When We Believed in Mermaids(62)

“Oh,” he says, “I like Art Deco.”

The words in his voice are somehow lyrical, his tongue making the syllables softer. A shiver walks up my spine, and I open my eyes again.

He’s looking at me. I’m aware of my shoulders, my thighs.

“Perhaps,” he says, “we should return to your room, hmm?”





Chapter Eighteen

Mari

It’s hot and humid the next day, and I’m cranky from too little sleep. Inside Sapphire House, the air is thick even when I open all the windows, and I make a note to look into what it would cost to add air-conditioning. I hate the idea of shutting out the ocean, but with global warming, who knows what the next thirty or forty years will bring?

I’m working on the pantry today, recording the style and variations of all the dishes on the shelves. I always do the inventory before I bring anyone else in. It’s tedious work in a way, but it gives me a chance to feel the house itself, to know it intimately before I begin the heavy work of shifting walls and tearing it apart. In some strange way, I feel I owe it to the house itself, honoring it for what it was, what it gave someone else.

It’s not exactly difficult psychology to know why. Our beautiful old Spanish-style house was devoured by the earthquake—not only the restaurant and house, the buildings, but everything that was inside them. My mother, Kit, and I scoured the beach for weeks afterward, trying to find things to rescue, but in the end it wasn’t much. Some of our clothes, some battered things from the kitchen. What the earthquake began, the sea and weather completed.

I still carry three things from the recovery effort. One is a ring made from a teaspoon, my father’s choice for Eden, simple heavy tableware designed to stand up to harsh commercial dishwashers. It has a little carving of Mount Etna on the end, which I thought unbearably beautiful when I was small. My mother had the ring made for my twelfth birthday.

The other is a chipped guitar pick that belonged to Dylan and a T-shirt that belonged to him too. The shirt is as thin and delicate now as flower petals, and I keep it wrapped up and tucked into a drawer. I wore it for years and years, and I never once put it on without thinking of a night the three of us made a big fire on the beach.

Kit and I must have been in late grade school—maybe twelve and ten—because Dylan’s hair was really long. He must have been seventeen or eighteen. He’d started growing it when he arrived at Eden, and it grew longer every year. By the end, he could braid it into a tail that was halfway down his back. His freak flag, he said, a reference to a song I didn’t know. No matter how my father nagged him, he refused to cut it.

So I grew my hair out too. It was already pretty long when he came to live with us, down to the middle of my back, but by the time of the earthquake when I was fifteen, I was known for my long, long blonde hair, which swept the top of my thighs. Neither of us wore it loose very often—it tangled and matted so easily, you wouldn’t believe it. Mine was thicker than his, but his was laced with more colors—silvery blond, wheat, a little red, some glittery gold. Mine was just dishwater streaked with sun highlights, but there was power in it.

A lot of power. Boys liked it, and even some of the girls on the beach, who were kind of amazed at how long it was.

On that night of that summer fire, I took my hair down and started brushing it. Kit took the brush out of my hand and applied herself to my head, which had to be one of the ten best feelings on Earth. She loved brushing my hair and braiding it, and she was both gentle and no-nonsense. “Do you want it down?”

“Yeah.” It felt good on my back, which was bare from my bikini. We’d all been swimming in the hot day, and the sand under my butt was still warm. Dylan was shirtless, his T-shirt in a pile on the sand. He almost never let anyone else see him with it off—he even surfed with it on—but he trusted us not to stare at his scars too much. Cinder stretched out beside him, his paws muddy, eyes glinting.

Dylan fed the fire until it was snapping and bright orange, then hauled out the bag of stuff he’d brought down from the house kitchen, lining it all up in a tidy row in front of the long, thick tree branch we used for our couch.

“We have chocolate bars, marshmallows, graham crackers,” he said. “Also real food you have to eat first. Arancini, ham, and peaches.”

From the bag, he also brought out Mountain Dews, our favorite, and Kit squealed. “Mama hasn’t been letting me drink them.”

I pinched her thigh, which was thick and solid. “She doesn’t want you fat.”

She slapped my hand away, hard. “I am not fat. I’m athletic.”

“Dude,” Dylan said in agreement, and held up his hand for a high five. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

Kit met his palm with a sharp slap, tossed her head, and settled beside him. She was still skinned knees and grimy fingernails, a kid in every way, whereas I’d learned a lot about getting attention, which I loved, so I dressed for it and cleaned up for it. Nobody really paid much attention to Kit with her crazy hair and square body.

But I was jealous of the way she leaned on him. How easy they were with each other. Kit carried around a sense of quiet with her, and it spilled into Dylan in a way I could never match. You could almost see his red aura turning a soft blue the minute she came anywhere near him, as if she carried a magic spell that calmed him down.