Four

At eight o’clock my mother knocks on the door to my studio. I don’t hear her at first. My earbuds are in, and I am close to getting something right. I’ve got a desk lamp set up, and I’m working in front of it with this stuff that’s basically Play-Doh, but I made it upstairs in the kitchen, out of flour and cream of tartar and red food coloring. And I’m bending and stretching the lump of it in front of the light, fascinated by the shadow it casts on the concrete wall, its silhouetted fingertips elongated—clutching, spreading, grasping—this hunk of innocuous goo made horrible in the shadow it throws.

My mom pushes open the door, and the warm evening sunlight that spills into my space ruins the effect on the wall. That’s how I know she’s there. I yank my earbuds out and spin around, my body blocking the lump of dough. “You’re home early. I thought you were having dinner.”

She hesitates on the threshold, as if she can tell I don’t really want her to come in. “Yeah, Lucy got one of her migraines.”

“Bummer. Hey, I’ll be right up, okay?”

She starts to say something, but then her face softens into a smile. “Okay.”

She leaves the door cracked behind her. I close it tight before turning my gaze back to the shadow, back to the form that throws it.

***

Mom is in the shower when I go upstairs. She is singing.

When I was a little girl, I used to think that maybe my mother was really a mermaid. I mean, it made sense … her voice, her long copper hair. Her beauty, too intense to be mortal, too intense to not be tinged with magic. I did hundreds of sketches of her with a tail.

This was what I imagined:

My mom, Rebecca Golding, was born in the sea. She was the most beautiful of all the mermaids, her hair shinier, her tail shimmerier, her voice more captivating than any other fish-girl’s. Her parents were royalty, of course—the king and the queen with all the trappings: a giant gold trident, tall undersea thrones, a beautiful castle made entirely of shells, banners of seaweed waving from every turret.

But she got separated from her family. In my little-girl brain, I watched her chasing a pet sea horse that wouldn’t come when she called it, following it farther and farther away until she couldn’t find her way home to her shell castle.

The sea grew dark and murky, shafts of light piercing down here and there. She swam and swam, her mermaid tears the same salty water she breathed and cried, breathed and cried.

And then a wave came—boiling, insistent, it bore her to the ocean’s surface and threw her far and fast, and she tumbled, head over tail again and again until she landed, coughing and sputtering and drowning in air on the sandy beach. Her body heaved as her tail cleaved into legs, as her lungs drew air.

And that’s where they found her—my grandparents, her parents on land. They scooped her up and took her home and never knew her secret mermaid heart.

And she grew up like that, a fish out of water, too beautiful to really pass for one of us. Her hair, even on land, seemed to float as if in water. She moved like liquid gold, crossing her legs, gesturing with long, beautiful fingers, and her mermaid heart beat in her chest all the while.

Maybe that was why they left her, her land parents, my grandparents. Maybe that was why they never wanted to meet me, see me, touch me. Because they had found out her secret—that her tears were ocean water, that she really, truly wasn’t of the earth.

And so maybe in a way I wasn’t, either. I didn’t have her beauty—my hair was frizzy with static, tangled and quarrelsome, not ethereal and floaty like hers. My movements weren’t liquid beauty. People didn’t turn to follow me with their eyes, not like they did with her.

I drew my mother the way I knew she should look—ephemeral, regal, and free, her skin shimmering into scales at her waist.

What color should her tail be? I tried them all—pinks and purples when I was really young, when those were still my favorite colors. Then greens and blues. Finally, I found the color of her tail when I was twelve years old and made my very first mermaid sculpture, a Mother’s Day present that she kept in a place of honor on the fruit-crate bookshelf. The tail was formed of hundreds of newly minted pennies, overlapping like scales. I had taken a five-dollar bill to the bank and exchanged it for five rolls of pennies. I needed clean pennies for my sculpture, fresh ones—before anyone had touched them; darkened them with oily, greedy fingers; spent them; dropped them on the street; stepped on them. Used them up.

Sometimes I still find myself struck by that image of my mother, a mermaid queen, like just now as I walk into our dank little cave of an apartment, as I listen to the rain of the shower and the sound of her voice.

I would do anything to protect my mermaid mother.

Anything.

The place grows quiet suddenly as she cranks off the water. Then I hear someone taking the stairs up to our level two at a time. It’s a guy—I can tell by the sound his feet make when they hit the steps.

I am still just inside the door, and it is open behind me. The night is warm, the air wet in that way it often is close to the beach. Outside on the landing the security light glows orange yellow. I can’t see who the shape bounding up the stairs will be; in that moment when he is still shadow, still a faceless form, he could become anyone.

Then he reaches the landing, and it’s just Jordan.

“Hey, Seph.” His hair is wet, like he’s been taking a shower too, or maybe he’s just gotten in from the surf. The waves were shit today, but that never seems to bother Jordan.

“Hey.”

“Your mom home?”

I don’t need to answer him because just then the bathroom door opens and out steps my mother, mostly dry, wrapped in a worn gray towel.

Beside me Jordan stiffens. Poor Jordan. He can’t help himself. Technically my mom is too old for him, and I know she thinks of him as that kid who lives downstairs, but it is clear as crystal how Jordan feels about her. I can feel it in the air around him, charged.

He’s twenty-two or twenty-three, closer to my age than my mom’s, but his attention is all in her direction. I can’t look away either. Who could?

“Hey, Rebecca,” he says. “Sorry to bug you.”

“You’re not bothering me, Jordan,” she says, smiling. As if the sight of her half-naked and wet isn’t already enough to ruin him. She has to smile at the poor fucker too. “Give me a minute to get dressed. Okay?”

He and I watch together as she crosses the short distance from the bathroom to the bedroom. Then that door closes and Jordan shakes his head a little, as if breaking from a trance.

“Your mother,” he murmurs, but I don’t think he really means to say it out loud, so I ignore him.

“Want something to drink?” I go into our little kitchen, more to put some distance between me and Jordan’s need for my mother than anything else.

“Um … sure,” he says. “What have you got?”

Juice, water, some milk. A couple of beers. “I’ll take juice,” he says. Then, as I twist the cap off the bottle, “No, no, wait—beer.”

I don’t say anything as I put back the juice, pull out a beer, and knock off its lid.

Jordan takes a gulp of the beer like maybe it’ll give him confidence. His eyes keep traveling over to the closed bedroom door.

It’s awkward, so I say, “What have you been up to, Jordan?”

It takes a minute for him to register that I’ve spoken and another for him to form a thought. Finally, he says, “The usual. Work. Surf.” Then, to be polite, he says, “How about you? Working on anything new?”

I shrug. “Maybe.”

He nods, still distracted, waiting for my mom. But then he says, “Hey. I forgot. My board snapped last week when that big swell came in. Do you want the pieces?”

“Sure. I could at least use the scags.”

“I’ll put it outside your workshop,” he says.

I start to say “Thanks,” but then my mom comes out of the bedroom and Jordan’s not capable of focusing his attention on me anymore. She’s wearing a pair of yoga pants, the plum-colored ones with the fold-over waist that makes like a little skirt, and a black T-shirt.

It is a gray-area outfit. I can’t read it, and that frustrates me. If she’d put on a clean pair of scrubs like she sometimes does for nighttime instead of the yoga pants, then I would know that she definitely isn’t interested in Jordan. If she’d worn her pink silk wrap skirt, that would have been a signal too. But yoga pants … just one step up from sweatpants. A big step, though. Especially with the fold-over skirt thing.

She’s left her hair down to dry, and as she walks past me I can smell the jasmine shampoo she uses.

“What’s up, Jordan? How are things?” She gets herself a beer from the fridge. I wonder at the possible implications of her drink choice.

“Not much. Waves were pretty shitty, but you know what they say.”

“What do they say?”

“You know. About a bad day of surfing being better than a good day of work.”

Mom smiles. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “I think work can be pretty rewarding.”

I grin on the inside as I watch Jordan backpedal. “Oh, no, yeah, of course, I mean, if you’re doing something you love.”

“Or even if you’re doing something you don’t love,” Mom says, “but you’re doing it for someone you love.”

“Right,” Jordan says. He takes a long drink of beer.

I kind of back up quietly, like I’m not there at all, and settle in on the couch. This is promising to be better than TV.

My mom laughs. “I’m just messing with you, Jordan,” she says. “I know you love surfing.”

He smiles, looking relieved. Until she continues.

“When I was your age, if I hadn’t had a kid, I would have spent all my time down at the beach too,” she says.

I ignore the twinge this comment elicits in my gut and wait to see how Jordan’s going to answer this one. He doesn’t, right away. Instead, he leans against the kitchen counter and takes another pull on his beer. I watch my mother watching him, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, the tanned flesh of his throat. His light brown hair curls against the neckband of his faded-out tee.

“Well, I know all about responsibility,” he says, setting his beer on the counter. “I mean, I come from a big family.”

A big family. How strange that must be—ours has always been just the two of us, me and my mom. Once there was a thick letter, addressed to my mom, that I think had been sent by her parents, but she’d scrawled “return to sender” across the envelope and that had been the end of that.

Mom has never offered me information about my father. I have never asked for it. I like the way it is—just us two. I have no desire to share Rebecca Golding with anyone. When I was little and we would sleep together every night, I remember feeling smug. I had friends with two parents, and I knew that their moms didn’t hold them all night, warm and soft and safe.

Those mothers held the fathers.

Mothers and fathers. I push aside these words, purposefully, and focus on the action in the kitchen.

Jordan is running his fingers through his hair, clearing his throat every thirty seconds or so in between gulps of the beer, which I doubt he is even tasting. I almost feel sorry for him. I mean, you can see that he has it bad—his eyes stay trained on my mother’s mouth as she tilts the bottle back, watches as she swallows, as she licks her lips.

I imagine sculpting them—her, a goddess, giant and luminous like the sun, and him, shrunk to the size of a child, gazing up worshipfully.

“So, uh, Rebecca,” says Jordan, and I can tell he’s winding up for the pitch. “There’s this concert next weekend. You know, no big thing, just a local band. I remember you saying how much you like reggae, and I thought maybe you’d want to go.” Pause. “With me.”

There. I study his face for one moment more—anticipation, eagerness, anxious fear. Then I turn to my mom. Let him down easy, I think. After all, he’s a nice enough guy and, from an objective perspective, not bad looking, either. Classic California surfer.

But her face is all wrong. She is smiling. And she leans forward in her seat in a way that makes me uncomfortable, in a way that reminds me she has legs where a tail should be.

“Sure,” she says. “Sounds fun.”