exhaust pipe of a motor scooter he’d got as a gift one Christmas.
They had talked until after dark that first night they’d met, feeling woozy from love and from the smell of the pig sizzling on the spit, a tusked warthog the boys had speared in the thicket of wilderness behind the public beach. And in the months after, Desiree and Axel had slipped each other love letters through a crack in the wall, and when they’d been able, they’d snuck away for clandestine meetings at a fork in the creek in the pastureland behind the school, where they had lain in each other’s arms in the ribs of a rowboat run ashore into the weeds. Some nights they’d whispered only “I love you” over and over, and each time they’d felt it as if they hadn’t already said it seconds before, as if they were saying it for the first time, and each time, whether hearing it or uttering it, quickened their hearts and trembled their breaths.
Meet me on the broken Ferris wheel, Axel had written to Desiree only the week before the next Mermaid Parade, referencing the old part of the amusement park where the pier had collapsed one catastrophic summer day and dropped all the carnival rides into the water.
Throughout the entire parade, as she tugged the redheaded mermaid’s tank down Seaweed Boulevard, Desiree nervously gnawed at a hangnail, tearing at it until her thin blood dripped down her hand. She thought Axel might ask her to marry him that night — in the candy-colored chapels of Mudpuddle Beach, anyone over the age of thirteen could be pronounced man and wife. She’d never wanted anything more, so the potential for disappointment had made her grind her teeth and chew on her fingernails and suck hard on the ends of her hair.
After the parade ended, Desiree waited until nightfall to head off to meet Axel at the pier. She changed from her costume into a cocktail dress Miranda had sewn for her from the slick, midnight-blue kimono she’d stolen from the wardrobe of the warden of Rothgutt’s. A gold tassel hung from the end of each short sleeve, and the sateen fabric was patterned with open parasols and butterflies. Miranda had Desiree kiss the end of a lipstick so that her lips were only just barely touched with red, all of it lost on the paper of her cigarette as she smoked on her walk across the beach. The shadowed, haphazard edges of the wreckage of the pier ahead of her were black against the sky, the Ferris wheel like a slipped cog, it having rolled from its axis and partly into the sea.
Desiree feared stepping past the invisible magnetic fence that would set off the poisoned spines in her bracelet, so she proceeded carefully among the crashed bumper cars, with her wrist to her ear, listening for the first hint of a click of the bracelet’s workings. She crawled along twisted and knotted roller-coaster track, and as she climbed onto a spoke of the Ferris wheel, she felt a tug at her ankle, lost her balance, and fell with a shriek into Axel’s arms. He caught her, but the force of her fall nearly knocked them both from the wooden seat that rocked fiercely just above the waves below. Her left slipper dropped into the water with a plip-plop. They clung to each other then, tightly, clawing at each other’s backs and laughing at their crying. When the seat stopped swinging on its creaky hinges, they kissed for a while.
“My sister made this dress for me,” Desiree said as Axel undid the buttons up the back, as he kissed her neck. “She took apart a kimono.” Though she’d seen Axel naked on the first day they’d met a year before, and though she’d shown him her scars, she didn’t want him undressing her. She loved him too much to risk being the girl who gave it all up too soon. Boys set girls up for failure all the time, Desiree had heard from one of the teenagers at Rothgutt’s — a girl named Pearl with a broken-heart tattoo on her cheek. “Boys are too stupid to know that’s what they’re doing,” Pearl had said, “but that’s what they’re doing. The boys think they’re just dumb, and they are, but they’re putting things together in their brains by accident.”
Ask me to marry you, Desiree thought, as she brought her hands to the front of her dress, to hold it against herself. She then put her hands to his cheeks to push his face away, to look into his eyes. She scrunched up her eyebrows into sinister caterpillars, indicating she meant serious business. But she said nothing.
Finally Axel said, “Let’s get a good start on ruining our lives together, huh?”
“A girl likes to get a ring before she says yes,” Desiree said, though she had every intention of saying yes yes yes yes yes yes, endless yeses, ring or no ring. “So she can have something to show the other girls back at the asylum.”
With that, Axel brought from his pocket the ring he’d bought on the boardwalk from a man’s open raincoat, watches dangling from safety pins up and down the coat’s lining, rings and necklaces tucked into the many pockets. Give it a bite, the man had said, inviting Axel to test the diamond’s authenticity, to prove that Axel was being charged far, far too little for such stubbornly authentic jewelry, and Axel had stuck the ring on his pinkie and given the diamond a good hard bite, chipping a back tooth, causing a sharp thunderbolt of ache he felt through his body — in his temples, behind his ears, tingling his bones and back behind his testicles, and curling his toes.
“Give it a bite,” he told Desiree, but before he could put it on her finger, it bounced from his hands and, in classic slapstick, tumbled about them like a clumsy dragonfly, seeming just within fingertip’s reach, even knocking against a finger or a knuckle, then springing away opposite. Finally it joined Desiree’s slipper in the sea with a soft and undramatic plink. Axel jumped in after it, but the water was as murky as squid’s ink. Desiree twisted her hair around and around her finger in an effort to console herself as Axel came up for air, then dived back down, then back up, then back down. She made no suggestion that he abandon his search.
But Axel did abandon it after a few more dunks and he swam from the Ferris wheel, with urgency, as if he’d spotted the ring spirited away on the frothy top of a wave. But no, he’d heard something, someone weeping and gasping. The carousel horses, that had been perpetually suspended midstampede in the carnival’s merry-go-round, fell apart with a sudden sweep of stormy weather, and Desiree watched as a white stallion broke away from its team. Its ceramic teeth bared and clenched around a green apple, the pink locks of its mane curled like plumes of smoke, it raced off. A girl’s arms were wrapped around its long neck. Not a girl’s, a mermaid’s, Desiree saw, correcting herself with some delight, a mermaid topless, with long hair, riding away like a bucked-off Lady Godiva.
“She’s alive!” Desiree yelled into the storm that had yet to produce any rain, only wind and howl. And the mermaid was not just alive, but clinging for life, willing herself to live. “Save her, Axel,” Desiree whispered. Her almost-husband would be the night’s hero, the ring no longer just a ring regrettably lost, but the ring lost on the night Axel rescued a mermaid from drowning.
When Axel reached the carousel horse, the mermaid allowed herself to be taken into his arms, and she held tightly to him, collapsing against him as if her fin were crippled, as he swam toward shore in the hectic waters, the waves teasing the two of them forward, then tugging them back. Desiree climbed from the Ferris wheel and along the creaking boards of the fallen pier. She ran across the sand. By the time she reached where Axel and the mermaid had washed up, Axel had coughed and vomited the ocean from his lungs. He picked up the mermaid and carried her across the desolate beach, her long wet hair coiled around his leg like a vine.
Desiree ran to keep up, gnawing at the heel of her palm to get at a sliver that pained her, as Axel rushed the mermaid to the empty lot near the casinos. There, a nurse was stationed to attend to drunkards and other overindulgent parade revelers in a collapsible medical shed slapped together for the weekend and painted orange. But just before reaching the lot, her hand to her mouth, Desiree heard the first suggestion of her bracelet’s tyranny — the tiny but piercing squeak of the tightening of a spring — and her heart pounded and her feet stopped. She stumbled backward and fell into the sand, pinching and scratching at her legs to assure she still had feeling. She did. She lay on her side to wait for Axel to come back for her, watching the lightning outline the black clouds.
“I’d eaten some peaches I found,” the mermaid ghost told Desiree as they dangled there from the hanging branch. Though Desiree could hear her clearly, the mermaid spoke with a click and an awkward knocking in her mouth, as if she were only just learning her way around the stump of her tongue. “I’d been swimming for hours to reach Mudpuddle Beach, and I was so hungry I was half-sick.” The mermaid told Desiree that she’d rested on some rocks beneath the boardwalk in the hours before Axel rescued her. Up above had been people dancing, paper lanterns strung about and casting tall and jittery shadows up and down the walls of the casinos of red sandstone. In among the trash littering the rocks were tins with the lids cut open and jagged but with peaches still inside. The mermaid hadn’t known the story of the tins, of course, of the summer tradition of cocktails mixed from their nectar, so she’d eaten all she could find.
The tins, every parade, were hauled out from a warehouse where thousands had been stored ever since a national recall. But the botulism-tainted juice, if consumed only in tiny spoonfuls, would produce a slightly out-of- body euphoria without causing illness, so bartenders added the toxic syrup to the Bruised Peach, a summer drink that also called for gin, ginger beer, and a cough drop to give it a tint of purple-black. The mermaid, however, had devoured the peaches by the fistful and, woozy, she’d fallen from the rocks and back into the sea. It was as if the
