The Easily Distracted Author

I was glad!

2011-04-29T03:04:00.001-07:00

Just the GREATEST ANTHEM EVER. Really hope they do the 'vivat!'s.

No carriages?!

2011-04-29T02:13:00.000-07:00

What is this car business?!

Camerons in da hizzy

2011-04-29T02:05:00.001-07:00

His wife is WAYYYY underdressed for this event. He's in a morning coat and she looks like she's in the secretarial pool.

The dress.

2011-04-29T01:54:00.000-07:00

God, I really hope the dress is McQueen. And the speculation is that it will be so.

So this wedding doesn't start for over an hour.

2011-04-29T01:50:00.000-07:00

Are these people seriously going to sit in those hard little Abbey chairs for over an hour?

THE REDCOATS ARE COMING! It's go!

T-Minus 1:16.

2011-04-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

We're go with BBC America. Some initial observations:

1) Earl Spencer's hair: no longer red.

2) Half of these women are wearing their hats/fascinators in the middle of their freaking foreheads and they look like deranged mutated unicorns.

The Remains-- Chapter Four

2009-12-01T11:52:00.000-08:00

Within the span of a year, Charlie had taken custody of and held funerals for nearly a dozen anonymous souls.

Violet Hausman had been a war bride from Britain and the mother of three sons, all of whom had followed in their father's footsteps and enlisted in the military. Unlike him, all three had been killed in the line of duty: David in Vietnam, Paul in the Beirut barracks bombing, and George in the Persian Gulf War. Her husband had died of a heart attack in between Paul and George. Despite these losses, Violet persevered, earning a living as a seamstress and dressmaker, and was estimated to be nearly ninety when she finally died. She had been found in the back of a fabric store, clutching the bolt of red gingham she had been inspecting when the aneurysm struck.

John Czernesky gave the best years of his life and health to the second shift at the plant, where he helped build the thousands of circle saws and power drills that went out and built treehouses and fences and bookcases, only to see his job vanish and his skills rendered useless when the corporation packed up and moved to cheaper climes overseas. He soothed his despair with can after can of cheap beer and cigarettes, eventually drinking himself onto the street. His liver poisoned beyond repair, he died in his sleep under the bridge he used to drive across twice a day coming and going from the plant. He hadn't been much older than Charlie.

Summer Johnson had run away from home when the arguments with her abusive stepfather became too much to bear. Blessed with a magical singing voice, she dreamed of escaping to New York City and making a run at Broadway. She had been living with a friend, studying for her GED and working a mall job to save up the money for a head shot and bus fare. Unfortunately, she had begun stripping and turning the occasional trick as well, and one night, she ended up with a john who had a thing for snuff films.

Violet, Paul and Summer, and all the others, had ended up in Charlie's care, and he tried to plan respectful and appropriate funerals and burials, even putting in personal touches: a coffin blanket of pink daisies (her favorite) for Summer, having a soloist sing a haunting rendition of 'Jerusalem' for Violet, carving the emblem of the machinists' union on Paul's headstone. (He didn't dare carve the name; the names remained in his notes at home.) He spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on the services and burials, trying to treat every last anonymous body as if it was his family member.

He even created portraits of each person. He had tried his hand at drawing them, but the results were laughable. Then he began leafing through magazines at the supermarket checkout line to look for matches, but never could get anybody just right; the eyes of one person would be right, but the nose and the mouth and the hair would be all wrong. That was when he experimented with cutting the ads and pictures apart and building new faces out of the pieces. The new faces were disjointed, to be certain, but with practice and technique he was soon able to make some startingly precise pictures. He made one for every decedent, then began to make baby pictures and, for the older ones, pictures of their younger days. Violet even had a magnificent wedding portrait.

At first he kept the pictures in the person's folder, but soon purchased picture frames and displayed the pictures on his bookshelves and end tables. It was nice to return home from a long day and see Paul or Summer smiling at him.

Charlie's pictures and funerals remained his secret for a long time, until the day that Thomas St. Pierre came into his custody. Thomas hailed from New Orleans originally, coming here to teach music at one of the local colleges, and had meant to return to his beloved hometown, but an accidental fall by the river ended his life before he could go back South. Charlie decided to throw Thomas an old-fashioned Louisiana funeral, complete with parade, marching band, umbrella-waving dancers and steaming kettles of gumbo at the repast.

The spectacle-- the likes of which had never been seen in these Pennsylvania streets-- attracted a lot of attention.

The Remains-- Chapter Three

2009-11-17T07:33:00.001-08:00

The unknown man ended up with a beautifully-stained hardwood casket lined in white satin, a new suit, a blanket of white roses, and a graveside service conducted by Vera's minister, who had agreed to hold rites for the man free of charge. Tim and Tom Hoffman, the coroner, and Charlie had attended, the four of them acting as pallbearers. Then the man was laid to rest in a plot--purchased by Charlie-- in the cemetery closest to Miller Furnace Park, his grave marked with a simple stone etched with the year of death.

Charlie had done a beautiful job providing the stranger with a respectful funeral and burial. But he still felt that it was inadequate, that something was missing. He pondered it for days and days after the burial, wondering what he had forgotten, and why he couldn't lay the anxiety to rest. Then one evening, as he was watching the news, it suddenly occurred to him.

He needed to know the man's name. The man had died anonymously, mourned by strangers, and now slept in an unmarked grave, and Charlie found that utterly unacceptable. He resolved to give the dead man the final dignity of having his name, and life, acknowledged, and in the morning placed another call to the coroner.

The officer on the other end of the line let out a long, weary sigh. "I'm not sure what else we can do, Charlie. We did everything we could to find out who he was."

"DNA?" challenged Charlie.

"Yes."

"Dental records?"

"Of course. Fingerprints, the whole nine yards. We even put the notice in the paper."

"But...he had a name," insisted Charlie. "He had to. He had a life."

"Welcome to our world," said the coroner sadly. "This happens a lot. More often than you'd think."

"Somebody out there might be looking for him!"

"Perhaps, but-- well, at this point, it's not likely. Look. Most people around here have lived here their whole lives. Their families have been here for generations. And sometimes, well, the rest of the family dies off, drifts away, whatever, and people are left alone, and they remain here, and they eventually die here. And, a lot of the time, that's it. We have a lot of unknown bodies here. They aren't claimed because there's nobody left to claim them. It's sad, but it is what it is."

Charlie looked around at his little house, empty and-- unless the TV was on-- silent. Would anybody claim me when my time comes?

"I want them," Charlie said.

"I'm sorry?"

"I want them. The unclaimed people-- I want all of them. When the time for finding their families is over, and there's nothing left for you to do, I want you to call me."

"You don't want to do that, Charlie. You can't do what you did for that man for all these other people. It will cost you a fortune."

"I have a fortune, and this is how I wish to spend it. Until it runs out, I'm going to hold funerals for all of them. Nobody should have to go unknown and unclaimed."

***

He hired a private investigator to try and find the dead man's identity, but with the limited information from the coroner-- white male, 6' 1", 200 pounds, in his early 60's, three silver fillings, early stages of heart disease-- there wasn't much to go on. The investigator chased the few weak leads he had, but came up empty, and told Charlie that he, too, had done what he could. Charlie had to confront the horror that the man would never be identified.

He tried to let go of the mystery, but as much as he distracted himself and lectured himself, the nagging question would not lie still.

Unable to sleep, he padded downstairs for a glass of milk. He sat at his little table, drinking the milk and staring at the clock, which glowed 1:38 accusingly.

Then he had a strange idea, which he initially dismissed, but then called back for further consideration. He finished the milk, got up, and picked up the notepad and pen from beside the phone. He poured himself a second glass of milk, sat back down, and stared at the blank page.

C&S Industrial Forms, Inc., read the logo at the top. He had no idea where he had gotten the pad.

Then he set the pen down on the paper and began to write cautiously.

Walter Schmidt

Age 62
Born in Upper Rock Haven Township
Mother Mary, Father Henry

Six feet tall, eh?

Guard, West Valley High School basketball team

...which meant that, he may have...

Attended Villanova University on basketball scholarship

...and, if he was in his sixties, he may have...

Played in the NCAA Tournament

What else? He had cavities and heart disease, so...

Favorite foods were hard candies and sausages

He looked at the list of Walter's supposed accomplishments and felt better. He chewed the end of the pen thoughtfully, and continued to build the dead man's imaginary resume.

The Remains-- Chapter Two

2009-11-14T13:04:00.000-08:00

Many months passed. Charlie went to his job every weekday morning, came home every weekday evening, pretended to care about Penn State football, fell asleep in front of some crime drama, raked leaves, raked his neighbor's leaves, cleaned out his closets, ordered pizzas and, one afternoon, bought himself a new pair of oxfords for work. He tumbled comfortably back into the mundane routine he had known before the inheritance, and after a while forgot entirely about the unknown dead man, the phone call, and even his fortune.

The only thing he didn't forget was Aunt Vera. She had been an old curmudgeon, but she had been the only family he had left, and he mourned the loss of her muttering, frowning little mouth and watery coffee.

He returned one day from work to the message light on his answering machine, flashing on and off in a oddly celebratory manner.

Mr. Wentzl, this is the coroner's office? Please call us back at your earliest convenience at 484 646 9903. Thank you!

Charlie's eyes flew wide. He grabbed a pen, replayed the message, and jotted down the number. As it was after 5 pm, it was too late to call that day, but he resolved to call first thing the next morning.

And he did.

"Coroner."

"Hello, this is Charlie Wentzl. Your office called me yesterday?"

"Oh, yes. You had contacted us some time back about the John Doe from Miller Furnace?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well, nobody's claimed him. Do you still want to take him?"

"Absolutely." Charlie grabbed his pen and notepad again. "What do I need to do?"

"Just pick him up."

"Pick him up?" Charlie quailed. "Like, come put him in the trunk of the car or something?"

"Sure," replied the coroner, "although you need to arrange for a legal method of disposal. You can't take him home and bury him in your backyard or anything like that. You need to get a licensed mortician lined up. I have some names and numbers of funeral homes that can help you."

"No, that's okay. I have one. I'll arrange for them to come get him." He made a mental note to call the Hoffmans; they had done a good job for Vera.

"Who will you be sending?"

"Hoffman Brothers in Weisstown."

"Oh yeah, I know Tim. Just have him call me with his pick-up time."

It felt eerily like he was arranging for the purchase and delivery of a piece of furniture. "Will do."

He hung up the phone, jogged his memory for the Hoffmans' phone number, and failing to recall it completely, caved and looked it up in the phone book.

"Hoffman Brothers Funeral Home," said the gentle yet assertive voice. "How may I help you?"

"Yes, this is Charlie Wentzl. You handled the arrangements for my aunt, Vera Wentzl?"

"Oh, yes, Charlie. How are you doing?"

"Fine. Look"-- and suddenly, he realized just how bizarre he was going to sound, and he stumbled. "Um...um."

"Is everything all right?" Tim prompted.

"Um...yes. I'm sorry. I need--I need to have a body picked up from the county morgue?"

"Of course." Tim's businesslike demeanor betrayed no alarm, but then again, he did this for a living. "What name?"

"Um...well, I don't know. John Doe."

"John Doe?" Now Tim sounded a bit surprised.

"Yes. I--I don't know his real name."

"Well, Charlie," Tim said gently, "I'm not sure that I can claim somebody without a name--"

"No," Charlie interrupted. "They'll know who you're looking for. They don't know who he is, either. Do you remember the bit in the paper some time back about a dead man in Miller Furnace Park?"

"Vaguely."

"Well, that's this guy."

"Is he a relative of yours? Friend?"

"No."

"Can I ask, then, why you want me to pick him up?"

"I'm going to have him buried," explained Charlie. "Otherwise they'll donate him to science, so-- they're letting me take him and handle his arrangements."

"Charlie, that's so kind of you," exclaimed Tim.

"It's nothing," dismissed Charlie.

"No, it is," insisted Tim, "but-- well, even a basic funeral isn't cheap. You know that."

"No, I know. It's okay."

"You'd do that?" Tim sounded awed. "You'd do that for this man you don't know?"

"Like I said, it's nothing."

"It's very kind." Charlie could hear Tim ruffling through some papers. "I'll call them and arrange a pick up time, and then I'll call you back to schedule a time for us to meet and make the arrangements." He paused. "I can't make any concrete promises right now, but I'll talk to Tom and see if there's something we can't donate to the cause. I can't do the whole thing for free, but I'm sure we can give a few things."

"You don't have to do that."

"It would be our pleasure. What a wonderful thing you're doing here, Charlie."

***

It felt weird to be seated, once again, in the exquisitely-upholstered leather chair opposite Tim Hoffman's mahogany desk, answering the same questions he had just answered months earlier, with the added oddity of making such sensitive decisions for a total stranger.

"Now," said Tim, his manner much more matter-of-fact this time around (he wasn't dealing with the dead man's relatives, after all), "do you want a burial or cremation?"

Charlie hadn't even considered cremation. "Um...I'm not sure. What do you recommend?"

"Well, considering how long this man has been...deceased, I would suggest cremation. Plus, it's a much more economical choice." Tim peered up over his frameless glasses. "If that is a consideration, of course."

"Obviously, I don't want to spend a fortune on this," Charlie pondered aloud. "But I don't want to be cheap, either."

"Cremation is a very respectful choice, Charlie. A lot of families are electing it these days."

"But..." Charlie sighed. "I'm worried about doing something this man wouldn't've wanted."

"There's no way to know one way or the other," Tim reassured him.

"True."

"Plus then we can forego consideration of an outfit, purchase of a burial plot..." Tim scanned his worksheet. "The only issue would be scattering of the ashes. Or you could inter them in our memorial garden here."

"How much would cremation be?"

Tim methodically punched some figures into his computer and clicked the mouse with a bit of flourish. "$3,155. That includes our basic service fee, cremation in the fiberboard container that we used for transit, and the fee for pickup and transit from the morgue."

Charlie didn't say anything.

Tim glanced up at him. "Is that satisfactory?"

"I spent almost three times that for Vera's service," mused Charlie.

"Yes, it's a very good package. The price is quite reasonable for what you get."

"The price is good," agreed Charlie. "But...I don't know."

"What's wrong?"

"I'm-- I'm not comfortable with it," confessed Charlie. "I bought Vera a deluxe casket, printed memorial cards, and everything. This poor man, whom nobody apparently cares about, is going to be incinerated, naked, in a cardboard box. It's not much better than what the county was going to do with him. I want to do better than this."

"Charlie," urged Tim, "while normally I would be encouraging you to add on as many bells and whistles as you want to this, I don't think you want to go all out here."

"So you're comfortable overcharging me for my aunt, but not for this man?"

Tim winced. "It's not quite like that. Your aunt was family. You do the bells and whistles for her because she was your aunt. This man, on the other hand? He's a stranger. You're so kind to make sure that he gets a proper send-off, but--"

"As far as that man is concerned," interjected Charlie, "I'm the only family he has."

"Charlie, this is going to cost you a lot of money."

"Tim, do me a favor. Pretend this man was my father." Charlie gestured at Tim's mortuary guidebooks and catalogues on the desk. "And proceed accordingly."

Tim regarded Charlie for a moment, then smiled.

"Very well, then. Let's start"-- and Tim opened the thick binder to display several models of caskets-- "by choosing this."

The Remains-- Chapter One

2009-11-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

Vera Wentzl spent the last day of her life driving her fifteen-year-old Chevrolet sedan to and from the grocery store, where she had purchased $43 worth of groceries-- everything, of course, on special-- using $19 in coupons.

She died in her sleep in her one-hundred year old, two-bedroom Cape Cod, wearing a faded polyester nightgown she had owned since 1991.

Charlie Wentzl had chalked up his aunt's frugality to the parsimony characteristic of the Pennsylvania Dutch, as opposed to any actual poverty. Therefore, he wasn't terribly surprised to discover that she had left behind a lot more than a old nightgown and a beat-up car. She had been a careful, hawkish investor, he remembered, closely examining the statements that arrived monthly from her broker with her rheumy, yet sharp, eyes.

When he was appointed executor of her estate, he gathered the statements and reviewed them, startled to find that she had several mutual funds in her name. She had also been receiving the survivor benefit from her late husband's pension; Charlie knew that Uncle Bill had worked for the big corporate employer in town for decades, but he never knew just how high Bill had risen in the ranks. Vera had invested every penny of his significant pension in the markets and had withdrawn most of it before the bottom-out.

He had her Cape Cod appraised and discovered that, while the house itself was worthless, its location was zoned for mixed residential and commercial and close to a major thoroughfare, so the land it sat on (a much larger lot than the house's footprint would lead you to believe) was quite valuable, even in a down market.

Charlie figured Vera was much wealthier than her lifestyle suggested, but even he was breathless when he arrived at the final value for her estate. It was in the millions.

And, under the terms of her will, it was all his.

The only debt he had to settle was her funeral expenses. As her sole surviving relative, heir, and executor, Charlie was responsible for organizing her service and burial. She would often return from a friend's service tut-tuttering about the poor dear's ungrateful children giving the deceased such a cheap, disrespectful send-off. He took pains to ensure that her own service lacked nothing.

He thought it odd, though, that somebody so stingy with money would take issue with minimizing funeral expenses.

"Aunt Vera," he once remarked, "maybe they're just being careful with their money."

"Nonsense," sputtered Vera. "Her son drove up in a new car. Delores hadn't even been buried yet and they're already acting like they're the Rockefellers or something."

"Maybe he bought the car before she died?"

"Mmm. Counting on her money to pay for it!" Vera shook her head disapprovingly. "I'm not saying funerals should be vulgar or anything, but it's one of the last things you do for a person, and everybody should at least have a proper funeral. Poor Delores. The minister rushed through the service and you could tell he had never met her when she was alive, and he said a bunch of meaningless drivel that could apply to anybody."

"Maybe her church just had a change at the top and he's the new guy."

Vera snorted derisively. "The whole thing was just crass. They served heat-and-eat pizza bagels-- pizza bagels! Her son would have held the service in a drive-thru if he could."

Vera had a weird thing about funerals. She would always cluck her tongue sadly while reading the local section of the paper, remarking on the tragedy of the occasional notice where police were searching for a decedent's next-of-kin or trying to identify a body they had found. Her greatest alarm was at a story about what the local coroner's offices did with unclaimed corpses-- one donated them to science, another provided a no-frills burial in an unmrked grave. Her stoic eyes had even betrayed tears at that one, and she shook her head, saying over and over, "I can't imagine, I can't imagine."

He kept both simple, as she would have wanted, but he made sure to choose a good-quality casket with a pretty lining, and ordered sprays of her favorite cream-colored roses, and served her friends a hearty repast in the fire hall where she used to play bingo with them. The one thing she would have disapproved of was her outfit; not wanting to lay her out in one of her fraying old dresses, he purchased her a new suit for her burial. But all else was in order: her longtime pastor, beautiful hymns, heartfelt eulogies by friends, and a final resting place in the cemetary plot next to Uncle Bill, the headstone freshly engraved with her year of death.

The judge's final order and the cashier's check in hand, Charlie deposited his late aunt's assets into his account, his head spinning when the teller handed him a receipt showing his astronomical balance. He celebrated by taking himself out for a pizza dinner, something he rarely did on his own meager salary, remembering to toast his aunt silently with his plastic tumbler of Coke.

Then he returned to his job as a quality-control specialist at a local manufacturing concern, and his life went back to normal. He considered quitting, and living on his inheritance, or using the funds to buy a new car or take an exotic vacation, but he could not in good conscience spend Vera's carefully-cultivated wealth on such extravagances. He didn't want to just let the money sit, unused, however; he had no children or other heirs to leave the wealth to.

Then, one morning, he was reading the paper and spotted a small news brief:

Police are still trying to identify a 62-year-old man they found in Miller Furnace Dam Park early last week. A department spokesman says that no missing persons matching the man's description have been reported, and efforts to match the man with dental and DNA records have been unsuccessful.

He noticed that the dead man had been found in the jurisdiction where unclaimed bodies were donated to science. Remembering Vera's horror at this fate, he suddenly had an idea.

He flipped through the phone book, located the number for that coroner's office, and dialed it.

"Yes," he said when they answered. "I'm calling about the man in Miller Furnace Park?"

"Oh, really?" replied the coroner. "Do you have any information about him?"

"No," said Charlie. "But if you don't find a relative for him, are you going to donate him?"

"It would be a while, but yes, that's our policy if nobody claims him."

"Well, if it gets to that point, I'd like to claim him," said Charlie.

"Um, okay," said the coroner, puzzled. "Can I ask why?"

"Yes," said Charlie. "I'd like to give him a proper funeral. At my expense, of course."

So now what?

2009-11-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

First off, thanks again for reading Megan's Bath-- the feedback and support you guys gave me was amazing and really inspiring! I'm glad you enjoyed it, and if you have any suggestions or issues, I'd love to hear them. I may clean that up (the prose is still pretty wonky, in my opinion) and get it off to an agent after all, but I'm going to let it marinate for a while first. That may be a post-Christmas head-off-the-blahs project.

I have two grants in the pipeline due at the beginning of December, so that's where most of my writing efforts are going for now.

I have another story that I'll start soon, but it won't be updated as regularly as Megan, at least not until I get these grants done.

It's a tale that will provide an excellent anecdote to holiday cheer: The Remains. Stand by!

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 9 (cont'd and concluded)

2009-11-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

"What?" whispered Helen. Everything in the room suddenly came into insistent focus.

"She's dead?" whimpered Megan.

Donna nodded. "I'm so sorry. I hate that you had to hear this from me."

"Oh God." Helen's confused hand scrambled and felt the arm of a nearby chair; she lowered herself into it. "Oh God." Across the room, she could hear Megan start to cry.

"We don't know why she did it." Donna sounded apologetic. "Like I said, it wasn't like something she would do."

Helen closed her eyes tightly.

"Can I get you anything?" asked Donna anxiously. "A glass of water? A Kleenex?"

Helen shook her head.

Donna searched the office for some hint of what she should do next. Her eyes fell upon her message pad. "Here," she said, suddenly determined, striding over to her desk. She flipped through the old message pages until she found Tuesday's records. "This is the number for the sheriff's office. You should give them a call." As she spoke, she copied the number to a slip of paper. Then she glanced up at Helen. "Where are y'all staying tonight?"

Helen shrugged.

Donna flipped open her reservation calendar and scanned it with her lavender index nail. "I have a unit open for the next couple of days. Y'all are welcome to use it if you'd like."

Helen looked up at her.

"Free of charge," added Donna.

Helen smiled weakly at her. "Thank you," she said quietly. "That's very kind of you."

"It's the least we can do." Donna went into her back room again, emerging this time with a key. "Number 224." She handed the key, along with the phone number, to Helen.

"Thank you." Helen set the key and paper aside and rubbed her eyes. I'm too late, she thought.

"Really, it's nothing." Donna sat down heavily at her desk, shaking her head. "I can't believe they didn't contact you."

"I'm not sure they would have known to," admitted Helen. Then she glanced around, suddenly realizing that she and Donna were alone. She sat up sharply. "Megan?"

Donna looked up, startled. "Your daughter?" She looked around. "Where did she go?"

Helen was up and out of her chair, searching frantically. "Megan?" She pushed open the office door and stepped back out into the hot afternoon, her eyes scanning the parking lot. Megan was nowhere to be seen.

"Where did she go?" fretted Donna.

Helen heard the gentle roar of the nearby surf in the air and immediately figured out where Megan had gone. "Oh God," she cried. "How do you get to the beach from here?"

Donna pointed towards a small wooden walkway. "That's the access ramp."

Helen took off across the lot, Donna jogging behind her, and flew onto the ramp. Her feet pounded on the bleached boards as she ran up and over the sea wall and down towards the sand. When she saw Megan on the beach, standing stock-still and facing towards the ocean, she slowed.

"There she is," Helen called, relieved. She turned back to Donna, who was huffing slightly as she still hurried up the ramp. "I see her. She's on the beach."

Donna stopped and grabbed the hand rail, breathing heavily.

"Are you okay?" called Helen, suddenly concerned, but Donna held up a hand.

"I'm fine, honey," Donna gasped. "Go check on your little girl."

Helen walked down the ramp and out onto the beach. Megan stood several yards away, on the part of the beach washed by only every seventh or eighth wave, where the sand glowed, soft as velvet. Quietly Helen made her way to her daughter's side. She glanced down and saw that Megan's feet were black.

"You okay?" asked Helen softly.

Megan shook her head and blurted out, "I don't want to go."

"What are you talking about?" asked Helen, studying her child's face; Megan's eyes, full of fear, remained fixed on the horizon.

"I don't want to go," Megan repeated.

Helen turned to look out to the surf. "Then don't," she said simply.

"What if I don't have a choice?"

"Why do you think you don't have a choice?"

"Ali didn't have a choice."

"Perhaps not," said Helen. "But you're not Ali."

"But what if I am? What if he was like me, once?" Megan wrapped her arms around herself. "What if he was once a kid on the land? What if he had to finally leave it behind?"

Helen felt a pang. "I don't know, sweetheart."

"I don't want to go," Megan said again. She looked at her mother, panicked. "I don't want to leave you."

"I don't want you to leave me, either." Helen smiled sadly at Megan.

"So what do I do?"

"What do you need to do?"

Megan looked back out at the surf, and suddenly Helen perceived how hungry the girl's eyes were. "I don't want to go, but I need to go."

Helen put her face in her hands for a long time.

This is where my father washed ashore, she thought, where my mother drowned, and where my daughter will swim away from me.

Then, resolved, she looked up.

"Here's what I'm going to do," she said evenly. "I'm going to go up and get some towels. And maybe a deck chair. And perhaps, even, a good book."

"And what am I going to do?" pleaded Megan.

"You're going to do what you need to do," answered Helen. "Go."

"Really?" Megan was taken aback. "But-- but what are you going to do then?"

Helen grasped her daughter's shoulders and peered intently into her eyes. "I'm going to wait for you."

Megan looked bewildered. "But it-- it might be a while."

"Hence the chair and the book."

"But--" Megan floundered. "But what if I can't come back?"

"I'll help you. I'll get every towel I can find. We'll do what we did last time."

"But--" Megan looked on the verge of tears again. "But what if I-- don't come back?"

"Then I will call your father," said Helen, "and tell him to sell the house and buy a boat, one that can go out to the open ocean, and we will learn how to pilot it, and we will come find you, and we will live on it, anchored wherever you are, as long as you want us to."

"You would?" asked Megan.

"Of course I would. I'll learn how to scuba dive if I have to. Nothing is impossible here." Helen pulled the hair gently back from Megan's face. "Do you remember that book I used to read you? The Runaway Bunny?"

Megan nodded, tears leaving blackened track marks on her cheeks.

"Remember what the mother said, when the little bunny wanted to run away, and when he threatened to turn into a trout and swim away?"

Megan smiled. " 'I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.' "

"Exactly," nodded Helen, pulling the girl into a tender embrace. " 'I will be a tree that you come home to.' " She pulled back and smiled at her. "Or a deck chair."

"Or a boat." Megan grinned.

"Right."

Megan hesitated. "So-- should I go? Now?"

"If you're ready."

Suddenly Megan looked crestfallen. "I can't," she blurted out.

"Why not?"

"I can't swim," she groaned. "I never had a reason to learn."

Helen laughed. "All you do," she explained, demonstrating, "is paddle your arms like this, and kick your feet."

"That's it?" said Megan dubiously.

"That's it," affirmed Helen. "The hard part is the breathing." She smiled. "You don't have to worry about that."

Megan looked around anxiously. "I'm going to have to change over. I don't want anybody to see."

"There's nobody around here," Helen reassured her, scanning the beach. "Do you want me to help you?"

Megan flashed a surprised smile. "Would you?"

"Of course." Helen put her arms around her child. "Are you ready?"

After a moment's hesitation, Megan finally nodded. Helen could feel the girl's limbs trembling and held her closer to reassure her.

Mother and daughter walked cautiously forward, the waves breaking against their shins, then their knees. When the water lapped around their waists, Megan suddenly began to twitch and take sharp breaths. Here it comes, thought Helen, the change.

"Put your face in, Megan," Helen commanded her.

Megan leaned over and submerged her body in the water. There were a few more spasms, but soon all was calm, and Helen loosened her grip as the girl adjusted to her new form.

"Paddle," urged Helen. "Kick. That's right."

She walked Megan in a few more feet, then realized that before long, she would not be able to stand. The waves were rising gently around her chest, occasionally washing over her face.

"I'm going to let go now," she called.

Megan reached a scaly hand out of the water and waved.

Helen let go. The girl pulled away, a dark shadow under the greenish water, and soon disappeared into the depths, paddling and kicking as she had just been taught.

Helen backed slowly towards the shore, a mix of grief and triumph churning inside her. Eventually she emerged, dripping, from the shallows, and stood contemplatively on the beach for a moment.

Then she wrung out her hair, wiped the water from her face, then went to ask Donna about towels and a beach chair.

***

Megan swam. Once she was past the gentle rise and fall of the shore tides, the water grew deeper and colder, but nothing she couldn't tolerate. Before long she was joined by schools of small gray fish, the occasional bobbing jellyfish, and below, on the sea floor, little crabs scuttered sideways.

She soon came upon a trio of bull sharks, and at first she faltered, but the instant they detected her presence, they flicked away back into the shadows. It suddenly occurred to her that they were frightened of her, and she was awed.

Her mother was right; swimming was pretty easy, and she delighted in the newfound strength her limbs displayed, pulling her confidently through the water. She caught a glimpse of her forearm, caught in the faint rays of light from the faraway sun that danced beneath the sea.

In the ocean water, in the faint light, her skin had iridescent flecks of purple and pink and blue.

She swam for a while more, confidently testing out a few somersaults, marveling at the reefs of branching and tubular corals that sprang up beneath her-- I thought those were in the Caribbean, not here!-- and exploring the wreck of a small sailboat, now nearly encased in barnacles and soft, waving algae.

She wondered if there were any others like her out wandering the reef. She wasn't sure she wanted to find out. Certainly, there would be more time to explore these waters, but right now, she was growing tired, and it was getting late. She turned and headed back to shore, eager to report what she had just seen and done.

My mother is waiting for me.

THE END

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 9

2009-11-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

A nagging question haunted Helen.

She refrained from asking it during the flight to Orlando (crowded, as it usually was, with Disney families). Even ensconced in the privacy of their rental car, she held her tongue throughout the clutter of the city well into the scrub brush and pine groves that were the hallmarks of the Space Coast. But once they merged safely onto the anonymity of I-95, Helen finally dared to ask.

"Megan?"

"Mm-hm?" The girl was gazing out the window. Her father, unable to take more time from work, had remained back in Virginia, so it was just the two of them in the car.

"Did you"-- Helen faltered-- "were you-- when you climbed in the tub?"

This got Megan's attention; she looked at Helen fearfully.

"Were you trying to kill yourself?" asked Helen finally.

Megan considered the question, then shook her head. "No," she said. "Well, not really."

"What do you mean, 'not really'?"

The girl shrugged. "I mean, I wasn't planning on dying, but I didn't really care if I did."

"Why did you do it?"

"I don't know."

"You don't care if you die?"

"Honestly? My life kinda sucks, Mom." Megan returned her gaze to the window.

Helen frowned. "Well, what can we do to fix that?"

"Other than make me into a normal girl? I don't know."

"Can I do anything?"

Megan looked at her mother and gave her an apologetic smile. "You're already doing it."

They drove on in silence for a while, then Helen spotted the sign up ahead:

RT. 328
TARPON BEACH
POWAHATCHEE
NEXT EXIT

Her heart plummeted into her shoes and she felt a rush of cold, but she steeled herself and moved into the right lane.

"Is this it?" asked Megan, sitting up eagerly.

"Yeah," nodded Helen, her eyes locked on the highway ahead that would lead them to the coast.

"How long has it been since you've been here?"

"Since I was eighteen years old."

"Wow. And you've never come back? Not once?"

"No reason to." There was the service station where she had last bought gas on her way out of town. She had sworn then that she would never come back.

"But your mom is here," protested Megan.

"For a long time, that didn't really mean anything to me."

"What did she do that was so awful? Was it really just about your dad?"

"Mostly, yeah."

"But that wasn't her fault."

Helen sighed. "I thought she was a doormat. She was-- is-- this really bright woman. She was a professional in her home country. I couldn't comprehend how somebody like her would just settle for so many things. She settled for her job. She settled for this town. And she settled for him."

"So she's not ambitious enough for you."

"It's not like that," retorted Helen. "I thought she was putting up with all of this stuff for his sake. She was stuck in this crappy town, scrubbing toilets, hoping that he'd turn up eventually." She eyed Megan knowingly. "Even long after she supposedly threw him out for good."

"You think so?"

"I don't know. I mean she's still here, for God's sake. Same place and everything. I wonder if she's stayed where she is all this time just in case he wanted to find her again." Helen shook her head. "I didn't want to be like that, and I certainly didn't want you to see that and think it was okay, or how women were supposed to be. I wanted you to be independent." I thought I did, anyway, she added silently.

Megan was quiet for a mile or so, then spoke. "If Daddy went away, would you take him back?"

"Daddy wouldn't do that."

"But what if he did?" Megan pressed.

"It would depend," Helen admitted.

"On what?"

"Why he left."

"What about me? What if I left? Would you let me come back?"

"Of course," Helen said irritably.

"Would it depend?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It's different with parents and kids. Parents will always wait for their kids. It wouldn't matter."

Megan thought about this for a moment.

"Maybe," ventured Megan, "that's why she's still here."

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe she's not waiting for him. Maybe she's waiting for you."

Taken aback, Helen looked at her daughter, who had turned her gaze back out to the highway.

"Maybe," Helen said quietly, suddenly realizing where she was. "Wait." The stores in the shopping plaza had changed, and the storefronts had been facelifted, but here it was. She slowed down and, when the traffic had cleared, she made the left turn onto Osceola Street. There, not far off the main highway, was the little cluster of garden apartments. She pulled over to the curb and parked. They got out of the car and walked uncertainly up the cracked narrow sidewalk to building 2558, then under the overhang to number 4.

There was a doorbell, which Helen pressed with a trembling finger. Then they waited.

After a few moments, Helen pressed the bell again.

"Maybe it's not working," suggested Megan.

"Maybe," agreed Helen. She knocked, but after a few more minutes it became clear that nobody was home.

"You told her we were coming, didn't you?"

"I sent a note." All these damn notes! The tension broken, Helen stared at the nondescript green door. "I couldn't find a phone number for her."

"Maybe she's out."

"Maybe," said Helen. "There's another place we can check." She turned back to the car. "C'mon."

"Where?"

"The condo."

They got back into the car. "Why would she be there?" asked Megan. "She's not still working, is she?"

"She might be."

"God, isn't she retired by now? How old is she?"

"Housekeepers don't always get to retire." Helen gripped the wheel and steered the car away from the curb and back towards the highway.

They drove over the intracoastal waterway bridge and into the resort area of Tarpon Beach. Ahead, Helen could see the gray concrete outline of Sea Coast Villa IV, the fifth one down on the oceanfront.

She pulled into the parking lot, observing that unlike the shopping center, the condo clearly had not had a facelift. It looked almost the same, the only difference was that now, it was even more run down.

They left the car in a visitor space and walked into the rental office. Its cheap wood paneling reeked of decades of cigarette smoke.

A middle-aged woman sat behind the desk, flipping through a calendar as she talked on the phone. Megan was immediately mesmerized by the woman's long lavender fingernails; she would periodically stop flipping to tap her fill-ins on a particular date.

"Uh-huh," said the woman in a thick and syrupy accent. "I can do March 3rd, but not the 10th...uh-huh...yeah. Okay, let me see"-- she flipped more calendar pages-- "I have the 17th , but you'd have to share one unit rather than two...two bedrooms, yes." She glanced up and smiled at Helen, then held up one finger to indicate she'd be right with them. "Do you want to think about it and give me a call back?...No, I don't think they'd be taken before tomorrow...okay then...yes, that's fine, I'll be here. Thank you, and you have a good one now...bye bye." She hung up the phone and looked expectantly at Helen and Megan. "Yes, can I help you?"

"Yes," said Helen, suddenly awkward. "I was looking for Maria Beltran?"

The woman's eyes widened. "Maria?"

"Yes, she was on the housekeeping staff?" explained Helen.

"Oh yes," said the woman, "I know Maria." She narrowed her eyes. "Are you family?"

Helen was taken aback. "Why, yes. How did you know?"

The woman smiled sadly. "You look just like her. The eyes." She stood up. "I'm Donna McPhee. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Helen grasped the woman's heavily-ringed hand uncertainly. "Helen Ursis. This is my daughter, Megan."

"Hi," said Megan.

"Hello, dear." Donna smiled at Megan, but there was a hint of pity. She turned back to Helen. "They told me you might come by...it's in the back. Let me go get it for you." Before Helen could ask what she was talking about, Donna bustled through a door and disappeared.

"Get what?" whispered Megan.

"I'm not sure," Helen replied.

In a few moments Donna re-appeared, a cardboard box in her arms. She set it down on a coffee table near her desk. "Here...I think this is everything."

Helen walked over and peered inside. The box held an old, cracked leather purse that strained at the seams, a plastic grocery bag with a soda and a few butter containers inside, and a worn cotton cardigan.

"What is this?" asked Helen.

Now Donna was confused. "What do you mean?"

"Why-- why are you giving me this?"

"These are her things," said Donna.

"Why are you giving them to me?"

Donna's face became ashen. "Oh no," she said quietly. "They didn't call you?"

"Who?"

"The police," Donna answered gently.

"Why would they?"

"Oh, no," said Donna again. "Oh, no." She covered her mouth with her hands. "I'm sorry, really, I am, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't be the one to tell you."

"Tell me what?" Helen demanded. "What happened?"

"Nobody's quite sure," began Donna. "She went swimming that morning. Tuesday. It was the strangest thing-- she still had her uniform on."

Helen shot an alarmed look at Megan.

"She never did that," Donna continued. "She never did anything like that."

"What happened?" interrupted Megan, practically hollering.

For a moment, Donna stared at Megan, her eyes full of pity. Then she finally answered.

"I'm sorry, honey," said Donna sadly. "She drowned."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 8 (cont'd)

2009-11-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

Megan sat dumbstruck, the pages of Maria's letter almost falling from her hand.

"Well?" asked Michael.

"Well what?" said Megan sullenly.

"What do you think?"

"What difference does it make?" She shrugged. "It is what it is."

"Do you-- understand what she's saying?" prompted Helen.

"Oh, sure," replied Megan, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "I'm a fish." She tossed the letter dismissively away, and it clattered to the carpet.

"You're not a fish," Michael corrected her.

"I'm not? Let's see, I have scales...my grandfather-- wait, what did he say again?" She jumped from the couch to her knees on the floor, rooting through the letter's pages. "Here it is," she said triumphantly, reading aloud, "he came from the sea, but"-- here she threw up a hand-- "not on a boat." She looked up at her parents bitterly. "That's the part where she throws him out for good, remember?"

"Megan--" Helen closed her eyes in exasperation.

"Oh, but wait, the most important part!" She barked out a laugh. "I almost forgot! I can breathe underwater! Shit, whales can't do that!" She threw her arms wide. "I'm a fish!"

"You're not a fish!" Michael protested.

"Then what am I, Dad?" She whirled angrily on him. "The Little Fucking Mermaid? I must have missed the part where my hair grew out long and flowy and my boobs got huge. Oh yeah, and my lovely singing voice. I couldn't even talk! Did you see me? Did you see what I looked like? I looked like that old movie--The Creature from the Black Lagoon! That's me! When I become my magical self, I look like a fucking B-movie monster!" Her bitter pantomime quickly dissolved into tears. "What am I?" she wailed. "Am I what he was?"

"I don't know," said Michael quietly.

"Is that how it ends?" she cried. "Dead? A skeleton in a--park?"

"Megan," said Michael sharply, "I told you. No."

"He was an addict, Megan," interjected Helen.

"Yeah, because it hurt too much, Mom. He had to go back to sea because it hurt too much to stay on land. He took the drugs to stick around. Don't you realize that?" She pointed at her mother. "He killed himself trying to stay with you!"

The full weight of that fact suddenly struck Helen; she blanched.

Megan looked back and forth between her parents in a panic. "Is that what I'll have to do? Drug myself to stay with you guys?"

"No," said Michael quickly.

"Or will I have to go out to sea?" Megan was nearly hysterical. "I don't want to go, I want to stay here, I can't go, I can't--"

Helen swiftly crossed over to her child, knelt down beside her, and put her arms around her. "Shhhh," she said.

"I can't go, Mommy, I can't."

Helen cradled Megan as she cried, looking up at her husband. After a few moments, she spoke quietly. "I think I'm going to nix your suggestion to call Dr. Greene."

"Dr.-- Greene?" stuttered Megan.

"I agree," nodded Michael. "She can't help us with this."

"What about Dr. Greene?" Megan wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

"No more doctors," said Helen. "We're beyond that now."

"So what do we do?" sniffled Megan.

"I think we need to talk to somebody who can help us." Helen brushed back Megan's hair and peered into her daughter's black-streaked face.

"Maria?"

Helen nodded.

Megan shook her head. "But she already told us everything she knows. It's in the letter."

"Perhaps, but maybe we can get some more details. Maybe there are things Papi told her that she doesn't think are important, but they are. We need to ask her."

"Papi?" asked Megan, then understood. "Oh...your dad."

"Yeah." said Helen quietly. "Besides...I think I owe her an apology."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 8

2009-11-05T09:57:00.001-08:00

For a long time, Helen and Michael sat-- Helen still in the tub, Michael beside it-- in silence.

Megan too was silent, but only because she didn't know how to speak underwater. If she could, she would scream. Her mother's gentle caresses on her face didn't soothe her, as she could barely feel them through the shell that now encased her. She felt claustrophobic and restless and utterly, utterly confused.

She began shaking her head back and forth, and her mother drew her hand away.

"What is it, Megan?" asked Helen, but Megan couldn't answer her.

"Is it another seizure?" asked Michael.

"I don't think so," Helen replied, cautiously. "Are you too warm? Too cold?" Then she realized that she was still partially sitting on the girl. "Oh God, I'm probably squashing you." She climbed, dripping, out of the tub. She grabbed the small towel nearby and wrapped it around her waist, quickly saturating it, and stood beside Michael. "How's your head?"

"I've completely forgotten about it," he said, gingerly touching his scalp where a tender lump had sprouted.

"We should get that looked at," she said.

"Later," he said, and called to Megan, "Is that better?"

Megan still shook her head and reached her arms up out of the water.

"You want to get out? Is that it?"

Megan nodded frantically.

"Okay," he said, looking up anxiously at Helen.

"We're going to need some more towels," she observed, glancing around the flooded floor. "We'll never get dry in here." She stepped out into the hallway and opened the linen closet; Michael followed her. Shrugging, Helen grabbed all the towels she saw, piling several of them into Michael's arms.

"What if we can't get her out?" he whispered.

"Well, she's not thrashing any more," Helen mused. "I think it'll be easier to grab onto her now that she's settled down."

"That's not what I mean. What if she's-- changed?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean...what if she can't get out of the tub now? What if this is permanent?" He glanced anxiously back at the bathroom door. "What if removing her from the water will kill her?"

Helen dropped the towels she was holding and put her hands over her mouth. "Oh my God."

"Yeah."

The sound of furious splashing suddenly erupted from the bath, sending both parents sprinting back in to see what was the matter. Megan stopped kicking when they entered and fixed them with a scowl.

"What is it?" asked Michael.

Megan thrust her arms out of the water again, jabbing her hands into the air for emphasis.

"We're working on it, okay? Be patient." He pulled Helen back into the hallway. "Okay, so what do we do?"

Helen hesitated. "I think we have to try it," she said finally. "I think if we can get her dried off quickly, she might change back."

"And if she doesn't?"

"We'll keep the tub full and throw her back in and figure something else out."

Michael nodded. "Worth a shot." He glanced back into the bathroom. "We need to dry that floor off first. I'll do that." He grabbed a handful of towels and went back in, dropping to his knees to mop up the flood. Helen noted how few towels were left and went down to the basement to retrieve whatever old ones were stored there.

As she rooted through boxes, her mind spun. So what is she, then? What am I? She was battered by a host of emotions, from helplessness to anger to guilt, and she was unsure of what to do next.

The first thing to do is to get her out of that tub.

Locating the towels, she lifted the entire box and carried it upstairs. Michael had ended up soaking most of the towels, but he had managed to get the floor reasonably dry. She walked in as he was rebuking Megan. "If you don't stop splashing, we won't be able to get you out!"

"Looks good," she observed, dropping the box on the floor.

"So how should we do this?"

Helen began spreading towels on the floor and over her arms. "You lift her, put her down here, and we'll start drying."

Michael shrugged. "Works for me." He knelt beside the tub, reached in, and after some shifting and juggling, lifted Megan out of the water.

When her face broke the surface, her eyes bulged and she immediately began gasping for breath, but Michael quickly laid her on the towels and joined Helen in wrapping her in them. For a tense minute, Michael and Helen again had to bodily restrain Megan as she spasmed, and several times they exchanged worried glances. But as the water was wiped away, the lurching and gasping subsided, and finally Megan was again able to breathe normally.

Helen looked up at Michael with relief. "I think we can empty the tub."

Michael reached behind him and pushed the drain latch open, the bathwater gradually gurgling away.

Helen leaned over Megan and asked gently, "How do you feel?"

The lump of towels that hid Megan answered miserably. "I don't know."

Keeping her swaddled, Helen reached into the lump and carefully wriggled the girl's wet clothes away. "Let's get you a change of clothes, okay?"

Megan didn't answer. "Okay?" Helen prompted her, pulling the towels away from the girl's face. Megan gave her a forlorn nod.

They helped Megan stand up, still wrapped, and hobble out of the room; as they did so, Megan caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror, her head covered in black scales, and screamed.

"Let's go," Helen urged her.

"Oh my God," cried Megan.

"It'll be okay," said Michael.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."

They went into Megan's room, where Helen busied herself with pulling open drawers and digging out fresh clothes. Michael, meanwhile, tried to reassure his horrified daughter.

"What have I done?" she wailed. She had seen the scales before, even painted some of them on her face, but this was different.

"It'll be okay. Look," he insisted, pointing at her arm, which was now only partially scaled. "It's already fading. You didn't do anything permanent."

Helen laid the clothes on Megan's bed. "Get changed," she said. "We'll meet you downstairs when you're ready."

Megan looked confused.

"Do you need help?" asked Helen.

Megan thought about it, then slowly shook her head.

"Are you going to get into the tub again?" Helen added.

"No," said Megan quietly.

"Put your clothes on," instructed Helen, following Michael out of the room, "then come down to the kitchen. We have a lot to talk about."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 7 (cont'd, and wrapped up finally)

2009-11-04T06:43:00.000-08:00

Michael groaned as he slowly regained consciousness. His clothes were soaked through with bathwater, partially from Megan's splashes but mostly from the flooded floor. He saw through cloudy eyes the outline of his wife in the tub; Megan was nowhere to be seen.

"Helen?" he mumbled, sitting up.

She was whispering something over and over and gazing down sadly.

"Helen?" he repeated, growing more alarmed. "Where's Megan?" Helen didn't appear to hear him. He strained to discern what she was saying. "Helen?"

"Not on a boat," whispered Helen. "Not on a boat. Not on a boat."

"Helen?"

"Not on a boat...not on a boat...not on a boat..."

What was happening? "Helen!" he shouted, startling her from her reverie. At last she looked at him; he saw that she was weeping.

"Helen?" he asked. "Where's Megan? Is she...still in there?"

Helen turned her gaze back to the water. "Yes." Her choked tone and haunted face sent sudden chills of horror through her husband. Has she gone insane?

"Helen"-- he was afraid to ask, but had to know-- "what did you do?"

Helen was still looking down. "I saved her," she whispered.

"You saved her?" he repeated.

"Yes," said Helen.

"Helen--"

"Not on a boat." There it was again. "Not on a boat."

Then he noticed that one of Megan's blackened feet was sticking out of the water, propped on the tub edge where it had come to rest. It wasn't moving.

"Oh, Helen," whispered Michael, his body ice-cold, "what have you done?"

"Come and see," she replied quietly. Her voice sounded almost reverent. She's insane.

Dreading what awaited him, Michael forced himself to crawl through the puddled floor to the bathtub edge. He steeled himself and looked inside.

Megan, her face covered in the black welts, lay beneath the water. Her face was frozen in an expression of horror and fear. The sight of his child motionless under the water was too much for him to bear, and he broke down and sobbed.

"Jesus, Helen," he cried, "you killed her. Why did you kill her?" He scraped the tears angrily from his eyes and looked again, his grief quickly transforming to rage. How could you, Helen?

Then he saw Megan's eyes flick towards his face, then back to Helen.

"Wait," he said, alarmed.

He remembered when his father died, how he could have sworn the chest in the casket was rising and falling, how the mind insisted despite all evidence to the contrary that the ones we love still live and breathe. Was this the same illusion?

"Megan?" he ventured, testing her.

Her eyes turned to him in response.

"Megan?" he repeated.

She stared at him, and as he studied her, he observed tiny columns of bubbles rising from her nose. They ceased for a moment, then rose again, then again in a steady rhythm.

"My God," gasped Michael. "Is she... breathing?"

Helen nodded, still gazing down, tenderly stroking the girl's face. "Yes."

"But-- but--" Michael stumbled. "That's not possible." He looked at Helen with alarmed eyes.

Helen looked back at him. "Not on a boat," she said.

Where did that come from?

Then it hit him.

That's when he told me, Maria had written, that he wasn't like me, that he couldn't live where I live. I said I didn't understand, and then he blurted out that he was from the sea. I was confused, and I asked him what he meant. From the sea, like he lived on a boat? And he shook his head sadly and said, no--

"Not on a boat," whispered Michael, and as he looked down again, he recognized his daughter's rash as the scales they were. "Oh my God."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 7 (cont'd, and I am starting to think is a bit too long, but oh well.)

2009-11-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

Downstairs, Helen sat glowering at a corner of the room.

"Honey, I'm not saying that we need to invite her for Christmas," said Michael, his voice fatigued. "But at the very least, we need a sample from her."

"I'm not convinced that's necessary."

"It may not be, but we're not the experts here."

Helen pondered this for a moment. "That damn documentary," she muttered.

"You think that's why she contacted us?"

"How else would she know that Megan has anything wrong with her? How else would she know she even exists?" Helen rubbed her eyes. "I'm sure she is only trying to help, but she's managed to create a whole mess in the process. It seems to be her way."

"Let's get a sample, Helen," Michael urged her. "Your mother's story is insane, certainly, but her DNA may help Dr. Greene figure out why this is happening to Megan."

"You may be right, but I'm not quite comfortable with it," Helen sighed.

"What if-- what if we just talked to Dr. Greene about it? She'll know whether or not it would make a difference." Michael looked for Helen's approval, but she didn't answer. She was suddenly staring, hawk-like, towards the ceiling.

"What is that?" she said darkly. "Is that-- water I'm hearing?"

Michael heard it too, the whisper of water flowing through the pipes. He shrugged. "Megan probably just used the bathroom," he offered.

Helen didn't move; her eyes remained locked on the ceiling, her body tense. "It shouldn't still be on, though," she said, rising.

Michael was about to suggest that the toilet gasket must be loose, but then he remembered Megan at the museum, and the way she was gazing at the fountain.

His eyes met Helen's, and suddenly they were dashing up the stairs to the closed bathroom door. Helen went to open the door and found it locked.

"Megan?" she called. "Are you all right?" There came no reply. "Megan?" She turned to Michael. "Get the screwdriver," she instructed him, and he dashed back downstairs as she resumed pounding on the door. "Answer me. Now."

She suddenly became aware of a damp sensation on her toes, and looked down to see a puddle of water beginning to spill out from under the door. "Oh my God!" she screamed. "Michael!"

Michael came running back upstairs; Helen began flinging herself bodily against the door.

"The bathroom," she gasped, "is flooding."

"Oh God," shouted Michael. "Stand back." Helen obeyed, and Michael ran at the door, throwing his full weight against it, over and over until it finally gave way and flew open, the lock splintering the frame. Seeing the scene inside the bathroom for the first time, Helen screamed in horror.

Megan was in the overflowing tub, thrashing wildly, her head and arms and feet completely covered by the black rash. Her eyes bulged and she was gasping frantically for air, sending her body into convulsions with her efforts.

Michael splashed across the flooded tile floor and dropped to his knees beside the tub. He struggled to lift his daughter, but the wet hives that covered her were slippery, and he couldn't keep his grip. Helen fell down beside him, trying to help, but she couldn't hold onto Megan either. She punched the tub faucet closed to stop any more water from entering, but it was too little, too late. Megan had made the bathroom into a deathtrap.

Then Megan's leg spasmed out violently, kicking Michael away so forcefully that he fell backwards against the vanity, smacking his head and knocking him unconscious.

"Michael!" cried Helen, but he didn't respond. She flung a frantic look at his slumped body, but Megan still writhed and wheezed, and Helen had to turn her attention back to the child. She kept struggling fruitlessly to grasp the girl, whose seizure was growing more and more violent. "Megan, please, honey, stop fighting me," she begged, but the child could no longer hear her. The allergy had overtaken her, and she was lost.

Not on a boat.

Realizing that she wouldn't be able to pull her out of the tub, Helen despaired, trying to think of anything she could do. The thrashing and gasping was unbearable to witness, much less experience.

Not on a boat.

Her daughter was no longer able to breathe.

Not on a boat!

With a scream, Helen suddenly jumped into the tub on top of Megan and threw all of her body weight onto the girl's arms, chest and head.

Not on a boat! Not on a boat!

Megan struggled, the spasms nearly bucking Helen across the room, but Helen held on. With strength she never knew she had, she forced Megan's head under the water with shaking, insistent hands and held it fast. Megan whipped her head back and forth, her eyes full of fear and panic; Helen, sobbing through her clenched teeth, forced herself to look into them. Stay with her until it's over.

Gradually the seizure eased. Megan's limbs jerked violently, then less so, and less and less, and then, after what seemed like ages, at last lay still.

"Not on a boat," sobbed Helen, looking piteously at her daughter through the water. "Not on a boat."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 7 (cont'd)

2009-11-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

"That's my letter!" shouted Megan. "You had no right to read it!"

"What?" snapped Helen. "It is not your letter. It's mine."

"She wrote it to me."

"Why on Earth would she do that?"

Megan faltered. 'Because-- because--"

"Please, for the love of God," barked Michael, "go upstairs."

"Michael." Helen whirled on him. "What is she talking about?"

"She found the note in the trash," explained Michael irritably. "Now, Megan--"

"She did?" exclaimed Helen, turning her glare towards her daughter. "Why are you going through the trash?"

"She said she knew what was wrong with me," pleaded Megan.

Frustrated, Helen closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead. "Oh Jesus."

"I want my letter." Megan suddenly lunged for the papers in her mother's hand, but her father grabbed her and held her fast.

"It's not your letter, Megan!" snapped Helen. "Stop it!"

"What does it say?" Megan begged, her face desperate.

"Like I said, it's bullshit."

"Tell me. Please."

"No."

"Megan," warned her father. "Remember what we talked about."

Megan looked at him angrily.

"What did you talk about?" interjected Helen.

"I'll tell you as soon as Megan goes upstairs." He fixed Megan with a threatening look.

Megan glared at both her parents, then sullenly turned and stomped up the stairs. She went into her room and slammed the door as hard as she could. Flopping down on her bed, she seethed with anger.

It was her letter.

Or was it?

Maybe Maria hadn't received the reply Megan had sent. Or maybe-- she had ignored it?

Suddenly, she felt a sting of betrayal. Whose side are you on, Grandma? I told you she had thrown your letter away!

Through her bedroom door, raised voices wafted up from downstairs. Her parents were arguing. She rose and crossed over to the door, pressing her ear against it to hear better, but the house was pretty solidly built, and the door effectively muffled their words. Not wanting them to hear her, she slowly turned the knob and pulled the door open a crack.

"Read that," her mother snapped, and Megan heard an angry rustle of papers. "Read that, and tell me again that this woman should be involved in Megan's life in any way."

There was a long silence, broken only by the clipped staccato of footsteps. Helen was pacing.

"Wait," said her father suddenly. "Wait...what?"

"You see what I mean?" asked Helen triumphantly.

"Is she serious?"

"I have no idea. Either she's serious, and she's lost her mind, or she's not, and she thinks this is some kind of joke."

"Some joke," said her father incredulously.

"I know. "

There was a long pause, and then her father spoke. "Hmmmm...okay."

"Still want to contact her?" challenged Helen.

"Not so sure that's such a good idea," mused her father, and Megan winced. He was going back on his promise now?

The tears leaped to her eyes, and she despaired. Who would help her? Not her mother, whose own anger put her beyond reach; not her father, who once again was acquiescing to her mother's demands; not Maria, who ignored her request for help to go over her head to her mother, who had already refused to hear her once; not her friends, as she no longer had any. She was all alone, a girl with a freak condition and parents who, in spite of all the doctors and the precautions, were ultimately too weak to do everything they could to help her.

Then she remembered the museum fountain, and how the lush, clear water had flowed with abandon, filling the air with whispers that cried out to her.

Quietly she slipped out of her room, hoping that her parents' argument would distract them long enough for her to do what she needed to do.

She crept into the bathroom, carefully closed and locked the door behind her, and walked over to the tub. She bent over, pulled the drain closed, then opened the faucet. The water flowed heavily into the tub, frothing over the drain and sending a ripple, gentle but insistent, towards the back. Slowly the water level rose, and Megan watched with fascination until the water was several inches deep.

How much is enough? Will this do it?

She shut off the tap and waited, listening, but after a few minutes, it was clear that her parents hadn't heard anything.

She took off her shoes but elected to keep the rest of her clothes on; she thought that being found naked would be humiliating. The rash would be troubling enough, but there was nothing to be done about that.

She decided not to leave a note. Notes were what had caused all the trouble in the first place, and anyway, they would know why.

Then Megan climbed into the water and lay down.

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 7

2009-10-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

Michael walked out of the exhibition and passed through two more galleries, searching for Megan. He finally found her in the museum atrium, where there was a little cafe with a central fountain. The rushing water created both a soothing echo which flowed throughout the atrium and a little breeze that caused the wide-leaved plants in the neighboring garden to wave gently. She sat alone at a small table at the corner of the fountain, staring forlornly into its pool.

He headed over to her and waited expectantly for her to acknowledge him, but she refused to look in his direction.

"Mind if I join you?" he asked.

Megan shrugged.

Taking that as permission, he pulled out the wrought-iron chair and sat down. For several minutes they sat in silence, both watching the fountain. He stole glances at her, gradually realizing that she was wincing slightly every so often. He noted that her arm-- close to the fountain-- was flecked with black marks where occasional water droplets were landing. Yet she didn't move her arm away. Her eyes, fixed on the water, were full of longing.

He was alarmed.

Hoping to distract her, he fished around in his pocket. "Would you like to make a wish?" he ventured.

That made her look at him finally, and he extracted a dime and held it out to her.

"What would I wish for?" she asked glumly.

"A new family," he responded.

She smiled slightly, in spite of herself.

"Look," he continued, "I'm sorry, honey. What we did was wrong."

She looked surprised.

"We were wrong to compromise your care like that." He laid the dime down on the table. "Like I said, your mom has a lot of issues with her mom, and I think they clouded her better judgment-- hers and mine." He laid his finger on the dime and pushed it around in little absentminded circles. "She loves you, and I don't think it occurred to her that we were doing anything that could hurt you. She was trying to protect you from somebody she saw as a bad influence, and after we knew your grandfather had the mutation, we figured the mystery of the source was solved and there was no harm in leaving the rest of it alone."

Megan pursed her lips. "Yeah...maybe."

"I think the thing to do now is to go on home, and I'm going to talk to your mother and figure out what to do next. Obviously, we need to talk to Dr. Greene." Dr. Greene was Megan's geneticist. "But let me handle things with your mom, okay? This is a sensitive subject for her, and it's better that I work it out with her."

Megan nodded, but she didn't look pleased with the solution.

"Well?" he prompted her.

"Well what?"

"Is that okay?"

"It's going to have to be, isn't it?" She held out her hand for the dime. "Can I have that?"

Michael picked up the coin and dropped in her hand. She thought for a moment, then pitched it into the fountain; it fell in lightly, barely registering a ripple.

***

Meanwhile, Helen sat at the kitchen table, her eyes locked on a thick envelope that she had found in her mailbox. The handwritten Tarpon Beach on the return address, in the elderly version of her mother's script, stared back at her.

She wrestled with what to do for many minutes, one moment wanting to tear into the envelope and pour over its contents, the next wanting to seize the envelope and throw it into the trash unopened. Finally, she made a decision.

I know what is wrong with your daughter, her mother had written earlier.

Helen had grown increasingly worried about her daughter's isolation, losing hope that the legion of doctors around the world would ever come up with a diagnosis, much less a cure, and daunted by the task of having to educate and care for a girl-- before long, a woman-- who could be killed by the thing that every other person depended on for life. She wasn't quite willing to start reading every quack letter she received, but perhaps--

She took a deep breath and carefully tore open the envelope. It took a few minutes to work up the courage to withdraw the letter, a few more to unfold it, and many more to begin to read.

She was stunned by her mother's account of meeting her father. Passed out on a beach? She rolled her eyes. That should have been your first clue that he was a loser, she thought.

Then she came to the passage where her mother described the night she threw her lover out for good.

You were nine, and by then you had the habit of locking yourself in the bathroom when he would stop by.

Helen remembered how she would fill the tub, climb in, and lie back until her ears were submerged. The warm water comforted her and muffled her parents' words. She would stay in long after her fingertips and toes had shriveled into raisins.

I accused him of using again, and he didn't deny it. I told him I couldn't go on like this any more, never knowing where he was or when he was coming back. He was very sorry, but when I told him he needed to get clean, he shocked me by refusing. I told him he would never see you again if he didn't stop, and that's when he told me that he needed the drugs to keep seeing us. It hurt too much if he didn't use them, he said. This made me so angry, and I told him that if it was so horrible and painful to be with us, then maybe he could do us all a favor and just stay away. He shook his head no, no, it wasn't like that, and I said, then what is it like?

When Helen read her father's explanation, she gasped, then re-read and re-read the passage to make sure she had understood it correctly, then went on to read the rest of her mother's letter, her heart sinking when she realized that her mother had not only believed his ridiculous story, but was now asking her to believe him too, and to base her care for Megan on it! Her confusion turned quickly to the familiar anger and betrayal.

After all this time, she's still making excuses for him!

She folded up the letter meticulously with trembling hands, then set it aside and sat there stewing in fury. She became so lost in her anger that she jumped when she heard Michael's key in the lock.

Michael and Megan came in.

"How was the museum?" Helen asked, failing miserably at masking her distress.

"Fine," said Michael uncertainly. He looked at Megan. "Give me a minute to talk to your mother, okay?"

Megan turned to obey, but then spotted the thick letter on the tabletop. Oh shit, of course it would show up today! "Is that from Maria?" she yelped, pointing at the papers.

Helen was taken aback. "Excuse me?"

"Go upstairs, Megan," urged her father, pushing her gently towards the staircase.

"Wait a minute, Michael," said Helen, rising. "Megan, what are you talking about?"

"Maria," said Megan. "Your mother." She could see that her mother had already opened the letter, so the jig was up anyway.

"Go upstairs," warned Michael. "Now."

"Did she tell you what was wrong with me?"

"Megan, how do you know--"

"What did she say?" begged Megan. "What is that?" She moved to grab at the letter, but Michael stood in the way, effectively blocking her on the staircase.

"This?" asked Helen, suddenly grabbing the letter and holding aloft, her voice dripping with disdain. "This, Megan, is a bunch of bullshit."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 6

2009-10-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

The woman's face was serene and in perfect symmetry. Her wavy hair was gathered behind her head and tumbled to her shoulders in a way that evoked the lines raked into the sand of a Zen garden. She wore a tunic that framed her graceful shoulders and a diadem. Her eyes stared forward, her pupils absent.

Megan read the placard on the nearby wall.

Bust of Woman (Helen of Troy?)
Attributed to the Diomedes School
c. 3rd century BCE

Concerned about his daughter's increasing isolation, Michael had suggested this trip to see the Greek Treasures of the British Museum exhibit that would only be open for a couple more weeks. Megan, self-conscious about her appearance, had resisted until Michael arranged to take time off of work to go see the exhibit in the afternoon at mid-week, when the field trip groups and tourists would be relatively minimal.

Megan didn't really care about the Greeks, but she wanted to have a chance to speak to her father. In the days since she wrote Maria, Megan had been thinking about Maria's letter, about Maria herself, and about some of the ugly things that the situation implied. She didn't want to think that her parents could be that selfish, but it was hard to come to any other conclusions.

Michael wandered over and stood beside her, joining her in regarding the woman.

"Where are her eyes?" asked Megan.

"They were probably once painted on," explained Michael. "All of these statues were once really colorful. After a couple thousand years, the paint wears off." He pointed at the marble tiara the lady wore. "That might have been covered in gold leaf."

"Pretty," observed Megan.

"Well," her father smiled, "it is Helen of Troy."

"Another Helen," said Helen. "Like Mom." She tilted her head. "Kinda looks like Mom."

Michael squinted as if to see the resemblance better. "Darken the hair...brown eyes...yeah, kinda." He smiled again. "The face that sailed a thousand ships."

"So they could get away from her," muttered Megan.

"Hey, now. That's not a nice thing to say."

"Well, Mom hasn't been very nice lately."

"She's just worried. Same as usual."

Megan nodded. "Worried about her mom?"

Michael blanched. "Her mom?"

"Yeah."

"Why would she be worried about that?"

"Her mom wrote her a letter," said Megan.

"She did?"

"Yeah," said Megan, and fixed her father with a frown.

Michael was silent for a moment. "Did she tell you that?"

"No."

"Then how do you know that?"

"I found the note in the trash," Megan admitted.

"I see. You shouldn't go rooting through the trash and reading things that don't belong to you."

"I was curious," retorted Megan. "I mean, how often do you get mail from beyond the grave?"

Michael closed his eyes and grimaced.

"I thought she was dead," continued Megan.

"Yes. I know."

"But she's not, is she?"

Michael hesitated, then shook his head. "No."

"How long have you known?" demanded Megan.

"A long time."

"Why did you say she was dead, then?"

"Because she was," explained Michael. "As far as your mother was concerned, she was."

"What does that mean?"

Michael sighed, unsure of how to explain it. "Your grandmother...made a lot of mistakes. She did things that really hurt your mother. It was your grandfather." He looked around the gallery to make sure they were alone, then lowered his voice. "He was a drug addict, and he abandoned your mother over and over again, and your grandmother kept taking him back."

"And Mom hates her for that?" Megan was incredulous.

"She wanted to get away from a bad situation, and once you were born, she thought it was best that you not be involved in that either. She thought her mom was weak and cared more about him than her daughter, and she couldn't forgive her for basically choosing that man to be her father."

"That's so...harsh."

"It is, maybe, but since I didn't grow up with a dad who checked out all the time, I can't understand how it feels. And I'm not going to tell her how to handle her relationship with her parents."

"How about him?" Megan asked bitterly.

"Who? Your grandfather?"

"Yeah. Is he secretly not dead too?"

"No, he is dead," said her father quietly.

"You sure?" challenged Megan.

"Yes." Michael frowned. "When we took you for the genetic tests and they hadn't seen your mutation before, they ran your code through the database to see if there were any matches. There was one."

"Him."

"Yeah."

"And he was dead?"

"Yeah. They had found him in a park years earlier and had taken a DNA sample before they cremated him in case they could ID him somewhere down the road."

Megan considered this for a moment, then asked, "How did he die?"

"They weren't sure," Michael admitted. "He was...well, he was a skeleton when they found him. He had been there a long, long time. There was a syringe nearby, so they think he overdosed. But there was no way to know for sure."

"It may have been somebody else's," Megan pointed out.

"True," agreed Michael. "But given his history, it was probably his. We don't know, but...yeah."

"And he had what I have," she said quietly.

Realizing what she was concluding, Michael hastened to reassure her. "He had the mutation, sweetheart. That's all we know."

Megan didn't answer.

"We don't know that he had what you have." He peered intently at her. "You're not going to end up like that, honey, if that's what you're worried about."

She looked back at him. "Did you tell the geneticists that my grandmother was dead?"

Taken aback at the question, Michael shook his head. "Megan, she isn't the source of the gene, it's your grandfather--"

"Did you tell them she was dead?" she growled.

Michael couldn't bring himself to answer her, and as her suspicions came true, her eyes grew wide with anger.

"Did it ever occur to you," she said hotly, "that maybe my grandmother has the same mutation, or that her genes combined with his somehow was the reason I have what I have?" Her face crumpled. "Mom is mad at her mother for putting up with her deadbeat dad, so you think it's okay to lie to my doctors? Maybe that's the key to what's wrong with me!"

"We can't be sure of that--"

"We won't be sure of that! You closed that door! Nobody knows anything, and they need all the information they can get, and you're hiding things from them? You didn't even stop to think about it! You and Mom were so concerned about her hurt feelings! Did you ever think about the fact that this is killing me?"

"Megan," Michael urged her, "calm down." He reached for her arm but she yanked it away.

"I'm inside all the time! I have no friends! I can't do anything! My life is ruined!" She turned and ran out of the gallery, crying, "How could you? How could you?"

Ashamed, Michael stood frozen, watching her disappear. He turned helplessly to look at Helen of Troy, as if she could offer any counsel, but her eyes only stared ahead, stony and blank.

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 5 (cont'd)

2009-10-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

It took Maria days and days to finish her letter to Helen. She would rise in the morning, write a page, head off to work, think through what she had written, then come home, throw it out and start over. She thought she knew what to say, but the thoughts, when inscribed on the page, didn’t adequately express what she wanted to convey. Then she would sleep on it, regret her haste, and wake to re-write what she had edited out. After a few episodes of this, she disciplined herself to simply set the offending page aside, to be re-added later.

I do not know if you received my earlier letter; honestly, I did not expect a reply. I am writing to you again because I need to tell you what I know. Whether or not you do anything with it is up to you, but I owe you this information, and if it can help your child, I hope you can set your anger at me aside for a moment for her sake. In a way, this is as much your story as it is mine. Your father is the key to your daughter’s condition.

I have filed a report with the police here to find him. They don’t know if it’s possible after such a long time, and I know not to expect too much. If he is still alive, you may want to contact him and get him to meet with your child’s doctors. I am certain he suffered from the same problems she does.

Then again, I’m not sure that her doctors can really do anything for her. Your father’s condition was beyond the understanding of most people. I didn’t understand it myself until I saw the documentary.

Maria then wrote down what she thought Megan’s problem was. Looking at the words staring at her in the face, she realized that she sounded utterly insane. She went to cross them out, but saw that they would still be legible. She would have to re-write the page. Cursing, she crumpled the paper, tossed it aside, and re-did her introduction. There was a large blank space on the bottom of the paper, but she ignored it and grabbed a new sheet.

I think a little background would help you understand better.

She took a deep breath.

Did I ever tell you the story of how I met your father? Did you ever wonder how

somebody like him and somebody like me ever fell in love?

Even back then, I was working at the Sea Coast Villa as a cleaning lady. I had been there for almost ten years. I had left El Salvador to escape a bad marriage.

She had been an accountant in El Salvador with a college degree.

It was the summer when we had all of the hurricanes. We had been through three already when Lorenzo formed near the Bahamas. Luckily, Lorenzo missed us and never came ashore anywhere, but he still stirred up the sea. The beach outside the condo was pounded by huge waves. The surfers loved the hurricanes for this reason, although I always heard that you should stay away from the water when it’s rough like that, and I thought they were stupid, frankly. They were young, though, and that’s what young people do. I was nearly forty and no longer young, so I didn’t understand it.

One morning I arrived at work early and decided to go down to the beach for a few minutes to look at the surf. The tide had gone out and what was left of the beach was empty. (Like now, the people who live at Sea Coast Villas are all old and don’t really go near the water, so that wasn’t unusual.) What was unusual was the young man lying still on the sand. I hurried over to see if he was alright.

He was unconscious. The surf was still pretty strong, and I guessed from his young age and his condition that he had been one of the idiot surfers, and he had been knocked out by a wave. I don’t know how long he had been there. He had been there long enough to be completely dry. His surfboard was nowhere to be seen and had probably washed out to sea.

She decided to omit the detail about his clothes being washed away as well.

I managed to bring him around, and I tried to ask him what happened, but I quickly realized that he didn’t speak English. He looked Middle Eastern, so I figured that he was a foreign tourist. There weren’t many of those in Tarpon Beach. He didn’t really say anything, so I couldn’t tell what he spoke. I knew what it was like to be in a strange place and not able to talk to anybody, so I felt sorry for him.

He seemed to recover pretty quickly, although he was a bit dazed. I gave him some dry clothes from the condo laundry lost and found and bought him something to eat when my shift was over. I tried to figure out where he was staying or who his friends were, but again, he wasn’t really speaking. I gave him money for the bus and drew a map to the police station for him, hoping that maybe they could help. Then I went home.

A week went by, and then I saw him again on the sidewalk by the condo, still in the same clothes I had left him in. They were clean so I thought he had at least done some laundry. I tried to find out more about him, but he would only smile shyly and occasionally make a clicking noise with his tongue. I tried out some names on him that sounded Arabic (although I had no idea, really), and when I said ‘Ali,’ his face lit up. Eventually I figured out that his name was ‘Ali Hassan,’ but I still didn’t know anything else. I named every Middle Eastern country I could think of, but nothing seemed to register. I had no idea where he was living and neither did he.

I kept running into him like this, and although I thought it was weird, he seemed harmless and very sweet, and I pitied him a bit. I gave him more clothes. I bought him lunch. One day he surprised me with a large fresh fish from the seafood market, and although I had no idea how to prepare it or any place to put it in my little refrigerator, I was touched by the gesture. We would hang out together during my breaks and I would try to teach him Spanish or English. He struggled for a while, but eventually learned quite a bit of both.

I got him a job cleaning at the Sea Coast Villas. He had been there a while at that point, far too long for a tourist visa, and I gathered that he had come from a place he didn’t want to return to. He and I would scrub and vacuum and practice our languages, and as time went by I found myself thinking about him long after we had parted for the day.

He was very young. Not a boy, but much, much younger than me. I was older and plumper and starting to go gray, and I scowled at myself for having such feelings. But when I realized that he was sleeping every night on the beach by the sea wall, I foolishly invited him to stay at my apartment until he could save up enough money to rent his own.

As you are sitting there reading this, you can guess what happened.

We were very happy except for one problem: Ali started to disappear. For days on end he would vanish and not call or leave a note or anything. I covered for him at the condo, but I was annoyed that he would be so irresponsible and put me in such a bad position. He would return and not be able to quite explain what he had been doing or where he had been. He was always very remorseful, and foolishly I always forgave him. When I was shocked to learn I was pregnant, he was so delighted, but then left again, and again, and again. He wasn’t there when you were born, but returned soon after, again apologetic.

I tolerated this for so long because when he did stay around, he was the kindest, most attentive, most thoughtful man you could imagine. Quite the opposite of my husband. And he adored you. He would cradle you and smile at you as if you were made of starlight, and I would stare at him and forgive him for everything.

I don’t know if you remember the night I finally threw him out for good. You were nine, and by then you had the habit of locking yourself in the bathroom when he would stop by. He would ask to see you, and when you refused to even answer him, he was heartbroken. I was heartbroken too. By then, I knew something was very, very wrong. The condo had finally fired him for his ongoing absences, and nearly fired me for covering for him so much. His health was horrible too. His skin was so dry it was almost falling off, and he would tremble uncontrollably and sweat and wheeze. One time I noticed the track marks on his arms and asked him if he was using, and he denied it, but he was looking away when he did.

I had finally had enough, and I decided it was time to cut ties with him, for your sake and mine. We couldn’t go on living like that and I didn’t want a drug user and deadbeat in your life. I told him to leave and to never come back, and I think he could tell that I meant it, for he went into an absolute panic. That was when he finally told me what was wrong.

When Maria wrote out what Ali had told her, it no longer seemed so crazy. She hoped Helen would feel the same way.

She finished the letter with good wishes for Helen and Michael and especially little Megan, and prayers that her letter would help solve the mystery of the girl’s ailment. Then she collected the pages, read through them one last time, and with satisfaction she folded the pages and wriggled it into an envelope, pulling the flap as best she could over the straining letter.

In the morning, she took the early bus and stopped at the post office, not sure how much postage her letter needed. There was no line and she was on her way to the condo much sooner than she expected.

Writing the letter had been cathartic. She hadn’t felt this good in years. It was a relief to tell somebody else what she knew, and she wondered if her news would be the solution to the child’s illness, and that, perhaps, Helen would finally forgive her. Maybe they would come to visit her, or have her to their house. She wondered what their house was like, what Megan was like. She was almost giddy with the idea that she might have her family back.

She arrived at the condo, put her things in the break room, and decided to walk back to the beach. She had a few minutes before she had to get started on her round.

It had been a long time since Maria had spent more than a few minutes at the ocean’s edge. She smiled, slid her feet out of her sensible shoes and sweat socks, and wriggled her toes in the sand. It was still early, so the sand was still cool and somewhat damp from the long-receded high tide. She tiptoed into the shallows, the little waves rippling over her ankles, and looked over nearby to where the beach crested a bit. That was where she had first seen him.

I wasn’t a fool, she thought happily, wading in further. He loved me. He was trying everything he could to stay.

The waves washed over her knees, then her waist. My life hasn’t been a joke. I was loved.

Forgetting her shift, she ran and dove with glorious abandon into the next wave.

I was loved!

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 5

2009-10-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

(Start on October 13, 2009.)

Maria hunched over the toilet bowl, scouring furiously to make the old, stained porcelain look as good as it could. The Lysol fumes still made her eyes water, even after all these years, but they did the job and the owners would be able to tell that she had cleaned the bathroom. She finished up, flushed away the foam, and poured a tablespoon full of Lysol back into the bowl (an old housekeeping trick to ensure the 'clean' smell hung around). She struggled to her feet, her elderly knees popping as she did so, and stepped over to the shower.

As she bleached away the mildew, she pondered what she would do.

She had written the reply to Helen a hundred times in her head; she knew exactly what to say, and how to say it, and in what order so that her account made some kind of sense, particularly to a person like Helen, who no doubt would be a hostile reader.

But the letter, when it arrived, completely threw her for a loop. It had been from the girl herself.

My mother threw your note away

Maria's heart wavered when she read that. She hadn't spoken to Helen for years, and she knew that her daughter despised her, but it still stung to be reminded of it.

And what do you know?

That was the worst part; she knew what was wrong with Megan (or, at least, had a strong suspicion), but Helen's bitterness was so intense that she refused to hear it.

My mother threw your note away

How would she write her back? If Helen had thrown away the letter, surely she hadn't permitted Megan to have it, much less to respond to it. She wanted to help the child, but not at the risk of getting her into trouble. What about email? What was that called-- Facebook? She had heard of these things on TV, but had no idea how to use them. Perhaps the girl had email or Facebook; perhaps the young woman at the library would help her contact Megan?

There was something discomfiting about it, sneaking around to make contact with a child such that the child's parents wouldn't know.

She shook her head. Not my place.

She ran the shower and splashed the water over the mildew remover to rinse the tiles clean, then dropped her sponge into her supply bucket and dried her hands on her apron. Her hands felt rubbery from all the cleaners, and she was glad her shift was almost over. She wiped the mirror free of flecks of soap and toothpaste, refilled the toilet paper, and replaced the towels, then carried her bucket out of the last condominium unit for the day.

On her bus ride home she wrestled further with what she should do, resting her head against the smudged glass and watching the seafood restaurants and souvenir shops drift by.

And what do you know?

She realized that there was only one solution. It wasn't perfect, but the child was owed a reply, and Maria would provide it. It would be up to her parents to decide what to do with the information. Besides, she had written the letter in her head a hundred times, so putting it down on paper would be easy.

She pulled out several sheets of paper-- she hoped she would have enough-- and curled up on the sofa with a hardbacked book and Wheel of Fortune on in the background. She uncapped her pen and began to write:

Dear Helen--

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 4 (cont'd)

2009-10-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

The alarm buzzed at 4 am, and Megan bolted upright and slapped it silent. Jesus, that was loud, she thought, and for a few breathless moments she stayed right where she was, pricking up her ears to detect any noise from her parents. Satisfied there was none, she slipped out of bed.

Despite the early hour-- the windows showed it was still pitch-black out-- she was wide awake, humming with nervous energy, the same feeling she had after she had discovered the thrill of dipping her fingers into the tap water. Urgently she stuffed her feet into her sneakers and grabbed her hooded sweatshirt; at this hour, she was unlikely to encounter anyone else, so she didn't bother with changing out of her pajama pants and t-shirt.

She slipped the letter to Maria into her sweatshirt pocket and padded quietly down the hall. She stopped for a moment at the secretary cabinet, where she rooted through old receipts and old bills until she found the little strip of postage stamps. She carefully peeled one loose and fixed it to the envelope, then made her way to the front door.

She stepped out onto the porch; it felt good to breathe in fresh air, and she wondered if she shouldn't start rising earlier. She walked down to the sidewalk; there was her mailbox, but she passed by it without stopping. It wouldn't do to mail it from her own house.

She turned left and began scouting her neighbor's mailboxes. The Tran box's flag was down. The McLaren box's flag was up, but there was a light on upstairs. The Willams box (did they still live here anymore?) was missing its flag and the door lay limply open. The Amiri box was intact, but old and metal and Megan feared its door would squeak. Finally, she spotted the new mailbox that the Parks had just installed: perfect. The flag was up and their house was dark. She darted to the curb, slipped her letter inside, and practically leaped back onto the sidewalk.

She was heading back home when she spotted a man standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, several houses away. What was he doing there? Then she noticed a bus stop sign above his head. Since when was there a bus stop there? And who's catching a bus at this hour, anyway?

She walked back up to her house and turned the doorknob, but it hit a catch almost immediately and didn't turn. Locked, thought Megan. Oh shit.

She jiggled the handle, even though she knew it was useless, and glanced back at the man at the bus stop. Did he see her?

She groaned quietly, worked up a quick story, and rang the doorbell.

It took several rings, but finally her bleary-eyed father opened the door. "Good Lord, Megan, what are you doing out there?"

"Thought I'd take a walk."

"This early?" He squinted at her clothes. "And in your pajamas?"

"Couldn't sleep." She squeezed past him into the house. "Felt good to get some air, actually."

"Well, next time, take a key."

I don't have one, she thought. "Sorry to wake you, Dad."

"Yeah, I'm sorry too." He glanced at the hall clock and sighed. "I have to be up soon anyway. No point in going back to bed." He headed for the kitchen and began pawing through the cabinets for the coffee.

Megan followed him and sat down at the table. "Can you believe that somebody's waiting for the bus right now?"

"I can," he answered. "A lot of the military guys have to be at the Pentagon first thing and it takes a while to get there from out here."

"I can't imagine having to do that."

"You might someday," he smiled, wondering if that was even possible for her.

*****

Then Megan waited. She figured it would take her letter three or four days to reach Tarpon Beach, then another day or two for Maria to write a reply, and then three or four days to receive it, so it wouldn't be until next week at the earliest. In the meantime, she occupied her mind with her reading, her occasional school lessons from her mother (who, despite her best efforts to put on a content face, was clearly agitated about something) and her new secret hobby.

To be absolutely certain of privacy, she refrained until her mother slipped out to run an errand or until after both parents had gone to sleep. Then she would creep into the bathroom, lock the door, and run the tap.

She experimented. She dipped her toes into the shower and marveled at the black dots that splattered her calves wherever the water flecks had landed. She collected droplets on her fingertips and drew lines on her face, fighting to suppress guffaws at the silly masks she created. She rolled up her sleeves and leaned her arms under the water; she did the same with her legs. She was very careful not to do too much at once, but she found herself getting bolder and bolder as time went on.

After all, it didn't hurt. Well, it did at first-- that burning sensation that made her eyes well with a spurt of tears and made her bite her lip never seemed to get any easier. But once that initial shock subsided, it felt pretty good. It was soothing and refreshing and for the first time in her life, she felt clean.

But then one morning--her mother was out at the dentist-- she went a little too far. She was making handprints on her neck and upper chest, creating some kind of abstract pattern, when suddenly her breath caught. She inhaled deeply, but only a trickle of air came through. She tried again, but it was even less, and as she gasped and panted, flashes of light burst in her eyes. Her limbs started to tremble and she grabbed onto the counter to steady herself, slowly sinking to her knees. She felt nauseated and sensed that she was slipping out of consciousness. Her ears felt like they were plugged with cotton; her chest felt like it was sandbagged. Her failing eyes fell on a towel.

Dry off, she fought to command herself. Now.

She reached out her shaking hand for the towel, managed to fumble it off the hook, and weakly tried to blot at her neck. In the blur she saw her arms were almost completely greenish-black.

Too much.

Her efforts weren't accurate, but as she wiped away the water, she began to recover and gradually regained control. Her breathing stabilized and she drew in greedy lungfuls of air. The spasms in her limbs relaxed, but she still trembled. For the first time in her life, she understood what her parents were afraid of, and it frightened her too.

Haunted, she stayed away from the tap after that, but only for a little while. As days and days passed with no reply from Maria, her anxiety gradually beckoned her to return, and she found herself awake at 2 am, dipping her fingers into the soothing water.

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 4

2009-10-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

(Note: This story begins October 13, 2009 blah blah blah)

Megan wasn't the only one having trouble focusing on a book. As she thumbed through a used copy of an American history textbook, looking for the chapter on the post-Revolutionary War period, Helen's mind was far away from the Whiskey Rebellion and the Articles of Confederation.

How did she find me? And how did she know about Megan?

The documentary, and she cursed the day she and Michael consented to that show. For the meager fee they were paid, they ended up with random letters from kooks and long-lost parents. One and the same, she thought bitterly.

The idea of writing back kept flitting around her head, like an annoying housefly, but she swatted at it angrily. No. She had worked too hard to put as much distance between herself and her failed family, and she did not want Megan dragged into that. Megan had enough problems as it was. Helen recalled the sight of Megan's black, scaly arms, and shuddered.

"Here it is," said Megan, pushing the book towards her mother.

Helen sighed. "Honey, you know what? Let's skip the lessons today, okay?"

"You're still freaked out by this afternoon, aren't you?"

"A bit," Helen admitted.

"Mom, please," insisted Megan. "I'm fine. It was an accident. It won't happen again."

"Do you realize how lucky you were?"

"I know," Megan groaned, exasperated.

Helen slapped a hand on the book. "You weren't there," she lectured sternly.

"What?"

"You didn't watch your baby struggle for air. You don't know how that feels. You don't know how close you came to doing that again."

"I know."

"You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little upset about all of this."

"I was the baby," Megan muttered.

"Excuse me?"

Megan fixed her eyes on her mother's defiantly. "I was the baby," she repeated. "I was there."

"You have no memory of it," snapped Helen. She stood up. "Like I said, let's do this later. I can't handle this right now." She left the kitchen quickly, pausing only to look back and offer a quieter, "I'm sorry."

Megan simmered, glaring at George Washington for a few moments. What the hell was her problem? The bathroom incident had clearly rattled her, but she seemed far too upset for that. If she had suffered an attack, then maybe, but she hadn't. She wasn't any worse for wear, so why was her mother so upset?

Then Megan glanced at the trash can.

She rose, walked over to it, and peered in. There, near the top, was the crumpled slip of paper her mother had been transfixed by earlier. She lifted it carefully, shaking off a few stray coffee grounds, and carried it back up the stairs to her room.

She shut the door behind her and sat down on the foot of her bed. She pulled the note open, extracted the envelope that had been wadded around it, and read the shaking handwriting.
I know what is wrong with your daughter-- she rolled her eyes. Another nut who saw the show. But then she saw the signature.

Mami?

She had watched enough hours of Sesame Street to know a bit of basic Spanish.

Mom?

Who was writing her mother and signing the note 'Mom'? And in Spanish to boot? Her mother-- Helen Hanson Ursis-- wasn't Latina. Was it some kind of old joke, old nickname? Her mother's mother was long dead. Was it a family friend?

Megan glanced at the envelope. Florida?

She went over to her desk and sat down, the wrinkled envelope in hand. Grabbing a sheet of notebook paper and a pen, she wrote:

My mother threw your note away, but I want to know who you are.

Megan

PS And what do you know?

She found a blank envelope, folded and inserted her reply in it, then copied the Florida address painstakingly onto it. She slipped the envelope into her desk drawer, plotting how and when she could mail it without her parents noticing.

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 3

2009-10-21T11:36:00.000-07:00

While Helen stood frozen with shock, staring at her mother's unexpected note, Megan was in her room, staring at a book.

She hadn't bothered to turn the page in at least ten minutes; she was struggling with her concentration lately, and the stories that used to engross her for hours no longer held any sway. The words melted into an incomprehensible blur before her eyes as she lay on her bed.

It had been months since she had last set foot in a school. It had worked for a long time, but it wasn't possible now. Megan thought sadly about her elementary school, how all of the kids had been taught not to splash her with water-- "not even as a joke," the teacher had lectured them as they all nodded solemnly-- and how they all looked after her. They had the playground towel, which they used to dry off the slide and the swings after a rainy day so that Megan could use them safely, and the children would plead for a turn to be on 'towel duty.' Her classmates would fill her water cup for her at the drinking fountain so that she wouldn't risk getting damp; they would attach its lid securely and wipe off any stray droplets with their sleeves before giving it to her. They paid no mind when Megan steered clear of the sinks after using the bathroom, since they knew that she kept a giant dispenser of hand sanitizer in her desk and that she would use it faithfully. They didn't notice her stringy hair or dirty fingernails; they were kids, after all, and they were just as dirty as she was, and they were too busy with imaginary games and feats of strength anyway.

But then Megan had turned twelve, and she was too old for her school, and she was sent to a different intermediate school than most of her classmates because of where she lived-- they redrew the district lines-- and there nobody knew nor cared about her condition. Suddenly, on the cusp of adolescence, the appearance of her hair and skin was of utmost importance, and people whispered about the girl who didn't wash her hands and snickered about how she smelled, and the few kids who knew her from her old school were too insecure about their own precarious social positions to say anything in her defense. The school sent out a memo to inform parents and classmates about her condition, but that only made things worse; the kids who teased her had new material to work with, and her classmates' parents were afraid of inviting her to their homes for fear that she would be harmed (and they would be sued). Eventually Megan refused to attend, and her parents, sympathetic to her plight and unsure of any other solution, didn't make her. Helen became a reluctant homeschooler, and was daunted by how she would get Megan ready for college on her own; with the medical expenses, they didn't have any money for tutors.

Now Megan sat, ensconced in her room, staring blankly at a book with no memory of anything she had read in it. Carefully she inserted the straw of her water cup between her lips, as she had been trained since toddlerhood to do, and took a cautious sip.

She didn't have anything else to do.

She flipped the book over, still open to the page, and rose from her bed. She walked out of her room into the hallway, where she could see her mother from the landing staring at a piece of paper, not moving. Her mother heaved a sigh, crumpled up the paper, and tossed it into the garbage can.

Megan needed to use the bathroom, which was always fraught with peril, but she had been well-coached and she had never come to any harm; it had been years-- at least five?-- since her parents had decided she didn't need supervision and left her to her own devices.

She finished up and flushed, careful to stand away as she did so to avoid any possible splash, then reached for the hand sanitizer. As she rubbed the alcohol-scented goop over her hands, she looked at herself in the mirror, just long enough to see her dirty hair, her skin which managed to be both dry and oily at the same time, her chapped lips, the washed-out color of her face, and suddenly she was crying, and as the salty tears slipped down her cheeks, they left angry red traces that soon welled up in black and green.

The effect was so startling that she stopped crying and stared. She had never seen her rash in real life, only in lab photographs, and she was mesmerized. It didn't really hurt, and she breathed in consciously, trying to detect any struggle or catch in her chest, but there was nothing.

I thought this was supposed to kill me.

It was her own tears, she reasoned; she was certain she had cried before, and she had survived, so they must not be dangerous. But now, suddenly for the first time in her life, she wondered.

Her eyes drifted over to the faucet, which came into sharp focus, almost glowing in the bathroom light. She had always avoided it, as she was instructed to, and had never really looked at it before.

She stepped over to it, reached for the handle, and turned it on. The water flowed gently in a neat little column and disappeared through the drain that lay beneath it, utterly predictable in its course. The sound was both electrifying and soothing at the same time. She shut it off, then, with a thrill, turned it back on again. She glanced at the closed door; she didn't know if they could hear her. For several moments she turned the water on and off and on again, but nobody came running, and after a while, she let it run freely.

With trepidation she touched her fingertip to the cool stream, her arm jerking with surprise when she actually made contact, but she steeled herself, moving her whole hand beneath the flowing water. It burned at first, and the red welts rose up in their diamond pattern, but as the redness turned to black the pain subsided, and to Megan's surprise, she discovered that the feeling was delicious. She resisted the urge to stop up the drain, fill the basin, and submerge her whole head, but she spent several long minutes drawing the burning rash on her hands and forearms, withstanding the pain to see the black diamonds form. Her breathing remained normal and Megan felt giddy.

Calm down, she reminded herself. You don't know how far you can go.

"Megan?" called her mother, coming up the stairs. "Are you ready for our history session?"

"Oh," replied Megan, quickly shutting off the water and grabbing a towel. "Give me five minutes?" She wrapped the towel around her hands.

Her mother's footsteps approached the door; Helen knocked once, then opened the door. She saw the towel around Megan's hands and her face grew alarmed.

"Megan?" Helen gasped. "What are you doing?"

"It's nothing," Megan pleaded, but Helen snatched the towel away from Megan's hands and yelped.

"What happened?" Helen grabbed Megan's greenish-black hands and studied them frantically.

"I tripped," Megan fibbed.

"How did they get wet?"

"I fell into the toilet," Megan said, instantly regretting the words as she spoke them.

"Oh my God," said Helen. She grabbed another towel and began rubbing Megan's hands. "How do you feel?"

"Fine."

"How's your breathing?"

"Fine. Mom, please, you're rubbing the skin off."

Helen took a deep breath and stared accusingly at Megan's hands, as if they had betrayed her in some way. "Well," she said.

"I'm okay. Really. It was an accident."

Helen's gaze swept around the bathroom like a scanner. "What did you trip on?"

Megan searched around for something to scapegoat, but saw nothing obvious; her parents had removed all obstacles in the room years ago. "My own feet."

"Your own feet?"

"I had a klutz moment," explained Megan.

"God, Megan," sighed her mother. "Be careful."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm okay...please stop worrying."

Helen rubbed her face exasperatedly with her hands. "Are you ready for history?" she said, her face still behind her hands, muffling her voice.

"Yeah. Look, Mom." Megan stuck out her hands, now back to bright red. "It's already clearing up."

"Make sure you put a ton of sanitizer on your hands and arms," instructed Helen, as she walked out of the bathroom. "Then meet me downstairs."

"I will," promised Megan. When her mother was out of sight, she gave her reflection a conspiratorial little smile, then left the room.

This was something she would have to try again, and soon.

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 2 (cont'd)

2009-10-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

(Note: This story begins with the post dated October 13, 2009.)

The desk officer peered up from his form at Maria with incredulous eyes. "Excuse me?"

"Twenty-three years," Maria repeated. "I know, it's a long time."

"I'll say." He tapped his pen on the countertop. "What took you so long?"

"He's my ex-husband. I threw him out."

"But now you want to find him?"

Maria nodded. "Or at least find out what happened to him."

"Well, ma'am, I can take a report," said the officer wearily. "But honestly, after all this time, I doubt we'd be able to do anything. I'll fill out this form and put it in the system, but then that's probably it. This is probably more of a job for a private investigator."

"Honestly, I doubt he's still alive."

The officer gave the pen a final tap on the counter, spun it around in his hand and poised it at the next line on the form. "Well, it's worth a shot. How old is he now?"

Maria had to think for a moment. "I would say maybe...mid-fifties?"

"You don't know how old your husband is?"

"He didn't know how old he was," Maria said, then hastened to explain. "He wasn't born in this country."

"I see," said the officer, but she could tell from his expression that she was losing him. "I know, it makes no sense. It doesn't make sense to me either."

"Why would you think he wasn't still alive?"

"Because he was an addict. Drugs."

"What kind of drugs?"

"I'm not sure, he never used them around me. Heroin, I think. Track marks." She pointed at her arms.

"You may be right, then." The officer shook his head. "Can you describe him? What did he look like?"

Maria had stuffed the memory of his face into a closet in her mind years ago, but it took her only seconds for her to find it again. His pleading eyes, sunken with dark rings beneath them; his face with the dry patches of eczema that turned his caramel skin an angry red; his thick dark hair; his whole being untouched by age after nearly ten years only to be (probably) destroyed by drugs. She suppressed a shuddering sob and spoke.

"Dark hair-- brown eyes-- dark skin. Tan," she clarified. "He was Arab." Was he?

"How tall?"

She pointed to a spot in the air about a foot and a half over her head.

"Heavy? Thin?"

Towards the end..."Thin." But not always.

"Name?"

"Ali Hassan."

The officer finished scrawling the name and set down the pen. "Last seen where?"

"Tarpon Beach."

"Locally...good. That'll help." He picked up the form. "Like I said, I'll put this in and see what happens. But I wouldn't expect a lot from it."

Maria nodded curtly. "Thank you." Then she had an idea. "Wait...what about DNA?"

"What about it?"

"I see it on the TV. Some kind of...database?"

The officer laughed. "Well, yeah, we have DNA databases, but unless Mr. Hassan here had a criminal record and somebody took a sample, he wouldn't be in there." He frowned. "He might be if he's a John Doe, though."

"John Doe?"

"Unknown corpse," said the officer grimly.

Maria winced.

"Would you have anything we could match him with? Old hairbrush, anything like that?"

Maria shook her head. "No...but I have some names of matches."

"Like relatives?"

Maria nodded.

"Would they be in the system anywhere?"

"Not as criminals, no," replied Maria.

She remembered the geneticist on the TV documentary: "I've never seen anything like it."

Meanwhile, Maria's letter arrived on Monday afternoon. Helen rummaged through the mail, saw the shaky handwriting, and rolled her eyes; they occasionally got these kinds of letters from people who saw the documentary, offering up all kinds of crackpot theories and cures for Megan's condition, usually for a price. Helen had quit bothering opening them a long time ago and usually pitched them directly into the trash. This letter nearly met the same fate, but then Helen's eye caught the return address:

2558 Osceola Street #4
Tarpon Beach, Florida 32675

Helen's eyes flew wide and her heart froze for a moment. Slowly, as if the contents might bite her, she worked the seal loose on the envelope flap and extracted the letter. She looked at the little slip of notepaper for a long time before she finally unfolded it and read:

I know what is wrong with your daughter. If you would like my help, please write to me at the return address.

--Mami

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 2

2009-10-16T07:27:00.001-07:00

(Note: This story begins with the blog post dated October 13, 2009.)

What had ultimately moved Maria to tears was a photograph, taken by a dermatologist several years ago, showing a close-up of Megan's bizarre rash: the diamond-shaped pattern that had manifested at her first bath. The skin had turned a mottled grayish-green color, marked with black spots. It closely resembled necrobiosis, save for the odd diamond pattern and for the fact that the flesh recovered completely when dry. Maria had never seen anything like it before, but seeing it now-- especially in connection with this little girl-- rattled every fiber of her being.

She remembered the story Ali had told her, the night she finally worked up the courage to dump him for good, after yet another one of his long, unexplained absences. For years afterward she had shaken with rage when she remembered what he had told her, at how offensive it was, especially when she knew precisely what he had actually been up to. As time had passed, her anger had subsided, replaced by pity and resignation; what did she expect, after all? He was an addict and had been for years, his arms marked by the telltale tracks that countless needles left behind. In fact, she wondered bitterly, if he himself had actually believed his own story. She couldn't really blame him for that, as it was a much better alternative to what he was actually struggling with. In fact, it showed just how hopeless and desperate he was that such a preposterous explanation was preferable to the pathetic truth.

But now, looking at this poor child's skin sample, she knew that his preposterous explanation had been the truth.

She lay awake all night, trying to figure out what to do next. After hours of alternating weeping and wondering, she managed to wring out a couple of hours of slumber. She was on duty at eight a.m. and off at four, so perhaps she could get over to the county office at the end of her shift in time.

In the morning a phone call revealed that her work day mirrored the county's hours of operation; she would have to wait until Monday, her day off. But she could make it over to the library this afternoon.

At four p.m. she cleaned her last bathroom, signed out and took the bus over to the little library. She approached the help desk, where a teenaged girl sat reading a book nonchalantly.

"Excuse me," she said. "Can you help me?"

The girl put down her book and looked at her inquiringly.

"I need to find an address," Maria ventured.

"Local?" asked the girl.

"No," said Maria. "In Virginia."

"You can find that on the Internet," the girl informed her, waving her hand towards a small cluster of PC's in the corner. "Password is 'turtle.'"

"I'm sorry," apologized Maria. "But I don't know how to use the Internet."

The girl's eyes widened. "Really?"

Maria smiled sheepishly and shook her head. "I haven't needed to until now."

"Have you ever used a computer before?"

Maria shook her head again.

The girl exhaled loudly. "Hmm. Okay, then." She stood up and walked out from behind the desk, gesturing at Maria to follow her. Maria did and the two sat down in front of one of the terminals in the corner. The girl punched T-U-R-T-L-E into the keypad, wiggled the mouse, and began clicking away. Maria tried to follow what she was doing, but it made no sense.

"We're closing in a bit, so we don't have a lot of time," the girl said as she clicked and typed and clicked. "Do you want me to show you how to do this, and then you'll have to come back another day and look up your info, or do you want me to just get it for you now?"

"Just get it now."

"No problem." A screen came up. "What's the name?"

"Ursis," replied Maria.

"Spell that?"

"U-R-S-I-S," said Maria. "I think."

"In Virginia?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it's not Smith or Jones or something like that, so that'll make it easier." The girl typed and clicked and another screen opened. "There's several of them. Do you have a first name?"

"Michael," said Maria. "Michael or Helen."

The girl typed some more and looked at the results. "There's five Michaels, no Helens. Do you know the city?"

Maria racked her brain; the show had said the town name, but now it escaped her. "Started with a R, I think."

"Two are in Roanoke." Was it Roanoke?

"That's not it." Maria shook her head.

"Let's try just M." The girl studied the list. "There's a few...here's one in Reston."

"That's it," said Maria suddenly.

The girl pointed at the listing and Maria copied it down slowly, her hand shaking. She folded the paper over and stood up. "Thank you," she said to the girl.

"No problem," said the girl. "You know, come back over when we have more time and I'd be happy to show you how to use the Internet. It's a great tool."

Not interested, Maria smiled politely. "Perhaps I will."

Maria returned back home, retrieved a piece of paper and a blank envelope, and sat down to write. She printed two lines:

I know what is wrong with your daughter. If you would like my help, please write to me at the return address.

She signed the note and packaged it in the envelope, then mailed it from the rental office at work the next day.

On Monday, she took the bus over to the county complex and walked into the public safety division.

"May I help you?" the officer asked.

"I need to report a missing person," replied Maria.

"Okay." The officer pulled out a form and a pen. "Adult or child?"

"Adult."

"Male or female?"

"Male."

"How long since he was last seen?"

Maria swallowed hard. "Twenty-three years."

Megan's Bath-- Chapter 1

2009-10-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

(Note: This story begins with the post dated October 13, 2009. I'm working on getting the posts to display in reverse chron order, but until then...)

The arrival of the EMTs heralded the beginning of Megan's long odyssey through an endless list of specialists-- dermatologists, allergists, ad nauseum-- with each one shaking his or her head, declaring they had never seen anything like it and writing down the name and contact information for another doctor to consult.

After several years, thousands of miles of travel, and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of tests , the family had figured out the basic ground rules for Megan's condition:

1. Water could not touch Megan's skin. If it did, the rash developed. Too much direct exposure to water caused the anaphylatic shock that Megan displayed at her first bath, but superficial exposure-- a few drops, say-- did not.

2. Products with a small amount of water in them, such as lotions, did not cause a reaction.

3. Megan could drink water with no ill effects, but she had to use a straw or risk an outbreak around her mouth.

This meant that conventional showers and baths were out of the question. Megan's parents seized upon any alternative they could find, from using hand sanitizer (tended to be too drying) to just rubbing her with dry cloths to using 'dry bath' products developed for pets. Nothing was a perfect replacement, and Michael and Helen were forced to limit any activities that made Megan excessively dirty. Consequently, Megan never played in the dirt or a sandbox, was forbidden to use magic markers, and had to avoid exposure to communicable disease and sweating.

Megan also had to remain at home if the weather threatened even the slightest chance of rain. Family trips to the pool and the shore were out of the question.

Megan ended up reading a lot.

Her medical bills meant that there wasn't a lot of extra money for vacations anyway. The family received a lot of free treatments and testing by consenting to Megan's participation in case studies and trials-- one of the benefits of being a medical oddity-- and she was the subject of several research papers that garnered awards and promotions for their authors. At the end of it all, however, the family was left with little more than suggestions, kind smiles, and shrugs.

"Look at it this way," said one specialist. "At least she can drink the stuff. She'd be in real trouble if she couldn't."

One puzzling revelation was the composition of Megan's genetic code. It was fairly conventional, but huge pieces of it defied comprehension. Moreover, Helen's genes, surprisingly, had the same features.

"Do you have any reactions to water, Mrs. Ursis?" asked the geneticist. "Or anything else?"

Helen shook her head.

It was difficult to determine where the mutation came from. Helen was an only child, and when asked about any other blood relatives, she informed them that both of her parents were dead and that she had no other living family members. Michael had no mutations and neither did his parents or siblings, so the researchers tentatively pinned the condition on Helen's background, but without any of her relatives available for testing, they could not be certain.

And none of them could understand why Megan had these bizarre reactions while her mother remained unscathed.

When Megan was eight, a television production company caught wind of her plight and sought permission to film a documentary. It was an opportunity to pay off more medical expenses, so the Ursis family agreed. The resulting forty-minute special ended up airing from time to time on basic cable; occasionally Helen caught it at 2 a.m. when she couldn't sleep.

One time it was shown at 9 p.m. on a Friday night. That was when seventy-two-year-old Maria Beltran, home from a long day cleaning houses, happened upon it, and ended up transfixed.

By the time the credits rolled, she was sobbing. "Ali," she cried. "You were telling the truth. You were telling the truth."

Megan's Bath-- Prologue

2009-10-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

The camcorder lay useless at the bottom of the toilet, where it had landed after being flung across the bathroom.

Moments earlier, Michael had been happily recording a milestone of his daughter's young life: her first bath. His wife had cradled the baby's pudgy little body close to her own, cooing happily, as she dangled a lazy finger into the carefully-measured-out inch of bathwater in the tub, checking its temperature for the twentieth time. She turned Megan's little face-- which wore the look of perpetual confusion typical of the newly-born-- to the camera and chirped her name, then knelt carefully beside the tub and laid the baby in the little cushioned seat that would support her. Still cooing, Helen dipped a tiny washcloth into the bathwater and began to delicately dab the baby with it.

Then all hell broke loose.

Helen dropped the washcloth and gasped. "Michael," she said uncertainly, "look."

"I'm getting it, Helen."

"No," Helen urged him. "Look at her face. Look at her legs."

Michael lowered the camera from the face and looked. There was an odd rash breaking out across the baby's body: red welts in a diamond-shaped pattern.

"What the--?" He peered closer.

"We rinsed out the tub, so there wouldn't be any residue on it," protested Helen, as if she was pleading a case. "We used the baby detergent on the washcloth, not the regular."

"You're not using any soap, are you?"

"Not yet," said Helen, looking bewildered at the bottle of baby wash that stood at the ready by her knee.

Suddenly, Megan lurched violently, splashing her mother with water. Her eyes bugged out, her mouth gaped, and she was thrashing and gasping for air.

"Oh shit!" cried Helen, instinctively grabbing the dripping-wet baby from the cushion and holding her fast to her chest, as if she could wrestle the seizure into submission, but Megan kept jerking and twitching. That was when Michael threw the camera away from him, inadvertently sending it flying into the toilet. He grabbed a towel and stuffed it around Megan's writhing body, as if drying her off would do any good.

"She can't breathe!" cried Helen. Megan was wheezing, trying to find air anywhere she could. "Call 911! Now!"

Michael ran out of the room for the telephone as Helen cradled her distressed infant fearfully, praying for the awful thrashing to stop and wrapping the towel tightly around her. Should she try CPR? Did she know how? Helen cursed her poor preparation and the demon that had possessed her poor, helpless infant, and pleaded for the ambulance to arrive. "Please...please...please...please..."

Slowly the lurching and gasping subsided, and Helen summoned the courage to look into Megan's face, fearing she had died. Instead, Megan looked alarmed, then burst into wailing tears.

"Oh, God," sobbed Helen, clutching her baby tightly.

Michael ran back in. "They're on their way," he gasped. "What's happening?"

"It's over," wept Helen. "She's okay." She drew Megan's face away from the hollow of her neck to show Michael; Michael heaved a huge sigh and sank to his knees. He put his arms around both of them and the small family rested together for a moment, none of them sure what had just happened.

"Are you okay, sweetheart?" Michael asked Megan gently, wiping the tears away from her tiny cheeks. "It's okay now, it's okay."

"What the hell was that?" Helen looked haunted.

"I don't know. Let's take a look at that rash."

He carefully pulled the towel away from Megan's little body; immediately, both parents gasped.

Let's Do This

2009-10-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

The first story is an idea I've been kicking around for a couple of years. The way this works is that each post is part of the ongoing story; one post is not the entire story. I'll title posts so that you know where we are. I promise not to mix stories together-- once we start one, each subsequent post will continue that story until fin.

Feedback is not only allowed, it's encouraged. Please let me know what you think. I may not agree with you, but criticism is the writer's nourishment, and comments make me a better writer and, more importantly, create a better story.

Thanks for coming along! We're off!