Carol Mitchell

On that last day in Barcelona, I sat alone on the beach watching the Balearic Sea swell. Wave after wave crashed into the shore then rushed up to lick at my toes and dredge cold pools around my feet, anchoring me into the gray sand. The ocean flowed towards the horizon, its path so clear and uninterrupted that the sunset-red-tinged silhouette of the mountains of Palma, the even-fainter outline of the Algerian coastline, and the seagulls which cawed raucously as they circled in search of their evening meal were the only indications that I had not found my way to the end of the earth. I wrapped my arms around my body, hugging my breasts and reaching my fingers around my back to sear the sensation of complete calm into my body’s molecules.

I had left my family behind at the hotel. For an entire week, I had catered to them; acquiesced to their desires to experience the city each in their own way: my husband, Laurence,—following the guide book with strict adherence to the recommended tourist spots; my eldest daughter, Samantha,—eleven and fascinated by any experience related to animals; and the eight-year-old twins, Mark and John—craving constant movement which meant multiple stomach-churning (for me) rides on the funicular. I managed to negotiate two hours to do something I wanted to do, and with that I had escaped to the beach.

I had no intention of getting into the water. Like many who were raised in the seventies in the Caribbean, I could not swim. Instead, I remained on shore and inhaled, filling my body with the salted smell of the ocean and with memories of breathing in that same scent in every breath I took on my Caribbean island home.

You must return here one day, Charmaine, I vowed, closing my eyes to seal the promise.

I exhaled, opened my eyes, and started in surprise. In front of me, a woman was emerging from the water. She must have been in her seventies; her face and body lined by a full life. Her dark skin glistened with the weight of the water and drooped in slack circles from her cheeks, her collarbones, and her bare breasts—which hung long and loose onto her belly. Thick curly gray hair lay flat on her head dripping a steady flow of water down her back as if she had been in the water all her life or at least, long enough to swim the three hundred miles from Algeria to Spain.

Several yards from the shore, she paused. Although the sun was low, the water droplets that covered her body sparkled, hinting at arcs of reds, greens, and gold below the surface. When she resumed her approach, her gait was unsteady, as if she were a toddler just becoming familiar with walking on human legs.

Her gaze met mine and I started again. Her pupils were piscine: dark and bulging to fill her entire eyes. I blinked, and when I looked again the pupils had receded and her irises, brown with an odd yellow tinge, were visible around each pupil. Her strides were sure now, exuding power, and I envied her confidence. This woman would not have endured years of indifference and affairs from her partner. She would have enacted decisive change, without a thought for anyone: not her husband, not their children, not her parents, not for a soul but herself. Deflated, I broke our gaze and the woman stalked by, pausing only to open her right hand and discard an object onto the sand as if it, like me, had been found wanting.

The object was a mirror, a little larger than my hand, with a handle fashioned from pale red-and-pearl-white coral. It was clearly precious, something she’d need; that she’d regret throwing away. I should have called after her, but instead I grasped it in my palm where it lay cool and wet. I held it up to my face, and caught the reflection of the woman’s retreating feet. They were surprisingly youthful: slim, high arched, with brown skin stretched smoothly across the bones. A line of fish scales in sparkling iridescence encircled each ankle. I swiveled to get a closer look, but she was gone.

I sank back into the sand and vowed once more: I will return to this place, and on my return, I will be worthy.

***

I was sure I had packed the mirror somewhere safe, but in the chaos that was necessarily a part of packing up three children to leave a hotel room in which they had spread themselves for seven days, it must have slipped out of sight. I searched for it. On our first night home, as we unpacked, my senses were on high alert for evidence of its pearl-like glaze, but it never appeared. Later, when Laurence and I lay side-by-side in exhausted silence, I searched for it in my memory. Where did I put it? When did I last see it? I was aware of my body, of every inch of my skin awake, not with pain, but with a pressure that felt like a voice saying “You are here.” The sensation filled the space between Laurence and I. I could not imagine that he didn't feel it too.

“Do you ever feel like someone is watching you?” I asked.

“Like God?” He propped himself onto one arm and regarded me with an expression tinged with both curiosity and derision.

“Maybe. Or someone more nefarious.”

“More nefarious than God?” He laughed.

I shook my head. “Forget it,” I said.

“Charmaine.” He reached for my shoulder. “Don’t be so sensitive. Talk to me.”

I turned and pretended to fall asleep.

The next day was Monday. We returned to our routine and over the next few months, memories of the vacation morphed and faded until it was difficult to feel anything about the vacation was real except what had been captured in photographs.

Then one morning, as I made my usual patrol through the house, straightening up and relishing in the silence that settled in after Laurence and the children left for work and school, I passed by the twins’ bedroom and stopped in the doorway. The morning had seemed particularly tense although I could not say why. Laurence had been distant, his mind already on work and silent at the breakfast table except to scold Mark and John about their manners and to quiz Samantha about her homework. The children, usually impervious to their father’s moods, had been quiet, tightly wound like tops waiting to be released. I absorbed all of their energy and felt tired even though my day had not really begun.

A stream of sunlight entered through their open curtains and danced across the wavy navy-blue stripes on their comforters, drenching each of their single beds with light. I paused in the doorway and reminisced about when those beds had been cribs, and the boys had been incapable of navigating the world on their own. Back then I had been unaware of how their very existence would forever eclipse mine. I let that happen, I thought. And it’s too late to change course.

A glint of light caught my eye. Something shiny on the floor, halfway out and halfway under Mark’s bed. Mark, the younger of the twins by twenty minutes, had always been a distracted child, and had been more so since our return from Barcelona. Better not be something he needs for school, I thought, as I walked over to pick it up, calculating the impact on my day if I had to swing by school on my way to work. Only when I touched the object and memories of the Barcelona beach and the woman and the promise came back–faint at first as if they were traveling across the Atlantic, then stronger as my grasp tightened around the coral handle–did I know what it was.

I turned it over slowly, but stopped when it reflected my feet. My stockings were not visible in the mirror; my feet were bare, adorned only with a line of snake’s scales around my ankles, their colors sparkling so brightly they appeared to be dancing. I swung the mirror up to my face, and my face looked back, undecorated; my eyes large and empty as if my soul had been swallowed up by the dark pools of my pupils.

I sat on Mark’s bed, raised my left ankle onto my right knee and trained the mirror on it again. The enchanted image returned: my ankles bejeweled by a circle of scales. I had seen this pattern before, in this mirror, in Barcelona. I should have been shocked by this hallucination, but all I felt was a clear understanding that this transformation of my body was what I needed to embrace. This would be the start of my journey.

And so, despite the general Bible-inspired taboo against tattoos, I found an artist in St. Kitts willing to fill a small semi-circle with gold, green, brown, and black ink just below my right ankle. He worked under my supervision—”more green here, less blue there”—to recreate the image I alone saw in the mirror.

The tattooing was painful. Barely subcutaneous, the nerves near my ankle protested violently at being pierced. To make it worse, he had to inject and reinject ink into the same spots to create the effect of iridescence on my dark skin. Each time the needle touched me, I gritted my teeth and reflected on my journey from child to woman; from wife to mother, each stab of pain a reminder that true transformations were never painless.

When I reviewed my ankle’s markings in the Barcelona mirror, I saw that my instructions to the artist had been perfect, but the drawings reflected in the mirror had expanded into a more intricate pattern that trailed up the back of my legs and into the crook of my knees. And so, one week later, against the tattooist’s advice, I had him recreate the mirror's image, adding more markings in places I knew Laurence wouldn’t notice if I dressed right, especially since sex between us had devolved into infrequent minutes of practiced fondling, mounting, and release.

Each tattoo empowered me, as if the artist were infusing a special elixir that boosted my courage. I made bold changes at the small financial firm I managed and those changes led to an immediate increase in the company’s profitability. I cut off my chemically-straightened hair and let my prematurely-graying curls sprout unhindered from my scalp, and over time, the reflection of my eyes in the mirror evolved from empty and sad to bold and knowing.

Simultaneously, Laurence’s appearance withered. In the flesh, he remained unchanged, but when I angled the mirror, surreptitiously, towards him, he appeared pale and his eyes held a bewildered, vacant look. While the mirror was clearly not prophetic, it seemed to show the outcome of a path that one could choose to accept or to change and I contemplated the best way to address the mirror’s suggestion that Laurence’s current trajectory led to an unpleasant future.

Then his nightmares began. He awoke at least once a night, his breathing ragged, his forehead covered in sweat.

“I’m swimming, deep in the ocean. It’s dark: no moon. It’s quiet, and I’m completely alone,” he reported. “Sometimes though, I see eyes just above the horizon; black and bulging like a fish or a snake watching me.”

I let him describe the dreams, never letting on that in my own dreams, I watched him struggling in the water, knowing somehow that I could act–to save him or end him in the dream and in reality.

Then one afternoon, about three weeks after his dreams began, my indecisiveness ended. I was in the kitchen prepping vegetables for dinner. Samantha was at football practice and John had a music lesson. Mark sat at the kitchen table holding my mirror.

The evening of the morning when I found the mirror in his room, he had run into mine, his eyes wide with panic and filled with tears.

“I lost something important, Mommy,” he cried.

I knew that he meant the mirror and for a second or two I considered keeping it to myself. He was young; he would get over whatever attachment he had formed with it…or I could buy him a special gift to replace it. But the depth of his loss was palpable. At nine, he was a sensitive child, often dominated by his father and his siblings and I considered that he might feel the same buoying I felt when I looked in the mirror. I confessed to finding it and we agreed that we would share its magic.

In the kitchen that afternoon, there was silence except for the sound of my knife hitting the chopping board. He stared at the mirror, as he often did, as if he saw something there that he did not perceive in himself.

“We did it!”

I tightened my grip around the handle of the knife in my hand. Enchanted by the afternoon’s serenity, I had not heard Laurence’s arrival.

“We got the contract to build the new marina!”

Still facing the kitchen counter, I grimaced. The deal would mean a significant improvement to our financial situation, but the construction would displace the mangrove swamp where the marina would be built. Environmental impact studies had shown the construction would be detrimental; studies Laurence had seen and withheld. A tsunami of guilt rose from my belly and flooded my throat. I sliced into an onion and the sting of the fumes rose to my eyes.

“But what about the mangroves, Daddy,” Mark said, his prepubescent voice high-pitched but steady with conviction.

I turned in time to see Laurence’s expression transform from excited to shocked to angry like a boxer absorbing an unexpected uppercut.

“You need to stay out of big people business,” he shouted. “Them mangroves putting food in your belly?”

Mark’s body trembled slightly in the chair as fear spread over face, and I struggled to resist the urge to pull him into my arms. Picking a side would only make Laurence angrier.

I clasped my shaking hands to steady them and soothed Laurence instead. “He just curious, sweetheart.” But Laurence was beyond being calmed.

“You coddle that boy too much. Have him spending the whole day watching himself in that damn mirror. Now he think he can tell me what to do?”

Laurence grabbed for the mirror, and Mark, retreating from his father’s reach, let go.

The mirror clattered onto the tiled floor between them.

I dropped to my knees where it lay, glass side down. The coral shell back was intact. I held my breath as I turned it over, sure that its magic would have saved it from ruin. But a long crack ran from the top of the glass to the bottom, wavy like an ocean’s tide line. Mark gasped. I reached to touch his arm, but he wrested away and fled from the room. Still kneeling, I cradled the mirror in my palm and stared into the glass. Perhaps I will be able to see my face. Instead, water appeared to flow from one side of the crack to the other, like the reconnection of the Red Sea. As I looked, the water became murkier; turning dark brown then brightening into a blood red. Grief, anger, guilt, loss, desertion, desperation, I felt them all as I sank back on to my heels. I wanted to tear at my clothes, to beat my chest, to claw at the tattoos I could never complete; to howl.

Explode! the mirror seemed to insist; the liquid under the glass bulged and retreated, mocking me. But I had to hold it in, for Mark, for all the children, always holding it in.

“Seven years of bad luck?” I looked up at the sound of Laurence’s voice. He stood above me. His expression registered only vague concern. I could tell that his mind had already moved on to things of greater import than a broken mirror. Loathing filled my body, flooding everywhere any lingering love had lived.

That night in the dreamscape, sky and water merged into darkness so black it was almost blue. I sensed Laurence’s presence in the water struggling to stay afloat. I headed towards him, propelling my body with a strong front crawl I had not mastered in my real life. When I reached him, he had stopped moving and was floating: arms outstretched, eyes resigned and passionless. But when I touched him, he focused his eyes on my face, then on my body, and they widened. I looked down and realized that my lower body was a long tapered column of scale-encased flesh which curled back and forth, keeping me afloat.

I moved behind Laurence and held him under his armpits in a life-guard hold, pulling him towards what I hoped was a shore. I kicked and kicked but encountered no land. I did not feel physical exhaustion, only frustration and it occurred to me that, as solid as his neck felt between my hands, I could crush it and be free of this nightmare. I imagined him dead, imagined myself whole and free without him.

Do it, a voice urged in my head. I pressed my palms together. His carotid arteries pulsed beneath my fingers.

Do it.

I shifted my thumbs to the front of his neck and pressed again, fingering the length of his windpipe. His eyes came to life again in recognition of what I was about to do.

Murderer. The word popped into my head from nowhere, quiet but swift. I imagined my future. His death would not free me, just change the way in which I was trapped. I would move from a prison I could potentially control to one with real bars.

Let it go. I closed my eyes, relaxed my grip, and imagined seeing him in the mirror healthy and whole as I continued my push to find a shore, my resolve to complete the preparation of my body then find my way back to Barcelona solidified with each stroke.

***

It has taken twenty years, but I am finally here. My transformation, slow without the guidance of the mirror, is incomplete, and the circumstances are all wrong. But I am here.

In my fantasies, I return to Barcelona to stay, no longer tethered to Laurence—our connection having frayed to nothing when the children abandoned the house for college, leaving us with empty rooms and nothing to say. I have imagined myself as that woman emerging from the water: fierce, powerful, alone. In my darkest moments, this dream has been my lifeline. I have not achieved either of my goals: standing up to Laurence or learning to swim, yet the timing feels right. My sixtieth birthday has pulled at me to enact a major change. Now or never.

I rise from the hotel bed I’m sharing with Laurence, and when I look back, I see that the sheets remain indented in the shape of my body next to his, as if a part of me is forever moored to him.

“Now that we’re here, how do you want to celebrate your birthday?” Laurence asks, but his eyes are on the TV. One of his hands holds the remote and his thumb beats a steady rhythm on the channel button. Snippets of Spanish and Catalan erupt like machine gun fire as he surfs through the channels.

Standing in the doorway between the bathroom and the bedroom of the tiny hotel room he has decided we can afford, I lean on the door jamb and watch him. My body tingles, responding to the proximity of the ocean. I consider the secret carved into my body. He will not get in my way, I think. This trip is about me. I am a different woman now.

“You didn’t answer.” Laurence’s voice cuts through my reverie like a buzzsaw. He has put the remote down and he lies on his back, his body a dark shadow on the hotel-white sheets, hands behind his head.

I fight back revulsion and smile instead. “I thought I’d walk to the beach.”

He sucks his teeth. “I can’t believe you dragged me four-thousand miles from the Caribbean Sea to sit on the beach. Makes no sense.”

Makes no sense. Those were the same words he exclaimed, two days after the mirror was broken, when a newspaper anonymously received and printed the suppressed environmental impact statements about the marina construction. The project stalled, then went forward, years later, under a different name, with a different firm. I occasionally feel guilty about my part in the loss for his business, but more often exculpated when I see how our children learned to live within our honestly-earned means. And while neither our adventure in the dream nor the loss of the contract changed his behavior, they have impacted the way I deal with him. I perform the dance of a successful marriage but no longer cringe when he points out my flaws. The markings on my body have become my own flagellation.

“I’ll come with you, though. Let me see this beach you’re always on about.”

I flinch and the smile I have fixed on my face almost slips. He has gone off-script.

“You don’t really want to come, Laurence.”

I expect him to drop his eyes, a silent acknowledgment that I am right. Instead he looks directly at me. “I do. I don’t want us to end up like one of those couples who drift apart after the children leave. You spent all those years focused on them. This is our time.” He pauses, finally breaking our gaze. His voice is soft now. “I need you.”

I do not move. He has always loved yet resented the children, insisting that I had abandoned him. And he is right, but they had been like newly-hatched birds confined to a nest high in a tree; unable to fly until I taught them. They had needed me sometimes in ways that stretched beyond the borders of my capacity to give. Now I am expected to give that which I don’t have to him.

Our last few years together flash before my eyes and for the first time I realize that he has changed. I recall our planning for this trip. I wanted a place near to this specific beach, I wanted a room on the bottom floor, I did not want any fuss: no cake, no flowers, no surprises. My only concession was his presence. He has always ignored my requests on my previous significant birthdays, but I look around the room and realize that this time he has listened, and executed exactly what we agreed. I thought the calm that had settled on the last years of our marriage had been the result of my focus on improving myself but I see now that he has become my partner in a way he never was before.

To have and to hold. Til death do us part.

I consider ten, twenty, thirty more years…potentially good years. I can adjust as well, be the woman he needs.

My skin crawls as soon as the thought enters my mind, as if my tattoos are rising in protest to the idea. I cannot be moved by this. He cannot accompany me. I must escape; I must be somewhere I can explore all my parts: beautiful and ugly, without an audience. My mask of congeniality slips lower the closer I get to the place where I first encountered who I might become. Who I will become. Soon, I will not be able to hold it in.

“I’d-I’d prefer to go alone.” I hear the tremor in my voice and know he will interpret it as uncertainty when, in reality, it is determination. He is not deciding this for me.

“I really do want to come. Put on your swimsuit. It’s been ages since I’ve seen you in anything besides long pants.” He gestures to his own unclad legs. He has removed his pants, and his legs stretch like thin, moss-covered logs from his boxer shorts.

I sigh, no longer smiling, and release the buckle of my pants, letting them drop to the floor. I turn and catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror behind the bathroom door. I stare, mesmerized by the tattooed scales on my legs as they shift and shimmer with 3-D magnificence. The ink circles my bikini line and flows in an uninterrupted swirl of greens, golds, blacks, and browns to my toes. I move my legs together bending slightly until they touch from my crotch to my ankles. My knees disappear and my lower body appears to sway as I imagine it will when I enter the water. I have been growing towards something, and although I have never quite been sure what the end point would be, I know now that I am very close.

“What the hell?”

The exclamation pulls me from my mesmer. Laurence is standing behind me. He stares at my image.

“Are those…” He leans closer. “Are those tattoos? What the hell have you done to yourself, woman?”

His lips are pursed, his eyes narrowed in anger. His expression is derisive. This is the Laurence I know. Then his eyes meet mine in the mirror’s reflection and widen in horror as he notices my pupils darkening. I watch as well as they enlarge beyond a look of human surprise, merging into my irises and the surrounding sclera filling with colors reflecting the red, green, and blue swirls covering my lower body.

For a moment, I too am hypnotized by the change in my eyes, but where he sees a warning of impending danger, I see a promise of something new…and clarity, clarity of direction and purpose. So I leave, but I don't break our mirrored gaze until I have found my way to the hotel door.

***

The scent of the seafood cooking in the restaurants that line the broadwalk, the screeching of the birds fighting for discarded food waste, the sounds of spectators on the beach exclaiming “Déu n’hi do” in response to my body—all begin to fall away, fading like the ending of an extended version of a melody. I approach the shore and the waves crest and ebb, teasing me with their nearness; the shushing of the water sounds like a breathy murmur: ‘we’re waiting’. I quicken my steps. I have no idea what awaits me; if I will sink or swim, but I long to be embraced by the water. I know I am not worthy, but I am ready.