When We Believed in Mermaids(4)

“No,” I say. “You’re right.”

“You have to go find her, Kit.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say, even though I’ve been thinking the same thing. “How would I do that? Millions and millions of people live in Auckland.”

“You would be able to find her. You know her.”

“You know her too.”

She shakes her head, straightening her back stiffly. “You know I don’t travel.”

I scowl. “You’ve been sober fifteen years, Mom. You’d be fine.”

“No, I can’t. You need to do this.”

“I can’t run away to New Zealand. I have a job, and I can’t just leave them in the lurch.” I shove my hair off my face. “And what will I do with Hobo?” My heart stings—the job I can navigate, since I haven’t had time off in three years. But my cat will pine without me.

“I’ll go stay at your house.”

I look at her. “Stay there, or go in the morning and night and feed him?”

“I’ll move there.” She slides the omelet, steamy and beautifully studded with peppers, onto the table. “Come eat.”

I stand up. “He’ll probably hide the whole time.”

“That’s all right. He’ll know he’s not alone. And maybe after a day or two, he’ll come sleep with me.”

The smell of onions and peppers snares my body, and I dig in to the eggs like a sixteen-year-old boy, my mind flashing up images. Josie bending over me to see if I was awake yet, her long hair tickling my neck when we were little; her exuberant laugh; a flash of her throwing a stick for Cinder to chase. My heart literally aches, not metaphorically—a weight of memory and longing and anger press down hard on it until I have to pause, set down my fork, take a breath.

My mother sits quietly. I think of her voice when she told me Josie was dead. I see that her hand is trembling ever so slightly. As if to cover it, as if this is a normal morning with normal things in it, she lifts her cup to drink. “Did you surf?”

I nod. We both know it’s how I process things. How I make peace. How I live with everything.

“Yes. It was gorgeous.”

She sits in the second chair of the two at the table. Her gaze is fixed on the ocean. Light catches on her serious mouth, and I suddenly remember her laughing with my father, her lips red and wide, as they spun around in a dance on the patio of Eden. Suzanne sober is a far better creature than Suzanne drunk, but I sometimes miss the exuberance of her in those days.

“I’ll go,” I say, maybe hoping to see a whisper of that younger woman.

And for a single moment a flame leaps in her eyes. She reaches for me, and for once I let her take my hand, squeezing it in a fit of generosity.

“You promise you’ll actually live in my house?” I ask.

With her free hand, she draws an X across her heart and raises that same hand in a gesture of an oath. “Promise.”

“Okay. I’ll get out of here as soon as I can arrange it.” A wave of mingled anticipation and terror rolls through my chest, sloshes in my gut. “Holy shit. What if she’s really still alive?”

“I guess I’m going to have to kill her,” Suzanne says.





Chapter Two

Mari

Fingering the blindfold over my eyes, I ask, “Where are you taking me?”

My husband, Simon, slaps my hand away. “Leave it alone.”

“We’ve been driving forever.”

“It’s an adventure.”

“Are we going to have kinky sex when we arrive?”

“It wasn’t previously on the agenda, but now that you’ve brought it up . . .” He slides a hand up my arm, aiming to wander over my chest, but I swat at him. “I quite fancy the idea of you naked and blindfolded, out in the open.”

“Out in the open? In Auckland? Uh, no.”

I try to puzzle out clues about our destination. We left the highway a few minutes ago, but I still hear no auditory clues to the neighborhood. Distance traveled might be more of a help if we didn’t live all the way in Devonport, a long drive to many other areas of the city. I lift my head to smell the air and catch a whiff of bread. “Ooh, I smell a bakery!”

Simon chuckles. “That should narrow it down.”

We ride quietly for a bit. I sip my paper cup of coffee and fret about my daughter, Sarah, who had a breakdown over breakfast, her wild dark hair falling in a cape over her arms as she protested going to school. She would not say why, only that she hated it, that it was awful, that she wanted to be homeschooled like her (strange and prissy) neighborhood friend Nadine. Quite the scene for a seven-year-old who’d previously been the star of her class. “What do you think is going on with Sarah?”

“It’s likely a schoolyard spat, but we should go round to the school and talk with them anyway.”

“Yes, agreed.” Even with her older brother offering to keep an eye on her, she hadn’t wanted to go. At age nine, Leo is a mirror image of his father, the same thick, glossy dark hair, ocean-deep eyes, and lanky build. He shows every indication of taking after him athletically as well, swimming like a fish from the age of six months. And like his father, he suffers no dark moods or lack of confidence, unlike Sarah and me.