“We going to Massachusetts?” Tessa Lee asked.
“Absolutely,” said Goose.
THAT NIGHT AT the state park campground, they built a fire and had hot dogs without buns and then marshmallows, and her momma said, “Isn’t this fun?” and Travis laughed and ran around spitting on antbeds. He had marshmallow on his face, and the dirt stuck to it and gave him a little gritty beard. When Tessa Lee pointed it out, everybody laughed, even the couple at the next campsite with just a one-room tent.
Goose dug through a cooler and handed her momma a beer. Tessa Lee cut her eyes and said, “You promised,” but her momma looked away and said, “We’re on vacation.” Then she popped the tab and made the beer hiss. Even after Tessa Lee and Travis were inside the tent, trying to sleep with a mess of mosquitoes and no-see-ums, Tessa Lee listened for the hissing of beers, one after the other.
And then it was late, but too hot to sleep. Travis was asleep, but not Tessa Lee. His diaper needed changing, but the diapers were out in the truck, and Tessa Lee’s momma and Goose were whispering and laughing in a way that let her know that she shouldn’t go out there. Then they moved to the tent, and Tessa Lee thought she should go get a diaper. But Goose and her momma were rustling the walls, so she decided to be still and keep her eyes closed. She’d never been in a tent before, much less a two-room tent, but she wished the walls were thicker and didn’t flutter so much.
THE NEXT DAY when she woke up, her momma as gone, and Goose was gone, and the truck was gone. She thought at first that Travis was gone too, but then she saw him wandering around a couple of campsites over, and when she got there, he was licking a pine tree.
“Get your mouth off that tree,” she said, and slapped him easy like her momma would do.
“I like how trees taste,” Travis said and kept on licking.
He was wearing gray shorts over his diaper—a clean one—but no shirt. Somebody had written a phone number on his back, in big black Magic Marker letters. Tessa Lee looked at the number and didn’t know at first what it meant. She took his hand and led him back to the tent and found a box of Cheerios beside their bags of clothes.
“Is that your phone number?” asked the woman at the next campsite. “Whose number is that?”
“I don’t know,” Tessa Lee said. “Maybe it’s the place where Momma and Goose went for breakfast. Probably wanted me to call when we woke up.”
But she knew they weren’t coming back. They’d skedaddled without her. The clothes in the bags belonged to her and to Travis. Her momma’s clothes weren’t there. Her momma’s clothes had been packed in a duffel bag with the word “Foxy” written in rhinestones on the side, and the duffel bag was gone. The only thing she’d left behind was the two-room tent and her firefly cloak, which Tessa Lee and Travis had used for covers the night before. Tessa Lee put it on over her pajamas and didn’t worry too much about dragging it through the dirt.
A security guard sat with them at a picnic table and waited, and then a police officer came, and a nice woman who drew hopscotch squares on the ground for nobody to jump in. Travis went inside the tent and cried until the policeman let him blow the siren on his car. Tessa Lee just paced around the campsite, looking for a note that might have blown away in the wind. There wasn’t any wind to speak of, but she thought maybe it had been windy before she woke up, and she checked the back of a BB-bat wrapper she found in the grass, and she studied a receipt half-burned in the fire pit, but there were no words from her momma.
Finally her grandparents drove up in a white van, but since Tessa Lee didn’t know yet who they were, she most certainly did not go hug their necks or try to pet the little dog who hung his head out the window and yowled. She wrapped the cloak tight around her and sucked on a strand of her hair, and when the woman who turned out to be her granny asked if she knew where her momma was headed, she didn’t mention anything about Massachusetts.
SEVEN YEARS LATER, when she finally found her momma, she wasn’t in New England after all. She’d been living two hours away, all that time, up the beach just two hours and never coming to a single dance recital or ball game. Not sending the first birthday card or even calling when she got her tonsils taken out and had to spend the night in the hospital.
All those years, Tessa Lee made up stories for Travis. She told him their momma was a dancer with long legs who wore glitter on her eyelids and white costumes with transparent wings that glowed in the dark. She told Travis that their momma had fingers like feathers, and then he remembered how softly she’d held him, and he cried a little until Tessa Lee whispered that she’d be coming back some day soon.
Secretly, she thought that when her momma did come back, she’d punch her in the guts for leaving Travis. Tessa Lee was strong enough to take care of herself, but Travis was still really little. She could have waited until he was four.
Tessa Lee told Travis their momma smiled all the time and knew more songs than anybody, and she sang him the one about the itsy-bitsy spider and also the one about shoofly pie.
She told Travis that whenever their momma laughed, her laugh was as strong as cheese. Then they both tried to laugh that way, practicing to sound like their momma. They ate cheese slices on the backdoor steps, in case that would help them get the sound right, and Travis would say, “Like this?” and he’d eat some cheese and whinny like a mule, and Tessa Lee would say, “No, more like this,” and then she’d call up a laugh from the lowest part of her throat.
But it never sounded quite right, and Tessa Lee knew it was partly her fault that Travis never got to hear their momma laugh. If she hadn’t nagged her so much, she probably wouldn’t have left.
WHEN TESSA LEE found her momma, she was working in a wax museum on the boardwalk strip. It was the hottest part of summer, and she’d walked a long time down High-Seas Avenue, past beachwear shops and sunglasses huts, past dingy motels built of cinder blocks and motels that jutted up twenty stories and blocked out the waves breaking just over the dunes. She’d been walking for ages when she stopped for a sno-cone and asked the girl behind the counter how much farther it was to Fantasies of the Boardwalk, and it turned out she had a long way left to go.
She walked through air thick and sweet with cotton candy, then suntan lotion, chili, hot garbage. In the next block, there were diesel fumes, the pizza spices, and incense wafting through a beaded doorway where a man with barely a mustache at all smiled at her and tried to wave her inside.
She hoped her granny was all right and not too worried, not lying on the couch with her head hanging off the side, swallowing bits of crushed ice like she did when Travis died and her heart wouldn’t quit banging. Tessa Lee’s own heart slammed against her ribs, thinking about her granny, so she cleared her head and kept walking.
Finally, she could see the sign up ahead, a black sign with neon letters—FANTASIES OF THE BOARDWALK—and a row of white lights flashing all around the edges. Her breath came fast, like those lights, electricity jumping from one bulb to the next. What if her momma had been transferred to another wax museum somewhere far away?
Tessa Lee stopped, took off her backpack, and fished around in it for the flyer, a full-color brochure advertising the place where her momma supposedly worked. The wax museum boasted life-sized replicas of famous celebrities and monsters. It promised freaks of nature, like the Amazing Three-Legged Ballerina and Other Wonders.
She’d taken the flyer from the inside cover of her granny’s bible the day before. She’d memorized the directions. She’d memorized everything on that flyer, including the code for a dollar-off coupon she knew she’d never use. Almost every day since her granny’s cousin had delivered the flyer to them, Tessa Lee had visited it, tried to charm the meaning out of it. She’d folded and refolded it, sniffed it, rubbed its edges along her face. The cousin claimed he’d seen her momma working there when he was at a medical-supply conference, and he’d picked up the brochure from his hotel lobby.
The flyer described Fantasies of the Boardwalk as “dazzling” a
nd “out of this world,” so Tessa Lee was surprised to see a sick-looking bum leaning against the side of the building next to some garbage bins. She was surprised by the mildew that stained the white paint green where the gutter was broken and the rain had dripped down. Those weren’t things she associated with her momma or things she’d imagined as she left home early that morning.
Just that morning, she’d tiptoed in her bare feet down the hall past her granny’s room, where her granny snored softly beneath the buzz of her window unit. She was careful with the door and didn’t let it squeak or slam, and she didn’t put on her sandals until she was off the deck. She’d walked the mile out to the highway, then down the roadside in the dewy beggar-lice, her thumb pointing north, and about the time the sun got hot on her head, a trucker stopped, a nice trucker who bought her a breakfast biscuit. She’d heard stories about the dangers of hitchhiking, but the man who picked her up was a part-time evangelist, and all he wanted in return for the miles was to hold her hand in his while he prayed for her safe journey.
So she said “Amen” and then “thank you.” She hopped out of the truck at the edge of town and took off again on foot.
When she found the place where her momma worked, it wasn’t much past lunchtime. But what if her momma was off that day? Her heart kicked hard, and a part of her wanted to run back to Hully Sanders’s Mobile City where her granny was probably worried sick.
She hoped her granny wasn’t crying and that Rosie Jo was with her. She’d waited for Rosie Jo to get back from her Caribbean cruise before she took off.
Tessa Lee was sweaty, and she didn’t want her momma to see her like that, so she went inside a dark arcade, where boys in loose T-shirts watched other boys shoot targets on a screen. The boy working behind the counter had safety pins through his ears and green hair that stood straight up, and Tessa Lee was a little afraid to talk to him. Boys didn’t look like that where she came from. There was a sign that said NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS right there on the counter next to the cash register, but when she asked the green-haired boy if she could use the bathroom, he nodded and pointed her to a hallway, where she wedged between cardboard boxes and stepped around a bucket of water and an old moldy mop to get through the door.
The toilet was broken, but she used it just the same. She splashed water on her face and hoped her sunburn wouldn’t keep her momma from recognizing her.
IT WAS HER momma, all right. Tessa Lee recognized her right away. She had long dark hair with loose waves, like Tessa Lee’s hair, and very round hazel eyes, like Tessa Lee’s eyes. But she was really skinny, with collarbones that scooped in and made moats around her neck. Tessa Lee put her face up close to the glass and stared until a breathy voice said, “Welcome to Fantasies of the Boardwalk. Buy your ticket at the booth to your left.”
Her voice didn’t sound quite real. It sounded like a bird imitating her momma.
Her momma was dressed like a mermaid, reclining in a conch shell, but she was shrunken, not full size. The conch shell itself was just a little larger than a baby’s cradle, and her momma was small enough to fit inside it. She didn’t look much bigger than a baby or a doll. Tessa Lee wondered what it would feel like to hold her.
“Welcome to Fantasies of the Boardwalk,” her momma repeated. “Buy your ticket at the booth to your left.”
Tessa Lee watched her mouth move and saw that she was actually speaking. It wasn’t a recording. But there was something wrong with her teeth. They didn’t fit. They were too big for her mouth. They pushed her lips out a smidgen too far to be her momma’s lips. Her momma’s long legs were missing, too, hidden somewhere beneath the blue-green tail that draped over the side of the conch shell and arched gracefully into a perfectly useless fin.
Her bra was made of shells, maybe cockleshells, and Tessa Lee stared at her small breasts, her tanned skin, her long brown arms, the slight wrinkles at the base of her neck.
Her momma sighed and said, “Girl, are you gonna buy a ticket or just stare at me all day? You act like you’ve never seen a mermaid before.” It was the same voice that might have said, “Girl, are you gonna pick up those blocks or leave them scattered all over the floor?” and something in Tessa Lee’s chest broke open and spread out warm.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t had a lot of experience—with mermaids.”
She could tell now that the conch shell was made of plastic, that it was like a bed, like the spaceship bed Travis had looked at over and over in the mail-order catalogue. Pop-Pop wouldn’t buy it because there wasn’t enough room in the mobile home for a bed with a pointy nose.
A man in flip-flops carrying a little girl on his shoulders edged up to the window. The child pointed and laughed, and while her momma told them where to buy their tickets, Tessa Lee noticed that there were crabs crawling around the bottom of the fake conch shell. She couldn’t tell if they were real. They looked real, but it was hard to be sure. They might be windup crabs, like bathtub toys.
She went to the ticket counter where a man, eyes closed, was bobbing his head to music only he could hear. Tessa Lee knocked on the glass, startling him, and she bought a ticket and strolled through the museum. She was the only patron in those stuffy, dark halls. She looked for an inside view of her momma while she worked up the nerve to tell her who she was.
She saw wax renditions of a famous clown and some old movie stars, and she saw the characters from a cartoon she used to watch with Travis. She could see rough edges on every figure, like nobody’d bothered to scrape off the extra wax when the figure came out of its mold. Tessa Lee had made candles with her granny to sell at craft fairs, and she knew how important small details could be. Here, nobody seemed to care. And on top of that, there was no sign of her momma.
So she went back to the picture window, where the mermaid said, “Welcome to Fantasies of the Boardwalk. Buy your ticket at the booth to your left,” like she’d never seen Tessa Lee before in her life.
Tessa Lee looked around, and since nobody else was there, she said, “Momma, it’s me, Tessa Lee.”
The mermaid peered out from her conch shell with empty round eyes while the crabs clicked around on the floor.
Tessa Lee held her breath and tried to swallow past her heart, which had made it up as far as her throat. “Remember? You left me and Travis seven years ago?” she said. “You left with Goose?”
“I don’t know nobody named Goose,” the mermaid said, sharply now.
But she looked like she might cry, like her mouth was about to crumple. Her teeth nudged out past her pout, her all-wrong teeth. Tessa Lee studied her about-to-crumple face, and her hair, which sat cock-sided on her head.
Her momma was wearing a wig.
“Sheila Birch?” Tessa Lee asked. “That’s your name, right?”
“I don’t go by that name,” the mermaid whispered. “I’m on the clock,” she said. “You gotta go.” She looked confused, her eyes darting every which way.
“You gotta come home,” Tessa Lee said. “Something bad’s happened.” She wanted to tell her about Travis and how he’d died, but she couldn’t. Not when her momma was wearing a costume.
“Shhh,” the mermaid shushed. “I don’t know you.” She adjusted her shoulders and jabbed at one of the shells of her bra, and Tessa Lee wondered if she had anything underneath that shell at all. Maybe the mermaid wasn’t her momma. Maybe she wasn’t real.
The mermaid composed her face, sat up taller, and gave her shoulders a wiggle. “I can’t have children,” she said. “All my children are fish.” And then she laughed a startling laugh, too loud for someone so shrunken, too rich.
The sound was completely familiar, and Tessa Lee could feel her face get hot. She touched her cheeks and touched her nose, and she could feel tiny blisters from the sunburn breaking, damp on her fingers as she rubbed them away. Her whole face was wet with sweat and blisters, and she couldn’t breathe.
“Momma,” she said. “Please,” and then she took off her backpack and pulled out the firef
ly cloak, hoping it would help her remember. Because maybe her momma’d been in an accident and had amnesia, and that’s why she’d never come back. Tessa Lee held it up for her momma to see. “Look,” she said, and she put on the firefly cloak, which fit her perfectly by then.
It was a faded navy blue velvety robe, with tiny gold fireflies glowing all over. Some of them were so gold they almost looked green, and when she held up her arms, the fabric made wings. Just putting it on made Tessa Lee feel stronger, gave her something to cloak herself with and make her feel safe.
But her momma sucked in a deep gasp, and when she let it out, she cried, “Nooooo,” long and hard. It was almost a shriek, almost a wailing. In an instant, there were people around Tessa Lee on the boardwalk, tourists and shopkeepers and the guy from the hot dog cart across the street, watching the mermaid, who kept crying. She put both hands on her face and wiped backward from her eyes until she’d pushed the wig far enough for everyone to see her bleached hair frizzing yellow beneath it. She smeared her mascara in thick swoops, and Tessa Lee was ashamed to see her like that.
People swarmed around the window, and one woman tapped on the glass and said, “Easy, honey,” and tried to calm her momma down as Tessa Lee backed to the edges of the crowd.
Then a door opened from the side of the wax museum, and a man with thick gold chains around his neck and hair like a rusty Brillo pad sauntered up to the window and said, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” He looked official. He had a cell phone on his belt and a knife in a little holster with a swinging golden chain.
Her momma was gasping, like she was choking. She looked a little like her granny right after Travis died, when she got too worked up and Rosie Jo had to put a paper bag over her nose to keep her from hyperventilating. Her momma kept shaking her head, wheezing “No, no,” her voice already hoarse.