And then it throws him, and he disappears into the sea. Cinder barks and barks and barks, but Dylan doesn’t surface. The water goes still, and there is nothing to see but silvery ocean all the way to the horizon.
I jerk awake, mouth dry, and open the blind to look out at the darkness of endless ocean. The moon is full and shines in a line over the water far, far below. Stars glitter above, softening the harsh darkness of black sky.
A yawning hole pulses in my chest for long moments, but as always, if I am still and focus on something outside of myself, it fades.
The only way I survived the losses that marked my early life was by learning to compartmentalize, despite my mother’s advice to get some counseling. I’m fine most of the time. But tonight, with the dream fresh in my mind, memories pour in. Me and Josie stealing into the restaurant in the very early morning to pour out the sugar and substitute salt, thinking it so hilarious until our father lost his temper and spanked us both. The two of us dancing on the Eden patio in my mother’s cast-off nightgowns. Playing mermaid on the beach or fairies on the bluffs. Later, all three of us moving like a school of fish, Josie and Dylan and me, swimming in the cove or making a bonfire or practicing calligraphy with fountain pens my mother brought back from some trip she took with my father during one of their happy stints, an interest bolstered by Dylan’s passion for all things Chinese. Like so many boys of the era, he’d fallen hard for Kwai Chang Caine in the Kung Fu television series.
I adored them both, but my sister was first. Worshipped the very air she breathed. I would have done anything she told me—chased down bandits, built a ladder to the moon. In turn, she brought me sand dollars to examine and Pop-Tarts she stole from the pantry in the house kitchen, and she kept her arms around me all night.
It was Dylan who introduced surfing. He taught us when I was seven and Josie nine. It gave us both a sense of power and relief, a way to escape our crumbling family life and explore the sea—and, of course, it was our bond with Dylan himself.
Josie. Thinking of her in the times before she turned into the later version of herself, the aloof, promiscuous addict, makes me ache with longing. I miss my sister with every molecule of my being.
She changed as an early teen, fighting constantly with our father and rebelling against even the tiniest rule. Not even Dylan could rein her in, though he tried. For all that he acted as an uncle or father figure, he was still only a teenager. She started hanging out with older kids on the beach just north of us. Baby Babe, they called her, Surfer Baby. By then she was even more beautiful, tiny and tanned to a deep mocha, her blonde hair sun-streaked and endless.
Josie, Josie, Josie.
At last I doze again, this time falling into a deep, faraway kind of sleep, and do not awaken until a shaft of light plays on my eyelids.
There below me is New Zealand, blue and sinuous in the vastness of the ocean. Little islands dot it all around, and I’m amazed to see both the Pacific and the Tasman Sea. The Tasman looks bluer.
The plane banks and drops, and now I can see the coves and cliffs lining the coast, and my heart jolts a little. Is Josie down there somewhere, or am I on a ridiculous errand?
I rest my forehead against the glass, unwilling to take my eyes off the view. Light skitters over the waves, and I remember when my sister and I thought there were jewels in the ocean, dancing on top of each swell.
One morning when we were small, my mother woke us, whispering into the tent where we were sleeping, Josie and me curled together with Cinder.
“Girls,” she called sweetly, wrapping a hand around my foot, “wake up! I found something!”
The air was thick with fog, but the tide had gone out, leaving ironed-flat sand. My mother led us over the path and into a small cave that was approachable only at low tide. “Look!” she said, pointing.
Inside was what looked like a box. Josie bent over, peering into the dimness. “What is it?”
“I think it might be treasure,” Suzanne said. “You should go see.”
Josie straightened up, crossing her arms. “I ain’t going in there.”
“I will.” Although Josie was two years older than me, seven to my five, I was always the brave one. Filled with a piercing curiosity and a lack of worry over creepy-crawlies, I stomped into the cave, bending over to keep from bumping my head. Even in the darkness, I could see the glitter in the box, things spilling over the sides like cartoon booty. “Treasure!” I cried, and hauled it out to the beach.
Suzanne knelt. “I see. Do you think it was pirates?”
Digging through the pearls and jeweled rings and bracelets and chocolate coins, I nodded. “Maybe it was mermaids.”
She unwound a string of sapphires and dropped them around my neck. “Maybe it was,” she said. “Now you’re wearing their jewelry.”
I adorned her arm with bracelets. Josie pushed rings onto Suzanne’s toes. We drank hot chocolate and sat on the beach in our finery, and we were mermaids with our mermaid mother.
The flight attendant snaps me out of my reverie. “Miss, we’ll be landing in just a little while.”
“Thank you.”
I blink, bringing myself back to now, where that very mother is waiting to hear what I find out about the daughter she lost. For the millionth time, I wonder how to fit the good and the bad of Suzanne into one package, but it’s impossible. She was the worst mother of all time. She was the best mother of all time.
Below, the city is visible, sprawling across a vast, hilly landscape packed with roofs and streets. With a sudden sense of idiocy, I think this is the very definition of a fool’s errand. How in the world will I find a single person in that crowded space? If it’s even her.
The whole thing is absurd.
And yet I know it isn’t, not really. That was adamantly, absolutely my sister, Josie, on that screen. If she’s there, in that city below me, I’m going to find her.
By the time I make it to downtown Auckland, I’m so hideously jet-lagged, it’s like some evil spell. I’m aware of hauling my bag into the foyer of a high-rise residential apartment building, appointed with nods to an Art Deco past it never had. My suitcase rolls over the marble floors with a whisper, and a young Maori woman in a uniform greets me and then hands over a key and directs me to the elevators. A pair of well-dressed Asian girls passes me, impossibly perfect, and next to them, I am a giantess at five ten, my curly hair wild from travel. Whatever makeup I left California with disappeared many hours ago. I wish for the protection and credentials of my white coat reminding the world that I’m a doctor.
Pathetic.
When the door swings open, a middle-aged couple emerges, cameras in hand, and a good-looking man holds the door open. I give him a nod. “De nada,” he says charmingly. I smile faintly as the doors close and rest my head against the wall until I realize I have to press a button.
Eighteen.
I’m the only person in the elevator and emerge on my floor, find the apartment, and let myself in. For a moment, I’m slightly startled. It’s roomy and attractive, with a kitchen to my right, a bathroom to the left, a sitting area with a table and a sofa, and then a bedroom with a balcony looking out to high-rise buildings and a harbor.
But even that doesn’t really register. My phone is nearly dead, and I’ll have to go find a charger, but right now I shed my clothes, draw the curtains against the sunlight, and fall into bed.
When I climb out of my heavy sleep, I don’t immediately know where I am. I’m huddled beneath the covers, curled up against the cold air, but not in my bed.
Slowly, I remember everything. New Zealand. My sister. My mom and poor Hobo. Reaching for my phone, I also remember that I don’t have a charger and it’s dead, so I am not sure what time it is. Without getting out of bed, I reach for the drapes and yank one side open a little.
And there, spread like a winking fabric made of jewels, is the harbor. What seems to be late-afternoon sunlight slants down in buttery glory, and a sailboat cuts cleanly through the wate
r. A ferry scuds in another direction, and in the distance is a long bridge. Office buildings tower around me. I can see people through the windows, walking briskly down a hall, gathering in a conference room, standing around a table, talking. It’s strangely soothing, and I lie where I am for a long while, just watching them.
It’s my growling hunger that insists I get up. Stretching the kinks of the flight out, I putter into the kitchen area, where there is a bowl of fruit and a French press with a sachet of coffee. Milk in the fridge—a generous size for the space—and sugar packets on the counter. A bright-red electric kettle waits. I fill it with water, set it to boil, and head into the shower, which is a luxurious thing, all glass, with fragrant bottles of shampoo and soap. The water revives me better than anything else, and when I emerge, I’m ready to tackle whatever needs doing. The French press is fussier than I’d like, but the coffee is fantastic, and I open the curtains fully to enjoy my view as I scarf down two bananas, two apples, and the coffee. It’ll hold me over until I can get a real meal.
The main thing is the charger. I attempted to buy one before I left, but there wasn’t much time, and the shop had only European, British, and Japanese. At the front desk, I ask a slim young man for directions, and he points me out the back door to the main drag.
Outside, the heat swallows me, a thick, humid envelope. For a moment, I stand just outside the door, suddenly and acutely aware that I’m alone in a city of millions, thousands and thousands of miles from home or anyone I know. I feel a little panicked over the fact that I don’t have my phone GPS to guide me around. My brain tosses out all the things that could go wrong—getting killed by forgetting to look the right way when I cross the street, veering into an unfriendly neighborhood, stumbling into the middle of a fight by accident.
Not everything is a disaster waiting to happen, I tell myself. Although, strictly speaking, it is.
But I’m not going to let that control me. I dived into a university miles from home without a moment’s thought, and nobody had maps on their phones in those days. Looking around, I get my bearings and find landmarks—a big open square with steps is filled with well-dressed young Asians and sweaty European tourists. I hear Mandarin and Korean, a snippet of German, English in several accents.
The medley settles me, reminds me of San Francisco, where I spent almost a decade between med school and post-grad work. Auckland is like it in other ways too, glittery and surrounded by water, crowded and expensive, highly prized.
Looking over my shoulder as I set out, I see that my building, which seems to be at least partly residential, is quite distinctive with its Art Deco accents. It will be easy enough to pick it out. Still, I make a note of the address and the street I’m walking along.
The man behind the desk directed me to a mall, which leads me through a warren of tiny shops belowground, then spits me out on the busy main drag. Queen Street. Here, overhangs cover the sidewalk, allowing the crowds to bustle along in deep shade, and I’m grateful.
The electronics store is exactly like any other I’ve ever seen. Full of gadgets and cases and cords. The counters are staffed with young men and one girl. She steps up. “Hello, ma’am,” she says—which makes me feel ancient—“how can I help you?” Her accent is not at all Australian, which I’d been expecting, but something else entirely, more pinched and lilting.
“Yes.” I pull out my phone. “I need a charger.”
“American, are you?”
“Yes, but they said it doesn’t matter, right? A New Zealand charger should still work with my American phone.”
“No worries.” She smiles. Her face is round and milky. “I was just noticing. I’d so love to go to America.” She cocks a finger for me to follow her. “Over here.”
“Where do you want to go in America?” I ask, being polite.
“New York City,” she says. “Have you ever been?”
“Once, for a conference,” I say, but it’s blurry in my memory. “The only thing I really remember is seeing a painting I’d always loved.”
“Here we go.” She pulls a package off a rack, holds out her hand for my phone, double-checks them both. “Yes. This is right. Anything else?”
“No.” Eyeing the cords, I realize I’ll need one for my laptop too and tell her the make and model. We head for the cash register, and I give her my credit card.
“What was the painting?” she asks.
“I’m sorry?”
She gives me back the credit card. “What was the painting you wanted to see in New York?”
I smile, shaking my head, unwilling to admit it was a Pre-Raphaelite mermaid. “Waterhouse—do you know his work?”
“No, sorry.” She picks up the bag. “Have a nice visit.”
The exchange, really the memory of the painting, makes me think of my sister, though of course she hasn’t been far from my mind for even a minute since I saw her on the news. “I’m actually here on a sad errand. Do you happen to know where the nightclub fire was? Someone I knew was there.”
“Oh!” Her hand covers her mouth. “I’m so sorry. It’s not far; just head down toward the wharf and to your left just before the main street.” Her cheeks have gone quite red. “You can’t miss it, really. There’s a memorial.”
I nod. It’s as good a place to start as any.
She’s right. It’s not hard to find. The building sits on a corner. Police tape ropes off access on three sides. Smoke marks climb the building to the roofline, black and grim, and I pause for a moment to steady myself.
Then I walk around the corner and see the memorial, a pile of stuffed animals and candles and flowers, some fresh, some turning brown after a few days. There’s a smell in the air I associate with burn patients, scorched fabric and hair and blistered skin. Never good.
I’d done some reading on the fire before I arrived, but nothing particularly set it apart. It wasn’t terrorism—not an issue in New Zealand, hard as that is to fathom—just a wretched accident, an overcrowded club, a blocked exit, and a malfunctioning sprinkler system. The perfect storm. It only made the news in the US for its drama.
Disasters are always worse when they involve bunches of young people, and this crowd was very young indeed. I walk slowly past the photos that have been taped and tied and paper-clipped to the fence keeping everyone out. Mostly Asian, not a soul past thirty, their eyes still twinkling with everything ahead and nothing too terrible behind. Now they’ll be frozen there forever.
The vast losses thud in my gut. The parents who love them, the friends, the siblings, the shopkeepers who enjoyed their jokes. I think about it all the time in the ER, when it’s been more ghastly than usual—idiotic car accidents, domestic violence, and bar fights and shootings. Lives wrecked. Stopped. Nothing to be done about it.
It’s been getting to me. I’ve always hated losing patients, of course, but I loved the rush of saving them, being there at the moment of acute trauma and terror and helping bring them back from the brink, like the girl in the ER the night I saw Josie on the news, a bullet wound to the gut. Her boyfriend carried her in, and his hands were covered with blood from keeping the wound compressed. It saved her.
But it’s all the lost ones who haunt me lately. The mother who’d slammed her car into a tree, the boy who’d been attacked by a dog, the sweet, sweet face of the little boy who’d shot himself with his mother’s pistol.
I shove their faces away and focus on bearing witness to the collection of photos here in front of me, taking the time to look at each one. The girl with purple streaks in her hair and a crooked front tooth. The diva with red lips and a knowing expression. The boy laughing with a dog.
How many of their families will have the satisfaction of actual identification? A scene like this, with so many victims and physical damage, can be challenging.
The car that took the main blast on the train that supposedly killed Josie was in pieces, melted and evaporated, and so were the humans within. They found her backpack and the remains of one of her travel co
mpanions, a guy she’d mentioned once or twice in emails she sent home from the odd internet café, and we knew she’d been traveling with the group.
The phone call came in on my cell when I was on my way home to get some sleep after a grueling thirty-six hours of an obstetrics rotation at SF General, walking up the hill to the apartment I shared with four other residents, none of us home enough for it to matter that it was so crowded. The place was a pit, but none of us cared about that either. Food was all takeout, the environment be damned, and a local coffee shop downstairs in the building provided the caffeine. I’d been dreaming of a long, hot shower and washing my hair, then sleeping for a few hours by myself in the house, since I’d left all my roommates back at the hospital.
The phone rang, and it was my mother, howling. I’d only ever heard that sound one other time, after the earthquake, and it is carved into my bones. “Mom. What is it?”
She told me. Josie was dead. Killed in a terrorist bomb that demolished a train in France a few days before.
The weeks after were a blur. When I wasn’t on the phone with my mother or the funeral home or the authorities, I worked. Often I took calls between patient visits, ducking into a storage closet to get some privacy. I was too exhausted and overwhelmed to cry. That came later.
Next to me on the street in Auckland is a young woman, weeping, and I move away to give her privacy, wishing to make her path easier, knowing there is only one way to walk that road: step by bloody step.
I’m suddenly so deeply, vividly angry that my hands shake. I have to stop to take a breath, looking up at the building. “What the hell, Josie?” I say aloud. “How could you do that to us? How could you?” Even from my self-centered, surfer-loser sister, it’s hard to fathom.
When We Believed in Mermaids Page 3