The Girl with the Mermaid Hair (4 page)

“D
ADDY!”

Sukie streaked down the path, jumped a hedge, shortcut across the grass and jumped another hedge, and when she landed again on the brick path next to his court, crashed into a stroller. A drum beat in her chest—Be all right, be all right, be all right. “Daddy!” While her first bellow had been from shock, this second was a wail of worry. Warren Jamieson still lay flat. His tennis partner hunched over him. “Daddy,” she called, “I’m coming, Daddy.” Fear sucked her energy away in a sudden whoosh, and her legs weakened. Slogging along, her legs now as soft and heavy as sandbags, she let out great honking breaths that would have embarrassed her to death had she been remotely aware of them. She
rubbed her hand across her face, her eyes were blurred. The man in the red Windbreaker strode toward her quickly.

Sukie shuddered backward, cowering, barely daring to blink. He passed, thank God, he passed. She had taken another heavy step forward when she felt her arm seized. Later she couldn’t remember his face, just a grimness, and when he spoke he barely unclenched his jaw. “Your dad’s slime. Never forget it.”

Sukie yanked her arm free or thought she did. He might have released it. He kept going. Sukie swung around. Her dad was sitting up now.

Flopman.

He looked like Flopman, the stuffed body made from white sheets and string that their neighbors at their old house propped up on their porch each Halloween, next to a big pumpkin.

Frank, helping to position a towel on her father’s bloody face, tilted her dad’s head so his neck no longer appeared broken.

She ran onto the court. “Dad?” She squatted next to him.

He moved the towel so he could see her with half an eye. “Hey, kiddo.”

She burst into uncontrollable tears, lost her balance, and plopped sideways.

“Stop, honey, baby, Daddy’s okay.”

Sukie, her ass on the asphalt, her legs splayed in front of her, let the tears fall.

A few club members were venturing hesitantly onto the court. They bent forward in a curious way as if they were looking for something suspicious under a house. Closing in, they lobbed inquiries: Was he all right, what happened? “Heart attack?” someone whispered, and someone else shook his head vigorously no.

“Call the police,” Sukie blurted loudly.

The police. Bystanders spread that like gossip. A few produced phones.

“No, no.” Her dad tried a laugh. “I think my daughter means I might need an ambulance, which I don’t.”

Sukie hadn’t meant that at all. An ambulance? It hadn’t crossed her mind, although perhaps it should have. What about the grim man in the red Windbreaker?

“Baby, get this damned headband off me.”

Sukie scrambled up. She had a job with a grave responsibility. It was just like in those English movies
on PBS where fashionable girls volunteered to become nurses, tending injured soldiers in World War II (or was it World War I, she was never sure), tenderly unwrapping bandages over hideous gaping wounds, their hair stylishly coiffed, their aprons stiff and spanking white with attractive red crosses on them. Now, with her dad able to speak, even summon his reassuring mellow confidence, she slipped into that familiar place where she wasn’t only in the world—the world was watching.

She stood over her dad and, placing her hands on either side of his head, tugged gently. The band slipped up and off. She released the bloody side and held it gingerly by the clean side, pinching it between her fingers.

“Get Mikey,” he instructed her. “Come on, Frank, help me up.”

Frank locked his arm under her dad’s. “One, two…” On Frank’s “three,” her dad made it to standing, although bent at the waist. Sukie could see that each breath he took hurt. “You might have a cracked rib,” said Frank.

Sukie remained mesmerized by her dad’s painful breathing.

“Get your brother,” he told her. “Hurry up. Meet me at the car.”

With all eyes on her, inflating the importance of her mission, Sukie flew to do her father’s bidding. She couldn’t help but notice as she ran swiftly that players on every court had stopped their games. At the net, on the baseline, wherever the last point had left them, they stayed. Alerted initially by Sukie’s shriek, they had halted their own dramas to make sense of her dad’s.

Sukie tore into the clubhouse and stopped at the entrance to the bar. “Mikey.” She waved him toward her. When he casually spun on the bar stool, a row of pretzel sticks poking out of his mouth, she marched over and roughly yanked him. “Hurry up.”

“Ow.” He jerked his arm away.

“Someone hurt Dad. Just shut up and come.”

Mikey, racing to keep up as they rushed to the car, kept asking what happened, and Sukie refused to tell him, partly to keep him agitated, he deserved it, though she wasn’t sure why, and partly because she was so anxious herself.

“I
GOT into a fistfight,” her dad told Mikey, who fell silent at the sight of him and behaved, in Sukie’s opinion, in a way that no one should.

“Stop staring.” She slapped Mikey on the back, although she was just as riveted as he was by the sight of her agile dad, bent and bloodied, moving across the gravel as if every step were an accomplishment.

When the whole family had first visited their nearly finished, brand-new development home, it was sitting on a dirt lot on Lilac Drive, bare except for four birch trees. Their tall skinny trunks had twiggy branches lush with leaves. “Don’t love them, they’re history,” her dad told her mom. “They’re growing where the driveway’s going.” A man was already sawing one of them, and it
was tilting, tilting, tilting. Then it fell, not with a crash but with a slow sigh. Sukie kept imagining that her dad would sigh over in the same way, but he didn’t. With Frank’s help, he wedged his body behind the wheel. Not easy. The strain and pain were biological proof of how everything is connected: His stomach hurt, and his muscles and ribs were bruised, which meant that to get his legs into the car, he had to lift each one up and into driving position. Every so often his lips tightened into a wince, causing his eyes to squint and then fly wide open when the squinting triggered pain in his cheek, where a red bruise spread from there down the left side of his face.

“Get in back, hurry up, dope.” She pushed Mikey in.

“Who’d you fight with?” Mikey asked as they drove home.

“An idiot.”

“Why?”

“Business. It’s just business.”

“What business?”

“Leave Dad alone. He’s hurt,” said Sukie.

“A building,” said her dad. “He wants it, I got it. He’s a sore loser.”

“Are you in the mob?” asked Mikey.

“Nothing as interesting as that.”

“Mom’s coming home today,” Sukie piped up, realizing as she said it how happy and relieved she was. “She said she’d be home by three. She texted me—” Sukie did not fully get the word “me” out of her mouth. It died on her lips, dealt a knockout blow by the word “texted,” which she said, and then heard, and then remembered.

Her breath caught in her chest. With sharp, shrieking intakes she fought for air.

“What the hell?” Her dad braked quickly.

Her elbows winged up, a spasm. Was she going to flap like her mom? Am I a flapper? Is it genetic? Strange thoughts can flit through your head even when you’re struggling to do something as essential as breathing. Perhaps if she’d leaped off a skyscraper, she might think, My hair’s dirty, or I wish I had a cat, before she hit the sidewalk. Or, as a noose tightened around her neck, which was exactly how Sukie felt this second, she might be struck with one last burst of self-knowledge: I’m a flapper too.

“Get air,” her dad barked.

She hit the button to lower the window.

“Put your head down,” he said, and unsnapped her seat belt.

She bent forward and let her head drop between her knees. “My cell,” she choked out.

“Yourself?”

“My cell. My cell phone. It’s gone!” Her wail broke the jam—she could breathe again.

“Are you kidding?”

She sat up. “No.”

“You mean this fit is about your phone? Your silly phone?”

“I must have dropped it. When I was running. When I saw you. My racket, too.” Her bottom lip trembled.

“Christ.” Her dad smacked the steering wheel. “Are you going to cry?”

Sukie shook her head.

He shot Mikey a look in the rearview mirror. “What about you?”

Mikey shrank back in his seat.

Her dad reached to open the glove compartment but gave up with a grimace. “Christ,” he said again, and there was blame in his voice. Sukie could hear it. It was her fault for making him forget his injuries and do something as stupid as reach. “My phone’s in the glove compartment. Call a friend at the club
and ask her to find it.”

“Can we go back?”

“No.”

“My whole life is in that phone,” said Sukie. But what she was thinking was, My heart is in that phone. Maybe my future. Bobo’s text. She’d never get to read it.

“I’m not going back to the club.” Her dad pulled into traffic.

He’s never going back to the club. How did she know that? Why did she know that?

“Don’t you have a friend at the club?”

“No,” said Sukie.

“No one?” He threw her a curious look.

“No.” She kept her eyes low.

“Then call Mrs. Merenda and ask her to look for your stuff. I’m sure someone found it.”

Sukie took her dad’s phone out of the glove compartment. She punched in her own number. Answer, someone please answer, she prayed, and then reversed herself, Don’t answer, please don’t answer. Was it better if someone had her precious cell phone with Bobo’s text message in it, or was it better if the phone was lying on the grass somewhere waiting to be
found? After a bunch of rings she heard her own voice, “Hi, this is Sukie, I really appreciate your call. Leave a message please.”
Oh, man, could my voice-mail message be any more lame?
Sukie clicked off with dismay and dialed the club.

“Hi, Mrs. Merenda,” Sukie chirped so adorably, so innocently, so helplessly that she might be a baby chick who had broken its shell and was announcing its arrival to the world. She laid her catastrophe on Mrs. Merenda in an endless run-on sentence, the words tumbling after one another, some um’s and uh’s sprinkled in to generate maximum sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Merenda. “Someone was talking to me, could you repeat that?”

Sukie flatly supplied the facts. “I dropped my cell phone and duffel bag somewhere between courts three and five when my father—”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Merenda.

The “yes” threw her. She sensed disapproval. What had she done wrong? Or was it her father? Did Mrs. Merenda think her dad was slime?

“Do you have it, by any chance?” said Sukie. “Did anyone turn it in?”

“No.”

“Will you look?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

But there was a click. Sukie put the phone back in the glove compartment.

From Bobo
. She saw the words suspended in space. Like skywriting, they diffused and slowly evaporated, leaving a smudge and then nothing, no proof that they were ever there to begin with.

“I’m sure she’ll find it,” said her dad.

“Maybe I’ll find it in the mirror.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know.”

They turned down Lilac Drive. Sukie, depressed, didn’t immediately notice the black car in front of their house. A hat emerged—a lady’s straw hat with a wide curved brim and a trim of black ribbon. The wind caught it, flapping the brim, and a woman’s hand clamped it down. At the same time, the trunk popped open and inside Sukie saw pink. The woman in the hat had to be her mother, because her mother had luggage the color of bubble gum.

The driver took out her mother’s bag and carried it to the door.

Sukie yelled out the window, “Mom!”

Her mother, still holding her hat in place, whirled around to wave. She wore sunglasses—large ones with black frames, the kind movie stars wore when they didn’t want to be seen and wanted to attract attention all at the same time—and she had a long scarf wound around her neck a million times with still enough length to trail in a divinely nonchalant way. Sometimes to see your mom from afar is to see a different person. The woman other people see when they look. My mom is a stunner, thought Sukie. The most stylish ever. I bet Dad thinks so too. I bet when he met this glamorous woman, he was swept away.

Her dad stopped the car so Sukie and Mikey could greet their mom before he pulled into the driveway. Normally Mikey raced while Sukie sauntered, her butt a slow swinging pendulum, a move she’d perfected. Today, overwhelmed, relieved, she bolted across the grass, her arms out. “Mom!”

Her mom shied backward. “No, no, no.”

Sukie and Mikey, speeding toward her, stopped in time.

“No hugs. Just air kisses for now.” Her mom puckered and sent them three, “
P-P-P
.”

“Oh, my God!” Sukie’s hands flew to her heart. “Mom, what happened, were you in an accident?”

Not visible from afar, close up an astonishment: Her mom’s nose was bandaged, taped down and across, bits of gauze peeking out underneath, a snow-covered mountain in the middle of her face.

“W
ERE you in a fight too?” asked Mikey.

Her mother started to laugh, at least that’s what Sukie thought. It was hard to tell because not much of her mom was visible between the glasses, the bandage, and the rest of the getup, but her lips did widen, a giggle might have erupted before she stiffened. “Don’t make me smile,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

“How come?” said Mikey.

“What happened to your nose?” asked Sukie.

“I have to go to bed, I’m not myself yet. Oops, what is that? I thought I saw a wolf. Hi, Señor.” Her mother rapped the glass pane next to the door. Through it Señor, inside, watched them. “What a day, isn’t it beautiful? It’s hard to talk, it is.” She pressed
her hand against her lips. “I’m sewn together.” She started to smile again and again stiffened. “Who got into a fight?”

The car door slammed. They all turned to watch Sukie’s dad ache his way over.

“Warren? Warren, what happened?”

“Do you want to see the buffalo nickel that Marie gave me?” Mikey pulled it from his pocket.

“Hold it up, I can’t look down.”

“Why not?”

“Mom, what’s wrong with your nose?” Sukie, loud now and insistent, still got no reply, because her mom was quizzing her dad about why he could barely walk and had a bruise bulging like a plum on the side of his face, and her dad was refusing to answer except with one word, “Later.”

“Peas, you need peas.
You
need peas, not me. Isn’t it great that I told you to buy peas? Did you remember to get the peas?” said Sukie’s mom.

Her dad nodded.

“I must have known somehow that someone would need them. Ouch. Don’t make me talk. This is so thoughtless, Warren, I can’t make that many expressions yet.”

“Mom, tell me,” Sukie begged.

Her mom thrust her purse into Sukie’s arms. “Open the door for me, would you? I can’t look for my keys, it’s dangerous.”

“That’s dangerous too?” said Mikey.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Felice,” said her dad.

“You think I’m exaggerating. If you’d visited me, you’d know. I’m not supposed to look down.” Her mom took off her dark glasses, breaking the news. Her face appeared to have swallowed her eyes, because the flesh was so swollen and bruised black and blue that her mom’s eyes were reduced to peepholes. “I don’t mean to shock you,” she told her kids, “but your father forced me.”

Mikey started to cry.

“Calm down,” her dad said. “Your mom got a facelift. That’s all.” He opened the door. “It’s no big deal.”

“But your nose,” said Sukie.

“It was driving me crazy,” said her mom. “And if you’d suffered the way I had, you’d think it was a big deal. Take my bag upstairs, would you, Sukie? Obviously your father’s useless.”

Sukie rolled it into the house. “What about your
nose was driving you crazy?” She and her mom had the same nose. They both had little ramps from top to tip. They were both—Sukie recalled that website—“ramp.”

“Ramp?” said Sukie. “Was that what drove you crazy?”

“Ramp? What are you talking about?”

“How was the spa?” asked Mikey, wiping his eyes.

Sukie dragged the heavy suitcase from step to step. “She wasn’t at the spa, Mikey. Come on. I’ll explain later.”

He ran up the stairs, happy to be with his sister.

In the Jamiesons’ showcase of a house, the large foyer with a marble floor soared two stories. The staircase, a winding affair, had a lacquered wood banister with white balusters that wrapped the open upstairs hall. Sukie, wheeling her mom’s suitcase, stopped to look down at her parents. Mikey bumped into her and stayed there. She put her arm around him. Again from a distance, with the brim of the hat obscuring her mother’s face, the winding scarf concealing God knows how many stitches, Sukie was once again struck by her mother’s chic and how
different things can seem from far away, how there’s more than one truth, the faraway truth and the truth close up.

“I can’t deal with this now,” her mom was saying.

“There’s nothing to deal with,” said her dad.

Their voices were low but traveled easily. Sukie and Mikey didn’t have to strain to hear.

“I can’t believe you did this.”

“What?” said her dad.

“This is my day.”

“Your day?”

“My homecoming. I need care.”

A red rubber ball fell between the balusters. Sukie, watching her parents, didn’t see the small ball until, on its way down, it entered her sight range and hit the marble floor.

Hearing the thump, her parents turned to see Señor’s ball rolling toward them. “Oh my God, I looked down,” her mother shrieked. Sukie pulled Mikey back just as her parents gazed upward to see where it had come from. Her mother’s hand flew to her neck with another shriek. “I’m not supposed to look up, either.”

Señor’s fur brushed Sukie’s legs. Even though the
dog moved through the hall at his own deliberate pace, by the time Sukie realized the tickle was Señor, all she saw was his rump and the curl of a tail disappearing into her room.