When We Believed in Mermaids(63)

His hair was back in a braid. “You want me to take your braid out and brush your hair?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Eagerly, I picked up the brush and squished through the sand to kneel behind him. Kit scowled at me—it was her thing to brush our hair.

I ignored her. Tugging the rubber band from his braid, I loosened it with my fingers. It was cool and soft and still a little damp in places. Running the brush through it felt good, watching it ripple under the bristles and straighten. It was all the way down to the middle of his back, where a particularly bad scar twisted over his spine. I touched it with the tips of my fingers. “What’s this one?”

“Right in the middle?” He sat with his arms looped around his knees. His hair skimmed his shoulder blades, fell forward in drifts toward his elbows. “That’s a scar from a sword I got in a duel with Long John Silver.”

I traced the wormy pink shape of it, end to end, for the first time realizing that something else had happened to him. “For real.”

He turned to look me in the eye, and there was a pain there I’d never seen. It was like a window had opened into a hell I never wanted to visit. “That’s as real as it gets, Grasshopper.”

My heart hurt like somebody had shoved a sword through it, and I put my palm on his face. “I wish I could kill them.”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” he rasped, but he pressed my hand into his face, and for the first time, I thought maybe there was somebody on the planet who knew what I knew, that a smiling face didn’t always mean well. Somebody hurt him, just like somebody hurt me.

I also knew the exact moment he would shatter if I didn’t shift the mood. I grabbed a fistful of his hair. “We’re twins,” I said, and tied my hair to a hank of his. We all laughed before the knot slipped out.

But something changed. He tossed me the T-shirt. “You’ll get cold.”

Vaguely I heard Kit say, “What about me? I’ll get cold too!” as I pulled the T-shirt on over my head, smelling Dylan-ness all around me, against my skin.

That was when he broke out his guitar, and while we ate peaches and s’mores, he started to play the folk songs he’d taught us to sing. We joined in, Kit with more gusto than tone, but I fancied myself a pretty good singer, and I tried to weave my voice into the main line of Dylan’s bass. His speaking voice was raspy and low, so nice to listen to, but his singing voice was deep and clear, so rich you could almost drink it out of the air like honey. We sang a bunch of camp favorites, then moved into the ballads.

I loved the moody, sad, violent ballads Dylan had taught us. He loved playing and singing them, and tonight there was something magical in the air, as if the sparks of the fire were turning to fairies who danced around us. Kit felt it too. She moved close enough to press her bare arm into mine as we sang “Mary Hamilton” and a Civil War ballad that was Kit’s favorite, “The Cruel War,” and one of my favorites, “Tam Lin,” which I thought could have been written for Dylan himself. As we warmed up, his voice wound around the fire and through both mine and Kit’s, and we sang like we were onstage somewhere. Overhead, the stars burned bright, and the waves rolled in eternally, and if we could have just stayed right there forever, everything would have been okay.

Kit said, “You should be a singer, Dylan. Nobody is better than you.”

He laughed. “Thanks, Kitten, but I just like being here with you guys.”

As the fire burned down, we spread out a big blanket on the sand, pulled our pillows out of the tent, and stretched out under the vast sky. Light spilled down the hill from Eden, along with music and the sound of voices. I was sleepy as Kit and I took our places next to Dylan, who flung an arm out in either direction so we could scoot up close. The two of us girls spread an open sleeping bag over our bodies and snuggled in, one head on each shoulder.

It was our ritual and had been for years and years now. By then, he’d been with us for five or six years and was woven completely into our lives. Often, all three of us would fall asleep, only to wake up and stagger into the tent one by one.

Tonight, the Perseids were shooting their way across the galaxy. For a while, Kit pointed to one and then another and chattered about the distance the stars traveled and how many there were and all sorts of other facts. Until she trailed off and fell asleep, just like that.

Dylan and I just lay there and watched the sky. It was perfect. He shifted so that Kit was more comfortable on her pillow, but when he came back down again, he patted the spot I liked on his shoulder, and I happily slipped back to my place. He lit a joint, and the smoke made shapes against the night.

It would have been impossible to be happier than I was right there, with Dylan and my sister close by, the stars overhead, nothing to worry about. Dylan smelled of salt and perspiration and a sharp note of something that belonged just to him.

His voice, low and quiet, rolled into the night. “I’ll tell you about the Long John Silver scar if you tell me something.”

I tried to pretend I didn’t know what he was going to ask, but my body turned into a board. “What?”

“Did something happen to you a couple of summers ago?”

“No.” I said the word in a tone of voice that made it sound like he was stupid for asking. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Mm.” He took another toke, blew it out, and I reached for the smoke as it wafted over the stars, cutting the sky in two pieces, just like my life—before and after. “Maybe I was wrong.”