When We Believed in Mermaids(84)
My dad was contrite—he knew he’d been in the wrong over both the fight with me and with Dylan—but his only concession was to let Dylan come back, with the promise that he’d have a job when he healed.
Sitting in traffic on the Harbour Bridge, barely moving, I wonder why I was reading to him instead of him reading to himself. It seems like there was some reason, but I don’t remember what it was. I read to him all through the spring and into the summer as he started to heal.
Physically, anyway. Mentally, he was not okay. He didn’t talk much. He took a lot of pills—back then no one had heard of an opioid crisis, and the doctors were very free with Vicodin and Percocet.
The summer was hot. We had no air-conditioning, and I tried talking him into coming downstairs, at least, where he could sit on the deck overlooking the ocean and get some sunlight. “You’re as white as a ghost,” I teased.
He only shrugged.
It was summer. I was surfing and hanging out with my friends on the beach down the road from our cove. I was fourteen going on fifteen and hot, hot, hot. I knew it too. My hair had grown down to my butt, and when I took it out of a braid, the blonde waves against my dark-brown skin made the boys crazy. It also made them crazy that I could out-surf most of them. Not the way Kit could—even two years younger than me, she was a better surfer. She was too tall and hippy to be considered cute, but that seemed to play into the respect the guys gave her on the waves.
I didn’t care, not really, if she was better in that way. I was queen in all other ways. If I wanted a guy, I could get him, even if he was older, like eighteen. On the beach at night, smoking dope and learning to snort coke with the beach bums, I gathered a lot of tricks for pleasing guys too. Hand jobs, blow jobs. I let them take off my top, but nobody touched my bottoms. I liked kissing, a lot, feeling that pressure and the power it gave me.
I didn’t go all the way, which somehow made me think it was okay. I was young. I lived on the beach. I surfed and partied and made out. What else was there to do?
Kit did things another way. Dylan’s injuries, past and present, focused her attention on the body, on medicine, and she applied to some geeky camp in LA for aspiring doctors, and naturally she got in—which curtailed my partying because my parents were also going to be out of town for two weeks at some conference for restaurants, and it was in Hawaii. They were making it a second honeymoon. By my count, it was more like the fifth honeymoon or the twentieth. Over and over and over, they battled furiously, then came back together.
This time, I was left in charge of Dylan. I was pissed off about it at first. He was so boring that it was ridiculous. Even when I read the really sexy parts in books, he didn’t look at me or respond or anything, just kept staring out the window.
But he’d been there for us, both Kit and me, and I couldn’t leave him lying upstairs all alone for two weeks. The first couple of days, I tried again to coax him out of bed, get him downstairs, but he would only use his crutches on the upper level. He hadn’t gone downstairs since he’d come home.
I carried his meals upstairs. Carried his dishes back down. Brought him clean clothes. Medicine. Helped him to the shower. “Wash your fucking hair this time,” I yelled.
Three or four days in, it was close to evening, and hot, and I was sick of the whole scene. “Come on, Dylan. Get your ass out of bed, and let’s get outside.”
“You can go,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
I rolled my eyes. “This is ridiculous. What the hell is wrong with you?”
His silvery aqua eyes glowed in the twilight. “You wouldn’t understand, Grasshopper.”
“Oh, why, because you’re the only person who ever had bad things happen to them?”
He whipped his head around. “No!” He reached for my hand, and I let him take it. “I’m just so goddamn tired.”
“Of what?”
He closed his eyes, and his lashes made long shadows over his high cheekbones. His mouth, so battered, was healed now, and the soft evening washed his lips with pink light. He was like a fairy who’d stumbled into the wrong land. It made my chest ache to think that he might really actually kill himself one of these times. Acting on some wild impulse, I leaned in and kissed that beautiful mouth.
It was electric. My mouth buzzed, and it sent a shock through every nerve in my body, and for a long moment—I don’t know how long—a minute, maybe, or two, he responded, almost as if it was automatic or he was high, or both, probably. It didn’t matter to me why. My body blazed so hard I thought I might faint as we kissed, as his lips parted and our tongues touched.
He pushed me away. “Josie. Stop. No.”
I yanked back, aware that my face was bright red. I tossed my hair over my shoulder. “Just wanted to get you moving.” I dropped his hand. “Get over yourself, dude.”
From the top of the dresser, I grabbed his pain pills. “I’ll be downstairs.”
It took two days, but he finally roared out his frustration and came down the stairs on his ass. His hair had come loose, and he wore only a pair of boxers, his leg too awkward for even split shorts. “Give me the fucking pills.”
I smiled, walked over, and dropped them in his hands. “Want some water? Some food?”
He started getting better finally after that. He came down to play card games at the table, and a couple of times, his friends came bearing rum and serious weed, buds so crystallized with THC that they looked like they’d been dipped in diamonds. Even a couple of bong hits knocked me on my ass.