringing together into an eerie melody.

“It’s singing,” Mertyle said.

It was the strangest song Boom had ever heard, even stranger than Winger’s singing, and Winger was completely tone-deaf. People often asked Winger to stop singing. Winger’s church choir leader made him stand in the very back row, even though he was the shortest member of the choir, and had him hold his sheet music directly over his face. But while Boom politely endured Winger’s singing, he wanted to yell at the baby to stop because the sound was so horrible. The song wrapped itself around Boom’s body and crawled into his ears. It swept over his hair and down the back of his neck. He felt as though it might pull him underwater. What was it about the song that made it unbearable?

“It sounds so sad,” Mertyle murmured.

That was it. The song felt like it contained pure, undiluted sadness. The room grew dark and the air turned even colder. Storm clouds gathered outside the window. Boom shivered again. He wanted to run away from the song, to hide under his bed. The song pressed down upon him. It curled its fingers around his heart and squeezed. “Stop,” he moaned, pressing his hands over his ears.

“Why does it have to be so cold in this house?” Mertyle whimpered, wrapping her arms around herself. “The cold makes me feel so sad. I wish it wasn’t cold anymore.”

Boom was about to flee from the singing when the song faded away. The baby dove beneath the water and the storm clouds cleared, revealing a bright midday sun. Its rays cast a warm glow upon the bathroom floor and reflected off the bathtub water. A palm tree sprouted from the toilet and a banana tree punched its way through the floor right next to Boom. He jumped aside as the tree continued to grow to the ceiling.

“It’s going to go right into the attic,” Boom cried.

“Ahhhhh!” Mr. Broom yelled from the attic as the banana tree punched its way through. “The wind knocked over a tree. It almost killed me.”

“Are you okay, Dad?”

“I’m fine, Boom, but that exterminator had better get here soon. I think there’s a monkey in this tree.”

Boom released a big breath of air as he looked around at what had once been a simple white bathroom. There could be no doubt — not an inkling, a smidgen, or even an infinitesimal amount of doubt that magic had come to the Broom house.

A parrot flew overhead and the bathtub water shimmered turquoise. A school of yellow-and-black-striped butterfly fish swam beneath the faucet, joined by a pair of orange clown fish. Sand dunes covered the floor, where crabs now scurried. A gull swooped down and pecked at the sock that stuck out through the hole in Boom’s sneaker. But the most amazing thing was that it was no longer cold — it was humid, like a tropical paradise. And that’s what Mertyle had said, that she didn’t want to be cold anymore. She lifted her face to the sun’s rays. “It’s so warm. It feels so nice. Won’t Mom just love this bathroom?”

Mom is gone,
Boom wanted to say. He buried his sneakers in the sand, watching as Mertyle dug for shells. She had retreated from everything. The girl who used to get good grades at school, who used to have friends, who used to ride her bike up and down the sidewalk, that girl would have understood that dead and gone was forever.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked, holding up a black-striped shell. It was beautiful. The whole room was beautiful, and all the result of a wish.

“Mertyle, don’t you realize what’s happening?” Boom asked.

She scratched her arm. “What do you mean?”

Mr. Broom poked his head through the banana-tree hole. “Call the National Guard,” he cried. “This unseasonably warm weather is sure to bring another twister!” Then he disappeared again.

“Look outside, Mertyle. There are corn husks in the field, boxes of cod fillets in the Mumps’ truck, and the bathroom isn’t cold anymore. You wished for all those things.”

“I did?” She started scratching her other arm.

“And you wished for a pink house with rainbow flowers that looks exactly like the house in your painting, didn’t you?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, I guess I did. I showed the baby my drawing. But I never thought . . .”

Boom Broom wanted some answers and he wanted them now. He ran into the bedroom and grabbed the leatherbound Viking book that was already open to the section on merfolk. He needed to figure out just how many wishes a person could get from a merbaby. Genies grant only three wishes, and everyone knows that one of those wishes cannot be, “I want more wishes.” In fairy tales there’s always a limit to wishes, and if that were true with merfolk as well, then Mertyle was wasting hers. A tropical bathroom, a pink house — wishes from a totally deranged mind. If she got only a few more, then Boom had to make sure she used them better.

The merfolk section had a drawing of a thing that looked similar to the creature that swam in their tub, only older. Boom searched the page until he found exactly what he wanted. He read:
Vikings believed that mermaids would grant wishes if they deemed the wisher worthy.
Deemed the wisher worthy? What made Mertyle worthier than Boom? He kept reading:
Only the mermaid has the ability to grant wishes. While mermen possess superior strength and endurance, they are incapable of conjuring magic.

“It’s a girl,” he announced, carrying the book into the bathroom. Mertyle was scratching her back against some coral. An eel dangled from the baby’s fangs.

“How do you know?”

“It says so, right here.”

But before he could show Mertyle the book, someone started yelling in the street. Boom opened the bathroom window and peered out. Mr. Mump and Hurley stood below, each holding an armful of bananas. The tip of the banana tree had burst through the Brooms’ roof and was leaning over the street.

“Hey, Broom!” Mr. Mump called. “This is a code violation! The neighborhood association never agreed that you could plant a banana tree. And we never agreed that you could paint your house pink. There’s gonna be a fine for this, Broom!” He said all that while gathering bananas as fast as he could and loading them into the back of his truck. Just like with the corn and the cod fillets, just like with the title of Fairweather Kick the Ball Against the Wall Champion, the Mumps continued to take other people’s things.

“Those don’t belong to you!” Boom cried out the window. Hurley looked up.

“What are you gonna do about it?” Hurley challenged.

“That’s the right attitude, Son,” Mr. Mump said, patting his boy on the back. “Protect what is yours.”

“You’ll see,” Boom yelled. He couldn’t stop himself. He knew it would sound stupid but he was so angry that the words came flying out of his mouth like jet-propelled venom. “We’re going to be rich, you stupid Mumps! We’re going to be so rich that it will make your eyes spin and you’ll wish you had been nicer to us!” Both Hurley and Mr. Mump started to laugh. “You’ll see.”

“What are you going to do?” Hurley asked, mocking fear. “Sell your house to a garbage collector?”

“I’ve had it with those Mumps,” Boom said, slamming the bathroom window. He leaned over the tub, as close to the merbaby as he could without getting bit or spit at. “I want my wish right now! I hate Hurley Mump. I want you to turn him into a . . .”

The baby was clearly listening. She dropped the eel, lifted out of the water on an erect tail, and folded her arms across her chest. Suddenly, Boom felt as though he faced a python that was about to strike him right between the eyes. He moved away from the tub and sat down in the sand. The merbaby lowered herself back into the water.

Boom had almost wasted a wish on Hurley.

“Hurley Mump’s a great big jerk,” Mertyle said, patting Boom on the shoulder. She gathered up the baby in a towel and took her back to their bedroom.

At that moment, a universal truth came to Boom — that great big jerks don’t deserve to be turned into anything else. They deserve to spend the rest of their lives as Great Big Jerks.

Boom squeezed sand between his fingers.
I’ll show those Mumps,
he vowed.

Chapter Seventeen:

The Strange Drawing