When We Believed in Mermaids(49)

She looks good, my mom. Her hair is still long. Her face is heavily lined, and I bet she still smokes. I know she doesn’t drink anymore by the millions of references she makes to being sober and to AA.

But no matter how sober she is or how good she looks, I still resent her. Raising my children has given me an understanding of just how terrible my own parents were.

A girl without a mother who protects her is a girl at the mercy of the world. How could she have been so blind to the alcohol I consumed at nine years old? Twelve? Fourteen? How could she have missed seeing the abuse that occurred right under her nose? Sarah isn’t allowed to walk on the beach alone, much less spend the night there alone.

At times I soften, thinking of how difficult her life was then too. My father was a hard man, born in Sicily during the war, and although he loved my mother jealously and protectively, he also took other women on a whim. He thought we were all spoiled and privileged, my mother and his daughters.

And God, how the two of them drank and partied!



The Christmas morning after Kit’s tenth birthday, we tumbled down the stairs to find not the gifts “Santa” ordinarily left but a scene of devastation. The Christmas tree blinked in mute witness to overturned furniture, broken glasses, debris scattered all over the rug. Kit stood silently beside me, her big eyes taking in the disaster.

Dylan came up behind us. “Wow.”

We stood there for long minutes, completely silent. My heart sank, falling from somewhere in the middle of my chest all the way through my gut and into the floor. I felt tears welling in my eyes. “Why did they do this?” I whispered. “Why did they have to do it on Christmas?”

Kit did not make a sound.

Dylan touched her shoulder, then mine. “I have an idea. Go get dressed. Both of you. Something nice.”

We only looked at him. Not even Dylan could save this.

“Go on!” he said, and shoved us a little. “Get dressed, brush your teeth, brush your hair. Meet me outside in ten minutes.”

Kit and I exchanged a glance. She shrugged.

We raced through our ablutions and ran downstairs and out the front door. Dylan had changed too, into a nice pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with three buttons at the neck. His hair was clean and shiny, combed neatly and pulled back into a ponytail. He was waiting by my mother’s Chevy and opened the door. “Kit in the front seat on the way there, Josie on the way back.”

Kit’s grin flashed for the barest moment as she claimed the prized spot. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” He rubbed my head as he went by, and mollified over losing the front seat, I buckled myself in.

“Did Mom tell you that you could borrow her car?” Kit asked.

He started the car and headed north on the highway. “What do you think, Kitten?”

She shook her head.

“Right. Let’s not talk about that anymore.”

He drove us all the way to San Francisco, first to the pier, which was quiet except for the homeless people, and then to our true destination, Chinatown. He parked; then we got out and walked, and I was immediately enchanted by the red balls strung overhead and the multitude of shop fronts and signs. A strange smell filled the air, not completely pleasant, but I felt exhilarated by such a different world. I skipped on one side of him, and he held on to Kit’s hand. “How’d you know about this place?” I asked.

“My mom used to bring me here.”

“You have a mom?”

He shook his head. “She died.”

Kit asked, “How old were you?”

“Eight,” he said.

I peered up at him, intrigued by this new information. “Do you miss her?”

He was quiet for a long time. “That’s a hard question. Sometimes she was okay, but most of the time she wasn’t. I liked coming to Chinatown, though. We came at Christmas almost every year.”

“Really?” I tested this, weighing the idea of Christmas dinner as prepared by my father against the lure of something so exotic. “Did you like it?”

He gave me his sideways smile, the one that made his eyes twinkle. “I did, Grasshopper.”

We walked for a while, peering in crowded windows and dodging foot traffic. In the alleyways, people chattered in a language that sounded like music to me, up and down. A woman in red pajamas walked by and smiled, dipping her head at Dylan.

I was enchanted.

Dylan led us to a restaurant tucked at the edge of an alleyway. Inside, it was bright and clean, and a waiter waved us to a table by the window, where we sat down and looked out at the street. Dylan conferred with the waiter while Kit stared out the window and I tried to catalog all the things I could see by just turning my head. Chinese letters looking like houses or snowmen or little people, paintings of houses and fields on the wall. A shelf with red teapots.

Kit simply looked out the window, not even swinging her feet as she ordinarily did. Looking at her made me feel hollow, made me flash on the mess back in the living room, so I peered toward the back of the room to a window cutout that showed two heads in the kitchen.

“We’re going to have dim sum,” Dylan said. “And then a lot of sweets.”

Kit looked at him but only nodded.

He pulled her chair close to his and put his arms around her, pulling her head into his shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, kid.”