When We Believed in Mermaids(77)

To keep it safely in place, I take a breath and sit up straight, give him a rueful little smile. “All I’ve done since I met you was talk about myself.”

For a moment, he only looks at me. “Your quest is powerful. You needn’t apologize for the space it takes.” He covers the hand he’s holding with his other. “That you take. You are important too. Not only your sister.”

I swallow, looking away. Nod.

Thankfully, the server brings our appetizer just then, easing the mood at the table. It’s an envelope of thin, crispy pastry wrapped around tuna and a cooked egg that spills yellow onto the plate when I cut into it. The taste is sea and heat and comfort. “Ooh, that’s amazing.”

He smiles, closing his eyes. “This one is very good. I thought you would like it.”

I spear the fork into the egg yolk and a red paste that’s quite fiery, taste the two apart from the pastry. My tongue rejoices at the mix of heat and fat. “What’s the red?”

“Harissa.”

“It’s amazing.”

“It is such a pleasure to eat with you,” he says. “I think I would like your father, if it was he who gave you such passion.”

I nod. “Yes. And he would have liked you too, I think.”

“Is he gone?”

“Yes. He died in the earthquake.”

He waits, and I realize I didn’t even know I was taking a breath, bracing myself.

“The restaurant and the house were on a bluff above a cove, and when the earthquake hit, we were only a couple of miles from the epicenter. Both the house and the restaurant fell down the mountain. My dad was in the kitchen, which is where he probably most would have wanted to die.”

He swears under his breath. “Were you there?”

“I was in the house, but when it started, I ran out the front door. They always tell you to get out, so I ran out to the road. It knocked me down, and I just lay on my stomach with my hands over my head, waiting for the end.”

“Pobrecita.” He touches my back. “You must have been out of your mind with fear.”

“Yes and no. I was frightened, but I also knew”—I laugh without much humor—“because I was such a geek, that the shaking usually doesn’t last more than thirty seconds or so, and I just focused on the actual experience. You know, thinking about the amazing fact that the earth was moving against itself.”

His smile flashes.

“I did realize that this was a big one, and I started trying to estimate what it would be on the Richter scale—definitely a seven. Maybe even an eight, which would be super rare.”

“And were your estimates close?”

“They were.” The waiter approaches with our food, and I lean back to allow it to be set in front of us. “It actually only lasted fifteen seconds, officially, at six-point-nine, with seven hundred and forty-five aftershocks.”

The plates give off a grounding scent—a succulent roast chicken along with a big plate of vegetables, carrots studded with feta, a tomato salad, rice with lentils, and spinach. It smells of everything whole and homey in the world, and I barely notice the waiter taking away the empty dish, refilling our glasses, disappearing again.

“Allow me,” I say, reaching for the knife to cut and serve the chicken. Some for Javier, some for me. We dig into the vegetables, and then, as if we are puppets on the same string, we both put our hands in our lap and pause. Not a prayer but certainly a moment of gratitude. “It’s beautiful,” I breathe.

“Yes,” Javier agrees.

Across the table, my father sits down and plucks a tidbit of chicken from the plate, tastes it, nods happily.

We all dig in.

“When I was a boy, I liked disasters,” he says. “Pompeii, the Black Death, the Inquisition.”

“Cheerful subjects.” I savor a bit of carrot. “Do you remember the details?”

“Oh, sure. In seventy-nine AD, Vesuvius exploded with a force equal to a hundred thousand times the force of Nagasaki—”

“A hundred thousand?” I echo skeptically.

He holds up a hand in oath. “I swear. It sent stone and ash thirty kilometers into the air and killed two thousand people where they stood.”

“Have you been there?”

“Mm. It’s a strange and haunting place.” He pauses, looking at the tomatoes. “Delicious. Have you tasted them yet?”

“Yes. Have you tried the rice?”

He nods, moving things on his plate with the tines of his fork, admires it all. “Miguel told me this place was wonderful, but I did not expect it to be . . . so perfect.”

A wave of emotional weariness passes over me. I want to let go of all the heaviness of finding my sister, the heaviness of the past, and look forward instead. I suddenly wish that I could sit with him like this many times, over many years. I can almost see a ghostly version of us, sitting in this same place, a decade or two out. His hair will silver by then, but those long lashes will still frame his lovely dark eyes, and he will still eat like this, reverently.

Cool it, Bianci, I tell myself, and shift the conversation. “Miguel is your ex-wife’s brother?”

“My brother now; it has been so long.”

“Does he play with you often?”

“No.” He inclines his head. “We are . . . not in the same circles.”