When We Believed in Mermaids

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Triage,” I say.

  “That’s right. You’re an ER doctor.” She smiles. “By the way, did you save a kid’s life on Rangitoto?”

  I blink. “What? How did you know about that?”

  “Simon asked me. It was in all the news. Human interest story and all that.”

  “It was me, but it wasn’t exactly a big deal.” She starts to interrupt, and I raise a hand to stall her. “Remember how kids always jumped off the cliffs? And how every year somebody would crack their head wide open? It was me standing right on the rocks where they go in and seeing that somebody knocked themselves out on the way down.” I shrug. “I was in the water before he was, I think.”

  She laughs. “I love it. Still heroic.”

  “Whatever.” I’m feeling a little faint or something and take a long gulp of tea. “Tell me the story.”

  “Okay.” She takes a breath. “I was in France with some people. We’d been traveling all over, surfing. A lot of drugs.” She looks down into her cup, and I see the weight of it on her shoulders. “I was . . . bad.” She lifts a shoulder, meets my eyes. “You saw me. When I stole all your stuff. I’m so sorry about that.”

  “Later.”

  A nod. “So the plan was to go to Paris and then down to Nice. I didn’t have much at that point. A backpack and my board. That’s all most of us had. We caught the train in Le Havre. I went to find a bathroom, but the first one was filled, and I just kept going down to the next one. I was high, shockingly enough, and when I came out, I turned the wrong way, and I got all the way to the back of the train before I realized it.”

  My stomach aches with the tale.

  “The bomb blew when I was in the back. The cars were all derailed, and I was thrown out.” She’s frowning toward the past, over my left shoulder. “I don’t honestly know what happened right after, just that I woke up, and I was . . . okay.”

  She stops. Looks at me with alarm.

  “What?”

  “I just realized that I’ve never told anyone this story. Ever.”

  And because I loved her once, I reach out and touch her knee. “Just tell it.”

  She closes her eyes. “It was awful. People were dead. They were screaming. There was all this smoke and sirens and . . . noise. Smells. I just wanted to find my friends, find my backpack—like, that’s all I could think about. My pack.”

  She stops. Looks out to the ocean. Taps her fingers against her cup.

  I’m quiet, letting her tell the story.

  “The closer I got to where they should be, the worse it got. Like, not just dead people but . . . pieces. An arm. I saw an arm, and I threw up, but I just couldn’t stop. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was thinking; I was just fixated on that pack.”

  I nod. “Shock.”

  “I guess.” She takes a breath. “My friend Amy had this ridiculous little-girl pack. It was pink with flowers, and she thought it was ironic, but it was just stupid.

  “I found it and picked it up and kept looking for mine. But—” She stops. The silence stretches for thirty seconds, a minute. I don’t interrupt it, and eventually she says, “I found Amy. Her face and her chest were fine, but something fell on the rest of her. She was dead. I could see other bodies and a surfboard, and I just—I just grabbed her pack and started walking. I walked . . . away. I walked all the way into Paris. It took hours.”

  Outside, a bird makes a robot noise. The sea crashes against rocks somewhere. Inside is still.

  Josie looks up. “She had a New Zealand passport and three hundred dollars. I found a ride on a freighter and took off. Came here.”

  My heart suddenly aches. “Damn, Josie. How did you get so bad?”

  She lets go of a sad, short laugh. “A day at a time.”

  I bow my head. “Why didn’t you let us know? I mean, you took off constantly.”

  “When I was on the freighter, I detoxed. It was awful. I was sick as a dog for weeks, and when I was finally done, I had plenty of time to think. It takes a while for a freighter to go from Paris to New Zealand.” She presses her lips together. “I had to start completely fresh.”

  I close my eyes. “You abandoned me.”

  She knows I’m not talking about when she supposedly died. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  “Simon doesn’t know anything about this?”

  “No.” Her lips pale faintly. “He would hate me.” She shifts gears suddenly. “You have to come get to know the kids, Kit. You’ll love Sarah. She’s just like you.”

  My calm snaps. “What are you even talking about? We’re just going to forget everything and start over like nothing happened, like you didn’t break our hearts into a million pieces?”

  “That would be my preference,” Mari says, and the words are calm. Clear.

  It makes me wonder if I can just let it all go. Set down the burden, drain the boil, and stop punishing everyone, including myself.

  Mari says, “Come to dinner tonight, get to know my family. See who I am now.”

  “I don’t want to add to the lie.” But if I’m honest, I’m aching to spend time with my niece and nephew. I also feel uncharacteristically nervous, and my mind goes immediately to Javier. Despite my usual solitariness, I feel the need for someone in my corner. “Can I bring someone?”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Of course. Come at seven.” She swallows. “My life is in your hands, Kit. There is nothing I can do to stop you from telling the whole story if you so choose. Please don’t.”

  I stand up. “We’ll be there at seven. You can take me back now.”

  She nods, and I see that she’s again weeping.

  It infuriates me. “Stop it! You don’t get to cry over this. You’re not the one who was left behind, the one who was lied to. If anyone should be crying, it’s me.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what to feel,” she says, her chin lifting.

  “You’re right.” My voice is tired when I say, “Just take me back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Mari

  I drop Kit back at the ferry. I offered to take her into the CBD, but by then she was done with me. As I head home over the bridge, I’m captured by a traffic jam caused by an accident somewhere up ahead.

  Stuck, I roll down my window and turn up the radio a jot. Lorde, the local hero, sings her song “Royals,” about a bunch of blue-collar kids imagining what it would be like to be rich. In my current mood, it brings back a lot of yearnings and memories. I wonder what Kit actually knows about everything. Billy. Dylan. My addictions, which grew with the weed Dylan and I shared and multiplied after the earthquake when we went to live in Salinas. I wonder if she knows I was selling weed then to keep myself in whatever I needed—booze, weed, some pills, though I was never much of a pill popper. Too unreliable.

  Traffic edges forward slightly, and I realize it’s nearly three, and I’ve invited Kit and her plus-one over for a dinner that isn’t even started. Is there anything to cook in the house? I briefly consider takeaway, but I really want to cook for her. Cook something from our childhood, something beautiful and comforting, to show that I’ve turned over this leaf too. She did all the cooking after we moved to Salinas, food my mother and I often ignored or took for granted—stews and soups in the winter, fresh salads and homemade pizzas in the summer.

  What would she like? What would my dad have cooked for such a family reunion?

  Pasta, for sure. I run through a bunch of ideas—ravioli will take too long; lasagna is too ordinary. Bucatini is lovely but also time-consuming. My mouth tastes eggplant and red peppers, some olives, some Parmesan. Yes. Vermicelli alla siracusana with my dad’s favorite preserved lemons, which I keep on hand. And cauliflower salad. And cake. Chocolate cake. I can do all of it even if it takes an hour or more to get home. On the steering wheel, I push a button to make a phone call and tell my phone to dial Simon. He doesn’t answer, but I leave a message to let him know Kit and her friend are coming for sur
e, and he needs to pick up wine. We rarely have any in the house.

  Kit, in my house. With my children. My husband. The delicate, sturdy life I’ve built here.

  My stomach turns over. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve done in my life, and a part of me wonders why I’m doing it this way, the most dangerous way. Anything could go wrong. A slip of the tongue. A full revelation from Kit.

  But it feels like the only way, as if I have to cross a tiny, rickety bridge to the next stage of my life or remain here on the precipice, poised to fall, forever.

  It occurs to me that I don’t have to wait for the revelation. I could just tell Simon myself.

  But I imagine his face turning to stone, and I can’t. I just can’t.

  Traffic is immovable. My mind wanders backward.

  Helplessly, I follow.

  When my father and Dylan beat each other up in the kitchen of our house, we didn’t see Dylan for days and days. There were no cell phones then, so we couldn’t call and nag him, just wait for him to return.

  Which he always had before.

  Kit was furious with me for fighting with my dad, for supposedly causing the fight with Dylan and Dad, but it wasn’t my fault, and I wasn’t about to take the blame. My dad and I weren’t really talking either, and neither were my mom and dad—unless they were fighting, bellowing at the top of their lungs, throwing things.

  Everything was falling apart.

  We found out where Dylan was when the hospital in Santa Barbara called. He’d been in a brutal motorcycle accident only days after he’d taken off, and his injuries had been so severe that they had induced a coma. “How severe?” my mother asked over the phone. The hand that held her super-skinny Virginia Slims cigarette trembled, and my stomach dropped out of my body. Kit, standing nearby, went stone-still.

  The three of us drove down to see him. He was conscious again but really drugged, his face swollen, black and red, his mouth torn and stitched, his right arm broken cleanly, his collarbone broken, his skull cracked. But the worst of it was a mauled right leg, broken in four places, pinned back together precariously. He wouldn’t be able to walk for six months.

  The doctors showed my mom his X-rays when I was sitting there. Kit had gone to get snacks or something, and I don’t know why the doctor said anything when I was there. Maybe he thought I wasn’t listening, because I’d been reading The Little Prince to Dylan, even though he was asleep.

  “Is he your son?”

  “No,” my mother said, without adding the usual justification that he was her nephew. “He works for us, helps take care of the girls.”

  “How long has he been with you?”

  She was uncomfortable. I knew that he had lied and said he was sixteen, but he was really only thirteen. She went with the lie and then some. “Three years. He was seventeen.”

  It had been six years, and she knew it.

  “Well, you see the new damage here, on his leg, his arm, his collarbone. Cracked cheekbone seems almost healed.” I watched the pointer pick out bright-white spots on the gray bones.

  She nodded.

  Then he moved to the other leg, a ragged gray line across the ankle, one in the wrist, several across ribs. Old injuries, the doctor said. “I’m not sure he ever had medical attention for them.”

  My mother covered her mouth. “Jesus wept. Who would do such a thing?”

  “You’d be surprised,” the doctor said.

  I stood next to Dylan’s bed and covered the old broken wrist with my hand, then bent down to put my head against it. I thought of all the scars, the cigars and the belt buckle, and I wanted to kill somebody.

  Very slowly.

  It was a brutal, powerful emotion.

  When Kit found out, she cried and cried, but I never shed a single tear.

  When he was able to get out of the hospital, he still faced a long recuperation, with three eager nurses to fetch and carry, bring him books and play cards and games with him. At first he was withdrawn and sad, huddled in his room refusing to come down, even when we figured out he’d be safe coming down on his butt. He spoke to none of us, just looked out the window listlessly.

  But he hadn’t counted on the Bianci women. My mother aired the room every morning, opening the curtains, letting in a fresh ocean breeze, changing his sheets and his dressings, forcing him to endure a sponge bath, which she administered privately until he was well enough to do it himself.

  Kit brought him shells and feathers and told him about surf conditions and who’d done what out on the waves.

  I read to him, sometimes for hours at a time. I went to the library at school specifically to find adventure stories and to a used bookstore in Santa Cruz for paperbacks I thought might have a good story to keep him involved. He vetoed anything violent, which left out a lot of horror and adventure, but I kind of got it. I found some books in my mom’s room that were thick historical tales, not exactly the Johanna Lindsey I liked so much but more involved. Green Darkness, Taylor Caldwell, stories about the past. He liked those.

  My dad was contrite—he knew he’d been in the wrong over both the fight with me and with Dylan—but his only concession was to let Dylan come back, with the promise that he’d have a job when he healed.

  Sitting in traffic on the Harbour Bridge, barely moving, I wonder why I was reading to him instead of him reading to himself. It seems like there was some reason, but I don’t remember what it was. I read to him all through the spring and into the summer as he started to heal.

  Physically, anyway. Mentally, he was not okay. He didn’t talk much. He took a lot of pills—back then no one had heard of an opioid crisis, and the doctors were very free with Vicodin and Percocet.

  The summer was hot. We had no air-conditioning, and I tried talking him into coming downstairs, at least, where he could sit on the deck overlooking the ocean and get some sunlight. “You’re as white as a ghost,” I teased.

  He only shrugged.

  It was summer. I was surfing and hanging out with my friends on the beach down the road from our cove. I was fourteen going on fifteen and hot, hot, hot. I knew it too. My hair had grown down to my butt, and when I took it out of a braid, the blonde waves against my dark-brown skin made the boys crazy. It also made them crazy that I could out-surf most of them. Not the way Kit could—even two years younger than me, she was a better surfer. She was too tall and hippy to be considered cute, but that seemed to play into the respect the guys gave her on the waves.

  I didn’t care, not really, if she was better in that way. I was queen in all other ways. If I wanted a guy, I could get him, even if he was older, like eighteen. On the beach at night, smoking dope and learning to snort coke with the beach bums, I gathered a lot of tricks for pleasing guys too. Hand jobs, blow jobs. I let them take off my top, but nobody touched my bottoms. I liked kissing, a lot, feeling that pressure and the power it gave me.

  I didn’t go all the way, which somehow made me think it was okay. I was young. I lived on the beach. I surfed and partied and made out. What else was there to do?

  Kit did things another way. Dylan’s injuries, past and present, focused her attention on the body, on medicine, and she applied to some geeky camp in LA for aspiring doctors, and naturally she got in—which curtailed my partying because my parents were also going to be out of town for two weeks at some conference for restaurants, and it was in Hawaii. They were making it a second honeymoon. By my count, it was more like the fifth honeymoon or the twentieth. Over and over and over, they battled furiously, then came back together.

  This time, I was left in charge of Dylan. I was pissed off about it at first. He was so boring that it was ridiculous. Even when I read the really sexy parts in books, he didn’t look at me or respond or anything, just kept staring out the window.

  But he’d been there for us, both Kit and me, and I couldn’t leave him lying upstairs all alone for two weeks. The first couple of days, I tried again to coax him out of bed, get him downstairs, but he would only use his crut
ches on the upper level. He hadn’t gone downstairs since he’d come home.

  I carried his meals upstairs. Carried his dishes back down. Brought him clean clothes. Medicine. Helped him to the shower. “Wash your fucking hair this time,” I yelled.

  Three or four days in, it was close to evening, and hot, and I was sick of the whole scene. “Come on, Dylan. Get your ass out of bed, and let’s get outside.”

  “You can go,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I rolled my eyes. “This is ridiculous. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  His silvery aqua eyes glowed in the twilight. “You wouldn’t understand, Grasshopper.”

  “Oh, why, because you’re the only person who ever had bad things happen to them?”

  He whipped his head around. “No!” He reached for my hand, and I let him take it. “I’m just so goddamn tired.”

  “Of what?”

  He closed his eyes, and his lashes made long shadows over his high cheekbones. His mouth, so battered, was healed now, and the soft evening washed his lips with pink light. He was like a fairy who’d stumbled into the wrong land. It made my chest ache to think that he might really actually kill himself one of these times. Acting on some wild impulse, I leaned in and kissed that beautiful mouth.

  It was electric. My mouth buzzed, and it sent a shock through every nerve in my body, and for a long moment—I don’t know how long—a minute, maybe, or two, he responded, almost as if it was automatic or he was high, or both, probably. It didn’t matter to me why. My body blazed so hard I thought I might faint as we kissed, as his lips parted and our tongues touched.

  He pushed me away. “Josie. Stop. No.”

  I yanked back, aware that my face was bright red. I tossed my hair over my shoulder. “Just wanted to get you moving.” I dropped his hand. “Get over yourself, dude.”

  From the top of the dresser, I grabbed his pain pills. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  It took two days, but he finally roared out his frustration and came down the stairs on his ass. His hair had come loose, and he wore only a pair of boxers, his leg too awkward for even split shorts. “Give me the fucking pills.”