When We Believed in Mermaids(30)
I nod.
He is the first to step away. “Shall we go?”
I shower the pool from my skin and tame my hair with product, drawing it away from my face in the vain hope that it will behave for a few hours. To protect my skin from the harsh sun—New Zealand has some of the highest melanoma rates in the world—I bring a broad-brimmed hat. It’s too hot for long sleeves, so I’m wearing the sundress again, and I slather on heavy-duty sunscreen. Carrying a rattan bag, I head down to meet Javier in the lobby.
This time I’m the first to arrive, and I wait by a bank of windows overlooking the square. Young people, mostly students by the look of them, sit in the sunshine, reading or talking in clumps of two or three. The girls have a wide array of color in their hair—sometimes silvery with purple ends or ombre shades of watermelon or leaves. One girl has streaks in a rainbow array, and she wears oversize sunglasses and bright-red lipstick.
It seems like a long time ago that I felt that young, so dewy. If I ever did. At twenty, I was buried in textbooks, working two jobs to stay afloat. It didn’t leave a lot of time for lazing around in the sun. I’m piercingly envious for a moment.
“You look lovely,” Javier says nearby.
I swing the red skirt. “I only have the one.”
He touches his chest. “This is one of two.” It’s a soft gray button-up with very thin blue stripes. Expensive. “I cannot bear to bring more than a carry-on.”
“I’m not that efficient,” I admit as we head toward the elevators to go down to street level. Inside, I smell his cologne, a continental touch I’m unused to.
“I have become so over the years. Two good shirts, jeans, slacks, one pair of shoes, maybe a pair of sandals.”
The door slides open, and we head outdoors to the heavy day. I slide my sunglasses down my nose. “Whew. I’m not used to heat,” I say. “It’s not this hot in California, at least not by the ocean.”
“I like California,” he says. “The people are friendly.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Many times.” He’s dropped his own sunglasses over his eyes, very black aviators that give him a glamorous air. “It’s beautiful. Where do you live?”
“Santa Cruz.”
He frowns slightly.
“Just south of San Francisco?”
“Ah. So you stayed there, even after the earthquake.”
“I’ve never lived farther than sixty miles from the hospital where I was born. Native Californian.”
“Is your family there?”
“My mother. She’s staying with my cat.”
“Not the cat with her?”
I laugh softly. “He’s afraid to leave my house, so she came to him.”
“That’s very kind of her.”
I look up at him, recognizing the truth. “It is.”
A sign alerts me to the shopping area I’d been hoping to find. “I think this is it. How much time do we have?”
“As long as you need. There is no hurry.”
“I just want to duck inside here and ask around.”
“Of course.”
In a bar of shade, I pause to pull out my phone and then find a still I lifted from the video of the nightclub fire. I show it to Javier.
“This is your sister?”
“Yep.” I look down at it, feeling butterflies flutter around in my gut.
“You’re very different.”
I snort slightly, a very unladylike sound I wish I could take back. “Understatement of the year.”
He cocks his head, and a swath of light undulates over the waves in his hair. “How so?”
“She was tiny. I’m tall. She loved—loves—metaphor, and I love facts.” I look up at the various shops. Boutiques with seven dresses hanging in rows. It’s hard to imagine Josie ever shopping for clothing like that. “She was a complete hippie. I’m a doctor.” An upscale florist. Several restaurants. “She was outgoing, and I was introverted.” I don’t say, She was beautiful. I am not, but that might have been one of the more obvious things. Josie and Dylan and my mother were beautiful. I was the sturdy, sensible one.
Not that I minded, honestly, except for that small, heady stretch of time when I fell in love with James in high school. Otherwise I was relieved to be free of the demands of beauty. It didn’t seem to serve any of them particularly well, after all.
A cluster of professional women passes, wearing stockings and pencil skirts. The stockings surprise me, especially on such a warm day, and I stare after them, trying to remember the last time I wore a pair of stockings for any reason. Do people even do that anymore in the US?
Again I scan the storefronts. Javier waits.
For a second, I feel anxious and resistant and overwhelmed. Why am I on this ridiculous errand? And what am I going to do if I find her? The thought makes me feel queasy.
“Do you wish to show her photo around?”
I take a breath. “I guess I do.”
He takes out his phone and shoots a photo of my screen. “I will try the shops across the way, yes?”
“Sure.”
He heads across the way, and I weave in and out of the boutiques and shops on my side. At the end of the row, he joins me, and together we approach the Italian restaurant I spied earlier on Google Maps. I pause, faintly nervous, to glance at the menu attached to an elegant stand, and my mouth waters a little. “Ooh, they have Sicilian-style cannoli.”