“Are you okay?” I say. And I feel stupid. I have no reason to believe this guy has a human brain in that human head.
He shakes his head hard for a few seconds and touches his cheek with his scaly hand. Then he sits up, balancing where his tail meets his torso, his fin curled behind him, and dusts himself off. “Thanks.”
His tail is skinny and silver, the same color as Dylan’s fish. All of his scales, especially the ones on his chest, look dry, like they’re about to flake off. His hair is short and uneven. Mermaids in fairy tales are never this ugly.
Mermen.
I say, “Hey. All right?” Because his cheek is bleeding now, and because I don’t know what else to say.
I should go.
“No. See, someone ripped off my head and gave me this stupid human one instead,” he says. He spits a mouthful of blood into the water.
“Oh . . . ”
“I’m fucking joking. I’m fine. Those assholes can never keep me forever, anyway. I bite. I would have gotten away. You didn’t have to do that.” He tries to scoot back toward the ocean, but it’s obviously hard for him to move in the sand. “Hey. Give me a shove.”
“I . . . ”
“I’m not fucking contagious, I promise. And I won’t bite you. Even though I could.” He looks me up and down. “Yeah, I could take you.”
I don’t want to give him a push, because I don’t want him to go. But how the fuck do I explain that?
I say, “What are you?” too fast for my brain to figure out what a completely shitty thing that is to ask.
But Fishboy just smiles and says, “I’m their dirty secret.” He wiggles around a little until he’s free, then gives me a nod and pushes himself into the ocean without my help.
I find a fish, already gutted and drying in the fisherman’s basket, and run it home.
I really think I’ll see Fishboy again. I can just feel it, in the hungry part of me.
So I’m holding my sick brother on my lap, keeping him busy while my mom fries up the new fish, and I’m thinking: My friends at home weren’t nearly this interesting.
four
IT TAKES TOO LONG. I DRAW, I RUN, I DO HOMEWORK. I OVER and over again think about going to Diana’s and asking about her books, or about . . . whatever. I chicken out and reread the bloated paperbacks I brought from home and watch the same five videos over and over again with Dylan.
I climb the cliffs by the house and think about climbing trees in my backyard. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a tree. I’m trying to smell them in my mind, but all I’m coming up with are the Christmas tree air fresheners. That’s not right.
I never pictured magic as this cold, gray, dead thing.
I climb all the way up to our kitchen window and tap on it until my mom looks up. I just want to scare her, just to get some reaction, like I’m a fucking child, but she just waves like she was expecting me and, once I’ve hoisted myself onto the real land and through the door, tells me to sit down and do my homeschool work. Tricked.
She sits at the table with me and beats eggs while I scratch out quadratics on a sheet of graph paper. She has the baby monitor they use for Dylan pressed against her ear, like she’s trying to use it to make a phone call. Dylan’s down for a nap, so I’m barely a blip on her radar right now.
I tell her, “I saw Fiona at the market today.”
Mom blows her hair off her forehead. “What are you paying attention to her for?”
Fiona tried to tell my mom’s fortune once. She predicted a happy ending, and I think that’s when Mom tuned her out.
“She was telling me about the ghost who haunts this island. Not even just Ms. Delaney. It’s the whole island. Just one ghost, whole island. Whole ocean.”
Mom says, “Really, Rudy,” in this voice like she hasn’t slept for days. Maybe she hasn’t.
All the more reason she needs a good story. “It’s the ghost of this boy they threw into the ocean who drowned. And now he just . . . wanders.”
She looks up. “Why would you say something like that?”
This hits me like a slap in the face, because she’s looking at me all fierce and angry and I wasn’t expecting it.
I guess she doesn’t like to hear about dead kids.
So I say, “It’s not my story. It’s just something she told me. I thought it was interesting. Come on, I’m not saying it’s true.”
She softens. “I’m sorry, Rudy. It’s been a long morning.”
“Yeah.”
I feel like this exchange should help her unscrunch, but it doesn’t. She’s still beating the eggs, even though they’re now all the same color. Her hand moves faster and faster. Her whisk keeps tapping against the bottom of the bowl. I have this thought that she’s going to keep going forever, like a windup toy that never winds down. Like her whole purpose in life all of a sudden is to beat these eggs. She’s done all this shit for me my whole life, and now all I can imagine her doing is beating eggs.
When I was a kid, I always felt like I needed to keep her safe. She was made of marshmallows and candy canes and she knew twenty hundred lullabies. Dad would give me these talks about how we needed to protect her, and I would feel like a knight. And I loved it. I loved every wimpy bone in my mom’s body, because I felt so fucking strong.
Now she’s made entirely of steel, and Dad’s the one who cries every time any little thing is wrong. And Mom never cries. She hasn’t cried since the first time Dylan was hospitalized. I can’t decide if I’m afraid to see her cry again, because of what it would mean, or if it would be a relief, like coming home. I don’t know.
The house creaks in the wind.
“Your father wants to take you fishing,” Mom says.
I wonder how hard Dad would cry if he dipped his fishing line in the ocean and pulled out a ghost.
Or a boy.
Maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Maybe the fishboy is the ghost.
I should have touched him. I missed my chance to find out what he was.
A ghost is as good a guess as any, I suppose.
And now I’m focusing on the fact that my father is trying to schedule time to be with me, acting like Mom is his secretary, and that feels even more unbelievable than a fishboy or a ghost. We used to play Ping-Pong in the backyard. We used to split peanut butter sandwiches.
I say, “Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll talk to him.”
She nods tightly, like she’s afraid if she moves any more, her cheek will slip, for even a second, from its home against the baby monitor.
“How’s Dylan?” I ask.
“Sleeping well.”
“Good.” I wonder where Dad is. He probably went for a run. We used to run together. There’s no reason, not a single good reason, why we don’t anymore. It’s like my barefoot thing; I want it to mean something and it just doesn’t.
The ancient clock on the wall clicks with each second, but the hands are so springy that every click has two tones.
I’ve got this glass of water that just tastes like salty air.
The clock is making me fucking crazy.
Mom gets up and goes to the stove. I say, “Mermaids can breathe underwater, right?” I don’t know. Because I have to say something. Because I want her to have answers.
“Rudy, do your homework.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Stop procrastinating.”
“Can you look at me for a second?”
She turns around and does, of course, with this soft expression. I guess I’d forgotten that she still looks at me like that. I thought she saved all those looks for Dylan. I didn’t even pay attention. God, I can be a callous asshole when I want to be. And I want to be all the time, it seems like.
I wish Dylan were up from his nap. Lately he’s been really into playing pirates, and I could go for that right now. Someday maybe Dad and I can build him a real boat, just a tiny thing, and I could take him out on the water, and we could look for—
Oh. The fisherman was touching him. He
couldn’t have been a ghost. The fisherman had his hands all over him. The whole thing was . . . God. I don’t want to think about it.
Besides, I don’t even know why someone would think about doing anything with anyone who looks like the fishboy, and it’s not like he could do anything more than kissing, since he’s scales and fins from the waist down.
“How do you have sex with a mermaid?” I say.
“Rudy, honestly.”
“Okay, sorry. God.” But I don’t know if she even hears me, because she’s holding that monitor like she wants it to be a part of her skull. And I don’t even know if I’m sorry.
I draw that night, with Dylan watching, with enough of my attention on the waves instead of the page that it takes me a really long time to realize I’m sketching Diana.
Not a good idea, Rudy. One girl on a whole big island. If you’re not going to marry her, stay the hell away.
I drift off that night imagining regaling her with stories of my conversations with the fishboy. I dream up a smile for her.
five
MOM AND DYLAN END UP COMING WITH US TO GO FISHING, which should probably make me angry. But really I’m thankful that we can blame the awkwardness between us on Mom’s presence rather than the simple fact that we have nothing to talk about. “How’s a guy supposed to bond with his son with a chick around, huh?” Dad says, with a wink at me, and I smile back. After that, we don’t know what to do.
It’s not that we don’t have anything in common. It’s that we have everything in common, and every single bit of our lives has been discussed to death, and neither of us has anything to say that won’t put the other to sleep.
But Dylan is being adorable, sitting next to Mom in the sand next to the dock, kicking his feet in the spray. Mom keeps worrying that he’s going to get loose and float over to us somehow and we’re going to catch him with our fishing lines. Sometimes, the things she finds to worry about, it’s like we don’t have any real problems.
“We’re going to catch the freshest fish you’ve ever eaten, Dyl,” Dad calls down. Dylan could not care less.
But I’m getting comfortable sitting here on the dock, with just the tips of my toes freezing in the water. For a minute everything really is okay. I get my brain to shut up, and I breathe. Dylan digs in the sand until he finds a sand crab, one of those massive armored bugs, and he goes absolutely wild and shows it to Mom, laughing so hard he starts coughing. She’s nervous watching him get all worked up, but she’s smiling, too.
It’s warmer today than it has been, and even though the sun’s starting to go down, I’m not shivering for the first time in what seems like forever. I could probably convince myself that it’s summer, if my goddamn feet weren’t so cold.
I look up at the Delaneys’ mansion, or what I can see of it, anyway—the stilts, the underside, a bit of the lowest balcony that juts out over the dune. I don’t think they could see us unless they really craned over the edge of the balcony, which is probably a good thing, since none of us has gone up to the mansion since that time I ruined dinner two weeks ago.
I see a pair of legs—in jeans, sneakers, Diana—on the mansion’s deck, facing away from us. This might be the first time I’ve ever seen someone whose gaze doesn’t naturally aim at the ocean. Whenever you have a conversation with anyone here, their eyes are always drifting toward it, like we’re all compasses and the whole sea is north, or like if we look away for a minute, we’re afraid it will disappear and nothing will hold us here. We’ll forget why the fuck we’re on this island.
This is the first time I’ve seen Diana since that dinner. And it’s the first time I’ve ever seen her outside. I keep expecting Ms. Delaney to come and call her in, to tell her she’s going to catch a cold or something.
I wish I knew what the hell was up with them. Maybe Ms. Delaney believes the ghost story, and she’s afraid of them, and afraid for Diana, so she keeps them both cooped up. Maybe Ms. Delaney met the fishboy once. Maybe she’s not a fan.
Diana might be able to see us now that she’s on the sand and beyond the crest of rock that stands like a fence in front of her house, so I go back to scanning the water. I’m hoping the fishboy will appear, even if just to prove to my parents that I’m not totally crazy. And it would probably impress Diana. I’d look like some superspy, spotting the mysterious sea creature before anyone else.
But when I check back toward the house, Diana is gone. I see the curtains inside move and the hint of her hair as she draws them closed over the huge window.
An hour later we still have no fish, and Mom thinks it’s time to pack it up and go home. “I’ll make brussels sprouts,” she says, like this is an incentive for us to hurry up. Or maybe she’s just rubbing in our failure. We’re so lame, we have to go back home and eat soggy brussels sprouts instead of fresh fish.
A big wave crashes on the rock in front of us. It misses me but soaks Dad. And I laugh until he yanks me up a few inches by the back of my shirt and threatens to throw me in the ocean. He tugs me up to kiss the top of my head and drops me right before his fishing rod almost jumps out of his other hand. “Hey,” he says. “Got something.”
“Hallelujah,” Mom mumbles, pulling yet another sweater over Dylan’s head. Soon we’re not going to be able to identify him. We’ll think he’s a pile of laundry.
Dad’s fishing rod jerks with another sharp tug, and then he says, “Shit, feels like I lost it.” He keeps reeling in the line.
My own fishing rod tugs. “Whoa, Dad, I think I got something now.”
“You have it?”
But then my line jerks and lets go the same way his did. “Lost it.”
“What the hell?” Dad holds the end of his fishing line in his hand. Both the bait and the hook are gone. What’s left of the end of the line is frayed like someone sawed through it.
Or like someone bit it off.
I reel my line in as quickly as I can. The same.
“What the hell happened?” Dad says.
“Mm. We must have got them caught on the rocks and the bottoms pulled off. Cheap line?”
“Must have been . . . ” He looks at Mom suspiciously.
Then Dylan starts to cough, and he’s hacking up shit that a kid his size shouldn’t have the ability to hack up, and Mom says, “We’ll have to solve the mystery of the fateful fishing trip some other time. Inside, all right?” Dad agrees because he has to.
I say, “I’ll be in in a minute.”
“If you miss dinner, you’re getting skinned.” Sometimes my mother reminds me she’s from the South.
“No such luck. Skin Dyl in my stead.”
Once they’re gone, I toss my fishing pole into the sand and walk to the end of the dock. I don’t see him, so I chance it and yell, “Hey!”
I worry for a second that Diana’s going to hear me. Then she’ll really think I’m crazy. Yelling at no one.
But Fishboy says, “Hey yourself.”
I turn around, and there he is, just his torso bobbing out of the water, his arms crossed over his scaly chest. He has the broken ends of our lines in his mouth, hooks dangling by his chin. “So what the fuck was that?” he says. “You save a fish from the big bad fisherman, then you stick fucking hooks in the water to try to kill all the rest of them? What the fuck kind of joke is that? And I thought you were interesting.”
Um. “You’re a fish?”
“What the fuck do I look like?”
“Fiona says you’re a ghost.”
He laughs once. “Fiona’s full of shit.” He spits the hooks into his hand and buries them in the sand. “She said Ms. Yves would die at a hundred and two. I heard someone say yesterday that she’s a hundred and five. So.”
“You know Fiona?”
“I know all of you.” He smiles. “Rudy.”
I take a step back.
He stops smiling. “Is this really a surprise? What do you think I have to do all day? Spy on all you fucking humans while you kill the fish. Yep. Great. Thanks a lot.”
<
br /> I can’t stop watching him while he talks.
He says, “Are you gonna be a fisherman when you grow up, Rudy? They don’t even have to do anything, now that they have those fucking nets up; it’s like, they can sleep all day and kill the whole population.” His face is turning red while he talks. “God, you’re even worse than them, you know? Because you walk around with your cute little family like you’re so fucking whatever, then you come down here and start hunting all of us. Yeah, you’re such a little hero, saving the one fish and going home and eating a whole father-whatever-baby set for dinner.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Maybe he likes fish so much that he fused himself with one. Maybe that’s what happened. That doesn’t make any sense. “You’re not a fish,” I say. “You have, like, hair. And arms. Lungs.”
He seems to be agreeing with me, if a little reluctantly, until I gesture to his chest, and then he grabs me by the legs and tackles me into the water.
I’m not fast enough to close my mouth, so I taste everything: the salt, the algae, the shed scales. I never realized before how loud water is.
And mother of Christ, it’s cold. I struggle. The fishboy’s hands keep gripping my thighs, hard, like he’s trying to tear them off.
It’s the longest anyone besides Dylan has touched me since I’ve been here.
I’m kicking and it’s not working shit it’s not working. I’m going to drown. I can’t believe I moved to an island without learning how to swim. I’m choking and I’m going to die . . . .
He’s pulling me down as hard as he can, and he’s going to kill me, fuck, my parents are going to actually fall apart, but one of my flailing feet nails him in the ribs and it startles him enough that I can scramble to the surface for a breath. My foot brushes his tail. It’s rough and ugly like a rash.
I push myself away from him, panting, grab on to the edge of the dock, and pull myself up, into the air. Safe. I’m huddling against the wood like it’s my mother. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to haul myself back onto the dock, so maybe I’ll just stay here forever. This is my new home.