When We Believed in Mermaids(35)
I nod. “I get it. Nearly scared myself to death the other day.”
She settles the cup in its place and closes the pantry door. “I’ve got heaps of notes I’ll type up later and send over to you, but I got a pretty good start.”
“Tomorrow or the next day, I want to get into the attic. I’m looking for things like papers and anything that might have belonged to Veronica. Clothing, jewelry, notes, scripts. Any of it. Might be a museum that’ll want them.”
“No doubt.”
“Want some feijoas?” I ask, smelling them on the breeze as we walk out. “There’s a ton of them around.”
“Uh, no. My mum has two trees, and I’m already ducking her.”
I laugh. “See you tomorrow.”
Chapter Eleven
Kit
The harbor tour allows us to disembark at any number of stops. Javier and I wander into a little village with thick shade beneath the trees and rows of Victorian-like houses. The air is hot and still, the mood very quiet along the streets. Peaceful. He points at things now and again but seems content to simply take it in. I like that he doesn’t feel the need to fill every silence with words.
A bookstore draws us both in, and I lose him within two minutes when he dips down an aisle of moldering history books. I wander on by myself, looking for light reading to bring back with me, but there isn’t much in that category. I content myself with leafing through a book of botanical drawings, then a history of flowers. I wind down a few more aisles, turning this way and that, until I’m somewhere in the deepest heart of the place, surrounded by the hushed whisper of the books and the faint dusty smell of them, in front of a deliciously huge collection of children’s books.
I pick up a couple, open them at random to read a page. Nancy Drew and the Boxcar Children, Harry Potter in many different formats, some regional work I don’t recognize and that intrigues me. I shoot a photo of their spines to look for them later.
And there, in the middle of it all, is a battered copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I gasp a little under my breath, as if someone dead has come back to life, and pull it out, holding the weight gingerly in my hands for a moment. It’s the same edition we owned, a book Dylan brought home from a trip to San Francisco. I open the cover, flip to the first page, and fall back in time.
To a cold afternoon long ago, me and Josie with Dylan between us. I leaned into his hard ribs, smelling the soap he used to scrub his hands of garlic and onion. “I can’t wait to read this to you,” he said. “It’s such a good story.”
“I can read it myself,” Josie said, and it was true that at eight, she could read anything she wanted.
“But if you read it,” Dylan said, “then we don’t get to sit here like this, together.” He dropped a kiss to each of our heads. “Doesn’t that sound better? We can read a chapter a day before you take showers.”
“Why do we have to take showers every day?” I asked, falling across his lap. “Mommy doesn’t make us.”
He pinched my side, tickling me a little, and I giggled, shoving his hands away happily. “Because you smell like little goats after you’ve been out there playing in the sand all day.”
“We take showers in the ocean,” I yelled, and he laughed, putting a finger to his lips.
“A boy in my class told me I had disgusting ankles,” Josie said, holding one skinny leg up for inspection.
“It’s kind of disgusting,” Dylan said, grabbing her leg. “Scrub it tonight.”
“Scrub it how?” Josie asked. She licked her thumb and rubbed at the grime, and it started to give way.
“Quit it,” Dylan said, slapping her hand. “It’ll wait until your shower. You can use soap and a washcloth.”
I liked lying across his legs, looking up at him. I could see under his chin where little shimmers of blond whiskers caught the light and his ponytail hung over his shoulder, bright and messy. It was safe with Dylan, warm. Although I complained about the shower, I liked having someone who knew when our clothes needed to be washed and who made us follow a system—shower, brush and braid hair, brush teeth, lay out clothes for the next day. My sense of worry had calmed a lot since he’d arrived. “I can see up your nose,” I said, giggling.
Dylan laughed. “Get up, you monkey. Let’s read.”
I scrambled upright. Josie crossed her legs and leaned in, her long, long hair falling like straw over her skinny limbs. Dylan took a breath and turned to the first page. “These two very old people . . .”
Twenty-five years later, in the dusty bookstore with a copy of the same book in my hands, I hold very still to let the cactus spines in my lungs settle. From experience, I know it will get worse before it gets better, that I can’t move, only breathe with the shallowest breaths possible, and it will still be like a hand brushing back and forth against the spines, creating waves of deep pain. Each spine is a memory—Dad, Dylan, Josie, Mom, me, them, surfing, s’mores—and all of them ache at once.
As I stand there, breathing shallowly, I can sense a person coming down the aisle, but if I move, it will take longer for the ache to disappear, so I stand there, head down, as if I don’t know the person is there. Maybe they’ll turn around and go back.
But they don’t. He doesn’t. Javier touches my upper arm lightly. “Are you all right?”