False Mermaid

Elizabeth hadn’t actually seen the slap, but its sharp noise still seemed to reverberate in her ears. When her father spoke again, his voice was almost unrecognizable. “Don’t ever let me hear you talk like that again, do you hear me? Stay away from my daughter.”

Remembering that confrontation, Elizabeth began to feel queasy again. Miranda and her father had never argued like that before, at least not that she knew. It was all her fault, for running away. Why did she have to go and find all that stuff on the Internet and mess everything up? It was better not to know. She missed the empty space inside her that was now filled with doubts and questions. All she wanted was for everything to get back to normal.

She crawled back into the narrow bed, pulling the covers over her head. Maybe running away had been a mistake. She knew what they were all thinking, Nora and everyone else, that she was running away from her dad, but it wasn’t true. He got angry sometimes, but he had reasons. She was always messing up, doing stupid things—like climbing up on that wall. He was trying to protect her. That’s why he got mad when Miranda said those things. He couldn’t have hurt Mama—if he had, he would be locked up, wouldn’t he? You couldn’t do things like that and not go to jail. She felt the questions crowding, pushing into one another inside her. Nora, her dad, Miranda, her grandparents—they all said something different, and it couldn’t all be true. Somebody had to be lying.

She hadn’t actually planned to run away at the airport until they were walking off the plane. What did Miranda mean—maybe she’s more like her mother than you thought? Sometimes when she lay in bed at night, with darkness close around her, certain memories came back, mostly as she was drifting off to sleep, or just waking. Suddenly she felt a string of words rising up inside her, each a separate bubble, bursting as it hit the surface: Lizzabet—Mama’s tired.

And then it all came back, like water under a door, rising around her ankles in a flood. All the days Mama was so tired she couldn’t wake up. Elizabeth remembered wandering through the silent house—frightened by the noises from the icemaker, looking up at the sink piled high with dishes, hallways and bedrooms strewn with toys and clothes. Whole days playing alone in her room, eventually having to brave the rumbling refrigerator for something to eat. Then she would go back into the bedroom and try shaking Mama’s shoulder again. Why wouldn’t she wake up?

The damp air under the covers pressed down on her, until she had to throw off the blankets and take a breath of cool outside air. With it came the smell of toast and bacon, floating up from below, awakening something in her—a hollow, cavernous hunger she hadn’t felt for days, and with it a sharp memory of her dad making toast on Sunday mornings, cut into triangles just the way she liked it, dripping with butter. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her stomach, fighting the hunger inside. She missed her dad so much. Running away had been a mistake.

8

Truman Stark always took the back streets home from downtown. Ninth to Broadway to Grove Street, up past police headquarters on Olive, along the tracks at Phalen Boulevard to Clarence. From his bedroom window, he’d watched the workers put up the shiny new building on the corner. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the BCA. Sort of like the state FBI. They thought they were so special, the people who worked there. He had watched them, talking, laughing, getting into cars at the end of their shifts. He even followed a few of them, once in a while. They were just regular people, like him. Nobody special at all. So why did they get to work at a place like that, while he was stuck in a parking ramp, staring at TV screens, marking time? The injustice of it all stuck in his craw, threatened to choke him every time he looked out his bedroom window.

He turned left on Clarence, knowing what would happen when he got home. What always happened: his mother would have some little chore for him, some stupid job like changing a lightbulb or running up to Walgreen’s for her medicine. Or she’d want him to sit with her and watch one of her game shows, when he had more important things to do.

As long as he was out of the house, he could forget about all the stacks of junk mail and newspapers and the garbage bags full of old clothes, forget the reek of cat piss so strong from downstairs that it made his eyes water even all the way up in his room. His mother hadn’t been like this when the old man was alive. It was like she’d lost a screw or something.