When We Believed in Mermaids(53)

“Don’t worry; I’ll still be sober.”

“I’m not worried in the slightest.” She’s so tall, she kisses my forehead, and I realize in a bright, sharp moment how much time I’ve lost with her, how much I’ve deprived her of. Both of us. “Can I say good night to Sarah?”

“Yes,” I say before Simon can step in, and I go to the foot of the stairs to call her.

She tumbles down so quickly that I worry she’s overheard it all, but even if she has, we need to have a better talk before it all comes out. She halts three stairs from the bottom so she can look Kit in the eyes, she says, “I’m so very glad to have met you. Will you write to me when you go back?”

Kit makes a sharp, strangled little sound. “I’ll do better than that.” She reaches into her purse. “This is one of my favorite pens. It’s a fountain pen, and right now it has my favorite ink, which is called Enchanted Ocean. I’ll send you a bottle, and your mom can show you how to refill it.”

“Oh, this is lovely!” She holds it in her hands, as smitten and awed as I’ve ever seen her. “Thank you.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Green,” she says decisively.

“I’ll send you some green inks too, and you can decide which ones you like best.”

Sarah nods.

“May I hug you?” Kit asks.

“Yes, please,” says my polite little girl.

And they do. “Please come back,” Sarah says in a small voice.

It pierces me, how much my daughter has wanted an ally, a person to look up to. Someone like her.

Had it been that way for Kit too?

Both Kit and Javier touch my shoulder on the way out. I kiss Sarah’s head and send her back upstairs.

I take a breath and go into the lounge to face Simon.



My husband is sitting on the sofa with his hands clasped in front of him. I’m trembling as I sit down in the chair nearby, not right next to him as I usually would.

For a long time, he says nothing. The music is still playing, quiet Frank Sinatra that makes me think of my father, a piece of information that I would previously have squelched. “My dad loved Frank Sinatra.”

“The actual father or the one you made up? The one who was killed in a fiery crash or—”

“You have a right to be angry,” I say. “But you don’t have a right to be cruel.” I raise my chin. “My actual father died in the Loma Prieta earthquake. It wasn’t fiery, but it was violent.”

He drops his head in his hands, a gesture of such anguish that I reach out to touch him before I hold it back.

“There are good reasons,” I say quietly. “I don’t expect you to understand that right away or to forgive me instantly, but in light of the fact that we have made a good home and a good marriage together, I would ask that you at least hear the truth before you make any judgments.”

“You lied to me, Mari.” He raises his head, and I see that his eyes are red and shimmering with unshed tears. “Or Josie, was it?”

“I’m still Mari. Still the woman you loved this afternoon.”

“Are you, though?” He makes a little sound. “You started off lying to me and have lied to me for nearly thirteen years now. Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”

Slowly, I shake my head. “No. I killed the woman I was before for good reasons, Simon. You would not have liked her at all.” It takes everything I have to keep my voice from trembling. “I hated her. Hated myself. The opportunity presented itself, and I just took it. I had to kill her or die.”

“Were you really an addict, or was that a lie too?”

“Oh, no. That part is absolutely truth. It was what made me so wretched. My mother was also an addict, but Kit says she’s clean now too.” I look at my hands, the rings sparkling on my wedding finger. “She quit when she thought I was dead. So I guess it made two of us sober.”

He doesn’t respond. My chest aches at how much I’ve broken him, but I can’t think of what else to say.

“The thing is,” he says, “that we are the culmination of our experiences. You can’t be Mari without being Josie too.” He looks at me. “You can’t be Sarah’s mother without being Kit’s sister.”

“But I did just that.”

“You made it all up!” he shouts. “None of it is true. Tofino, your dead parents. All lies. How do I even know who you are?”

I bow my head and toe a spot on the carpet where a yellow flower winds around a blue wall. “I know you’re too angry to hear it right now, but I wish you would give me a chance to tell you the whole story.”

His jaw shows his immovability, his struggle for control. “I don’t know.” His voice is utterly cold as he meets my eyes, and I know how those who’ve fallen out of favor with him must have felt. I’ve been cast from paradise into the wilderness. Banished.

And yet I see the sorrow in his eyes too, and I know how much he values self-control. He will be furious if he reveals how I’ve broken his heart. I make a decision. “I’m going to go stay with Nan or at a hotel or something.”

“What?”

“Give you some time to”—I struggle for the right words—“sort through everything.”

His jaw hardens. “I’m so disappointed in you, Mari.”

A blister of anger rises through my terror. “Life is not all black or all white, Simon. Your life has been so easy.” I fight the impulse to weep, to fling myself on his mercy. “You’ve had everything given to you from birth. You’re handsome and wealthy, and your parents took really good care of you. Kit and I . . .” Emotion crowds my voice. “We only had each other until Dylan came.” I can’t help the tears that spill over my face, but I’m not going to be weak, not now. Not after all I’ve had to do to get here, to stand here. “It was not a good childhood.”

“And yet there’s Kit, who seems to have done all right.”

It’s fair. And unfair. “Yes,” I say, and find a place of calm. “We protected her, me and Dylan. As much as we could. It wasn’t always enough.”

Maybe he hears the despair, the loss, some hint of the reality that was my life as a child. “I will listen to your story, but I can’t do it right now.”

He’s very close to tears. I see the effort it takes for him to hold himself together. He will hate it if I witness his breakdown. “I’ll give you some space. Give me a few minutes to get a bag.”

One of the hardest things I’ve done in my entire life—or should I say my lives?—is to go into the bedroom I’ve shared with my beloved husband for more than a decade and take out a bag and pack it, knowing I might not ever be back here. To keep it together for my children. I can’t think about that, not yet.

I tuck into each of their rooms. Sarah has put herself to bed, as she does, and she’s fast asleep, fountain pen in her hand. I kiss her forehead, lightly so as not to wake her; turn off the lamp; and tiptoe out.

Leo is still playing Minecraft. He looks up guiltily. “I thought it might be all right, since you were talking with—”

I raise my eyebrows.

He turns off the game. “I’m off to bed now.”

“Wait. I need to talk to you for a minute.” I sit on the edge of his bed and pat the plaid duvet.

“Okay.” He plops down beside me, his skinny arms brown from all the swimming he’s done this summer.

“I’m going to take Kit down to Raglan to surf in the morning, so you guys are on your own for a few days. Look out for your sister.”

He nods. Presses his lips together. “I heard you and Dad fighting. She’s your sister, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Can you wait that long?”

“Yes.” In his hands, he rolls his shirt up into a tight ball. “Dad is really mad. Are you getting a divorce?”

I shake my head, kiss his hair. “He is mad. We just have to talk things out, okay? Sometimes grown-ups have conflicts too.”

“Okay.”

“Love you, Leo Lion,” I say. “Be good.”

“Have fun surfing.”

“Dude.”

It makes him laugh, and I leave his room and go down the back stairs to the kitchen. The dogs are asleep on the tiles, and I want to take one of them with me, but that wouldn’t be fair to them. Instead, I head out into the garage, toss my bag in my car, and climb into the driver’s seat.

And there’s really only one place to go.





Chapter Twenty-Eight

Kit

The imprint of my niece’s hands on my shoulders stays with me as Javier and I walk to the ferry. It’s a mild night, with stars twinkling above the water and the dazzling lights of Auckland thinning to each side as the landscape moves into housing. I can see the waves of hills the city is built upon, each carrying its own spray of lights. “This place is beautiful,” I murmur.

“Yes,” Javier says.

A cocoon of quiet muffles my feelings, my thoughts, my words. I have nothing to say as we board the ferry and sit down inside, watching the dark water move by. He never pushes. He doesn’t hold my hand, which I couldn’t bear right now. He only sits quietly beside me.