The Mermaid Girl (4 page)

In the middle of the night, he woke to find her watching him. “Is your head any better?”

“Perfect,” she said.

“Good.”

“I just need to remember to breathe more.”

“That's like telling yourself to remember to blink. You do what you can, that's it.”

The nights she'd been in the tank she'd breathed only five times an hour. She told him that the pressure, the water, and the lights had made the headaches start.

He settled back to sleep. She whispered into his ear, “You're a good, solid man, Danny. Love you.”

When he left for work he heard her in the bedroom, laying cards on the floor, the soft tap of paper and the whispering. At the press, in the middle of the day, when his knees started barking, he tried to take apart what he'd heard her say. She'd been asking for her mother. There were cards she read for other people, she'd read for Frank, for Leah, for him every now and again. She'd used silly laminated tarot cards she'd picked up at a bookstore. It felt like a party trick, a really good party trick. The deck she used in mornings, at night, when she was asking for her mother, was the deck she kept in a box in her top drawer. They were old, worn, and smelled like Simon had said his book did, like basement, cookies, and vinegar, and like somewhere he wasn't allowed to be.

*   *   *

He didn't feel the press go through his glove, not even the pressure of it. A quarter-instant of heat, blinding heat. Friction, pressure, then the punch. Leather, oil, and metal met skin, muscle, and bone. He must have screamed. His knees buckled, the left turning sideways. The pain sluiced through his hand, wrist, arm, whole body, flashing cold, cold, cold.

Tools dropped. Someone came running. The steel strips began to curl, pile up, and mash into the press line. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tim Banderlee smack the emergency stop on the feed. His world blinked electrified purple.

Someone tried to pull his hand free, but he was attached to the punch. It had gone through his finger, but not severed it. He was stuck to the machine, nailed there. Flesh gummed in the works. When Tim tried to pull, the animal wail Daniel made frightened him. “Jesus Christ.”

Banderlee called for the floor manager. They overrode the machine and dismantled the punch until they could pull it straight up, straight through. The pain of removal was worse than the punch. He remembered his hand being lifted, his arm held above his head.

Someone—Curtis?—shouted, “Watch it, he's gonna drop!”

Rocco caught him. There was so much water in his ears, thick water, he couldn't hear right and everything stung and throbbed.

“Hey, you okay, buddy?”

“Yes. No. I think my wife's sick,” he said. He didn't sound like himself.

“Okay, Dan. We'll call her,” Rocco said. “Tim, keep his arm up. Don't let him look.”

She was in the emergency room. He was in the emergency room. She squeezed his good hand. He had a good hand, now. That much he knew.

“Hey, sleepy.”

The overhead lights trailed. She looked like water again. “I fucked up, didn't I?”

“No,” she said.

“Where are the kids?”

“With Frank and Leah.”

“The guys told me not to look.”

“You should look,” she said. “You'll feel better if you can get your eyes around it. I'm here.”

He took it in small glances, down the arm, to the wrist, to the giant clubbed white bandage. His sleeve had been cut away and he couldn't feel his arm below the elbow. He pressed the forearm with his right hand. The skin was warm, but also distant, like it wasn't his. It felt like wood putty somehow, or Play-Doh, something to be shaped. “I can't feel it?”

“That's the nerve block,” she said. Then she told him he would lose his finger. “Not even a whole one, just most of a finger. What happened?”

He tried to find words. Something about the time he'd have to take off work, what he'd do. “My ring,” he said. It was probably stuck in the metal, with the punch, his glove, his flesh and bone. His sweat felt strange too, cold and slick on his right side, just a tickling on the left. When they started using the press again, there'd be little bits of him and his ring scraping into the metal, fusing together. Parts of him would be everywhere.

“They cut it off when you got here,” she said. “I've got it in a baggie. We'll get it fixed.”

Paulina pulled her chair as close as the bed would allow. She leaned in. She tapped his nose with her fingertip. Her left hand. She tapped his forehead, his lips, then trailed her finger down his arm until she reached where he seemed to disappear. “Hey, it's just a finger. I can't even feel with the tip of this one at all,” she said.

He'd never known that.

“Why?”

“From sewing that fucking fish tail,” she said.

“How much sewing did you do?”

“More hours than I can count. The stuff we used to clean the tank made it so the water would eat through the threads.” She leaned over the bed rail. “Can I climb in with you?”

He nodded. She fit against his side. If he could see them from above, he knew what they'd look like, love and worry, the sweet foolishness people tended to envy. Inside felt cottony, like morphine, like being thirsty, like hurt. “What about your skin? How'd the water not hurt your skin?”

“Vaseline,” she said.

He'd fallen in love because she'd shone, because she tried to keep the water from eating her, because she'd sewn so many sequins she'd lost herself. “Did your fingers get any feeling back?”

“Yes,” she said. “It hurts at first.”

*   *   *

He knew that Simon was afraid of the stump. Was it a stump if it was just a finger? It was more a not, a sudden absence, as though someone had stopped just shy of completing a hand.

Simon watched it at dinner. “What's it feel like?”

“It doesn't feel like anything,” Daniel said, which wasn't true. He didn't not feel it. He didn't ever imagine that it was still there, but he felt things that weren't happening, water dripping on parts of his hand, a feather brushing skin that wasn't there. He was lucky he didn't have pain. He was more aware of the finger for its absence than he had ever been when it was part of him. Then he understood. Pills would never work; Paulina's headaches were from absence—a phantom pain from missing the tank, the water, and Michel.

Enola would grab on to the stub of his finger, as though she'd discovered a new handle, just the right size for her chubby fist.

In the mornings he took to pressing his hand to the vanity in the bathroom, squeezing his other fingers against the space, seeing if he could convince himself it was still there.

Paulina wanted to know how it happened, the exact why and the process.

“I was distracted. Thinking about things, doing everything you're not supposed to.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing, really. I was just tired,” he said.

She made a point to grab his hand more, the imperfect one, the spot where he had been.

“Don't trim yourself down any more,” she said. “Not ever. There's just enough of you.”

*   *   *

On the beach, children playing in the water, she pressed his palm to the sand. Her hand was warm on top of his. A few grains of quartz gritted against his skin, glass waiting to be born.

“Lift up,” she said.

The imprint of his hand remained in the damp sand. He stared at the truncated mark where his ring finger should have been.

“Watch,” she said. With her left hand, she filled in the missing digit's shadow. It was light at first, barely there as she figured out the pressure required to truly draw. He realized that she never knew how hard to touch, or when exactly touch began.

She finished his hand.

“There we are,” she said.

In the water Simon splashed around with Frank and Leah's daughter.

Daniel looked up the cliff, then at his house, which sat on the edge. Time and water were slowly carving the land to nothing. Terracing might stop it for a while, but it was fighting a losing battle. The island was shaving itself down, shaking away all excess. Trees, houses. He'd shaken away some excess.

His surgeon said to be grateful that he hadn't lost his thumb or index finger. He didn't have to learn to write again; he'd never played an instrument. He taped his work glove's empty finger to the back, which marked the set as his. No one took them by mistake now. His wedding ring made the easy switch to his right hand, where it sat more snugly than it ever had on his left. His life accommodated the small absence as though he'd been born with it.

In the sand his hand was restored by the shadow finger his wife had drawn. He began to understand that missing made him complete.

 

Also by
Erika Swyler

The Book of Speculation

About the Author

ERIKA SWYLER
, a graduate of New York University, is a writer and playwright whose work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies. born and raised on Long Island's North Shore, Erika learned to swim before she could walk and happily spent all her money at traveling carnivals. She is also a baker and photographer with a widely followed Tumblr,
Cookie Dough & Regret: Baking and shame
(
ieatbutter.tumblr.com
). Erika recently moved from Brooklyn back to her hometown, which inspired the setting for this story. You can sign up for email updates
here
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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Also by Erika Swyler

About the Author

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE MERMAID GIRL
. Copyright © 2016 by Erika Swyler. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Olgra Grlic

Cover photographs:

Mermaid © Shafran/Shutterstock

Waves © natsa/Shutterstock

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