When We Believed in Mermaids(53)
And as we do another walk-through, I find myself falling more and more in love, feeling as if Sapphire House might be the reason for everything. The children tear through the rooms, and it’s all I could ever want.
I’m meant to be here. It was fated.
Looking at Simon across the room, so hearty and cheerful, I wonder what would happen if he knew everything. My terrible reputation as a teen, my reckless, reckless behavior, my—
My gigantic lie. Eyeing my beautiful husband in his crisp shirt and jeans, with one foot kicked out in front of him and his shoulder on the wall, I wonder what it would be like to confess it all. To be fully myself with the man I love more than I thought myself capable of. It’s lonely to carry a secret.
But as he smiles his honest, open, loyal smile, I know the truth. I can’t confess. He would hate me. He would never, ever speak to me again.
So I do the interview, putting on my cheeriest face, my not-quite-Kiwi, not-quite-US accent, and show them around Sapphire House. I’m captured again by the story, by the tragic love story back there in the past, by the startling, thrilling fact that I can restore it.
In the end, the reporter says with a smile, “Thanks, Mari. I think that’s it.”
“My pleasure,” I say, but the words hurt my throat, as if they have corners. When this airs, my face is going to be splattered all over TVNZ. It will be on the internet.
Anyone could see it.
Anyone.
It is the worst danger I’ve faced since I arrived, and it puts everything—everything—at stake.
Before we go, I head up to the attic to look for artifacts from Veronica’s life. It’s draped with cobwebs I sweep away with a broom I brought for just this reason.
Sarah has come with me, too, and I put her to work opening boxes while I make notes on the contents. The attic is mostly barren, with a few boxes of odds and ends, none of which looks particularly interesting. A few hold clothes, and we’ll want to explore those more carefully, considering the era. At last, far away in the back, are two smallish boxes that prove to be the bound diaries Helen filled. I bend over and pick one out at random. The date is 1952. I dig deeper and find one from 1945. The other box contains later entries, and I’m not as interested in those. “Give me a minute, kiddo.” I sit on the floor next to the box and take them all out. They’re not in any order: 1949 is next to ’55, but that seems to be the latest.
The earliest, frustratingly enough, is 1939. “I wonder where the rest of them are.”
“There’s more boxes over here,” Sarah says. “And look! Baby clothes.”
Frowning, I jump to my feet. The clothes are tucked into a wooden cradle, covered with a dusty sheet. The clothes are all for a newborn or just a little older and don’t appear to have been used at all. Someone must have had a miscarriage. My heart aches a little, lifting up tiny sweaters and rompers.
Sarah’s already lost interest in the clothes and opened a few more boxes. They contain any number of things but nothing I can really use to get the answers I need. Where are the other journals? I need the 1930s.
Maybe she hadn’t started keeping them until she moved here.
I mark the two boxes of journals and a third box of scrapbooks with an X for Simon to bring down.
Then I remember the stacks of plastic containers holding magazines, down in Helen’s room. Maybe there will be something there. “Come with me, Sarah. I have an idea.”
Chapter Fifteen
Kit
When I was seven and Josie was nine, Dylan taught us to surf.
I remember the first lesson clearly, because I had Dylan to myself for once, a very rare occurrence. I woke up in the tent, and Josie was gone. Dylan was sprawled flat on his back, hands crossed on his chest, and Cinder snored beside me, but Josie’s sleeping bag didn’t even look touched. I crawled out to pee. The morning was thick and overcast, the ocean restless below it, and I waded into the lapping waves, letting the cold water ripple over my arches and ankles. We swam most days, Josie and I, and this was how I kept myself ready—wading in as high as I could, then dashing back out, wading in, dashing out. Cinder must have heard me, because he scrambled out of the tent too and started running in and out with me. He found a long weathered piece of driftwood and tossed it to me. I laughed and picked it up and threw it back toward the beach. He was a retriever, but he didn’t love actually swimming unless he absolutely had to. Once the water reached his chest, he always ran back to the beach, barking.
This morning, he did the same. I ran into the ocean and out, and he ran in and out chasing his driftwood. After a while, Dylan emerged from the tent, blinking, wearing a pair of Hawaiian-print board shorts, all his scars on full display—the puckered pink one that ran over his biceps, the constellation of perfect circles across his belly, and one-foot-long thin marks here and there, not the ordinary kind of scars a person had. He told crazy stories about them—that he’d wrestled a pirate, danced over coals, gotten stuck in a meteor shower in outer space.
“Hey, kid,” he said now, his voice raspy. “Where’s your sister? Did she ever come down?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He frowned, looking up the stairs toward the restaurant. He tugged his shirt on and sat down on the sand to light a half-smoked joint he took out of his pocket. The sweet smell mingled with ocean and fog to make a scent that I would always associate with him. “You hungry?”