One of the things I can’t make peace with is Dylan. I thought I knew him and understood him, but Josie’s revelations destroyed that vision of him.
Or maybe, honestly, I knew.
I saw them sometimes on the beach, late at night. Saw them bending their heads together and laughing, as if they were partners in some secret caper. It made me jealous enough that I think now, I did know. Appropriate or not, they had an intimate relationship, one that had nothing to do with me.
But what does all that mean for my relationship with him? My memories of him? All this time that was the one thing I could count on. Dylan loved me. He made my life better. He saved me, in so many ways.
It’s still true. It’s also true that he contributed to my sister’s downfall.
I don’t know how to reconcile those two versions of him.
On the water, I’m fine. I don’t have to think. I don’t have to feel. I can just ride the waves, become part of nature. Out there, I wonder if that’s what Dylan was doing, dissolving into nature. Trying, anyway.
In the end, that was exactly what he did. Drowning was the perfect death for him.
The waves are honestly not great, and I head back after only a half hour, peeling off my wet suit and donning a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, my hair tied up in a knot on top of my head. My mom won’t care.
My phone dings with a personal email, and I stand against my Jeep on the bluff where Eden used to be and open it.
Mi sirenita,
The sky tonight shines with orange light, reflected in the water. I walked to Ima for dinner, where I go very often now, and ate roast chicken and thought of you.
I hope you’re doing well. Your sister invited me to come for supper, and I told her I would be pleased. Sarah will be sad that you are not with me, but I will bring her fountain pen ink and tell her it comes from you. Perhaps you’ll truly be here soon. We are all waiting, wishing for your company.
Yours,
Javier
Every day, he writes something. A paragraph, like this one. A fragment of a poem—he’s quite fond of Neruda’s love poetry. It’s touching and sweet, and I write him back only every third or fourth time. It seems a foolish connection, one bound to fade away. And really, we had only a few days together. It’s ridiculous that I should be in a funk about it. Which my mother has carefully not commented upon.
I stand on the bluff over the empty cove and feel the ghosts around me. Dylan leans on the car, smoking a joint. My dad slaps the dust off his jeans, his watch in his shirt pocket. We never found it, and I cried for days over that one thing.
Neither of them was perfect. One was a hard man raised in a hard place. The other was warped by abuse.
Just as Josie was.
The revelation is soft, rolling through my body like a summer breeze. It eases the knots in my belly, unfurls the protective thorns over my heart. Maybe I don’t have to choose between Dylan as a villain and Dylan as my beloved hero. Maybe he was both. Maybe Josie was—is—both too. Heroine and villain.
Maybe we all are.
The ocean is calm. For the first time in weeks and weeks, I feel calm too. I still haven’t sorted out what to do about my job. I am tired of patching up humans who hurt themselves, and maybe I want to go back to animals. My first love was the sea, animals and fish in the water, and God knows they could use all the help they can get right now. I have plenty of money saved. I could look into arenas of study.
Maybe.
My stomach growls, and I hop in the Jeep, drive to my mom’s place. The sun is starting to peek out through the clouds, and it lifts my mood slightly. Maybe I just need a long vacation in a sunny place. I climb the stairs, sorting through the possibilities—Tahiti, Bali, the Maldives.
Spain.
Even the word makes all the hairs on my body hurt. I have to stop on the stairs and breathe through it, stuffing all those things back where they belong. Did I really fall in love with Javier?
Not in less than a week. That’s just ridiculous.
But then why do I miss him so much? It feels like the stars have fallen from the sky. Quite apart from everything else, I miss Javier specifically. I miss talking to him. Being myself with him.
I stomp the rest of the way up the stairs, yank open the door, and halt, uncomprehending.
“What are you doing here?”
“Surprise,” says my mom.
“Surprise!” says Sarah, and she bolts across the room to fling her body at me. “We all came to see you!”
Her body feels so solid and strong. My hands fall on her back, and I’m so glad to see her, so very, very glad that I’m afraid all my emotions are going to split their seams and rush out onto the floor, so I take some deep breaths. “I’m so glad to see you.”
Mari is standing with my mother, and Simon is behind them, and Leo is trying to look engaged.
And there, as if I conjured him, is Javier. He’s standing in the middle of my mother’s living room, looking elegant and European in a fine pale-lavender shirt with darker purple stripes, and tailored slacks, and good shoes, and he is wearing cologne and looks like everything good that ever was. “Hola, gatita,” he says, and smiles.
I look from one person to the next. “I don’t understand. What—”
“Sweetheart,” my mom says, “this is an intervention.”
Sarah is still leaning on me, hard, and I clasp her back. “Intervention? But I—”
My sister says, “Mom has been worried about you. She asked us to come.”
“Why? I’m fine.”
Simon shakes his head. It surprises me, and I say, “I was just out surfing, that’s all.”
“It’s a love intervention,” Mari says.
“Love?” The lava of emotions that I’ve been safeguarding, keeping carefully in place, starts to gurgle.
“Yeah,” Mari says, and comes forward, joining her daughter by putting her arms around me. The scent of her hair washes over me, making me dizzy, and then Simon joins, and my mother, and Javier. Even Leo, though I don’t think he really wants to. “We wanted you to know,” my sister says, “that you aren’t alone anymore.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say. “I’m—”
“We abandoned you,” my mother says. “All of us, in one way or another. Me and Josie and Dylan and your dad.”
“Not me,” Sarah says, and holds me closer.
“Nor me,” Javier says in his deep voice.
Simon chimes in, “You’re not alone anymore. We are all your family, and you can count on us.”
“And me,” says Sarah.
And there’s no holding back that lava flow. Like Mount Vesuvius, I blow. All the tears I’ve never cried, all the grief I never expressed, all the fury and the sorrow come pouring out until I’m sobbing like a very small girl, wailing while their hands stroke me and pet my head, while arms hold me solid and voices whisper, “Go ahead and cry; we’ve got you.”
I’ve been so lonely for such a very long time.
We’ve got you.
When I’m finally finished, and poor Leo has escaped to the beach outside, and my mother has led me to have a shower and wash my hot face, we all sit down to breakfast. She has only the two chairs at the table, so we hold our pancakes on our knees as we sit on the couch. Josie/Mari sits next to me.
“This has your fingerprint all over it,” I say. “You planned it, didn’t you?”
“Of course.” She smiles at me. “Not quite as good as the unicorn cake but not bad.”
My throat gets tight. “Way better than the cake.”
“Dude, there were at least two bottles of sprinkles on that cake.”
I laugh. “True.” I look at her. “Still. This is better.”
“I’m glad.”
Simon joins us. “Did Mari tell you that she solved the great mystery of the murder of Veronica Parker?”
“No! Who was it?”
She sighs deeply. “Sadly, it was George after all. He caught her having an affair with the
carpenter and attacked her. He probably didn’t mean to do it, but that was that.”
“How did you find out?”
“Helen’s journals,” Simon puts in. “They were buried in about a thousand pounds of magazines, but she clearly couldn’t part with them.”
“She was in love with George too,” Josie continues, “and she’s the one who leaked the affair, maybe hoping he’d turn to her in his grief. Instead, he killed Veronica, and Helen covered for him.”
“That’s a very sad story.”
“It explains why she only lived in that tiny corner all those decades.”
I nod. Across the room, Javier is listening intently to my mother, but as if he feels my gaze, he looks up. He tilts his head toward the door, and I nod. “Excuse me.”
We walk down the stairs in silence, and then he stops. “I need to remove my shoes for a proper walk on the beach.”
I wait while he takes off those very expensive shoes, and his socks, and rolls up the hem of his slacks. His bare feet, white and strong, make me think of the hot tub in Auckland, of the day he came down in bare feet to my room and I was leaving.
I swallow.
We head for the edge of the waves, and he takes my hand. “Okay?”
I nod, suddenly shy. Embarrassed that I’ve not responded to his emails very much and that I’ve been such a bitch, really. “Thank you for coming,” I say politely.
“Pssht,” he says. “I was very nearly on a plane the next day, but it seemed you might need some time.”
“We haven’t known each other very long.”
“That’s true,” he says. His hair lifts in the breeze, blowing away from his extraordinary face.
“It feels rash.”
He looks down at me. “Love is rash.”
“Is this love?”
“Yes, mi sirenita.” He stops and takes my face in his hands. “It is absolutely love. For me, certainly.”
I look up at him, resting in those big hands, trusting him. “I’m so afraid.”
“I know. But you are not alone—I promise you that.” He kisses me very gently.
“What does mi sirenita mean?”
“My little mermaid,” he says, smiling.
“And gatita?”
“Kitten,” he says, as if it’s obvious.
The beach is empty of my ghosts, but I feel Dylan with me, laughing gently. “Those were Dylan’s names for me.”
“Mm. They’re my names now.” He kisses me, and I kiss him back, and I have a million questions, but they’ll be so much easier to answer if I don’t have to answer them alone.
“I missed you so much,” I whisper.
“I know. Because we are twin souls, you and I.”
“Alma gemela,” I say. “Can you have more than one?”
“Of course! My friend who killed himself, he was one of mine. Your sister is one for you, and your niece.” He chuckles.
“Yeah. Sarah for sure.”
He nods, tucks my hair behind my ear. “Let’s walk.”
So we do.
Epilogue
Kit
In the early dawn, Josie and I go to the cove and carry our surfboards down the bluff. We’re wearing heavy wet suits against the cold water. It’s a little blustery, the wind creating sharp waves. We don’t speak, just stand on the hard-pressed sand where we once slept in a tent and made s’mores and gazed at the stars, watching the waves roll toward us, one after the other, endlessly, as they will for all time.
She looks at me. “Ready?”
I nod, and we paddle around the rocks out into the open. A lot of other surfers are there too, eager to ride, but it doesn’t matter. Every surfer and every wave is a unique combination. We’re all there for the same reason. For love.
My sister and I lose ourselves in the moment, in the salt on our lips, the boards under our feet, the tickle of water along our fingers. I follow her blonde head as I’ve always done, and then suddenly she waves for me to lead, and I do. The wave is beautiful, breaking in a powerful curl, and I leap to my feet at exactly the right moment, feeling everything in my body center and steady.
All of time condenses and coalesces, and I can feel Dylan behind me, his arms at my sides in case I fall. He laughs at my power, and I grow twenty feet tall.
I am alive. I am human. I am loved.
Behind me, my sister whoops, and I glance back, raising a shaka, and whoop myself.
Acknowledgments
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an army to get a book into the world. I’m wildly grateful to my whole team at Lake Union—editors Alicia Clancy and Tiffany Yates Martin, who help make my work shine so much brighter; Gabriella Dumpit and the entire marketing team, who do such fabulous work behind the scenes; and of course Danielle Marshall, whose vision guides us all. Thanks to my warrior agent, Meg Ruley, for all the things she does all the time.
Thanks to my beta readers, who helped me scout for errors—Yvonne Lindsey, native Aucklander, a great writer and kindly friend; Anne Pinder, for help with Madrid and the quirks of Spanish speakers; Jill Barnett, for her insightful read and suggestions and knowledge of California, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and surfing. Any mistakes remaining are entirely my own.
And most of all, thanks to my readers, all of you. I love each and every second of our communion.
About the Author
Photo © 2009 Blue Fox Photography
Barbara O’Neal is the author of twelve novels of women’s fiction, including The Art of Inheriting Secrets, How to Bake a Perfect Life, and The All You Can Dream Buffet. Her award-winning books have been published in more than a dozen countries, including France, England, Poland, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Brazil. She lives in the beautiful city of Colorado Springs with her beloved, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent.
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