Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (18 page)

“Hey,” she said. The cat blinked at her, then dozed its eyes. Sophie tugged her sea glass from under her shirt. It was cool and heavy in her palm. She shook the cat awake. “Hey,” she said. She showed the cat her necklace. “It's okay. I know everything. You can speak to me.” The cat blinked, yawned and slid its pointy chin onto its long legs. It purred a light purr. Sophie shook it again with her hand, eliciting an annoyed mew. “Tell me what you know,” she ordered the cat. “It's okay. I'm not going to freak out, okay? Just say something.” She brought the sea glass closer to the cat, who sniffed it, gave it a lick, and pulled its head away.

“Sophie,” Angel was behind her. “What are you doing to Creamsicle?”

Sophie jumped, tucking her talisman quickly beneath her shirt. “I just, I was just letting it know that it could—talk to me,” she said. It sounded dumb, but then, a flock of pigeons had escorted her home last night. She couldn't be blamed for not understanding the rules of this magic new reality. She tucked the sea glass back under her shirt.

“Creamsicle doesn't speak to people.” Angel smiled.

“So, the cats don't know anything? Only the pigeons know things?” Sophie felt annoyed. “Or do, like, rats know things? Can I expect dogs to start talking to me, or bees or raccoons? Can I expect to start reading a seagull's mind anytime soon? Will I be getting a visit from, like a UFO full of space aliens?”

“Creamsicle probably knows everything,” Angel said. “But he's not talking.” She walked over and dumped a bucket of glass shards into the tumbler. “Hold on,” she said. She dumped a bag of grit into the machine and switched it on. The noise was a lion's roar and they were inside the beast's mouth. The ground beneath them was alive with the tumbler's power. Angel came close to Sophie. “We can talk about it here,” she said, “But only when the tumbler's on, okay? It scrambles your grandmother's powers or something; she can't hear when it's going. Not just ear-hearing, but her other hearing. She can hear your feelings, your thoughts. And you don't need to be right in front of her for her to do it.”

Sophie was alarmed at this. “She can read my feelings?”

“Yep,” Angel nodded. “Where do you think you got it from?”

“You know I do it? Do you know everything? Will you explain it all to me?”

“I don't know everything,” Angel said sadly. “I only know my piece. I know that Kishka can spy on your insides.”

Sophie ran through a catalog of feelings as if through a violated diary, trying to gauge what her grandmother might know. “I have… bad feelings about my grandmother,” Sophie confessed. “Like, I've always been scared of her. Or, kind of repulsed by her.”

“She knows.” Angel nodded.

Sophie felt terrible. “Should I apologize?” She tried to conjure sweet feelings for her grandmother, but found it impossible.

“No, no,” Angel waved her hand. “It's all as it should be, you can't
help it. Even if you didn't know your grandmother is bad, you'd at least know she's sort of crazy. Don't worry about your feelings. You can't ever change them, anyway. You can't control them. That's a good first thing to understand—you can't control how you feel. It's pure honesty, feelings. But you can block them. That's what I can teach you.”

Sophie remembered her attempt to peek into Angel's emotions, how it felt like diving into an empty swimming pool. “You've blocked yours, right?”

“I couldn't be here otherwise,” Angel said. “You felt it, right? You ran into it yesterday. You were snooping.”

Sophie felt ashamed but Angel didn't seem to mind. “I was glad you did that, actually,” she said. “I wasn't sure how far along you were in your powers, or in your understanding of them. I was glad to feel you playing around with it.”

“What
is
it?” Sophie asked. “At first I thought there was something wrong with me. I do this—thing, with my friend.”

“The pass-out game.” Angel nodded. “Don't, anymore. The mermaid will find you without that.”

“Did it hurt me?” Sophie asked. “Last night I was out for so long…” She thought of Ella and her heart hurt.

Angel pulled a knit cap from the back of her pants and pulled it over her head of sweaty tangles. “There is so much for you to know,” Angel said. “Have the pigeons bring you to me tonight. It's not safe here.” Angel brought the tumbler to rest with a switch, and the echo of it rung in Sophie's ears for the rest of the afternoon.

* * *

THE DAY WENT
quickly, Sophie and Angel smashing glass silently, side by side, the sounds muffled from their foamy headphones. Sometimes Sophie would try to look into Angel, slowly, carefully, sneaking up on that hard, protective wall as if it were a living thing she could outsmart. Her sly pace prevented her from smashing against it, but Angel was impenetrable. And Angel could feel Sophie, too—every time the girl tried to pry inside, Angel would lift her head and look out from goggles, shaking her head with a smirk. “Nice try,” she mouthed above the smashing.

“I'm sorry!” Sophie hollered, though she wasn't. She felt something, a breeze inside her.

“No you're not!” Angel yelled, shattering an empty jug of wine.

“Was that just you?” Sophie exclaimed. She dropped her shovel, her hands crossing her body as if she could somehow hide her insides. “Did you just peek at me?”

“Yes,” Angel said. “That's what it feels like.”

“Don't do it again!” Sophie ordered. It felt like her brain had been cracked open, pools of thought and opinion, fantasy and memory exposed to the elements. Like she'd been singing in the shower and someone had turned the water off and pulled open the curtain.

“I won't,” Angel promised. “Not without telling you first. But, keep trying to peek at me. It's okay.”

And so Sophie did, becoming familiar with the perimeters of
Angel's wall. In her mind it was a steely dark gray, tall and sleek, impossible to climb, impossible to penetrate. Sophie didn't know the wall was made from it, but she imagined it was iron. She leaned in to smell its slight metallic smell. Angel laughed.

“Okay, Sherlock,” she said. “Give it a rest for a while.”

* * *

SOPHIE SPENT THE
entire day at the dump without running into her grandmother. It felt strange, especially with all she'd learned. She wanted to have a normal interaction with the woman, to see if she
could
act normal, what with all she knew and didn't know.

“Don't worry,” Angel said. “You'll have plenty of time to see your grandmother.”

“Is she really bad?” Sophie asked.

“Um, yeah,” Angel said with a little laugh. “I mean,
she
doesn't think so. It's like she's just a businesswoman or something. She's just looking out for number one. But, trust me. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, she's really bad. Especially for your work in the world.”

My work in this world
, Sophie thought.
I've got work in this world. Work to do. Work that is all mine
. She felt excited and anxious, filled with a pride of purpose quickly deflated by the understanding that she didn't know quite what that purpose was. Or if she'd even want it.

Passing by the Airstream, Sophie thought,
There is the lair of my wicked grandmother
. Wicked people lived in lairs, didn't they? Could
an Airstream trailer be a lair? If her grandmother was so bad, wouldn't she have a castle? A dungeon, a cave? Sophie sidled up to the trailer. She placed her hand on it, and the hot metal seared her palm. The Airstream looked like a bullet or a spaceship, and Sophie had always liked it. They were meant to be hitched to cars and dragged around the country. This one was beached, beached in a garbage dump in Chelsea. Sophie imagined it would have preferred a different life, one spent winding down roads blasted into the sides of mountains, rust-colored canyons rising and falling as far as the eye could see.

Sophie knocked on the door. “Nana!” she yelled. Angel had turned off the tumbler, she realized. The dump rang with quiet, and Sophie felt vulnerable, like a rabbit caught in the sight of a hawk. “Nana?” There was nothing. She nudged open the door. The place was hot. The air conditioner was off, the lights were off, the interior held a swampy humidity and a wonderful smell—like bubble gum, but sweeter and fainter. It took Sophie's eyes a moment to adjust. “Nana?” she said, softer. The pile of sheets and pillows on the couch was only that, sheets and pillows, not the slumbering body of her grandmother. At the kitchen table covered with papers, no grandmother. The door to the narrow bathroom was open, no grandmother in there, either. Sophie walked deeper into the trailer. There wasn't much space; the place was small but so stuffed with junk it seemed bigger for the mysteries it stored. There was a crate of antique bottles, words bulging from the glass. Another crate held glass balls, some of them caught in stiff, ropy nets. There were dishes of rusty object—nails, locks,
skeleton keys. On a countertop beside a pan of old buttons sat a hot pink stargazer lily, the source of the trailer's wonderful smell. The flowers splayed open like starfish, their petals stained rosy as tongues. Their pollen-crusted stamens dangled. The back of the trailer was so stuffed with pots bearing trees and climbing plants, succulents and ferns, it appeared to be a jungle. Sophie couldn't spot where the trailer ended for the lush wall of foliage. How could someone so bad take care of such beautiful, natural things?

She stepped gingerly toward the greenery, dodging the chipped teacups and torn scarves littering the scratched floor. The Airstream was small but it felt so large inside, it seemed to stretch before Sophie as she moved through it, a sensation that left her a bit dizzy. She realized she hadn't eaten enough today, or drunk enough water, and it was so hot and the work she'd done was tough. The shady coolness of Kishka's trailer should have been a relief, but as Sophie moved toward the plants her breathing became difficult. She reached out and brushed a vine with her fingertips, peering into the plants. Something caught on the back of her throat and she choked. She needed water. She thought briefly of the sink behind her, right behind her in the trailer, but now it seemed sort of far away. This wall of plants, shimmering, creating their own environment, their own mixture of smells, was way more interesting than a
glass of water. Phew
. Sophie took a deep breath, and moved closer.

Were there more plants behind those plants? And more behind them? Sophie felt disoriented. Was there a mirrored back wall, presenting an infinite illusion? Sophie reached her hand to touch it, but her hand kept going. Through more plants and more plants and
more. She made her breaths shallow, just little breaths, like teeny sips of air. Didn't plants and trees help make
more
air? Wasn't that what was so great about them? If Sophie looked close she could almost see the leaves making the air in front of her, the thinnest fog drifting out from the green. But was that air? Sophie tried for a regular breath and choked. She poked a bit deeper into the forest, a claustrophobic panic rising within her.
Where was the wall?

As far back as she could see, Sophie caught a rustle in the leaves. A tremble, a rough shaking, a creature scampering.

“Hello?” A tiny voice quavered, and Sophie jumped, then screamed. She watched the leaves in the distance quiver as the creature dashed away, deeper into the grove, deeper and deeper, the trees trembling and twigs crackling in the quiet, deeper and deeper the thing scurried until it was gone. Somehow.

Sophie's last breath felt like someone had taken a can of hair spray and blasted it down her throat. She pushed herself back out from the plants, shocked to see how deep she had crept into them. Pushing through rows of vines, their leaves prehistorically large, slapping her in the face, blocking her view, she ran. Her Vans slid on the undergrowth, tripped on low vines. She wanted to scream but could not take a breath to. Was the forest growing before her?
Not a forest!
She yelled at herself inside her freaking-out mind.
No forest inside a little trailer!
Finally, Sophie could spy her grandmother's disheveled couch. With a cry she hurled herself out from the plants and onto a pile of sheets, gasping and wheezing at the cool, clean air around
her. Sophie was surprised to taste the drip of salt that hit her lips, and lapped at it hungrily. She hadn't even known she was crying.