When We Believed in Mermaids(56)
Blood spilled into my eye, and I pressed a hand to the throbbing spot on my head. It was a big cut, and blood was soon leaking down my arm. My mom was holding on to me, hard, as the world shook itself apart around us. It was violent and loud, and I was trying not to pass out. It seemed like it went on and on and on, though later they said it was only fifteen seconds.
When it finally slowed to a stop, my mom let go of holding me so tightly as she looked around.
She said, “Jesus wept,” and I had to see too.
The air was filled with dust and debris, making it dark, and it looked like a bomb had hit, with the front of buildings crumbled into individual bricks on the sidewalk. One building looked like it had imploded. People were crying, and somebody howled, and I saw a man who was so dusty, he looked like he’d walked into an exploding bag of flour. Alarms were going off. I smelled gas.
My head hurt loudly, with a noise to it, and the blood dripped to the ground from my elbow. A woman hurried over and tugged off her sweater. “Sit down before you faint,” she ordered, and pressed the sweater to my head. “Mom, you need to sit down too.”
“Oh my God!” my mom cried, and she was literally crying, shaking so hard that when she reached for me, it made me think of the shivering of the earth, and I moaned, ducking away. She sank down beside me. “You need to go to the hospital.”
“We need to call Kit!” I cried. If it was this bad here, what happened at Eden? Panic squeezed my lungs so hard that I couldn’t catch my breath, and I grabbed my mom’s wrist hard. “Kit!”
“I will; I will.” Mom stood up, stared around her, looked at me. “You’re bleeding so badly, I don’t want to leave you.”
The woman lifted the sweater. “Yep, you’re going to need a bunch of stitches. Can you walk?”
I tried to stand up, but another wave of noise and shaking overtook us, knocking me down. Someone started screaming again, in little bursts. My mom was on her hands and knees. “The hospital is too far away. We need to call an ambulance.”
“Every ambulance within a hundred miles is going to be busy.”
“Let’s just stay here. They’ll be down here soon enough.”
The woman had the air of someone who was used to getting things done. She hesitated, looking around us, then sank down beside me. “You’re right.”
A roar filled my head. “Kit and Dad! We need to call them!”
“Yes. Right. I need to call home,” Mom said. “I’m going to try to find a phone.”
I nodded, but I was feeling dizzy and sick, and only lolled against the planter. I was covered in blood, and my gut was cramping in rhythmic waves that mimicked the earthquake or maybe the ocean.
My mom came back, looking sick. “No answer.”
And there was nothing to do but wait. Wait while people staggered by, while they tried to drive cars that couldn’t go anywhere because the streets were broken into waves, while little kids screamed at the top of their lungs. While the smell of smoke filled the air and increased the darkness, and sirens finally wailed into the space, carrying police and EMTs who assessed the injuries of the people scattered like more litter around the area.
We leaned into each other. I wondered how we’d even get home.
It was hours before anyone could clean and stitch up my still-bleeding cut. By then I was incoherent with pain and terror, and to this day, I don’t remember getting to Eden. A stranger in a Jeep helped us, our Good Samaritan.
There were no lights as we drove up, only blackness and emptiness where the buildings had once stood. After the long trauma of the day, I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.
And then I did. My heart shattered a thousand times, over and over and over. I jumped out of the car and screamed, “Kit!”
She ran into the light of the headlights, her face a mess of tears and dirt. I hugged her so hard it made my head ache.
“Where’s your father?” my mother asked.
Kit shook her head. Pointed.
On the beach of the cove were the remains of our house and the restaurant, a wreck of lumber that looked as incoherent as my mother became in seconds. She screamed and then screamed again, falling to her knees on the rocky ground.
Chapter Thirty
Kit
Mari picks me up right on the dot of six. She looks exhausted. “Hey. I brought you coffee.”
“Oh my God, it smells so good.”
“I didn’t know how you took it, so I figured milk, and you can add sugar if you like.” She points to a thick stack of sugar packets in one of the cup holders.
I laugh. “I’m not eight anymore, you know.”
“Once an addict, always an addict.”
“Takes one to know one.” I realize too late that it sounds mean. “Sugar addict, I mean.”
She glances at me, moving into traffic smoothly. “I get it. And I am the worst. Taste this.”
I take a sip, and she’s right—it’s like a milkshake. “Too much for me.”
We ride along in the quiet until I gather my nerve and ask, “How did it go after we left?”
She shakes her head. Sips her coffee. “Simon is a proud man, and he’s cut of old-school cloth—men are meant to be men, manly and strong.” She sighs. “I have no idea what will happen.”
For the first time, I reach for her, squeeze her arm. “I’m so sorry for my part in this, Josie.”
“It’s not your fault. None of it.”
“Still. I’m sorry.”
She nods, changes lanes. “I was going to take you down to Raglan, but the surf forecast for Piha is awesome, and it’s not so far.”
“Crazy how you always know now, isn’t it?”
“Right? Just call up the reports, and Bob’s your uncle.”
I laugh. “What did you just say?”
“Bob’s your uncle, mate.” She laughs. “Best slang in the world, right here.”
“I get why you love it here. It’s amazing.”
“It is. I’m never leaving.”
It’s an overcast morning, and the traffic is heavy as she makes her way through town. The radio plays a local pop station, modern top-forty stuff. “When did you start liking pop?” I ask. She was always into the heavy-metal bands of the ’80s and ’90s, Guns N’ Roses, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and the doomed Kurt Cobain.
She shrugs, easy in herself in a way she never was back then. “Heavy metal makes too much noise in my head,” she says simply. “I start disappearing, and then I make bad choices.”
I nod.
“What do you like?”
“The same things I always have, really. Easy things to listen to.”
Her sideways smile is sly. “Like flamenco?”
The word gives me a flash of Javier playing last night, his body and the guitar becoming one thing, lighting every nerve center in my body. “I never knew I liked flamenco before, but yeah.”
“How long have you been dating Javier?”
I laugh slightly. “‘Dating’ is overstating it a bit. I just met him.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he sat down next to me the first night I got here, at this little Italian place in an alleyway by my apartment, and we struck up a conversation.”
She’s quiet for a minute. “It doesn’t look like a new relationship.”
“Again, ‘relationship’ is overstating it.”
“He looks at you like you created the earth and heavens all by yourself.”
It jolts me. “What are you talking about?”
“Are you kidding me? You don’t see it?”
“No.” I sip the coffee. “We’ve had a great time, but it’s just a holiday romance. He lives in Madrid.”
“So you’re not that interested?”
I shrug. “I don’t really get involved.”
“That’s a nonanswer.”
Something in me snaps. Irritably, I say, “It’s none of your business, actually.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
The exchange reminds me of the reality here. We can’t just pick up our relationship as if nothing has ever happened. I feel myself lifting my shell, protecting myself against her long knowledge of me, her insight into things I work hard never to reveal.
Except with Javier. I frown.
We head off the highway to a smaller road. At a red light, she looks at me. “Have you had a serious relationship, Kit?”
She knows about James, and maybe she thinks that doesn’t count. I sip my coffee, look out the window. “Too much drama.”
“Not always.” The light turns, and she pulls forward. “Not every relationship is like our parents’.”
“I know.” I keep my voice light, unconcerned, but on the sidewalk is a man walking with the same liquid grace that marks Javier’s movements, and I’m aware on some distant plane of a low howl of yearning. That, it says. Him. Without rancor, I say, “Don’t try to fix me, okay? I’m fine. I love my job. I have a cat. I have friends and go surfing. Take a lover when I want one.”
“Okay.” She shrugs, but I can tell she has more to say.
I sigh. “Go ahead. Say the rest.”
“When I was watching you and Javier last night, I thought about what beautiful children you would have.”
And suddenly I can see them too. Sturdy little girls and plump little boys, all wearing glasses and collecting rocks and stamps. A welter of tears strikes the backs of my eyes. I have to look away, blink hard. “Stop it, Josie,” I say quietly. “You have what you want, but I don’t have to want the same thing you do.”