When my mother answered the door, a boy was there, soaked and shivering, his long hair stuck to his neck and forehead. His chambray shirt and jeans clung to him, and his face was bruised and bleeding, as if he’d washed overboard from a wrecked ship, or he was the ghost of a seaman who had drowned and didn’t know it.
We read lots of stories like that, Kit and me. I read far above my age and loved reading to her from a battered copy of The Big Book of Pirates, filled with tales of shipwrecks and ghosts and mermaids seducing sailors to their deaths. Much of it was over our heads, but it fueled our imaginations for years.
My mother brought him inside and fetched towels and a mug of tea. Kit and I stared, captured by his beauty. He was barely a teenager, though at the time, he lied and said he was fifteen, so his skin still had the dewy sheen of boyhood, stretched over elegantly assembled cheekbones and jaw. His eyes were the color of abalone shell, silver and blue and hints of violet, as if he’d been born in the sea.
I whispered to Kit, “Maybe he’s a merman.”
My mother was not known for taking in strays, not cats or dogs or people, but she took to Dylan as if he were her own child. She shifted Kit to my bedroom so there was a place for him to sleep and gave him a job in the restaurant washing dishes. “You girls need to be nice to him,” she said, tucking us in that night. “He’s been through a lot.”
“Is he a merman?” Kit asked.
My mother smoothed her brow. “No, sweetheart. He’s just a boy.”
A boy she took in and nurtured from that moment forward, as if he were a lost cat, with no explanation whatsoever.
Just a boy. For a long moment, standing beneath the lightning-lashed sky over Auckland, I think how small that phrase is. How true and untrue, all at once.
A thudding ache pulses in the center of my chest. What if my mother had called the police to report a runaway? What if he’d been sent to a foster home instead of taking root in our family the way he did?
Instead my mother simply lied to everyone and said he was her nephew from Los Angeles. No one ever questioned her, and in those days, my father let her have her way over almost anything.
The dogs, impatient with my woolgathering, swarm my legs and lick my fingers. I bring them in, then go wash my daughter’s hair.
Later, Simon is watching a movie, some kind of adventure through a jungle with lots of mud and things that bite and cut and a sturdy man leading the way. His favorite thing. He doesn’t love to read, but he watches all the sci-fi and adventure movies that exist, and when he runs out, he calls up YouTube videos in the same realm.
I’m sitting next to him with my laptop, a blanket over my legs because it’s gone quite cold. He’s drinking a ginger beer and popping peanuts into his mouth every so often, while I have a cup of green tea that’s probably cold. I only have it as company, really.
I’d been pinning ideas for Sapphire House to Pinterest, and then I found a bunch of recipes for feijoas, and now I’m knuckling down to look up more of Veronica’s backstory.
My friend Gwen is enchanted with Veronica and has often regaled me and our friend Nan with stories about the Auckland legend. I’ve long been intrigued by her rise and tragic end. I feel a tangled connection to her attempt to make herself over, become someone new—and she was successful at doing so.
But like a female Icarus, she was punished for her moxie and died young.
On YouTube, I download the movie that launched Veronica’s career. She’d been in Hollywood for several years and played many parts, mostly in the jungle-girl realm. But when sound arrived on the scene, Veronica was cast in the role of a vixen, unapologetically ambitious and beautiful, and the sparks flew between her and her costar. There’s a famous kiss and a dress so sheer and clinging that she might as well have been naked.
Watching, I’m shocked at the liberal tone of the script and the saucy, tongue-in-cheek way Veronica played the part. Her body in the famous dress is incendiary—a slipping lacy bodice that gives the illusion of nipples, or is it that it’s nipples giving the illusion of lace?—curvy hips, slim arms and waist.
The big surprise is the intelligence of both script and actress, plus the fact that this cheeky vixen actually wins at the end. It’s as if someone turned the rule book on its head.
Clicking around, I find more info on the era—very short-lived, called Pre-Code. For a brief five years, between the establishment of the sound movie industry and the 1934 enforcement of the Hays Code, there were no morality guidelines, and moviemakers took full advantage. Dozens of movies were made, often with overtly sexual themes and often with women in roles that acknowledged their sexuality and their ambition.
It startles me that there was so much freedom of story, of power in women’s hands, such a long time ago. For the space of a few breaths, I wonder how life would be different for women if those stories had been allowed, embraced. Even celebrated.
Veronica Parker, with her elegant long limbs and sexy voice, had made her name there. In five years, she’d made thirteen movies, nearly three a year, and she’d been paid handsomely for it, $110,000 a year. It sounds like a lot of money for the early thirties, Depression years, and I look up the equivalent to now, roughly $1.5 million a year. Clearly enough to build a beautiful house that she barely had a chance to live in.
Post Code, Veronica was not able to land parts in Hollywood as freely, and a director in New Zealand lured her home with promises of starring in a tragic romance, but the movie was never made. According to Wikipedia, the director, Peter Voos, was involved in dozens of scandals around women. His photo shows a handsome blond man with an arrogant brow. I can’t find the reason the movie wasn’t made, aside from “creative differences.” Veronica found work in smaller parts, always as the vamp or dangerous Other Woman.
Curled in my blanket, I wonder how that felt for her, to rise to such heights and then fall out of favor when she was still so young and had so much to give. Melancholy creeps under my skin, and I close the laptop. “I’m off to bed,” I say to Simon, and kiss his head. “Don’t stay up too late.”
“No, no. I’ll be up soon.”
I make a mental note to find some more of her movies and watch them. Maybe Gweneth will want to join me. She’s going to flat-out faint when she finds out we bought Sapphire House.
Chapter Seven
Kit
Jet lag wakes me at four a.m., and I try for a time to go back to sleep, but it’s no use.
The curtains are open. Office buildings stand between my balcony and the harbor, but the water lies in inky blackness between the edge of the downtown area and what seems to be an island on the other side. Little lights sparkle there, quiet middle-of-the-night kind of lights. I lie on my side and imagine my sister in a house out there, fast asleep, the same moon shining on her that is shining on me. I imagine that she gets up to go to the bathroom and stops at the window, drawn by my intense gaze, and looks out toward the central business district and my window, invisible amid all the others. She feels me. She knows I’m here.
When we were quite small, before Dylan arrived, we had our own rooms, but I was five when that ended, and up until I left for college, we shared. First the room that looked out over the ocean, when an open window meant the sound of the waves rocked us to sleep, then in the master bedroom of the apartment in Salinas. It took me a long time to get used to the emptiness of a room that contained only my breathing. One of the things I love about Hobo is that he is company at night, curling up against the crook of my knees or creeping onto my pillow to rest his face against my head, as if we are two cats. I ache for him at those moments, and I wonder where his mother went, what terrible things he endured before I brought him into my house and let him stay.
The thought of my cat makes me check the time. It’s nearly eight a.m. in Santa Cruz. My mom will be awake by now. I punch her number as I pad toward the little strip of kitchen by the door and fill the kettle. On the other end, the phone rings so long I think she’s not going to pick up. A
familiar sense of disappointment and worry fills me; she has let me down and hasn’t gone to stay with Hobo after all. I think of my poor cat, who trusts only me and was so battered by the world before I took him in, alone in my house—
At the very last minute, she answers, breathless. “Kit! I’m here!”
“You’re there? At my house?”
A slight beat of quiet. She knows I don’t trust her. “I’m here, Kit. I was just out in the backyard watering your plants and forgot I left my phone inside.”
“Did Hobo come outside with you?”
“Oh, no. He hasn’t even come out from under the bed.”
My stomach squeezes. I can see his black face so clearly, his tufted toes. “You slept there?”
“Yes. I swear. He is eating and using the litter box when I leave. I think he peed on your tennis shoes, though. You left them by the door.”
“He’s probably claiming me. Keep your stuff in the closet.”
“I am. We’re fine, Kitten.” The nickname is rare, and sweet enough. “Promise. I’ve had a cat or two in my life.”
“Okay.”
“It’s only been a couple of days. He’ll be fine.”
“Just make absolutely sure he doesn’t get out. I don’t want him to come looking for me.”
“I promise,” she says in a very reasonable voice, and I realize I’m freaking out a little over a situation I can’t control.
Shocking.
I take a breath and let it go. “Okay. I believe you.”
“Thanks. Now tell me about everything. What’s it like? Is it beautiful?”
I walk back to the sliding door and pull it open, letting in a waft of muggy air, and step out to the concrete balcony eighteen stories above the street. “It’s amazing. The water and the hills and these strange trees—it’s gorgeous. I’ll send you some pictures later today.”
“I’d love that.” Instead of rushing in with questions or comments, she waits for me to keep talking, a listening trick she learned at AA that would have made my childhood ten thousand times better.
“I visited the nightclub site,” I say. “It’s hard to imagine what she would have been doing there, honestly. It seems like a club that was frequented by very young Asians, not middle-aged white ladies.”
“Oh, she’d hardly be considered middle-aged.”
I raise my eyebrows. “If she’s really still alive, she’s almost forty-three. Once you cross the line of forty, I think you have to admit to middle-aged.”
She makes a dismissive noise, and I hear her light a cigarette. The cigarettes she thinks I don’t know she smokes. “Well, what’s the next step?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“Maybe you could take a picture around to the businesses in the area. Ask if anybody knows her.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“Crime TV has its uses.”
I laugh. “Well, if you come up with more tips, feel free to text. This is not exactly my forte.”
“If anyone can find her, you can,” she says.
“What if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t,” she says firmly. “All you can do is try.”
Across the immense miles, I hear a blue jay cawing in my backyard in California. It reminds me acutely that I am a very, very long way from home with no one but myself to keep me company. The loneliness of being unmoored from my little patch of geography, without the cat and—okay, I admit it—the mother I am used to seeing every day is stinging. “I will do my best,” I say. “Please keep trying with Hobo. He needs love.”
“I will. I bought him some tuna last night, and he did stick his nose out to get some.”
I laugh. “Good idea. Thanks, Mom. I’ll call you soon.”
I settle cross-legged on the bed with a cup of tea on a tray. The cups in the apartment are tiny, and I will need to buy a mug somewhere today. I saw a Starbucks on my travels, but it seems kind of pathetic to visit a brand I know perfectly well when I’m seven thousand miles from home.
Opening my laptop, I bring up a map of the area around the nightclub and scan the names of the shops in the buildings nearby. I’d already seen that it was an area of high tourist volume, with cafés and restaurants of all kinds and shops full of postcards and T-shirts. But off to one side is a shopping area that looks more upscale, the Britomart, and it seems to have a higher grade of restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, and such things. Would that be Josie’s kind of place?
It’s hard to even imagine who she’d be now. As emotion—anger and fear and a weird sense of hope—starts to gurgle low in my gut, I don my scientific hat. How do you age a person who actually faked her own death and started fresh in a faraway land? Why did she do it? What has she done with the new life? How might she have spent the past decade and a half?
Sipping my tea, I watch a cleaning crew vacuum a floor full of offices in a building across the way. Ponder the possibilities.
One of the last times I saw Josie, she’d come to visit me in San Francisco. I was in med school, studying day and night, and she blew into town the way she always did, calling me on a pay phone from somewhere near the beach. “Can we get together?”
I close my eyes. It had been at least six or eight months since she’d been in town, but I didn’t have time. She would want to party all night and eat everything in my meager kitchen and then go out to get more takeout and she’d expect me to pay, even though I had zero money and mostly ate baked potatoes with whatever crappy leftover veggies I could find on special at the supermarket, or else ramen noodles by the truckload. “I’m on rotations, Josie.”
“Just a cup of coffee or something? It’s been a while, Kit. I miss you.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said by rote, but I didn’t. I’d missed her fiercely a hundred times in my life, but on those long, lonely days in Salinas after the earthquake, when she dived entirely into her dual addictions of surfing and getting high, I’d finally realized she was never really coming back to me. “I just have a lot of studying to do.”
“That’s cool. I get it. Med school, dude. I’m so proud of you.”
The words plucked a string somewhere deep in my gut, and the reverberation released a thousand memories, all reminding me of the ways I loved her. I took a breath. “I’ll meet you somewhere. Where are you?”
“That’s okay, sis. Seriously. I get it. If you don’t have time, you don’t have time. I just wanted to say hi.”
“Where are you going after this?”
“Um. Not sure. The waves are great in Baja, but I’m kind of over Mexico. Maybe Oz. A bunch of us have been talking about finding space on a freighter or something.”
The more she talked in her raspy, beautiful voice, the more I wanted to hug her. “Look, you know what? I can spare a couple of hours.”
“Really? I don’t want to interfere with anything.”
“You won’t. It might be ages before you’re back in San Francisco. I’ll come to you. Where are you?”
We met at a burger joint not far from Ocean Beach. Some guy with a tangle of blond hair and at least three leather bracelets on his arm dropped her off. Josie tumbled out of the truck looking like a creature from a Charles de Lint novel, an urban sprite or fairy walking amid the mortals. She was deeply, deeply tan from her year-round surfing, her hair impossibly long, cascading over her lean arms and past her waist. She wore an India cotton peasant blouse over jean shorts and sandals, and every male from the age of six to ninety-six stopped to admire her. A backpack, battered but strong, hung from her left shoulder.
When she saw me, she broke into a run, stretching out her arms, and I found myself moving toward her, allowing her to fling her slim, taut body into my arms. We hugged hard. Her hair let loose the scent of a fresh breeze, a scent that made me ache to go surfing, to leave this grind I’d put myself in and run away to the beach with her. “Oh my God,” she breathed in my ear, her arms fierce around my neck. “I miss you so damn much.”
Tears stung my eyes. By
then I had my guard up with her, but within twenty seconds, she swept me into her realm. “Me too,” I admitted, and this time it was true. For one minute, two, I held on to her, dizzy with love and no thought, only her lean body against mine, her hair in my face. I stepped back. “You look really good.”
“Fresh air,” she quipped, then touched my face. “You look tired.”
“Med school.”
Inside the diner, still in touch with the seventies with its red Naugahyde booths and chrome appointments, we sat by the window and ordered cheeseburgers. “Tell me everything,” she said, sipping Cherry Coke through a straw.
“Umm . . .” I floundered, trying to think of something that wasn’t a grind of books, rotations, notes. I was third year, on the floor for the first time, and it was both exhilarating and devastatingly exhausting. “I don’t know what to say. I’m working hard.”
She nodded eagerly, and I noticed how red her eyes were. High, as ever. “Well, what did you do yesterday?”
“Yesterday.” I took a breath, trying to remember. “I got up at four so I could get to the hospital in time to do early rounds; then we had rounds with our team, which is surgical, so I’m working with surgeons and residents. I scrubbed in for a gall bladder removal and an emergency appendectomy.” I paused, feeling sleep, like a hook on a slow-moving train, start to reel me under. I blinked hard. Shook my head. “What else? I met a study group before dinner, then ate, then went home to read for rounds this morning.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Dude. Do you ever get to sleep?”
I nodded. “Sometimes?”
“I can’t believe you’re going to be a doctor. I always brag about you.”
“Thanks.” They drop off the burgers, and all the salt and fat smells so good, I bend in and breathe it deep. “I’m freaking starving.”
When We Believed in Mermaids Page 7