Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (21 page)

“Death from above!” another pigeon shouted, spinning toward the ground, then arcing up sharply, tumbling in a loop-de-loop.

“Wow.” Sophie was impressed.

“Well, if, um, trouble goes down I will be your man on the ground,” Angel offered. “Safety in numbers.”

“Totally,” Giddy cooed, nestling into Angel's shoulder. Roy settled onto Sophie's, and they headed toward the square, turning down Heard Street, just short of the city's center and all its late-night activity. Anyone out at this hour was up to no good, and anyone up to no
good would head to Bellingham Square to find it. It did the trick of keeping the rest of town relatively safe and quiet until the sun came up, releasing hoodlum boys and girls into the streets.

They walked down Heard Street, passing the house with the glut of lawn ornaments spilling across the lawn, then the vacant lot with overgrown weeds springing from the busted concrete, finally stopping at Sophie's house, the dark green house with mismatched, chipped lion statues resting on either side of the stairs. It faced the dark rails of train tracks a block away.

“This is where you live.” Angel looked around. She noticed the tracks. “Wrong side of the tracks,” she teased.

“There isn't any right side of the tracks in Chelsea,” Sophie teased back, but serious questions nagged her. “Angel, how did you know that I was coming?”

“My mother told me,” she said. “She'd thought maybe you would come in her generation, and she prepared, and when you didn't she taught me everything she could. I got hired at the dump as soon as I got old enough, and I've been waiting there for you.”

“For how long? How did you know I would come there?”

“I've been working for your grandmother for five years, since I was fifteen.” Angel shook her head. “And I'm not crazy. That's how I know I got strong magic.”

“But how did you know I would come?”

“We knew you were Kishka's granddaughter.”

“How, how did you know that?”

“Awww, Sophie.” Angel shifted uncomfortably. “I told you, I don't know everything, I just know my part.”

Sophie rushed at Angel and got in before she knew it, before she could yank her iron wall up around her. It felt so different inside Angel than it had earlier; Sophie marveled at how quickly a person's feelings could change. The love was still there, Sophie knew it was true, and that Angel had goodness in her heart, but now there was fear and discomfort, a claustrophobic feeling inside her, like the walls of her own self were closing in on her. It was an icky feeling, and Sophie could feel that Angel didn't like it, either. It was the feeling of a lie.

“Stop it!” Angel yelled. Sophie could feel her pushing her out, the dense vibrations of the wall coming, but Sophie stayed. She went deeper.
That's how you stay
, she thought.
When they try to push you out, you go deeper
. Sophie burrowed into Angel like a tick. “Ugh!” Angel twisted like there was an insect crawling up her back, just beyond her reach. It was true that many normal people had their psyches invaded all the time and didn't even know it. But Angel was sensitive, attuned. Her walls were the strongest. She had never felt someone break inside and stay there. Her mother was probably powerful enough to do it, but she was too respectful. It felt terrible, like an ant had crawled into your brain, to feel this small, invading motion in your most tender parts. “Please!” she begged Sophie.

Sophie had been on the edge of learning something more about the lie Angel had told her. There were waves of information, shimmers, she only had to catch them, braid them together into the truth.
There was
mother
, her mother, and
salt
. A baby. A terrible sadness, a sacrifice. She pushed for more, but Angel's anguish at Sophie's invasion grew, until all Sophie felt was her feeling of violation, her despair at not being stronger, able to protect herself. Angel had never felt so unprotected. It was a frightening feeling. Though she'd known that Sophie possessed incredible magic, it was hard to match that knowledge with the easily frustrated, sometimes bratty girl she'd been tutoring. Sophie's strength, her fierce perseverance, stunned her.

When the understanding that she was hurting Angel became more painful than the feeling of being lied to, Sophie leapt back into herself, feeling the iron wall spring up behind her as she left.
She was trying to pull her wall up that whole time
, Sophie realized.
She couldn't do it. I'm stronger than her wall.
And Sophie knew she had learned her final lesson, how to stay where she wasn't wanted. That she had in fact known how all along, and even without Angel she would have figured it out, the way she had understood to pull back from Ronald and not enter his boozy, decrepit interior. The way she'd known she could send herself into Angel that day she first saw her at the dump. Was that yesterday? That was only yesterday.

Angel sat on Sophie's front steps. She looked broken from the experience, her head hung, her bangs clumped to the sides of her face—wet, Sophie noted. Angel was crying.

“I'm sorry,” Sophie rushed to say. Whatever had happened, whatever lie Angel had told, there certainly was a reason for it. Angel was good, had been only good to her, and Sophie had hurt her. “I'm so, so
sorry Angel. I didn't—” Sophie started to say she hadn't meant to do it, but she had. And maybe she hadn't meant to hurt Angel, but once she did, she'd stuck around a while. Why? Because she could. Because she was pissed at Angel's lie and wanted to know the secret of it.

“I don't,” Sophie corrected herself. “I don't like what happened. That I did that.”
Don't cry don't cry don't cry
. There was something gross, Sophie thought, about crying while offering an apology. The tears gathered at the corners of Sophie's eyes and dried there. Angel rubbed her wrist across her face and looked up at her student.

“I can't be mad at you,” Angel said. “You are more powerful than me. I've known that all along, it was just really intense to feel it.” She stood up. “I guess our work is done,” she said. “That was my last lesson for you, but you know it. How to stay when someone is trying to make you leave. You just go deeper. There is no end to how deep you can go. You can go so deep in a person, even a person fighting you, that they stop feeling you're there, they think you're gone.” Angel shook her head, still stunned from Sophie's invasion. “I knew you were the one and everything, but damn,” she said. “You just kicked my ass. You're really, really powerful Sophie. I thought it would take a lot longer to teach you what I know but, you got it. That's it.”

“Our work can't be done!” Sophie cried. “I—I—there's a lot I don't understand, Angel. What if I go too deep and I can't get out? Can I get trapped in a person?”

Angel shook her head. “No. They might begin to feel you again when you come out, there could be a struggle, but you can hold your
own in a struggle. Jeez.” Angel tried to smile, to lighten the moment, but truthfully she didn't feel light. She felt battered and exhausted, and sad. She had been training for this moment her whole life; she didn't expect it to be over so soon. The girl knew everything she could teach her.

“Well, what about Teresita?” Sophie said, desperate. “You barely told me anything about her, she seems really important.”

“She is important.” Angel nodded. “Honestly, Sophie, I have thought that you might be her. You might be her, and Joan of Arc, and all those saints, those girls who had crazy magic and didn't know what they were doing, who didn't have helpers like you have, and the people of their time just punished them for it. I've even thought you could be, like, the big revolutionary heroes who spoke about love, you know? Like Jesus Christ or Gandhi. Maybe it's the same spirit coming back again and again to try to help. Maybe this lifetime, it's you.”

Sophie thought of the images she'd seen of the men Angel talked about. Fragile-looking Gandhi, too skinny, but he seemed cheerful, a happy man in his little glasses. Jesus Christ on the cross. She'd looked at him every day for eight long years of Catholic school. And Angel was suggesting she
was
him.
In your face, Sister Margaret
, she thought with a spiteful pride. Angel caught it.

“I shouldn't be saying any of this to you,” Angel said. “This is not the story. This is not the prophecy, not at all. These are just my thoughts. Maybe it only means that you are part of a powerful lineage, Sophie. It is good for me to remember. Because when I see you,
I see a young girl with snarls in her hair, and I need to remember your lineage.”

“What's
lineage
?”

“Like ancestors. But, it's like you're part of a bigger family than the one you have here on earth. Anyway, it's good for me to think like this.”

“I'm sorry I didn't get out of you when you wanted me to,” Sophie said.

“It's okay. Please don't do it again. I hope to never give you a reason to.”

“But Angel—” Sophie started, stopped. “Why did you lie? What won't you tell me?”

“Someone else should tell you these things. It is not my work to explain everything to you.”

“Hennie,” piped Livia, who, like all the pigeons, had been watching them quietly. “Hennie will tell you more; go to her when you can.”

“Okay,” Sophie said. She wanted to look at Angel but felt she might cry. “We'll still hang out at the dump, right? Smashing glass and stuff?”

“Sophie,” Angel was shaking her head. She busied herself pulling her hair from its ponytail, then roping it back into a ponytail. She fussed with her bangs. “Sophie, I have been waiting to quit the dump for years. I was only there to wait for you. I can't keep working with your grandmother, in that smell, watching how she treats Ronald— she's killing him, giving him all that alcohol, she might as well give him rat poison. Having to keep my wall up all day in case she comes
snooping, having her think I'm a guy all the time—I can't do it. It's really stressful.”

“Well, what will you do?” Sophie cried. She couldn't picture Angel anywhere but the dump, smashing old jars in her goggles, harvesting gleaming beads of perfect glass from the tumbler.

“I want to help kids,” she said. “I want to be a juvenile drug counselor. It bums me out, seeing so many kids in Chelsea messed up like that. There's a program at that college that just opened a campus right here in town, in the old post office. I bet I could get financial aid, I think I could do it.”

Sophie thought about Angel counseling drug addict kids, her ability to go inside them, her ability to keep them outside of her. It seemed perfect. “You're a really good teacher,” Sophie said shyly. “It would be kind of like teaching, wouldn't it be?”

“Maybe.” Angel nodded. “So… I won't be at the dump tomorrow. I'm sorry to leave you there. The pigeons will be with you, but you have to steer clear of your grandmother as much as possible. Okay?”

“Okay.” Sophie hurled herself impulsively at Angel, gripping her in a clutching hug. “Can I please come visit you sometimes? What if I need you?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Angel said. “Of course, if you ever need me, come find me. You know where I live. My mother will always be home, she would always be happy to see you, okay?”

“Can I just come and, like, hang out sometimes?”

Angel laughed. “Yeah, sure. In all your free time. When you're
not, like, saving the world, come by and I'll tell you the whole story of Teresita.”

“Okay, great,” Sophie felt relieved. Angel handed her a paper bag she'd brought along.

“One white candle, dressed by my mother. Light it and pray to Teresita. Make an altar. It will help you stay focused and strong, and it will call help to you.” Angel kissed Sophie on her forehead. “I will be praying for you all the time, always know that Sophie.”

Sophie clutched the paper bag to her chest and watched Angel walk away. A sweet fragrance, like lilacs and peonies, floated up fro the sack. One of the pigeons, a bird named Bix, settled onto her shoulder and lifted his feather to soak up her tears. “ ‘Parting is all we know of heaven,' ” he intoned, “ ‘And all we need to know of hell.' That's Emily Dickinson. She was a poet, perhaps you've heard of her?”

“Don't start with the poetry crap,” Arthur bellowed. “She's having a moment, let her have her moment.”

“I find that poetry aids the having of such moments, greatly,” Bix sniffed.

“Thank you, Bix,” Sophie said. Together with the pigeons she watched Angel move up Heard Street, unti she was around the corner and gone.

“Who will put out water for us to bathe in?” Giddy asked sadly.

“I will,” Sophie promised. “
If
you guys promise to stop taking dumps on my mom's car.”

“You drive a hard bargain, lady,” Arthur said. “But you got us over a barrel. We need a bath. It's a deal.”

“I would offer to clean it for you,” Bix offered generously. “But we do not possess the appendages for such a task.”

The pigeons took off into the sky, the tail-whistles of Livia and the others like audible streamers in the night. Sophie waited at her door until she could no longer hear them, then pulled her house key from her shirt and let herself in.