I nod, pretending that I’m not feeling the heat of my cheeks.
“We married, and it was good for a while. She liked to travel with me, liked all the crowds and celebrity, you know?”
I take another bite of succulent, exquisitely seasoned chicken. “Mm.”
“In the end, I think she only wanted an ordinary life. Children and a dog and trips to the plaza to see friends on summer nights.”
“A nice life.”
“For some.”
“Not you.”
“Not then. That was a long time ago.”
“And what about now?”
“Now? Do I want that life?”
I lift a shoulder. “That life. That woman.”
His eyes narrow faintly. “Not the woman. Sometimes, yes, maybe the life.” He picks up a slice of bread. “You do not strike me as a jealous woman.”
“I’m not,” I say, and admit to the rest. “Usually.”
“My marriage was long ago. It’s to me like a story I read once.”
On the table, my phone buzzes, and I glance at it in alarm. “My mother is the only one who’d text me, and it’s the middle of the night there.”
“Yes, of course.”
I turn the phone over. We should plan a meeting place for tomorrow.
The lava boils in my belly, and I think of Pompeii. “I forgot I gave it to my sister,” I say, turning the phone back on its face.
“I won’t mind if you answer.”
I shake my head, covering the phone with my palm as if to keep Josie out of my life. She made me wait long enough. “She can wait.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kit
On the ferry to Half Moon Bay the next morning, I’m as calm as a surgeon. Which, honestly, is another word for bloodless. I’ve known a few who had some juice, but you’ve got to be at least part robot to make that life work. I was a nervous wreck on my surgical rotations. Give me an emergency every time.
Anyway. I’m drinking a cup of coffee in the nearly empty commuter ferry. At least on the way out—the people pouring off when it docked at the CBD didn’t seem as if they’d all fit.
This one is not geared for the tourist trade, so I sit by the window and watch the scenic spread of volcanic islands and think of what it would be like to see one erupt at 100,000 times the force of the Nagasaki bomb. It’s hard to even picture it, given the serene blue water and bluer islands. Javier did not stay over, at my request, and I slept so hard my face had lines all through it.
But I admit I kind of missed his company this morning. He hasn’t texted. I almost did and then thought better of it. He knows that I’m going to meet my sister, because I texted her on the way back to the hotel, and she suggested where we should get together.
Which I am anticipating and dreading in equal measure.
I haven’t talked to my mom yet either, because I hardly know what to say. Yes, she’s alive. Yes, she’s fine. So fine! And you have two grandchildren who are nine and seven who you’ve never had a chance to know.
Maybe say it better than that, as Javier suggested.
So I’m putting it off for a little longer, until after this meeting today.
After a few minutes of the agreeable movements of the ferry, I find the water doing its usual magic. I watch a guy in a kayak avoiding the wake of a motorboat, then swirling through the wake with joy, and it makes me smile. I’m falling in love with this place. It’s so much water, so much sky. I love the village centers that feel a little out of time with their covered walkways and shops of all sorts, and the very real way the landscape dominates everything.
Like the way the ferry carries me into a bay I hadn’t seen before, hidden and surrounded by hills. A marina boasts dozens of sailboats and yachts of various sizes, and the hillside above is a tumble of houses. I disembark, and there is Josie, hair pulled back from her face, sunglasses hiding her eyes. She has a hat in her hand, and she uses it to wave to me.
I lift a hand and both admire and hate myself for my cool. It doesn’t encompass the way I feel, which is nervous and shaky and on the verge of tears, which I would hate more than I can possibly say.
When I get closer, I see that tears are streaming down her face, which infuriates me, and when I’m close enough, she reaches for me. I hold up a hand to stop her, my voice icy cold. “No. It caught me off guard yesterday, but all this time you knew how I’d feel, and you let me suffer, thinking you were dead. How could you do that, Josie?”
“Mari,” she says, and I hear her voice deflating. “My name is Mari now.”
“I don’t—” I want to hit her.
She must see it on my face, because she says, “Look, we can do all of that.” She shifts her glasses to the top of her head, and I see that there are circles under her eyes. “You can yell at me, and I’ll answer any question you ask as honestly as I can. But can we just . . . start . . . in a better place?” Her eyes are as dark as buttons, just like my dad’s. Swimming in their depths, I’m captured.
It softens me. “Okay.” I start. “You look good, Jo—Mari. Really good.”
“Thanks. I’ve been sober fifteen years.”
“Since you died?”
She meets my eyes, her chin up. On this, she is not ashamed. “Yes.”
“Mom too, actually.”
That causes a flicker. “Is that so.”
“Yep.”
She looks at me, really looks at me, my hair and face and body. “You’ve grown into a beauty, Kit.”
“Thanks.”
“I google you all the time. Stalk you on Mom’s Facebook.”
“You do?” It strikes me that she had this freedom, but I did not. While I was grieving her, searching crowds for her face, she was reading about me online. I look away, shaking my head.
She touches my arm, the inner flesh of my left arm, where my tattoo is. Quietly, she says, “You’re a doctor. And you have a cute cat.”
I relent. “His name is Hobo.”
She smiles, and right there, in that easy gesture, I see my lost sister—Josie, who read to me and cooked up schemes with me—and it nearly doubles me over.
“Hey,” she says softly, taking my arm. “Are you okay?”
“Not really. This is hard.”
“I know. It is. It’s hard for me, and I’ve known all along.” She gently turns me toward the parking lot. “I packed snacks. I thought I could take you to a place I like, so we can just talk. It might be awkward in a restaurant or something.”
I think of myself weeping and weeping and weeping on Javier’s shoulder. “That’s a good idea.”
She leads us to her car, a black SUV on the smaller end but luxurious. In the back seat are things that clearly belong to kids. I start to climb in on the right side, and then I see the wheel and round the car to the left. The passenger side.
“Sorry it’s a mess,” she says. “I’m starting a new project and it’s just—I never get everything done.”
“You were never exactly tidy.”
She lets go of a quick, bright burst of laughter. “That’s true. I drove you crazy.”
“You did.”
“Where the hell did that come from? It’s not like Mom was neat.” She starts the engine, and it hums into quiet life. A hybrid, which gives her points in my book. “Our destination is a little bit away but not terrible. Water?”
“Sure.”
She hands me a metal water bottle, very cold. “Sarah outlawed all plastic a while back.” In the words, I hear the hint of a New Zealand accent, the syllables slightly shortened. “Nothing plastic in the house at all.”
I’m quiet as we pull out, my emotions compressed and contained. It’s very hilly. We climb a steep one, go around and down another, up again to a village center that’s just as quaint as the others I’ve seen. “This is Howick,” she says. The streets fall away to the water, houses lined up all the way down.
“Pretty. The whole place is pretty.”
“It is. I love it. I feel like I ca
n breathe here.”
“We can’t sleep unless we can hear the ocean.”
Her breath catches audibly, and she looks at me quickly, then back to the road. “Right.”
I imitate her accent. “‘R-iii-ght,” I sort of drawl. “You don’t sound American anymore.”
“Have I picked up the accent?” she says, exaggerating the pinch of the words.
“You have, a bit. Maybe you sound Australian, though I wouldn’t really know.”
“Have you traveled, Kit?”
“No,” I say, and for the first time I let myself be myself. “I haven’t, but since I got here, I’ve really wondered why.”
“You work a lot, I guess.”
“Yeah, I mean, but I have a ton of vacation time stacked up.” I look out the window to the sea that sparkles on the other side of a hill. “Seriously, look at this place. Why haven’t I ever seen it before?”
“So what do you do instead?”
“Surf.” I pause, trying to think of anything else. “Surf and work and hang out with Hobo.”
It sounds pathetic, so I’m doubly irritated when she says, “Not married, then?”
“Nope.” A gurgling heat bubbles in my gut, the lava going liquid as I think of my empty house and the little girl—my niece—who stood on the promenade and told me she has experiments. “How long have you been married?”
Her hands, slim and tanned, show white at the knuckles where she’s holding on. The ring on her finger is discreet but a beautiful stone—some kind of pale green. “Eleven years. We’ve been together thirteen. I met him surfing at Raglan.”
“Wait. Raglan—the Raglan?” It was one of the litany of places we all recited to each other, me and Josie and Dylan.
“The very one,” she answers, smiling. “It’s gorgeous. Not very far away. We could drive down there and surf another day if you want to.”
“Maybe.” The entire conversation is surreal. But normal. I mean, what do you say to someone you haven’t seen in so many years? Where do you begin? Surfing is one of our languages.
On cue, she asks, “Have you surfed since you’ve been here?”
“I went to Piha. Which is actually what made me think of calling surf shops, which is how I actually figured out where you were.”
“Smart.”
Silence settles, only the soft radio playing between us. She asks, “How did you know to look in Auckland?”
“I saw you on the news, when the nightclub fire killed those kids.”
She sighs. “I figured.” A pause. “Yeah, that was a terrible night. I was having dinner with a friend at the Britomart when it happened.”
“At the Italian place?”
She looks at me. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“I went there. They said that you came in, but they didn’t know your name.”
“Good girls.”
A ripple of rage burns beneath the skin of my face at this brazen reinforcement of her long lie. “Mom saw you on the news too. She was the one who wanted me to come find you.”
“Hmm.” Her tone is unreadable.
“She’s different, Josie.”
“Mari.”
“Right. Because if things are not convenient, you can just leave them behind.”
She glances at me. “It wasn’t like that.”
I look out the window, wondering why I even bothered to come. Maybe I would have been happier never knowing she was alive. Again, tears—when I never, ever cry—threaten to well over. I mentally count backward from one hundred.
We turn off the main drag and start driving uphill under a thick canopy of local forest. Tree ferns with extravagant leaves and some kind of flowering shrub line the road, which is rutted and uneven. It ends in front of the house that was on the New Zealand television show.
“I saw this on the news. Why did you bring me here?”
She turns off the car and looks at me. “Because I need you to see the life I’ve built here.”
Stubbornly, I stay where I am. “Are you going to tell me the truth about what happened? Or are there just going to be more lies?”
“I swear, on all that I hold holy, that I will never tell you another lie as long as I live.”
I open the door and jump out. I’m not sure if I really want the entire truth. The prospect fills me with a sense of hollow anxiety. I look up toward the vivid blue sky and suddenly sense a host of half-known things lurking in gray darkness at the edges of my mind. My arms break out in gooseflesh, even though a soft breeze soughs over us as we walk toward the house. I rub my arms, trying to calm myself. “What is this place?”
“Sapphire House. It was built by a famous New Zealand actress from the thirties, Veronica Parker. She was murdered here.”
“That’s not creepy or anything.”
My sister, whose name feels strange on my tongue, stops before we get to the door and points back the way we came. In the distance is the ocean, in between a vast spread of the city. “At night, it sparkles all the way to the coastline.”
“Great. So you have a mansion and a family and nothing bad to bother you.”
“I deserve every single ounce of that. But can we do this part first? Please?”
I take a breath. Nod once.
She turns to the front door and unlocks it, and I follow her inside to the cool interior, which is just like the shots I saw on TV, only more amazing because of the scale. The foyer is round, opening to several rooms and a staircase that leads upward, and everything, everything is Art Deco. “Wow.”
“I know. C’mon.”
I follow her into a long room that faces the sea, a green sea tossing all the way to the horizon. A wide lawn spreads between the house and what is probably a cliff, and I’m drawn outside through the glass doors to the grass. A very soft wind rustles over my skin, lifts my hair. I capture it and look up to the back of the house, where balconies line the entire upper floor.
“Holy shit,” I say. “It’s gorgeous.”
“I’ve been flipping houses since 2004. I started down in Hamilton. When I met Simon, he lived in Auckland, and he convinced me to move up here with him. The market is insane here, as bad as or worse than the Bay Area, and I’ve done very well.”
“This is a flip?”
“Not exactly.” She tucks her hands in her back pockets. She’s as slim as ever, and just as flat-chested, and her hair suits her. “I’ve kind of been in love with the house and the story of it pretty much since I got here. We used to live over there a bit, and I could see it from our living room, shining up here on the hill. When the sun rises, it washes the whole thing pink, and it looks like a . . .” She pauses, looks at me, then back to the house. “A mermaid house.”
I cross my arms.
“Simon’s family has been in Auckland for a long time. They came with some of the first settlers, so he knows everyone and everything that’s happening, and they’ve been ‘dabbling’”—she puts the word in air quotes—“in real estate for a century. When the owner died, Simon snapped it up.”
“Because you love it.”
Simply, she turns to me and says, “Yes.”
I can only look at her for a moment, then look back up to the house. “I saw pictures of your family and you when I found out your name. He clearly adores you.”
“We have a good life, Kit. Much better than I deserve. But it’s real and true. We’ve built a world together. We have children, and now I’m going to make this house over for all of us.”
I look toward the sea, back to the right where a tall line of tree ferns make a scallop of the sky. “But it’s all built on a lie, right?”
She bows her head. Nods.
“I don’t know why you think that bringing me here would change how I feel right now!” The carefully contained emotions are restless beneath my skin, deep in my abdomen, there at the base of my skull. “You landed on your feet. Great! How does that change the fact that you faked your own death? You let us believe that you were dead!”
“
I know, I—”
“No, you don’t know, Josie. We had a memorial service for you!”
“Oh, I bet that was very well attended! Did you hire homeless guys to come in and cry or something? Because the only people left when I supposedly died were you and Mom. You hated me, and I hated her, so—who exactly was there to mourn me, Kit?”
“I never hated you! You hated yourself.” I refuse to let the tears fall, but they’re thick in my throat. “And believe me, I mourned you!”
“Did you?” The words are skeptical. “Really? Even after I cleared out your entire apartment?”
“I was furious, but I didn’t hate you.”
“I tried calling you. You never picked up.”
Which has haunted me more than I want to admit. “I had to keep my distance, Josie, but that didn’t mean I hated you.”
And for the first time, I see the lost Josie I knew then. “I’m so sorry I did that.”
I shake my head. “I mourned you. I didn’t want to,” I admit. “But I did. We both did. For months and months after you died, I combed the internet for any possibility that you could have survived.” I shake my head, winded. “For years, I’d think I saw you in a crowd and . . .”
She closes her eyes, and I see that tears are gathered on her lashes again. “I’m so sorry.”
“That doesn’t really help all that much.”
She takes a step closer. “Don’t you see, Kit, that I had to kill her? I had to start over.”
We’re standing face-to-face, both of us with our arms crossed. I’m so much taller than she is now. I think of the things I think I know about her, about what happened to her, this tiny woman who once loomed as large as a dragon over my life. “How did you do it?”
“Let’s go inside. I’ll make tea.”
She shows me around as the kettle boils, and then we carry our mugs into the lounge, where she opens all the doors to the sea breeze. We face each other on a sofa, and she tucks her legs up under her. Something about the way the light comes in strikes her scar, an uneven zigzag through her eyebrow that healed poorly. “The doctor who stitched you up did a terrible job,” I say. “I could have done better first year.”
“I think it was because it was so long before it got attention.” She touches it, the old wound. “Everybody else was so much worse off.”
When We Believed in Mermaids Page 24