The water churned like a boiling kettle of soup. On both shores, the mangroves and docks that had rested in the lagoon were withering and melting like sticks of butter. The color faded from yellowish green to translucent yellow. She thought she could see the lagoon bottom in the shallows, but that couldn’t have been right. It looked too smooth and glassy.
Mariella’s people were doing this. They had started building their home. Soon it would host the rebirth.
But at what cost, Moni wondered. Before she could elaborate on that thought, a wave of newly-acquired memories engulfed her mind. She saw gleaming cities in perfectly clear seas. The structures were of flesh and metal. They moved in seamless harmony as they shuffled their inhabitants around. Moni could barely make out the creatures. She only saw purple dots from that high a vantage point. They flowed as elegantly as the notes of a symphony. A small slice of that world would do wonders on earth.
When the images faded, she gazed at the girl who had given them to her. The faint purple glimmer in Mariella’s eyes no longer terrified her. It was beautiful. Now she had met the real girl that she loved.
“I’ll bring your home back, baby. A lot of people won’t understand what you’re doing, but I’ll tell them you don’t mean them any harm. I don’t know if they’ll listen to me, but I’ll tell them.”
Moni knew that Sneed wouldn’t listen. That’s why she didn’t answer his fourteen calls to her cell phone. It didn’t matter what he told her. He hated black people, purple people, and anything he didn’t understand. She wouldn’t let megalomaniacs like him demean her anymore.
When her father called, she answered the phone immediately.
“Hi dad. Almost here?”
“Are you serious?” Bo Williams asked. “The lagoon looks like piss today. And it smells worse.”
“Oh, we can see the water fine from here,” Moni said. Not only did she see the water, but through her binoculars she also saw her father’s rusty C amaro pull off the narrow strip of land just before the ramp to the Eau Gallie Causeway. It entered the parking lot, which granted access to the walkway underneath the bridge. He fished down there all the time. “I bet you won’t have a problem finding a parking space today.”
“You don’t say. Your undercover cop car is the only one out here,” he said. Moni grinned. She had parked her Taurus near the bridge and used her badge as leverage to hitchhike to the hotel. He got out of his car and circled around Moni’s battered ride. She had covered Darren’s bloodstains in the back seat with a blanket, but the exterior was still smashed up. “Shit, what happened to this clunker?”
Someone who drove a car that sounded like it had a trash compactor working under the hood didn’t have the right to call anything a clunker.
“I was playing bumper cars with the Lagoon Watcher. That was before I choked him out and brought him in.” Now he couldn’t needle her for dealing with only kiddie stuff. He would finally get the message that she had grown into a tough woman and no longer a girl cowering in the closet.
“Yeah, I saw his mug shot,” her father said. “I could have whooped his ass without getting a scratch. I heard he marked you up pretty good.”
A normal father, after hearing that a man had hit his daughter, would break into jail and kick his teeth in. Moni’s father acted like he’d rather shake the man’s hand and give him some woman-beating pointers for next time.
She had so many sharp words for him-poison-tipped words that had marinated within her for years-but she couldn’t unleash them now. Let him get onto the walkway first.
“We got into a bit of a tussle, but I handled it,” Moni said. “Now come on. Your granddaughter can’t go fishing without your help. I never was any good at it.”
“That’s because fishing is a sport of patience, and you got none of that,” he said as Moni watched him trot from his car over to the walkway. He wore a pair of crusty old jeans and a faded biker t-shirt-with no sign of fishing gear. “How the hell you think we’re gonna fish in this? If any fish are still alive in there, you can cook ‘em up yourself, darlin’.”
She loved how he called her darling and suggested that she choke on toxic fish in the same sentence.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got your monthly rent in my pocket,” she said.
“Now we’re talking. I could get used to this grandfather deal. See you kids soon.”
No you won’t.
They both hung up. About halfway across the walkway underneath the bridge, he stopped walking and called her back. “Hiding again are ya? Well, there ain’t many hiding places ‘round here. Come on out before you piss me off.”
He had threatened her when she hid in the closet too. He offered her a chance to come out before he broke in and laid his boots into her-as if the outcome would change if she approached voluntarily. She’d rather suffer in resistance than give him a shred of justification.
She could do it now. He had strayed into range.
“You don’t scare me anymore. You’re a broken down old man.”
“Is that right, honey? Well, you looked mighty scared to me last time I paid your home a visit. I hope you brought that skinny punk again. I’d get a kick outta snapping his neck.”
She hadn’t heard from Aaron since early that morning. She hoped he had listened to her and stayed away from the lagoon. Moni glanced at Mariella. She didn’t respond to that train of thought.
“He’s sitting this one out. This is between you, me and Mariella, who, by the way, isn’t your granddaughter. You’re nothing but a stranger.”
“You think you can raise her by yourself? She’ll be turning tricks on the street corner by the time she’s fifteen. Hell, that’s where you woulda been if I hadn’t taught you straight.”
“Do you call the abuse you put me through teaching?” Moni nearly flung the phone over the balcony in a futile attempt to plunk him in the head with it. Her tears fell over the edge in its place. The droplets carried off into the swirling wind. “You had no right to do what you did to me. You had no right to touch me like that! You had no right to hit me and choke me and… say what you said…”
“You been fucking up my whole life, you little whore! All you do is screw up!”
Her trembling hand seized her ear, and a clip of braids, but it couldn’t muzzle her father’s yelling voice inside her head. The imprint of his harsh words still stung her even as her physical scars had long faded.
“Have you ever slaved in a grease shop for a boss that didn’t give two shits about you? Can you imagine how I felt when I got home, and saw your mom with her fat ass on the couch and you dressing like a lil’ floozy and blabbering on the phone? I busted my ass every day. All you and your mother did was think of new ways to burn my paycheck.”
“I don’t care. Okay? I don’t care why you did it. You had no reason to hurt me. And what you did to mom…”
She remembered the sickening thump that reverberated through her wall when her father slammed her mother’s head on the other side. She heard her mother whimpering as she dropped to her knees. She heard her scream, “ Don’t hurt my baby!” Another thump silenced her. Her mother tried to cover the bruises with makeup, but Moni could still see the blue and purple marks on her dark skin, and the swelling. Yet, she never whimpered about her own suffering. Her mother’s eyes looked upon her daughter in agony when they saw the scars she couldn’t prevent.
Her spirit had been shattered so completely, that she couldn’t reassemble herself after he went to jail. The woman’s heart couldn’t take it. When her father sent her degrading letters, week after week, that blamed her for his arrest, she couldn’t throw them away. She read every one, and each of them pushed her closer to her casket.
Moni had watched her mother die in a hospital bed; her heart had surrendered. The whole time, she asked herself why she had never called the police on her father, so her mother could escape.
“Mom tried so hard, but she couldn’t fight you. I was too small, and afraid to keep you off her. How would I even think about it? What young child thinks of protecting their mother, instead of the other way around? That’s just it. I had no one to protect me, because you didn’t care. You thought your paycheck was all you owed me. I’d have rather gone to bed hungry every night with a loving family than have a monster like you as my father.”