I'm drowning.
This thought occurred to Lorna O’Shene in slow motion as she sank, the lights of the aquarium's after-hours event twinkling like stars overhead and being obscured now by the moving bodies of the sea lions escorting her into darkness. As surprised as Lorna was by this sudden turn of events, she found that she wasn't panicking -- at least not yet. Somehow, this felt like memory.
Somehow, this felt like love.
The sun had slipped beyond the horizon, its distant light lingering at the edge of the Earth. Lorna had slipped her hand into Kitt's and held it. Kitt had turned to her, slowly raised his hand to her face, the warmth of his palm exploding like that of sunlight across her skin.
Lorna remembered watching an Animal Planet documentary about sea otters. It had been on TV late at night and Mom had let her stay up to watch it, curled up on the couch in her mother's arms. Lorna remembered the smell of hot chocolate and her mother's perfume and the sound of the accented voice -- somewhat similar to Kitt's own -- narrating about the life of sea otters.
"Sea otters hunt, groom, play, rest, sleep and even mate, almost entirely at sea… They hold onto each other to avoid drifting apart and getting lost."
Another memory occurred to Lorna as she sank through the cool depths of the sea lion pool. Another memory of falling through water. She'd been a child at the public pool, watching the older kids leaping so effortlessly off the diving platform, their bodies curving like parabolas and then becoming rigid, arrow-straight, entering the water smooth as dolphins. Lorna climbed the steel-edged cement stairs, walking up to the edge of the platform as though it were the edge of the known world. She leaned over the edge and looked down to the surface of the rippling water that seemed so far away to a child but must in reality have been only a few meters. Lorna had hesitated at the edge of the platform and couldn't go through with it, could not now even imagine herself canon-balling like some of the other kids did. Lorna looked and didn't leap. She backed away from the platform's edge, seeking safety on the ground but in her retreat Lorna collided with a boy who was ignoring the No Running signs. The boy's shoulder connected with Lorna's chin, snapping her head back and making her bite her tongue, the salty-copper taste of blood filling her mouth as she stumbled backward, arms pin-wheeling. Her body passed the Rubicon, her feet leaving the platform and Lorna fell for an eternity through the air and through the water and through the center of the Earth and into memory...
The first drops of water went unnoticed, dripping from the leaking fire sprinkler in the shopping mall ceiling into a potted plant on the third floor between Nordstrom and the Hugo Boss store. Lorna O'Shene was minding her own business, sipping at a too-hot cafe latte as she strolled through Glendale Galleria, enjoying a day of relaxation. She was glad she didn't have to work today at the spa, glad to give her hands a rest from kneading the back-flesh of bored L.A. housewives.
Lorna's cell phone chimed, signaling an incoming text message from her sister, Marina. Lorna reached into her handbag, searching for the phone -- her hand diving past her wallet and lipstick, swimming down past the shipwreck tumble of a handkerchief and Tic-Tacs, alongside the coral reef of a Susan Rockefeller charm bracelet, finally finding her cell phone on the far-away ocean bottom of her over-sized cerulean-blue Juicy Couture handbag.
Lorna brought the phone to the surface and read the message:
Hey, I am in Newport for the day. There is a guy I met, so hot. Are you home later? I will call you. Byeeee!!!!
Lorna rolled her eyes, tapped out the usual response and hit send. That's when the fire sprinkler overhead burst. The starburst-metal shape of the sprinkler head shot down into the potted plant like a bullet, cracking the side of the planter and causing the stored-up reservoir of water and soil to gush forth. Lorna slipped in the resulting wave of mud and fallen palm fronds. Her first thought was that her lush brushed-velour handbag was now ruined, followed almost immediately after by the certainty that within moments her image would be captured by cell phone cameras and blasted across the Internet faster than a whale ingests a school of plankton.
Lorna's Coach flip-flops had come off and were slowly floating away along the Galleria promenade. Her legs were fusing together, from her thighs under her knee-length Kenneth Cole summer dress, and on down to her ankles. Lorna struggled to her feet, themselves now rapidly changing into a fin. She hastily gathered up her handbag and hopped with difficulty on the tips of her tail, the transformation almost complete, pushing her way past the crowd of Saturday morning shoppers and through the heavy double doors of a service corridor between a Claire's accessories store and the Build-A-Bear Workshop. She closed the doors behind her and sat with her back against them, hoping nobody would follow her. Miraculously, Lorna found she had managed to keep a hold of her cell phone and that it still worked despite having gotten wet, thinking Thank you, pink silicone cover!
She searched her contacts list for Marina's number, reconsidered and called the spa instead.
"Hello, Mermaids of Glendale," said the cheerful voice on the other end. "Relaxation from tip to tail, how may I help you?"
"Hi, April, it's Lorna," said Lorna. "I need your help. It's... It's an emergency."
"Uh-oh," replied April. Lorna could hear April already reaching for her car keys. "Where are you?"
Lorna told her.
"Bring a towel," she added. "A big one."
"What's happened?"
"I... I think I'm turning into a fish!"
Years ago, before working at Mermaids of Glendale, April M'kwala worked at the Glendale Galleria. Once she knew where Lorna had sought refuge, it was a quick matter of driving her VW Beetle into the parkade and making her way to the correct service corridor access door. April leaned over the center console, pulled the door handle and pushed the passenger side door open. As she did so, the grey steel fire door opened and Lorna came out, splattered with mud and hopping on what, yes, did appear to be an actual tail.
"April!"
"Oh my God!" exclaimed April.
"I know! I'm a fish!"
"Half a fish," said April, ever the optimist as Lorna came toward the car and started to climb in. "But, woah, sweetheart, you're a mess! You'll get mud all over the interior."
"Really?" asked Lorna, rolling her eyes and thinking maybe she should have called Marina after all.
"It's OK, hon, it'll be OK," reassured April, tossing Lorna a large white towel embroidered with the Mermaids of Glendale logo -- a topless mermaid with real curves, which Lorna herself had drawn on a cocktail napkin one evening several years ago.
Lorna wrapped the towel around her waist and sat in the car, the length of the towel going all the way to the floor mat and covering the tail fin which, not a half-hour earlier, had been her beautifully pedicured feet. Lorna covered her face with her hands as April navigated her way back out of the Glendale Galleria parkade, every twist of the cement ramps leading toward the street exit feeling like a churning whirlpool in Lorna's stomach.
"I... I just don't know what happened," said Lorna. "One minute I'm thinking of having sushi for lunch, and the next minute I am sushi!"
"I'll drive you home, OK, Lorna?" asked April, pulling out of the parking lot and merging with the traffic on West Broadway. April honked her horn, leaned her head out the window and yelled at a motorist who had tried to cut her off. She turned to Lorna, adding, "Some people, huh? Don't recognize a crisis when they see one right in front of them."
Lorna mumbled into her hands.
"I can't hear you, hon," said April.
Lorna took her hands away from her face and sighed.
"Just watch the road," repeated Lorna, then sniffled. "I ruined my handbag."
"What happened, Lorna? You look like Creature from the Black Lagoon. Either that or a mud treatment gone horribly wrong."
"Where are we driving to?"
"I told you, hon," replied April. "I'm taking you home."
"Right, sorry," said Lorna. "Just distracted, I guess."
"Girl," said April. "You got a tail, you're allowed to be distracted."
April drove south to Glendale Boulevard and crossed the Amtrak line from Glendale and into Atwater Village. A few minutes later they arrived at Lorna's place; a 1950s apartment complex with two businesses on the ground floor - a coffee shop and an accordion school. The coffee shop was always busy. The accordion school was always closed. Right at that moment, Lorna was extremely glad, thinking that she couldn't handle hearing accordion music on top of everything else today.
"Can you help me get upstairs?" asked Lorna, opening the car door.
"I'm not sure I'll need to," said April. "Look."
The spa towel had come loose, falling away from Lorna's waist and opening to the floor.
"Feet!" cried Lorna, wiggling her gel-painted toes. "I have feet!"
The sun was shining, birds were chirping, and in the passenger seat of April's VW Beetle, Lorna fainted. April, used to carrying armloads of wet, heavy towels and spa robes in her time at Mermaids of Glendale, had little trouble putting Lorna's arm around her neck and hauling her, semi-conscious and stumbling, up the stairs to Lorna's top floor apartment. April cast around in Lorna's handbag for her keys.
"Girl, how do you manage to find anything in here?" said April, finally locating Lorna's keys on their leather Coach key chain and, selecting the apartment key, opened the door and half-carried, half-dragged Lorna over the threshold like a drunk bride and groom after an open-bar wedding. The blinds were drawn and the apartment was dark, lit only by the blue glow of the aquarium light, Lorna's clown fish swimming in lazy circles that were in no way reminiscent of the vigorous adventuring of their Disney counterparts. The aquarium filter buzzed with white noise, electric and constant, competing with the compressor of the refrigerator and the traffic on Los Feliz Boulevard.
April helped Lorna into the bedroom.
"You're home now, hon," said April, helping Lorna out of her damp, muddied dress. She grabbed a dressing gown from the bedroom closet, wrapped Lorna in it and lay her down on the bed. "You just rest now. I'll be right in the other room if you need me."
"No," said Lorna. "No, you should get back to Mermaids. I should go to Mermaids."
Lorna began to sit up. April gently pushed her back down to the pillows. Lorna did not resist.
"Mermaids will be fine for now," said April reassuringly. "Clint and Emma have the place well under control. And don't you worry about Dame Kilroy, I'll handle anything she may care to say."
"Yes," said Lorna, yawning, closing her eyes, drawing up her legs -- legs! Not a tail! -- and curling into a fluffy bathrobe ball of sleep. "Yes, April, you're right..."
April stood watching Lorna for another minute to be sure she was OK, then tip-toed back out of the room, half-closed the bedroom door and settled on the couch with last month's InStyle magazine and while idly turning pages she texted her boyfriend Marc to let him know that she'd miss their date and that something important had come up.
She rises up from the waters and her body emerges, head to hips, from the surf. She holds her arms high, hands pointing toward the sun and its life-giving, love-bringing light and warmth. All around her the sunlight glitters on the ocean surface, infinite numbers of salt crystals like tiny diamonds flashing. She draws her power from the ocean and her inner strength in turn gives life to the waters as much as the sun; everything connected, plankton and whales and coral and starfish and mermaids and telephones...
Lorna's eyes snapped open. For a moment she is not sure where she is and if she had been asleep this whole time. The landline phone on her Pottery Barn bedside table was ringing. She grabbed for it, fumbling with the handset and finally managed to answer.
"Hello?" she said.
"Hi, Lorna," said the voice on the line, warm and welcome. "It's Dad. How are you, honey?"
"I had the strangest dreams, Dad," said Lorna, freeing her other hand from the bathrobe's voluminous sleeves and wiping sleep crust from her eyes. "But I think I'm OK now."
There was a sudden smash and a loud curse-word from the apartment's galley kitchen.
"What was that, Lorna?" asked her Dad.
"I'm going to call you back soon, Dad," said Lorna, pressing the End Call button.
Lorna shrugged off the bathrobe and exited the bedroom. April was in the kitchen with the dust pan and brush, sweeping up pieces of the cereal bowl she had dropped. April tilted the broken bowl into the trashcan, looked up and saw Lorna.
"Sorry, hon," she said. "Did I wake you?"
April in Lorna's apartment, and who had slept on Lorna's couch last night.
The living room drapes were open, letting in the morning sunlight. Lorna had slept all night. It was tomorrow now, which meant that yesterday had not been a dream. Lorna looked at the ticking Felix the Cat clock on the dining area wall, its tail sweeping back and forth like it was erasing the seconds, minutes and hours of the day.
"April," said Lorna, picking up her -- Yes, still ruined! – handbag from the coffee table. "We're late for work!"
"I'm glad you're feeling better, hon," said April. "But dressed like that, we aren’t going anywhere."
It was then that Lorna realized she was in her Victoria's Secret bra and panties, and her hair was a mess! She had a long day ahead of her at the spa and, as Dame Kilroy would say, how Lorna looked right now was no state to be in for any self-respecting Mermaid of Glendale.
Dame Kilroy clapped her hands together like a school mistress calling wayward kids onto the sitting mat for story time.
"Places, everybody, places," she said in her sing-song manner. "It is another beautiful day to be Mermaids, people, wouldn't you agree?"
Clint and Emma were nodding assent, April was looking over the appointment book, and Lorna was nursing a tall skinny latte from the Starbucks next door. Despite having slept through the night and most of the previous afternoon, Lorna felt drained and not at all desiring to provide spa treatments to their clientele.
"Now, we have a bonafide celebrity coming in later today. I don't want to give you his name in case any of you go online tootering or twixting or whatever it is the kids are doing these days," continued Dame Kilroy. "But he is in the daybook under an alias you may recognize."
April, still paging through the appointment book, found the name and showed it to Lorna. Lorna rolled her eyes.
"I know who it is, I know who it is," said Emma, whispering to Clint, who in turn inspected his immaculate fingernails.
"No doubt it's that soap opera star again," said Clint. "The one who makes a big show about being such a ladies’ man but then tried coming on to me in the sauna while I was refreshing his hot stones. Not that I minded, of course."
Dame Kilroy gave her usual talk about discretion and how Mermaids of Glendale always strives to offer the best of service to their clients.
"Thank you for listening, ladies," she added, "and have a super day. Lorna, a word please."
April patted Lorna's hand then walked toward the storeroom to collect fresh towels and lotions for the massage rooms. Emma went to the Reception desk and booted up the computer, popping a couple fresh pellets of Juicy Fruit chewing gum in her mouth as she did so. Clint headed for the sauna. Lorna followed Dame Kilroy up the narrow staircase to her office off the first floor landing. One wall of the office was frosted glass with the Mermaids logo etched into it. Sometimes Dame Kilroy liked to sit up there and look down through the clear glass portions of the etching to the shop floor below, watching the minions work.
Lorna did still like working at Mermaids, but sometimes felt nothing but resentment for Dame Kilroy. Several years ago, when Mermaids was a struggling business and Lorna had fallen into working there after college, Lorna worked hard to revamp the image of the place. She typed up a business plan for Dame Kilroy to present to the bank for a loan and even redesigned the company logo -- it had previously been much too similar to that of the Starbucks next door and, apart from the obvious possible legal ramifications of this, Dame Kilroy would never stop complaining to Lorna that she was sick of people thinking that Mermaids, too, was a coffee shop.
More recently, Mermaids of Glendale had been trying to become the destination for a select clientele, mostly moneyed-up and bored housewives and, yes, the occasional celebrity wanting to avoid the more paparazzi-prone spas of the Greater Los Angeles area. Dame Kilroy wanted to be rich and famous -- and affected the title Dame along with it; her real name was Marjorie -- and Lorna, despite being well-paid, also held out hope that she might one day be treated more like a business partner and less like a lackey.
Lorna inwardly sighed, giving her full attention to Dame Kilroy, who sat behind her desk, powered up her laptop, hit a couple of keystrokes and turned the screen toward Lorna.
"Can you please explain this?" asked Dame Kilroy.
Lorna raised her hands to her mouth as the laptop played a grainy camera phone video on YouTube -- video taken by a shopper yesterday at the Glendale Galleria.
Footage of Lorna turning into a fish.
"Wow!" someone on the video was saying. "Would ya look at that?"
"A fish tail, a fish!"
"Special effects just keep gettin' better. This is like life, but in 3D!" cried one onlooker.
The YouTube video followed Lorna pulling herself upright and hopping on her tail into the service corridor. The people standing around were applauding, with appreciative hoots and hollers. Dame Kilroy paused the video.
"Lorna?" said Dame Kilroy.
"It's... I... Um...," stammered Lorna, her mouth working like that of a gasping fish out of water, the irony of that image not lost on her.
Dame Kilroy held up a hand.
"No need to explain," said Dame Kilroy. "That really was... rather brilliant, my dear."
"What?!” said Lorna. Brilliant was hardly what she had been expecting.
"Can you do it again? I mean, for a marketing video for Mermaids? Oh my word, a mermaid at Mermaids... How did you manage it?"
"What?!” repeated Lorna, now most definitely floundering like the catch of the day on the deck of a fishing boat.
"Is it CG? Prosthetics? Jim Henson? In any case, it's the best tail I've seen since Splash!" exclaimed Dame Kilroy. "And then this!"
Dame Kilroy continued the video. The footage zoomed in to a business card lying on the floor of the Galleria, surrounded by pot plant soil and a handful of shimmery fish scales, electric and rainbow-hued like light reflecting off an oil spill.
Mermaids of Glendale, said the business card, accompanied by the logo Lorna had designed, along with the slogan Relaxation from tip to tail, and the spa's address and phone details. The business card must have fallen out of Lorna's handbag during her scramble to get to the service corridor.
"This video has had over five thousand views since yesterday afternoon," said Dame Kilroy. "Do you know what this means?"
As if on cue, both telephones at Reception started ringing.
"Mermaids of Glendale," said Emma. "Relaxation from tip to tail, how may I help you?"
Emma was going to have a very busy day, as were they all.
Lorna caught up with her sister that evening at a bar on West Broadway in Glendale. Marina sipped her apple martini and went back to tapping out messages on her cell phone. Lorna sat patiently, enjoying the glow of the candle-lit booth and the warming comfort of the glass of red wine. Lorna had called her sister and asked if she was free tonight. It had been three days now since her transformation and, while Lorna had not experienced another change since then, she'd continued to have strange half-remembered dreams wherein she was swimming in the ocean, diving down among coral reefs and shipwrecks like a fish in a home aquarium; the coral like pink plastic, the shipwrecks like poorly hand-painted dollar-store plaster replicas. In the morning, Lorna woke up and found a scattering of fish scales in the bed, shimmering like discarded sequins from a cocktail dress. She brushed them to the floor with a sweep of her hand, made the bed and went to work.
Today had been less chaotic but steadily busy nonetheless. Dame Kilroy was already interviewing prospective employees in her office above the shop floor, and a temp had been hired to work the reception desk in order to free up April, Emma, Clint and Lorna for attending to their clients in the spa.
"So," said Marina. "What's up? I saw the video on YouTube. I shared it to my Facebook page. OMG!"
"Yeah," said Lorna. "OMG is right."
"So, do tell. Are you, like, an actual mermaid now?"
Lorna had been thinking in terms of temporarily transforming into half a fish, but becoming -- in Marina's words -- an actual mermaid...
Lorna finished her wine, and signaled a passing waiter for another glass.
"How are you, Marina?" asked Lorna, electing to, at least temporarily, change the subject.
"So, I told you about the hot guy in Newport, right," said Marina.
"You might have mentioned it," said Lorna, remembering the couple of brief text messages she had received in the past couple of days. In the first message Marina seemed keen and in the second she was over him. That pretty much summed up many of Marina's guy troubles over the years.
"Turns out -- get this -- he's married," said Marina.
"Ugh," said Lorna. "I'm sorry to hear that, sweetie."
"Yeah," said Marina, also motioning for the waiter. "One more apple martini, though, and I'll be over it."
There's plenty of fish in the sea, thought Lorna. Heck, maybe there are enough of those on land right now.
"Has it happened again since?" asked Marina. "Have you, you know..."
Marina wiggled her hand like it was a fish tail darting through an underwater field of seaweed in the Pacific.
"No, just the once so far," replied Lorna. "I just don't know how to explain it."
Marina's phone beeped with an incoming message. Marina picked it up, read the screen, tapped out a reply. Lorna knew better than to wait for gaps in Marina's cell phone schedule. She was practically glued to it yet was always able to somehow follow a conversation even while it appeared as though her mind was elsewhere. It had always been the same, growing up, as though they shared a psychic bond, a common language.
"Have you talked to Dad yet?" asked Marina.
"Not yet. I'm going to. I just don't know what he'll say, though," said Lorna. "But I guess it will still feel good talking to him. It always has."
"I know," said Marina, the cloak she wore to protect herself from the world briefly slipping away. Several years ago their relationship had been sorely tested by tragedy, and they had grown apart for a while as a result. But a late night phone call from a nightclub in Mexico had changed that. Marina had called Lorna and their Dad reverse-charges from a pay phone, crying like a banshee, the throb of dance music in the background, saying she was sorry for everything, sorry for going away.
"We lost Mom," they had said. "We can't lose you, too, Marina. Come home."
Just as quickly as Marina’s armor had slipped it was back in place as the waiter placed their drinks in front of them.
"He's cute," said Marina, watching the waiter move away to serve other customers. Her phone beeped, she looked at it, but didn't reply straight away.
"Problem?" asked Lorna.
"It's him," said Marina. "Hot guy in Newport. He says he isn't really married, and that it's just a figure of speech!"
"Right," said Lorna. "Like how California isn't just a state, it's a state of mind."
"I thought that was New York."
"Maybe it is," said Lorna, shrugging her shoulders and wincing with the movement of it. She needed to book a session for herself with Clint at the spa. Clint had said he'd work his magic and Lorna didn't doubt it, he really had magic fingers. Even though Marina herself had once said, Oh, if only he weren't gay, Clint wasn't Lorna's type anyway. In fact, like Marina, Lorna didn't really think she knew what she wanted.
"Going to the big Neiman Marcus designer shoe sale tomorrow, Lorna?" asked Marina.
"Yes, yes," said Lorna, thoughts of bed sheet fish scales and late night Mexican nightclub phone calls put aside. Spending time with Marina had helped restore some sense of normality, of sanity.
Maybe that pretty pair of Stella McCartney shoes she'd been eyeing for the past couple weeks would also be of some help in that department.