When We Believed in Mermaids(26)

Chapter Eight

Mari

I’m frying eggs from Sarah’s hens when the earthquake hits. It starts low, that slight disorientation you get that feels like maybe you turned too fast or lost your footing, and then the sound, the tinkle of glasses in the cupboard. Urgently, I turn off the gas and shout for my family, running for the door to open it and let the dogs out. The birds are hushed as I dash outside.

For a little while, I think I’m going to be okay this time. It’s not violent, just a slow, easy tumbler, more of an aftershock than quake.

The kids are still inside. I hear something rattling and the thud of something falling over in the shed, and I think I should go check it out, but I’m plastered to the trunk of the palm tree, my cheek pressed hard into the bark, my arms straining.

I gauge the intensity of it from long experience, not a six but maybe in the high-four, low-five range. Enough to knock things from grocery shelves, tools from the shelves in the shed. I wonder where the epicenter is, who is getting it now. Maybe it’s offshore, and the damage will be minimal. There have been some substantial earthquakes in the country since I arrived, the worst being the two back-to-back that nearly destroyed Christchurch, and another just a couple of years ago on the South Island near a little tourist town. Simon mourned Kaikoura, a place he’d visited a lot as a child. I’d never been there, but Simon said the destruction had been very bad indeed. The city is recovering, finally, but it has taken a long time.

Auckland feels the quakes, but they’re not centered here—it’s always somewhere else. Instead, they cheerfully predict a volcano will someday incinerate the city, but it’s the kind of thing you can’t believe will ever happen.

Unlike the earthquakes that remind us, over and over, that they can do whatever they want. The earth finally stills, but I’m still clinging to the trunk like a five-year-old.

“Mari!” Simon yells, and I hear him running. His hand, that big solid hand, covers my upper back, but I still don’t let go, not until he peels one arm, then the other, off the tree and settles them around his waist. “You’ll be right,” he says, a peculiarly New Zealand phrase. “No worries.”

I smell the sharpness of clean cotton and his skin below. His chest is as solid as a wall, his body the thing that will save me, always. Sarah and Leo are suddenly beside me too, their hands on my arms, my hair. “It’s okay, Mummy. You’ll be right.”

Enfolded in their love, I can take a breath, but they don’t rush me. “I’m sorry, you guys. I wish I could get over this. It’s so silly.”

“No worries, Mum,” Leo says.

“We’re all afraid of things,” Sarah adds.

I snort and look at her over my arm. “Not you.”

“Well, not me, but most everybody.”

My chuckle eases the rigidness of my body, and I force myself to straighten, to let go of my husband, to kiss my children’s heads, one, two. “Thank you. I’m good.”

Simon’s hand lingers on my upper back. “Get yourself a cup of tea. I’ll finish breakfast.”

I used to protest, but a counselor finally told me that the more I resisted the emotions of my PTSD, the worse it would get. To overcome it, I have to be present with it. So I head inside and pour a fresh cup of tea. The screen of my memory flashes with images from the earthquake that gave me the scar on my face—the noise, the screams, the blood everywhere from the wound on my head and the wound in my belly. All of it.

I stare into my cup of milky tea. On the surface, my kitchen window is reflected in a white rectangle interrupted by the line of pots along the bottom. I force myself to take slow, even breaths. Same in as out, one-two-three in, one-two-three out, and slowly my trembling eases. The voices of the children, lilting up and down, smooth the gooseflesh on my arms. I sigh, letting go.

Simon, frying bacon, a bibbed apron around his body, gives me a smile. “Better?”

“Yep. Thanks.”

We eat normally, and Simon loads the children in the car and turns to me. His gray eyes are filled with concern as he brushes hair away from my face. He knows I suffered through a massive earthquake, though I lied about which one it was. “Take the day off.”

“I’m hiking with Gweneth and then meeting Rose at Sapphire House to make some more notes.”

“The walk will be good.” His palm cups my cheek. “Go to the CBD and visit the cat café or something.”

I give him a grin. “Maybe. I really think I’m all right.”

He presses a kiss to my forehead, lingering a second longer than usual, then squeezes my shoulder. “I’ve got the swim fund-raiser tonight, don’t forget. The kids and I will be late.”

Our division of labor means I don’t have to participate in the swim stuff, which I find stultifying—the long, long hours; the drives to various places; the chitchat with all the other parents. I know women knit and read and whatever, and I do show up for the big meets, but Simon loves it madly, and I don’t. In return, I do a much larger share of housework and laundry and shopping, which he loathes.

But I had forgotten about the meet tonight, and a little knot sticks in my throat as I lift my hand and wave them off, the three of them in a single car, the only things in the world that really matter to me. Maybe I’ll call my friend Nan, see if she wants to meet for dinner in the CBD.