When We Believed in Mermaids(25)

“I guess.” A little burn of impatience edged my spine. “Dylan and Cinder were already gone.”

“I know that. Why do you have to be so mean in the middle of something like this?”

“It’s not mean. It’s just reality.” Facts and figures.

“Yeah, well, reality isn’t always what you think it is. Sometimes things are more complicated than simple facts.”

Like our parents. Like our childhood. Like the earthquake. “You weren’t even there that day,” I said, a rare moment of furious honesty. “I had to sit there on the edge of the cliff by myself for hours, while I knew Dad was probably dead down there. And all you ever seem to remember is that you got a cut head.”

“Oh, Kit!” She grabbed both my hands. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. You’re right. That must have been terrible.”

I didn’t take my hands away, but I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at her. “I know it was bad in Santa Cruz too, but—”

She slid out of her side of the booth and into mine, flinging her body around me. “I’m sorry. I’m so selfish sometimes.”

The smell of her, the essence of Josie, unlike any other scent in the world, enveloped me, and I was lost in my love for her, my adoration, my fury. The hungry, lonely cells of my body drank it in for long minutes. Then I extracted myself.

“Life is always a mixed bag.”

“I guess so.”

“But I can’t imagine who we’d be without Dylan. Can you?”

I didn’t even want to. “It doesn’t matter. It is what it is.”

It was my turn to look away, out the window, to the promise of the ocean on the blank blue horizon. “I could really use a walk on the beach after this,” I offered. “Maybe find some mermaid coins.”

“That would be really lucky,” she said.

That was the day we impulsively got our tattoos, sitting side by side at a tattoo parlor near Ocean Beach as twilight moved in.

I run my fingers over the tattoo. It’s elegantly, delicately drawn, and I’ve never regretted it, though I’ve never done anything that impulsive before or since. Maybe I just wanted to be close to her again.

Lucky, I think now, sitting on my bed in Auckland, watching a band of light leak into the horizon. It wasn’t like she’d had much, something I’d always been too self-righteous to see.

Josie. So beautiful. So lost. So smart. So doomed.

Who would the woman I saw that day in San Francisco have become? Will I find a party girl, somebody still surfing the world? She’s pretty long in the tooth for that now, but I wouldn’t put it past her. Or maybe she’s found a way to be connected to her passion and work with it, like the women who opened a woman-centered surf shop in Santa Cruz. Or maybe she’s just a pothead, smoking her life away.

I sip my tea, which is going cold. It’s probably not the latter. At some point, she must have turned herself around or she wouldn’t have survived. Her addiction had become so extreme by the last time I saw her that nothing short of a miracle would have saved her.

On the laptop, I bring up the image of her from the news. It’s a surprisingly clear shot, and there’s nothing dissipated or weary about that face at all. The haircut is expensive, sharp, or maybe just recent. Her face is not bloated, which tends to show up on long-term drinkers, and in fact, she doesn’t look a lot older than she did fifteen years ago, which is classic Josie. She’s still beautiful. Still lean.

Still herself.

Where am I going to find her?

I walk to the sink, dump the cold tea, fill the kettle again, and lean on the counter while it boils, my arms crossed.

In solving medical puzzles, I’ve learned to always, always go back to the actual known facts. A patient presents with something mysterious—start there. Stomach pain and rash. What did she eat? What has she been doing the past twenty-four hours? How old is she? Live alone? Eat with friends or family? Take a shower?

So I start where I am with Josie.

No. Scratch that.

Start with a fact: a blonde woman with a scar exactly like my sister’s was filmed at the site of a nightclub fire five nights ago.

The kettle clicks off, and I pour boiling water over my tea bag in the tiny cup and wish for a mug that would last a little while before I putter back to the computer on the bed.

What time was the blonde woman filmed? I have to look that up and find the time stamp: ten p.m. New Zealand time, which would have been two a.m. my time. Just about right. I must have caught the news as the first reports were coming in.

Okay, what would have been open on a Friday night at ten p.m. in that area? Pretty much everything, I discover. All the restaurants, all the clubs and bars.

But again, facts. She is a woman of means, judging by the haircut and the expensive sweater. Maybe she had met friends . . . I scroll around the map, looking at possibilities to add to my list. One establishment leaps out at me, an Italian restaurant in Britomart, the upscale shopping area next to the harbor. I send the directions to my phone. I’ll go down there and show the photo around. Maybe somebody will have seen her. Even better, maybe they know her. Maybe she’s a regular.

But nothing is open until much later. It’s just now gone seven, and I’m restless. The building has a pool. I’ll head down there, do some laps, and then come back and get ready to go out.