When We Believed in Mermaids(69)

I don’t have a photo of Helen, and I search for one but come up with only three. With her sister and George just after the house was finished; as a girl somewhere in the bush, her hair natural and flying in the wind; and a few years before her death, at some kind of fund-raiser. By then, she was polished and stately, her hair smoothed back into a snowy French twist, her warm skin beautifully offset by an aqua dress.

Not a beauty like her sister but good-looking enough. In the one with George, he had one arm around her and one around Veronica, and he was grinning as they both leaned into him. It makes me think, unexpectedly, of Dylan and Kit and me, and I have to shove the vision away.

Helen, George, and Veronica were all Maori. Enjoying a level of wealth and celebrity that would have been rare for anyone but maybe was even more notable for Maoris at the time.

Huh. I make a note to read more about the celebrity romance. What did they say? How did they talk about George and Veronica?

But also—sisters. That could be a very fraught relationship, as I well know. Could Helen have had a thing for George or he for her? (Naughty George, if so, cheating on his wife, then cheating on his mistress.) But once a cheater, always a cheater in my book. Men who cheated kept cheating.

Like my father.

The first time I figured out that one of the hostesses was having sex with my dad, I was eight. I’d been out on the beach but cut my toe on a rock and raced up to Eden to get Band-Aids. My dad was in the empty bar, making out with Yolanda, the weekend hostess. They jumped up when I slammed into the room, and I just glared at them. “I cut my toe.”

My dad made Yolanda bandage my toe, and I could tell she didn’t want to. Her lipstick was all smeared, looking stupid, and she seemed like she was about to cry. “Don’t tell your mom, okay?” she said. “I really need this job.”

“Stop doing that, then,” I said.

“I promise. I won’t do it anymore.”

I went through the kitchen on my way back. My dad was the only person around, and I said, “I’m going to tell Mom.”

“Yeah?” he said, and the mean look came on his face. “It’s none of your business, little girl. You don’t know anything.”

Usually just that look was enough to send us scurrying, but I glared at him, furious when tears welled up in my eyes and spilled over traitorously. “You’re stupid,” I said, and then I ran before he could catch me and spank me for my disrespect.

Up until then I’d adored my father, would do anything to spend time with him. Afterward I could almost always figure out who his girl of the moment was, and he always had one. She’d have big tits and big hair and big teeth, and she’d be younger than my mom by a decade—even though my mom was already a decade younger than my dad. I made the lives of the girls miserable in a million tiny ways. Salt in their diet sodas, broken ink pens left in strategic places to wreck their clothes, stealing from their purses left in the lockers in back—never money, or least not a lot. It would more be things like lipsticks or tampons or, once, birth control pills. I spilled things when they’d have to clean them up. Anything I could think of.

How much did my dad know? I don’t know. He disapproved of me, anyway, even when I was only eleven and twelve. My clothes and my hair and my grades. The older I got, the more he criticized me until by the time I was thirteen, we were engaged in a full-on war. I did as many things to drive him crazy as I did the women he kept on the side, using them, one after the other, like they were nothing, like they were shoes he’d worn a hole in.

I don’t know if Kit knew about any of it. Probably not. By the time she was ten, she was all the way into her studies of marine life and climate and surfing. God, how she loved surfing! And to my chagrin, she was better than I was. I looked better doing it, with my skinny arms and long hair and tiny bikinis—they called me Baby Babe—but Kit was just plain better. She read the waves and the wind as if they were the alphabet. Everyone encouraged her to try out for surf competitions, but she wasn’t interested. Surfing, she said, was just for her.

Same for Dylan. Just for himself. The two of them sometimes piled their boards into the battered Jeep he drove and headed up or down the coast, looking for some mythical surf.

I never went on those trips. By then, I had my own interests, things that had nothing to do with Kit and Dylan. I stayed home to have my room to myself, to read, to write in my journal and imagine the day I could finally escape Eden and my parents and make my own life.

I had no idea how soon it would happen.





Chapter Twenty-One

Kit

After I find Mari/Josie’s pictures on the internet, I wander down a rabbit hole for an hour, shaken, looking at photos of my sister’s rise to prominence as Simon Edwards’s beloved wife. He’s local royalty, a sailor and yachtsman who runs a chain of fitness and swimming clubs. He is a fit, big man with a winning smile, and I love the way he looks at my sister. In every picture, he has his hand laced through hers or an arm draped over her shoulder, one on a child’s shoulder. Their son looks exactly like him, but their daughter—

Looks like me. Almost exactly like me. Freckled and sturdy, with thick dark hair, not blonde like her mom.

Reeling, wildly emotional, I track down their address. Devonport, which is the township that I can see from my balcony, the lights that wink at me at night. When I’ve been staring out at her, she might have been standing at her window, looking back across the water at my hotel.