Before and Afterlives by Christopher Barzak Read Free Book Online Page A

not elaborate. She only stroked her board like a cat.
    She was high on meth, he discovered. He went home and told Helena, who shouted and screamed and immediately made him drive her to the place. By then, though, Jordan was gone again. “Why didn’t you bring me with you?” Helena had demanded. “Why didn’t you le t m e talk to her?” Paul had no answers for her then. He still didn’t.
    He stopped at an Asian grocery a few blocks from their house, where he bought food and drove home between the roadside co rridors of palm trees. At home he unpacked the items in his experiment while Helena scrutinized everything. All of it was Japanese food, she pointed out. “I know,” Paul said. “Take this to her.” He held out a clear plastic package filled with sheets of greenish-black, papyrus-like material, which Helena sniffed at doubtfully.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    “Roasted seaweed,” Paul told her.
     
    Martha. Martha Pechanski. The girl with the green eyes and blonde hair, the blonde hair that reached down to the small of her back. And those legs—those legs that turned anyone’s head. Twenty-three when Helena was seventeen, the girl who lived down the street, the girl who married into the sea. There were two stories about Martha Pechanski and Helena knew them both.
    One story said Martha drowned herself in the ocean. She had tied plastic grocery bags filled with rocks around her belt loops and walked out and out, into the waves, until they co vered her head like a veil. She was a sad girl, some said, cut quite a tragic figure. Had problems that no one else knew about. A person would say this while twirling a finger beside an ear. But Helena never liked those who insinuated Martha was crazy.
    The other story said Martha Pechanski had fallen in love with a merman she met while surfing one day. She’d been out early in the morning, her legs straddling the board, waiting for a wave, when his head burst out of the water. Like a do lphin or a seal. Some said it was her legs he had noticed from beneath, dangling in the water.
    The merman’s eyes were like two black glass beads and his hair was moss green. His skin was ivory and his muscles moved b eneath his skin like light rippling on water. If you kiss me forever, he told Martha, I can breathe for us both beneath the sea. And so she went, clasped in his arms, mouth on his cold mouth, his strong tail pushing them down deep, deeper, until they reached home. There she developed gills and a tail of her own and soon she forgot her former life. It was only in dreams, sometimes, that Martha possessed those head-turning legs once again. And in those dreams, her legs took her step by step back down to the water.
    A sea gift, Helena thought. What the sea takes, it gives back in return. She leaned over the edge of the tub and watched the mermaid devour sheet after sheet of the seaweed paper. “You like that, don’t you?” she said. That and the raw shrimp Paul bought, and the tuna and the salmon eggs. She was a luxur ious girl, this one. This mermaid here, now she was a fussy one.
    Over the past few days she had eaten her fill of the groce ries Paul bought; she had calmed down a bit. With her stomach full, she’d given Helena this gift of proximity. She was allowed to be closer now, although the food had to keep coming. They fed her raw oysters, popping them into her mouth like grapes. The days were good, filled with peace and harmony once again. The only cloud obstructing their place in the sun was that several homeless people were sleeping under the deck again. Helena found them. Or rather, heard them, whispering beneath the deck. Let them stay, she told herself. A sea gift, she thought. A gift from the sea.
    That and a neighbor had phoned to tell Paul he was brin ging someone over to inspect his house; it seemed its foundation had been undermined over the past few years, and the seawall hadn’t helped as much as they had hoped. Paul mentioned the call to Helena, but