Rouge(112)

“Mother’s gone,” I tell her. My voice is an empty shell. My teeth chatter through my words. “She was right here a minute ago and now she’s gone.”

Sylvia looks at me lying in the sand. My bare legs in the cold, lapping water. My shivering wet body in ripped silk. How I’m gripping the shore in my hands. My fists clutching crystals of sand.

She nods. “I know,” she says in a lower voice. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. They are the only words I have breath to speak.

“Let’s get you home,” she says. She picks up her phone. “Emergency? Hi, yes, I need help at…”

Help, I think. And I’m nodding, my cheek in the shining sand crystals.





33


After they drag me up from the beach, I sleep for a week at Sylvia’s place across from Mother’s. Her guest bedroom is entirely blue. Blue walls, blue pillows, blue bed. Glass seashells and starfish everywhere you look. Peaceful, Sylvia said. I hope you’ll be comfortable here. There’s a little placard on the nightstand that reads MERMAID KISSES STARFISH WISHES. I look at that whenever I open my eyes. The mermaid kiss and the starfish wish. Mostly, though, I keep my eyes closed. Sometimes I dream of black veils and red jellyfish. I wake up screaming. Sylvia’s there in an instant. Shhhh, she says like I’m a child. It’s all right. You’re safe. Only a dream. She does not say tell me your dreams. She does not say what’s this about black veils and red fish? She does not ask what the hell were you doing in a torn dress, washed up by the waves, anyway?

A doctor comes and takes my pulse and shines a light into my eyes. He listens to my heart and lungs and he says Yup. Just fine. Unbelievably. “No hypothermia. No concussion. No psychosis,” he whispers to Sylvia, who blushes. “Of sound body and mind,” he declares, like he could declare such a thing in five minutes. I’m a very lucky young lady. Especially given how long I seem to have been lying there half-naked, submerged in ocean water. Who knows? Maybe I’m part fish. A mermaid. Is that my secret? And he winks at us.

We stare at him.

“No more evening swims, okay?” he says, not smiling anymore.

And Sylvia says, “Thank you, Doctor.” Her voice is a door banging shut in his face.

More than the black veils and jellyfish, I dream of other things. Lake looking at herself in the tray mirror and whispering, Beautiful. Her house on a hill with thirteen windows, I was supposed to help her find it. Dancing with Hud Hudson, beautiful detective. Gray eyes full of tenderness, full of wanting to save me. Who needed to be saved himself in the end. I can only pray he was. Sometimes I dream of Tom. Seth. The breeze of his blown kiss on my forehead. The twin black holes of his true eyes. Mostly, I dream of her. Swimming me up through the dark night of water. Lying side by side with me in the white sand. Watching her red tentacles turn to white arms. Watching her white arms turn to foam on the waves.

“A terrible accident at the house on the cliff,” Sylvia says to me one morning, bringing me coffee. “A flood, can you believe that?”

“A flood?” I picture the veiled ones thrashing in dark water. Their long table of rose petals and black candles floating.

“Terrible,” she says. Her golden retriever comes trotting in after her. The one who found me on the beach. He jumps on the bed beside Mother’s cat and they lie together. They actually get along, Sylvia told me. They’ve been around each other enough in their lives that they’re just fine. Anyway, quite the story about this house on the cliff. There was some sort of giant tank in the middle of the house like an aquarium? It shattered and the whole place flooded. Top to bottom.

“Top to bottom?”

“Yup. People drowned. In a house!”

And now I see everyone floating. The Queen of Snow with her carving knife. The Statues of Cold with their nets, the moonbright ones with their silver mirror trays. All of them drifting lifelessly under black water. Their silk gowns billowing around them, making them look like ghosts. The red chandelier of fire finally out. I think of Hud Hudson again and my chest tightens. The last time I saw him we were dancing beneath it. Dance with me, follow me, his eyes on my eyes, and something in him breaking when I wouldn’t follow. My heart swells.

“Did they find anyone?”

Sylvia looks at me, suddenly curious. “Everyone else must have fled, apparently. No one found. No one taking responsibility, can you believe it? Just typical.” She shakes her head of spikes. That’s the world for you. Right there.

She walks around the blue room, drawing back the pale curtains, opening the windows. “You need air,” she says to me. Every morning when she draws back the curtains, I think they’re going to reveal a tank of blue-green water, a swarm of red tentacles, and I brace myself. But it’s only ever blue sky. A high pale sun. Palm trees, their frondy fingers swaying in the breeze. Sylvia smiling. There you go. She thinks I need more light these days too.

“That house will be condemned now, of course,” she says. “Far too much damage to the foundation. It might even fall into the sea, who knows. Good riddance, I say.” She walks over to the bed and pats the dog’s head. Mother’s cat, Anjelica—my cat now, I guess—just looks at me. “I never liked that place. Creepy, you know the one. You’ll have seen it if you went for a walk on the path along the cliffs?”