When We Believed in Mermaids(82)

She stops. Looks at me with alarm.

“What?”

“I just realized that I’ve never told anyone this story. Ever.”

And because I loved her once, I reach out and touch her knee. “Just tell it.”

She closes her eyes. “It was awful. People were dead. They were screaming. There was all this smoke and sirens and . . . noise. Smells. I just wanted to find my friends, find my backpack—like, that’s all I could think about. My pack.”

She stops. Looks out to the ocean. Taps her fingers against her cup.

I’m quiet, letting her tell the story.

“The closer I got to where they should be, the worse it got. Like, not just dead people but . . . pieces. An arm. I saw an arm, and I threw up, but I just couldn’t stop. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was thinking; I was just fixated on that pack.”

I nod. “Shock.”

“I guess.” She takes a breath. “My friend Amy had this ridiculous little-girl pack. It was pink with flowers, and she thought it was ironic, but it was just stupid.

“I found it and picked it up and kept looking for mine. But—” She stops. The silence stretches for thirty seconds, a minute. I don’t interrupt it, and eventually she says, “I found Amy. Her face and her chest were fine, but something fell on the rest of her. She was dead. I could see other bodies and a surfboard, and I just—I just grabbed her pack and started walking. I walked . . . away. I walked all the way into Paris. It took hours.”

Outside, a bird makes a robot noise. The sea crashes against rocks somewhere. Inside is still.

Josie looks up. “She had a New Zealand passport and three hundred dollars. I found a ride on a freighter and took off. Came here.”

My heart suddenly aches. “Damn, Josie. How did you get so bad?”

She lets go of a sad, short laugh. “A day at a time.”

I bow my head. “Why didn’t you let us know? I mean, you took off constantly.”

“When I was on the freighter, I detoxed. It was awful. I was sick as a dog for weeks, and when I was finally done, I had plenty of time to think. It takes a while for a freighter to go from Paris to New Zealand.” She presses her lips together. “I had to start completely fresh.”

I close my eyes. “You abandoned me.”

She knows I’m not talking about when she supposedly died. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Simon doesn’t know anything about this?”

“No.” Her lips pale faintly. “He would hate me.” She shifts gears suddenly. “You have to come get to know the kids, Kit. You’ll love Sarah. She’s just like you.”

My calm snaps. “What are you even talking about? We’re just going to forget everything and start over like nothing happened, like you didn’t break our hearts into a million pieces?”

“That would be my preference,” Mari says, and the words are calm. Clear.

It makes me wonder if I can just let it all go. Set down the burden, drain the boil, and stop punishing everyone, including myself.

Mari says, “Come to dinner tonight, get to know my family. See who I am now.”

“I don’t want to add to the lie.” But if I’m honest, I’m aching to spend time with my niece and nephew. I also feel uncharacteristically nervous, and my mind goes immediately to Javier. Despite my usual solitariness, I feel the need for someone in my corner. “Can I bring someone?”

“A boyfriend?”

“Not exactly.”

“Of course. Come at seven.” She swallows. “My life is in your hands, Kit. There is nothing I can do to stop you from telling the whole story if you so choose. Please don’t.”

I stand up. “We’ll be there at seven. You can take me back now.”

She nods, and I see that she’s again weeping.

It infuriates me. “Stop it! You don’t get to cry over this. You’re not the one who was left behind, the one who was lied to. If anyone should be crying, it’s me.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to feel,” she says, her chin lifting.

“You’re right.” My voice is tired when I say, “Just take me back.”





Chapter Twenty-Five

Mari

I drop Kit back at the ferry. I offered to take her into the CBD, but by then she was done with me. As I head home over the bridge, I’m captured by a traffic jam caused by an accident somewhere up ahead.

Stuck, I roll down my window and turn up the radio a jot. Lorde, the local hero, sings her song “Royals,” about a bunch of blue-collar kids imagining what it would be like to be rich. In my current mood, it brings back a lot of yearnings and memories. I wonder what Kit actually knows about everything. Billy. Dylan. My addictions, which grew with the weed Dylan and I shared and multiplied after the earthquake when we went to live in Salinas. I wonder if she knows I was selling weed then to keep myself in whatever I needed—booze, weed, some pills, though I was never much of a pill popper. Too unreliable.

Traffic edges forward slightly, and I realize it’s nearly three, and I’ve invited Kit and her plus-one over for a dinner that isn’t even started. Is there anything to cook in the house? I briefly consider takeaway, but I really want to cook for her. Cook something from our childhood, something beautiful and comforting, to show that I’ve turned over this leaf too. She did all the cooking after we moved to Salinas, food my mother and I often ignored or took for granted—stews and soups in the winter, fresh salads and homemade pizzas in the summer.