When We Believed in Mermaids(105)
Chapter Thirty-Five Kit
One month later
It’s been a brutal night at the ER, a teenager killed when he crashed his car through a barrier wall and landed in the river; a fentanyl overdose we couldn’t revive; an old woman who broke her leg in two places falling down the stairs, a hideous injury with bones protruding.
Which sets me off on some weird level. I am furious with the world in general for the rest of the night.
It’s busy. All the usual things. Broken wrists and knocked-out teeth and food poisoning. The human body is a delicate, amazing creation. It takes almost nothing to completely destroy it, and yet it takes a lot. Most of us manage to stay on the planet, in our bodies, for seventy or eighty years, all of us amassing scars along the way, each one with a story. The chunk of plaster that marks your face forever, that belt buckle, those cigarette burns.
My mom texts me: Want breakfast this morning? Blueberry pancakes.
She’s worried about me. I know she is. And I’m trying to be at least somewhat normal so she doesn’t have to be afraid to leave and go see her grandchildren, a trip that is arranged for the middle of next month. I’m happy for her. She’s done the work. She’s earned it. I text back, Sure. I’m surfing. Will come after.
I haven’t been able to settle into anything since I got home. Work makes me restless. I can’t sit for more than five minutes with my mother. Can’t read. Hobo is fine, just as my mother said, and she thinks he might want a companion.
All I do is surf, whenever I can get out there. This morning, the surf forecast is not particularly brilliant, but I don’t care. I load up my board and, on a whim, head for the cove. I haven’t been there since I’ve been home. Maybe I’m looking for answers.
To what, though? Everything that ever happened to anyone, ever? Life is sometimes just wretched; that’s all. I was lucky to have the good years at Eden with Dylan, and Josie, and Cinder. All of us happy, on the beach, before everything that happened. Some people don’t even get that.
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.