When We Believed in Mermaids(58)

“This is so good,” I comment, immersed in mine, a chocolate and passion fruit concoction that melts in my mouth. “I could seriously eat a couple more moons.”

“I’m jealous of your size.”

I laugh. “That’s a turnaround.” Wiping my hands, I say, “We should call Mom.”

For a moment, I think she’s going to refuse, but then she capitulates. “Okay. Let’s do it inside the car. Too windy out here.”

Now I’m nervous as I dig in my purse for the phone. I check the world clock, and it’s only early afternoon. Perfect. I take a breath and text. You free?

It’s not five seconds before she texts me back. Yes! And then my phone bleats the FaceTime ring. I glance at Mari, and she gives a nod. I punch the button.

And there she is, sitting on the floor with Hobo on her lap. She’s wearing a pair of jeans with a T-shirt, her hair in that messy bun she likes so much lately. “Look who loves me now!” she says.

Josie, because she’s Josie right now, starts to cry at the sound of her voice.

“That’s great, Mom. Thank you so much for doing that. Listen, I have some news.”

“You do?” Something in my voice must have alerted her. She sits up straighter. “What?”

“I found her.” I turn the camera to the other direction, and there is my sister, so unmistakably herself.

“Hi, Mom,” she says.

My mother makes the most piercing sound, halfway between a howl and a laugh. “Josie! Oh my God.”

Josie is crying too, tears streaming down her face. She reaches for the screen, touches it. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

For a long time, they only weep and look at each other, murmuring things: “You look so good.” “I can’t believe how little you’ve aged.” “I just want to look at you.”

Finally, Josie sits up and, for the second time this morning, wipes tears off her face. “You look amazing, Mom!”

“Thank you. So do you. You quit drinking.”

Mari nods. “Quit everything.”

“Me too.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, can we have the AA meeting some other time?”

They both laugh. “I have so much to tell you,” Mari says.

“I want to hear every bit of it. And Kit!” She yells the last like I’m in another room. I click the camera around to my face.

“I’m right here, Mom.”

She looks stricken and happy, and she wipes her face. “Thank you. I can’t wait to hear about your journey too. Are you okay?”

I pause, thinking of the search and Javier and now the terrible recognition that my mother’s neglect allowed my sister to be raped at the age of nine. “Yeah,” I say, but it’s clear that I’m not sure. “I will be, anyway.”

“Okay.”

“Let me talk to her again,” Mari says, and I hand her the phone.

“Mom, there are two things I need to tell you today, and then we have to go because there’s a storm on the way. I’m married and have two kids, so you’re a grandmother.”

My mother makes a noise, and I can see her in my imagination, covering her mouth.

“Their names are Leo and Sarah, and Sarah is like a mini Kit, all the way down to those webbed toes. You will love her, and you have to come see her.”

“I will, sweetheart. I promise.”

“Things are kind of crazy right now, though I hope they’re going to work out, but no matter what, I want to see you. And, Mom, thank you for the day of the earthquake. I never said thank you.”

Now I can hear a slight sob in Mom’s voice, and it gives me a weird anxiety. “You’re welcome.”

“We have to go, Mom,” I say when Mari gives me the phone back. “Kiss my kitty, and I’ll let you know when I get tickets back. Very soon.”

“Take your time, honey. I’m happy, and you see Hobo is fine.”

I hang up the phone and hold it in my hand, aware of a faint, low trembling of reaction running beneath my skin. Josie leans her head against the window, tears running down her face, looking at something far in the distance.





Chapter Thirty-One

Mari

On the way back to the high-rise, we’re quiet, Kit and I. My heart feels shredded into ten thousand pieces, and I still haven’t told her the last thing. My thoughts are skittering forward to Simon, and back to the look on my mother’s face when she saw me, and the way Kit sobered when I confessed the truth about Billy Zondervan.

“You should turn him in,” she says as we get close to the high-rise. “He’s probably still doing it.”

I nod. “Obviously I couldn’t do it before, but I’m thinking about it now. I just worry that it might make people feel sorry for me. It might make my kids think differently about me.”

“The first thing—no. No one will feel sorry for you if you get a pedophile off the streets. On the second—maybe they don’t have to know.” She shakes her head. “Yeah, right. I mean, I get that part. Only you know what they can handle.”

“Thanks.” I pull into the small drive in front of the high-rise.

“I’m probably going home in a day or two,” she says. “Get back to work.”

My gut twists. “No! Not yet!”

“I know. It’s fast, but we can keep in touch.”

As if we are just old friends who bumped into each other. But I have to give her space. “Thanks for coming out. Thanks for talking to me. Thanks for all of it, Kit. I mean it.”

She softens and leans forward to hug me. I smell her hair, feel her muscles. “We’ll stay in touch.”

“Javier is in love with you, Kit. I think you might want to give that relationship a chance.”

“Mm,” she says, and sits back in her seat. “I hope things work out with Simon.”

“Yeah.” I run a thumb along the seam of the leather on the steering wheel. “Are we just leaving it like this? That’s it?”

“I don’t know. What are we supposed to do? I’ll call you when I get home.”

“Okay. Sarah will love writing to you.”

“And I will love writing to her.”

I take a breath. Consider keeping this one last thing to myself. Rain starts to plop down hard on the windscreen. “Kit, there’s something else I need to tell you. So everything is out in the open.”

Wariness fills her entire body. “Maybe don’t.”

“We can’t go forward with any more secrets.”

She bows her head. Touches her fingernails. “Go ahead.”

“When Mom and I went to Santa Cruz the day of the earthquake, I was having an abortion.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I’m sorry that happened,” she says. “But it’s not exactly a big shock.”

“Well, actually, I did make out with a lot of boys at that time, but I didn’t have sex with anyone. I was afraid. But then I did.” The burning in my chest feels like it will melt my bones. “When you were at that doctor camp and Mom and Dad went to Hawaii, I got Dylan really drunk, and I had sex with him.”

Her body goes so still it’s like she’s turned into a photo of herself. All the color leaves her face.

“The abortion—it was his. And he was dead, so what could I do?”

She still doesn’t move for the longest time. Rain patters down on the roof, obscures my view of the world. “Why didn’t you tell me, Josie?” she asks quietly.

“I didn’t want you to hate me. Blame me for his death.”

She sighs, closes her eyes. “That’s why he drowned himself,” she says, and it’s not a question.

My bones all melt, and I can’t look at her. “He was so angry and ashamed. I should never have done it. I don’t know why I did. He was so fucked up.” Tears I can’t halt fill my eyes. “He never spoke to me ever again.”

“You kind of deserved it,” she says, and then opens the door and jumps out, then turns around to face me, the rain pouring down on her head, soaking her hair, tipping her eyelashes. I love her like she’s one of my own organs, my eyes or my heart. “No one ever protected you the way they should have. But I would have.” She’s crying. “I would have.”

She slams the door.





Chapter Thirty-Two

Kit

Two weeks before the earthquake, when I was thirteen, I found Dylan’s body.

It was a cold, misty morning, with a fog so thick I almost couldn’t see coming down the steps to the cove, and I had carried down a breakfast of Pop-Tarts and a bottle of milk to get away from the endless fighting that filled our house. My mom yelled at my dad. My dad yelled at Josie. She yelled back. On and on and on. She’d done something bad this time, but I didn’t know what it was, and honestly, I didn’t care anymore. They called her names at school, really bad names, and after four years of steadily declining behavior, I was over trying to understand her. Her actions embarrassed me.

Dylan was lying facedown on the hard-washed sand, just about where we used to set up the tent long ago. He wore the same shirt he’d left with the day before and jeans and no shoes. His hair was loose and tangled. On his left wrist was the leather bracelet I’d made him in fourth grade, the one he never took off, with silver beads. There was no question he was dead.