When We Believed in Mermaids(7)
Chapter Three
Kit
A couple of days later, I’m boarding a big-bodied Air New Zealand plane, feeling oddly nervous. I haven’t traveled a lot, not counting spring break trips to Mexico a few times, so I booked myself a window seat in business class. Since I don’t buy anything but surfboards and fountain pens for myself, I also splurged on a juicy Airbnb in a high-rise building in the city center, overlooking the water. That way if the whole trip is a bust, at least I’ll have had a little vacation.
Cocooned in the white noise of the engines and the murmuring voices, I find myself falling almost instantly asleep. Inevitably, the dream arrives. It’s always the same.
I’m sitting on a rock in the cove with Cinder beside me. I have my arm around him, and he leans against my body. We’re staring out to the restless ocean, watching waves that are too big race toward shore and smash against the rocks that are so dangerous. Spray splashes us all over, but we don’t move. In the distance, Dylan is riding his surfboard, not even wearing a wet suit but only his yellow-and-red board shorts. I know he shouldn’t be out there, but I just watch him. The wave is too big to safely ride, but he does it, skates along the center of the curl with his hands out, his fingers trailing in the water in front of him. He’s happy, really happy, and that’s why I don’t want to warn him that the wave is breaking up.
And then it throws him, and he disappears into the sea. Cinder barks and barks and barks, but Dylan doesn’t surface. The water goes still, and there is nothing to see but silvery ocean all the way to the horizon.
I jerk awake, mouth dry, and open the blind to look out at the darkness of endless ocean. The moon is full and shines in a line over the water far, far below. Stars glitter above, softening the harsh darkness of black sky.
A yawning hole pulses in my chest for long moments, but as always, if I am still and focus on something outside of myself, it fades.
The only way I survived the losses that marked my early life was by learning to compartmentalize, despite my mother’s advice to get some counseling. I’m fine most of the time. But tonight, with the dream fresh in my mind, memories pour in. Me and Josie stealing into the restaurant in the very early morning to pour out the sugar and substitute salt, thinking it so hilarious until our father lost his temper and spanked us both. The two of us dancing on the Eden patio in my mother’s cast-off nightgowns. Playing mermaid on the beach or fairies on the bluffs. Later, all three of us moving like a school of fish, Josie and Dylan and me, swimming in the cove or making a bonfire or practicing calligraphy with fountain pens my mother brought back from some trip she took with my father during one of their happy stints, an interest bolstered by Dylan’s passion for all things Chinese. Like so many boys of the era, he’d fallen hard for Kwai Chang Caine in the Kung Fu television series.
I adored them both, but my sister was first. Worshipped the very air she breathed. I would have done anything she told me—chased down bandits, built a ladder to the moon. In turn, she brought me sand dollars to examine and Pop-Tarts she stole from the pantry in the house kitchen, and she kept her arms around me all night.
It was Dylan who introduced surfing. He taught us when I was seven and Josie nine. It gave us both a sense of power and relief, a way to escape our crumbling family life and explore the sea—and, of course, it was our bond with Dylan himself.
Josie. Thinking of her in the times before she turned into the later version of herself, the aloof, promiscuous addict, makes me ache with longing. I miss my sister with every molecule of my being.
She changed as an early teen, fighting constantly with our father and rebelling against even the tiniest rule. Not even Dylan could rein her in, though he tried. For all that he acted as an uncle or father figure, he was still only a teenager. She started hanging out with older kids on the beach just north of us. Baby Babe, they called her, Surfer Baby. By then she was even more beautiful, tiny and tanned to a deep mocha, her blonde hair sun-streaked and endless.
Josie, Josie, Josie.
At last I doze again, this time falling into a deep, faraway kind of sleep, and do not awaken until a shaft of light plays on my eyelids.
There below me is New Zealand, blue and sinuous in the vastness of the ocean. Little islands dot it all around, and I’m amazed to see both the Pacific and the Tasman Sea. The Tasman looks bluer.
The plane banks and drops, and now I can see the coves and cliffs lining the coast, and my heart jolts a little. Is Josie down there somewhere, or am I on a ridiculous errand?
I rest my forehead against the glass, unwilling to take my eyes off the view. Light skitters over the waves, and I remember when my sister and I thought there were jewels in the ocean, dancing on top of each swell.
One morning when we were small, my mother woke us, whispering into the tent where we were sleeping, Josie and me curled together with Cinder.
“Girls,” she called sweetly, wrapping a hand around my foot, “wake up! I found something!”
The air was thick with fog, but the tide had gone out, leaving ironed-flat sand. My mother led us over the path and into a small cave that was approachable only at low tide. “Look!” she said, pointing.
Inside was what looked like a box. Josie bent over, peering into the dimness. “What is it?”
“I think it might be treasure,” Suzanne said. “You should go see.”
Josie straightened up, crossing her arms. “I ain’t going in there.”