Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (8 page)

Ronald, oblivious, righted himself upon his crooked stool and popped his eyes open. For the first time she watched the man
focus—on her. A smile ate his face, revealing rows of perfect, white teeth beneath his lips. They surprised Sophie; everything about Ronald seemed ruined; she'd expected a jack-o'-lantern's grill, jagged and discolored as a ripped chain-link fence.

“I know you.” Ronald nodded his head, happy the way a child is happy, happy at nothing, making no sense. “I know you, do you know me?”

“Yeah, you're Ronald. I'd like for you to tell me where my grandmother is.”

“You don't know me.” Ronald shook his head, his words long and mushed by his slow-motion tongue. “That's not allowed.” Then his arm lifted, and he pointed down the hill. Away from the office her grandmother kept in an Airstream trailer beneath the only shade trees on the property. Away from where the trash grew into mountain ranges on the horizon. Sophie followed the point of his dirty finger, his nails green and fungal, toward a squat, lopsided building, a shed ringed with hulking metal barrels.

“Angel,” Ronald coughed the word wetly, like something that had blocking his air passages. “She's with Angel.”

“Great,” Sophie clipped. “Thank you.” The man began to tremble back into motion; his feet, jammed sockless into a beaten pair of sneakers, shuffled. The stool's legs sunk deeper into the soft earth. Ronald was running in place. “Nice to see you,” he croaked. Sophie left him there, began the trek down the hill, her Vans kicking up puffs of dust that coated her bare, sweaty legs. The dump would make her
gross, she thought sadly. Her nose would become accustomed to the amazing variety of foul stinks the breeze carried this way and that. The odor of swill decomposing in the sun would become as familiar to her as mown grass. She'd expect her skin to be gritty and smudged. Her hair would clump like Ronald's into dreadlocks of grease. Just great. She comforted herself by the thought that at least no one worth caring about would see her. At least this wasn't school, where an overslept morning could send you, disheveled, into the world of catty classmates, the world of boys Sophie just did
not
want to think were cute—she did not, they were jerks, most of them, serious jerks, could win medals in an international jerk competition, the cream of the jerk crop right there at Our Lady of the Assumption School in Chelsea, Massachusetts—but, they
were
cute. Several of them were cute. That she thought so made Sophie as mad at herself as at them, the losers. Tripping people as they passed on their way to the pencil sharpener. Sending mortified girls dashing into the bathrooms on false claims of period stains bleeding through their uniforms. Greeting everyone with the salutation,
Hey, faggot!
Sending phony love notes to students whose loneliness sat on their skin plain as acne. She hated them. But their cuteness was undeniable. She felt a relief at never having to see any of them during this, her punishment summer spent at the dump. She would submit to the grime, become like a feral cat wandering the heaps of trash.

Chapter 5

S
ophie saw her grandmother only a smattering of times each year, usually on holidays. Her home was dim and the furniture was old, bought new many years ago, when she had lived there with Sophie's grandfather, before he disappeared. No one liked to talk about Papa Carl's disappearance—it brought up in Andrea a sadness Sophie couldn't bear to witness. It made the world seem topsy-turvy to watch her mother, so strong and harsh, be shoved to the brink of tears so abruptly, her adultness suddenly full of wobble, as if it could tip over and a little-girl Andrea would tumble out. Sophie didn't like her mom's bad moods but at least they were consistent, and she'd learned how to maneuver around them. To see this tender, wounded streak exposed paralyzed her, filled her with a strange mixture of love and fear, and the urge to hug her mother and run quickly away. Clearly her mother had loved her father. That Kishka had loved him too was harder to see, as the man's name brought out of her grandmother a
bitter rage that made her cigarette smoke hotter, that made the muscles in her skinny neck tense so that she'd loosen the breezy scarf kept knotted there, sometimes taking it off and wrapping it around her hand, like a boxer taping his fingers together before a fight.

Well, he was a man after all
, Kishka would say, and Sophie couldn't tell if this was Kishka's understanding, her dark acceptance—it is a man's prerogative, after all, to leave as he wishes—or, if it was the old woman's regret at a mistake—she'd believed Carl was special but it turned out he was a man after all, a thing that leaves. Either way it made Sophie shift with discomfort, and so she didn't mention her grandfather, whom she'd met many times but so long ago she had no memory of him, only photos pasted into yellowy photo albums, baby Sophie sitting on the lap of a faceless man. Faceless because someone—Kishka in her rage or Andrea in her grief—had cut out the offending image, leaving a perfect, round hole, a gap where the gluey page of the album striped through. Sophie found them creepy, and imagined an envelope somewhere containing a confetti of her grandfather's tiny heads. He'd
disappeared, and then they had disappeared him. Sophie hated all of it. She hated that anyone could disappear. She wondered what it meant, but never did she imagine boarding a bus, running away, hopping a train. She thought of a slow shimmer that vanished her.

Kishka's apartment was frozen in the era of Carl's vanishing. Nothing new had entered, nothing old was discarded. The place held the stillness of a museum. Andrea doubted her mother even
slept there anymore, choosing instead to sleep inside the cluttered Airstream trailer that tilted on the side of a hill at the dump. Sophie had glimpsed the Airstream's interior during the Fourth of July barbecues Kishka threw for her workers; the tight space was a havoc. A giant television sucked a bounty of channels from a satellite dish perched in a nearby tree. Great glass ashtrays overflowed with lipsticked cigarette butts. Mess scattered the capsule, including a couch so heaped with sheets and pillows it gave the impression of a bed. A desk held piles of papers, and more paper poked from the slammed drawers of file cabinets, as if trying to crawl from their habitats. Air conditioning chugged from a hulking machine jammed into a window. Sophie wasn't permitted more than the briefest peek inside.

“See?” Her grandmother would flap open the door, then shut it before Sophie's eyes had the chance to adjust to the dimness. “Just a hangout for an old lady. Nothing fun in there for a little girl.”

Sophie always hated the cookouts at the dump, but as it was a holiday, Sophie and Andrea's presence was insisted upon. The glare of the sun was unrelenting and carcinogenic; the stink of charcoal and lighter fluid barely masked the putrid stink of the summertime trash. Her grandmother's employees were self-conscious and obligated, the occasional city official dropped by, beaming their fake personalities onto everyone. If she had been allowed to roam the grounds perhaps it would have been interesting, but the dump was off-limits to little Sophie. Again and again she would stray toward the heaps of fascinating junk-stuck muck, only to be called back by Andrea, her
mother's voice raw with annoyance and repetition. Well, not today. Now that Sophie wanted nothing to do with the putrid piles, it would almost certainly be required of her to touch it. Why was life so mean?

As she approached the crooked, wooden building Ronald had pointed toward, Sophie became aware of a steady, powerful rumble. If she'd lived in a different part of the country perhaps she would have stopped and braced herself for the rolls of an earthquake, but Massachusetts didn't get earthquakes. They got blizzards in the winter, a sheet of frozen white that canceled school and turned the rules of the road upside down—the streets teeming with sleds, and the cars, buried under mounds of snow, now things to climb upon and slide down. They got hurricanes sometimes, winds that could blow you down, that beat the trees until their branches snapped, until their trunks tumbled into the street, the giant snarled mat of their roots upended, dripping dirt. But no earthquakes, no volcanoes, nothing that could explain this jumbling, rumbling sound—so loud Sophie could feel it like the bass of very loud hip-hop blaring from the supersonic car speakers of a Bellingham Square lowrider. It grew louder as she neared the building and its ringed fortress of tall, round buckets. The vibrations climbed her bones. As she came upon the barrels, she saw that they were shaking, and was stopped by the tremble of what they held inside. Jewels? Jewels. Jewels! Like a cracked geode, each rust-scabbed, dingy barrel was brimming with rough sparkle. Millions of pebble-sized chunks glittered blindingly in the sun. One barrel contained bright green jewels, the
corners smoothed to touch. The next, deep blue jewels, like droplets of some Caribbean lagoon. More barrels held cold, dark green jewels, the hard color of the Atlantic at winter. She picked up a handful, half expecting to see angry waves trapped inside, like bugs stuck in amber.

There were red jewels—rubies?—and so many barrels full of crystal clear jewels, each cut into different sizes, that the abundance of sparkle hurt Sophie's eyes and caused her to gasp in excitement. Diamonds? She plunged her hands into a bin, slid them deeper and deeper, until she was up to her elbows in diamonds! They felt cool against her skin. She lifted her hands and let them rain from her cupped palms, falling between her fingers, a chunky waterfall. A neighboring barrel of milky white jewels stopped her. What would this be? She wracked her brain for a gem that looked like this, solid and white and smooth, like the bumpy, antique lamp her mother kept by her bedside;
milk glass
she called it. Milk glass. Glass.

As quickly as Sophie had been sucked into the rich fantasy of junkyard treasure, so quickly did her imagination spit her back out. Glass. She felt about as intelligent as Ronald, whom she had left up the hill with a stool stuck to his pants. Of course there were not bins and bins of precious jewels being stored at her grandmother's dump! What a lunatic, to think so for even a moment! Was she a child, after all? Sophie burned with private embarrassment, and was glad to be alone. Certainly in all her wonder, she would have blurted something about the diamonds and rubies and emeralds that were now, clearly,
the rubble of beer bottles, the smashings of jars, and the glass of shattered car windows tumbled edgeless and smooth.

Sophie crept deeper into the space behind the barrels, observing rows of smaller buckets filled with jagged glass shards ordered by color, waiting to be tumbled. Shelves made from scrap wood held bottles that looked tremendously old; words and designs rose from their surfaces. Sophie ran her hand over one, feeling the word
elixir
roll beneath her fingers. She divined an order to the mess, a system: which barrels held finished products and which were next to be tumbled, empty shelves waiting for more raw bottles to come in, and shelves holding bottles too precious—antique?—to crush and crumble into ornamental debris.

Once she accepted that the shining nuggets were nothing but unexceptional bits of broken glass, Sophie's wonderment returned. Nothing was precious here, but all of it was pretty. Buckets and buckets of regular, everyday glass somehow bashed into dazzle. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. There was something about a piece of smashed windshield tricking you into thinking it was a priceless diamond that conjured a sort of respect for the glass. She was proud of it, as if it were a living thing that had pulled off a clever feat. It still felt nice to plunge her hand into the cool bin of beads, felt just as cool on the sun-hot skin of her arms as when she'd mistaken them for jewels. Sophie felt relaxed among the glass. They were all equals here.

She found a bucket containing chunks of multicolored, rounded beads that looked like a giant bin of candy. Her mouth watered. She'd
forgotten to eat breakfast, and her hunger for salt lingered. Would her grandmother feed her? She had never seen the woman eat, only smoke. Even at the Fourth of July cookouts Kishka would sit with a cocktail in a plastic tumbler, knocking the melting ice against the sides, and take drags off her dramatically long cigarettes. Kishka liked charring marshmallows over the burnt grill, but after she blew out their tiny fires and plucked the blackened crackling of the skin she threw the rest of the candy away, half-melted and sticky in the grass, to be scarfed up by a junkyard dog.

The rumbling sound faded as Sophie plucked her way through the barrels and bins. The vibrations had settled in her bones and now felt natural. She climbed atop an overturned bucket to reach a row of shelves stocked with those charming, antiquated bottles that had been spared from pulverization. The height of the bucket increased her view of where she was—Angel's place, whoever that was. She could see Ronald up the hill, his head plopped onto his chest, unconscious on his stool in the brutal sun. The glare of the day on the great heaps of trash was too much to look at. It burned a wall of light onto Sophie's eyes, she had to blink it away to see again. When she could, she noticed the pigeons. A wide flock of them, assembled on the roof of the crooked building, staring at her with their small, orange eyes. Sophie felt that she'd been caught, but doing what, and by whom? A gang of scabby birds?
Rats with wings
, her mom called them, throwing handfuls of uncooked rice into the gutter outside their house as if someone had just been married, but
no. Supposedly the rice expanded in the greedy birds' stomach until their insides exploded.