An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant (32 page)

John
started to get out of the Jeep when a glint caught the corner of his eye. He
stretched forward and snagged the Goddess figure from the dash and pocketed it.
He slid his hand into his pocket and his fingers found the smooth gemstone. Its
warmth calmed him and his breathing eased. He walked to the office door, his
eyes squinting to catch any sign of movement. Plywood covered the windows and
he heard nothing.

He
rapped on the door with his left hand. When he got no response, he tried the
doorknob. It was locked. He backed up and rammed the door with his left
shoulder. The Goddess lying against his palm thrummed as if alive. A moment
later, the door burst open.

Overhead,
a fluorescent light hummed, its bright light dazzling him after the
near-twilight outside. In front of him stood an old metal desk, large and
sharp-cornered and dun-colored like the decade in which it was manufactured.
Forms and documents fluttered around the small room as the wind swirled in
behind him, searching for something or someone in the stuffy space. On the wall
behind the desk hung an institutional wall clock like the kind he’d seen throughout
childhood at school. Underneath it stood two old metal filing cabinets, gray
and impervious. The sharp scent of burned coffee mingled with the smell of
dusty carpets, stale perfume, and body odor.

John
took a few steps around the end of the desk and stopped. On the floor before
him lay Tamarind, a gag in her mouth and her arms awkwardly wrenched underneath
her. Her t-shirt had been sliced open down the middle and her breasts lay
exposed. Other than the ravaged t-shirt, she wore only a pair of pink underwear.
She stared at him, unseeing. The pupils of her eyes had widened so much that
the ultramarine of her irises had nearly disappeared. She looked odd. For a few
wrenching heartbeats, John couldn’t comprehend why. And then he understood: her
head had been shorn of its signature tresses. The manic copper curls lay
forlornly in severed clumps about her on the floor and scattered across her
chest. Long strands sprinkled her face and blurred her features.

“Tamarind!”

He
crossed the distance between them without being aware that he moved and sank
down on his knees at her side. She blinked several times and made no sound.
Gently, he rotated her head until he could pick at the knot in the gag, but he
couldn’t untie it. The bindings on her wrist had also been tied too tightly for
him to manage with his fingertips. While he struggled with the knots, Tamarind
lay still and silent. John sat back and grunted, running his fingers beneath
his hair and raking his nails into the scalp. As he did so, the Goddess in his
pocket burned his thigh through his pants and he yelped.

He
dislodged the wire figure from the confines of his pocket and held it by the
head away from him. Tamarind slowly turned her face towards it. Awareness
precipitated in her eyes after the trajectory of her gaze intersected the gem’s
soft beam and her pupils shrank back to normal. Her eyes slid up to John’s face
and held his.

An
electric shock surged through the figure and up John’s hand to his spine.
Something dark and steady swirled inside his chest and his eyesight sharpened.
He leaned forward, rolled her onto her side and his fingers deftly untied what
had seemed impossible only a moment before. Ignoring the tufts of hair clinging
to the rough material, he quickly untied the gag. He picked it out of her mouth
as carefully as he would have picked shards of glass from the sole of a child.
When the cloth came away in his hands, he saw that it had rubbed the corners of
her mouth raw. Tamarind worked her lips, but no sounds emerged. John laid a
finger across her lips and she calmed. He flung the rough gag away and then set
the Goddess into her palm, wrapping her fingers around it. He rested her hands
across her heart.

The
floor creaked behind him. Tamarind’s eyes slid sideways and widened.

John
swiveled his head toward the sound in time to see a blurred figure and metal
winking. In the space between breaths, he flinched.

John fell away from
the rush of flesh and shadow that descended upon
him. Rasping breaths filled his ears and the office walls contracted around
him, burying him underneath an avalanche of clothing, carpet, and a tangle of
limbs and hair. Bodies squirmed around him and John flailed his arms and legs
in response. As he jerked and heaved, memories surfaced and blotted out the
reality of the office. Memories of seawater drumming in his ears, of salt
burning his eyes, and of choking. White spots blossomed onto his darkened
vision and his chest clogged shut.

Breathe.
Just breathe
.

Humming
echoed inside his skull and his body responded of its own accord. His lungs
opened a little and his vision cleared. His world had gone topsy-turvy. Papers
flew around the office like dazed birds mistakenly trapped inside a glass
building. Tamarind squatted near him on the floor, her shorn head forlorn in
the fluorescent light and shadows obscuring her features. She held the Goddess
between her knees. Her feet were bare.

John
rolled a little to the left and saw Jesus propped on one hand and two knees; he
held the other hand to the right side of his face. When he heard John move,
Jesus lifted his head so that John saw the blood that streamed from his damaged
right eye. He lurched toward John and tumbled onto him, scrabbling at John’s
neck until he’d found a purchase with his blood-glazed fingers. John clawed at Jesus’
fingers, kicking his heels into the floor. Again, Tamarind’s voice floated
through his thoughts like a memory, or an epiphany.

Remember
the pearl divers?

John
closed his eyes. An image of a long dive filled his mind and he relaxed. He
clearly saw the oyster shell waiting for him. Then Tamarind appeared next to
him, her copper hair fluttering about her in the current and she smiled. She
slipped her hand into his and together they swam to the bottom. Together, they
reached down and lifted the oyster shell up. When John pried it open, a
luminous pearl sat cushioned on the oyster’s flesh. As he blinked, dazzled, Jesus’
fingers released his neck.

John,
surface now.

He
opened his eyes and saw Jesus kneeling in front of Tamarind, who once again lay
on her back. The Goddess gleamed in the dark recesses under the desk and the
wind had taken on a life of its own. Now it was a banshee, howling through the
office and sending papers whirling madly; now a poltergeist who ripped at the
corkboard on the wall. The blinds on the windows danced and rattled. Jesus,
impervious to the character of the wind, fumbled with his belt.

“
Ahora,
mi cariño, ahora
. You will have a fucking like you have never had,
mi
querida
.
Esto te prometo
.”

He
lowered himself onto her.

John
levered himself off the floor and launched himself onto Jesus’ back. Clawing at
Jesus’ shirt, he managed to grasp enough cloth with both hands to wrench the
other man off Tamarind. His breath grunted from deep in his chest, but his
chest remained open, expanded—light. Again, the electricity that he’d felt only
a few moments before while holding the wire Goddess charged through him; this
time it rushed through every nerve in his system until he felt illuminated from
within. He threw Jesus away from him.

Jesus fell
into the desk and yelled. Clutching his side, he stood up and turned to face
John, who had pulled Tamarind behind him. John darted a glance at her. She sat,
listing to one side, one hand propping her upright and the other hand limp
across her torn underwear. When he swung his head back, Jesus flashed his
knife, which had fallen under the chair during their earlier struggle. The
jagged gash along the inside corner of Jesus’ right eye distorted his features
and gave him a sinister, alien appearance. Dried blood and mucous—accidental
war paint applied with fate’s indifferent hand—bisected his cheek.

“Ssst.”
Air hissed through Jesus’ clenched teeth. He swiped the knife at John, who
barely arched his back in time to pull his stomach out of its path. “You think
you’re so
listo
,
gringo
. How smart are you now, eh?”

He
tossed the knife to the opposite hand and swung at John again. Again, John
avoided the blade. The third time, Jesus feinted to the right and John moved
left; the blade traced a path across his abdomen. John understood that Jesus
had sliced him, but he felt nothing. Instead, he watched as the wind caught
Jesus on the far point of his pendulous arc, overbalancing him. For a moment,
Jesus hung suspended in an invisible swing and then John stepped into him,
shoving him into the desk. Jesus grunted as his battered side crashed into the
sharp edge of the steel desk. John kicked at Jesus’ bent legs and the other man
collapsed, cracking his face on the desk as he fell. He lay in a crumpled heap
and made no sound.

John
ignored him and spun back to Tamarind, who had slid over onto her side on the
rough institutional gray carpet. The t-shirt had fallen open and he saw her
belly rise and fall in shallow breaths. Her skin had pallor to it that he’d
never seen before. It clung to her frame, revealing fine details in bone
structure and hollows under her ribcage and cheekbones. Tamarind had always
been slight, but now she appeared almost emaciated, as fragile as onionskin
stretched over a frame of hollow reeds.

He took
a step towards her and the wound across his stomach burned and stung so sharply
that he winced. She opened her eyes and looked at him. They were huge, too
huge, and a dull blue like arctic seawater.

“You’re
hurt.” Her voice no longer lilted. She sounded far away and traveling still.

“Not
much. The other geeks will be in awe when I show them the scar.”

He knelt
at her side, consigning the pain in his gut to the recesses of his mind where
it belonged.

“Tamarind,
I know you’re
del mar
. Did you–did you leave the sea for me?”

She took
several breaths before she answered. Her eyes watched his face. “Yes.” She
raised a hand to his cheek; it was hot and dry. “I fell in love with you the
day you came to Culebra and climbed that mangrove tree … near the canal.”

John
pulled her hand into his and then touched her lips with his other hand. They
were cracked and bled a little.

“You
need water, don’t you?”

She
nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“There’s
water in the Jeep.” He glanced over at Jesus, who hadn’t moved since he’d
slithered to the floor. “I’ll go get some and bring it back to you.”

He stood
up, feeling as if his gut had come unhinged and might swing open, spilling
everything inside. He braced himself for the onslaught of compressed air from
the doorway, but in that moment the wind abated. He hobbled toward the open
door, anticipating a fresh blast, but it didn’t come. He paused in the doorway.
Outside, the sky had darkened to a premature nighttime and the air smelled wet.
The oppressive heat from earlier in the afternoon had disappeared as the air
pressure dropped. John looked south toward the harbor and saw the palms bent
horizontal and the thorny thickets shaking as if in the grip of a fever; rain
blurred the edges of trees and buildings alike. He ducked his head and ran.

In the
trunk of the Jeep he found a case of water that he’d meant to unload for
Valerie. He hefted it, resting it on his hip as a mother rests her toddler, and
shuffled awkwardly back to the refuge office. Once inside, he stopped to catch
his breath and swing his gaze from Jesus’ body to Tamarind, lying with her eyes
closed. The slight rise and fall of her chest reassured him that she hadn’t
been completely desiccated yet.

He set
the water on the desktop and broke the plastic seal. Grabbing a bottle, he
twisted the cap off and then knelt by her side, gently lifting her until he
could prop her against his bent knee. Her head lolled forward and he slipped
his left hand behind to steady it. His fingers snagged on her truncated
tendrils, but he ignored his first touch of her head after so many weeks of
imagining it and instead focused on tipping the bottle between her parted lips.
Most of what he poured dribbled out of her and down her chin and neck, but he
persisted. When he saw the water on her skin disappear as if absorbed directly,
he poured more recklessly. Tamarind choked and coughed, her eyelids fluttering
open and then she raised a thin hand to his holding the bottle. Their gaze met
and held.

Tamarind
drank five one-liter bottles of water without stopping. By the last one, John
had surrendered the bottle to her and had opened three more with which to douse
her body. Her skin and soft tissues rehydrated enough that she no longer looked
as if she was on the verge of collapsing in on herself, but John suspected that
her condition remained precarious.

“You
need to get back into the ocean, don’t you?”

Tamarind
set the empty water bottle down and shifted so that she could lean more
comfortably against his bent leg.

“Yes.”

“You
look so human, it’s hard to believe. …” Here he touched her legs delicately,
just a brush of fingertips and nothing more.

 “I
am
human—almost anyway. I’ve been living between two worlds,
mer
and human,
all summer. Even though I have legs, I can’t stray too far from Mother Sea.”