When We Believed in Mermaids(24)

“Montauk. You’d love it there.”

“Okay, you got me. I’m jealous.”

“Yeah.” She grinned that impish, charming, encompassing smile. White teeth but not perfectly straight because she should have had braces and my parents never got around to it. Neither of us saw a dentist until we were in middle school, and only then because Josie had a very bad molar, and Dylan had insisted they get her in to see someone.

“Have you ever considered surfing professionally?” I asked.

She stirred her straw around in her ice, gave me a half-tilted smile. “Nah. I’m not that good.”

“Bullshit. You just have to focus, make that the center of everything.”

She gave me a slow one-shoulder shrug, her mouth twisting into a wry dismissal. “No fun. I don’t have your drive.”

I ate my burger for a time, focusing there, on the food that wasn’t from a box or bag.

“I’m so proud of you, Kit,” Josie said again.

“Thanks.”

“How’s Mom?”

“Fine. You should go see her.”

“Maybe.” Another dismissive lift of one shoulder. “I’m not here for long.”

Maybe I was jealous; maybe I missed her. Maybe it was a combination of both, but I said, “Are you just going to wander around your whole life?”

She met my gaze. “What would be wrong with that?”

“You need a job, a profession, something you can do to support yourself when—”

“When I’m old and ugly?”

“No.” I scowled.

“I don’t have your brains, Kit. I was a bad student, and no college is going to let me in, so basically I can suffer along at some pissant community college, or I can do odd jobs and surf and love my life.”

“Do you love it?”

A flicker over her eyes before she lowered them. “Of course.”

I didn’t want to fight. “Good. I’m proud of you too.”

“Don’t say things you don’t mean.”

I ducked my head, and it was all nothing but polite until the end. She ate every bite on the plate, right down to the lettuce leaf, then blotted her mouth. Cloudy light fell through the window to her bright hair, the tips of her eyelashes. A part of me was suddenly three, leaning on her as she read aloud to me, and five, tucked into a sleeping bag next to hers under the shelter of a tent. The images made me ache. How much I missed her when she deserted me! How much I still did. I looked away, thought of my immunology test. Facts and figures, facts and figures.

“Do you ever think of what might have happened if Dylan never came?” she asked suddenly. “Or if the earthquake hadn’t wrecked the restaurant?”

Her words slammed into a heavily fortified box in my heart. “I try to look forward.”

“What if, though? What if Dad was still up there at Eden, cooking, and maybe Mom got her act together and we went home for weekends or holidays and Dad told jokes and—”

“Stop.” I closed my eyes, an ache along the bottom of my lungs. “Please. I just can’t.”

Her face was haunted, adding luminosity to her cheekbones, depth to her dark eyes. “What would have happened to us without him?” She shook her head, turned those tortured eyes on me. “Our parents were horrible, Kit. Why did they neglect us like that?”

“I don’t know.” My words were hard, erecting a wall against the past. “I have to focus on the present.”

Again, she ignored me. “Why couldn’t we save Dylan?” When she turned that gaze on me, tears edged her lower lids, never quite spilling. “Don’t you miss him?”

I clenched my jaw. Swallowed away my own grief. “Of course I do. All the time.” I had to pause, bow my head. “But he wasn’t savable. He was already too broken when he showed up.”

“Maybe.” Her voice broke slightly, going husky. “But what if things happened to make him take that last step? I mean . . .”

“What things, Josie?” I was both impatient and weary. She had gone over this subject a million times when we were teenagers. “He was always going to die young. Nothing pushed him over the edge except his own demons.”

She nodded, dashed away a tear that dared fall, and stared out the window. “He was happy for a long time, wasn’t he?”

I reach out and take her hand. “Yes. I think he was.”

She clutched my hand tight, her head bowed, her hair falling in a curtain around her face. The obscuring mists of my emotion cleared, and I could see her objectively, as if she were a stranger who’d wandered into the ER, a too-thin young woman with dry skin and chapped lips. Dehydrated, I’d note, probably an addict. I wanted, suddenly, to take care of her.

“I miss all of it,” I volunteered. “Dad and Dylan and Cinder.” My voice grew croaky. “I swear to God, I miss that dog like a limb.”

“Best dog ever.”

I nodded. “He was.” I shook my hair out of my face. “I miss the restaurant. The patio, the cover. Our bedroom.” I take a breath. “Sleeping on the beach in our tent. That was the best.”

“It was.”

She ran a fingertip over the scar on her forehead. “The earthquake wrecked everything.”