“I understand being angry.”
“You don’t know what you looked like. I knew every table you waited, dish you washed, the hours at the library, at school, and that you did it for me.”
“We both had to eat and live, it wasn’t just for you.” I remember being tired, yes. Long days, knowing that there was no choice but to do, to keep on doing. “Was it so bad?”
“It would have been easier without me,” she says. “Don’t bother saying it wouldn’t. You could have sold the house and gone wherever you wanted, except that I was here. If I’d stayed you would have wanted me to go to school.”
“Probably.” She’s smart. She should have gone.
“And you would have kept working like that. I couldn’t watch you anymore, knowing I was doing it to you,” she says. Her fingernails are scratching the couch fabric, digging and picking. “It was hard, Simon. Maybe you don’t want to think about it, but it was. I was a burden and it isn’t easy being deadweight. I really thought you’d leave after I did. I wanted you to.”
It’s too hard to say that I kept the house not just for Mom and Dad, but for her, in case she came back. I know now, fiercely, that I wanted her to come home. Where would she come back to if not this house? “If you hate the house so much, why do you care if I fix it?”
“You like it,” she says. “I’m not entirely selfish, I promise.”
Then there’s guilt, and not a little of it either, because I have thought her selfish. Over dinner with Alice. I make coffee while ghosts of us walk the kitchen. My younger self, leaning on the counter, tired like a dead man; Enola, watchful and quiet, curled up in a chair, trying to disappear. I fill two mugs. Enola: cream, three sugars. Mine: black. I drink it while it’s still hot enough to scald.
“Why do you think Dad left this place such a wreck?” she asks.
“Grief, I guess.”
“The great excuse.”
We stare at our coffee, much the way he did. “He told me things sometimes, when he could talk about her.” It was a year before he could say her name, longer before he could talk to me without his eyes looking painful and red. “He said that when he first saw her, she was wearing a blue sequined fish tail and swimming in a tank. She put her hand up to the glass, smiled at him, and he knew that he would marry her.”
It had been more than that. I remember the words and his sour coffee breath.
I saw her in the water and I believed her. I knew it was true, even if she didn’t really have a tail, even though there’s no such thing, she was a mermaid. My whole life before that moment I’d been in a locked room, and then all the doors opened
. And Frank had stood there, witnessing that moment of falling in love. Dad went back to the show every night for a week. “She did different things. The mermaid act, card reading. He saw her being sawed in half by a man so old he could barely lift the saw. She was in a box, hands out the sides, feet out the bottom, helping the guy move the blade.”
Enola shrugs. “Boxes get banged up on the road, the saws bend, they get stuck. You know.”
“I guess the act was going really wrong, but there was Mom, dismembering herself and smiling.”
He talked to me before the sun was up, about the way her hair looked that night. The way she blushed.
Like a ripe peach
. How he’d ditched Frank with some friends from the marina and waited around for hours until the show shut down for the night. He’d lingered outside the magician’s tent until he saw her in shorts and tennis shoes, her hair in a ponytail.
Like a normal girl
.
“He told her he’d come by every night, just for her, and that if she didn’t go for a walk with him he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if she’d been real.”
“Doesn’t sound like Dad at all.”
No, not the Dad Enola knew, but the one before, the memory who told stories about fish so big they’d swallow a little boy in a single gulp. Mom went walking with him. He took her down to the harbor and under the docks. I’ve done it myself when the tide is out and the air is sweet with the smell of ocean and the sound of boats pulling at their moorings. It’s a rite of passage for Napawset boys to take girls down there, to lean against a piling and wrap their arms around them. That was the sort of thing my mother loved—rituals in place for years that never changed. She’d been used to living in trailers, RVs, hotel rooms. He hoped that the lure of a home would be strong.
“He promised Mom the house,” I tell her.
“Well, he could have bothered to take care of it.”
I shrug and drain the last of my coffee. “Maybe with her gone there was no reason to.”
She smirks. She doesn’t have to say it: we should have been reason enough. She stretches and shakes her head. “You fucked things up with Alice.”
“I know.”
She swirls the coffee around in her mug. “She’ll forgive you, though. She just needs time.”
“You think?” During dinner she’d seemed unbending, disgusted. It’s hard to recover from disgust.
A shrugged shoulder. “Sure. If you want her to. But you can’t take money from Frank.”
“I don’t really have a choice.”
“You do, you just don’t like making choices. It used to take you forty minutes to pick out a shirt.”
“It’s the house, not a shirt.”
“Exactly. You could just come with me and Doyle, forget the house, and give Alice time to cool off.”
“I can’t do that, okay?”
“Fine. Suit yourself,” she says. “Oh, I looked at your book some more.”
“Tell me you didn’t tear out any more pages.”
Her eyes roll. “I bet you don’t know what you have.”
In point of fact, I don’t. “I know it’s old. The earliest date in it is 1774. It follows a circus—well, not exactly a circus since there wasn’t really circus in America yet. It had multiple owners, I don’t know how many. A lot of it is ruined.”
“It’s an owner’s log. Thom let me see his. Circus masters, carnival guys, they all keep them. You put in everything that happens on a show, who signs on, who leaves, what they make, where you travel, dates, everything. It doesn’t stay with one person; it stays with the show. Thom’s book is from his father. He’s got a case of books that go back to the sixties. His dad bought the show when the last owner retired to Sarasota. It helps you keep track of the important shit.”
“I figured it was sort of a show history.”
“It’s kind of like a family Bible. Yours, though,” she nudges the book. “That’s weird. It’s not supposed to be like a diary. Thom’s isn’t sketched up that way, either.”
“It’s old. There probably wasn’t an established way of doing things.”
She taps her fingers two at a time, pinkie and index then middle and ring. Dad did that too. “Maybe. Still, you shouldn’t have that book. The way it’s all ruined in the back it looks like it survived a flood or something. Maybe that’s why it’s not with the show or with the family.”
“What do you mean?”
“Books like that aren’t supposed to leave a show. It’s all inside information, history kind of stuff. Valuable. If there was a flood or fire, though, maybe somebody left it behind.” She chews her lip and I can hear the unspoken words. Its owners left in a hurry, or its owners died.
“It’s with family, kind of. Mom’s relatives are in it.”
“It’s just weird that you have it. You should send it back to that guy—I know you won’t. You should also forget about the house and leave, but you won’t do that, either.” Her hand twitches, a quick jerking motion, half wave, half threatened slap. “Why does talking with you always end with me being pissed off? I’m gonna get Doyle. We should check in with work today. And,” she adds as she stops down the hall, “you need to talk to Alice.”
Doyle is on the bed in her room, cross-legged, and meditating. The tentacles on his neck ripple with each breath. Enola says his name and his eyes flutter open. “Hey, Little Bird. I heard you guys talking so I figured I’d just…” He pops his neck. “You guys should talk more, right? It’s good when people talk. Brothers and sisters especially.” He says this as though it’s profound.
“Yeah. Sure,” she says. “Thom’s going to want us to come by. We should get going.”
“Right. Gotta keep an eye on the work situation,” he drawls. He says
sitchyation
and stretches, moving like a man who needs to scratch. “We should talk to Thom about your brother, yeah?”
She nods.
“I have some things lined up. I’ll be fine,” I say. Sanders-Beecher checking references is a good sign. And the half a job lined up with Frank might tide me over—if Alice forgives me.
“Whatever,” she says.
Seeing Enola and Doyle in her room makes me realize how small it is, a child’s room. She rummages under her bed, bones and sinew thrown together in jeans and a dirty paisley skirt. I’ve never understood women who wear skirts and pants at the same time. She stuffs her foot into her shoe, shoving it over a mangled backstay. I stare at her other naked foot. She scrunches the toes up, a habit to hide a deformity, a slight, fleshy webbing between each digit.
“When will you be back?”
“Not sure. Swing by if you feel like getting out.” She looks around her room. “Hell if I know how you stand this place.” Without looking at it, she points to a deep gouge in the wall. To Doyle she says, “I did that.” She began digging that gouge after Dad died.
“Really?” His forehead wrinkles, scrunching the dark ink that crosses his scalp.
“I liked really picking at something hard, you know? When I was pissed off I’d dig at it with a quarter.” I let her lie to him. She used to eat the chalky lumps of drywall. When I came home late I’d check on her and watch as she dug at the wall with her littlest finger and licked the dust.
Things were that bad. They must have been.
“You want us to bring you zeppole?” Enola asks as we walk back to the living room.
“Huh?”
“From the carnival. You used to like them. You should come. If it’s a slow day and George is bored he might share his weed with us; the Fat Man gets good weed. You want?”
“Thanks, no.”
“Suit yourself. Come by, though, okay?” Enola pulls hard at the door, bracing her foot against the wall, yanking until it pops open.
“Do you think Thom would talk to me about his book?”
Doyle slinks an arm around Enola’s waist. Maybe it’s the light, but she’s so thin that if she turned sideways she might disappear. She isn’t well.
“Stop it with the book stuff,” she says. “I know you want to think it’s something more, but maybe it’s just that we’re sad. Maybe Mom was unbearably sad. It doesn’t have to be more than that. Being that sad is enough.”
And then she walks away. Doyle looks over his shoulder at me as they head to his car. For a moment I think he’ll say something, but he rests his hand on her hip and walks with her. As they’re pulling away he leans from the window and shouts, “Dude, just come.”
Two steps from my desk a crack rends the air; my left ankle rolls and my knee buckles.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I’m shouting, falling. The floor gives way and the lower half of my leg is swallowed by breaking boards, wrenched and wrong. I crash onto my back, skull cracking against the floor. The quickest flash of memory—Mom, pressing her lips to a bump on my head after I smacked it against the corner of the coffee table.
I’m close enough to the couch to press my shoulders into it and leverage my weight. Shimmying the leg from the hole adds splinters to the pain. I shout to Enola, Doyle, but they’re already gone. My calf is chewed up and my ankle is bloodied and twisted. A dust cloud makes the air dirty. Papers fall from my desk, floating like leaves.
I could just lie here, couldn’t I? Just for a little while. I look down at the hole. It’s a decent size, a fair amount of damage, I thought it would be foot-shaped but it’s no specific shape. The disturbing part is that there’s a noise, lapping waves from the void below the floor. I stare into the hole. Is that sand? It could be sand. There shouldn’t be sand down there. I put my belly to the floor and peer down through the hole. That can’t be sand. I stick my head into the blackness. Only it’s not entirely black. Light is leaking in.
With Enola and Doyle gone I call Alice, hoping pain will breed sympathy.
“Please don’t hang up.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t,” she says.
“Because my floor just broke, maybe my ankle, too. I’m stuck by the couch and I’m sorry.”
I hear her closing a desk drawer and remember that she color codes her pens. “You made it to the phone just fine.”
“It was on the floor.”
“Fine,” she says. And I learn the meaning of a long-suffering sigh.
If I was hoping for softness, the Alice who opens the door lacks it. She helps lift me onto the couch, arms under my shoulders, with the efficiency of an ER nurse.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Yes, you are.” Before she leaves she slings a bag over one shoulder. “I’ll take those books now.”
The Tenets of the Oracle.
“You said it would look bad if you brought them back. I promise I’ll do it. Just give me a day.”
She chews on her bottom lip and though she’s angry it’s lovely, drawing attention to a dark freckle in the valley between lip and chin. “What’s going on, Simon? I feel like you’re not here anymore.”
I tell her that it’s Enola.
She sighs. “It always is.”
“She likes you,” I say. “She thinks you’re good for me.”
She leans against the door and though she’s here, she’s somewhere else, too. “It’d be nice if you were good for me,” she says.
“I do want to leave here, eventually,” I say. “I don’t want to take the money.”
“Good,” she says absently. “Keep that elevated.” And then she’s out the door. I push up on my hands to watch her go. She’s at her car when she calls, “I’ll cool off. Eventually.”
I wonder, just maybe, if she and Enola talk.
If Enola is right and there isn’t a curse, if we are just a sad family, the sort that’s chemically unable to stay alive, if we drown ourselves for that reason, then my sister just told me there’s nothing I can do for her. That is not a possibility.
Near the desk is a color printout of a flyer, an excerpt from
H. W. Calvin’s Guide to Entertainments for the Discerning Gentleman—
a guide to clubs, speakeasies, and brothels, a piece of propaganda from the burlesque days of Celine Duvel, before she became the Mermaid Girl of Cirque Marveau. A fine line sketch shows that Celine Duvel is one of us: dark hair, light skin, eyes like Enola.