Revised: The Merbaby

(Hey everybody- real quick, my sincere apologies for getting this posted so late. Thanks for reading!)

One evening, Andrew suddenly wondered aloud if our having a merbaby was punishment from God for premarital sex. “We had a child out of wedlock, Cath,” he philosophized. “It would explain a lot.”
I wasn’t offended so much by his declaring our progeny a “punishment” as I was by his impromptu piety: I’m fairly sure Andrew thinks Deuteronomy is a surgical procedure. I asked him how’s the weather up on that horse, which naturally started something of a tiff; we had had a similar fight two days earlier when he proposed covert government toxic waste dumping as a possibility. New parents are inevitably cranky, I suppose. After all the cooing and picture snapping and mutual congratulations of: “Nice work on the miracle, partner,” what’s left is the reality—it’s hard to see the beauty in a man whose eyes are screaming bloodshot for sleep, difficult to find romance with a woman whose hair and tee-shirts are perfumed with the scent of spit-up.
Right then, reality was loud, with a tiny mermaid squalling for a feeding; it was not the time for argument, anagogical or otherwise. I tossed Daddy a bottle of warmed-over fish feed to three parts formula.
“Your turn, preacher man. I’m due for some sleep.”
With that, I ended our argument, certainly pissing off Andrew even more—I knew he hated when I stopped us fighting by brushing it off. He would point out that me walking out, or hanging up or shutting up is “it’s own sort of violence.” He prefers to keep talking things through until we’re apologizing with soft hands on others’ cheeks, or languishing on the floor after a cleanse of make-up sex. I couldn’t do it right then, though; I felt violent and acted on it, went into the bedroom to lay in the dark and think until I felt bruised behind the eyes.
I had no reason to be hard on him—after all, I was guilty of forming theories, too.
I questioned, I wondered. Why did we, two humans, produce a merbaby? I thought back to the aquatically hosted sexual encounters Andrew and I had had: aside from the requisite swimming pools and hot tubs, there was once in the ocean at Cabo, and the time in Lake Tahoe when we got caught by the Sea-Dooers. An explanation shows itself in neither instance.
Was the cause hereditary, some weird throw-back gene in one of us that harkened back to a base point on the forking tree of evolution? Had I consumed too much seafood in my lifetime, unwittingly set off some crucial balance in my bloodstream—tricked my hormones into believing I was more siren than homo sapien?
I refused to think it was the work of God, or karma or aliens or the ghost of Hans Christian Anderson. If I was going to get an answer, I wanted it to be true down to its bones as gravity, or the chemical composition of snow. I would leave conspiracy and suspicion to Andrew, who wouldn’t know empiricism if it hit him the head and then proved the fact. The mermaid drinking dinner in the next room was a living, oxygen-converting baby, not a fairy tale; I would act as such.

It became clear rather quickly that one of Andrew’s biggest issues as a new father was the fact that our mermaid is a boy. “He’s going to develop a complex,” he practically wailed one night as we lay in bed; he had been upset since that afternoon, when a little girl he passed in the grocery store waved a glitter-finned Barbie at him from the throne of her mother’s shopping cart. I stroked his hair and told him to go to sleep, that no such thing would happen, as though I knew, as though anybody knew.
He would have none of it; he buried his face in my clavicle and continued in a skeleton-muffled voice: “Imagine having to spend your life as a boy being constantly referred to as a ‘maid.’ Do you have any idea what that will do to his psyche? No one thinks of mermen- no, it’s all girls and princess stuff. Long hair and seashell bras.”
I kind of laughed and he kind of got mad; I apologized with a kiss and he accepted but continued to mope. The next morning, I found him a grim-faced soldier in the kitchen, wielding his coffee mug—he was resolved.
“I swear,” he looked at me, eyes wild yet full of violent reverence; I could picture him charging to steal a piece of masses-feeding bread in a do-over of Les Miserables. “I swear Catherine, no son of mine is going to get treated like some pussy joke. He’ll win the friggin’ Super Bowl if he wants to. I’ll be damned!”
It is this sort of iron idealism in the face of all opposition that first intrigued me to Andrew, made me cultivate an adoring affection for him. It also makes me want to bury his rose-colored glasses deep in his skull, and my own. I simply gave him a hug and recited some words of encouragement, comfort—girlfriend mode. But truly, what was he going to do? File a class-action suit against Disney? Demand a greater presence of masculine mer-role models in the media? I knew that at twenty, Andrew had participated in a march on the city’s San Jose Union Realty, when they had listed an empty lot whose unfortunate luck it was to have sprouted trees where some kind of dumpy, little, endangered swallows were nesting. Every rung of the food chain mattered, in Andrew’s order; every nasty look you garnered from a stranger, every new friend you made who seemed like they would be loyal, was of consequence.
He left for work soon after and I was scheduled to care for the baby alone. My mother was coming by for a visit in the afternoon; I tried to busy myself in the meantime with something stay-at-home motherly and picked laundry folding. There was suddenly, at our place, an endless supply of washing, most of it tiny pieces that added up to a huge bulk—bib cells building a terrycloth body, receiving blanket drops composing a cottony ocean. The tv buzzed uninvitingly in the background as I worked, picking up and folding over the teeny tubes for arms of long sleeved tee-shirts, halving and quartering minute short sleeve tee-shirts. Something in me shifted—my brain clicked off its automatic setting, and I rifled a hand through the basket in front of me. All tee-shirts.
I went into the nursery to look at my son. I risked waking him. He was having a fussy morning and had only just gone down, but I needed to look at him.
The room was dim, lit only by the weak throb of sunlight behind the curtains and a small, moon-shaped nightlight near the floorboard. I snuck up to the high-bar crib, my socked feet blessedly silent on the carpet, and peeked in. Andrew had added extra supports to the base of the crib so it could hold the weight of a small, filled tank—it hadn’t seem right to put it anywhere else. I gazed down. In the midst of his four glass walls, the baby was asleep, emitting a consistent arrangement of puffs and wheezes through his open lips. We had made a slope of smooth pond rock within the four glass walls that dipped under a half foot of clean water. His petite tail lazed happily under its blanket of wet, and the rest of him was stretched out on the dry incline, cradled in downy thick peat.
I watched his belly, the round size of a small honeydew melon, swell and fall with his breath. I watched his gills as big as dimes open and close just below his waist, where his perfect pink body seamlessly gave way to the handsome sleekness of a muscular tail, covered by a mosaic of shimmering green-gold-dark scales. His fins were the banners waved by conceited koi fish, too beautiful to not be traced onto silk screens. I reached a finger out and touched it to his chest, which answered me with the firmness of skeleton and skin beneath his soft cotton shirt. All tee-shirts—I washed no diapers, or socks too miniature to be believed, or pants with a six inch inseam.
He stirred, momentarily breaking open one foggy eye on me, then settled back into his breathing. I gathered him in my hands, careful to support his head, and lifted him to my chest. He made a contented noise and sunk his cheek to my shoulder. He was terribly heavy for his age, with the brawny tail; the first time he had slapped Andrew in the face with it, his dad’s shocked face had almost immediately dawned into a grin.
“You gotta feel that, Cath—we’ve got a little powerhouse here. That’s my boy!”
Within moments of holding my baby, my entire front was soaked with runoff from his fins. I smooth a hand over his head, over the feathers of hair that promised to be my own honey brown. Part of me felt like singing something, a lullaby or anything else that could become a bedtime favorite when he got older. But there was a clicking in my head, loud and unmusical; I realized it was my teeth slightly chattering, describing the chill of my wet clothes.

The baby wasn’t planned, a fact that in and of itself should have been anticipated. Andrew and I never did things the “right” way. We met because I was dating a friend of his, whom I left when I figured out that I instinctively knew how to look into Andrew’s eyes for longer than this other boyfriend’s. Instead of under the mistletoe or on New Year’s Eve, we had our first kiss at two o’clock in the afternoon on Halloween, in an aisle of the video store while we were hunting out some classic horrors for our first date. I fell in love with him only after we moved in together.
It was on a night when we were lying on our living room floor during an electrical storm. There was a black out, so we dug out our scant candle supply from cupboards and boxes and placed them in lit, squat groups on our coffee table, on top of the dead tv. We idiot-giggled like we were telling scary stories at a slumber party; we curled up together in a comforter on the floor, the sky white-hot angry through the window, throwing rain against it in its tantrum. Andrew began to fall asleep—he was always the first one to fall asleep—with his forehead against mine. There, with the fading thunder grumbling farther and farther away, I silently made the decision that it would be okay to let myself go, since it seemed like he would be there to catch me.
One afternoon eight months later, I had Andrew lay in the same place on the floor with me when he got home from work—I’m not usually one for standing on ceremony, but the phone call from the doctor that day had shaken something in me, set my center to a rhythm of pale crashes and dark-cloud growls. I had no idea what Andrew’s reaction would be—the couple times he had ventured to hint about an engagement, I had done something between coolly scoffing and choking on my own breath in panic. I didn’t do other people’s institutions and superstitions: priests can have poor critical reading skills, same as the rest of us. Love and a house could be shared, families started and affairs committed with or without rings and titles—I insisted.
But now, here I was, about to tell my boyfriend of a little over a year that I was pregnant; I was going to find out if I could put my proverbial money where my fool mouth is. If he wanted to walk, he could very well use my own fluid notions of devotion as a way out. I would let him.
I lay down on the floor next to him, both of us on our sides, facing each other.
“What are we doing down here?” he asked me. I looked at him, his hair the color of cherry wood curling over his forehead—the big brown eyes that always took me in like I was about to deliver a verdict or unveil the next Sistine Chapel. His nearness wound him into my breath—he smelled like his work, the small restaurant he owned with his brother where he fried crepes and roasted rosemary potatoes six days a week. He smelled like Andrew. My stomach worked hard to talk itself out of swallowing my heart over the thought of not being able to get this close to him tomorrow. I rested our foreheads together, and told him I was pregnant.
I spent the next hour or so in the kitchen, where the window to the fire escape is. Andrew had jumped on the word “pregnant,” hard and fast, knocking our foreheads together so we spent our first moments of shared parenthood developing ferocious welts. He had then disappeared to the roof of the building. I didn’t try to follow him. I sat on the kitchen counter, listening to the sounds of the city howling and scratching below our apartment. A warm, street-smelling breeze fingered my hair, my only companion save for a bag of frozen peas I held to my sweltering forehead.
Andrew finally emerged through the curtains, and I jumped from the counter and to the other side of the kitchen; you would have thought he was threatening to bite me.
He looked stern, side from the sickly yellow-black bulb perched on his eyebrow. I prepared myself to raise him, whatever he said: I set my expression straight and held my chin up, doing my best to pretend I didn’t have a knot the size and color of a plum decorating my face.
“Catherine, I don’t exactly what to do here,” he started. He looked lost. I didn’t move closer, because standing right next to him always made me feel short. It was a thing I griped about—even in high heels, I still wasn’t exactly eye level with him. At a distance from him, I could stand tall.
Andrew seized a breath like he was about to take a long dive, and I took it with him, and he said: “I just don’t want you to be scared, okay? I can handle this for the both of us.”
I handed my bag of peas to him, stepping right up to him to put it in his hand. He looked down at me and smiled. I kissed his fingers, icy bag and all.

We forgot to name our son. Yes, it’s bad, but it happened. In the shock of first seeing the tail, certain elements of the usual delivery room pomp and circumstance were forwent. A merbaby was nothing we had expected; I hadn’t had a sonogram since my first trimester, and then, everything had looked normal, in that the pulsing Rorschach blots on the clinic’s small screen revealed a tiny, froggy mutant in my belly, which was apparently what a fetus looked like. We refused most of the medical hand-holding offered during pregnancy—amniocentesis, Lamaze classes. Andrew didn’t want to know the sex of the baby before the birth, because he wanted it to be a surprise.
“This is like the best birthday present you could get. Why spoil it?” he had smiled and put his ear to my belly, a kid shaking a wrapped box under the Christmas tree. I knew I would have the baby, no matter what dread disease showed up on screenings and under microscopes; this was a thing I had started, and I would see it through to its end, no matter what that might be. So, I took my prenatal vitamins, and Andrew bought kits of wood and screws to make furniture for the nursery, and we left the rest to my body and the one it was building inside it.
The result of such faith was the total surprise of hearing my newborn crying amidst the dead silence of a delivery room that had no idea what to say.
“What is it?” I managed to croak out through exhaustion more utter than any I could have described before living through it. I was asking after the sex of the baby: did I have a son or a daughter?
I couldn’t see anything—my vision was printed with floating spots. Whispering had finally started hissing through the room. Did it sound urgent? Andrew’s hand slid around mine. “What is it?” I repeated.
I suppose it’s fitting that the man who knocked me up with a mermaid should tell me I had given birth to one.
One week later, things had calmed down. Relatives had come to pinch cheeks and give presents. Andrew and I had given three interviews for benefit of the interested public, though actually, I made Andrew do the one for the San Jose Channel 9 News by himself, as my right cheek was garishly stained with a splotch of miniscule red veins—a blood vessel busted by the exertion of labor, I was told. But after all this, it seemed like we had reached a point where there would be nothing to answer to but the workings of our new family. Then, the hospital secretary called.
“I’ve got a birth certificate here with a blank entry for the baby’s first name,” she tsked at me through the line.
I think I actually groaned, like she was a high school teacher handing out a pop quiz or something. I told her I’d call back, cringing over the thought of how that must sound. Like all new parents, wrapped in the chrysalis of a three person world, Andrew and I had merely been referring to “the baby.” Visiting new grandparents had been no help, either, in that they simply lavished the object of adoration with the entire dictionary of pet-nicknames. Everyone else seemed happy to refer to “the merbaby.” Obviously, this would not do.
When Andrew got home from the restaurant, I sat him down at the dining room table and declared open season on names. All the ones we had teased back and forth through the pregnancy seemed wrong now—that had been a different baby, an anonymous baby who was more me than himself. What would fit the little being who I was coming to know more and more everyday? I was learning an already-growing multitude of his facial expressions, beginning to see the ways he resembled me and Andrew and then another, new person who was neither of us. Sometimes I would stand petrified over his crib as he cried, feeling the great hollowness of all I did not know about how to not screw this up. I almost wanted him to tell me what he wanted to be called.
Andrew was in a short mood, as I had made him get up for two feedings the night before, even though he had to work in the morning. I thought it was a fair trade for nine months. I was turning down suggestions as quickly as Andrew could come up with them.
“No, it doesn’t sound right,” I groaned over something like Theodore or Russell. “This is something that will be part of his identity, what he is.”
“What he is?” Andrew challenged, waving a red cape in front of me. He was sensitive about the mer-ness, and wanted to make me sensitive, too. The morning prior, he had accused me of trying to ignore our son’s “true nature” when I got mad after finding him bleary-eyed over a pair of tiny booties, purchased on some pre-birth shopping trip.
“It’s okay to be upset about it, Cath,” he had shouted back at me. “It means I’m feeling something about the reality of this. You’re just denying it by pretending it’s normal. Why does everything have to be so goddamn sane with you?”
Now, facing off over a scrawny list of possible christenings, I had nothing to yell with. I felt like sloppy handwriting, a pencil that needed sharpened; I was worried about failing the hospital’s quiz. “Don’t be an ass, Andrew. I have no problem with you picking some name straight out of a Jacques Cousteau book, if that’ll make you happy.”
“How about Wade?” my prick of a boyfriend smirked, earning himself a punch in the chest. Still, we continued to work together, making new lists. We went to baby name websites on the internet, combed the family trees, cracked open favorite books with favorite characters. Three hours later, the only spoils was a notebook page full of crossed-out entries. Daddy had had his way with half a bottle of wine and was dozing on the couch, his chest playing bed to an anonymous, purring baby whose bottom half was wrapped in a soaking wet towel. I had involuntarily resorted to doodling on the paper in front of me when the phone rang—it was the hospital again, the night shift secretary now. What should she fill the empty line with?
“I’m sorry this has been inconvenient,” I offered, wincing and switching the phone to my other hand: my knuckles were tender from their earlier collision with Andrew’s kryptonite sternum. “This wasn’t because we didn’t care, you know? It’s been hectic—”
“Baby’s first name?” she cut in, other phone calls on her mind.
I took a breath, and dove. “Wade.”

I had begun to research at home, in the tip-toe stolen hours when Wade was asleep, or when Andrew was playing with him and I didn’t need a nap myself. I even snuck in some investigation at work after my maternity leave was over, my job proving a little perfect for just this thing. I was in my third year at the archives department of a publishing company, one that owned five different magazines. No fashion, celebrity gossip, 50-ways-to-blow-his-mind-in-bed shit—these were journals about science, photography, politics: importance. Other people could mummify themselves in wrappings of romance and beauty; I worked to organize and preserve things that matter, and in this case, it was an advantage. I spent lunch breaks and downtime combing for explanations and instructions for Wade’s mer-ness and what it would mean, ultimately. I quickly picked through every promising lead in the files and shelves it was my job to organize and oversee; I left behind the bony remains of articles and anecdotes about religious miracles and sickening injuries. I was still hungry.
I read about children born with their skin-pink legs and feet fused together. This was a crime against nature punishable by death: there were only three known survivors. I read about another boy with gills, his on the side of his neck—they had evidently sealed up on their own by puberty. But I couldn’t find another Wade, which made me so proud and so worried.
There were medical reports about “mermaid syndrome,” or “Sirenomelia.” I read historical pieces about mermaids being dragged from hotel to upstart hotel in the days of the Gold Rush, by exhibitioners who charged a fee to let dusty miners stare and wonder how much of the earth they would have to dig up before they could buy their own fish-girl. At night, I would dream of wet tails slapping around saloon rooms crafted of rustic wood; even in my sleep, I felt worried about the soft, black-green flesh soaking up splinters. I began to look around every room I walked into—the post office, my sister’s studio apartment, the Starbucks on Peter’s Street. Everywhere had advantages, but threats, too. There were uncovered electrical outlets, smiling in a friendly gape that invited tiny fingers wet with drool and salt water. So many swimming pools had ridiculous gates around them to prevent drownings, excessively devised ramparts in a too-hot world. Inevitabilities and unknowns began to show themselves: we would have to buy seafront property, and within only a matter of years. Would Wade be sensitive to things we couldn’t even foresee—dog dander, strawberries, Halloween costume greasepaint? Would he have a desk at school? Wade’s pediatrician, Dr. Ricardi, told Andrew and me about children fatally allergic to sunlight, who attended kindergarten classrooms where the windows had been completely blacked out by poster board and “of course’s.”
“Do the other kids get, uh—resentful about the dark windows?” Andrew asked, always on the look-out for friends that would promise to play with his son, when they all finally got old enough to even notice each other.
“Not at all,” said Dr. Ricardi. He sat at his office desk, not the huge oak splendor that movie sets grant to movie doctors; his was the kind of small metal and particle board thing you pick up from Staples for a home computer center. He smiled at Andrew and I, seated opposite, unified but subservient to this other man’s greater knowledge of our child’s future. His bright sweater was grandfatherly, his black hair streaked with silver that was oddly sexier than the rest of him. He palmed a hand on the desk in front of Andrew like he was laying down a card for a magic trick. “Young children are very adaptable. If you tell them something’s alright, then it’s alright. They think nothing of a difference unless they’re taught to.”
Andrew gave Ricardi a thumb’s up, his chest filled and smile wide, as though they had just won a basketball game together. He moved to a new subject and Ricardi followed. I stared past the doctor’s head, at his office window with its surgical white blinds, clamped shut. Even with their military precision, tiny bars of pink afternoon light seethed quietly in between the plastic strips. My head clicked, opening window after window in my mind’s search engine; my eyes fluttered with the rustling of rolodex cards behind them. “How do they get into the school?” I asked.
Ricardi and Andrew had been chuckling together, buddies over a cold pitcher, and they both stopped to look at me. “What’s that, Catherine?”
“I said, the children with the sunlight allergy—how do they get from the car to the inside of the school?”
The doctor cleared his throat; Andrew’s chest went small, then big again with a different kind of breath. “Well, usually parents carry them wrapped in a blanket,” Ricardi explained. “They wrap them totally, from head to foot, and drive them to school that way and then unwrap them once inside.”
“I see,” I said.
“I see,” said Andrew.

I found the werewolf boy and his mother through an article on the Internet. The boy was doing well, apparently; this particular blurb was from a small newspaper in Arizona, where the boy was at his first year in college. His mother, reportedly, still lived in the home where he had been raised in Mexicali. I did more research, found more information on them. Almost immediately, I liked the werewolf boy out of all the other stories I had found—the cat people with their vertical slits for pupils; the bat babies with their soft, strangely human wingspans and creaturely, pointed teeth. His name was Martin, and mom Camilla had raised him by herself. There were some pictures of him as a young teenager; in them, his face was handsome, albeit a little shadowed in places. It was explained that he shaved his face whenever he wanted a smoother look. He looked nice— the kind of boy who joined the debate team in high school, who was shy about asking girls to dances but a good date once he got them to agree. There was also a picture of him taken a few years earlier, capturing a ten year-old face full of dark, fine-looking hair. In these, his eyes blazed bright from the murk of his cheeks and forehead—the kind of eyes you could see in the dark, that could see you in the dark. When I first caught them looking at me from the monitor, I accidentally let a chill trickle through my back. Quickly, I reviewed that this was a little boy, who probably wore jeans and ratty sneakers to watch cartoons the day the photo had been taken.
There weren’t that many articles and reports; every once in a while, some out-of-the-way corner of the press had apparently gotten bored with political smearing or sensationalizing the latest natural disaster, and tried to breathe air into the years-musty story of the Mexicali Werewolf and his poor mother. It went like this: Martin was average; normal; pick-a-synonym, until at age seven his body began to sprout unnatural amounts of a hairy covering (try to not use the word “fur”). The amount of hair would wax and wane, like a tide or mood swing, and though it never fully disappeared, Camilla and other observers claimed that it was alternately, visibly thinner and bushier a different intervals of the month. The hair also came in generally thicker during the winter months. Though he had never really liked his vegetables, Martin suddenly lost his appetite for anything but meat; he would do some carbs, if it was a thing like birthday cake. He loved ice cream. Strangest of all, his temperament began to follow a pattern of change—valleys of sweet, little boy mildness that swooped up into peaks of unruliness. He would pick fights on the playground. His energy was boundless, and he could stay up all night running around his backyard, turning cartwheels and whooping into the air and wrestling with the neighborhood dogs, who were thrilled with their strange companion. His mother said his table manners were terrible at these times. Doctors in their medical reports begrudgingly assented that these periods coincided with the full moon.
Explanations presented themselves with smug poise. I was suddenly reading words I’d never heard before, exotic flowers from an old Roman garden that sprouted unsurely from the tongue. Lycanthropy: an actual, recorded mental disorder by which the sufferer believes they are a werewolf. Hypertrichosis: a syndrome which causes hair to grow all over the body. Scientists theorized that Martin’s changes in hair growth and behavior could easily be hormonal, citing PMS and the fact that a man’s beard grows at an imperceptibly faster rate if he’s expecting to have sex. Case closed.
I liked the werewolf boy out of all the other stories because of Camilla. She was a mother in love with being one; she was the forever-proponent of her son. She was, by all evidence, completely fucking crazy. She insisted year by year, interview by interview, that her son was not a statistic in a medical textbook. He was a werewolf, and she would go to her grave believing it. Celebrating it. Reading her words made me uncomfortable, a little irritated even, but it was also strangely pleased.

I got myself hooked on certain things on television—those ridiculous travel shows that basically advertise amazing beachside hotels under guise of some brand of journalism; historical documentaries about pirates and explorers who risked sailing off the edge of the world and the intoxication of siren ballads. My special addiction, though, was deep-sea nature programs—hour-long biology lessons where coral reefs where filmed to show their gorgeous best, looking like exotic table spreads in a high-end wedding magazine. They prompted me to spend my days off from work taking Wade on car trips to aquariums one, three, five hours away, where I would push him through pitch dark passageways in his cumbersome stroller, specially rigged by Andrew’s father to bear an eight-gallon tank. I would stop us in front of immense walls of glowing blue glass that held back the layers of a world where everything was engaged in a constant slow dance, fish in love with kelp in love with current. “Fishies, Wade,” I would tell the stroller, my voice tuned octaves too high by estrogen and instinct. Anglers and Barbs and Top Smelt would wander over to us and stare back through the glass, reciting silent poems that never ended and seemed to be written out of only the letter “O.” I would look at them, deep as I could, while they allowed their tails to push themselves past us. They reminded me of mannequins—perfect and beautiful, but with eyes alive as gumballs. I would look down at my son, and he would catch me doing it and look back, and scrunch his nose and smile, sometimes test a syllable that I hoped, breathlessly, would soon become “Ma.” His pupils would then quickly dart away from mine and into the tank as a glitter of scales suddenly shot by. I could see things happening in his eyes, so many things.
Driving home, watching for freeway exits that promised San Jose, I would formulate demands of myself in my head, sign contracts and swear oaths over what I would make for my son. The water of Wade’s tank would whisper in sloshes from the back seat as he wiggled in his sleep, and I would calculate summers when Andrew and I could get SCUBA certified, arrive at resolutions about Disneyland trips and no-smoking talks. My son would get a good education. He would hear beautiful music. He would have poems made of every letter.

It took me a whole day to drive from San Jose to Camilla Rodarte’s home. I started out at four a.m., when the sunlight was still so new it had no color or heat yet. All the same, it was already getting on nighttime again by the time I pulled in to her small dirt driveway, far away from Andrew and Wade and my own home.
I turned off my car, got out, and looked around at where I was. The Mexicali Werewolf had grown up on a thin, worn out street, sparsely populated by undersized cubes for houses that sighed in nests of tall, triumphant weeds and impotent chain link fencing. The house directly across the street had six or seven small cages hung from the front eave; though the twilight made it too dark to see, I could tell they contained pet store songbirds, because of the tiny voices being thrown out in conversations about tin and chimes.
The Rodarte house was painted, of all colors, pink. The only light out front came from an old fixture hanging by the front door, a frosted glass orb that would have been archaic seventies chic if it didn’t have a couple of large chips interrupting its cloudy roundness. Bugs of varying size and brownness hovered around it, their wings invisible as they beat faster than my eyes could see—none of them were long for this world, I knew, because every so often a shape darker than the dark passed over my head like a sigh: bats.
The yard was considerably more well-maintained than some others I had passed in my car, having a cleanly shorn lawn amidst the surrounding desert brush and a tall tree with leaves shaped like an artists’ palate. A heavy, beaten-up rope dangled long from one of the branches, choked into a knot at the end; I couldn’t help picturing Martin, dark faced and feverish with being ten, swinging from it when he should have been in bed, when all the other kids were in bed with moonlight heavy in their windows.
I had driven the whole day buzzed off a sense of purpose, alternately cheered by an ambiguous hopefulness and irritated by my own lack of speed in completing my important mission. Now, I saw the situation for what it really was if all righteousness was stripped aside—I had called a total stranger and asked to come stare at her in her own house, and subject her to the same sort of questions she had spent the last decade of her life shuffling through. I felt creepy and guilty and extremely embarrassed; an invisible, warm breeze snaked through the dark yard, making the leaves of Martin’s tree skitter against one another. It was the only sound aside from the neighbor’s pleading birds and my own breathing. I felt alone.
“Are you coming inside, or you want to talk out here?” a voice whacked me in the side of the head so I nearly tipped off my own feet. I turned to the front stoop, and saw Camille standing in the doorway. She had on—how could I have guessed?—a pink tee-shirt, and a pair of faded track pants. Her thick black braid reached to her waistband; a gold crucifix hung over her droopy breasts.
“Inside?” I said, feeling so much like my pants were down around my ankles, I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t trip as I moved to follow her in.
The layout of the house was weird to me, as we were immediately in the kitchen-dining room when we passed through the front door. Camille had me sitting at her table and holding a mug of coffee before I could thank her for agreeing to the meeting.
“So—welcome to my empty nest,” she said with a pleased smile. I made a prompt scan of the white linoleum floor, the countertops crowded with potted plants and cookie jars in strange shapes, like cows and jack o’lanterns. The one empty wall was not empty, but dressed in pictures of cake-faced toddler Martins and soccer uniform Martins and an oil on canvas of the Virgen de Guadalupe.
I nodded. “Is it hard, having him gone?” I asked, surprised with my easy jump to intimate things.
“Of course. You miss your boy already, don’t you? And it’s been only a few hours.”
I thought of Wade’s soft, downy belly against my cheek, his giggle like bubbles and the softly salty smell of him in my arms. My chest pinched in on itself. “Yeah, you’re right,” I laughed, but it was a sad sound. Suddenly, the unstoppable flow of years had poured onto me, a thing I couldn’t grab up and stop, a thing I couldn’t help getting pulled along into. Wade would be one day older by the time I got home the next morning, and that was a day we’d never get back. I thought to his fifth birthday, how swiftly half-way to ten would come. I thought of the first time Andrew and I would take him to the beach, thought of depths I could never follow him to and vastnesses that would, one day, be his for the taking. I suddenly saw, with absolute certainty, how much of my life would be spent standing on shorelines, wishing down to the color of my blood for him, and then pretending with a smile that I didn’t do just that whenever he came back to me.
“You cry a lot in the first year, I know,” Camilla said, tearing a paper towel from a near-by roll and handing it to me. “Doctors say it’s some shit like postpartum something, but that’s a lot of head-shrinking in place of what it really is. You signed away your heart when you had your baby. Now that’s what I call some spilled milk.”
I nodded and rubbed my nose with a rough swipe. “How do you know Martin’s a werewolf?” I looked at her, beyond worry now, beyond weird.
“You know, I don’t really care about ‘how’ anymore. Originally, it was because I knew, and my son knew. He got bit, and it changed him. Doctors and everybody has tried to say it’s anything else—rabies that he managed to survive, a disorder that happened to show up after the bite.”
“A coincidence,” I offered.
She pointed a finger of camaraderie at me. “Yeah. And I say, I don’t care. I know what I know and what I know is Martin. It’s like now, I don’t want to defend that, even—I don’t need to. I’ve got a kid who does his thing, just like any other woman and any other kid. And it hurts and it’s wonderful and it all just is. Yeah?”
I thought of children wrapped in blankets, cocooned from the sun; I thought of mothers in alien-quiet houses, hearts broken in indefinable, untreatable ways by children out in the world.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the story of the San Jose Merman and his completely fucking crazy parents.

Andrew had Wade in the bathroom when I got home. I watched him from the hallway for a while, the muscles taut in his bony shoulders as he knelt, bent over the tub, talking to the baby in the water. Wade laughed, louder and clearer than I’d ever heard.
“Yeah, buddy,” Andrew said. “That’s a good kick you got there. You’re gonna be so fast.” I liked Andrew’s voice when he spoke to Wade. It was soft, but sure of its own ability. It was a catching thing, walls painted pink. I listened and then decided to break in.
“Hey,” I said.
Andrew turned. “Hey. How was your trip?”
“Good. How’s Wade?”
Andrew grinned. “We’re swimming. Come see.”
I went to sit on the closed lid of the toilet. Andrew snaked an arm around my calves and kissed my knee. I ran a hand through his hair and looked down into the tub. My eyes connected with Wade’s and he shrieked, curling his fin up to his mouth to gum it, pleased that the pieces of his world were back together.
“Hi, Wade,” I said. “Show Mommy how you swim.”