Not that I minded, honestly, except for that small, heady stretch of time when I fell in love with James in high school. Otherwise I was relieved to be free of the demands of beauty. It didn’t seem to serve any of them particularly well, after all.
A cluster of professional women passes, wearing stockings and pencil skirts. The stockings surprise me, especially on such a warm day, and I stare after them, trying to remember the last time I wore a pair of stockings for any reason. Do people even do that anymore in the US?
Again I scan the storefronts. Javier waits.
For a second, I feel anxious and resistant and overwhelmed. Why am I on this ridiculous errand? And what am I going to do if I find her? The thought makes me feel queasy.
“Do you wish to show her photo around?”
I take a breath. “I guess I do.”
He takes out his phone and shoots a photo of my screen. “I will try the shops across the way, yes?”
“Sure.”
He heads across the way, and I weave in and out of the boutiques and shops on my side. At the end of the row, he joins me, and together we approach the Italian restaurant I spied earlier on Google Maps. I pause, faintly nervous, to glance at the menu attached to an elegant stand, and my mouth waters a little. “Ooh, they have Sicilian-style cannoli.”
“What makes them Sicilian?”
“Ricotta instead of cream inside. So good.”
A tall, tidy woman with a shiny fall of copper hair stands at the open-air hostess stand, getting things ready for the day. As I approach, she gives me a bright smile. “We’re not quite ready to serve, but I’d be happy to take your name.”
“No, thank you. I’m looking for someone.”
“Oh?” Her hands still on the napkins she’s folding.
I hold up the phone with my sister’s face. “Have you seen this woman?”
Her face smooths. “Yes. She’s a regular, but I don’t think I’ve seen her for a while.”
A bolt of shock runs through my body, like lightning. She’s alive. “Do you happen to know her name?” She cocks her head, and I realize too late that it’s odd that I have her picture but don’t know her name. “I know her as Josie, but I think her real name is something else.”
“Hmm.” Her face shutters slightly, and if she does know the name, she’s not saying it. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Okay.” I tuck the phone in my pocket, pushing down both disappointment and relief. “Can you tell me if there was anything happening around here the night of the nightclub fire? Like an event or a concert or something?”
Her lips go pale. “Was she in the fire?”
“No, no. Sorry. I just wondered what else might have been going on.”
She glances at Javier, and something I can’t quite read crosses her face—admiration, recognition, startlement. Her spine straightens even more. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Thank you.” I glance up at Javier and nod once. “Let’s go sightseeing.”
“Sure?” He touches the small of my back as we depart, and I see him nod at the woman.
We head for the wharf. “Was that like your father’s restaurant?” he asks.
“It has some things in common. The cannoli dessert, the fresh mozzarella, pasta with squid ink, and there’s something”—I look over my shoulder—“about the way it looks. I think if my sister knew about it, she would probably like it.”
He nods and doesn’t press me for more information. It’s only a couple of blocks to the wharf, and we duck into the comparative coolness of the building. “What would you like to do?” Javier asks as we stand, side by side, looking up at the offerings.
I’m deeply relieved to have something besides my sister to focus on. None of the names has any meaning to me, and I half shrug. “I have no idea.”
“Shall we do everything?”
Recklessly, I say, “Why not?”
He pays for the tickets, so I buy us some coffees in paper cups and a couple of pastries from a vendor. Settling on a white bench in the ferry building, I sip a flat white and nibble an apple Danish, watching Javier make a tidy diorama with a napkin spread wide on the bench, his coffee at one side, his pastry in the middle. After the morning swim and walk, I’m starving, and I watch people milling around talking to each other, the irritated kids hauled by their parents, tourists from everywhere. A line of people dressed in good hiking gear are lining up to board for an island volcano. The boat bobs gently.
“I love ferries,” I say.
“Why?” He’s hung his sunglasses from the placket of his shirt and admires the flaky edges of his pastry. A finger of sunlight makes a shadow fan of his eyelashes across his cheekbone, exaggerating their length. He takes a lusty bite.
“I don’t know,” I admit, and think about it, naming the images as they pop up in my mind. “The stairs. Those tidy rows of chairs. The open air on sunny days.” I sip my coffee. “It’s just being on the water, really. I always like that. In my family, we always say we can’t sleep if we can’t hear the ocean.”
“It is a soothing sound,” he agrees. “I like ferries because you climb in, and the boat takes you where you’re going. No bothering with maps and cars. You can read.”
“I thought all men liked driving.”
An expressive shrug. Not so much, it says, but what can you do? “It’s a modern necessity, but it brings no pleasure most of the time.”
I incline my head, trying to guess what he drives. “Huh. I would have imagined you flying down some twisty road in a convertible.”
A very small grin lifts one side of his mouth. “Romantic.”
“Sexy.” I hold his gaze. “Like one of those sixties movies of the guy navigating the coast of Monaco.”
He laughs. “I’m afraid I would disappoint you.”
I lean back. “So what do you drive?”
“Volvo.” A small translucent square of sugar falls on his thumb. “How about you? Or shall I guess?”
“You won’t get it.”
“Mm.” He plucks the sugar from his hand and tucks it in his mouth, narrowing his eyes. “I don’t know American cars so well. A Mini?”
I laugh. “No, but they are cute. I drive a Jeep.”
“A Jeep? Like an SUV?”
“Not exactly. I need room to take my surfboard to the beach, so—” I scan the horizon. “It’s practical.”
“Ah. Surfing.” He looks a bit perplexed.
“What?”
“I have to think how to say it.”
I smile, knowing what the struggle is. “Take your time.”
“I thought only teenagers surfed?” he says, instead of saying, Aren’t you too old for that?
“Well done.” I crumple my napkin and drop it in the paper bag they gave us, offer it to Javier. “I started surfing when I was seven years old.” I think of Dylan standing behind me on a longboard, his hands in the air beside me in case he needed to catch me. He never did. “It’s in my blood.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not really. I mean, I guess it is a little, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I do. Have you ever tried?”
“I have never had the opportunity.” He leans backward against the bench, one arm along the top, the fingers of his right hand warm behind my shoulder blade. “What do you like about it?”
I cross my legs, lace my hands around my knee, and look toward the water. I think of my palms skimming the water, the taste of salt on my lips, the board shivering under my feet, Dylan offering encouragement—there you go, that’s right, you can do it. “It’s exhilarating to get a wave just right, ride it a long way. You don’t think about anything. Just that.”
For a moment, he’s silent, his eyes resting on my face. His fingers touch my back, edge along the bone, and it sends an alert through my body, 100 percent chemistry, which flickers and brightens the longer he simply looks at me.
“What?” I say at last.
“Nothing.” He smiles. “I lik
e to look at you.”
I smooth a hand over my hair, liking his regard but also slightly tongue-tied, which is unlike me. I’m often the pursuer in these things, since men can be intimidated by my profession, my height. I drop my hand to my lap and look back at him. At his brow and his powerful nose and the opening of his shirt, where I can see his throat. In the sunlight, I reassess his age upward. At first, I thought he was early forties, but now I think it’s more. Midforties. Maybe even slightly older.
It doesn’t matter. As I look, the light touch on my back combines with the steady, clear regard to give me a sense of expansion, as if the field of my energy is stretching out, trying to find the edge of his. It warms me, and I think of that study that says you can fall in love with someone by looking into their eyes for thirty seconds.
I don’t fall in love, but I think I’ll remember this moment long years from now. His hand moves, open palm against my neck, thumb light against my earlobe.
Who knows how long we stay like that, both of us captured? A voice announcing our ferry brushes against it but doesn’t kill it, like a spiderweb still clinging to fingers. He takes my hand as we board, and I’m glad of the touch, grounding me, connecting me to him, him to me.
“Upstairs?” he asks.
For one moment, I think of how bad my hair will be when the wind and humidity have their way, but I nod, and we take our seats in the open air, in the bright sunshine of New Zealand. As naturally as if we’ve been together a hundred years, Javier picks up my hand and laces his fingers through mine. And even though it’s a little sweaty and I’m not really the hand-holding type, I let him.
Chapter Ten
Mari
Rose and I have flipped six houses together. She’s a sturdy, busty black-haired millennial who wears her hair very short. Her uniform is T-shirts with ironic sayings, jeans, and vintage Doc Martens. Her boyfriend wears a man bun in his curly hair and a thick beard that obscures what I am not sure is a particularly interesting face, but he’s good to her, and that’s really the only thing that matters.
We meet at Sapphire House midmorning, and she’s squealing and oohing all the way through, much the way I did, but she’s even more knocked out over the wood than I am. Her father runs a lumberyard, and she knows every variation of wood available in New Zealand and then some. With awe, she traces the inlays along the walls of the foyer and names the varieties of wood in the stairs, the banister, the framing, the doors. “My dad’ll go blimmin’ mad for this.” Her accent is as thick as they come, peppered with Maori slang, and when she talks quickly, I have a hard time deciphering her words.
“I thought of him,” I say. “I wonder if he knows anyone who does tile work.”
“I reckon he does.”
Our process is smooth after so many jobs. She starts work in the first room to the left of the front door and heads clockwise around the main floor with a stack of Post-its and duct tape in three colors, moving with surety through the rooms, tagging everything in a pattern we’ve developed over the years. She has a master’s degree in furniture design, and I can trust her to know the difference between junk and antiques worth exploring; this particular era is her favorite. She makes furniture herself in a shared studio space with a handful of other artists, and they sell a lot of it in Napier, where an earthquake nearly leveled the city in 1931. When it was rebuilt, it was all done in the Art Deco style, which was very up-to-the-minute, thus the inhabitants of the town wanting furniture. Eventually I’m going to lose her to the furniture, but for now she’s invaluable.
While she works on the main floor, I head upstairs with a kit of the same materials and start in the bedroom. Settling my box of tape and Post-its on the bed, I open the French doors along the balcony and then step out to admire the view—my view. The sea is dark and unfriendly this morning, waves slapping the shore almost petulantly, and I smell a storm. I am as close to the sea here as I was in our house by the cove, where the window of the bedroom I shared with Kit hung practically over the cliff. If you stuck your head out, you could see straight down the rocks below, the little cove with its stairs off to the right, the harsh rocky shore curving into infinity to the left, all the way to Big Sur and, farther still, Santa Barbara and then LA.
I used to miss that coast, my coast, but New Zealand has cured me. It wasn’t part of the plan—there wasn’t really much of a plan—but it sometimes feels like a hand of fate brought me here, to the green mountains and the endless coastline of an island, where I would meet a man who was unlike any other I’d ever known, and fall in love with him, and marry him, and have his children. With that man, my Simon, who bought this house because I love it, I will sleep in this room with the French doors flung open, listening to the sea.
A slight, faint aftershock rumbles through the earth, moving my body in an almost infinitesimal sway. My hands grip the railing, hard, and I wonder if the house has any protection from earthquakes.
A flashback overtakes me, a sound memory—the beeping of alarms and water rushing where it shouldn’t and people making a song, soprano screaming and tenor moans of fear and deep, bass cries of pain. I smell smoke and leaking gas.
It fades relatively quickly, just a flash and gone. All these years, you’d think I’d finally get over the PTSD. But it doesn’t seem to work like that. My therapist says I spent so much time drinking and drugging away my trauma that it’s just going to take a long time to work through it all.
And even she knows only the tip of the iceberg. I was on a sad and terrible errand that day, awash in scalding shame mixed with grief, emotions too large for the child I was, though I thought myself so adult.
A lot had already been lost by the day of the earthquake, but the way it completed the wreckage of our lives—Kit’s, my mother’s, and mine—marked us all irretrievably. Sometimes I miss them most when I want to touch that reality, that day standing on the bluff, looking down at the collapsed heap of timber and concrete on the beach, all of us clustered together, howling.
Enough.
In the bedroom, I get to work. The bed is covered with a silk spread that is too fine to be original. I take a photo of it and then the bed, pulling back the spread to look at the mattress, ancient and unimaginably dusty.
From my kit, I take a notebook and scribble information as I shoot photos. The closets are a dream, enormous, as would be needed by a movie star and all her dresses. Where have they gone? I make a note on another page to look up the history of Veronica’s death and the disposal of her things. Maybe the sister donated all of them or something.
In the bathroom, I make note of the light fixtures, light bulbs, colors of tile work, but there’s not much that will need doing here. It’s untouched, practically brand-new. Someone has cleaned it regularly, so there’s no dust built up anywhere. A pair of long, multipaned windows opens toward the sea, and I crank them open, letting in the breeze.
A sharp scent of seaweed and salt triggers a visceral memory—sitting on a blanket with Kit, eating tuna sandwiches and Little Debbies our mother had packed into a basket for us the night before. We carried it down to the beach after a breakfast of cereal and milk at home, as we often did. She didn’t like mornings, our mom.
The morning was cloudy, smelling of sea and rain, and chilly enough we wore hoodies and jeans. Cinder sat with us, chewing on a piece of driftwood between his paws. Kit said, “Is this Monday?”
I plucked a leaf from my sandwich. “You know it is.” The restaurant was closed on Mondays. Our parents were sleeping late, and we’d learned well enough not to disturb them.
“Aren’t we supposed to go to school on Mondays?”
“You don’t have to go every day. Especially not in kindergarten.” I was in second grade and, aside from lunch and the rows of books we were allowed to check out, didn’t care a lot about it. I had taught myself to read before I even started school, and who needed all the rest of it? The other girls were snotty, and they liked dolls and dresses and all kinds of dumb stuff. I liked only books,
Cinder, Kit, and the ocean.
Kit’s hair was braided into one long plait, but then she’d slept on it for a couple of days, and now curls sprang up all around her face and the top of her head like she’d stuck her finger in a light socket. Freckles covered her nose and cheeks, darker with the sun all summer, and her skin was almost as dark as the wooden walls of the restaurant, deep reddish brown that made people say we couldn’t even be sisters.
But she just took after my dad. His pale olive skin, his dark hair, his big, wide mouth. She was tall like him too, as tall as me, even though I was older.
Now she said, “But I like to go to school. We learn good stuff there.”
“Ew. Like what?”
“We have a plant experiment in the window.”
“Doing what?”
She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed it thoughtfully. “We planted five different seeds to see which ones grow faster.”
“That’s dumb.”
“I like it. They have different baby leaves. Some are round, and some are pointed. It’s interesting.”
“Huh.” I didn’t want to say BOR-ing, but I thought it.
“School is something to do.”
“We have plenty to do!”
She shrugged.
“You could tell Mom you want to be there every day.”
Her lids dropped. “She’ll yell at me.”
I poked her foot. “I’ll tell her, then. I don’t care if she yells at me.”
“You would?”
“I guess.” I flung hair out of my face. “If you want.”
She nodded, her big green-gold eyes shining like coins. “I really, really want to go to school.”
In Auckland, decades later, I run a finger along the tiled sill of the window. It wasn’t until Dylan came, another whole year, that she got to school every day. He made sure of it.
When We Believed in Mermaids Page 10