When We Believed in Mermaids(12)

“Outside, kids?” I ask, and they sweep their tails. Paris and Toby are a little lost. Paris is a black German shepherd, too thin, with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. She’s a big dog with long, beautiful fur, and I bend down to stroke her as she walks by. She allows it, but I think her heart is heavy. I make a mental note to look up ways to help heal a grieving dog.

The other, Toby, is much smaller, maybe a Shih Tzu or Lhasa mix, in need of grooming but otherwise pretty stable. He’s white and brown with cheery black eyes, and to my surprise, Simon has gone gaga over him. Already Toby knows he can jump up into his lap when he’s sitting in his big chair.

A ripple of lightning edges along the horizon as I open the door, and I smell rain walking toward us over the water, carrying the scent of ocean and sky. “Better hurry, guys.”

I stand in the doorway, breathing it in, the soft gathering twilight and the two-note song of a pair of tuis. A seagull sails on currents overhead. The water undulates in green and opal, with slight edges of purple. A storm is unmistakably moving in, and I look at the barometer in Sarah’s little shed, but I don’t know how to read the bubbles and weights.

Paris does her business, then comes back over to me, sitting on alert next to my leg. “You’re a sweetheart, aren’t you?” I rub her long ears, and she allows it, but she’s scanning the perimeter in case of invaders. I might really fall for this dog. She reminds me of Cinder, the retriever mix we had when I was a child. It was Cinder who alerted us to the stranger at the door the night Dylan washed up at Eden.

A storm had lashed the windows that night too, and it whipped the ocean into a wild monster that Kit and I watched from our living room window in the little house that perched so precariously on the cliff. On clear days, you could see a hundred miles, at least according to my dad, and all of it was ocean. Ocean that changed minute by minute, ocean that changed color and texture, sound and mood. You could look at the ocean a thousand times a day in exactly the same spot, and it would never appear the same.

But that night, it was wild. Kit and I told stories to each other about shipwrecks. “In the morning, we should go down and see if anything washes up from the ships,” I said.

“Booty!” Kit cried, her five-year-old fist punching the air.

Behind us, Cinder jumped up and barked his deep warning bark. My mom came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands. It was a slow night at Eden because of the weather, so we were home for once, although she wasn’t cooking—why would she, with my father’s stuffed squid to devour? One of the kitchen staff, a girl named Marie, had brought up a bowl of pasta with bread and herby olive oil, and we sat together eating it.

When my mother answered the door, a boy was there, soaked and shivering, his long hair stuck to his neck and forehead. His chambray shirt and jeans clung to him, and his face was bruised and bleeding, as if he’d washed overboard from a wrecked ship, or he was the ghost of a seaman who had drowned and didn’t know it.

We read lots of stories like that, Kit and me. I read far above my age and loved reading to her from a battered copy of The Big Book of Pirates, filled with tales of shipwrecks and ghosts and mermaids seducing sailors to their deaths. Much of it was over our heads, but it fueled our imaginations for years.

My mother brought him inside and fetched towels and a mug of tea. Kit and I stared, captured by his beauty. He was barely a teenager, though at the time, he lied and said he was fifteen, so his skin still had the dewy sheen of boyhood, stretched over elegantly assembled cheekbones and jaw. His eyes were the color of abalone shell, silver and blue and hints of violet, as if he’d been born in the sea.

I whispered to Kit, “Maybe he’s a merman.”

My mother was not known for taking in strays, not cats or dogs or people, but she took to Dylan as if he were her own child. She shifted Kit to my bedroom so there was a place for him to sleep and gave him a job in the restaurant washing dishes. “You girls need to be nice to him,” she said, tucking us in that night. “He’s been through a lot.”

“Is he a merman?” Kit asked.

My mother smoothed her brow. “No, sweetheart. He’s just a boy.”

A boy she took in and nurtured from that moment forward, as if he were a lost cat, with no explanation whatsoever.

Just a boy. For a long moment, standing beneath the lightning-lashed sky over Auckland, I think how small that phrase is. How true and untrue, all at once.

A thudding ache pulses in the center of my chest. What if my mother had called the police to report a runaway? What if he’d been sent to a foster home instead of taking root in our family the way he did?

Instead my mother simply lied to everyone and said he was her nephew from Los Angeles. No one ever questioned her, and in those days, my father let her have her way over almost anything.

The dogs, impatient with my woolgathering, swarm my legs and lick my fingers. I bring them in, then go wash my daughter’s hair.



Later, Simon is watching a movie, some kind of adventure through a jungle with lots of mud and things that bite and cut and a sturdy man leading the way. His favorite thing. He doesn’t love to read, but he watches all the sci-fi and adventure movies that exist, and when he runs out, he calls up YouTube videos in the same realm.

I’m sitting next to him with my laptop, a blanket over my legs because it’s gone quite cold. He’s drinking a ginger beer and popping peanuts into his mouth every so often, while I have a cup of green tea that’s probably cold. I only have it as company, really.

I’d been pinning ideas for Sapphire House to Pinterest, and then I found a bunch of recipes for feijoas, and now I’m knuckling down to look up more of Veronica’s backstory.

My friend Gwen is enchanted with Veronica and has often regaled me and our friend Nan with stories about the Auckland legend. I’ve long been intrigued by her rise and tragic end. I feel a tangled connection to her attempt to make herself over, become someone new—and she was successful at doing so.

But like a female Icarus, she was punished for her moxie and died young.

On YouTube, I download the movie that launched Veronica’s career. She’d been in Hollywood for several years and played many parts, mostly in the jungle-girl realm. But when sound arrived on the scene, Veronica was cast in the role of a vixen, unapologetically ambitious and beautiful, and the sparks flew between her and her costar. There’s a famous kiss and a dress so sheer and clinging that she might as well have been naked.

Watching, I’m shocked at the liberal tone of the script and the saucy, tongue-in-cheek way Veronica played the part. Her body in the famous dress is incendiary—a slipping lacy bodice that gives the illusion of nipples, or is it that it’s nipples giving the illusion of lace?—curvy hips, slim arms and waist.

The big surprise is the intelligence of both script and actress, plus the fact that this cheeky vixen actually wins at the end. It’s as if someone turned the rule book on its head.

Clicking around, I find more info on the era—very short-lived, called Pre-Code. For a brief five years, between the establishment of the sound movie industry and the 1934 enforcement of the Hays Code, there were no morality guidelines, and moviemakers took full advantage. Dozens of movies were made, often with overtly sexual themes and often with women in roles that acknowledged their sexuality and their ambition.

It startles me that there was so much freedom of story, of power in women’s hands, such a long time ago. For the space of a few breaths, I wonder how life would be different for women if those stories had been allowed, embraced. Even celebrated.

Veronica Parker, with her elegant long limbs and sexy voice, had made her name there. In five years, she’d made thirteen movies, nearly three a year, and she’d been paid handsomely for it, $110,000 a year. It sounds like a lot of money for the early thirties, Depression years, and I look up the equivalent to now, roughly $1.5 million a year. Clearly enough to build a beautiful house that she barely had a chance to live in.

Post Code, Veronica was not able to land parts in Hollywood as freely, and a director in New Zealand lured her home with promises of starring in a tragic romance, but the movie was never made. According to Wikipedia, the director, Peter Voos, was involved in dozens of scandals around women. His photo shows a handsome blond man with an arrogant brow. I can’t find the reason the movie wasn’t made, aside from “creative differences.” Veronica found work in smaller parts, always as the vamp or dangerous Other Woman.

Curled in my blanket, I wonder how that felt for her, to rise to such heights and then fall out of favor when she was still so young and had so much to give. Melancholy creeps under my skin, and I close the laptop. “I’m off to bed,” I say to Simon, and kiss his head. “Don’t stay up too late.”

“No, no. I’ll be up soon.”

I make a mental note to find some more of her movies and watch them. Maybe Gweneth will want to join me. She’s going to flat-out faint when she finds out we bought Sapphire House.





Chapter Seven

Kit

Jet lag wakes me at four a.m., and I try for a time to go back to sleep, but it’s no use.

The curtains are open. Office buildings stand between my balcony and the harbor, but the water lies in inky blackness between the edge of the downtown area and what seems to be an island on the other side. Little lights sparkle there, quiet middle-of-the-night kind of lights. I lie on my side and imagine my sister in a house out there, fast asleep, the same moon shining on her that is shining on me. I imagine that she gets up to go to the bathroom and stops at the window, drawn by my intense gaze, and looks out toward the central business district and my window, invisible amid all the others. She feels me. She knows I’m here.