Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel Read online

  Standing there on the dock, we wondered where Riley the videographer had gone. We hadn’t seen him since he told us the footage had been stolen; he’d said he was going straight to the police, to tell them about his camera. He’d promised to be here to welcome the Berkeley anthropologist, but he was nowhere to be seen and didn’t answer Chip’s calls or texts.

  We worried about the Berkeley anthropologist, too—what he might say, without a video. He’d probably think he’d made the arduous and, let’s face it, expensive trip for nothing. It was no joke, flying from California to the Caribbean on a last-minute ticket. And if he turned out to have been close to Nancy, worse yet—for then, of course, there’d also be the grief. We couldn’t recall if she’d said they’d been friends or only colleagues.

  The three of us watched the white prow of the ferry as it first appeared—it’s not a large ferry, really, mid-sized at best—and the lights of the harbor around us twinkled in the gathering dark.

  “I like ferries,” mused Chip, and squeezed my hand.

  “We came in by chopper,” said Steve. “I don’t do boats. Not anymore. No boats of any kind, not even a rowboat. I’ll never set foot on a ship again until the day I die.”

  “Do you get seasick?” asked Chip.

  “Not at all,” said Steve.

  Chip and I waited politely, but he didn’t go on.

  The ocean and horizon were dim purple shades, and the lights on the ferry twinkled—though way more dimly than the lights of the resort at our backs. Then we saw another light, the light of a second, smaller boat as it approached the ferry from one side.

  “That’s a police boat,” said Steve. “The BVI police cutter. Or maybe it’s the Coast Guard. I’m not sure the Brits even have their own boats.”

  To our surprise the two ships met. We couldn’t tell if the ferry slowed or stopped; it seemed to remain static until the police boat moved away again, off to somewhere we couldn’t see. After that it grew nearer steadily.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling,” said Chip.

  And sure enough, when the ferry reached us at the dock tourists streamed off—mostly couples, a few singletons with bulging shopping bags, the odd kid holding hands with a tired-looking parent—but there was no Berkeley anthropologist. We thought at first he might have been camouflaged among the day-trip shoppers, and Chip approached one or two, but we got no love from them.

  “Do you think,” I asked the guys, when the last of the passengers had disembarked and we were still standing there lamely, “that police cutter could have had something to do with it? With the fact that he never arrived?”

  Steve looked at me, and I saw it in his eyes: he did.

  “I don’t get it,” said Chip, as we walked slowly back down the dock, slumping. “If the police boat intercepted the ferry to meet the anthropologist—I mean if; he could have just missed his plane. But first off, why would they? How would they even know he was coming?”

  “They have her phone,” I suggested. “I’m sure they do. So they can access her voicemail, her texts and her email, no problem. That’s my bet. She probably unlocked her phone, since she was using it so much.”

  “But why would they want to intercept him? I mean he’s not a suspect or anything.”

  “And the cops around here are kind of a joke,” said Steve. “I researched it, you know—because of the phobia. Our assumption was, in this kind of tourist economy, good cops would actually be a bad sign, in terms of the likelihood of violent crime. The Virgin Gorda cops have to call in the troops from other islands when something serious goes down. I can’t see them doing anything they didn’t have to do.”

  “Who does have the power on the islands?” I asked Steve. “Do you know?”

  Steve shook his head.

  “Is there power?” he asked naïvely.

  “There’s always power,” I said. You’d think a Freudian would know that better than anyone, but I kept my mouth shut on that point. “The question is who has it.”

  “Whoever has the money,” shrugged Chip. “Right?”

  We stepped off the dock and onto the white sand; we looked up at the buildings of the resort in front of us, stretching far out to the sides, along the beach, and quite a ways back, to where the soft hill of the park began to rise. We felt the comforting shape of their well-designed spaces, their welcoming lights.

  BACK AT THE Steve/Janeane cabana, the two men and I sat on the back porch and Janeane brought out a brownish pile of hippie-style grain, mounded low and flat on the serving plate like a dormant volcano. We all felt worried and restless, so the mood wasn’t great; soon after she sat down and we all began to eat, we were interrupted by a crisp knock on the cabana’s front door. I flashed back to that morning, when Steve had knocked on our own door and brought me news of death. Then I abandoned my fork and ran to answer the summons, admittedly relieved to be clear of my quinoa mountain.

  There stood someone I’d never seen before, a young guy dressed in business casual—I’d almost say dapper, except his tan was a few shades too deep. It crossed the fine line between handsome and pleather.

  “Hey there—Mike Jantz,” he said, or it might have been Jans or Jams, the exact name was one of those small slivers of knowledge that slips through your fingers forever. “I’m with Paradise Bay Guest Services. Good evening!”

  “What’s this about?” said Chip, coming up behind me—he too, I think, was eager to escape the quinoa.

  “You must be our newlyweds in the Star Coral Cabana, am I right?”

  At Paradise Bay all the cabanas have names; ours was Star Coral, the Freudian’s was Pearl Diver.

  “That’s us,” said Chip, and cocked his head. “How did you know?”

  “We try to give all our guests a caring, very personal service. I make sure I always know who’s who.”

  “That’s nice,” said Chip, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “I apologize for interrupting your dinner,” said the tanned man. “It’s delicate, but we at Paradise Bay want to bring together all those who were associated with Dr. Simonoff, who, as you know, has passed away. We want to make sure the guests who were associated with Dr. Simonoff are kept in the loop—that everything is done, from our end, to make sure your needs are met at this upsetting time.”

  “We were associated too!” called Janeane, hovering at the sliding doors to the back patio. “We ate at the breakfast buffet together! Twice!”

  “Talked about aphids,” said Steve modestly. “Pea aphids. These bugs self-detonate. Whole suicide bomber thing, they self-explode. To take out ladybugs.”

  “Uh, sure,” said the tanned man. His tie, I noticed, seemed to depict fireworks on a maroon background. “That’s good to learn. Please join us, in that case. We’re gathering in the Damselfish Room in twenty minutes. We’ll send a buggy for you. I should go—doing my best to locate all the guests with a, you know, acquaintance or relationship. With the deceased.”

  After I shut the door on him I couldn’t move for a minute. It was like I was paralyzed.

  “Deb? Deb?” Chip was saying. “You OK there, honey?”

  I didn’t like the way the pleathery man had said deceased. The texture of it was greasy, smarmy. Death was trivial, in that mouth. I felt dizzy.

  Then I snapped out of it and nodded.

  “Fine. Yeah. We should go.”

  “Hmm—Damselfish Room,” said Steve, who’d also come in from the patio. He unfolded a dog-eared map that lay on the bar counter. “I’m pretty sure that’s—yeah. It’s way over on a far corner of the property. See? It’s where they do the nature slideshows no one signs up for, the natural history talks. I went to one. A guy talked about lizards that jump like frogs. It’s in one of those futuristic hippie domes. What are they called?”

  “Hydroponic?” said Janeane.

  “Geodesic,” said Steve, nodding like they agreed.

  “I’ve always wanted to see inside a dome like that,” said Chip.

  THERE WASN’T ROOM in the golf
cart for all four of us so Chip volunteered to run beside the cart while Steve sat up front, squeezed in next to the buggy’s driver. This one wasn’t acting servile, I noticed—more casual. A relief. He and the Freudian started chatting about trivia; the driver couldn’t act fully servile, I guess, all thigh-to-thigh with Steve up there. The servile dynamic didn’t work smoothly, with two guys rubbing thighs.

  At that point, with manly thighs rubbing—at that point even a servility professional has to throw in the towel.

  It was just Janeane and me on the passenger bench in the back, left there to jiggle inertly. Janeane jiggled a good amount. What was it, I asked myself, about the jiggle that so captivated me? Then it occurred to me: this was a Gina thing, the small Gina that always traveled with me. Because Gina talked about fat quite a bit, in her career as an academic failure. She’d written an article once, which, she said, was published in a journal six people read, two of them exclusively while defecating. It was called “Death and the Fat American.” I remembered her telling me about it over beers. Or maybe that was her ironic wine spritzer phase, where she ordered cantaloupe spritzers, sometimes pomegranate/honeydew.

  Of course, I didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. The bar scene stayed with me more than the details of Gina’s monologue. That often happens. She did say there was the phenomenon of morbid obesity and then, as a separate matter of study, our cultural and individual responses to it, the response of the non-obese as well as the actual obesity victims. Obesity was a piece of death we carried constantly, she announced to me as she scanned the jukebox lists for “Don’t Stop Believing.”

  Not only physically, she rambled on in front of the jukebox—in terms of heart disease, the liquids pooling in the vast, giant bodies, the wrongness of any human being possessing ankles that could brush along the floor—but also spiritually/symbolically. Our fat was obviously our death, entombing us prematurely. But that’s not all, she said, there’s more! The passive, consumer posture of fatness was a perfect embodiment of our “object status,” I think that’s what she mumbled out, though I may have got it wrong.

  Our life of abundance, our tragic lack of agency, our infinite foregone conclusion of abject uselessness—our fat was a death that went beyond death, Gina orated (as nearby men, with some belligerence, began to stare).

  Fleetingly angry because the Journey song was not available, she settled for “Urgent.” A drunk guy stumbled over to us and asked Gina to give him some sugar, please. She said Fuck off and he asked if her sister was less of a bitch than she was (leering at me).

  I tried to cheer myself up, after these unpleasant ruminations, by watching Chip’s lean, muscled ass as he jogged effortlessly alongside (Janeane did too, I noticed). It was a solemn time, an anxious time, but we still had eyes and there was still Chip’s ass, running. His beige cotton slacks showed it off—the grounds of Paradise were dark by then, of course, but the golf cart had headlights and there were footlights at intervals along the path.

  When I turned to Janeane to talk to her, after a minute, she moved her eyes away in a small, shifty motion, like they’d alighted on my husband’s ass purely by chance, and purely by chance were moving off that ass again.

  “We’re going into a rainforest,” she announced. It was a couple of scraggly bushes. “Look! Thick vegetation, big, waxy leaves, giant, bulging flowers like penises, gonads, flowers are sex organs, you know that, right?” Her voice was rising in pitch and volume. “In the tropics they’re huge—what does that mean? They threaten you! Tropical flowers are rapists! It’s a jungle! Giant rapist flowers!”

  “Are you worried about, uh …”

  I trailed off. I didn’t know where to start.

  “… flowers?” I struggled on. “Hey. Don’t worry about them. You know—no legs. They can’t run after you. To get raped by a flower you’d have to, like, put yourself on it. But by accident. But then how could—no. Plants can’t be rapists, I don’t think.”

  I was getting a little obscure, a little nitpicking, thinking about it. The day had been bad—man. So bad. I felt delirious.

  But it didn’t matter. Janeane had already moved on.

  “She was murdered. I know it!” she squeaked. “I’m sure she was murdered. Alone in her bathroom. Naked! In the tub! He burst in and he murdered her. He probably had a knife! Or gun! He wanted to shoot her face off! That poor, poor, poor woman. So full of life! Like we are now! Alive!”

  I nodded. Nancy had been alive.

  “The murderer could still be nearby. Concealed. He could be lurking in the bushes!”

  By this time she was rubbing her hands together anxiously—wringing them, I guess you could call it. But the cart was already slowing down; we’d passed through the bushes and come out into a small parking lot, at the end of which was a dome-shaped building, gleaming gray. The cart stopped.

  Chip was instantly pleased by the dome. He pulled up short. He hadn’t broken a sweat, and he hadn’t had to listen to Janeane, either.

  “Deb, we should get a dome home,” he enthused.

  I sprang out of the cart, leaving phobic Janeane behind; I wasn’t equipped to comfort her. There were lights shining out from the dome’s windows onto the parking lot’s pavement, making it look blackly wet. Light fell on the clumps of red flowers Janeane had talked about (admittedly they were large, roughly the size and shape of butternut squashes). Chip and I passed them, with Steve and Janeane lagging, and went through the door into a room with yellowing botanical drawings on the walls. It had to be some kind of disused educational facility. There was a small fleet of schoolroom desks near the back of the dome-shaped room, where the ceiling was low—wood, ink-stained children’s desks with chairs attached to them.

  Some of the other members of our expedition were already sitting, legs awkwardly folded beneath the miniature desks. Some of them stood; some grazed along a foldout table against the wall. It bore a vat of coffee, a stack of plastic cups, and a couple of plates of cookies. I don’t know what I’d expected—a PowerPoint? Wreaths? There was a nondescript woman with a plastic name tag pinned to her lapel, wearing a long, Mormonish skirt and standing near the front of the room with her hands clasped.

  “The gang’s mostly here,” said Chip. “Though I don’t see Riley the videographer. Still AWOL, I guess.”

  “I hope he’s OK,” I said uncertainly.

  “… glad you could make it tonight,” the Mormonish woman was saying. We’d already missed part of her spiel.

  “… doesn’t feel like a safe space!” Janeane stage-whispered to Steve, nearly into our ears. She seemed to be gearing up to a panic attack. “How many bars does your cell have? Steve? Steve! How many bars?”

  “We at Paradise Bay want to be sure that you, both our guests and members of our larger community, feel supported in this time of bereavement,” said the Mormonish woman.

  It was her skirt, really, that made her a Mormon, an ankle-length floral thing a Mormon wife might wear; I couldn’t make out her name tag from where I stood.

  “Here’s the thing,” said the old Navy SEAL, whose broad back I was looking at since he’d sat down in the front row. “We’re not buying the bathtub story.”

  “Sir, my personal area is guest relations and community outreach,” said the Mormon. “Anything legal or technical—of course, you’d have to take that up with the police.”

  “Don’t kid a kidder,” said the old salt. “I’ve been around the block. And back.”

  “I’m sure you have!”

  “I live here,” he went on. “The island cops? You’re joking, right? Those kids only take the job so they can dress up in the outfits. Not a man jack among them with half the sense God gave a Guinea baboon.”

  “This is a time to come together,” said the Mormon. “Offer each other our mutual support. The healing can only really begin when we let go of the anger.”

  “Shit on a stick,” said the old salt, and pushed himself out of his chair.

  “It’s so important to
us that our guests feel supported!” said the woman.

  “Can you just tell us what happened to Nancy?” said Chip, becoming impatient. “That’s what we want to know. What the hell happened to Nancy?”

  “We understand she had asthma,” said the woman. “There was, maybe, a breathing issue while she was in the bath, with the asthma, and then the bathwater, that situation in the bath, and so eventually, what we’re surmising, is what happened was, unfortunately, that.”

  “What?” asked Steve, under his breath.

  “What?” asked Janeane, loudly.

  “Bathtub asthma drowning?” said Chip. “Is that even a thing?”

  “In that scenario,” I said directly to the Mormonish woman, summoning my resentment, “she had an asthma attack while she was in the bath, is that what you’re saying? But then, instead of reaching for her inhaler, which she always kept close, she just, as an alternative solution, did a face plunge? Just stuck her face right under the bathwater to cleverly fix her major breathing problem?”

  “Unorthodox,” conceded Steve.

  “We don’t have the official forensic report at this time, yet,” said the woman.

  “Bathtub asthma drowning?” repeated Chip.

  “So then according to you,” said Janeane, her voice rising unsteadily, wobble-screeching, “no one came in? Snuck in with shadows disguising him and crept up behind while she relaxed in the soft bubbles, maybe with earphones in? Some peaceful music playing, like Zamfir flute? And then this guy never grabbed her and forced her under by the head? Burst in, strong and hulking, and murdered this poor, naked woman, meanwhile his dick raping?”

  “Oh. My.”

  “Rape-rape! Rape-rape! Rape-rape!”

  Janeane’s brow was furrowed as she said that, her face red; one of her hands was clenched into a fist, her arm moving in a curious rigid, pumping motion.

  “Oh dear,” said the Mormon woman.

  “You know what, let’s head back to our cabana, why don’t we,” said Steve soothingly, his hand on her upper arm, rubbing, trying to slow the arm down. It was a raping arm. That much was clear. People were really embarrassed. “We’re maybe ruffling a few feathers here. And we’re all so tired, aren’t we? So exhausted. What a stressful day it’s been. Let me help you, honey.”