When We Believed in Mermaids

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Mom!”

  The little girl is running down the sidewalk toward us. In wonder, I say, “She looks exactly like me.”

  “Yeah. Follow my lead.”

  And because I really don’t know what else to do, I turn with my sister, who says, “Sarah! I want you to meet someone!”

  The girl doesn’t give me a toothy smile, just turns her face and looks up, waiting as Josie/Mari says, “This is my friend Kit, from my childhood. We were the very best of friends.”

  “Like sisters,” I say, offering my hand, which feels like it should be shaking, to go along with the buzz in my ears.

  “Hullo,” Sarah says, and I have no idea why it’s such a surprise that she has a Kiwi accent. “It’s nice to meet you.” Her gaze catches on my T-shirt. “Are you a doctor?”

  “Yeah.” I touch the words. “I am. Emergency medicine. I think they call it something else here.”

  “I’m a scientist. I have all sorts of experiments.”

  My heart melts, and I drop to her level. “You do? What do you have?”

  “Weather,” she says, counting it on her thumb, “which is mostly a barometer and cloud recordings. And plant experiments, and some crystal things.”

  “That’s amazing. I used to do experiments when I was your age too. I thought I was going to be a marine biologist, but I ended up in medicine.”

  She inclines her head. “Do you like it?”

  “Yes.” I pause, swallowing. She is like me, so very like me. How could Josie have kept her a secret from me all this time? How could she have been so cruel as to hide her babyhood, her toddler years, everything? A distant howl of fury and pain sounds in the distance, and it takes every scrap of self-control I have to keep my emotions in check. “Yes, most of the time I do.”

  The other two are joining us, and I stand up as my sister says, “Kit, this is my husband, Simon.” I can hear the pinch in her voice, her fear that I will break everything, and for one moment I want to do just that. Spill everything, let the consequences fall where they may.

  But my little niece, so like me as a child, stops me. “She’s a doctor, Daddy!”

  He’s even more good-looking in person, with a genial kindness in his face that isn’t evident in pictures and a charisma field as wide as the entire park we’re standing in. I reach for his hand and meet his eyes, and a ripple of surprise washes over his expression for the most fleeting of moments. “Hello, Simon.”

  Mari says, “Simon, this is Kit Bianci. She was my very best friend.” To give the words weight, she leans on me, her hands on my arm, her face against my shoulder. “We just ran into each other. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  I give her a brief, shocked glance.

  “Is that right?” he says. His grip is firm and warm. “Good to meet you.” He turns to bring his son forward. “This is Leo.”

  Leo. Our father’s name. I force myself not to shoot a glance toward Josie. Mari. Whatever her name is. “Hi, Leo. Nice to meet you.”

  He’s as polite as his father. “You too.”

  “Just like Tofino,” I say to Mari.

  She takes my hand. “We were lucky to grow up there.”

  “Mm.”

  “We’re just going down to have supper,” Simon says. “You must join us.”

  For a moment I consider it, consider sitting with my niece and listening to her tell me about her experiments. I think of what my mother will feel, knowing these children are in the world and that she knew nothing about them. I look into Josie’s face, so familiar and yet so unfamiliar, and I can’t sit here tonight and pretend.

  I’m not ready. Not yet.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, turning to Simon. “I really do have plans.”

  “Oh, not really?” Mari cries. “You can’t just go! We have to catch up, tell each other everything.”

  I hand her my phone, and now my hands are shaking with rage. She sees and grips one tightly. Her eyes are fixed on my face, and I see the faint, small shine of tears. For a long second, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude, with love, with a hunger to touch her face and hair and arms, to assure myself that she’s not some robot version of herself but Josie, my own Josie. Here. Alive.

  “Give me your number,” I say. “We can get together as soon as you have time.”

  “First thing in the morning,” Mari says. She punches in the number and then calls it, making her phone ring in her pocket. As if to show me the evidence, she pulls it out, still ringing. Her eyes meet mine, steady. More assured than I ever remember, and something about that softens my fury the slightest bit.

  “It’s good to see you so happy,” I say, and bend in to hug her. So quietly only she will hear, I add, “But I am so furious with you.”

  She hangs on, tight, tight, tight. “I know,” she whispers. “I love you, Kit.”

  I let her go. “Call me.”

  Sarah steps over. “I hope you’ll come see my experiments.”

  “I will,” I say. “I promise.”

  And I force myself to keep walking past them, toward the address where they live. I walk there so I won’t run into them, and I see the house, which is a pretty thing with a porch and a second story looking out to the water.

  None of us can sleep if we can’t hear the ocean.

  On the ferry to the CBD, I’m back to a whirling mental state that tosses out a thousand images, moments, emotions. I veer between extreme fury and melting sentimentality and something that feels like . . . hope. Which makes me even madder, and the whole thing starts again.

  In my pocket, my phone buzzes, and I pull it out.

  Finished, Javier texts. Shall I pick you up at 7?

  Yes. That would be great. I hesitate and then add, It’s been quite a day.

  I will look forward to you telling me about it.

  His face rises between the screen and me, and I know he will listen. Quietly and intensely. I can see him taking a bite of food, his hair shining under the lamps of the restaurant, then focusing on me babbling and babbling. Because that’s what I’ll do. If I start talking, it’s all going to spill out, the bad and the good, the ugly and the beautiful.

  Do I want him to know me that well?

  No. I don’t want anyone to know me like that.

  But at the same time, I don’t have any defenses left at the moment. All my tricks and tools have been deployed in this whole business of tracking down my sister.

  I had not expected to be so undone by my niece. By a face that looks so much like mine and a heart that’s like mine too. I have experiments. I want to know every single thing about her.

  And Josie named her son after our father. Which is such a weird choice after how long they were at war. When we were small, they were close, but all I remember is how much they fought later. Constantly, furiously, violently.

  He once lost his temper with her and slapped her so hard her lip bled. He was instantly ashamed, but she stood there staring at him like a warrior goddess, her hair a long cape around her tanned body, her eyes shimmering with the tears she refused to let fall, her lip split and bleeding. I wanted to cry for both of them, but I huddled in my corner, defending neither.

  My mother snapped, “Josie, go to your room until you can speak properly.”

  Dylan wasn’t there. Maybe he was working. Or on his motorcycle. Or with one of his many girlfriends.

  I only know that he heard about it later and confronted my father, and then the two of them had a fight. An actual fistfight, which sent all three of the Bianci women into hysterics, trying to break them apart. Dylan had youth and speed on his side, and he tried to simply duck away from my father’s beefy fists, but my father had blinding fury on his side, along with size and power and the treachery of age. He broke Dylan’s cheekbone, a fact none of us knew until later, and ordered him out of his house.

  My mother caught my father’s arm and hauled him out of the room, into the kitchen of the small house, but Dylan had already grabbed his keys and flung himself out the front door. Josie and I ra
n after him, yelling his name. “Dylan! He didn’t mean it. Come back—where will you go?”

  Josie tried to jump on the bike behind him, flinging her arms around his waist, and for one second, I hated her. She had caused this mess. She always made trouble everywhere, and now I would lose them both.

  But for one second, I saw how alike they were, how lost. Dylan’s face bloomed with a bruise. Josie’s lip was still swollen. Each of them was so beautiful, like creatures from the sea, all limbs and fair hair and shining eyes.

  Dylan barked out an order. “Get. Off.”

  Josie started to protest. “Please, he hates me—”

  “Get off the bike.”

  He didn’t look at her. His limbs were rigid with fury. Josie slid off, and the instant her feet hit the ground, he was gone.

  Gone for days.

  When he returned, he was broken in a dozen pieces, that broken cheekbone the least of his injuries.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mari

  By the time I was fourteen, I stole entire bottles of vodka and tequila out of the storage closet and shared them with boys on the beach. Not the cove, our safe, isolated little place, but the actual beach, which I reached by hitchhiking down the highway.

  I learned to sip, not guzzle. Learned to space out the drinks so I didn’t end up heaving my guts out behind some rock or accidentally black out and have sex with someone. I never went all the way, but I would make out with just about anybody once I started sipping the vodka.

  I learned so many things.

  One of them was that there was a crack in the wall between Dylan’s bedroom and the one I shared—ever more reluctantly—with Kit. The house was sliding down the cliff long before the earthquake hit, and everywhere the walls were cracked, the floors uneven and full of tripping hazards. It makes me feel dizzy to imagine it now, that all these things revealed the fact that the house was going to fall into the ocean at any minute, but my oblivious parents did nothing. What if it had happened when we were all sleeping?

  I discovered the crack along our closet door, along the shared wall with Dylan’s bedroom. It was situated above our heads, so you had to stand on the end of Kit’s bed to see, and then you had to close one eye, but it was a perfect view of his bed.

  Where he had a lot of sex.

  The first time I spied on him, I felt guilty and giggly. I could see the girl’s naked butt and her tattoo of a butterfly. The girl covered Dylan the first time, but another time I watched him lying on the bed naked while she touched him, and I was both fascinated and repulsed. It was technically some of the same stuff Billy had made me do, but it was different somehow with Dylan.

  Kit would have thrown a fit if she’d found out, so I did it when she wasn’t around. Everyone said he was like our brother, and I know that’s how Kit thought of him, but I never felt that way. Never.

  We had a special connection. Everybody commented on it. People thought we were actual siblings because we both had such blond hair, such long legs, and could ride a longboard like we were the original Hawaiians. Because we spent so much time in the sun, we were tanned as dark as varnished cedar, and if he was the most beautiful boy on the beach, I was growing into the most beautiful girl. King and queen of the ocean.

  The big secret we shared was the weed. From that first time, when it calmed me down, I loved it. It soothed the shattered, angry girl who lived inside me, screaming all the time. It mellowed me out, just as it mellowed Dylan. We’d lie on the beach in the cove long after everyone else was in bed, after the restaurant was closed. We smoked. Often, we didn’t even talk, just sprawled there looking at the stars.

  Sometimes we did talk. One night, I asked about his life before he came to us, and he sighed the longest, saddest sigh. “You don’t want to know about that.”

  I turned my head, and the movement sent soft, happy ripples through my body, a combination of the beers I’d stolen and the pot he’d brought. I was so very high, I was pretty sure I couldn’t get up even if I tried. “Maybe I do want to know. Maybe you need to tell somebody.”

  “Do I?” he asked, and his voice rasped into the night, unsure.

  “That’s what you told me.”

  “I did.” He touched my hand with one finger, and in his eyes were the stars that had fallen. “Will you tell me?”

  “You first.”

  “Not this time.”

  I looked back up at the sky. “You know what happened. A man made me do things.”

  “What things?”

  I shook my head, feeling myself tremble all beneath my skin. I felt the places in my body where he hurt me, and something swelled right over my throat to keep me from speaking.

  “You know it isn’t always going to be like that, right?”

  A vision of his current girlfriend’s bouncing breasts rose up behind my eyes, and I giggled. “Yes. I spy on you.”

  “What?” He sat up.

  I had a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t be pleased with myself later, spilling this secret. “I can see you through a crack in the wall.”

  “Having sex?” He didn’t sound mad, just confused. “You watch me having sex? How long?”

  “Ooh, long time. Since Rita.”

  “Huh.” He fell back down. “You know you shouldn’t.”

  “Of course.” I closed my eyes, and to think about it, to see his shoulders, the kissing, the heat moves between my legs. “It makes me feel good.”

  He picked up the vodka bottle and took a big swig. “We shouldn’t be doing this either.” He fell back on the sand. “Jesus, I’m so fucked up.”

  I laugh. “Me too!”

  “You’re only fourteen,” he says sadly.

  “Yep.”

  “You shouldn’t know any of this stuff.”

  “But I do,” I sang, and felt like I was rising up from my body. In my imagination I took the place of his girlfriend, and it was me he was kissing and touching, and I was doing it back. “It’s not your fault, though. It’s Billy’s.”

  “Billy Zondervan?”

  “Who else?”

  “That motherfucker. We should tell your parents, Josie. He should go to jail.”

  I hauled myself upright. “No! Never.”

  “Why? Why don’t you want to punish him?”

  “They won’t punish him,” I said fiercely. “It’ll be all about me, and everyone will know, and—” I could just see the way people would look at me at school, and in my drunken state, I burst into tears. “You promised!”

  “Oh, baby.” He hugged me. I thought he might be crying. “I’m so sorry. I should have protected you better.”

  I buried my face in his shoulder, feeling relief and peace. I was so very, very tired. “It wasn’t your job.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

  We lay down on the beach, and he held me. Just held me, while we looked at the stars.

  After so shockingly running into Kit on the promenade in Devonport, I make it through my family’s dinner by focusing on the stories everyone else has to tell. If I let myself feel even the tiniest edge of it, I will lose control, and that is the one thing I absolutely cannot afford. So I’m perfectly Mom and Mari over dinner.

  The effort of pretending gives me an enormous headache, however, and when I get back to the house and settle the children, I head for the kitchen to make a pot of tea. “Do you want some chamomile?” I ask Simon.

  “No, thanks,” he says, typing something into the computer on his lap. Toby, the little mop dog, is perched on the arm of the chair, and the TV is on, playing the evening news. For a moment, I look at all the disasters happening around the world, and my drama seems ridiculous and small, all of my own doing.

  But it’s not about comparison, as my counselor used to say. My pain is my pain.

  Paris pads into the room as I fill the kettle and leads me to the back door. I prepare the pot with tea and turn the kettle on, then take her out. It’s a gorgeous night—soft and utterly clear, the stars overhead as br
ight as strings of patio lighting.

  The feeling of Kit’s body in my arms slams back into me. I close my eyes to feel it again. So tall and strong, so incredibly fit that I know she still surfs all the time. She smelled of herself, that undernote that is entirely Kit, grass and ocean and sky. That smell made my heart hurt, physically, as if something were pressing on it very hard.

  What have I done?

  As if she can read my thoughts, Paris trots over and leans on my legs, letting go of a sigh. “You miss Helen, don’t you, baby?” I murmur quietly, threading an ear through my fingers. “I’m sorry about that. I would make it better if I could, but I think you’ve just got to be sad for a while.”

  She tilts her head back and licks my fingers.

  Simon comes out and stands behind me, his hands on my shoulders. “Beautiful night.”

  “Perfect.”

  We stand there, all the unspoken things between us, until he says, as he did the other day, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “About?”

  “Whatever is bothering you.”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all. I’m just thinking about old times.”

  He steps closer, crosses his arms over my chest. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

  I close my eyes and lean back into him. If only that were true. His body is warm and solid, and I would know his scent in a football field full of men. “Thank you, sweetheart,” I say, unable to bring myself to say there’s nothing to tell.

  “Have her to supper tomorrow.”

  “Yes, good idea.”

  “Sarah took to her in a flash, I thought.”

  “She saw her T-shirt. She’s a physician.”

  “Is she? Do you think she might have been the one to save that boy on Rangitoto?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A woman, a tourist who was a doctor, dived off the pier at Rangitoto when some boy cracked his head. It was in all the news.”

  “Could have been,” I say, finally finding a reason to smile. “She was a lifeguard for years.” A lifesaver, I think, though she couldn’t save any of us.

  “Does she surf?”