“Poor baby.” A little of the sheen of the night washes away, and I think of Josie.
“Pssht,” he says, sweeping it away and grabbing his glass. “Holidays are for forgetting, eh? Salud.”
I grin. “Salud.”
Both of us fall to eating then, and the quiet is easy. The garlic of my dish and the extreme garlic of his perfume the air. A pair of boys walks by, shoulder to shoulder, one Maori, the other white, their legs moving in perfect sync, and a clutch of skinny teenage girls skitters by, hyperaware of themselves, chattering in a language I don’t immediately recognize. It’s still humid and hot but not as terrible.
For once, I’m happy in my skin, just sitting there eating.
Javier says, “My friend is a musician who is playing at a club not far from here. Would you like to go with me to hear him?”
For a moment, I wonder if it might be better to just go back to my room, get some sleep. “I don’t feel dressed for that,” I say. “And I have groceries to put away.”
“It is only a little way to the apartment. We could go by there first, then to the club.”
Which is really what I’d rather do. “All right.”
Lightning gathers on the horizon as I walk back to the apartment with Javier. He’s agreeably taller than me, with a solidness to his shoulders and thighs that makes me feel small as I walk along beside him, not something that’s all that common when you’re five ten in stocking feet.
He waits in the lobby while I run upstairs, plug my phone into the new charger with a sense of relief, and change into a sundress, with a thin sweater to go over it. The wall-to-wall mirror in the bathroom reveals a madness of curls from the humidity, not something I can do much about. To counter it, I smear on some lipstick. My mouth is my best feature, a mouth that belongs to my Italian side. The matte red lipstick makes the most of it.
When I exit the elevator, Javier makes a show of admiring me and offers his elbow. I take it, and we wander back out into the thick air.
“Do you travel often?” he asks.
I dodge a trio of girls dressed in their evening best and answer on the other side. “Not much at all, actually. It’s hard to get away from my work. You?”
“For me it is the opposite. Too much travel the past few years.”
“Work?”
He gives a simple nod, doesn’t elaborate. In companionable silence, we walk a few blocks. I take in the glitter of lights against the sky, the glimpse of water through tall buildings, the hint of music behind windows. We detour down a bricked alleyway, and he pauses, looks up. “Here we are.”
When he opens the door, a roll of sound and scent spills into the street, alcohol and perfume, voices and laughter and the plucking notes of someone tuning a guitar. I enter and Javier follows, and a lot of people look at us, which makes me self-conscious for a moment, until I realize that they probably look at everyone.
And perhaps too, we make a striking pair, me with my red mouth and wild hair, he with those shoulders.
Few tables are open, and he leads us to one near the back of the room, where a girl in skinny jeans and a peasant blouse meets us to take our orders. “Beer for me,” I say, sliding into my seat. “Whatever brown ale you have.”
“Same for me,” he says. “And a tequila, the best you have, neat.” The table is quite tiny, the space allotted forcing us to sit close. His thigh bumps my knee. My shoulder brushes his upper arm. He smells of something elusive and rich, and I try to place it for a moment before I turn my attention to the stage, aware of my heightened senses, his elbow, the thickness of his eyebrows.
“Which one is your friend?”
“All of them, really, but Miguel is the one I’m here to visit. He’s the one in the red shirt. The good-looking one.”
I smile, because it’s true. Miguel has an amiable expression and high cheekbones and very shiny, very black hair. He’s the one tuning his instrument, nodding to the accompaniment. “Have you been friends a long time?”
“We met through a mutual friend.” His smile is wry. “He’s my ex-wife’s brother.”
The server brings our drinks, and the ale is a very nice shade of toffee where the light shines through. I lean in to smell it. Promising. I raise my glass. “Cheers.”
For a single second, he holds the glass aloft, his gaze moving over my hair, my mouth. “To new adventures.”
I drink, and it’s cold and refreshing and spectacular. With a sigh, I set it back down. “Oh, I do love beer.”
He holds up his clear tequila. “I prefer this myself.” He smells it, sips it, as if it is wine. “But only in small doses.”
I chuckle, as I’m meant to do, but a memory flickers in my mind, a vision of a boy in my ER last year who’d immolated himself in a bonfire as a gesture of love after drinking a bottle of tequila. Not exactly a story for polite company. To shift the image, I ask, “Was it divorce that sent you here?”
“No, no.” He waves a hand. “We have been divorced a long time, many years.” His dark eyes hold my gaze. “And you? Have you ever married?”
I shake my head, turn the glass one quarter. “It’s not really on my list.”
He inclines his head, surprised. “Marriage is not?”
“No. My parents gave me an example I never want to emulate.” In fact, I can’t bear to let people close enough for more than a five-minute relationship, never mind marriage.
“Ah.” He sips his tequila, the sip so tiny I wonder that he can even taste it, and I like him for it.
The music starts up with a sudden, thrilling strum of the guitar. The handsome Miguel leans into the microphone, making it difficult to talk. Javier and I settle into our seats, and it is impossible that we don’t touch a little. It feels companionable and heightens my awareness as the music fills the air. It’s heated, passionate, with songs in Spanish. My body sways, and I remember suddenly a guitarist who used to play on the patio at Eden when I was eight or nine, a slim-hipped man my mother flirted with shamelessly. Josie and I wore our dance gowns, two of my mother’s silkier nightgowns, old and worn, that she’d sheared off on the bottoms so we wouldn’t trip. We swayed and twirled under the wide, dark sky, our hearts bursting with love and wonder and things we barely knew existed.
Now that I’ve grown into my hungers, I look at Javier. When he feels my gaze and looks back, I see it in his eyes too, and his hand slides along my thigh, just above my knee. I hold his gaze and let the pleasure of anticipation rise. We’re adults. We know the dance. I let my guard down slightly, allowing myself to anticipate kissing that mouth, touching those shoulders without the impediment of fabric, the promise of him—
“And now, we would like to invite my good friend Javier Velez up to the stage to play.”
The crowd rustles and starts to clap. Javier squeezes my knee. “I will be back soon. Order another beer if you like.”
I nod and watch him weave through the tables. He moves as if he’s made of water, easily, smoothly, as if there is only one way to go, through this opening, then that, never pausing.
Onstage, he man-hugs Miguel, then picks up a guitar. It leans against him like a child. His posture relaxes, hands settling against the strings.
A sharp cascade of warning rushes through my overheated system. A swath of blue light cascades over his hair as he bends his head, moves the microphone close, and waits for some internal signal, eyes closed. The room hushes, breath sucked in, waiting.
I wait along with them.
Javier looks out over the crowd, then bends his head suddenly and strums a melancholic chord and, right after, quickly coaxes out a complex waterfall of notes. My arms prickle.
He leans close to the mic and begins to sing in a rich, low voice. It’s a ballad, a love song, which is evident even if I don’t know the words. His voice caresses each syllable, rumbles and whispers, his fingers on the strings keeping time.
A musician. And not a hobbyist. He has captured the room, captured me.
Sexy.
Tall
.
Intelligent.
Wry.
And now a musician.
Javier Velez has made my very, very short No Way in Hell list. Never. Nope. Nada.
While he’s still singing, I gather my purse and my sweater and slip out of the club into the night, walking fast to burn off the spell he’s cast, the spell I’ve allowed to snare me.
Out in the night, striding up the hill toward my room, I’m aware of the prickling down my spine, along my palms. I’m disappointed. It’s been a while since my last short-term, completely inappropriate partner, a surfer a decade younger than me, wandered off to better waves. Sex is a biological imperative, and all sorts of systems are improved with regular intercourse. Sex for one is fine, and it can burn off a lot of bad energy, but sex for two is way more fun. Skin-to-skin eases the human animal.
I’d been looking forward to that.
People have stopped asking me if I’m going to settle down, find a husband. I’m not interested, though I was, once upon a time. It pains me slightly that I won’t have children unless I figure out what I’m going to do fairly quickly—I froze some eggs just after I turned thirty, so there’s that backup—but I’m feeling so restless in my life that I need to figure out my plan before I add a baby into the mix.
I don’t regret not having a long-term relationship in my life. It’s surprisingly easy to find men to be a partner for a while, like Tom, the buff surfer who’d kept me company over most of last summer and into the fall. At some point, as I age and become less sexually appealing, it might be more difficult. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
What I won’t do is allow myself to have sex with a man who has the potential to genuinely stir my passions. Living through the war that was my parents’ marriage, then everything my sister ever did, including getting herself killed, taught me to steer clear of intense liaisons.
Thus my rules, the rules that have kept me safe for my entire adult life, and I’m not going to start breaking them now.
Inside the building, I stab the elevator button irritably and wait, staring up at the numbers.
Damn. He had such promise.
Chapter Six
Mari
After dinner, Sarah helps me with the dishes. Our house is a villa that sits on a rise catty-corner to the harbor, and as I wash glasses and hand them to Sarah, I admire the opalescent pools of light playing over the waves. Across the water is a long bluff, just now starting to twinkle with lights coming on for the evening.
Sarah’s hair is pulled back in a braid in an attempt to tame it, but wild curls spring out around her face and stand up along her forehead. A grass stain mars her T-shirt, and even over the sweetness of dish soap, I smell kid sweat and dirt. She has a thousand little experiments going on outside—trying to grow shoots from celery stubs and an avocado seed and onion scraps; bird feeders in three styles; a fancy barometer her grandfather gave her to go with the little weather station he helped her set up. My father-in-law, Richard, a longtime widow, has a passion for sailing, and he loves the natural world as much as Sarah does. Every afternoon, she’s out there, tinkering and humming to herself and examining everything from feathers to rocks.
A total geek, just like my sister. In every gesture, all her serious attention to science and detail, her sober measuring of the world.
Tonight, she’s been quiet, but I’m forcing myself not to ask about school again. It’ll just put her on edge. Maybe tomorrow. For today, I’ll just love her up at home, and maybe that will fill some of the empty spots mean girls at school are leaving. “After this, you should take a shower, let me do your hair.”
She only nods, her fat lower lip sticking out as she dries a plate.
“Whatcha thinking about?”
She raises her head, blinks. “I want to read a story tonight.”
“Like an actual story? Maybe Harry Potter?”
“No.” She scowls slightly. “You know I don’t like made-up stories.”
I do know. And it was the weirdest thing in the world to me, a lifelong, die-hard reader, but as soon as she was old enough to think for herself, she questioned things. If there were fairies in books, why couldn’t she see them in real life?
When she was barely two, she started picking up bugs to examine them. She trailed after her grandfather as he went on his nature rounds, pointing out various flora and fauna to her. They hiked all the main trails around the city, then went farther afield. He’s teaching her to watch the sky, to read the wind and the waves. They are very close.
Something she will never, ever have with my own family, which is all the more painful because she and Kit would be so enchanted with each other.
“Okay, so what book?”
“A book I got at the library on botany.”
I will myself not to smile. “I’d be happy to.” I hand her the last saucer to dry. “Maybe The Little Mermaid after that?” It’s the one story she likes. Not the Disney classic but the older, darker Hans Christian Andersen version.
I read her the latter when she was five, and she went crazy for Ariel. The Disney version is fine, but fairy tales are dark for a reason. Kids know that life isn’t all sweetness and light. They know. “In the new house I bought, there’s a whole shelf of mermaid stories. Maybe we can explore them together.”
“Okay. Even though mermaids aren’t real.”
“You don’t believe in them, but I do.” I think of Kit and my mother, of a pirate chest full of booty. I think of Dylan, who seemed to come to us out of the sea and took himself back into it.
Why am I thinking of all these things all of a sudden?
“Mum, that’s just silly.”
I point to my forearm, where mermaid scales shimmer against my skin. “I’ve always been part mermaid.”
She shakes her head. “Tattoos don’t make things real.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do.” She plucks a pair of forks from the drainer. “Dad said we’re going to live in that house.”
“Yeah. It’ll take a while to get it ready, but that is the plan. You can have your own laboratory.” I give the word the New Zealand pronunciation, with the emphasis on bor. “And there’s a greenhouse.”
“Really?” Her eyes light up, the way another girl’s might over new shoes. “When can we see it?”
“Soon.” I pluck the dish towel from her hands. “Go shower.”
“Will you wash my hair?”
“Yes.” She’s only been doing it herself for a couple of months, and the results are uneven. “Yell when you’re ready.”
As I’m stacking plates back into the cupboard, my phone rings in my back pocket. The screen shows that it’s my friend Gweneth. “Hey, what’s up? Not canceling on me, are you?” We walk every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday right after the kids go to school. She’s a stay-at-home mother with a vibrant mummy blog, so her hours are her own the same way mine are.
“No, but JoAnn can’t make it. Do you want to hike Takarunga?”
JoAnn doesn’t have as much time as the two of us, so we save more vigorous hikes for when she has to get to work early. We have to coordinate ahead of time because I like having a CamelBak for it, which I otherwise leave at home. “Love it.”
In the background, a dog barks furiously, and she says, “See you at seven thirty, then! Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
As I finish up the kitchen, the dogs come tip-tapping in, the two who were orphaned when Helen died and my rescue, Ty, short for Tyrannosaurus Rex. He was named when Leo was in his dinosaur phase. He’s a golden retriever mutt, overjoyed to have friends to play with.
“Outside, kids?” I ask, and they sweep their tails. Paris and Toby are a little lost. Paris is a black German shepherd, too thin, with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. She’s a big dog with long, beautiful fur, and I bend down to stroke her as she walks by. She allows it, but I think her heart is heavy. I make a mental note to look up ways to help heal a grieving dog.
The ot
her, Toby, is much smaller, maybe a Shih Tzu or Lhasa mix, in need of grooming but otherwise pretty stable. He’s white and brown with cheery black eyes, and to my surprise, Simon has gone gaga over him. Already Toby knows he can jump up into his lap when he’s sitting in his big chair.
A ripple of lightning edges along the horizon as I open the door, and I smell rain walking toward us over the water, carrying the scent of ocean and sky. “Better hurry, guys.”
I stand in the doorway, breathing it in, the soft gathering twilight and the two-note song of a pair of tuis. A seagull sails on currents overhead. The water undulates in green and opal, with slight edges of purple. A storm is unmistakably moving in, and I look at the barometer in Sarah’s little shed, but I don’t know how to read the bubbles and weights.
Paris does her business, then comes back over to me, sitting on alert next to my leg. “You’re a sweetheart, aren’t you?” I rub her long ears, and she allows it, but she’s scanning the perimeter in case of invaders. I might really fall for this dog. She reminds me of Cinder, the retriever mix we had when I was a child. It was Cinder who alerted us to the stranger at the door the night Dylan washed up at Eden.
A storm had lashed the windows that night too, and it whipped the ocean into a wild monster that Kit and I watched from our living room window in the little house that perched so precariously on the cliff. On clear days, you could see a hundred miles, at least according to my dad, and all of it was ocean. Ocean that changed minute by minute, ocean that changed color and texture, sound and mood. You could look at the ocean a thousand times a day in exactly the same spot, and it would never appear the same.
But that night, it was wild. Kit and I told stories to each other about shipwrecks. “In the morning, we should go down and see if anything washes up from the ships,” I said.
“Booty!” Kit cried, her five-year-old fist punching the air.
Behind us, Cinder jumped up and barked his deep warning bark. My mom came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands. It was a slow night at Eden because of the weather, so we were home for once, although she wasn’t cooking—why would she, with my father’s stuffed squid to devour? One of the kitchen staff, a girl named Marie, had brought up a bowl of pasta with bread and herby olive oil, and we sat together eating it.
When We Believed in Mermaids Page 6