When We Believed in Mermaids(14)
No. The pain I keep shoved down deep in a cavern leaks out.
Just no.
More than a decade of practice gives me the tools to quash the memories. I have a million errands to run before the children get out of school, and unlike my own mother, I like being there for them. I wonder if Sarah has fared better today. As I turn to go, I spy a row of Agatha Christie and grin, nabbing one at random. A person can never go wrong with Christie.
The timer on my phone goes off, startling me. I’ve been here for three hours, lost in the past. I collect my things, making sure to double-check the locks and that I’ve left no lights on.
On the way out, I change my mind and turn on the light in the study, a beacon in the darkness. A sign that the house is not deserted. It makes me anxious that everyone knows Helen died and the house is empty. To both my and Simon’s surprise, there is no alarm system, a fact that is being rectified next week.
I let myself out into the overwhelming heat of early afternoon. The full weight of sunshine slams the top of my head, and I have to consciously take a deep breath in the wet, wet air. As I lock the door behind me, a wash of dread runs the length of my neck.
Mermaids and fountain pens. Across the screen of my memory, Kit and Dylan sat at the scarred, solid table that occupied one corner of the house kitchen, bent over wide-ruled paper, practicing letters with tails—g, p, q. I wrote a line of Zs, capital and small, like Zorro.
A ripple of warning moves through me. I raise my head to look around, feeling my ghosts gather and whisper. My father, my mother, Dylan. My sister.
I thought I could walk away. That I would get used to missing her. I never have.
On the way back down the hill, I wonder what would happen if the truth of my life came out. The thought of all I could lose sucks the air out of my lungs, and I have to turn up the radio and start singing to avoid having a panic attack.
“Get a hold of yourself,” I say aloud.
Josie Bianci is dead. I intend for her to stay that way.
Chapter Five
Kit
Leaving the site of the nightclub fire, I look around at the other businesses in the area. It’s clearly a popular spot—T-shirt and sandwich shops interspersed with restaurants and hotel entrances. Maybe Josie has been to one of them. Maybe somebody will remember her.
I cross the street and peer into each window I pass, but nothing particularly leaps out. She could have been anywhere, doing anything.
A little aimlessly, I walk up one block and down the next, looking for something, anything, that suggests my sister. But there is pretty much everything—a high-end jewelry store, a boutique selling tiny couture dresses, a two-story bookstore packed to the brim. It makes me feel slightly breathless to imagine asking about Josie in any of them, and I can’t make my feet stop.
Until the window of a stationery shop halts me, lures me inside with a display of ink in jeweled-looking bottles. At this point, I have more pens and ink than I could possibly use in three lifetimes, but that’s not the point. The store has a display of Krishna inks, small-batch inks in swirling, shimmering colors. I have a weakness for shimmery ink, though I have stopped using it for prescriptions and stick with a Very Serious, fast-drying black for those.
The rest of the time, I lean toward the flashy two-tone inks. I’ve never seen this brand before, and I stand there playing with the colors for quite some time. A Goldfish Gold is amazing, but I never seem to use orange or yellow inks. One called Sea and Storm attracts me, and the nonshimmery but still gorgeous turquoise called Monsoon Sky. It reminds me of another turquoise ink I had at ten or eleven, during the first crazy wave of passion when Dylan, Josie, and I discovered the art of calligraphy. Which of us started? It’s hard to remember now, where and how it began, only that we all fell in love with it, writing mannerly notes, leaving them in elegant handwriting for our parents or each other. Dylan loved Chinese calligraphy, practicing the characters for crisis and love and ocean that he found in a library book.
I carry the ink to the counter, intending to then go look at pens, but my stomach growls, reminding me that all I’ve had to eat are two bananas and two apples.
I force myself to ask the girl behind the counter, “Have you worked here long?”
“A year or so.” She smiles, wrapping my ink in tissue paper.
I’m about to ask if she might remember someone, my sister, that is, with her distinctive scar, but my face goes hot as I consider it. Instead, I simply pay and carry my package out with me, cursing myself as I go.
How will I find her if I never look for her?
My feet carry me back up the hill, and I shop in a grocery store tucked into the basement of another building, picking up a bottle of wine and fresh bread, more fruit and a half dozen eggs, and a chunk of cheese, which all fit into my pack. I don’t intend to cook for myself much, since all these restaurants deserve sampling, but it’s good to have a few things on hand.
Wandering into a little alleyway, I find a row of eateries with tables and chairs set out in the gathering twilight. An Italian spot catches my eye. “One, please,” I say to the host. “May I sit outside?”
“Of course, of course. Right this way.”
He settles me between a chubby young couple and a sharply dressed businessman who gets up the minute I sit down, chattering irritably into his phone as he hurries away. The Italian host tsks, shaking his head as he clears the table and wipes it down.