"No, Jenni." Den shook his head. He stood himself and stepped away.
"Exactly." She jabbed the center of his chest with her finger. "The kids don't die first. The parents have to die first. That's how the rules work. Not always, but you don't want to be a parent who's lost a child. Never. And yet that's what I've been stuck with. Something that eight-year-old thought thirty-something years ago. And it just keeps going around and around in her head until it's worn a groove that's so deep she can't even see out of it anymore."
"I'm—"
She jabbed him again. "Now you've taken away the only thing I had. I can't even make the thoughts go away anymore."
"It was killing you."
"So what?"
"I—"
"You think I'm blind to that?" she said. "I'm not an idiot. I'm just a mess. And you know what? You are too. In a different way. In a nasty, creepy, smarmy way. You come across all nice and pretty and helpful and loving and you just wreck things."
"Jenni. I'm sorry."
"Will you stop it? I don't need you to keep apologizing. I just need you to leave." Her shoulders slumped and she exhaled. She stepped around him and went into the bathroom.
Den heard her throwing up in the bowl. He wanted to go and help, but he felt seared after her attack. As if her words had been flames cooking off his skin.
He went to the front door and opened it. Melissa was sitting in the front with the passenger door open, her feet out on the strip of dead grass by the curb.
"How you two doing?" she called over.
Den shook his head, but didn't say anything. He should probably leave. It felt good to have Melissa to go to. Even if it did all come out at the lab, they had—twee as it sounded—each other.
"You going to see your dad?" Melissa said. She pulled forward into the sun and stood, leaning one arm across the car's roof.
"Maybe," he said. He waved, then went back inside. He heard the toilet flush and the sound of an air freshener aerosol hissing. The smell of apples wafted out.
Then the sound of water running in the tub and she pushed the bathroom door closed.
Den took out his phone and called his father, imagining that he would have to leave a message.
"Fishing," his father's message voice said. "After the tone and all. I might eventually get back to you."
"Hey, Dad," Den said. It took him a moment to figure out what to say. "I'm at Jenni's.
She's doing okay, I guess. We caught up a bit." He paused again. "Um, I think I'm going to come up and see you for a few days."
Jenni came out of the bathroom. "You still here?"
"Just calling Dad," he said.
She managed a smile. "I already called him. Is he on the line?"
"I'm leaving a message." Den held up the phone.
"Is he really fishing?"
"Yep. That's pretty much what he does."
Jenni nodded. "I didn't leave a message. May I?" She held out her hand.
Den gave her the phone, dreading what she might tack onto the end of his message.
"This is Jenni." She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Did I overhear you say you're going to see him?" she whispered.
Den nodded.
"Okay." Then, to the phone. "I'm going to tag along with Den and his girlfriend."
She looked at him. "I guess you came with Melissa?"
Again he nodded, feeling a little stunned.
"Okay, yeah, so get ready for three of us. That's three pairs of legs. All pairs. Your boy here's a bit of a swindler and he swindled me some new walking gear. I've got to show it off." She took a breath and handed the phone back.
Den ended the call. "You're coming?"
"If you can wait for me to scrub up. I'm running the bath."
"Sure, I can wait. What made you... why did you change your mind?"
Jenni squinted, still smiling. "I didn't really change my mind. You're still an interfering, insensitive know-it-all, but you're my brother and I guess your heart's in the right place."
"I hope. That's all I was—"
She held her hand up. "Don't keep talking." She looked down at her leg. "The thing is, it's much easier to get around now. Lose something, gain another."
"Gain a brother."
"Eww, really corny. Now get out of here and let me take a bath. We can leave right after."
She stepped forward and drew him into a hug. Her arms felt spindly and fragile, and her body was thin against him, but she still clung on like a bear. He hugged her back, surprised to find himself choking up a little. He felt like that little kid again, back at the very first time he'd seen her and she'd been that angry, agitated teenager, but she'd still been able to give him a hug back then. Years had gone by and this was all he'd really wanted, he realized. He just wanted his big sister to give him another hug.
"Okay," she said, pulling back. "Get out of here and let me get scrubbed. I'll be out in fifteen."
He stepped away and headed for the door.
"And stop grinning, will you," she said. "You're not properly forgiven yet. You're just my brother."
Den couldn't stop grinning, but he said, "That's enough."
Jenni laughed and went into the bathroom, and Den headed out to see if Melissa felt like a drive to Wyoming.
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her two hundred plus fiction publications include stories in
Asimov's, Clarkesworld,
and
Tor.com.
Cat's short story, "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain," from her third collection
Near + Far
(Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee and her editorship of
Fantasy Magazine
earned her a 2012 World Fantasy Award nomination. For more about the author, as well as links to her fiction and information about her popular online writing classes, see
http://www.kittywumpus.net.
In Cat's brutal new story, a woman whose world is coming undone finds little solace among...
"Mermaids," Petra said. She spit the word out, then chased its taste away with a sip of water. "Aren't people tired of mermaids yet?"
Leonid smiled condescendingly at her. "That's the joy of designing toys." He dabbed his face with a cloth napkin before continuing. "Children find things fresh, even things that staled for adults long ago."
The restaurant's bustle and clink was muted, decorous. Upscale, like Leonid's business suit. She said, "The world doesn't need another virtual game. Particularly a mermaid one."
He held up a finger. She hated when he did that.
"There's the twist, you see. Not virtual. These are real."
She leaned forward to spear another bite of orange-drenched tofu. How to depict flavors in a piece? If you opted for organic elements, you were surrendering to the idea that your artwork would decay, disappear one day. "Won't they be terribly expensive?"
"Of course. But I'm aiming at the 1 percent, who can afford fancy, frivolous things. They become status symbols for their children. That's the niche I'm aiming for."
Always some new business scheme with Leonid. Luckily he had the brains to back it up. Still, it was that restlessness, that search for something bigger and better that had driven him from one place to another, that had finally forced Petra from the marriage, taking Kerry with her, into stability.
At least, she hoped she was taking Kerry with her. Custody hearings were still to come. They'd barely gotten to the point where they could sit together and talk like this. Leonid had felt so betrayed by Petra's departure that he hadn't spoken to her for three months.
Still, he was cordial now. He said, "But I want to give you a set for Kerry. She'll be the envy of all her friends."
"She won't be back from camp for almost a week. You can give them to her then, wouldn't you like that better?"
He shook his head. "When you start setting things up, you'll understand. If you get it started for her, you can have a couple of generations of them ready to go." He pushed a pamphlet across the table toward her. "It's all in there, you'll see."
"You breed them?" she asked, looking down at the mermaid on the cover. She thought it a cartoon at first glance, but closer examination showed three dimensionality. Like a toy, an exaggerated vision of femininity, pink fishtail with sparkly scales, long blonde hair floating in the water, tangled with scalloped white shells.
She said, "Are they intelligent?"
He looked shocked. "No, that would be illegal, of course. They're not even the same level of intelligence as goldfish or finches."
She tapped a nail atop the pamphlet. The paper was stiff, heavy, high gloss. Expensive, to sell an expensive trinket. "They look humanoid?"
He smiled. "It does look that way, doesn't it? But in reality, we've bred them into specific forms, designed very carefully. Nothing risqué, of course. Our mermaids are strictly G-rated. Very Disney."
She didn't think that would be a point in favor of the mermaids for thirteen-yearold Kerry. Her daughter was interested in more emo, edgier things, skirting a line that Petra both sympathized with and feared. She understood the allure of knife-edged black. But she also knew how it drove you to test boundaries, to rebel against anything handy.
Leonid's hopeful face shone across the table. All he wanted to do was connect with the daughter who he hadn't seen in a month. Petra should help in that, for Kerry's sake, if not for Leonid's.
"How much fuss is this going to involve?" She pleated her napkin, looking at the texture. High thread count. Good for paper-making. A subtle nobby line was woven into it, a pattern of matte and shine.
Typical of Leonid to assume she had plenty of time for finicky pet keeping. He'd never understood how she worked, that creating the vast collages that she'd become renowned for, that now sold for a hundred thousand minimum, took hundreds of hours of effort and planning. You would have thought a contemplative scientist would understand that one could be staring into space and actually working. But Leonid was a tinkerer, a mover, filling every minute of the day with constructions. Even now, the toothpicks and sugar cubes he'd been fiddling with lay scattered like a deconstructed puzzle.
Leonid said, "Not too much." His blue eyes pleaded. "It's for Kerry, after all. Doesn't that make it worthwhile?"
It did, of course.
The set up equipment was more bulky than she expected, but Leonid helped load it into her trunk. She tipped the doorman to bring it up to her apartment. At least there was plenty of room in this new place. Only two months into occupancy, she was still furnishing it. She'd rented it primarily for the large room she'd designated as a work space, with its wall of windows overlooking Lake Union. And because it had a small bedroom for Kerry.
More room if she didn't end up keeping Kerry with her.
The kit was, in the manner of such things, more complicated to put together than the directions implied. Six tanks nested inside each other, the center occupied by a contraption called the "Song Chamber." More collapsible tanks in the bottom of the box. Tubs and spiraling tubes and oddly heavy plastic cubes, and "mermaid seeds." Each of the last was a bead-sized round that the instructions told Petra to insert in a spongy disk of matching color.
She set it all up in the breakfast nook for now. They could move the mermaids into Kerry's room when she got back.
If it ended up being worthwhile. Often Leonid's schemes sounded better than actuality.
That was part of life.
She'd ordered Sea Monkeys when she was twelve. From the back of a comic book, one of those full page spreads of marvelous things, X-ray spectacles and itching powder and prank gum and above all, the wonder of Sea Monkeys. The illustration showing a King Monkey flanked by two smaller females.
The reality of brine shrimp, not humanoid at all, crushed her. In a fit of pique, she flushed the monkeys down the toilet and suffered subsequent convulsions of guilt, envisioning the monkeys trying to find their way home out of the sewer's sticky darkness.
She put down the plastic pipe and went to the window. October through March, the Seattle sky was gray.
Gray like a city pigeon's Quaker coat, respectable.
Gray like a waterlogged page.
Gray like her mood, most days.
She was going to coffee with Marla tomorrow. That was what kept her sane, despite the isolation of working at home, the daily coffee or lunch that she rotated among her group of friends. She was looking forward to catching up with Marla, her oldest friend.
She splayed her hand on cold glass. On the other side, raindrops trickled down, silver as the distant clouds.
Returning to the table, she consulted the instructions. She filled two tanks and prepared two coral seeds, one orange and the other turquoise. She put each in a separate cup of distilled water beside the tanks.
The pamphlet was oddly thick and badly proofread. The second half was a listing of mermaids that could be created. Apparently you bred them with each other to produce new color combinations. Like guppies.
A name and a tag line accompanied each thumbnail-sized picture.
Mela: Her sweet nature mirrors the honey color of her hair. Watch her create harmony in a troubled tank.
Sirena: A tawny songstress, this mermaid loves the wilds, and is often seen riding a shark among the waves.
Voluptua: Black scales and red hair for this marine vixen. Don't put her in the same tank as an Angela!
Petra snorted. Someone had put a minimum of time into creating this mythology.
"My Volupta ass," she said aloud. She returned the pamphlet to the table and went to work on her latest collage.
Marla took the latte from Petra to put it on the checkerboard sized table. Petra settled tled herself and her own black coffee in the opposite chair. She was glad Marla had opted for Soul Food Coffeehouse, with its comfortable darkness and strings of Tibetan prayer flags. Their mugs mirrored the place's eclectic nature: Marla's sported a large skull and crossbones on the side, Petra's the words "Seneca Falls Ladies Auxiliary" in bright red Gothic lettering.