Mermaids of Glendale - a novel

Chapter 22

I’m drowning.

This thought occurred to Lorna O’Shene in slow motion as she held her father’s hand, careful to avoid pressing on the needle that had been inserted into the back of it, puncturing his flesh and blood, dripping IV fluid into his body in rhythm to the low-volume and steady beeping of the heart monitor. Patrick O’Shene’s pulse was a series of peaks and valleys like the highways winding along the southern California coast – the drive that Lorna had taken from Point Loma, San Diego where the Courageous Otter had berthed, traveling north towards Los Angeles, towards Glendale and home.

But Lorna wasn’t driving to her home, nor was she driving toward her father’s. She was driving with Kitt, driving north to Glendale Memorial Hospital. They’d taken Interstate 5 most of the way, with the towns of Encinitas, Carlsbad and San Clemente falling away behind them, barely registering as blurs at the fringes of Lorna’s vision. Kitt was driving; he had insisted and Lorna didn’t want to tell him not to.

Between Torrey Pines and Dana Point, the Interstate closely followed the coast and Lorna gazed out at the beaches that appeared and disappeared and re-appeared between houses, strip malls and guard rails that, if breached, would send Kitt’s car tumbling over the cliffs and into the roiling sea.

As the yacht had been returning to Point Loma, a storm had begun to whip up the waters and as they drove north towards Lorna’s father, the storm had grown worse, the wind buffeting the car, churning the sea to whitewater. Only a few brave or foolhardy souls where out on the Pacific, surfers riding the waves but never seeming to be quite in control, merely being taken in their grip and carried along and trying to stay afloat.

Some of the beaches along this strip of coast, Lorna knew, were treacherous. On even the calmest-seeming day a walk along the shore, a casual paddle into the water, going just a little deep and then deeper still, lulled by the illusion of serenity, could spell disaster. If you go out far enough the earth falls away beneath you, the steep drop-off like a precipitous cliff, gone before you can raise an arm and wave for assistance, before you can breathe and then you get that feeling, that drowning feeling.

As she looked out the car window and down at these glimpses of beach, she could see herself walking into the sea and slipping off one of those underwater cliffs.

I’m drowning, thought Lorna, her father’s hand in her own and now joined by tears, his skin being anointed by saltwater.

Lorna falls off the cliff and goes down, down into the water, where thoughts of dinner dates and which dress to wear are suddenly obliterated. Go far enough down and even the sun can’t penetrate that place.

“Lorna, oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here,” said Lorna’s sister, Marina, for the third or fourth time.

Marina was holding her father’s other hand. They stood on opposite sides of the hospital bed, alternately looking at each other or looking down at the sleeping, hopefully resting form of their father. His chest rose and fell steadily, his breath slipping in and out of his lungs, a faint whistling sound coming from his nose that both Lorna and Marina smiled at. It reminded them both of how he breathed when they were younger; when as children both of them would, some nights, climb into bed with their parents, careful not to wake them, to sleep with them and be reassured by their breathing in the night.

All Lorna wants to do is breathe, when the water takes her down the cliff-face beneath the surface. After going so deep, Lorna starts to come back in, back toward the earth and to caves carved out of the wall by tides and by time. She slips into one of these caves and it is a tunnel that takes her away, carried along in its inexorable pull as she travels beneath the continental shelf while now far, far above her are roads and houses and spas and aquariums. The tunnel takes her away from the California coast and carries her inland. Lorna opens her eyes in the darkness but somehow knows that far above her now is Orange County, Anaheim and Disneyland and then those places, too, are gone.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner,” whispered Lorna. “I’m so glad you were able to contact me.”

The ocean-filled tunnel is taking her, despite being however many leagues under the sea and under the earth, ever northwards, parallel to the Golden State Freeway, and she is in two places at once. Lorna is both drowning in saltwater and drowning in the passenger seat of a late model Acura sedan being driven by a man who loves her and she realizes that these two places, these two parts of herself, must re-unite. 

You know better than to turn and fight the riptide, you know that will only make things worse.

Instead, Lorna swims parallel to the rip until she can reach calmer waters, safe and familiar.

“I’m so glad we are here together.”

Travelling in on the yacht, once she was within cell phone range, Lorna had called Marina to find out what had happened.

“Marjorie Kilroy called me,” Marina had told her. “She tried to call you first and then she called me. At first I didn’t answer. I was seeing a movie with Derek.”

Derek, thought Lorna, glad that, for once, one of Marina’s relationships seemed to be lasting, even if had only been a month or so.

Marjorie had found their father in the stockroom of the pet store that he had owned and operated their whole lives, O’Shene Aquatic and Avian. He was collapsed on the brushed cement floor, a large bag of birdseed broken and scattered about him. When Marjorie arrived, she found Patrick’s parrot Eisenhower squawking and picking beads of millet and spelt off Patrick’s shopkeepers’ apron.

“Marjorie called the ambulance and then tried to call you,” said Marina.

For the majority of the drive back from Point Loma, Kitt was quiet. He had told Lorna that he was there is she needed anything.

“I’ll let you know,” Lorna had said. “For now, drive. Just drive and don’t stop.”

Somewhere around Griffith Park, where the freeway turns off onto Los Feliz Boulevard and carried them into Atwater Village, the two parts of Lorna – the one in the car, the one in the sea and far beneath the earth – were coming together. She struggled to the surface, knowing that now she had to fight, had to be strong. She had work to do. Not just to figure out why her mother’s name was on the wall of the dormitory on Guadalupe Island, nor the matter of who had left the note on Lorna’s pillow aboard the yacht. These things mattered but could wait. For now, Lorna had to be there, be present, for her father. She had to be there for Marina, had to be there for Marjorie – who Lorna had since realized was going to be in her father’s life for what was looking like the long haul, and Lorna had, indeed, made her peace with that.

“The doctors said it was a mild heart attack,” said Marina.

The words mild and attack didn’t seem to belong in the same sentence together, and certainly not when paired with heart.

Marina was crying, and together her and Lorna’s tears fell onto Patrick’s hands – the hands that had held them close in the night while he breathed, while they all breathed – Patrick, Lorna, Marina, and Cassandra, too, their mother, all of them breathing in the night and the dark.        

In the cardiac care ward of Glendale Memorial Hospital, Lorna stopped drowning, broke the surface and began to breathe again while, in the hospital bed, Patrick stirred, felt the wetness on his hands, and opened his eyes.