Mermaids of Glendale - a novel

Chapter 6

Lorna hadn't left her house for three days. She shuffled from the bedroom to the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom to the bedroom like a spirit haunting a gothic mansion, a ghost of Glendale. Her coffee table was a mess of pages she had printed from the Internet, filled with articles about mermaids and pictures of mermaids. Her laptop was glowing bright and running hot on the couch, showing YouTube videos of purported mermaid sightings from all around the world, including the videos of herself. In her Google searches she found it impossible, after all, to avoid the footage of her transformation at Neiman Marcus. It actually wasn't all that bad. In one of the videos, in grainy black-and-white lifted a store security camera, Lorna falls down under a sale table and emerges a short while later with her tail as though it really were a prosthesis that had been stored under there. Maybe that was why Rosenbaum called it a gimmick, no matter how realistic it was.

I'd think it was fake, too, thought Lorna. It would have to be...If I didn't know better...

It had been three days since Lorna had walked out on the meeting with Dame Kilroy and Myles Rosenbaum. Lorna was pretty sure she had effectively walked out on her job. Until the first rent notice came in, she wasn’t sure if she cared.

What salary can a professional mermaid bring in?

Lorna shook her head. She still didn’t know if she was a mermaid. She hadn’t transformed again in the past three days, not since she had managed to prevent it at Don Cuco. And despite all she had read and watched in the past three days, to the point of it becoming an obsession, she still felt no closer to an answer on just what was happening to her. She had even gone over every single piece of information from the Mermaids exhibit pages on the Aquarium of the Pacific website, curated by Kitt.

After walking out on Dame Kilroy, Lorna had called the Aquarium and asked for Dr. Dawson. While she had been waiting for him to pick up the phone, Lorna didn’t even know what she had wanted to say to him. All she knew was that, somehow, she needed to hear his voice. When she did, however, it was only to hear his voicemail greeting.

“Hello, you have reached the office of Dr. Kittridge Dawson. I am presently attending a conference in Mexico and unable to accept your call at this time. If this is an important call, you can talk to – “

Lorna had ended the call. She’d forgotten again, memory like a goldfish – Ha! thought Lorna without a shred of humor. She considered driving to the airport like a clichéd scene from a movie in the hopes of catching him before he left and telling him…

Telling him what? That I’m a mermaid and I want him to study me, investigate me, take me back to his laboratory and… and…

Lorna felt a familiar tingle that had nothing to do with an impending transformation and she could feel her cheeks flush red. She had doubled her pace back to her car and didn’t know where to go. She felt like her dad wouldn’t be able to help her – They had already established that he didn’t have any easy answers for her, that she wasn’t an adopted child of gods or the sea. Lorna also didn’t think she could call Marina, who no doubt was handling some complications in her own life, the so-called Hot Guy in Newport among them. In fact, not knowing what else to do, Lorna drove to the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Studio City to take her mind off things. This turned out to not be the best idea. Two hours and a large credit card receipt later, Lorna walked out with several bags full of books – history, mythology, biology, spirituality. All of them about mermaids and other aquatic anomalies.

Now a shut-in in her apartment, Lorna had supplemented the books with videos and web pages and was as a result feeling utterly overwhelmed and not at all satisfied. She had fielded calls from her dad and from Marina, saying that she was fine and that she would call them back. She ignored phone calls coming in from Dame Kilroy and from Mermaids of Glendale. Lorna didn’t reply to April’s text messages nor the one email that came in from Clint that said, Sorry.

Although Lorna had been able to prevent a transformation, she had not been able to cause one to occur, although she had been trying. Lorna had drawn the blinds, lit several candles, sat on her living room couch naked and focused. She thought about the depths of ocean trenches and about depictions of Atlantis and about her breathing and her flesh and blood. Once or twice she felt the tingling sensation but that may just have been from sitting still too long. She stood up and stretched, joints popping like knots of wood in a fireplace.

By the end of the third day, Lorna was feeling well and truly miserable but knew she couldn’t stay this way forever. She pulled on her bathrobe, blew out the candles and turned on all the lights in her apartment. Lorna swept all the books and papers into a pile and placed them in the far corner of her living room, and then covered the pile with a blanket for good measure; out of sight, out of mind or so she hoped.

She showered, got dressed and sat back on the couch with a glass of red wine, opening her email browser to reconnect with the world – and saw an email in her Inbox from Kitt:

Hello Lorna,

I don’t know what it is I might have said or done to make you run away. Maybe I was boring you after all, with all my talk of mermaids and chimaera. In any case, I would like to see you again. I’m hosting a party at the Aquarium this weekend. The details are in the attachment. I’d be pleased if you would join me.

I look forward to your reply.

Warm regards,

Dr. Kittridge Dawson

Lorna felt a shortness of breath and a fluttering in her chest that was a combination of delight and nervous anticipation.

“Maybe,” said Lorna, her voice sounding too loud in her empty apartment, the first words she had spoken all day. “Just maybe, returning to the world might not be so bad.”