Sophie pulled a key from a length of rawhide she wore around her neck, tucked into her t-shirt, and let herself into her home. She was surprised to find her mother in the kitchen, the light blue smock Andrea wore to her job at the clinic stuck to her body in the heat. Damp patches spread out from her arms, her fair neck was reddened from the walk home in the sun, and her hair was disheveled upon her head, bits of blondish-brownish-reddish hair bursting in a humid frizz of curls. Andrea held in her hand a chipped dish of iceberg lettuce, a hastily chopped tomato, and a pool of glistening dressing. She shoveled the food into her mouth in rushed, hungry gulps. The freckles sprinkled across Andrea’s cheeks always made Sophie imagine her mother as a girl, even though grown-ups had freckles, too. There was just something about it that made Sophie flash to faded photos from long before she was born, the colors in them suggesting the world itself had a slightly different palate, the yellows mustardier, the greens pinier, her mother’s pale skin deeper, as if perpetually tan. Photos of Andrea in skirts and dresses and bathing suits, four, ten, thirteen years old, a shy smile pulling her freckled cheeks up toward her eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Sophie demanded, instantly regretting her tone. She sounded pissed, or challenging, or some other unfriendly way of sounding, and the tone would not be lost on her mother.
“I live here,” Andrea snapped back. “I pay the rent here and buy the food here. I thought I would take some of the food I bought and eat it here in this kitchen I’m renting. If that’s all right with you?” She scooped dressing onto the last pulpy bit of tomato and forked it into her mouth, tossing the dish in the sink with a clatter. She turned to her daughter and regarded her with a squint. “Come here,” she ordered. Sophie stepped toward her. First her mother grabbed her hands and brought them to her nose for a sniff, her nose seeking the smell of smoke—cigarettes or worse. What she got was a burst of something ugly, like swill left in the August heat too long, with the tang of something metallic.
“Ugh,” Andrea gasped, waving at the air with her hand. “You smell like something died! Why are you all wet?”
Sophie twisted away from her mother. “I got hit with a water balloon. Some little brats on Tudor Street, I think they used dishwater or something.”
The lie came easy, as they tended to. Sophie had ceased feeling bad about all the little fibs she fed Andrea. If her mother would just calm down, she thought, she’d be able to be honest. But her mother was perpetually tense, high-strung, and so suspicious of Sophie that she made Sophie suspicious of herself. And so she’d become used to giving her mother the least alarming story she could muster, regardless of it was true.
“Were you with Ella today?” Andrea interrogated. Andrea always brought up Ella when she was unhappy with Sophie—with her appearance, her smell, her attitude.
“Yes.”
“Were you smoking with her?”
“No! I hate smoking! I don’t smoke, I’ve never even tried it!” It was true. To Sophie, cigarettes smelled like acrid, burning hate. She couldn’t comprehend wanting to suck the stuff into your body. She hated being around Ella’s toxic clouds and was perpetually navigating their wind-borne procession while they were hanging out.
“Were you smoking pot or doing other things? God forbid?”
“No, Ma! And Ella doesn’t do drugs, either! She only smokes cigarettes.”
Mother and daughter stared each other down. Sophie was at a disadvantage here. When Andrea had first asked her daughter if Ella smoked, Sophie had lied. But Andrea then brought a bag of trash out the clinic’s back door and spotted the shifty, lanky Ella sucking down a cigarette in the shoddy park across the way. Thusly proven a liar, Andrea reserved the right to never believe another word her daughter said.
But another thing kept Sophie vulnerable to her mother’s suspicion—she felt guilty. She knew the pass-out game wasn’t pot or pills or any other drug—nothing that sat with a stink on her skin or gave her bloodshot eyes—but her mother wouldn’t like her doing it, and would maybe even lump it with pot and pills, vices worse than cigarettes, even. Sophie had never tried a drug, but she bet the pass-out game made her as high and hallucinatory as any of them. She cast her eyes down at the busted linoleum floor so that her mother wouldn’t read the conflict in her face, but she had.
“Well, you’re up to something,” Andrea said finally. “Making out with boys?”
“No!”
“You’d better not be.” The way Andrea grouped making out with boys with cigarettes, pot, and pills confirmed to Sophie a suspicion of her own: that kissing boys was something fairly gross that nonetheless made you feel temporarily magical. If there were boys around worth kissing she might’ve braved it, but the boys of Chelsea were in much the same state of disrepair as the city itself.
“Laurie LeClair came in today,” Andrea said abruptly, and Sophie was glad to feel her mother’s judgment move away from her and onto another.
“Really?” she asked. “What for?”
Laurie LeClair was a local legend. A few years ahead of Sophie at Our Lady of the Assumption, the girl had been unremarkable until she hit eighth grade. It was then that her transformation began, sudden and flamboyant. Her hair, formerly a mousy brown, was stripped to a nearly reflective platinum blonde. Her eyes, small and blue, became smaller and bluer as she circled them with an inch of muddy liner. The jewelry she layered onto her Catholic school uniform looked like it could double as weapons. Her face bloomed with streaks of harsh color, as did her throat, the skin there marked with what looked like bruises. Many girls had seen Sister Margaret, the principal, looming over Laurie in the ladies’ room, her hands planted on her polyester hips, the porcelain sink running with motley rivers of washed-away makeup as Laurie scrubbed her face with a handful of rough, brown paper towels. Laurie’s jewelry was confiscated, and if the nun could have confiscated the hair from Laurie’s head she would have. It sat there, fried flat to her skull, the darkness at the crown growing in faster than Laurie could bleach it away. A rumor went around that she even had tattoos—lousy homemade ones her boyfriend gave her with a needle and ink. The rumor said that he stabbed his name into her skin, or his initials, or their initials side by side, like a declaration of love carved in wet cement. A rumor said it was on her butt, or high, high up on the back of her thigh, or on the inside of her thigh, a place so tender Sophie winced at the thought. But before any of these rumors could be proven true or false, Laurie was gone. She’d gotten “in trouble.” Sophie wondered what such trouble could be. Did she cheat on a test, or steal something from the school? Did she write on the bathroom walls, or get caught shoplifting at the mall? Did she call Sister Margaret a bitch, or did she get in a fistfight with another student? No. “Trouble,” Sophie learned, was a word for “pregnant.”
Removed from the school, Laurie LeClair’s legend swelled. Instead of ceasing, the rumors grew more lurid. Laurie had lots of boyfriends, and let them all tattoo their initials onto her; her legs a kaleidoscope alphabet, inky letters bleeding into each other beneath her skin. It was said that from far away she looked like she was wearing dark lace stockings. Laurie had a drug habit—it was cocaine, no, heroin, no, it was cocaine and heroin and she gave it to herself with needles, jabbing the crook of her elbow or scraping it along her arms or pricking the web of skin between her toes. Sophie felt degraded just hearing these tales. What had begun as a curiosity became something darker. The glee her classmates expressed in sharing the gossip brought up suspicion and scorn in Sophie—just why did everyone want so badly for Laurie LeClair to be such a mess?
But some of the tales were true. Sophie knew this because her mother worked at the clinic. The private business of every body who walked through the sliding doors made its way to her, and Andrea was not a tight-lipped woman. Like her classmates, Sophie’s mother took a perverse delight in the teenager’s situation. She was there when Laurie waddled in, in the throes of childbirth, fluid trickling down her bare legs, angering the cabbie whose taxi had dumped her at the curb. Laurie came in alone and left with a baby girl.
“Do you know what she named her?” Andrea sneered. “Alize!”
“What does that mean?” Sophie asked.
Andrea snorted at her daughter’s innocence, not quite sure if it was feigned or genuine. “It’s a beverage. An alcoholic one. Very cheap, like a wine cooler.”
“Well,” Sophie considered, “people name their babies Brandy. That’s alcohol, right?”
“Yes, and people name their babies Rose, and Lily, but you wouldn’t want to be named Crabgrass, would you? You’re just being difficult.” And Sophie was. She didn’t know why the urge to defend Laurie LeClair had risen up so strongly, but it had, coexisting with a baser interest in what had happened to the girl now.
There was the time Laurie had come in with her face smashed in the places her boyfriend’s fist had landed. A doctor’s examination had uncovered more bruises, and as usual the girl’s neck was all marked up with hickies. When Andrea told her about it, Sophie had gasped in concern, but Andrea had only shaken her head coldly.
“Some girls like that,” she said with a simple shrug, a comment that Sophie puzzled over for weeks. Some girls liked to be beaten up? That couldn’t be true. And even if it was, it had to mean that likes and hates had gotten so tangled up inside them that it became a sort of sickness, not a true like, not the way Sophie liked reading books or sleeping late into the morning or feeling the pastel dreamscapes of the pass-out game. Sophie felt a worry for Laurie LeClair but, having no place to go with it, shelved it where all her other useless worries were stored. Occasionally Andrea would return with more stories of the girl’s sad life—a stomach pumping for alcohol poisoning, a cockroach trapped in the cave of her baby’s ear. Sophie’s stomach lurched as the horrible stories took her on their ride. Who knew a chilly cockroach would seek out warmth in the nook of a baby’s ear? Sophie wished she didn’t.
It was sometimes hard not to share these horrid tales with her classmates, knowing the rush of instant friendliness and importance it would grant her, but she told only Ella, whose promise not to tell was solid. Scornful, cranky Ella looked down upon almost everyone in that school but Sophie, keeping her distance from the swarm of chattering students and their ill intentions. She couldn’t afford to get too close: if they ever found out about her germ thing, and her germ-related food thing, it would be her they’d gossip about when rumors of Laurie ran dry. She trusted only Sophie, whose unwillingness to betray Laurie LeClair, a girl neither of them actually knew, confirmed that her trust was sound.
* * *
“SHE ALMOST KILLED her baby.” Andrea was rustling for her keys as she said this, patting her smock pockets and glancing around, as if the news she had delivered was banal, and perhaps to Andrea it was. Life at the Chelsea Clinic brought with it a constant stream of tragedy—gunshots and stabbings, malevolent infections, illness spiraled out of control. Sometimes Sophie wondered if her mother’s hardness was how she coped with having to witness so much sadness all day long.
“What do you mean?” Sophie gasped. “What happened, what did she do?”
“Hypernatremia. Salt poisoning.”
“She poisoned her baby’s salt?”
“She poisoned her baby with salt. You can’t give a baby salt. They can’t handle it—it makes their kidneys stop.”
“Well, well, was it a mistake? Did the baby get into the salt?”
Andrea gave her daughter a look that expressed disappointment with her mental faculties. “A baby isn’t going to eat salt. Salt tastes terrible.”
“I love salt,” Sophie protested. Andrea’s look turned steely, and she turned away.
“Normal babies don’t think salt tastes good. Babies—”
“I did. I loved salt. I remember eating it right from the shaker, that same Tupperware shaker—”
“No you didn’t, and if you were stupid enough to try I would have slapped it out of your hand. Salt can kill small children, infants and toddlers especially. It’s a great way for a mother to kill her kid and then act like it was a big accident, like the kid just ‘got into’ too much salt. It happens all the time, especially here.” Andrea stopped and watched her daughter, waiting for her inevitable questions to come.
“What do you mean, here?”
“I mean in Chelsea. We have a lot of hypernatremia. A lot of babies die from salt. Every so often there’s a rash of salt killings.” She paused. “You’ve never heard about this?”
Sophie wondered at a place that would fill her head with outlandish fantasies about a teenaged girl’s tattoos, yet neglect to fill her in on an epidemic of crazed mothers murdering their babies with table salt. But under her confusion was a ribbon of something familiar. “Ma,” she said, annoyed. “I feel like you’re messing with me.”
Andrea jingled her house keys in her hands. “It’s because of all the immigrants,” her mother said, the distaste in her voice suggesting she’d forgotten that her own mother and father had been immigrants themselves. “They come here from the old countries with all sorts of crazy old wives’ tales, make-believe stories they think are true, and then they do stupid things because of it. Things like poisoning their babies with salt.” Andrea’s anger at this deadly foolishness was clear.
“But why?” Sophie asked, though she felt in her mind that she already knew, in some sleepy-stubborn part of her brain, the part that kidnaps your dreams and won’t give you anything but the slightest thread to latch onto. Maybe someone had told this to Sophie when she was very small—her Polish-from-Poland Nana, perhaps, or Papa, before he had disappeared.
“There is a myth, a very old myth, about a girl who’d be the most special girl in the whole world, the most important girl ever born. Like the second coming or something. She’d save the world, I don’t know, and she’d have the ability to eat huge amounts of salt, even as a baby. It wouldn’t hurt her. That’s how you’d know she was the one. So every so often there’s an outbreak of people dosing their baby girls with salt to see if they can take it. The babies usually die. It’s like believing in a comic book, Sophie,” Andrea said sternly, as if Sophie had been arguing her, not standing mutely, as she was. “It’s like believing your baby is Superman so you throw her off a roof to see if she’ll fly. They ought to be put into jail for life,” she muttered.
“So that’s what Laurie LeClair did? She gave her baby salt to see if she was the… the super salt girl or something?”
“Yep. She should know better. She’s not fresh off the boat. I can’t believe how strong these stories are. The city needs to do a public service announcement, telling people it’s a lie; that they could go to jail.”
“Can they?”
“Sure! They should! That’s murder!”
“But if she wasn’t trying to kill the baby, just seeing if it was special—”
“Sophie. You don’t abuse your children to see if a fairy tale is true. You don’t endanger your children, no matter what your beliefs are. There was that little girl in Boston who died because her parents were religious wackos who didn’t believe in doctors, they thought they could just pray and God would save her.” Andrea shook her head. “I even believe in God, and I know that’s wrong. God helps those who help themselves, that’s what God does. But some fairy tale? It’s criminal. Criminal. As far as I’m concerned it’s murder, whatever the intention.”
Sophie wondered about Laurie LeClair, and if she was on so many drugs that she thought her baby was some supernatural being. It gave her a sadness that sat in her bones. She didn’t understand why a person’s life had to be so bad. It didn’t seem fair. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be Laurie LeClair, with drugs in her body and a boyfriend who hit her, marks on her skin that wouldn’t ever go away and a baby she thought could maybe be impossibly special. At first she couldn’t imagine it and then, terribly, she could. As if Laurie LeClair’s life came into her like an indrawn breath, Sophie was filled with the feeling of it, a hot, dense sensation like a wall of rotting refuse, claustrophobic, lightless. It filled her lungs, a feeling of despair no amount of dreaming or hoping could crack, and then there was—the smallest pinprick of something airy breaking through the wild and spiraling pain, a bit of brightness so foreign to this world that it seemed insane, and it was, it was insane, the idea to feed salt to her baby girl. It twirled like a dust mote on a thin shaft of light, and as hard as it was to look at it, it was easier than looking at everything else, the deep, stuck, never-ever-ever feelings of that heavy, impenetrable wall of hurt.
Sophie didn’t know she had fallen backward into the fridge until a magnet stuck there jabbed her in the ear, and another wave came upon her. To feel so small, to feel so small and ugly that a cockroach seemed big, seemed better than you, more functioning, more intelligent. Sophie swung her head, her dirty-blond hair swinging about her, and she hollered. She didn’t want to feel Laurie LeClair. Andrea was at her side, pulling her up from where she had slid, down to the linoleum, her head striking the fridge as she struggled against the assailing emotions, dislodging bills and coupons from their magnets, sending them skittering across the floor.
“Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!” Her mother shook her shoulders, filled with her own raw panic at her daughter’s sudden seizure. She considered slapping her across the face but couldn’t bring herself to strike her. “Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!” she cried. “Sophie!”
And inside the dank cavern of Laurie LeClair’s reality, Sophie Swankowski’s name was lowered down to her, a rope to haul her self back into her self. Sophie, she thought, I’m Sophie, I’m Sophie, I’m Sophie, I’m Sophie. Slowly, too slowly, as if it were a living thing that had sunken its claws and was loathe to let go, the sensation began to retract, until Sophie was not Laurie LeClair but was only her self, sweating in her hot kitchen, her hair in fresh tangles, her face flushed with the effort of her return, her mother’s hands upon her, her body ringing with a need for salt. Her mother, filled with rage and fear and love, each emotion taking its turn upon her face like a great wheel had been spun, and both waited to learn which it would land upon. It landed on the cusp of fury and devotion. With a shake more forceful than necessary Andrea gave her daughter a final jolt, then pulled her to her in a ferocious embrace.
“What?” she cried. “What? What was that?”
Sophie pushed her mother off her with unexpected strength, diving for the stove, splattered with bacon grease and congealed cots of Hamburger Helper sauce, she tore the plastic cover off the salt shaker and poured her mouth full of crystals, letting them tumble down the back of her throat. The claws of Laurie LeClair’s life had left her punctured, and she could feel the salt falling into those torn places and filling them up. She was barely aware of the sounds she was making as she ate at the pile on her tongue, choking and animal. Andrea smacked the shaker from her hand and rudely shoved her fingers into her daughter’s mouth, wiping away the thick mound of salt and flicking it to the floor with a cry of alarm and disgust.
“Stop it!” Andrea hollered, and this time the will was there, her hand, gritty with salt, came down across Sophie’s cheek, swiping her mouth, leaving a trail of salty paste she licked at without thinking. “Stop it!” Andrea repeated in horror, wiping the salt away with one hand while smearing it in the girl’s hair with the other. They looked at one another in fear and revulsion, and Sophie thought, her mouth still thick with salt, maybe Ella was right, maybe she was brain damaged, maybe she had hurt herself playing pass-out, and the thought scared her so terribly she burst into tears, still traumatized on the inside by her visit to the psyche of Laure LeClair, still haunted by the mermaid of her vision, the creature’s sadness sharp as a sword, but an ancient sword, sheathed in the musty, dusty leather of an animal that had been extinct so long no one even knew it had ever existed. Oh, no. Something was awfully, awfully wrong with her. With her entire body atremble, she clutched out at her mother, grabbing onto her arms with almost the same force that her mother gripped her shoulders. “I pass myself out!” she blurted, a terrified confession, afraid of what she’d done to her mind and afraid of her mother’s wrath, ashamed at her foolhardiness with her body, guilty at betraying the secret pleasure she shared with her friend, that so many of the girls shared with each other. Andrea looked at her quizzically, then with understanding, and the wheel of emotion was spun again, this time coming down on the cusp of rage and fear.