Read Online Vicious Deep by Zoraida Cordova - Free Book Online

forearm, which is scattered with slick scales a few shades of blue lighter than the ones on my tail. She empties the Mason jar in the tub. We listen to the salt hiss when it meets water, the bubble bath deflating, and the careful intake of our breaths. Dad takes the jar from my mother and fills it. He picks up the little rainbow fish that’s flopping on the wet floor with not enough water and drops him into the jar.
    â€œIs he for dinner too?” I go.
    We chuckle briefly. I want to fix the dark cloud that’s hanging over all of us. Fix this . I can’t remember us ever being this quiet, this careful of what we say. I know everyone says their family is different, happy. When it comes to my family, I really mean it.
    Mom and I look at each other. Her cheeks are flushed red, but the rest of her is still the same porcelain pale she’s always been. Her eyes are impossibly turquoise. The corners of her mouth tilt downward, and she’s all trembles. Her lips, her chin, her hands. She wipes at her forehead with the back of her hand and breathes through her mouth. I can smell her regret, anxiety, fright. It’s bitter, like dried lemons.
    I don’t know how, but I do. Now, I may be the fastest swimmer in Brooklyn, but that’s about where my talents stop. Unless dating is counted as a talent, and recent events are proving me wrong.
    â€œThis wasn’t supposed to happen,” she says. She absently dips her hand in the water, like we’re at Aunt Sylvia’s pool and she’s lying on the ledge. I’ve never seen her so sad, and my body flushes because I know this is somehow my fault.
    â€œWhat was supposed to happen?” I don’t mean to sound so bitter. I can’t help it. “Why is this happening to me? Why now?” And before I can think to stop myself, “Who are you?”
    She’s Maia Hart, married to David Hart. Who was she before that? We’ve never met anyone from her side of the family. I’ve never asked, because I’m so used to it just being the three of us. New Year’s we spend with friends; Christmas is the three of us; Thanksgiving, it’s with Layla’s family; and Independence Day is with the rest of Coney Island. Even if my grandparents were dead, there would be someone , wouldn’t there? There would be pictures, no matter how old. People keep pictures of those they love, right?
    â€œFrom the beginning,” Dad says. He sits on the toilet with one hand under his chin, staring at my fins, like that statue of the thinking guy. “I met your mother when I had just graduated from Hunter and had moved back to my parents’ apartment. I spent that entire summer on a little boat off Brighton, hating the world and wondering if I should take the job with Techsoft. That kind of post-college thing.”
    Mom lets herself chuckle. “It was on one of our visits to Coney Island. Every fifty or so years, we come back here. That’s what we do. We spend most of our time visiting beaches all over the world. That’s why it takes so long between visits.”
    I sat it slowly. “We?”
    â€œThe Sea People. The Beautiful Deadly Ones. The Fey of the Sea. Children of Poseidon. Dwellers of the Vicious Deep…” She pauses as if I don’t already know I’m a moron. I just want her to say it. “Merfolk.”
    â€œOf course,” I say. It’s not enough that I’m in my parents’ bathtub up to my gills in rose-scented bubble bath, that my entire world has quite literally slipped right out from under my feet, that I don’t know anything about the changes in my body—if they’re permanent, can I eat fish? Is that like semi-cannibalism? That my parents have been keeping this from me since I was little, which means they’ve been lying to me my entire life. I can forget all that. But of all the creatures in my mom’s fairy-tale books, she had to go and be the girliest? Come