“Not much time to eat there either. Do you get to surf?”
“Sometimes. Not a lot, but it’s okay. Eventually, this part will be done, and I’ll be like everybody else.”
She pointed a fry at me. “Except you will be Dr. Bianci.”
I grinned. “I do love the sound of that.” I arranged the pickles and tomatoes on top of the cheese, then added swirls of mustard. “What about you? Tell me about last week.”
She laughed, that low, raspy laugh that made everyone lean in close. “Good one.” She took a bite of her burger and nodded as she chewed, as if she were thinking about all the things she could tell me. She held her napkin in her lap primly, and in the action I saw my mother. “I bet you do more in a day than I do in a month.” She dabbed her lips politely, making sure they were ketchup- and grease-free. “But actually, last week was bitchin’ because we were chasing a hurricane up the coast, from Florida all the way to Long Island.”
“Wow.” I felt a ripple of envy. “Biggest waves?”
“Montauk. You’d love it there.”
“Okay, you got me. I’m jealous.”
“Yeah.” She grinned that impish, charming, encompassing smile. White teeth but not perfectly straight because she should have had braces and my parents never got around to it. Neither of us saw a dentist until we were in middle school, and only then because Josie had a very bad molar, and Dylan had insisted they get her in to see someone.
“Have you ever considered surfing professionally?” I asked.
She stirred her straw around in her ice, gave me a half-tilted smile. “Nah. I’m not that good.”
“Bullshit. You just have to focus, make that the center of everything.”
She gave me a slow one-shoulder shrug, her mouth twisting into a wry dismissal. “No fun. I don’t have your drive.”
I ate my burger for a time, focusing there, on the food that wasn’t from a box or bag.
“I’m so proud of you, Kit,” Josie said again.
“Thanks.”
“How’s Mom?”
“Fine. You should go see her.”
“Maybe.” Another dismissive lift of one shoulder. “I’m not here for long.”
Maybe I was jealous; maybe I missed her. Maybe it was a combination of both, but I said, “Are you just going to wander around your whole life?”
She met my gaze. “What would be wrong with that?”
“You need a job, a profession, something you can do to support yourself when—”
“When I’m old and ugly?”
“No.” I scowled.
“I don’t have your brains, Kit. I was a bad student, and no college is going to let me in, so basically I can suffer along at some pissant community college, or I can do odd jobs and surf and love my life.”
“Do you love it?”
A flicker over her eyes before she lowered them. “Of course.”
I didn’t want to fight. “Good. I’m proud of you too.”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
I ducked my head, and it was all nothing but polite until the end. She ate every bite on the plate, right down to the lettuce leaf, then blotted her mouth. Cloudy light fell through the window to her bright hair, the tips of her eyelashes. A part of me was suddenly three, leaning on her as she read aloud to me, and five, tucked into a sleeping bag next to hers under the shelter of a tent. The images made me ache. How much I missed her when she deserted me! How much I still did. I looked away, thought of my immunology test. Facts and figures, facts and figures.
“Do you ever think of what might have happened if Dylan never came?” she asked suddenly. “Or if the earthquake hadn’t wrecked the restaurant?”
Her words slammed into a heavily fortified box in my heart. “I try to look forward.”
“What if, though? What if Dad was still up there at Eden, cooking, and maybe Mom got her act together and we went home for weekends or holidays and Dad told jokes and—”
“Stop.” I closed my eyes, an ache along the bottom of my lungs. “Please. I just can’t.”
Her face was haunted, adding luminosity to her cheekbones, depth to her dark eyes. “What would have happened to us without him?” She shook her head, turned those tortured eyes on me. “Our parents were horrible, Kit. Why did they neglect us like that?”
“I don’t know.” My words were hard, erecting a wall against the past. “I have to focus on the present.”
Again, she ignored me. “Why couldn’t we save Dylan?” When she turned that gaze on me, tears edged her lower lids, never quite spilling. “Don’t you miss him?”
I clenched my jaw. Swallowed away my own grief. “Of course I do. All the time.” I had to pause, bow my head. “But he wasn’t savable. He was already too broken when he showed up.”
“Maybe.” Her voice broke slightly, going husky. “But what if things happened to make him take that last step? I mean . . .”
“What things, Josie?” I was both impatient and weary. She had gone over this subject a million times when we were teenagers. “He was always going to die young. Nothing pushed him over the edge except his own demons.”
She nodded, dashed away a tear that dared fall, and stared out the window. “He was happy for a long time, wasn’t he?”
I reach out and take her hand. “Yes. I think he was.”
She clutched my hand tight, her head bowed, her hair falling in a curtain around her face. The obscuring mists of my emotion cleared, and I could see her objectively, as if she were a stranger who’d wandered into the ER, a too-thin young woman with dry skin and chapped lips. Dehydrated, I’d note, probably an addict. I wanted, suddenly, to take care of her.
“I miss all of it,” I volunteered. “Dad and Dylan and Cinder.” My voice grew croaky. “I swear to God, I miss that dog like a limb.”
“Best dog ever.”
I nodded. “He was.” I shook my hair out of my face. “I miss the restaurant. The patio, the cover. Our bedroom.” I take a breath. “Sleeping on the beach in our tent. That was the best.”
“It was.”
She ran a fingertip over the scar on her forehead. “The earthquake wrecked everything.”
“I guess.” A little burn of impatience edged my spine. “Dylan and Cinder were already gone.”
“I know that. Why do you have to be so mean in the middle of something like this?”
“It’s not mean. It’s just reality.” Facts and figures.
“Yeah, well, reality isn’t always what you think it is. Sometimes things are more complicated than simple facts.”
Like our parents. Like our childhood. Like the earthquake. “You weren’t even there that day,” I said, a rare moment of furious honesty. “I had to sit there on the edge of the cliff by myself for hours, while I knew Dad was probably dead down there. And all you ever seem to remember is that you got a cut head.”
“Oh, Kit!” She grabbed both my hands. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. You’re right. That must have been terrible.”
I didn’t take my hands away, but I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at her. “I know it was bad in Santa Cruz too, but—”
She slid out of her side of the booth and into mine, flinging her body around me. “I’m sorry. I’m so selfish sometimes.”
The smell of her, the essence of Josie, unlike any other scent in the world, enveloped me, and I was lost in my love for her, my adoration, my fury. The hungry, lonely cells of my body drank it in for long minutes. Then I extracted myself.
“Life is always a mixed bag.”
“I guess so.”
“But I can’t imagine who we’d be without Dylan. Can you?”
I didn’t even want to. “It doesn’t matter. It is what it is.”
It was my turn to look away, out the window, to the promise of the ocean on the blank blue horizon. “I could really use a walk on the beach after this,” I offered. “Maybe find some mermaid coins.”
“That would be really lucky,” she said.
/> That was the day we impulsively got our tattoos, sitting side by side at a tattoo parlor near Ocean Beach as twilight moved in.
I run my fingers over the tattoo. It’s elegantly, delicately drawn, and I’ve never regretted it, though I’ve never done anything that impulsive before or since. Maybe I just wanted to be close to her again.
Lucky, I think now, sitting on my bed in Auckland, watching a band of light leak into the horizon. It wasn’t like she’d had much, something I’d always been too self-righteous to see.
Josie. So beautiful. So lost. So smart. So doomed.
Who would the woman I saw that day in San Francisco have become? Will I find a party girl, somebody still surfing the world? She’s pretty long in the tooth for that now, but I wouldn’t put it past her. Or maybe she’s found a way to be connected to her passion and work with it, like the women who opened a woman-centered surf shop in Santa Cruz. Or maybe she’s just a pothead, smoking her life away.
I sip my tea, which is going cold. It’s probably not the latter. At some point, she must have turned herself around or she wouldn’t have survived. Her addiction had become so extreme by the last time I saw her that nothing short of a miracle would have saved her.
On the laptop, I bring up the image of her from the news. It’s a surprisingly clear shot, and there’s nothing dissipated or weary about that face at all. The haircut is expensive, sharp, or maybe just recent. Her face is not bloated, which tends to show up on long-term drinkers, and in fact, she doesn’t look a lot older than she did fifteen years ago, which is classic Josie. She’s still beautiful. Still lean.
Still herself.
Where am I going to find her?
I walk to the sink, dump the cold tea, fill the kettle again, and lean on the counter while it boils, my arms crossed.
In solving medical puzzles, I’ve learned to always, always go back to the actual known facts. A patient presents with something mysterious—start there. Stomach pain and rash. What did she eat? What has she been doing the past twenty-four hours? How old is she? Live alone? Eat with friends or family? Take a shower?
So I start where I am with Josie.
No. Scratch that.
Start with a fact: a blonde woman with a scar exactly like my sister’s was filmed at the site of a nightclub fire five nights ago.
The kettle clicks off, and I pour boiling water over my tea bag in the tiny cup and wish for a mug that would last a little while before I putter back to the computer on the bed.
What time was the blonde woman filmed? I have to look that up and find the time stamp: ten p.m. New Zealand time, which would have been two a.m. my time. Just about right. I must have caught the news as the first reports were coming in.
Okay, what would have been open on a Friday night at ten p.m. in that area? Pretty much everything, I discover. All the restaurants, all the clubs and bars.
But again, facts. She is a woman of means, judging by the haircut and the expensive sweater. Maybe she had met friends . . . I scroll around the map, looking at possibilities to add to my list. One establishment leaps out at me, an Italian restaurant in Britomart, the upscale shopping area next to the harbor. I send the directions to my phone. I’ll go down there and show the photo around. Maybe somebody will have seen her. Even better, maybe they know her. Maybe she’s a regular.
But nothing is open until much later. It’s just now gone seven, and I’m restless. The building has a pool. I’ll head down there, do some laps, and then come back and get ready to go out.
Chapter Eight
Mari
I’m frying eggs from Sarah’s hens when the earthquake hits. It starts low, that slight disorientation you get that feels like maybe you turned too fast or lost your footing, and then the sound, the tinkle of glasses in the cupboard. Urgently, I turn off the gas and shout for my family, running for the door to open it and let the dogs out. The birds are hushed as I dash outside.
For a little while, I think I’m going to be okay this time. It’s not violent, just a slow, easy tumbler, more of an aftershock than quake.
The kids are still inside. I hear something rattling and the thud of something falling over in the shed, and I think I should go check it out, but I’m plastered to the trunk of the palm tree, my cheek pressed hard into the bark, my arms straining.
I gauge the intensity of it from long experience, not a six but maybe in the high-four, low-five range. Enough to knock things from grocery shelves, tools from the shelves in the shed. I wonder where the epicenter is, who is getting it now. Maybe it’s offshore, and the damage will be minimal. There have been some substantial earthquakes in the country since I arrived, the worst being the two back-to-back that nearly destroyed Christchurch, and another just a couple of years ago on the South Island near a little tourist town. Simon mourned Kaikoura, a place he’d visited a lot as a child. I’d never been there, but Simon said the destruction had been very bad indeed. The city is recovering, finally, but it has taken a long time.
Auckland feels the quakes, but they’re not centered here—it’s always somewhere else. Instead, they cheerfully predict a volcano will someday incinerate the city, but it’s the kind of thing you can’t believe will ever happen.
Unlike the earthquakes that remind us, over and over, that they can do whatever they want. The earth finally stills, but I’m still clinging to the trunk like a five-year-old.
“Mari!” Simon yells, and I hear him running. His hand, that big solid hand, covers my upper back, but I still don’t let go, not until he peels one arm, then the other, off the tree and settles them around his waist. “You’ll be right,” he says, a peculiarly New Zealand phrase. “No worries.”
I smell the sharpness of clean cotton and his skin below. His chest is as solid as a wall, his body the thing that will save me, always. Sarah and Leo are suddenly beside me too, their hands on my arms, my hair. “It’s okay, Mummy. You’ll be right.”
Enfolded in their love, I can take a breath, but they don’t rush me. “I’m sorry, you guys. I wish I could get over this. It’s so silly.”
“No worries, Mum,” Leo says.
“We’re all afraid of things,” Sarah adds.
I snort and look at her over my arm. “Not you.”
“Well, not me, but most everybody.”
My chuckle eases the rigidness of my body, and I force myself to straighten, to let go of my husband, to kiss my children’s heads, one, two. “Thank you. I’m good.”
Simon’s hand lingers on my upper back. “Get yourself a cup of tea. I’ll finish breakfast.”
I used to protest, but a counselor finally told me that the more I resisted the emotions of my PTSD, the worse it would get. To overcome it, I have to be present with it. So I head inside and pour a fresh cup of tea. The screen of my memory flashes with images from the earthquake that gave me the scar on my face—the noise, the screams, the blood everywhere from the wound on my head and the wound in my belly. All of it.
I stare into my cup of milky tea. On the surface, my kitchen window is reflected in a white rectangle interrupted by the line of pots along the bottom. I force myself to take slow, even breaths. Same in as out, one-two-three in, one-two-three out, and slowly my trembling eases. The voices of the children, lilting up and down, smooth the gooseflesh on my arms. I sigh, letting go.
Simon, frying bacon, a bibbed apron around his body, gives me a smile. “Better?”
“Yep. Thanks.”
We eat normally, and Simon loads the children in the car and turns to me. His gray eyes are filled with concern as he brushes hair away from my face. He knows I suffered through a massive earthquake, though I lied about which one it was. “Take the day off.”
“I’m hiking with Gweneth and then meeting Rose at Sapphire House to make some more notes.”
“The walk will be good.” His palm cups my cheek. “Go to the CBD and visit the cat café or something.”
I give him a grin. “Maybe. I really think I’m all right.”
He
presses a kiss to my forehead, lingering a second longer than usual, then squeezes my shoulder. “I’ve got the swim fund-raiser tonight, don’t forget. The kids and I will be late.”
Our division of labor means I don’t have to participate in the swim stuff, which I find stultifying—the long, long hours; the drives to various places; the chitchat with all the other parents. I know women knit and read and whatever, and I do show up for the big meets, but Simon loves it madly, and I don’t. In return, I do a much larger share of housework and laundry and shopping, which he loathes.
But I had forgotten about the meet tonight, and a little knot sticks in my throat as I lift my hand and wave them off, the three of them in a single car, the only things in the world that really matter to me. Maybe I’ll call my friend Nan, see if she wants to meet for dinner in the CBD.
A good plan.
I met Gweneth on the ferry. I was pregnant with Leo, irritable in the summer heat, tired of Christmas in the summer, suddenly longing for family now that I’d be adding to it. I missed my father, weirdly, after so long. I’d found myself imagining how my mother’s eyes or sister’s mouth might look on a baby, if I would see my family in the hands or laughter of a child. I even grieved the fact that my mother would not be there when the baby was born, but perhaps all woman feel that way. Pregnancy made me so emotional, in fact, that it frightened me. I constantly worried about the dire things in the world, what might befall a child I loved so intensely even before it was born.
Simon had gently pointed me toward the city and an exhibit on the Bloomsbury Group, which both eased and stimulated me, just as he’d known it would.
Gweneth sat down next to me on the ferry, a tall, slim woman with a stylish air, and offered me an ice cream. “Hokeypokey,” she said. “Can’t go wrong.”
“As far as I’m concerned, no ice cream goes wrong.” I paused. “Except coffee.”
“You’re American!”
“Canadian, actually.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s what you all say, though, isn’t it?”
I laughed and stuck to my made-up story. “I grew up on the west coast of British Columbia. Vancouver Island.”
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