When We Believed in Mermaids(3)
After a year, my twitchy need to search for my sister calmed down, but I couldn’t help that catch in my throat when I thought I saw her in a crowd. After two years, I finished my residency at San Francisco General and came home to Santa Cruz, where I took a spot in the ER and bought myself this house not far from the beach, where I could keep an eye on my mother and build an ordinary, quiet life for myself. The only things I’d ever really wanted—peace, calm, predictability. My childhood had been drama enough for one life.
My stomach growls. “C’mon, kid,” I say to Hobo, “let’s get some breakfast.”
The house is a small two-bedroom Spanish style in a neighborhood that crouches on the edges of places you don’t want to walk at night, but it’s mine, and I can be at the beach in seven minutes on foot. I’ve updated the old appliances and crappy cupboards and repaired the splendid tile work. I’m thinking maybe pancakes for breakfast when my phone buzzes on the counter.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, opening the fridge. Hmm. No eggs. “What’s up?”
“Kit,” she says. A faint pause, enough to make me lift my head. “Did you happen to see the news about that big nightclub fire in New Zealand?”
My stomach drops, down, down, down all the way through the earth. “What about it?”
“I know it’s ridiculous, but I swear I saw your sister in one of the clips.”
Holding the phone to my ear, I look out the kitchen window to the waving fronds of eucalyptus, the flowers I planted painstakingly along the fence. My oasis.
If it were anyone but my mother, I’d blow it off, run away, avoid opening this particular door, but she’s done the work. Every step of AA, over and over. She’s present and real and sad. For her sake, I take a breath and say, “I saw it too.”
“Could she really be alive?”
“It’s probably not her, Mom. Let’s keep our heads, not get our hopes up, okay?” My stomach growls. “Do you have anything to eat? I was at the ER until four, and there isn’t a damn thing in this house.”
“How strange,” she says in her droll way.
“Ha. If you’ll make me some eggs, I’ll come over and talk about this in person.”
“I’ve got to be to work at two, so make it quick.”
“It’s not even eleven.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I am not putting on makeup,” I say, which she always notices. Even now.
“I don’t care,” she says, but I know she does.
It’s walkable, another reason I bought in the area I did, but I drive so she won’t fret. I bought her the condo a couple of years back. It’s a bit dated, the rooms on the small side, but she has a wide view of the Pacific from the windows of the front room. The sound of the ocean keeps her calm. It’s the thing we share, that hunger, bone-deep, for the ocean. Nothing else will do.
I climb the outside stairs to her second-story condo, looking automatically over the waves to check conditions. It’s calm now. No surfers, but lots of kids and families playing along the edges of the softly ruffling water.
My mom comes out to her plant-filled porch when she spies my car. She’s wearing crisp cotton capris, yellow, with a white top striped the same sunny color. Her hair—still thick and healthy, blonde and gray making it look streaked—is pulled into an updo like a young mom’s. It looks just right, even though her face shows the hard years she’s lived, all the sun worshipping she’s done. It doesn’t matter. She’s slim and long-legged and deep-busted, and the startling eyes have lost none of their jeweled brilliance. She’s sixty-three, but in the filtered light of her simple upstairs porch, she appears to be about forty.
“You look tired,” she says as she waves me inside.
Vigorous plants of many kinds fill the rooms. Orchids are her specialty. She’s the only person I know who makes orchids bloom over and over. Give her half a second and she’ll enumerate the various genus types—Cattleya; Phalaenopsis, her favorite; delicate and beautiful Laelia, all with their proper Latin names.
“Long night.” I smell coffee as I come in and gravitate to the drip pot. I pour coffee into the cup that’s waiting, the one she saves for me, a heavy green mug with HAWAII painted across the front. Eggs and chopped peppers await on the counter.
“Sit,” she says briskly, and ties an apron around her. “Omelet okay?”
“Better than okay. Thank you.”
“Open my laptop,” she says, dropping a pat of butter into a heavy cast-iron skillet. “I saved the clip.”
I follow orders, and there’s the piece I saw the night before. The chaotic scene, the screams and noise. The newscaster in his bomber jacket. The face behind his shoulder, looking right into the camera, for the solid beat of three seconds. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. I watch, then rewind and watch again, counting. Three seconds. If I stop the clip on her face, there’s just no mistaking it.
“No one could look that much like her,” my mom says, coming to peer over my shoulder. “And have the exact same scar.”
I close my eyes, as if that will get rid of this problem. When I open them again, there she is, frozen in time, that uneven scar that runs from her hairline, straight through her eyebrow, and into her temple. It was a miracle she didn’t lose her eye.