Mermaid Read online

  Table of Contents

  START READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JODI PICOULT

  CAST AND CREW

  Two Ways to Read

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  When my mother was pregnant with me, she used to float belly-up in the Gulf of Mexico, with her ears below the surface of the water, and wait for the waves to tell her my name. She told me she'd stare at the seagulls as they circled overhead, forming potential letters that never strung themselves into anything meaningful. For nine months she swam, and for nine months she heard and saw no signs. Still, she decided to name me Hope. Just because the ocean never chose to speak to her didn't mean it wouldn't choose to speak to me.

  She wanted me to become a marine biologist; me, I wanted to be a painter. I imagined sitting on a stool somewhere in Tuscany, framing a golden landscape; I wanted to be able to talk at cocktail parties about different types of light. But to make my mother happy, I took a marine biology course. I was hooked the moment the grad student injected phosphorus into shrimp and they glowed beneath the water like a string of Christmas lights. That grad student was Nick. He knew far more about marine biology than I ever would. What he didn't know is that he'd fall in love with me.

  Now, years later, I sit in the backyard waiting for the fish to come. Nick is doing a breeding experiment with Bothus lunatus--peacock flounder--and he's organized the project so that it can be done in the comfort of our home--the one we've only just signed the papers for. We bought this house--our first house!--because of the gunite pool, which was empty but full of potential. Not even the listing agent could explain why, in the heat of summer, the pool had been drained. It was a hazard for little kids, an eyesore, an unhealed wound in the backyard.

  For us, it was perfect.

  I have spent weeks preparing it, lining the bottom with sand and rock to accommodate the habitat of the West Atlantic Ocean. I have tested for acidity and salt. Nick will be studying the serial spawning of this species, and how the flounder might be triggered by warming and cooling currents in the water. He has been planning this since the first night he took me out to dinner. Over steak (he didn't eat fish, out of solidarity), he drew a map of his life that was as clear as any picture I could have painted. The ocean might not have called my name, but Nick had, and it was easy to confuse the two.

  I graduated and became an aquarist in Boston, which was the best I could do with an undergraduate degree in marine biology, while Nick slogged through his dissertation. When he took a job as a marine biologist at the same aquarium where I worked, I thought it would be convenient. We could carpool. We could steal kisses in dark corners.

  Then life got in the way.

  And now, he's heading up a study and I'm trying not to believe that he hired me to assist out of pity or nepotism, rather than credentials.

  I hear the rumble of a truck in the driveway. The man who peeks his head over the fence looks like someone I saw last night on the Lifetime Movie Network who killed an entire sorority with a Swiss Army knife, so I speak cautiously through the wooden slats before unlocking the gate. "Yes?" I say, playing dumb.

  "Mrs. Payne," he answers. "We have your fish."

  I unlock the gate. The blue truck in the driveway says On the Spot Transport. The man's faded plastic name tag reads Johnny.

  "You've got to be kidding," I say.

  There was a time when I would have called Nick to tell him this, and we would have laughed until our bellies hurt.

  Johnny and another man, Felix, cart a couple of large plastic tubs into the backyard. They make damp tracks on the lawn. At my direction, they release the fish into the swimming pool. I tip them, and they leave.

  The flounder swim in circles, hovering near the man-made reef Nick and I installed last month. Nick will come home, and we will watch the sun go down over our ingenious suburban breeding tank. We'll drink margaritas and sit so close our shoulders touch. The moon will leap on the water, casting green shadows in his eyes.

  I call Nick at the aquarium to tell him the flounder are here, but he doesn't pick up.

  I crouch down and stretch my hand over the shimmering mirror of the pool. The fish settle uneasily at the bottom and stare up at me, both eyes on one side of their heads. This is one of the interesting physiological facts about flounder: from certain angles, they can never tell what's coming.

  Here is how peacock flounder reproduce: In a harem. One male, many ladies. It happens just before the sun goes down. A male and a female sidle closer. They bow their backs, and their snouts brush. Then the female plays hard to get, moving away, and the male has to come toward her again, from the other side.

  You know, so she's blindsided.

  The way flounder mate is spectacular, magical. The male and female are drawn upward together, in a column of water, as if the very act of procreation makes them lighter. When they are floating about six feet above the ocean floor, the fish release their sperm and eggs, a tornado of genetic material. When the pair settle down on the sand again, the male checks to make sure that the mating worked, and they go off in opposite directions.

  It was less profound for Nick and me. A snowstorm. Vodka shots. A broken condom.

  For twenty minutes, I have counted and recounted. I have checked in corners; I even hiked up my pants and waded into the water myself to make sure there were no blind spots eluding me, no fish hiding beneath the reef. I close my eyes, open them, and count again.

  "There are supposed to be fourteen," Nick says, running his hand through his hair, the motion that's giving him a receding hairline.

  "There were. I swear it."

  "And what happened?" Nick asks. "Did one get up and go out for a jog? For God's sake, how could you lose a fish, Hope?" Almost immediately, his words lose their edge. "I'm sorry," he says. "I shouldn't be yelling at you." His hand, solid and warm, slips down the length of my arm. "It's okay. You signed for the fish, you counted them. The missing one's here, somewhere. Things don't just disappear."

  This is not true. This is not true at all.

  "You don't have to do this," he tells me. "Maybe it's too soon."

  I stare down at our fingers, twisted into a Gordian knot. "This is important to you," I reply. "So it's important to me."

  He looks at me as if he is about to say something, but then shakes his head.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. I just . . . There was a point when this was important to you, too," Nick says.

  This is not true, either. What was important to me was Nick. There's a difference.

  "I know this wasn't the plan," he murmurs. "But we'll make a new one."

  I wrap my arms around his neck and start kissing him. I kiss him so deeply that I start to see stars and he has to hold me up with his arms around my hips. When he pulls away from me, gasping, he stares into the center of me. "Really?" he asks, afraid to hope.

  I jump up and wrap my legs around his waist.

  Somehow we make it up the stairs, leaving a trail of our clothing behind us. Nick moves in me like a man who's found faith. I touch him, I kiss him, but I am thinking of the flounder. How when they swam to the bottom of the pool, swaying to and fro, it looked like a fall of autumn leaves.

  Then Nick buries his face in my neck and I imagine us floating off the bed, more ethereal joined together than we are apart. I picture the faces of angels.

  I don't even realize I'm crying until Nick presses a tissue into my hand. "I'm sorry," he says, over and over, like this is a prayer and he is the sinner.

  When I first met Nick, I didn't tell him where I worked. On Saturdays, I became a mermaid at a ratty theme par