Leo snorts and play punches his dad in the stomach. Simon play doubles over.
We make a morning of it, stopping first at a café in Mount Eden for a decadent breakfast. Sarah is animated and cheerful—but then, it’s a weekend, and she won’t have to go to school for two days. Leo sits next to me, talking a mile a minute about his mates and swimming and sport and mountaineering, which is his new obsession. He’s been reading about Sir Edmund Hillary, a local hero and the first to climb Mount Everest.
“How long did it take you to climb the Golden Hinde, Mom?” he asks, chomping on a piece of bacon.
I’m lost in imagining the climb up Everest and the continual need people feel to do it, and I answer offhandedly. I don’t honestly remember which mountain it is, only that it’s on Vancouver Island, where I supposedly grew up. “I don’t know. A day, I guess.”
“Not the Hinde,” Simon says with a frown. “Takes a couple to ascend that one, eh?”
My heart is racing, making a noise in my ears, and I’m sure that my skin has gone bright red. “Of course!” I cry, slapping my hands to my cheeks. “Oh my goodness, I’m so embarrassed.”
Simon bumps me with his shoulder. “It’s all good, sweetheart. We won’t put you in the home yet, will we, kids?”
Sarah says, very seriously, “I’ll never put you in a home, Mum. Ever.”
I reach over the table and squeeze her hand. “Thank you, baby. I love you too.”
“We aren’t going to put Grandpa in a home, are we?”
“Oh, no! No way.” I squeeze her hand more tightly. “Your grandpa is just fine.”
But I happen to look up at Simon and, as wives can do, pick up the subtlest twist of his lips. I touch his thigh beneath the table. He covers my hand with his.
At Sapphire House, we forget all that, and I make a dramatic moment of our entry. “You know, children, that I have loved this house ever since I came here, right? It sits so high above everything—”
“Like a palace!” Leo cries.
“Yes, like a palace. And so when your daddy found out it was up for sale, he bought it for us to live in.”
“I want to see the greenhouse,” Sarah says.
“In a bit, love.” I give Simon a smile. “First, let’s take a look at the inside of the house and the balconies and all the great things there are here.” I fling open the door and say, “Ta-da!”
They both dash in and pause. “Whoa!” Leo cries, spinning a circle as he looks in every direction at once.
Sarah is more moderate. She walks in like a girl in a storybook, taking in the setting for her new chapter. She peers up the staircase, and runs her fingers over the wall, and lets the wide bank of windows in the back call her to the view over the sea. “Mummy, look! You can see the cyclone!”
She’s been taking measurements and gleefully following a weather site she loves over news of the cyclone, which has been blowing our way for a couple of days. While the sky is sunny, she’s right—you can see the dark storm gathering in a line along the horizon.
“Let’s go out and look at it,” I suggest, opening one of the French doors.
The view is utterly gorgeous, the deep aquamarine of the water, the navy-blue mountains in the distance, the emerald grass between us and the water, the bright-blue sky, and that slim, faraway line of eggplant cloud. The layers and layers and layers of blue against green against blue against green is ever dazzling, impossible to get used to. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I ask, my hand on her back. “We can have a table out here. Some chairs.”
She leans on me unexpectedly. “Won’t cyclones hit us here?”
“I don’t know, baby, but the house has been here for eighty years. I’m sure there’ve been some big cyclones in that time.” I stroke her curly hair. “Are you afraid of cyclones?”
“No. Strong ones are rare.”
“That’s true. So you needn’t worry.”
“I don’t want to move, really. I like our house. And how’ll I move all my experiments?”
“I’m sure we can figure that out, sweetheart. Your grandfather will have good ideas.”
I remember the old-school telephone. “I have something to show you, and then we can go upstairs and look at bedrooms.”
“All right.”
She follows me into the house, and we head for the alcove. “Do you know what this is?”
“Of course. It’s a telephone.”
I’m deflated slightly, but there’s more. I pick up the earpiece, listen, and offer it to her. “Do you know what that is?”
“No. Why does it make a noise?”
“It’s called a dial tone. This is a landline, which means it’s connected to the wall with a wire, and the wire is what connects it to other phones. You lift up the receiver for the dial tone to make sure it works, and then you use the ring to dial the numbers.” I illustrate by dialing my own phone number, and it rings in my hand.
Sarah nods. But she’s turning away, heading for the stairs. “I want to see the bedrooms.”
Leo is already up there. “Mom, you’ve gotta see this! This room has its own little bathroom, and there are tiles all over it! Can I have this room?”
“You don’t get to choose before I even see!” Sarah protests, and runs past him into the bedroom.
I follow more slowly, because four of the six bedrooms have their own bathrooms, and all of them are tiled magnificently. Leo runs into the one I knew he’d love, with its row of windows like a captain’s quarters in the prow of a ship. They overlook the driveway and the city.
The children dash around, pulling open drawers and doors to peer inside. Most of it is empty. I haven’t spent time in the secondary bedrooms yet. This one looks weary, with a faded mural along the top of the walls and curtains of no distinction. From my bag, I take out a notebook and scribble a few notes to myself, using a fountain pen I picked up yesterday and filled with a bright-magenta ink. The reds and yellows were always my shades, while Kit loved turquoise, violet, green. Dylan liked brush calligraphy in a Chinese style, using the darkest, blackest ink he could find. I always thought Kit seemed like a person who’d want more serious ink, the heavy blacks or browns, but no. She loved vivid shades in her colors and favored a fine tip for her precise handwriting. As I make note of the curtains, the wallpaper, I’m pleased by the elegance the stubbed tip lends even my scribbled notes.
“What about me?” Sarah says. “Which room do I get?”
“Come here.” I tuck pen and book back in my bag and take her across the hall to a room very similar to the others. The walls are a faded, awful shade of grimy yellow, and the bookshelves are sagging, but all that is cosmetic. The best feature is the one Sarah narrows in on immediately: a trio of porthole windows that looks to the sea. She dashes toward them, stands on her toes to look out. On either side of the portholes are two windows that open outward, and I crank one energetically to let nature in. “Listen,” I say, putting a hand to my ear.
“I do like to listen to the ocean,” she says, smiling. “It helps me sleep.”
My heart stings. It’s something we always said—the Bianci women need to be able to hear the ocean when they sleep. For a moment, I am unbearably sad that she will never know she even is a Bianci. “I know,” I manage in an upbeat voice. “That’s why I thought of it.”
“Thanks, Mummy.” She hugs my waist.
“Let’s go check out the greenhouse, shall we?”
But Simon calls up, “Mari, darling, can you come down?”
I take Sarah’s hand, and we head down the stairs. A woman with a video camera on her shoulder and another wearing the coiffed hair and suit jacket of a television reporter are standing in the grand hallway. The camera blinks red, recording, as it tilts itself upward to Sarah and me, coming down the sweep of stairs. “What’s going on?”
Simon, looking highly pleased with himself, introduces them. “This is Hannah Gorton and Yvonne Partridge from TVNZ. They’re here to do a feature.”
My heart freezes so
hard I think it might shatter. “Nice to meet you,” I say, walking toward them to shake hands. Then I turn back to Simon. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Of course.” He follows me into the pantry, out of earshot.
“What are they doing here?”
“I told them they could come.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I might have wanted some better makeup, you know!”
“I knew you’d resist, and it will be good for publicity.”
“Why do we need publicity?” A frantic terror of revelation bangs around in my chest. “I don’t want our private lives made public!”
“It’s just business. We’re going to want to sell the other parcels at the best possible price, and this will generate excitement,” he says with a firmness I know will not budge. He’s a lovely man in a thousand and one ways, but when he decides on something, he is immovable. “And it’s only a half hour.”
“What other parcels?”
“I told you—to make this profitable, we’ll be developing the lower levels of the land into housing.”
“I don’t remember you talking about that.” Pressing my fingers to my temples, I try to calm down. It’s true that in the land-starved suburbs, housing parcels will make a mint. “But why do we have to put our lives on television?”
He presses his palm into my shoulder. “Come on, now. It’ll be right.”
For one long moment, I feel the two sides of my life in direct conflict. I feel them both on either side of my heart, pounding against each other. If I let him have his way, my face will be out on the internet again, increasing the danger that someone will recognize me. But I can’t argue with Simon when he makes up his mind on something. I may as well slam my head against granite. And if I’m too resistant, he’ll wonder why.
Shoving my fears down, I say sharply, “Fine,” and push his hand away, then stomp back into the other room. With effort, I plaster a smile over my face and laugh in a way I’ve learned to do, and I let them film me in the lounge and the halfway horrible kitchen. After a little while, I let go of everything but this—showing them the exquisite stairs made of kauri wood and Australian blackwood railings, the master bath entirely tiled in the Art Deco fashion, and the amazing windows with their views of the harbor, islands slumped across the horizon.
And as we do another walk-through, I find myself falling more and more in love, feeling as if Sapphire House might be the reason for everything. The children tear through the rooms, and it’s all I could ever want.
I’m meant to be here. It was fated.
Looking at Simon across the room, so hearty and cheerful, I wonder what would happen if he knew everything. My terrible reputation as a teen, my reckless, reckless behavior, my—
My gigantic lie. Eyeing my beautiful husband in his crisp shirt and jeans, with one foot kicked out in front of him and his shoulder on the wall, I wonder what it would be like to confess it all. To be fully myself with the man I love more than I thought myself capable of. It’s lonely to carry a secret.
But as he smiles his honest, open, loyal smile, I know the truth. I can’t confess. He would hate me. He would never, ever speak to me again.
So I do the interview, putting on my cheeriest face, my not-quite-Kiwi, not-quite-US accent, and show them around Sapphire House. I’m captured again by the story, by the tragic love story back there in the past, by the startling, thrilling fact that I can restore it.
In the end, the reporter says with a smile, “Thanks, Mari. I think that’s it.”
“My pleasure,” I say, but the words hurt my throat, as if they have corners. When this airs, my face is going to be splattered all over TVNZ. It will be on the internet.
Anyone could see it.
Anyone.
It is the worst danger I’ve faced since I arrived, and it puts everything—everything—at stake.
Before we go, I head up to the attic to look for artifacts from Veronica’s life. It’s draped with cobwebs I sweep away with a broom I brought for just this reason.
Sarah has come with me, too, and I put her to work opening boxes while I make notes on the contents. The attic is mostly barren, with a few boxes of odds and ends, none of which looks particularly interesting. A few hold clothes, and we’ll want to explore those more carefully, considering the era. At last, far away in the back, are two smallish boxes that prove to be the bound diaries Helen filled. I bend over and pick one out at random. The date is 1952. I dig deeper and find one from 1945. The other box contains later entries, and I’m not as interested in those. “Give me a minute, kiddo.” I sit on the floor next to the box and take them all out. They’re not in any order: 1949 is next to ’55, but that seems to be the latest.
The earliest, frustratingly enough, is 1939. “I wonder where the rest of them are.”
“There’s more boxes over here,” Sarah says. “And look! Baby clothes.”
Frowning, I jump to my feet. The clothes are tucked into a wooden cradle, covered with a dusty sheet. The clothes are all for a newborn or just a little older and don’t appear to have been used at all. Someone must have had a miscarriage. My heart aches a little, lifting up tiny sweaters and rompers.
Sarah’s already lost interest in the clothes and opened a few more boxes. They contain any number of things but nothing I can really use to get the answers I need. Where are the other journals? I need the 1930s.
Maybe she hadn’t started keeping them until she moved here.
I mark the two boxes of journals and a third box of scrapbooks with an X for Simon to bring down.
Then I remember the stacks of plastic containers holding magazines, down in Helen’s room. Maybe there will be something there. “Come with me, Sarah. I have an idea.”
Chapter Fifteen
Kit
When I was seven and Josie was nine, Dylan taught us to surf.
I remember the first lesson clearly, because I had Dylan to myself for once, a very rare occurrence. I woke up in the tent, and Josie was gone. Dylan was sprawled flat on his back, hands crossed on his chest, and Cinder snored beside me, but Josie’s sleeping bag didn’t even look touched. I crawled out to pee. The morning was thick and overcast, the ocean restless below it, and I waded into the lapping waves, letting the cold water ripple over my arches and ankles. We swam most days, Josie and I, and this was how I kept myself ready—wading in as high as I could, then dashing back out, wading in, dashing out. Cinder must have heard me, because he scrambled out of the tent too and started running in and out with me. He found a long weathered piece of driftwood and tossed it to me. I laughed and picked it up and threw it back toward the beach. He was a retriever, but he didn’t love actually swimming unless he absolutely had to. Once the water reached his chest, he always ran back to the beach, barking.
This morning, he did the same. I ran into the ocean and out, and he ran in and out chasing his driftwood. After a while, Dylan emerged from the tent, blinking, wearing a pair of Hawaiian-print board shorts, all his scars on full display—the puckered pink one that ran over his biceps, the constellation of perfect circles across his belly, and one-foot-long thin marks here and there, not the ordinary kind of scars a person had. He told crazy stories about them—that he’d wrestled a pirate, danced over coals, gotten stuck in a meteor shower in outer space.
“Hey, kid,” he said now, his voice raspy. “Where’s your sister? Did she ever come down?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He frowned, looking up the stairs toward the restaurant. He tugged his shirt on and sat down on the sand to light a half-smoked joint he took out of his pocket. The sweet smell mingled with ocean and fog to make a scent that I would always associate with him. “You hungry?”
“Not yet,” I lied. My stomach was growling a little bit, but I never, ever got to have him to myself, and I planned to enjoy it as long as I could. “Are you surfing today?”
“Yep.”
“Are you ever going to teach us?”
He glanced over
at me. “You really want to learn?”
“Duh!” I flung out my hand toward the waves. “You’ve been telling us for ages that we could.”
He inhaled, held it. His eyes were red already from all the drinking the night before, but it only made his irises pop—those abalone-shell colors blasting right out of his face. As he exhaled in a small stream, I tried to catch it, and he laughed. “You never want to do this, little girl.”
“No,” I said definitely. “Drugs are bad for you. Smoking is really, really bad for you.”
“You’re right.”
“So why do you do drugs if you know they’re bad?”
His long hair was caught back in a ponytail, and he reached up and tugged out the rubber band, working his fingers through the tangles. I touched my braid to check it, but it was still very tight and good. “I don’t know, Kitten,” he said. He plucked a piece of pot off his lip. “It’s stupid, but I guess I like not thinking.”
“But why?” I leaned in. “I love to think.”
He smiled. “You’re so good at it—that’s why. And that’s the reason you should never, never, never do any drugs—because you are so smart.” He tapped my forehead. “You’re the smartest one of all of us. You know that, right?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Good.” He pinched the end of the joint. “Pinkie promise me, okay? You will never, ever do drugs.”
I reached up my pinkie, and we twisted them together. “Promise.” I wished he didn’t have to do drugs either, but I could feel that darkness in him getting better as he smoked his joint. It was like he carried around some mean monster that shut up only when he drank or smoked pot.
“Surfing’s better,” he said, and stood up. “It’s going to be cold.”
“Duh.”
He grinned his best grin, the one that crinkled the edges of his eyes, and held out his hand. “All right, then. Let’s do this thing.”
He kept his board, a longboard with red and yellow detailing along the rails, on the beach. He put me on the board in front of him and paddled us out only about five feet. Waves were low and slow, and even I knew that these were bland conditions.
When We Believed in Mermaids Page 16