These Things Do Happen, Part II

To read the first installment of this story, click here!

False alarm! For a moment, I flailed helplessly in the water, but it was not as deep as I'd feared: I could stand, somehow, with my head above water, even though I couldn't see the floor anymore. I straightened up, cringing and glancing away from the rain that landed like shards of glass on my face.

Yes, these things do happen. And I was thinking that everything would still be OK somehow, that we would simply dry off and walk out of the store together, Jenny, my mother, with a bag and me without one, already joking about it, and that someday, when we were both old, this story would keep us laughing until we had tears in our eyes: the time there was a storm inside the Mix and Match Store.

Except just then, the linoleum floor tilted.

It threw me off balance and I fell under the deepening water again, where everything was terrifyingly dark.

When I surfaced, I saw that the part of the floor near the very front had lifted up somehow, way up off of the ground, and the back part, where I was, had fallen down four feet or more. Before I could even scream, the crash sent waves of water toward me—breakers, really, plowing over huge display pieces and checkout stations—rushing rapids racing, knocking me off my feet, determined to shove my head down below the water for just long enough.

This was the deep water I'd feared just minutes before.

And the clouds still spat their needles of rain and hail at me, quite large hail, really, tiny marbles of ice. I was filled with the understanding that I was going to die: that these clouds and their endless, landless water would kill me, drown me, right here in the stupid Mix and Match Store, which Jenny, my mother, apparently loved, even though I'd never heard her say so before today.

“Jenny!” I screamed once I’d righted myself. “Jenny! Help! I need help!”

But there was no answer. I could hear only the rich tones of Bonaventure’s voice somewhere, followed by an undignified shriek of laughter from the peacock, as I fought the churning maelstrom. Briefly, I failed, bobbing under the surface, and it was then that I found it was saltwater. It was raining saltwater.

I didn’t understand; the Pacific Ocean was 85 miles away. How was this happening?

But I couldn't think about it. Struggling to keep treading the rising water, I caught a glimpse of Jenny, my mother, Bonaventure in his blood-curdling blue brocade suit the terrifying color of the ocean, and the peacock, all munching on our cotton candy from a large red suede sofa suspended in the air six or eight feet above me, giggling, then shushing each other, reaching over one another for a handful of gold or blue cotton candy as if a movie were about to start.

Squinting through the rain, I saw Jenny, my mother, playfully slap Bonaventure's hand as he grazed her knee, then her inner thigh, and then I couldn't see anymore.

“Help me! Please!” I roared, but I was not louder than the rushing water. Yes, surely that was all: No one could hear me. “Jenny!” I bellowed again. “Bonaventure! Peacock! Peacock, help!” I took a breath and swallowed salt water. “I'm gonna drown!" I burbled. “Peacock!"

Peacocks working in retail settings are, of course, famous for their empathy and kindness, but it had been obvious since the first that this peacock would be an exception.

I could only try to stay afloat, to keep treading water, and without Jenny, my mother, so much as noticing: She and Bonaventure, in his beautiful, terrible, watery blue suit were laughing at something on her phone, which she was reaching over the perturbed peacock to show him.

Suddenly there came a great thrumming, a deep, crackling, cracking vibration from the back of the store, where the water was the deepest, and that got my mother, Jenny’s attention: All four of us craned our necks.

First I thought the water had hit a light fixture, that I’d be electrocuted, and my heart beat out eighth notes as I waited to be killed. A current pulled me beneath the surface—was I already dead?

Not yet: I surfaced, spitting out another mouthful of the icy water, and began to know that there was a waterfall at the back end of the store.

The current would throw me down it, I understood; I’d either drown or crack my head open—if the fearsome water, still rising, didn't trap me in its clutches first.

Desperately, I turned myself around to look back up at the red suede couch—floating a few feet higher now—and at Jenny, who was my mother, for God’s sake, who should care what was happening to me. Her laughter told me the dreadful sound at the back of the store and what it meant was of no more concern to her than the day’s high temperature in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

And her drowning daughter merited even less attention than that.

I tried one more time: “Jen—” But a rogue wave hit me in the face, and I let myself be pulled down.

They could hear me. I could hear them! They just didn't care.

Jenny, my mother, didn't care: The realization settled over me like a mantle as I bobbed back up to the surface.

I let my body be dragged and whirled around; as I did, I passed under an enormous TV set hovering over the water, near the couch. My ears were half in and half out of the water, but I could hear the whine of that awful song by the Rembrandts: They were watching a rerun of Friends, which I knew for a fact that my mother, Jenny, thought was stupid.

There was no use. No one cared.

But giving up felt good.

It hurt so much, and it was so very hard, to keep fighting the incredible pressure of the water, so I stopped. I let the waves draw me back towards the deeper water in the clearance area.

From this vantage point, I could see a large but nimble old brigantine bucking and yawing on the waves, threatening to capsize, its black skull-and-hourglass flag flapping helplessly alongside a solid red one, already shredded in the tumult.

Oh, a pirate ship, I thought, as if this were par for the course in a women's clothing store, as the waves carried me down the hall where the dressing rooms were.

I'm going to die now, I reminded myself.

All right, came my answer, and my body relaxed, having made peace with it.

Then, just as I was about to rush past it and be swept down the waterfall, I watched, astonished, as my arms reached out and grabbed onto a door: It was some kind of a break room or a manager’s office in the back.

Dying today wasn't all right at all. It shocked me to learn that I had any fight left, but here I was holding onto the door firmly, stretching out on my back, with my legs pointed inside the room. A deep breath, and I managed to heave a leg up onto a tall bookcase inside—tall enough to rise above the water.

A foothold! Marshaling the strength I had left, I bobbed half in the water and half out for another five seconds, then gave my best middle-school gym-class kick.

Instead of a burgundy rubber ball, my foot met the bookcase: Another shift, and—yes!—I was on top of it! Out of the water; safe, for the moment. Just one last twist, and ... thank you, God, I thought fervently: I found myself sitting securely on top of a desk the water hadn’t yet devoured, next to a tall filing cabinet with a microwave on top of it. Disposable silverware, fast-food napkins, and a wrinkly, pink packet of Sweet’n Low, which I hadn't seen in decades, were scattered nearby.

But the tide was rising. As I sat there soaked, shivering, panting, the red suede sofa appeared, having followed me, cruising gracefully above the flood. Jenny, my mother, Bonaventure, in his stupid suit the color of this sadistic seawater, and the peacock were perched on it, just below the ceiling, wearing expressions ranging from mild surprise to great fury. I had to turn away, though, as stick pins of ice pelted my cheek—and then I saw it:

A flash of color, there on the desk, not a foot from my hand. A brilliant color, the perfect shade of light blue. A sweater.

And it was dry!

I grabbed it with both hands, understanding that I had to put it on, and although I nearly couldn't bear to be any colder, even just for a few seconds, I pulled off the colorless sweater I’d been wearing and threw it toward the roaring waters.

At that moment, a shark the size of the sofa immediately breached the water. As if this were a Sea World routine the two of us had practiced over and over, it caught the sweater in its fearsome mouth and swam back out of the office, disappearing down to the depths to devour its prize.

Then, quickly, my numb, red hands fumbled the beautiful blue sweater over my head and down my torso. Suddenly I knew what to do. With all the strength I had left in my wobbly legs, I stood up on the desk and screamed as loud as I could:

“STOP!”

I looked around at the rain, the hail, the wind and the whitecaps here in this little break room, this little office.

And the spectators on the floating red couch were staring at me, each one unmistakably upset.

But no matter. “STOP IT ALL THIS INSTANT!” I bellowed. “I COMMAND YOU!” I paused. “I said I command you to stop! I don't deserve this shit!”

And in the time it took me to blink my eyes just once—it had been involuntary—the floor leveled again, the clouds were gone, the shark was gone, and I knew that the pirate ship was gone, too, back to whatever dimension in spacetime it had come from. The rain and the hail and the deep sea was gone, all except a tiny puddle, nothing more than a little spilled water, standing pitifully in the center of the floor.

In the little hallway outside the office, the red couch crashed ten or twelve feet to the floor, its occupants finally shocked into silence, all staring at me as square ceiling tiles and long fluorescent lights reappeared above their heads.

Silently I stalked past them and out into the main part of the store. After a moment, I heard my mother, Jenny, Bonaventure, and the peacock stand up and follow me.

When we were all back where we’d been half an hour ago, before the flood, I gestured to the sweater I was wearing. “I’ll take this one,” I said to the peacock. “But I don’t see a tag.”

They all looked at each other for a few moments, none certain of what to say.

Finally Bonaventure opened his mouth to speak. As he did, a dozen pink butterflies poured out, and he clapped a hand over his mouth in embarrassment.

“Well?” I asked.

The peacock rolled his eyes, then cleared his throat. “As it happens, that one is on sale,” he said. “According to my calculations, it should ring up for approximately ... well ... that is, approximately ... nothing.” The bird looked directly at me. “You may take it, Jenny.”

I nodded, somehow unsurprised. “Thank you."

The peacock nodded, then looked at Jenny, my mother. “Jenny, it’s nearly time for you and Jenny to go,” he said, and Bonaventure nodded his agreement.

“It’s time,” he agreed quickly, preventing any further butterflies from escaping.

Jenny, my mother, was still cradling the purple striped sweater she’d glommed onto earlier. Furious just moments ago, she now raised her eyebrows and smiled at me. “Jenny, shall we go?”

“Not so fas—oh, pardon me,” Bonaventure interjected as a single brown moth escaped his mouth. “Not so fast. Jenny, put that back,” he said, pointing to the striped sweater.

“What?!” Jenny, my mother, shrieked in immediate outrage. “She gets to keep hers? For free? And I don’t?! I’ll—I’ll—Can I buy it?” she asked, reaching into her pockets.

“You may not,” the peacock said grandly and plucked it from her hands with its long beak. Oh, what was his name? I'd heard it, hadn't I?

Then he looked over at me, first with a flash of pity. But then exasperation began to rise off his face like steam, and I felt that same lurch in my stomach again.

Then it hit me. “Morty!" I exclaimed, and now the peacock looked alarmed.

"Yes?”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I just suddenly remembered your name, is all,” I said awkwardly. "I'm sorry, peacock. I mean, I'd been thinking of you as ‘peacock!’ But you're Morty! Morty," I repeated for good measure, knowing I was babbling, as he shook his head to dismiss my outburst and looked at me incredulously.

“You’ve had all afternoon to guess this, and it's very important,” Morty told me. “And I tire of this. If you don’t say it before she does, I’m afraid you will catch on fire, begin burning, and eventually disintegrate into a lake of fire."

Morty peered at me over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses. "I'd hate to see that happen to such a nice girl," he said, his voice a little softer now.

Before I had time to panic that I didn’t know what to say, I knew what to say. I turned to Jenny.

“You are not my mother,” I said. “You are nothing like my mother. My mother is nice to me! And she wears pink and navy blue and drives a blue convertible, not a zebra, and she would hate that stupid striped sweater!

“And she would never want her name to be stupid Jenny!” I spat. “Her name is Eleanor!”

And she helps me when I’m in trouble, I added silently.

A look of shock, then hatred spread across Jenny’s face, just long enough to spook me, before the tips of her strange blonde locks flickered: Her hair was on fire.

She'd caught on fire.

Blisters of flame struck her sweater, her arms, her cheek, her thigh, and they grew, despite her shrieks, until Jenny was covered in a column of flame, an inferno, absolutely screaming her head off, screaming and yowling and weeping and choking all at once, burning to death.

Around her feet pooled liquid fire; the size of a car tire, then the size of a dining room table, then bigger still as the flames that had engulfed Jenny fell, this Jenny who was certainly not my mother, and then the column of flame collapsed down into itself.

By God, just like Morty had said, she’d disintegrated into a lake of fire.

Bonaventure, Morty, and I watched solemnly as the thing crackled and sizzled and hissed for a few seconds, then Bonaventure counted backwards from ten.

“... Three ... two ... one, and - poof!” he exclaimed as the lake of fire suddenly shrunk and disappeared, all sides racing toward the middle until all that was left coalesced into what looked like a dark marble, with orange, red, and yellow strands of glass like a conflagration inside.

“I believe I get it this time," he said to the peacock, who nodded.

"Yeah, yeah,” Morty said with a sigh.

Bonaventure bent down and picked up the little ball, then tossed it in his mouth and began to chew.

“Chocolate truffle," he explained to me. "Aha! Dark chocolate; notes of blood orange, papaya, and mango.” Bonaventure moaned softly. “Delicious.

“We’ll have to remember that one for next time,” he told Morty, who nodded again.

At my incredulous look, Bonaventure took a deep breath and sighed, several monarch butterflies leaving his mouth. “I do apologize,” he said, swatting ineffectually at them. “I’m coming down with something, but it's not contagious.”

"The hell it isn't,” the peacock said dryly. "Just yesterday I burped a tiger moth."

“Corinne doesn't want to hear about what you burped,” Bonaventure scolded him in a rare loss of composure, and I waved it away, shaking my head that I wasn't offended, until what he had said hit me:

That's right, I thought: I'm Corinne.

Not Jenny.

“But yes, these things do happen,” Bonaventure said as if continuing a conversation we'd started long before, lowering himself into a seated position, sitting down just in time for a solid gold chair like an open-palmed human hand to appear underneath him. “You have to watch out for it. Every now and then, somebody turns out to be one of these—” He shrugged helplessly.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Either of you! Both of you.”

He and the peacock shook their heads in unison.

“Against the rules,” the peacock said, shrugging regretfully, in that distinctive way in which only a peacock can shrug.

“We tried to give you clues,” Bonaventure put in, folding his hands and flashing his cufflinks again: Two different women etched in profile on the whalebone.

Jenny’s mother would never do that, I'd heard him say. He was certainly right about that.

“Well ... where is my real mother?” I asked.

From his hand-shaped seat in the middle of the sales floor, Bonaventure arched an eyebrow and raised it at me in response as the peacock looked deliberately off to his left at nothing. And those tiny actions, those slightest of movements, were somehow the worst and most terrifying of the whole ordeal.

I flew outside. Both zebras were there where we’d left them, leaning lazily against the big palm tree and passing a Marlboro Red back and forth, their bellies full after their feast of what must have been dozens of wild tacos.

“Oh, shit,” one of them said, elbowing the other. “She knows.”

“Goddamn. Here we go,” muttered the other, taking a long drag.

And suddenly, I stumbled, dizzy with the truth. Clutching my head, I lurched toward the palm tree to sit down; I heard one of the zebras saying, “Goddammit. Hey, it's OK, it's OK," as he rubbed his hoof against my arm, but he sounded so very far away.

My mother … Where was she?

And then, all at once, in a single great and lumbering heartbeat, I understood.

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